Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (60 page)

Middlekauff,
Glorious Cause,
7–97, covers the origins of the conflict through the Stamp Act Crisis, concluding: “By late August [1765] two major colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, each in its own way, had vented their anger at the Stamp Act. They in fact had started more than they knew; they had started a fire. Its spread seemed virtually inevitable.” (Ibid., 97.) Taylor,
American Colonies,
xiv, generally describes the rise of scholarly attention to the Atlantic world. “The Atlantic approach examines the complex and continuous interplay of Europe, Africa, and colonial America through the transatlantic flows of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas.” (Ibid.) See also Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds.,
Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Baltimore, Md., 2005); Edmund S. Morgan, “The American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement” in Wright,
Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution,
172–92; and Risjord,
Jefferson's America, 1760–1815,
47–69.

THE
A
LBANY
P
LAN
OF
U
NION
Walter Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
(New York, 2003), 158–62. See also Gipson, “American Revolution as an Aftermath,” 100. Gipson suggested that the American Revolution might have been prevented had the 1754 proposal been accepted. For a critical view of Gipson's epic series in general and of his thoughts on 1754 in particular, see Patrick Griffin, “In Retrospect: Lawrence Henry Gipson's ‘The British Empire Before the American Revolution,' ”
Reviews in American History
31, no. 2 (June 2003), 171–83. Griffin wrote: “Was the American Revolution inevitable? Gipson by and large does not fancy such counter-factuals, but he does point to one moment that seemed to offer an opportunity to construct a more enduring imperial scheme: the Albany Plan of Union. Under the aborted plan drawn up in 1754, the American colonies, united together through friendship and common concerns, would be tied to Britain under the Crown but by little else. If Americans, [Gipson] suggests, had embraced this plan, they could have avoided the touchy constitutional issues that led to rebellion.” (Ibid., 176.)

Late in life, Franklin himself saw the failure of the Albany Plan as a critical step on the road to revolution. “The colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves,” he said. “There would then have been no need of troops from England; of course the subsequent pretense for taxing America, and the bloody contest it occasioned, would have been avoided.” (Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin,
161–62.) See also Middlekauff,
Glorious Cause,
32.

I
TS
AUTHOR
, B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN
Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin,
158–62. The proposal was the brainchild of Franklin, who wrote of it: “By this plan the general government was to be administered by a president-general appointed and supported by the crown, and a grand council was to be chosen by the representatives of the people of the several colonies, met in their respective assemblies.… Its fate was singular: the assemblies did not adopt it as they all thought there was too much prerogative in it, and in England it was judged to have too much of the democratic
.
” (
A Benjamin Franklin Reader,
ed. Walter Isaacson [New York, 2003], 512–13.)

HE
INHERITED
HIS
FATHER
'
S
EDITION
Francis D. Cogliano,
Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy
(Charlottesville, Va., 2006), 22.

INEXTRICABLY
LINKED
WITH
THE
STORY
OF
E
NGLAND
Ibid., 22–24.

A
CONSTANT
STRUGGLE
T
O
PRESERVE
INDIVIDUA
L
LIBERTY
Trevor Colbourn,
The Lamp of Experience
:
Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution
(Indianapolis, 1998), 3–47. See also Cogliano,
Thomas Jefferson,
21.

HIS
TORY
WAS
“
PHILOSOPHY
”
Cogliano,
Thomas Jefferson,
21. Bolingbroke attributed the aphorism to Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

H
ISTORY
,
THEN
,
MATT
ERED
ENORMOUSLY
In Query XIV of his
Notes on the State of Virginia,
Jefferson offered an expansive vision of the role history should play in the lives of nations and of peoples: Nothing was more important, he said, than “rendering the people safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.” The reading of history was essential for this enterprise.

History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved to a certain degree. (Jefferson,
Writings,
274.)

Cogliano,
Thomas Jefferson,
26, quotes this passage from the
Notes,
concluding: “In Jefferson's view knowledge of history was necessary for the people of Virginia if they were to protect their liberty. It was a political necessity in a republic.” (Ibid.)

SOCIETIES
EVERYWHERE
WERE
LIKELY
DIVIDED
Ibid., 22–26.

T
HE
DRAMA
OF
THE
E
NGLISH
C
IVIL
W
AR
See Alfred F. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,” in
The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism,
ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London, 1984), 187–212, for an account of the cultural impact of the Cromwellian legacy in AmeriCA.

LIVED
IN
AN
AT
MOSPHERE
Ibid., 131. Bailyn wrote: “Their intellectual world framed by the concept of the mixed constitution, the colonists found ready at hand, in the terms of that powerful paradigm, a means of comprehending the disturbances around them. Some, reflecting on the socio-constitutional structure of colonial society, were struck by the discrepancies between the ideal and the real, the English model and the colonial duplicates, and attributed their ills to these discrepancies. It was often noted that the all-important middle order, the element of aristocracy—so vital, according to the standard constitutional theory, in keeping the extremes of power and liberty from tearing each other apart—was not properly represented in the colonies, in certain cases did not exist at all.” (Ibid.)

