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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745337593 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2018 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Legacies and Challenges
Since the seventeenth century, the debate among English-speaking peoples over the nature of "liberty" periodically spilled out of the salons of the Enlightenment into the streets and onto the battlefields. When business concerns used what they called their liberty to create scarcities that raised prices, and five hundred Bostonians exercised what they called liberty to turn out with drum and fife to escort four merchants out of the city. Shortly, Abigail Adams reported that when "an eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant" who had refused to sell coffee under six shillings per pound, a hundred or so women descended on his warehouse with their carts and truck, insisting on it. When he snubbed them, one of the women grabbed him by his neck and tossed him into the cart, from which he gave up the keys. The women tipped him into the street, unlocked the warehouse and seized the coffee they wanted. Throughout, "a large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction." Revolutions for liberty required mobilizing broad social currents with diverse and often conflicting interests and ideas of "liberty."
In contrast, the owners and rulers of the society translated this diversity of perspectives into the institutionalized standards of a white republic, said to subsume and codify the aspirations of that Revolution. The issues of the War for American Independence and the establishment of a new government of the United States pose a broad range of complex issues, so many of which have become hard to distinguish from the subsequent course of the nation. To understand the process from the inside out — from the bottom up — a serious appreciation of the revolutionary content of the movement and the aspirations of the people should be the starting point. Still, the elites in each of the thirteen colonies would define its specific and often contradictory impact. The limits on the potential of the Revolution become particularly evident in considering its reaffirmation of the mass exclusions endemic to the colonial condition.
Revolutionary Stirrings
The Stamp Act in 1765 got the independent craftsmen — and those artisans and laborers rampaging through the cities of British America — chanting "Liberty, property, no stamps!" Though many officials complained of "the mob," one British official opined that "the inferior people would have been quiet" had their social "betters" not agitated them. He thought that the sailors "are the only People who may be properly Stiled Mob, are entirely at the Command of the Merchants who employ them." The gentlemen dominated the "Sons of Liberty" which hoped would mobilize the craftsmen and laborers of the port cities where they might block the collection of the taxes. Still, it became quickly obvious that the "mechanics" meant something rather distinct from the merchant princes when they spoke of their "liberty, property." "What will it avail to secure a nominal independence," asked one rebel, "if we suffer our property which is the essence of it, to be wrested from us?"
Once mobilized to resist the Stamp Act, the crowds set a course of their own. The Boston's Sons relied on Ebeneezer Mackintosh, a twenty-eight-year-old cordwainer. The descendant of Scottish rebels and the son of a man so poor he had been "warned out" of several Massachusetts towns, Mackintosh had deep roots in the community as a veteran and a member of the militia leader, the fire company, and the South End gang, which had clubbed its way to victory in the annual "Pope's Day" brawl the previous November. In August 1765, he led a large crowd from "the Liberty Tree" on the Commons and to the Town House, as planned, but then began a three-day rampage by continuing to the docks where it reduced the half-built warehouse of a local Loyalist to kindling. At Newport, John Webber, a young sailor led a similarly independent rampage, after which the local Sons arrested him only to find the threatening "mob" on their own doorsteps. The Sons of Liberty learned early that the people they sought to use learned how to act in their own interests.
From his refuge in Boston Harbor, the royal governor warned that once one permitted popular challenges legitimacy, "Necessity will soon oblige and justify an Insurrection of the Poor against the Rich, those that want the necessaries of Life against those that have them." "Both employers and the employed," wrote another, "much to their mutual shame and inconvenience, no longer live together with anything like attachment and cordiality on either side; and the laboring classes, instead of regarding the rich as their guardians, patrons, and benefactors, now look upon them as so many overgrown colossuses, whom it is no demerit to wrong." Similar fears moved many resistance leaders to revise their approach to the problem.
