Conceived in Liberty (278 page)

Since the Revolution was a people’s war, the extent of mass participation in the militia and committees led necessarily to a democratizing of suffrage in the new governments. Furthermore, the principle of “no taxation without representation” could readily be applied internally as could British restrictions upon the principle of one man, one vote. While recent researches have shown that colonial suffrage requirements were far more liberal than had been realized, it is still true that suffrage was significantly widened by the Revolution in half the states. This widening was helped everywhere by the depreciation of the monetary unit (and hence of existing property requirements) entailed by the inflation that helped finance the war. Chilton Williamson, the most thorough and judicious of recent historians of American suffrage, has concluded that

the Revolution probably operated to increase the size of that majority of adult males which had, generally speaking, been able to meet the old property and
freehold tests before 1776.... The increase in the number of voters was probably not so significant as the fact that the Revolution had made explicit the basic idea that voting had little or nothing to do with real property and that this idea should be reflected accurately in the law.... The changes in suffrage made during the Revolution were the most important in the entire history of American suffrage reform. In retrospect it is clear that they committed the country to a democratic suffrage.
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While many of the state constitutions, under the influence of conservative theorists, turned out to be conservative reactions against initial revolutionary conditions, the very act of making them was radical and revolutionary, for they meant that what the radical and Enlightenment thinkers had said was really true: men did not have to submit blindly to habit, to custom, to irrational “prescription.” After violently throwing off their prescribed government, they could sit down and consciously make over their polity by the use of reason. Here was radicalism indeed. Furthermore, in the Bills of Rights, the framers added a significant and consciously libertarian attempt to prevent government from invading the natural rights of the individual, rights which they had learned about from the great English libertarian tradition of the past century.

For all these reasons, for its mass violence, and for its libertarian goals, the American Revolution was ineluctably radical. Not the least demonstration of its radicalism was the impact of this revolution in inspiring and generating the admittedly radical revolutions in Europe, an international impact that has been most thoroughly studied by Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot. Palmer has eloquently summed up the meaning that the American Revolution had for Europe:

The American Revolution coincided with the climax of the Age of Enlightenment. It was itself, in some degree, the product of this age. There were many in Europe, as there were in America, who saw in the American Revolution a lesson and an encouragement for mankind. It proved that the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment might be put into practice. It showed, or was assumed to show, that ideas of the rights of man and the social contract, of liberty and equality, of responsible citizenship and popular sovereignty, of religious freedom, freedom of thought and speech, separation of powers and deliberately contrived written constitutions, need not remain in the realm of speculation, among the writers of books; but could be made the actual fabric of public life among real people, in this world, now.
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*
Chilton Williamson,
American Suffrage,
pp. 111–12, 115–16.

**
Palmer,
The Age of the Democratic Revolution I,
pp. 239–40.

Through a burgeoning press, book and periodical, reading clubs and the reports of foreign soldiers who had served in the American War, Europe was swept with fervor for the revolutionary cause. Indeed, a widely read political press and the formation of a “public opinion” really began in this era under the impact of the American Revolution. France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands were particularly taken by the Revolution and its inspiring example for the rest of the world. Under its impact a political press developed in Germany and the Netherlands; in Ireland and the Netherlands, two countries with close personal and kinship ties to the American people, the revolutionary example of the Sons of Liberty and committees of correspondence inspired popular political clubs.

In the lands of America’s wartime allies France and Holland, revolutionary sentiment could grow in a particularly favorable climate. Future French revolutionary leaders from Lafayette to Brissot de Warville were deeply inspired by the American example. France (as well as Ireland and Holland) learned about constitutional conventions, committees of public safety, test oaths, confiscation of émigré property, paper money and price controls from the Americans. Ambassador Franklin was lionized in Paris, and an international intellectual debate was waged over the virtues of the various American constitutions by such leading liberals as John Adams and Jefferson in the United States, Turgot, Condorcet, Dupont de Nemours, Mirabeau, Abbé Mably, and Abbé Morellet in France, and Richard Price in England. In Holland, John Adams intrigued with the radical republicans to join the war against the wishes of the pro-British Orange regime.
Adams had close contact with the Dutch revolutionaries headed by J. D. van der Capellen tot der Pol, the Reverend van der Kemp, and the bankers of Amsterdam. The Belgian revolution of 1789 was greatly influenced by the American constitutions and state papers, and the Declaration of Independence by Flanders against Austrian rule in 1789 reproduced the language of the American Declaration. Moreover, the Act of Union of the United Belgian States in 1790 almost exactly reproduced the language as well as the spirit of the Articles of Confederation; the central legislative body of the union was even called “Congress.”

The American Revolution, and the question of participating in the fight against England, led to the formation of a Dutch revolutionary Patriot party around Capellen. Capellen, in a notable pamphlet of 1781,
An Address to the Netherlands People,
denounced the pro-British Orange oligarchy and bureaucracy, pointed to the example of an American government elected by the people, and, most importantly, called for the arming of the people, after the examples of America and Ireland. He also urged the formation of spontaneous grassroots citizens’ groups like the American committees and the English associations, to put pressure upon the government. To follow the American example, he wrote, was to be ready, “every man with his musket.” Accordingly, the burghers of Utrecht and other towns began to arm, drill, organize free corps, and form national meetings and assemblies. The mass army and the pressure of the burghers polarized and split the Patriot movement, for the aristocratic and traditionally anti-Orange Dutch “regents,” in control of the councils and provincial estates, began to be frightened at the democratic demands of the middle-class burghers. The burghers’ free corps was led by the fiery Ondaatje, a student at the University of Utrecht, who became a focal point for both sides in the Patriot split. The Dutch masses rallied to Ondaatje and the Patriots, while some of the regents left to join the Orange party.

