29. Massachusetts Turns Conservative

By far the most influential rebuttal to Common Sense, however, came not from the fading Tories, but from a rapidly emerging right wing within the independence movement. Until 1775, virtually the sole focus of political conflict in the colonies was the anti-British resistance movement, on what side to take and how fast to travel. But after Lexington and Concord, another great problem confronted the Americans: the structure of the internal polity within each colony. And as independence drew nearer, the internal problem—the problem of “who should rule at home,” in the famous phrase of Carl Becker—came increasingly to the fore, as compared to the older problem of “home rule.” Of course, this separation can be overdrawn, and clearly British rule had created and propped up an “internal” domestic oligarchy. But, essentially, the internal problem had naturally been submerged by the struggle against Britain until the war began and the choice of forms of government had to be faced.

Before Lexington and Concord, then, the radical-conservative “Left”-“Right” conflict centered around the struggle with Great Britain. After that point, a new set of conflicts emerged. Historians have long quarreled about the existence of internal conflicts and about the possible continuity of the various ideological factions over the years. The first thing that can be flatly asserted is that the conservatives on the British question became archcohservatives on the domestic scene. Believers in strong central oligarchic government from abroad also desired strong, central oligarchic government at home. Some of the conservatives became outright Tories and thereby put themselves outside the American dialogue; others, as we shall see below, opposed independence up to the last moment and finally opted for the rebel cause in deep resignation in order to guide it in a conservative direction. In short, they were more flexible and adaptable than their outright Tory brethren. These conservatives particularly predominated in the quasi-Tory provinces of New York and Pennsylvania. Among conservatives, then, continuity prevailed before and after 1775: the Ultraright before was the Ultraright afterward. There were no cases of quasi Tories later shifting to become radical on domestic issues.

The same continuity did not apply, however, to the pre-1775 Left, to those who had led the radical fight against Great Britain. Out of this increasingly victorious group there began to emerge a cohesive faction who were radical on independence and yet highly conservative on domestic affairs. In one sense, this lack of continuity is understandable, for as the unifying British question began to give way to consideration of domestic matters, temporarily suspended differences among the radicals inevitably came to the fore. Every revolution, after all, splits as it advances from one stage to the next and former advocates fail to adhere to its inner logic and go over into opposition. But in this case the split was particularly poignant, for those who remained radical on domestic questions simply wanted to fulfill at home the grand rhetoric of liberty and democracy which both wings had effectively employed in the fight for America against Great Britain.

In the case of the powerful center of the Virginia oligarchy, this split was to be expected. It was clear from the beginning, for example, that Washington was a radical on Britain and independence and yet a staunch conservative domestically; this rare centrist quality was one of the main reasons for his selection as army commander-in-chief. But the real shocker was Massachusetts. Massachusetts had always been the home of radicalism, the spearhead and vanguard of the American Left. Now it was Massachusetts that was to turn almost en masse to deep-dyed conservatism on domestic issues. Certainly one great reason for this was a lack of opposition on which to hone one’s edge; in contrast to Pennsylvania or New York, for example, where conservatism had always been dominant and radicalism precarious, Toryism had always been inherently feeble in Massachusetts. With little opposition on which to develop a cutting edge, the tendency for Massachusetts radicalism was to grow lax and conservative on domestic affairs.

A second problem was a crisis of leadership. John Hancock, as we have seen, turned sharply rightward largely out of pique. More serious was the collapse of the great Massachusetts leaders, the Adamses. The brilliant young John Adams not only turned sharply rightward on domestic matters; he was quickly to stamp himself as the major theoretician of a conservative American polity—a polity that would eventually end up as British rule without Great Britain. And Sam Adams, now that the domestic scene was inevitably growing in importance, lost his former marvelous sureness of step; uncertain, adrift in unfamiliar waters, he was from then on to drift and veer erratically leftward and rightward, his basically radical instincts at war with the influence of his brilliant cousin John. And with the Adamses shifting, the faithful followers of the Massachusetts Left shifted with them.

