The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Bernard Bailyn
Harvard University Press (1967) 2017, xxxvi + 396 pages
If you have time to read only one book about the American Revolution, it should be this one. This was the book that most influenced Murray Rothbard when he wrote about the American Revolution in his own great work Conceived in Liberty, and it formed the basis for Rothbard’s conclusion that “in the deepest sense, the American Revolution was a conscious majority revolution in behalf of libertarianism and against power, a libertarian ideology that stressed the conjoined rights of ‘Liberty and Property.’ The American Revolution was not only the first great modern revolution. It was a libertarian revolution as well.”
Bernard Bailyn asks a fundamental question: Why did the grievances of the American colonists lead them to revolt? They complained about higher taxes, the right of Parliament to tax them without their consent, and many other issues; but why did this lead to revolt rather than continued protest?
Through a detailed analysis of contemporary books, political pamphlets, and newspapers, Bailyn finds the answer in the colonists’ fear of government power. The British government was not just trying to raise money in order to finance its legitimate activities but rather sought to bring the colonies into subjection.
The colonists didn’t come up with this theory on their own. They were inspired by a faction of the Whig party that saw the British government as tyrannical. This faction’s most influential work, which Bailyn shows is cited again and again in the colonial literature, is Cato’s Letters, concerning which he says:
“To the colonists the most important of these publicists and intellectual middlemen were those spokesmen for extreme libertarianism, John Trenchard (1662–1723) and Thomas Gordon (d. 1750). The former, a west-country squire of ample means and radical ideas, was a 57-year-old veteran of the pamphlet wars that surrounded the Glorious Revolution when in 1719 he met Gordon, ‘a clever young Scot . . . fresh from Aberdeen University, [who had come] to London to make his fortune, equipped with little but a sharp tongue and a ready wit.’ They joined forces to produce, first, the weekly Independent Whig to attack High Church pretensions and, more generally, the establishment of religion, fifty-three papers of which were published in book form in 1721; and Cato’s Letters, a searing indictment of eighteenth-century English politics and society written in response to the South Sea Bubble crisis, which appeared first serially in The London Journal and then, beginning in 1720, in book form. Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages the major themes of the ‘left’ opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the ‘country’ mind everywhere in the Englishspeaking world. In America, where they were republished entire or in part again and again, ‘quoted in every colonial newspaper from Boston to Savannah,’ and referred to repeatedly in the pamphlet literature, the writings of Trenchard and Gordon ranked with the treatises of Locke as the most authoritative statement of the nature of political liberty and above Locke as an exposition of the social sources of the threats it faced.” (Brackets original)
You can find an ideological justification for revolution in John Locke’s Second Treatise, and in fact some of the language of the Declaration of Independence comes straight out of Locke. For example, the Declaration says: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” In the Second Treatise, Locke says: “But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.”
But Locke’s work was too abstract to influence most of the colonists directly; it had to be transmitted to them in a form they could understand. As Rothbard says, “Locke’s philosophy, though ultimately highly important, was too abstract to generate the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonists. Something, Bailyn rightly felt, was missing: the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary passions.”
In taking this view of intellectual history, Bailyn opposes the views of Leo Strauss and his followers, such as Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and Thomas Pangle, though he doesn’t directly address them. In their view, history is made by the great thinkers, whose thought is rigorously consistent. Lesser writers merely reflect oversimplified aspects of their thought. Not so for Bailyn: It is the ideas of the “lesser” thinkers that matter most.
Bailyn does agree with the Straussians that ideas play a formative role in history, as opposed to interpretations that stress economic interests. As Rothbard summarizes,
“We can now see why the Beard-Becker ‘economic determinist’ model of human motivation, a dominant school of American history in the 1920’s and 1930’s, so fruitful and penetrating when applied to statist actions of the American government, fails signally when applied to the great antistatist events of the American Revolution. The Beard-Becker approach sought to apply an economic determinist framework and specifically a framework of inherent conflict between various major economic classes, to the American Revolution. The vital flaws in the Beard-Becker model were two-fold. First, they did not understand the necessarily primary role of ideas in guiding any revolutionary or opposition movement. Second, they did not understand that there are no inherent economic conflicts on the free market; without government intrusion, there is no reason for merchants, farmers, landlords, et al. to be at loggerheads. Conflict is only created between those classes that rule the State as against those exploited by the State. Not understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms of the allegedly conflicting class interests of, in particular, merchants and farmers. Since the merchants clearly led the way in revolutionary agitation, the Beard-Becker approach was bound to conclude that the merchants, in agitating for revolution, were aggressively pushing their class interests at the expense of the deluded farmers.”
The message of Trenchard and Gordon, and other writers in the radical tradition, is well brought out by Rothbard (if my review has been as much about him as about Bailyn, I hope you will agree it is none the worse for that):
“Trenchard and Gordon, and the other influential libertarian writers, clearly and passionately set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and warned also that power—government—stood ever ready to conspire to violate the liberties of the individual. To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of liberty by power, the people must be ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies of the rulers to expand their power and aggress against their subjects. It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly imbibed, and that accounted for their ‘conspiracy view’ of the English government, a view which historians like Bernhard Knollenberg have shown was basically correct, since, after 1760, such conspiracies were all too real. Thus, what some historians have derided as the ‘paranoia’ of the colonists turned out to be not paranoia at all but an insightful apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonists’ libertarian understanding of the very nature and essence of state power itself.”
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is thus a key work for libertarians to read.
