The American Revolution: A History (11 page)
V
Republicanism
Amilitary victory over Great Britain may have been essential for the success of the Revolution, but for Americans it was scarcely the whole of the Revolution. Although the Revolution had begun as a political crisis within the empire, by 1776 it was no longer merely a colonial rebellion. From 1775, when independence and hence the formation of new governments became imminent, and continuing throughout the war, nearly every piece of writing about the future was filled with extraordinarily visionary hopes for the transformation of America. But not just America’s government and society would be transformed; its role in the world would be changed as well. Americans had come to believe that the Revolution promised nothing less than a massive reordering of their lives—a reordering summed up in the conception of republicanism.
THE NEED FOR VIRTUE
This republicanism was in every way a radical ideology—as radical for the eighteenth century as Marxism was to be for the nineteenth century. It meant more than simply eliminating a king and establishing an elective system of government. It added a moral and idealistic dimension to the political separation from England—a dimension that promised a fundamental shift in values and a change in the very character of American society.
Republicanism intensified the radicalism of the “country” ideology that Americans had borrowed from opposition groups in English society, and linked it with the older and deeper European currents of thought that went back to antiquity. These classical currents of thought—essentially explanations for the decline of the ancient Roman Republic—set forth republican ideals and values—about the good life, citizenship, political health, and social morality—that have had a powerful and lasting effect on Western culture.
These classical ideas had been revived by Renaissance writers, particularly Machiavelli, and had been carried into seventeenth-century English thought by such writers as James Harrington, the poet John Milton, and Algernon Sidney. It was under the influence of these classical republican ideas that England in the seventeenth century had executed its king, Charles I, and had tried its brief experiment in republicanism, the Commonwealth (1649–53). By the eighteenth century these classical republican ideals had spread throughout western Europe and had become a kind of counterculture for many dissatisfied Europeans. In countless writings and translations, ranging from Charles Rollin’s popular histories of antiquity to Thomas Gordon’s translations of Tacitus and Sallust, eighteenth-century European and British intellectuals evoked the utopian image of an earlier Roman republican world of simple farmer-citizens enjoying liberty and arcadian virtue. Reformers everywhere saw this idealized ancient world as an alternative to the sprawling monarchies, with their hierarchies, luxury, and corruption, that they had come to despise in their own time.
In the excitement of the Revolutionary movement, these classical republican values came together with the long-existing European image of Americans as a simple, egalitarian, liberty-loving people to form one of the most coherent and powerful ideologies the Western world had yet seen. Many of the ambiguities Americans had felt about the rustic provincial character of their society were now clarified. What some had seen as the crudities and deficiencies of American life could now be viewed as advantages for republican government. Independent American farmers who owned their own land no longer had to be regarded as primitive folk living on the edges of European civilization and in the backwaters of history. Instead, they could now be seen as equal citizens naturally equipped to realize the republican values intellectuals had espoused for centuries.
Inevitably, the new American states in 1776 became republics. Everyone knew that these new republics with their elective systems had not only political but also moral and social significance. Republicanism struck directly at the ties of blood, kinship, and dependency that lay at the heart of a monarchical society. In a monarchy individuals were joined together as in a family by their common allegiance to the king. Since the king, in the words of the English jurist William Blackstone, was the “pater familias of the nation,” to be a subject was in fact to be a kind of child—weak and dependent, sinful and lacking in self-restraint. Yet monarchies, based on the presumption that human beings were corrupt, had persisted almost everywhere for centuries because they offered security and order. Left alone and free, people, it was assumed, would run amuck, each doing what was right in his own eyes. Such a selfish people had to be held together from above, by the power of kings who created trains of dependencies and inequalities, supported by standing armies, strong religious establishments, and a dazzling array of titles, rituals, and ceremonies.