The basic issue in internal affairs was simply: Would the American governments remain as they had emerged at the outset of the Revolution: spontaneous, libertarian, democratic, and responsive to the checks of the people? Or would they revert to something very like oligarchic British rule: strong government, with an executive and upper legislative house far removed from the people and only partially checked by them? Would oligarchic power be resumed by a new set of Tory lords in another guise? This is what the internal struggle in the years after Lexington and Concord was basically all about. And this is why the separation of home rule from rule at home can be highly artificial; for in a profound sense, those who remained radical on the domestic front were carrying to completion the meaning of the struggle against Britain. After all, their objection was not only to a certain set of Tory and monarchical rulers; their objection was also directed to governmental power itself—to executive oligarchy, to taxes and restrictions, and to big government. They did not propose to overthrow one set of masters in order to raise up another.

If Tom Paine became the ideological spokesman of the new Left, John Adams was the theoretician of the new Right. This new Right was, of course, of inestimable value to the conservative cause. The New York and Philadelphia aristocrats, for example, who had to be dragged into independence, would have never been accepted as leaders of a new independent America. But John Adams and the Massachusetts men, impeccably in the forefront of the Revolution? Their presence in the conservative camp could not but lend that camp the color of patriotic respectability which it so desperately needed after independence.

In contrast to most believers in independence, Adams was angered rather than exhilirated by Common Sense. A vain and petulant man, he was patently envious of the popular success of one whom he considered a johnny-come-lately in the independence movement. More than that, the democratic-libertarian sentiments went against his grain. Already, he had set forth his views on the proper government to fellow congressional delegates from other provinces who had sought his valued advice. Now, to counteract Paine’s influence, Adams hastened to publish these views in his Thoughts on Government, a highly influential work that would prove to be a virtual political manifesto of American conservatism.

Adams’ aim was frankly the counter-revolutionary one of restoring as nearly as possible the status quo ante: the prerevolutionary form of government, especially a powerful executive and judiciary separate from the popular assembly and independent of it. His political system, akin to that of Blackstone and Montesquieu, rested on a separation of powers, especially a separation from the checks of democratic procedure. In order to limit and overcome the democratic arm, an independent executive power wielded by a new governor and council was to be added to the popularly elected revolutionary committees, this executive to have an absolute veto over the legislature. Within the legislature, an upper house removed from the people was to be created, supposedly as an aristocratic element in the polity, and Adams looked forward happily to the two houses being in perpetual conflict. Each house was to have an absolute veto over the other, and to make sure that the executive officials were to have little dependence upon the public, he proposed that the lower house choose the upper house and that they would together select the governor. Even this hedged-in and ringed-about democratic assembly was to be chosen only by property-owning voters. Furthermore, in contrast to the royal system of judges strictly under the control of the executive and the crown, Adams urged an independent judiciary holding life terms—a patent device to remove the judges completely from checks by the populace.

The judiciary in America had never been in the least independent. The colonial assemblies had always had judicial functions, and in the seventeenth century the Maryland, Virginia, and New England assemblies were the highest courts of appeal in their respective colonies. By the eighteenth century, however, the judiciary was appointed by the crown and became an organ of the executive. Life, or “good behavior,” judicial appointments were originally advanced as a means of removing judges holding their offices at the king’s pleasure, of curbing the absolute control of the crown. But with the royal power gone, life tenure of judges would be a backward step away from popular control.

The emergence of John Adams as the primary theoretician of domestic conservatism was parallelled by a conservative course of the colony and of leaders who had formerly led the radical vanguard. Of all the colonies, Massachusetts in particular faced an easy political path—and quickly took it. The British Coercive Acts, after all, had been directed against the Massachusetts Charter; what more apt—and more safely conservative— course than simply to reassert the charter of the status quo ante? And this is precisely what the Massachusetts Provincial Congress did when the Continental Congress, in early June, mildly advised it to do so. Of course, no governor could yet be found; but the General Court (legislature) was reconstituted in elections, and the Council was selected, as before, by the elected House, now to take on temporarily the entire executive power. The General Court resumed in mid-July 1775 for a very long session.