It would be the working people of the city that faced down the imperial authorities. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers opened fire on a civilian crowd in Boston. Said to be the first American killed in the Revolution, Crispus Attucks remains a terribly obscure figure, though certainly a man of color. Almost certainly a seaman of mixed African and native background, likely held as a slave until his escape around 1750, after which he went to sea. Attucks stood at the fore of a crowd armed with clubs advancing on redcoats at the Old State House. When the troops opened fire, Attucks and four others died and six were wounded. Many years later, William Cooper Nell and other black abolitionists started the celebration of a "Crisups Attucks Day." In the immediate aftermath, both sides pulled back from open conflict.
Yet, "anarchy" of "the mob" unfolded most clearly in the larger Mid-Atlantic cities — Philadelphia and New York — which concentrated them in the most numbers. At the latter, "The mob begin to think and reason," wrote Gouverneur Morris at New York. Yet, the British occupied the city early in the war, providing an immediate common enemy that stymied the debate among the revolutionaries about the nature of the liberty for which they contended.
Certainly, some of the resistance embraced the possibilities of a thinking "mob." After his training as a physician, Dr. Thomas Young had settled in rural New York, where he faced prosecution in 1756 for declaring Jesus Christ "a knave and a fool." By then, his travels had already taken him across the state line into Connecticut where he befriended the youthful Ethan Allen. Together they completed a massive tome entitled Reason the only Oracle of Man, later more popularly known simply as Ethan Allen's Bible.
Having suspended assumptions about the divine origins of human institutions, men such as Young or Allen anticipated a rational reconstruction of society and saw a role in this for the "New Hampshire Grants." Royal officials in New Hampshire had liberally distributed lands west of the Connecticut river although also claimed by New York, which doled out land there in larger swaths to speculators. Young made Some Reflections on the Disputes Between New-York, New-Hampshire, defending the settlers against both New Hampshire and "the great land-jobbers in New York." For settlers on the Grants — which Young would later name Vermont — the fight over home rule actually began as a fight over who should rule at home as well. Young became the most noisily peripatetic of the radical resistance, participating in the movement across New England before ending up in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia, the largest city in the colonies — with some 60,000–70,000 residents — avoided an early British occupation until September 1777 and the redcoats left in June 1778, which left the people there with the greater possibilities for action than their peers at Boston, New York City, Newport, and, eventually, Charleston. Moreover, the colonial elite there functioned through a peculiar Proprietary government that had long enjoyed greater autonomy than other colonies and felt less an impulse to take radical action. In the absence of occupation forces, these legions of people who cared little for the status quo and less for the past began to act on their own aspirations for the future.
The small circle of genuine radicals coalesced, not just to oppose British policies but around a common faith in human reason and the capacity of that "mob" of so-called ordinary citizens to govern themselves through an enlightened self-interest. Not the least memorable was the remarkable Anglo-American radical Thomas Paine, a native of Thetford already approaching forty years of age. Biographers have long covered his life, starting as an avid student in the Quaker tradition, continuing to read avidly even after he left the school at thirteen to enter his father's trade as a staymaker. After shipping out to sea several times, he returned to pursue his intellectual interests, attending regular evening lectures before marrying and opening his own shop, returning to Thetford as a collector of the excise tax.
Understaffed and overworked, excise officers rarely settled easily into the civil service, being almost forced to take bribes. Paine taught school, preached and even thought about entering the clergy, before taking a second appointment to the excise in 1768 at Lewes, and his peers had sent him to the Parliament in 1771–2 to lobby for a pay increase. At London, his The Case of the Officers of the Excise secured meetings with Whig leaders such as Edmund Burke, and the writer Oliver Goldsmith introduced him to the colonial agent, Benjamin Franklin. By then, he had become familiar with the iconoclastic ideas of Deism and the fraternalism of the Masonic order. In 1774, when the Crown answered the petition by firing Paine, Franklin persuaded him to take ship to Philadelphia. Taking a position as the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, he pondered and denounced slavery, the subject status of women, dueling, and cruelty to animals, while studiously avoiding the troubled relationship of the colonies to Britain. Those who knew Paine, however, became increasingly aware of his views on the subject.