S
ECURITY
C
OULD
BE
FOUND
ONLY
Ibid., 151–52. Bailyn wrote: “England stood almost completely alone in the Old World, sustained in its distinctive role, so far successfully, by the skillful rebalancing of its constitution in the settlement that had followed the Glorious Revolution. But that settlement had not extended, fully, to America. The phalanx of strong guarantees against the authoritarian power of the state was missing here, and the situation here, consequently, was peculiarly dangerous, peculiarly delicate, peculiarly demanding of the powers of vigilance and resistance.” (Ibid.)

T
HE
HISTORY
A
MERICAN
S
WANTED
Ibid., 106. On the question of ideology and power, Bailyn wrote:

I have suggested that a paradox lay at the heart of provincial politics in eighteenth-century America: on the one hand an enlargement, beyond what was commonly thought compatible with liberty, of the legal authority possessed by the first branch of government, the executive; and on the other hand, a radical reduction of the actual power in politics exercised by the executive, a reduction accounted for by the weakness of the so-called “influence” by which the crown and its ministers in England actually managed politics in that country. At once regressive and progressive—carrying forward into the Augustan world powers associated with Stuart autocracy yet embodying reforms that would remain beyond the reach of reformers in England for another century or more—American politics in the mid-eighteenth century was a thoroughgoing anomaly. Conflict was inevitable: conflict between a presumptuous prerogative and an overgreat democracy, conflict that had no easy resolution and that raised in minds steeped in the political culture of eighteenth-century Britain the specter of catastrophe. (Ibid.)

Bailyn found the impetus for Revolution in the degree to which the colonists believed America was not fully sharing in the classic eighteenth-century balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and commons. It was not, in other words, a dislike of or objection to the English constitution but rather disappointment that the New World was not allowed to live wholly within the post–Glorious Revolution system. “What the colonial opposition at every stage saw in contemplating the role of government, of power, of the executive, in the colonies were evidences—scattered to be sure, fading in and out of focus, rising and falling in importance, but palpable evidences nevertheless—of … conspiracy against the constitutional guarantees of liberty.” (Ibid., 136.)

R
A
PIN
'
S
MULTIVOLUME
HI
STORY
OF
E
NGLAND
Colbourn,
Lamp of Experience,
43–44.

P
ETER
J
EFFERSON
WAS
“
A
STAUNCH
”
Randall,
Jefferson,
I, 14.

FREEDOM
-
LOVING
S
AXONS
Colbourn,
Lamp of Experience,
237–43. For details about the longstanding Whig argument, see Joseph J. Ellis,
American Sphinx,
32–34. The section is an excellent explanation of the theory, its origins, and how, in Ellis's words, “Jefferson clung to the theory with nearly obsessive tenacity throughout his life, though even he admitted that ‘I had never been able to get any one to agree with me but Mr. Wythe.' ” (Ellis,
American Sphinx,
33.)

J
EFFERSON
AND
LIKE
-
MINDED
A
MERICANS
Bailyn,
Origins of American Politics,
159–61. Within two years of the Stamp Act repeal, in 1766, Bailyn notes:

The train of events that manifestly led to Independence was clearly visible: Stamp Act, Townshend Duties, Massacre. But these enactments and the other famous events of the period are not self-evidently incendiary. The stamp tax was not a crushing tax; it was generally considered to be an innocuous and judicious form of taxation. The Townshend Duties, which were also far from crippling, were withdrawn. And the Massacre was the result of a kind of urban riot common both in England and America throughout the century. Yet these events were in fact incendiary; they did in fact lead to the overthrow of constituted authority and, ultimately, to the transformation of American life. For they were not in some pure sense simply objective events, and they were not perceived by immaculate minds aloft in a cosmic perch. To minds steeped in the literature of eighteenth-century history and political theory, these events, charged with ideology, were the final realization of tendencies and possibilities that had been seen and spoken of, with concern and foreboding, since the turn of the seventeenth century. There was no calm before the storm. The storm was continuous, if intermittent, throughout the century. An inflamed, unstable politics, incapable of duplicating the integration and control that “influence” had created in England, had called forth the full range of advanced ideas, not as theories simply, not as warnings merely of some ultimate potentiality, but as explanations of present conflicts, bitter conflicts, conflicts between a legally overgreat executive and an irrepressible though shifting opposition.

The Seven Years' War was the catalyst.

For before 1763 there had been no relentless pressures within the system of Anglo-American politics, no sustained drive or inescapable discipline guided by central policy. When, after the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, that impetus and control appeared in the form of a revamped colonial system with more effective agencies of enforcement; when the system finally tightened and the pressure was maintained; and when, associated with this, evidence accumulated in the colonies that corruption was softening the vigilance that had heretofore preserved England's own mixed constitution—that an escalation of ministerial power initially stimulated by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, was taking place in England itself—when all of this happened, the latent tendencies of American politics moved swiftly to their ultimate fulfillment. (IBId.)