The leaders of Massachusetts were highly contented with their scarcely visible and conservative glide back to the pre-Coercive Act charter, achieving Adams’ frankly stated aim: “to contrive some method for the colonies to glide insensibly from under the old government into peaceable and contented submission to new ones,” in short, “veneration for persons in authority of every rank.” The former radical James Warren quickly concurred. Nor were the Congregational clergy, especially in the seaboard towns, slow to inculcate such supposed virtues in their congregations. In his important election sermon before the General Court in 1776, the Reverend Samuel West of the town of Dartmouth, a close friend of Hancock, urged everyone “to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates....” With the newfound veneration of power came also its perquisites, and the less scrupulous of the Whig leaders made full use of their new appointment powers; Thomas Cushing, for example, managed to obtain five important judicial posts from the Council for himself.

But not all the old radicals were content to celebrate the status quo, and a relatively small band of new radicals emerged who fought for further libertarian changes in Massachusetts government. Many radicals were unhappy at the continuation of the established Congregational Church in Massachusetts. Isaac Backus, the leading Baptist of New England, presented a strong plea to the General Court for disestablishment and religious liberty, but his petition was quietly buried. Also prominent in the vain fight in the General Court for disestablishment was Joseph Hawley, an eminent lawyer of Northampton and leader of the radicals in western Massachusetts. And a writer in a Boston paper, denouncing “such glaring instances of religious tyranny as the establishment” of the Congregational Church, asked if they were “contending for liberty that we might have it in our power to trample on the rights of others?” The plural officeholding engaged in by Cushing and others was widely protested in the press. A writer in the (Boston) Massachusetts Spy charged that “the members of the Assembly have divided among themselves and their particular friends, all the civil and military offices in the colony.” Another decrier of the new oligarchy warned that they might be fighting against a “foreign slavery” only to “suffer a domestic one to spring up in our country.”

The center of the rapidly emerging new radical movement, however, was the farthest western county of Berkshire. The Berkshire towns had been radically anti-British for several years, led by college graduates (generally from Yale) who had entered law, politics, or the ministry. Also strongly Whig in western Massachusetts had been physicians, merchants, and storekeepers. Most of the lawyers in the west, heavily dependent on royal patronage, had been Tory, but the substantial number of Whig lawyers were led by the veteran Joseph Hawley. The Congregational ministry in the west had been strongly radical, led by the young Reverend Thomas Allen of Pittsfield in Berkshire County and the Reverend Joseph Lyman of Hatfield. Now that the war had begun and the focus of radicalism was shifting to internal liberty, Berkshire took the lead of the new Left. There are two factors that in part account for the activity in Berkshire: the relative youth of the Berkshire leadership, due to its status as a newly settled frontier county, and the indefatigable leadership of the Reverend Thomas Allen, who stumped the county organizing the new opposition to the status quo. Allen’s friend, Joseph Hawley of Northampton much further east, would have been a natural leader of the movement, but chronic illness allowed him to be effective only sporadically.

Having travelled throughout the West calling for a new and more libertarian constitution, Allen became known as the leader of the Berkshire Constitutionalist Movement. In mid-December 1775 he called a Berkshire County convention of town committees of correspondence to meet at Stockbridge in the southern part of the county, an area much less devoted to the radical cause than was the north. The resolves of the Stockbridge Convention were simple and straightforward: the people of Berkshire should at least be able to nominate men for county offices from which the Massachusetts Council could select its choices. From this simple and almost innocuous request the delegates from eight towns in southern Berkshire issued an angry protest. The right-wing dissenters bitterly attacked the Stockbridge resolution, charging that the leaders of the convention were men whose principles would “tend to dissolve all government, and introduce dissension, anarchy... and disorder.” Five of the prominent conservative dissenters were, not coincidentally, recent Council appointees to the very county posts in contention, and hence had a vested interest in the defeat of the Constitutionalist Movement. Of these, three were understandably under particular popular suspicion: John Ashley of Stockbridge, one of the hated “17” Tory rescinders of the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768, and Mark Hopkins of Sheffield and Jahleel Wood-bridge of Richmond, formerly justices of the peace by royal appointment.