Republicanism challenged all these assumptions and practices of monarchy. By throwing off monarchy and becoming republicans in 1776, Americans offered a different conception of what people were like and new ways of organizing both the state and the society. The Revolutionary leaders were not naÏve and they were not utopians—indeed, some of them had grave doubts about the capacities of ordinary people. But by adopting republican governments in 1776 all of them necessarily held to a more magnanimous conception of human nature than did supporters of monarchy.
Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. Republics lacked all the accouterments of patronage and power possessed by monarchies. If republics were to have order, it would have to come from below, from the people themselves, from their consent and their virtue, that is, from their willingness to surrender their personal desires to the public good. Much of the Revolutionary rhetoric was filled with exhortations to the people to act virtuously, telling them, as Samuel Adams did, that “a Citizen owes everything to the Commonwealth.” Republicanism thus stressed a morality of social cohesion and devotion to the common welfare, or
res publica.
Several of the states in 1776—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—even adopted the name “commonwealth” to express better their identification with the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries and their new dedication to the public good.
Republican citizens, in short, had to be patriots. Patriots were not simply those who loved their country but those who were free of dependent connections. As Jefferson wrote in his
Notes on the State of Virginia,
“dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Hence the sturdy independent yeomen, Jefferson’s “chosen people of God,” were regarded as the most incorruptible and the best citizens for a republic. The celebration of the independent farmer in the years following the Revolution was not a literary conceit but an imperative of republican government.
The individual ownership of property, especially landed property, was essential for a republic, both as a source of independence and as evidence of a permanent attachment to the community. Those who were propertyless and dependent—young men and women—could thus be justifiably denied the vote because, as a convention of Essex County, Massachusetts, declared in 1778, they were “so situated as to have no wills of their own.” In Europe, dependency was common because only a few possessed property. But, as one Carolinian wrote in 1777, “the people of America are a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder.” Jefferson was so keen on this point that he proposed in 1776 that the new commonwealth of Virginia guarantee at least fifty acres of land for every citizen.
These republican communities of independent citizens presented an inspiring ideal. But history had shown that republics were an especially fragile kind of state, highly susceptible to faction and internal disorder. Because republics were so utterly dependent on the virtue of the people, theorists like Montesquieu concluded that they had to be small in territory and homogeneous in character. The only existing European republican models—the Netherlands, and the Italian and Swiss city-states—were small and compact, not fit models for the sprawling new nation of the United States. According to the best political science of the day, when a large country with many diverse interests attempted to establish a republic, as England had tried in the seventeenth century, the experiment was sure to end in some sort of dictatorship like that of Oliver Cromwell.
It is not surprising therefore that Americans in 1776 embarked on their experiment in republicanism in a spirit of risk and high adventure. Yet most American Revolutionaries were enthusiastic and remarkably confident of success. They believed that they were naturally virtuous and thus ideally suited for republican government. Were not the remarkable displays of popular order in the face of disintegrating royal governments in 1774–75 evidence of the willingness of the American people to obey their governments without coercion? Did they not possess the same hardy character the ancient republican citizens had? In contrast to England, where most people were tenants or landless workers, most Americans, at least most white adult males, owned their own land. Americans told themselves that they were a young and vigorous people, not yet dissipated by the aristocratic luxuries and indolent pleasures of the Old World.
THE RISING GLORY OF AMERICA
The exhilaration Americans felt in 1776 came not simply from their belief that they were in the vanguard of a worldwide republican revolution that would eventually topple decrepit monarchies everywhere. They also believed that they were destined to bring about a new flowering in the arts and sciences; they would become the leaders of the international “republic of letters.” Many American intellectuals came to believe that the torch of civilization was being passed across the Atlantic to the New World, where it would burn even more brightly. Despite their rejection of the luxury and corruption of the Old World, the American Revolutionaries never meant to repudiate the best of English and European culture, but rather to embrace and fulfill it. “The enterprising genius of the people,” declared an excited Joel Barlow, “promises a most rapid improvement in all the arts that embellish human nature.”
