Conceived in Liberty (130 page)

As reason tells us, all are born thus naturally equal, i.e. with an equal right to their persons; so also with an equal right to their preservation... and every man having a property in his own person, the labour of his body and the
work of his hands are properly his own, to which no one has right but himself; it will therefore follow that when he removes anything out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, he has his labour with it, and joined something to it that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.... Thus every man having a natural right to [or being proprietor of] his own person and his own actions and labour, which we call property; it certainly follows, that no man can have a right to the person or property of another. And if every man has a right to his person and property; he has also a right to defend them... and so has a right of punishing all insults upon his person and property.

Consequently, a law violating natural and constitutional rights is no true law and requires no obedience. The natural right of private judgment was also upheld by the Reverend William Rand of Massachusetts in 1757, and by the Reverend Joseph Fish of Connecticut three years later.

During this period, many of the New Light ministers, under pressure of establishment persecution in several colonies, began to move towards a libertarian position. Elisha Williams was a New Light. The Reverend Samuel Davies, leader of the Southern New Side Presbyterians, declared in 1751 that people had a “legal as well as natural right to follow their own judgment,” and to gauge governmental authority against the great principles of natural justice. Davies’ focus, of course, was on religious aspects of liberty. Princeton, the training ground of the New Lights, soon developed as a libertarian center. Davies, president of Princeton from 1759 to 1761, lauded the English Puritan Revolution and exhorted his listeners to fight if need be for their liberties. His predecessor, the Reverend Aaron Burr, was noted as a “great friend to liberty, both civil and religious,” in state and church.

“Separates”—New Lights in Massachusetts and Connecticut who insisted on clear-cut separation from the state establishment—petitioned extensively for religious liberty and exemption from church taxes, even though the petitions were almost always spurned by the government. Daniel Hovey, of Mansfield, was imprisoned in 1747 for refusing to pay the church tax, and petitioned for relief on the ground that liberty of conscience was “the unalienable right of every rational creature.” The Separates of Canterbury went beyond this to include the right of liberty and property. In their petition of 1749, they asserted that God’s law strictly limited the functions of government to “defense of everyone in the free enjoyment and improvement of life, liberty, and property from the force, violence and fraud of others; their different opinions in ecclesiastical affairs notwithstanding.” The Canterbury Separates also insisted on the natural right of parishioners to dissent and to separate from
them
—a welcome consistency for that or indeed for any era. Another leading libertarian petition came in 1743–44 from Exeter, Massachusetts. The petition asked: “Is not liberty equally every man’s right...?” The Exeter Separates asserted the right of private judgment,
the right to separate, and the right to be free of taxes for a religious establishment. And though it was rejected, they petitioned again eleven years later.

While England was the great fountainhead of intellectual influence in eighteenth-century America, France also was important, even in the first half of the century, more so than has been generally believed. By far the most widely read French writer in the colonies was the great French liberal and deist, François Voltaire. Despite the enormous prejudice in America against Roman Catholicism and against France, Voltaire was able to make his way as a representative of deist and optimist thought, and especially as an avowed disciple of John Locke. For liberalism in eighteenth-century France was a heritage of seventeenth-century liberalism in England, and especially of John Locke. The young Voltaire spent three years of exile in England, in the late 1720s, and there became a firm advocate of religious liberty and of freedom of speech and press, and of Locke as their philosophical groundwork. Voltaire’s libertarian views were therefore English by inspiration and in content.

Voltaire conveyed this liberalism to France with his
Philosophical Letters on the English,
published in English in 1733 and then in French in 1734. In the
Letters
he spread the Lockean message to the Continent. He also praised the Quakers for their condemnation of war. His English exile also influenced Voltaire to write modern European history. His popular
History of Charles XII
was published so that people would “be cured of the folly of conquest.”

It is the curious belief of many writers that whereas English liberalism was moderate, pragmatic, and cautious,
French
liberalism was destructive, absolutist, and revolutionary. The truth is almost the reverse. Liberalism emerged as a coherent doctrine and as a full and powerful force in seventeenth-century England, and a thoroughgoing revolutionary force at that. French liberalism in the following century was frankly taken from England, albeit at a time when English liberal thought had been all but stifled by the Whig “settlement.” But French liberals despaired of the odds of fomenting revolution against the might of French feudalism and royal absolutism, which were far more rigidly fastened upon France than upon England. The eighteenth-century French liberals therefore remained content with the futile cause of urging liberty upon the royal power as a free gift to the people. A vain hope. When in history has a ruling elite voluntarily surrendered its power and rule as a free gift, unpressured by severe and persistent opposition from below?

*
The dying words of another contemporaneous martyr of the Stuarts, the Crom-wellian Colonel Richard Rumbold, also served as inspiration to such revolutionary Americans as Thomas Jefferson: “I am sure there was no man born... with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”

**
See the Peter Laslett edition of John Locke,
Two Treatises of Government
(Cambridge: At the University Press, 1960).

***
Locke adopted the curious, theologically oriented view that the original unused land was given to mankind in common and was then taken out of this common stock by individual labor. Actually, in fact, original land being unused was therefore
unowned
by anyone, individual or communal. It should be mentioned that, contrary to some historians, Locke’s “labor theory of property” has no relation to the “labor theory of value” of Karl Marx and other socialist authors.

*
Macpherson has shown that Locke’s state of nature includes a free market for exchange of property, including monetary exchanges, all of which is logically anterior to government (C. B. Macpherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], pp. 208 ff.).

**
It is a misconception to accuse Locke of setting “property rights” above “human rights.” For the two were conjoined: property rights
included
the right of the individual’s property in his own person.