Stung by the conservative dissent, Allen drew up a remonstrance of the town of Pittsfield to the General Court, setting forth his and other Constitutionalists’ views systematically and at great length. It turned out that the conservatives from south Berkshire had not been far wrong in analyzing the ultimate position of Allen and his supporters. For many months the towns and counties of Massachusetts had nullified the royal appointments and therefore closed the local courts; they had all been living in “a state of nature,” a state close to anarchy, and they enjoyed the experience. As Allen’s petition strongly put it, “Since the suspension of government we have lived in peace, love, safety, liberty and happiness....” The only governmental power was the local committees and these were largely devoted to crushing Tories. But now the men of Pittsfield saw with dismay that assumption by the General Court of the old executive power to appoint county judges and officials would shortly end this libertarian idyl. “We find ourselves in danger of [returning] to our former state and of undergoing a yoke of oppression which we are no longer able to bear,” a yoke of “unlimited passive obedience and non-resistance” to governmental power.

For their practical demands, Allen and the town of Pittsfield insisted on the right to annul the central appointive power by electing or at least nominating all of their local county officials.

Heedless of the radical opposition, the General Court tried to establish a county court in Berkshire. The local Committee of Inspection forcibly prevented the court from opening, and Allen repeatedly denounced the Charter government of Massachusetts as “oppressive, defective and rotten to the very core,” which “ought not by any means to be submitted to.” Significantly, he was supposed to have based his argument in part on Paine’s Common Sense, which had just been published.

To the east, neighboring Hampshire County, in a convention of delegates from its towns on March 11, decided by a narrow majority to close its county courts. This court-closing movement was led by Joseph Hawley and by the leaders of Chesterfield and other towns of far western and northern Hampshire. The resolution was opposed by the older trading centers of the county on the Connecticut River: Springfield, Hatfield, and Northampton.

Allen’s subversive discourses were reported in great detail to the General Court by John Ashley and his fellow Berkshire conservatives, and Allen was denounced as an incendiary and sower of anarchy. He was reputed to have declared that “it was the duty of the people to oppose” the “rotten” Charter government, “and that [he] would rather be without any form of government than to submit to this constitution.” And again: “The people of this province had lived in peace and good order for more than a year, without government....” He also trenchantly informed the people that they were not simply fighting Great Britain but all tyranny; if the Congress abused its power, it should be opposed in the same manner as the king and Parliament. He cautioned, “Whilst we are fighting against oppression from the King and Parliament [we must] not suffer usurpers rising up amongst ourselves.”

Worried by the criticism relayed to the General Court, Allen and the town of Pittsfield sent another remonstrance to the legislature in May 1776, elaborating and also bowdlerizing their position. They took hasty pains to assure the General Court of their belief in the “absolute necessity of legal government to prevent anarchy and confusion,” and to deny false charges that they were a mere mob of debtors eager to close the courts so as to avoid payment of their debts. They assured the legislature of their belief that legal government is a “great blessing.” In this petition, they warned of the potential of domestic tyranny rising up to replace the old; a particular complaint was the practice of the county judges of handing out licenses to innkeepers at a fee of six shillings and more and then dividing the fees among themselves. Allen then set forth their political theory: that “the people are the fountain of power,” that since the dissolution of British power “these colonies have fallen into a state of nature,” and that the first step toward the restoration of civil government would be to form a “fundamental constitution as the basis and groundwork of legislation” and to check “the strong bias of human nature to tyranny and despotism” by a “wanton exercise of power.” Furthermore, a new constitution, being above the legislature, could not be made by the legislature itself; it must be effected by a true “compact” among the majority of the people.

