The American Revolution: A History (12 page)
The cultural relics of these neoclassical dreams are with Americans still: not only in the endless proliferation of Greek and Roman temples, but in the names of towns like Syracuse and Troy; in the designation of political institutions like the capitols and the senates; in political symbols like the goddess Liberty and numerous Latin mottoes; and in the poetry and songs, such as “Hail Columbia.” But the spirit that once inspired these things, the meaning they had for the Revolutionaries, has been lost and was being lost even as they were being created. How many Americans today know what the pyramid and eye on the Great Seal mean, even though the device appears on every dollar bill? Who today reads Joel Barlow’s epic poetry or Timothy Dwight’s
Conquest of Canaan
? Much of the art of the 1790s, except for portraits, was neglected and scorned by subsequent generations. All of these neoclassical dreams were soon overwhelmed by the egalitarian democracy that resulted from the Americans’ grand experiment in republicanism.
EQUALITY
The community of the arts and science was called “the republic of letters” because the participants in that community—writers, painters, scientists, and other creative people—were not there by hereditary right: They necessarily had to be talented. Who, it was asked, remembered the fathers or sons of Homer and Euclid? Artistic talent, declared Thomas Paine, was not hereditary. In a republic individuals were no longer destined to be what their fathers were. Ability, not birth or whom one knew, was what mattered. “In monarchies,” declared David Ramsay of South Carolina, “favor is the source of preferment; but, in our new forms of government, no one can command the suffrages of the people, unless by his superior merit and capacity.” This, said Ramsay, was what Americans meant by equality—the very “life and soul” of republicanism.
Equality—the most powerful idea in all of American history—predicted an end to the incessant squabbling over position and rank and the bitter contentions of factional politics that had afflicted the colonial past. Since this discord was thought to be rooted in the artificial inequalities of colonial society, created and nourished largely through the influence and patronage of the British crown, the adoption of republicanism promised a new era of social harmony.
But republican equality did not mean the elimination of all distinctions. Republics would still have an aristocracy, said Jefferson, but it would be a natural, not an artificial one. The republican leaders would resemble not the luxury-loving money-mongering lackeys of British officialdom but the stoical and disinterested heroes of antiquity—men, like George Washington, who seemed to Americans to embody perfectly the classical ideal of a republican leader.
Yet in the end, equality meant more than careers open to the talented few. The Revolutionaries’ stress on the ability of common people to elect those who had integrity and merit presumed a certain moral capacity in the populace as a whole. Good republicans had to believe in the common sense of the common people. Ordinary people may not have been as educated or as wise as gentlemen who had college degrees, but they were more trustworthy. They were frank, honest, and sincere, qualities that were essential for republican government. Republican America would end the deceit and dissembling so characteristic of courtiers and monarchies. “Let those flatter who fear,” said Jefferson in 1774; “it is not an American art.”
But republicanism went even further in promoting equality. The most enlightened eighteenth-century thinking challenged the scornful manner in which for centuries the aristocratic few had viewed the common many. In our egalitarian-minded age it is difficult for us to appreciate the degree of contempt with which for centuries the aristocracy and gentry of traditional monarchical societies had regarded the lower orders. Common people, when they were noticed at all, were often looked upon as little better than animals. Even some of the Revolutionary leaders were not beyond an occasional disparaging remark about ordinary folk. George Washington once called the common people “the grazing multitude,” Alexander Hamilton spoke of the “unthinking populace,” and early in his career John Adams, who never forgot he had once been one of them, referred to ordinary folk as the “common Herd of Mankind.”
Other Americans too did not hesitate to qualify their belief in the natural equality of mankind. Many balked at even including Indians or blacks within the sphere of men; and when most men thought about women in these terms, it was only to emphasize women’s difference from men, not their equality. Some continued to believe that God had ordained permanent distinctions between the saved and the damned. Still others, while admitting that all men had the same senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, argued that men of genius, the elite, had developed their senses to the point where they had become more sensitive than common people.
Although this distinction based on different degrees of sensibility helped to justify the continued separation of gentlemen from commoners, ultimately the eighteenth century’s emphasis on the senses and sensibility opened the way to a greater belief in the equality of people. If human beings were separated from one another not by innate characteristics but by learned ones, learned by the environment operating through the senses, then everyone at least began life with the same blank slate.
Jefferson’s affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal was, as he later recalled, simply “the common sense” of the age. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, to be enlightened was to believe in the natural equality of all men. Even those as aristocratic as William Byrd and Governor Francis Fauquier of Virginia conceded that all men, even men of different nations and races, were born equal and that “the principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the differing opportunities of improvement.” “White, Red, or Black; polished or unpolished,” declared Governor Fauquier in 1760; “Men are Men.” That only education and cultivation separated one man from another was the most explosive idea of the eighteenth century, indeed, of all modern thinking.
By placing a radically new value on knowledge acquired through the senses rather than through reason, John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) had given a new significance to the capacities of ordinary people. Perhaps only a few were capable of reason and intellectual achievement, but all people were capable of receiving impressions through their senses.