In light of their former colonial status and their earlier widespread expressions of cultural inferiority, their presumption of becoming the cultural leaders of the Western world is jarring, to say the least. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that Revolutionary leaders and artists imagined America eventually becoming the place where the best of all the arts and sciences would flourish. When the Revolutionaries talked of “treading upon the ground of Greece and Rome” they meant not only that they would erect republican governments, but also that they would in time have their own Homers and Virgils—in the words of historian David Ramsay, their own “poets, orators, criticks, and historians equal to the most celebrated of the ancient commonwealths of Greece and Italy.”
Such dreams, bombastic as they seem in retrospect, were grounded in the best scholarly thinking of the day and had helped to give Americans the confidence to undertake their Revolution. They knew, as philosopher David Hume had pointed out, that free states bred learning among the populace, and a learned populace was the best source of genius and artistic talent. But they knew as well that the arts and sciences were inevitably moving westward. From mid-century on, they had read and extolled Bishop Berkeley’s “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” which set forth the conventional notion of a western cycle of empire from the Middle East to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to western Europe, and from western Europe across the Atlantic to the New World. As early as 1759, an unsympathetic British traveler noted that the colonists were “looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give the law to the rest of the world.” So common became this theme of the transit of civilization westward that it led to the creation of a new literary genre, “The Rising Glory of America” poem, which, it seems, every gentleman with literary aspirations tried his hand at.
Of course, not every American intellectual was sure of the New World’s ability to receive the inherited torch of Western culture, and some doubted whether America’s primitive tastes could ever sustain the fine arts. But many of the Revolutionary leaders envisioned America’s becoming not only a libertarian refuge from the world’s tyranny, but also a worthy place where, in the words of Ezra Stiles, the enlightened president of Yale, “all the arts may be transported from Europe and Asia and flourish with . . . an augmented lustre.”
If Americans were to exceed Europe in dignity, grandeur, and taste, they would somehow have to create a republican art that avoided the Old World vices of overrefinement and luxury. The solution lay in the taut rationality of republican classicism, which allowed artistic expression without fostering corruption and social decay. It emphasized, as the commissioners who were charged with supervising the construction of public buildings in Washington, D.C., put it in 1793, “a grandeur of conception, a Republican simplicity, and that true elegance of proportion, which correspond to a tempered freedom excluding Frivolity, the food of little minds.”
Such a neoclassical art was not an original art in any modern sense, but it was never intended to be. The Americans’ aim, in their literature, painting, and architecture, was never to break irreparably from English forms but to give new and fresh republican spirit to old forms, to isolate and exhibit in their art the external and universal principles of reason and nature. Poets in the wilds of the New York frontier thus saw nothing incongruous in invoking comparisons with Virgil or Horace. The Connecticut poet John Trumbull was compared to Swift. Milton, Dryden, and Pope were all adopted without embarrassment as models for imitation. Even Noah Webster, despite all his experiments with developing a peculiar American language, never intended that the elegant style of Addison should be abandoned.
The criterion of art in this neoclassical era lay not in the genius of the artist or in the novelty of the work, but rather in the effect of the art on the audience or spectator. Consequently, someone like Joel Barlow could believe that his long epic poem
The Vision of Columbus
(1787), precisely because of its high moral and republican message, could excel in grandeur even Homer’s
Iliad.
And the painter John Trumbull, not to be confused with his cousin the poet, could conclude that the profession of painting was not trivial and socially useless as long as the artist depicted great events and elevated the spirit of the viewer. Washington, as much as he loved the theater, could only justify it on the grounds that it would “advance the interest of private and public virtue” and “polish the manners and habits of society.” There was nothing startling about Thomas Jefferson’s choice of the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple at Nîmes from the first century A.D., as a model for the new republican state capitol to be built along the mud-lined streets of a backwoods town in Virginia. Since architecture to Jefferson was “an art which shows so much,” it was particularly important for the new nation that appropriate inspirational forms be adopted, even though a Roman temple was hard to heat and acoustically impossible.