*
John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon,
Cato’s Letters,
in D. L. Jacobson, ed.,
The English Libertarian Heritage
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965), pp. 108–9, 114–15, 118–19, 127–29, 133–34, 193–94, 196, 256–57.

*
On
Cato’s Letters
and their great influence in America, see Bernard Bailyn,
The Origins of American Politics
(New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 35–44, 54; and Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press,
1967),
pp. 35–37, 43–45, and
passim.

We have so far been discussing events and conditions in the American colonies that have been essentially “domestic,” occurring within a specific colony or within the colonies as a whole. Now we turn to relations and problems that were essentially “foreign”—relations with the home country and, as part of the British Empire, other countries, especially their possessions on the American continent. While a hard and fast line cannot be drawn between domestic and overseas, or internal and external relations of an imperial appendage, we can still delineate such “domestic” developments as the growth of liberal thought (even though heavily influenced from abroad), as against such
directly
imperial relations as Assembly versus royal governor, mercantilist regulations, or such foreign affairs as war against New France.

By the first half of the eighteenth century, the internal political institutions of the various colonies had reached an uneasy overall quasi-stability, within which a tug-of-war for power raged between an appointed royal governor and Council on the one hand, and an elected Assembly on the other. The governor had an absolute veto over acts of the legislature, and the Council was appointed by the Crown on recommendation of the governor. The notable exception was Massachusetts, where the Council was elected by the Assembly. The governor and Council not only constituted the upper legislative body (with the governor as the supreme executive of the colony), but also constituted the supreme judicial agency creating and appointing the lower courts. Furthermore, governors, as designated vice admirals, also established vice admiralty courts to try Navigation Act violations. Appeals, confined to major cases, could only be taken from judicial
decisions of governor and Council to the supreme organ of the Crown (under the king), the Privy Council. Above and beyond the governors, of course, was the Crown, which could disallow the acts of colonial legislatures. The Crown also appointed customs officials to collect customs revenue, and naval officers to enforce the Navigation Acts. While never in command of naval forces, the governors of New York, South Carolina, and Georgia commanded regular troops stationed on the frontier. As controllers of the public domain, the governors also had authority to make grants of land to whom they pleased.

The Assemblies, however, were not without formidable resources of their own. Their major resource was that
sine qua non
of government: money. Only the Assemblies could levy taxes and appropriate funds for the government, including such crucial items as governors’ salaries. Also, the Assemblies’ consent was needed for any positive legislation in the colonies. In addition, the Assembly established the common-law courts, with their critical guarantee of the right to trial by jury, that is, by the people rather than by royal officials.

The picture was not very different in the proprietary colonies (Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland), where the proprietary took on the chief executive role (appointing the governor, trying to collect quitrents, etc.), under the overall watchful eye of the Crown. Only the chartered colonies (Connecticut and Rhode Island), which elected their own governors, presented a different picture, and even this virtual independence was subject to the overall regulations of the Crown.

Throughout the colonies, the tug-of-war of royal governor and Council versus the elected Assembly had by the middle of the eighteenth century resulted in marked dominance by the Assembly. In each of the colonies, the critical money power of the Assembly over the governor helped the colony establish a virtual
de facto
control over the executive, and hence a virtual independence by midcentury. One important reason for the emergent triumph of the colonial Assemblies, as will be seen below, was the deliberate failure of the British government to enforce the numerous mercantile restrictions over the colonies throughout most of the first half of the eighteenth century. But this still does not solve the puzzle of the increasingly feeble executive power in the respective colonies. In his brilliant work
The Origins of American Politics,
Professor Bernard Bailyn posed the question as follows: How is it that in Britain, where the Parliament was theoretically absolute, the king and his ministers were in practice able to dominate a supine Parliament, whereas in the American colonies, where the governor was theoretically dominant, he invariably lost out to Assembly rule? Why was the executive able to dominate in the home country, but not in the colonies? This disparity, Bailyn pointed out, is particularly puzzling because (a) the colonial governors had the right of absolute veto over
legislation, whereas the king had no veto over acts of Parliament; (b) the governors had the legal right to delay or dissolve the legislatures, whereas the king had lost that power in Britain; and (c) the governors constituted the supreme judicial power in the colonies, while the Crown had been forced to accept independent judges in Britain.

How, then, the accretion of power to the executive in Britain, accompanied by its decline in the colonies? Bailyn answered that the crucial difference between the two was what English libertarians of the day denounced as corruption—the ability of the Crown and its ministers to buy up, to put it bluntly, the will of Parliament. In Britain, the patronage at the control of the Crown was enormous, enabling the ministers to purchase parliamentary support. As Bailyn points out, in Britain

some boroughs—twenty-five or thirty—were owned outright by the government in the sense that a majority of their electorates were officeholders who could be dismissed if they opposed the government; in others the election of members favorable to the government could be assured by the proper application of electioneering funds. Beyond this, control of the House was assured by the distribution of the crown patronage available to any administration and by the management of the corps of placemen that resulted. In the middle of the eighteenth century about 200 of the 558 members of the House of Commons held crown places of one sort or another, and another thirty or forty were more loosely tied to government by awards of profitable contracts. Of those who held places, forty at least held offices intimately involved in the government and were absolutely reliable. The other 160 held a variety of sinecures, household offices, pensions, and military posts which brought them well within the grasp of the administration but yet required constant solicitation and management. A fluctuating number of other members were bound to the government less directly, particularly by the gift to their nominees of one or more of the 8,000 excise offices available.
*