Thus, despite the patrician sense of gentlemanly distinctiveness expressed by the Revolutionary leaders—a frank and unabashed commitment to elitism that profoundly separates them from us today—what in the end remains remarkable is the degree to which they accepted the equality of all people. A common nature linked people together in natural affection and made it possible for them to be friends and to share each other’s moral feelings. There was something in each human being—some sort of moral sense or sympathetic instinct—that bound everyone together in a common humanity and made possible natural compassion and morality. Jefferson expressed great doubts about the intellectual abilities of blacks, but he conceded that in their moral sense they were the equal of whites. It was obvious that reason was unequally distributed in people, but all persons, however humble and however uncultivated, had in their hearts a moral intuition that told them right from wrong. Indeed, some believed that educated gentlemen had no greater sense of right and wrong than plain unlettered people.
Jefferson believed that differences between people were created by experience, by the environment operating through people’s senses. But Jefferson and other enlightened eighteenth-century thinkers realized the dangers of pure sensationalism. How could men and women control the environment’s chaotic bombardment of their senses? Something was needed to structure their turbulent and jumbled experiences. Otherwise, human personalities, said the Scottish-born lawyer of Pennsylvania James Wilson, quoting David Hume, would become “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity . . . in a perpetual flux and movement.” A society composed only of fluctuating sensations was impossible; something had to tie people together intuitively and naturally. As Jefferson said, “the Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions.” Jefferson and other American leaders thus modified their stark Lockean environmentalism by positing this natural social disposition, a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being. Such a moral gyroscope—identified with Scottish moral or commonsense thinking and resembling Kant’s categories—was needed to counteract the worst and most frightening implications of Lockean sensationalism and to keep individuals level and sociable in a confused and chaotic world.
These beliefs in the natural affection, moral sense, and benevolence of people were no utopian fantasies but the enlightened conclusions of the eighteenth-century science of society. While most clergymen continued to urge Christian love and charity upon their parishioners, many other educated and enlightened people sought to secularize Christian love and find in human nature itself a scientific imperative for loving one’s neighbor as oneself. There seemed to be a natural principle of attraction that pulled people together, a moral principle that was no different from the principles that operated in the physical world. “Just as the regular motions and harmony of the heavenly bodies depend upon their mutual gravitation towards each other,” said the Massachusetts preacher Jonathan Mayhew, so too did love and benevolence among people preserve “order and harmony” in the society. Love between humans was the gravity of the moral world, and it could be studied and perhaps even manipulated more easily than the gravity of the physical world. Enlightened thinkers like the Earl of Shaftesbury and Adam Smith thus sought to discover these hidden forces that moved and held people together in the moral world. They looked for forces in the social world that could match the great eighteenth-century scientific discoveries of the hidden forces—gravity, magnetism, electricity, and energy—that operated in the physical world. Thinkers like John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, dreamed of a time “when men, treating moral philosophy as Newton and his successors have done natural philosophy, may arrive at greater precision.” Out of such dreams was modern social science born.
Of course, many intellectuals in the eighteenth century still believed that republican society could be held together only by the kind of ancient masculine and martial virtue expressed, for example, in Jacques-Louis David’s classical republican painting,
The Oath of the Horatii,
exhibited in Paris in 1786. But many others had come to believe that the kind of classical republican virtue represented in David’s painting was too demanding and too severe for the enlightened, polite, and civilized societies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
For many enlightened thinkers, people’s natural instinct to be sociable and benevolent became a modern substitute for the ascetic classical virtue of the ancient world. Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity. Mingling in drawing rooms, clubs, coffeehouses, and even commercial exchanges—partaking of the innumerable daily comings and goings of modern life—created friendship and sympathy that helped to hold society together. This modern virtue was more Addisonian than Spartan and was capable of being expressed by women as well as men; some said that women were even more capable than men of sociability and benevolence.
The Revolutionary leaders, of course, had varying degrees of confidence in people’s natural sympathy and benevolence. While someone like Alexander Hamilton soon came to doubt people’s moral capacities, others like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson remained very optimistic; indeed, they thought that the natural harmony of society might even replace much of governmental authority itself. If only the natural tendencies of people to love and care for one another were allowed to flow freely, unclogged by the artificial interference of government, particularly monarchical government, the most optimistic republicans believed that society would prosper and hold itself together.
Unlike liberals of the twenty-first century, the most liberal-minded of the eighteenth century tended to see society as beneficent and government as malevolent. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, legal privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts—indeed, all social inequities and deprivations—seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical government. “Society,” said Paine in a brilliant summary of this liberal view, “is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.” Society “promotes our happiness
positively
by uniting our affections,” government “
negatively
by restraining our vices.” Society “encourages intercourse,” government “creates distinctions.” The emerging liberal Jeffersonian view that the least government was the best was based on just such a hopeful belief in the natural harmony of society.
This liberal belief in the capacity of affection and benevolence to hold republican societies together may have been as unrealistic and as contrary to human nature as the traditional belief in austere classical virtue. Certainly hard-nosed skeptics like Alexander Hamilton came to doubt its efficacy. But for a moment in the enthusiasm of revolution, many Americans imagined a new and better world emerging, a world, they said, of “greater perfection and happiness than mankind has yet seen.”
A NEW WORLD ORDER
In that new and better world that many Revolutionary leaders envisioned, war itself might be abolished. Just as liberal Americans in their Revolutionary state constitutions sought a new kind of domestic politics that would end tyranny, so too did many of them seek a new kind of international politics that would promote peace among nations. This emphasis alone gave the American Revolution worldwide significance.