English 232 Martin Rosenstock

Gordon S. Wood. The American Revolution, The Creation of the American Republic

The American Revolution is inextricably linked to the idea of Republicanism. All manifest reasons for the outbreak of hostilities, such as end to the policy of ‘salutary neglect’ on the side of the British after the Peace of Paris in 1763, the enforcement of the Proclamation Line, or the endless back and forth of new taxes or duties and civic resistance, all these bones of contention set aside, the eruption of the War of Independence cannot be understood without a grasp of its ideological backdrop and intellectual underpinnings as embodied in the concept of Republicanism; nor can its effects be gauged without a knowledge of the energizing belief-system that drove it.

Strangely enough it may seem for such a powerful discourse, and despite the monolithic forcefulness the word seems to evoke, Republicanism in its modern form weaves together a multiplicity of principles, notions and sentiments, but also of anxieties and misgivings. It is only logical then that the effects this policital creed triggered in reality were sometimes inconsistent with the propounded body of ideas and themselves remained subject to nagging questions.

The Puritans building their ‘city upon a hill’ looked back to the trials of the children of Israel as related in the Old Testament for typological prefigurations of the present challenges they had to surmount, the intellectual trail-blazers of the Revolution harked back to classical antiquity. As Gordon Wood remarks in The Creation of the American Republic (1969):

For Americans the mid-eighteenth century was truly a neo-classical age – the high point of their classical period. At one time or another almost every Whig patriot took or was given the name of an ancient republican hero, and classical references and allusions run through much of the colonists’ writings, both public and private. (49)

The patriots took the republics of Athens and Rome as models of virtuousness and spiritual rectitude and conceptualized them as standing in stark contrast to the corrupt and depraved oligarchies and monarchies into which they degenerated. Transposed onto their own time, they frequently viewed themselves as the rightful heirs to these original republics and the monarchical power that wielded the colonial sceptre as a double of antique tyranical regimes, which was also venal and morally debased into the bargain.

This of course did not hinder them from employing ideas that had originated in Europe and especially in England as arguments for their political aim of self-government. Most prominent among the long list of European luminaries who came to be godfathers of the new American Republic is perhaps John Locke whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) by pointing out, as Woods puts it, that “only education and cultivation separated one man from another” (A R, 102) paved the way to an egalitarian view of human beings and whose concept of a social contract as laid down in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690 (?)) became increasingly important after the Declaration of Independence when “Americans needed some contractual analogy to explain their evolving relationships among themselves and with the state.” (C A R, 283)

But Locke was by far not the only figure into whose writings the Whig patriots tapped in order to find concepts that could explain the situation they found themselves in as well as justifications for their revolutionary plans. Pulling together ideas from people as diverse as Machiavelli, the Renaissance writer who served as the transmitter of ideas of Republicanism from classical antiquity to modern times, and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, who modified the Lockean emphasis on the individual by “positing [a] natural social disposition, a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being”, (A R, 103) as well as calling in their guaranteed ‘Rights of Englishmen’, which Parliament had wrested from the English monarchs over the centuries, the American elite cobbled together a system of self-empowerment as well as of legitimation of revolutionary action. To employ a very generalizing umbrella-term, one might say that Enlightenment-discourses in all their various forms stood at the beginning of the project of an American Republic; the United States can be seen as a brain-child of radical European ideas that had been stifled in their places of origin but which could flourish in new surroundings.

Despite the eventual success, however, it was a birth fraught with anxieties, and at least in hindsight the child was perhaps not quite as pretty as many of its parents imagined it to be. The disconcerting characteristic of the republics of antiquity was that they failed and turned into the very thing they were supposed to guard against, a tyranny of the few over the many. Building on Hume’s suggestion that republics could only survive in large territories, people such as Madison argued that the “republican state...must be so enlarged ‘without departing from the elective basis of it’ so that ‘the propensity of small republics to rash measures and the facility of forming and executing them’ would be stifled” (C A R, 504). But the fear of embarrassing failure always lurked in the background, and despite Madison’s visionary conceptualization of a pluralistic society in which the majority would rule but would never infringe on the rights of the minorities, these rights were not extended to a vast number of people living in the newly formed United States.

Native Americans, blacks, both slaves and free, as well as women are a conspicuous absence in Madison’s elective basis, and the failure, as we today would perceive it, of reality to live up to the high-flying ideals is troubling when one tries to evaluate the early American Republic as to its consistency with its republican and enlightened values. A man like Jefferson could write a document full of the ringing rhetoric of liberty, could hold it self-evident that all men were created free and equal, and then return to his Virginia plantation with hundreds of slaves; George Washington could wage a long and bloody war in the name of these principles and then do likewise. In addition one might ask, how egalitarian was a republic, how liberating a revolution that expelled a power which was perceived as aristocratic only to install people in government who were themselves from their economic and intellectual background as well as their self-perception aristocrats in anything but the title – members of the Virginia planter-aristocracy? This is not to suggest that the founding fathers deliberately acted against their own republican ideals or employed them merely as a smokescreen, nor to advocate a narrowly Marxist reading of the revolution in the tradition of Charles Beard, but to draw attention to the dynamics of the ideas that were born previous to and in the revolutionary era.

Republicanism had a profound impact on almost every aspect of life in America – from the realm of education where it gave rise to the Republic of Letters to family-life where it became enshrined in the belief of Republican motherhood, from the abolishment of the system of deference to changes in the apprentice-system, virtually no aspect of American life remained untouched by it. Nevertheless, it did not realize its full potential at the point of its inception; it did, however, provide the intellectual springboard for future changes. Saratoga Falls (1848), abolition movements and the struggle for the rights of the Native Americans all called and call in republican values. The power of the republican discourse extends to demands for virtuous behavior in politics and economics, and its legacy of the sub-ordination of the individual to the demands of his country can still be heard in Kennedy’s appeal not to ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Almost every reform-movement, pressure group or major politician has at least at some time gone back to the republican ideals as laid down in the late 18^th century, has appropriated and breathed new life into them. Republicanism for Jefferson had a different meaning than it has for us today, and the re-interpretation of this utopian concept will continue as long as the term remains emphatically meaningful for the people who employ it.