The Massachusetts General Court responded to this pressure by reducing all court fees in the province, but this was hardly enough to satisfy the Berkshire demand,* and the courts in Berkshire and Hampshire counties remained closed.

The one writer cited by Allen as a “most respectable” authority for these views was James Burgh and his work Political Disquisitions. Burgh, an elderly Scottish schoolmaster, published the Disquisitions in England in 1774; it was reprinted in Philadelphia the following year and soon became a highly influential bestseller throughout the colonies. It was eagerly read by the leaders and the common people alike. Burgh had turned his searchlight on the tyranny and corruption of the English Parliament of his day. Slashing away at the tightly controlled oligarchy constituting Parliament, the radical-liberal Burgh called for thoroughgoing political reform: corrected representation, annual parliaments, secret ballots by the public, open debates in Parliament, and universal manhood suffrage except for men on relief. Government pensioners and placemen should be abolished, he wrote, thus ending the economic dependence of members of Parliament on the crown. To effect these aims, he saw that mere pleas to the extant Parliament would hardly suffice. Instead, the people of each parish and county in the land should band together in a great association to put severe pressure upon the government and even (implicitly) serve as the potential nucleus of revolution if other means should fail. The failure of reform would lead the people to prefer the temporary evils of revolution to the “permanent evil” of tyranny, “distressing and debasing the human species from generation to generation, and deluging the world in a never-ebbing sea of blood.” Not only did he thereby anticipate the English association movement, but he also gave implicit backing to the burgeoning association movement in America, which fulfilled these very concepts. Burgh also hailed Algernon Sidney’s justification of rebellion, as well as the writings of Trenchard and Gordon, and attacked the practice of hiring mercenary troops. On specifically colonial problems, Burgh bitterly attacked taxation without representation and the oppressive measures against America.*

If the Reverend Thomas Allen was the political leader of the Massachusetts Left, the anonymous author of the brief pamphlet, The People the Best Governors or, A Plan of Government Founded on the Just Principles of Natural Freedom, was, in a sense, its intellectual leader. This trenchant libertarian writer declared that the people “best know their wants and necessities and therefore are best able to govern themselves.” He attacked upper houses armed with veto power and not directly responsible to the people as engines of oppression. A small council chosen by the assembly might be admirable for the sake of efficiency, but it should merely prepare material for the assembly and have no veto power over it. This writer not only wanted representation proportionate to the population, he called boldly for universal manhood suffrage shorn of any property qualifications, which would lead to tyranny over the poor by the rich. He would have a judiciary and perhaps an executive elected annually by the people, but interestingly, the executive would be denied any veto over the legislature. Thus he sensibly opposed not so much a judiciary independent of the legislature as a judiciary independent of the people. He also suggested that in each colony a house of representatives armed with some judicial power be the supreme court of appeals in the province—especially since, as he perceived, judges’ decisions are often a camouflaged form of legislation.

The author of The People the Best Governors grounded his program squarely on natural rights and natural law: “God gave mankind freedom by nature, made every man equal to his neighbor, and has virtually enjoined them to govern themselves by their own laws.... [Everyone’s] right to freedom is the same.” This identical right to freedom for all men is evidently what the author meant by “equality.” Any property qualification for voting, or oligarchic organs of government would deny this natural equal freedom and “make an inequality among the people and set up a number of lords over the rest.”

* For documentation of this controversy see Robert J. Taylor, ed., Massachusetts: Colony to Commonwealth: Documents on the Foundation of Its Constitution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.)

* The Handlins’ attempt to downgrade the radical content and influence of Burgh’s Disquisitions is unconvincing. Oscar and Mary Handlin, “James Burgh and American Revolutionary Theory,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1961), pp. 38–57. But see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 364–68.