Free corps began forming in 1784, and the first National Assembly of Free Corps met at Utrecht at the end of that year. By 1786, the National Assembly of Free Corps and the liberal wing of the regents issued a joint declaration calling for a truly republican, democratic, and liberal regime. What is more, the Utrecht burghers deposed the old aristocratic town council, and chose a new council by general election; the following year civil war broke out with the troops of the Prince of Orange. The Dutch Revolution seemed to be sweeping all before it. But, as was later to occur in France, the forces of foreign armed counter-revolution intervened to crush the popular movement. While financially aided by France, the Patriots were overwhelmed by large-scale British bribery and intrigue, but especially by the intervention of 20,000 Prussian troops, who invaded the
Dutch provinces, occupied Utrecht and Amsterdam, and crushed the Dutch Patriot revolution. The intriguer British Ambassador Sir James Harris was close to tears of joy as he and the Prussians restored the rule of the House of Orange. Edmund Burke, in a prefigurement of his reactionary role in the French Revolution, also hailed the crushing of the rebellion. Harris’ financial largesse controlled the restored regime, and the House of Orange instituted a veritable reign of terror, driving many thousands of Patriots into exile. Most of the refugees fled to France and the Austrian Netherlands, though van der Kemp emigrated to the United States. Britain and Prussia made so bold as to guarantee formally the rule of the Orange regime.
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The Belgian provinces, led by the province of Brabant and by the lawyer Jean François Vonck, successfully revolted against Austrian rule and declared their independence in 1789. After independence, the Vonckists determined to complete their revolution and democratize and liberalize the restrictive feudal and guild systems of Belgium. In provincial revolutionary committees and in elections of local officials, insurrectionary committees of middle-class citizens began to sweep Belgium. The Belgian aristocracy countered by forming an estates general and adopting an act of union modelled, in its decentralization, on the Articles of Confederation, and insisting that the American model was only a national, external revolution for independence. The liberals led by the moderate Vonck, however, countered by citing the importance of the American state constitutions and the consequent liberalizing of each state. Thus, both sides in the Belgian struggle relied on their varying interpretations of the true nature of the American Revolution. Finally, after various scuffles, the reactionary Estates party won out in the spring of 1790, and hundreds of liberal leaders were forced to flee to France. A rightist reign of terror, launched by the Catholic clergy and its reactionary theoretician Abbé Feller, broke out against the liberals, and one monk declared in a sermon that anyone meeting a Vonckist should kill him on sight. Masses of peasants, led by their priests, poured out into the towns to kill liberals. Hence, the return of Austrian rule in late 1790 was understandably greeted by the harassed Belgian liberals as “almost a deliverance” from the rule of the Belgian aristocracy; they then returned to Belgium bitterly anticlerical and looking wistfully to revolutionary and anticlerical France for their future model.

The first of the eighteenth century European revolutions had occurred in the city of Geneva. The burghers, with Rousseau as their philosopher, tried to break through the tightly knit rule of the local aristocracy in 1767–68, and gained a few concessions. In 1781, the burghers again tried to democratize rule in Geneva. The Geneva aristocrats appealed to the powers that had presumed to impose and guarantee a tight aristocratic rule in Geneva in the Act of 1738: the cantons of Bern and Zurich and the kingdom of France. Genevese aristocrat Micheli du Crest urged external intervention “in the cause of all legitimate governments and of all sovereigns,” to crush the “atrocious and unprovoked horrors of sedition.” France, Bern, and Zurich promptly sent in troops and laid siege to Geneva and finally stormed it. The foreign powers, consulting with the town aristocracy, not only reinforced the pre-1781 aristocratic rule, but they even revoked the minor concessions of 1768. The banker Étienne Clavière, a burgher leader, fled from Geneva to Paris and there formed with Brissot de Warville a Gallo-American society to perpetuate the ideals of the American Revolution. Clavière was later minister of finance in the revolutionary Girondin government of France.

Another particularly direct outgrowth of the American war was the upsurge of a revolutionary movement in Ireland. In response to John Paul Jones’ raid on Belfast in the spring of 1778, upper and middle-class Irishmen, almost all Protestants (the submerged bulk of Roman Catholic peasantry had no voice in Irish political life), formed armed companies throughout Ireland. Designed originally for defense against invasion, these armed companies, the Irish Volunteers, remained in being to emulate the Americans and press for greater liberty in Ireland. Legal because of their ostensible purpose of common defense, the Volunteers exchanged ideas and met in regional assemblies. Newspapers, pamphlets, grand juries and county meetings agitated for liberal reforms against England, especially for the relaxing of British imperial trade restrictions in order to ease the severe economic crises caused by the embargo of Irish exports (especially linens) to the United States. Politically, the Volunteers wanted home rule for the Irish Parliament and democratic reform of that aristocratic body itself. The pressure of the armed Volunteers forced substantial concessions from the British, permitting some exports of Irish goods to the colonies. Further pressure by a Volunteer movement grown to 80,000 armed men forced the British in 1782 to grant the Irish Parliament, led by the reformer Henry Grattan, home rule and equal status with the British Parliament under the Crown. Such infamous measures as Poynings’ Law were repealed. Exuberantly, the Irish admitted that it was America’s victory, joined to their own armed pressure, that had forced England
to grant home rule. “It was on the plains of America,” wrote one Irishman, “that Ireland obtained her freedom.”

But home rule proved disappointing, and trade restrictions and royal control continued in force; the Volunteers insisted on continuing in force to demand reform of the Irish Parliament itself. But they were weakened by a grave inner contradiction: their desire to democratize ran squarely against their commitment to keeping the body of Roman Catholics submerged. If the Roman Catholics were to be given the vote, the entire social system established by the English conquests, notably land monopoly and the established Protestant Church, would be cast into peril.