The American Revolution’s ideology centered on individuals escaping the oppression of corrupt monarchical government, as established by pamphleteers popularizing the views of Hanoverian Whigs, and the Constitutional settlement enshrined ‘a revolution not made but preserved’ by solving the question of acceptable national power. At least 50 years before the conflict, merchants, ministers, lawyers had established a common view of safeguarding liberty and political rights. They were keenly aware of not only the Glorious Revolution, which relocated sovereignty to Parliament (as Blackstone laid down), but also the fall of the Roman republic, an example of moral and political virtue decayed. Their rhetoric was didactic, explanatory not theoretical, popularizing the theories of Locke as well as Cicero, Montesquieu, and the Philosophes. Originating with the Radicals of the English Civil War, who held the monarch corrupts parliament by luring MPs with favors – or more broadly, the power’s necessary victims are liberty, law, right – the writings of learned New England Puritans softened over the course of the 17th century into the 18th century’s mainstream; Burke’s Reconciliation is a contemporary validation.
In America, where to relocate sovereignty? State charters once seen as aggressive became statements of right, bulwarks of liberty based not on natural law but providing for common law, and prohibitions of arbitrary power. Representation and consent, constitutions and rights, were vital but ultimately superseded by sovereignty, the source of legitimate power. Popular sovereignty emerged from 150 years of local design and administration of law and order. Then, after 1769 the debate shifted from specific questions of administration and tax to conceptualizing an American political science. Bailyn identifies ‘elements of liberty’. ‘Slavery’, the negative counterpart, meant more than chattel ownership; it was symptom and consequence of political disease following from loss of freedom, independence, from spread of corruption. Religion entailed tolerance of dissidence. Democracy meant the result of a radicalism looking not to solve economic inequality or social stratification but corruption (in the executive). It meant common rights and responsibilities not based on heredity. Thus the focus shifted from socioeconomic orders to the balance of power within government.
Turning to the constitution, Bailyn observes the problem of conciliating men now trained to question, specifically to mistrust national power. The Anti-Federalists were the true successors of the Whigs, the Federalists more forerunners of 19th-century liberalism (archaically, classical republicans or civic humanists). The most important matter was surmounting Montesquieu’s view of small territories being best suited for universal participation, by establishing the state (in the Senate) to be large enough to defend itself yet small enough to preserve civic freedom. Madisonian ‘factionalism’ was based in extent not counterbalance, Bailyn asserts.
Coda: ‘Because if one has a right to disregard the laws of the society to which he belongs, all have the sme right; and then government is at an end’ (p. 312)