In addition to Young and Paine, the radical circles there included Doctor Benjamin Rush and the teachers James Cannon and Joseph Stiles, as well as the druggist Christopher Marshall, the storekeeper Timothy Matlack, the shoemaker Samuel Simpson, and David Rittenhouse who had yet to make his reputation as a scientist. Through the winter of 1775–6, as armed bodies began clashing with the British Army, Paine scribbled Common Sense, his remarkable plea for breaking the colonies from Britain in January 1776. It wove an impassioned rhetoric into an unanswerable succession of reasoned arguments for launching a new nation. At its core, however, was Paine's insistence that the construction of a rational and humane society freed from the stifling traditions of the past would justify American independence, displacing colonial hierarchies with a genuinely representative political order.
As the Continental Congress warmed to the idea of independence and prepared for war, the delegates of Pennsylvania's Proprietary government thwarted both. Eager to find some way around this, Young's old friends like Samuel Ward of Rhode Island and the Adams cousins — Samuel and John — from Boston assured Young, Paine and others of their private advice and assistance. The local radicals petitioned the Assembly, took their case for independence into the February elections for the Committee of Inspection and Observation, and called for a state convention to elect its own delegates to Congress. Such pressures forced an apportionment of more seats to the underrepresented back country and the city for the May elections to the state Assembly. In consultation with the militia's Committee of Privates and the artisans' Patriotic Society, the radicals sought to make independence the key issue in the voting.
The effort failed. Perhaps ill-advised by their allies, the radicals picked their Assembly candidates from the same "silk-stocking" crowd as the conservatives, even as adherents warned of betrayal by those who had become "rich from nothing at all ... engrossed every Thing," and sought to "keep every Thing." Defenders of the old order had great difficulties in justifying previous electoral practices like early closing at the polls to minimize the impact of artisans and the direct exclusion of many Germans. Paine, Young and their cothinkers later attributed their defeat to traditional deference, Quaker pacifism, Catholic fears of New England influences, the continued exclusion of many Germans from the polls, and the absence in the army of many voters favorable to independence. For whatever reasons, though, the May election sustained the conservative perspective, albeit by tissue-thin majorities.
Removing the persistent obstacle to the plans of the Continental resistance required new strategies. Within days of the election, as the sounds of battle drifted upriver into the city, the military necessity seemed to justify the move of the Continental Congress against the very legitimacy of the Assembly. In mid-May, John Adams secured the passage of a resolution authorizing the replacement of governments not "sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs." One of its delegates protested that this placed Pennsylvania "instantly in a state of nature," and Maryland actually walked out of the Congress, but New England, Virginia and South Carolina carried the measure.
Meanwhile, military conditions demanded that Pennsylvania have a functioning government. The Associators — the popular militia — defied the Assembly and appealed directly to the Congress for assistance. By early June, the Committee of Privates instructed officers to poll each battalion on the Congressional resolutions and issued a circular titled To the Several Battalions of Military Associators, warning against "an Aristocracy, or Government of the Great," and advised that "great and over-grown rich Men will be improperly trusted" to structure the new government. The builders of the new government should have "no Interest besides the common Interest of Mankind," and take measures to insure "an Annual Return of all Power into your Hands." "Honesty, common Sense, and a plain Understanding, when unbiased by sinister Motives," it argued, "are fully equal to the task."
Radicals everywhere sought to place the people at the center of the debate over this new government. "The people best know their own wants and necessities," declared one Yankee pamphleteer, "and therefore are best able to rule themselves. Tent-makers, cobblers, and common tradesmen composed the legislature at Athens." Such impulses could certainly provide the American Revolution genuinely revolutionary content.
On June 18, as Congress in Philadelphia debated independence down the street, a state convention at nearby Carpenters' Hall drafted a new constitution. Few had played any prominent role in colonial politics, and one of them, Franklin had stayed home to nurse his gout. A week of deliberations established a single-chamber legislature, abandoning the old English goal of institutionalized "checks and balances" upon the representatives of the people. They also extended the vote to all Associators of twenty-one or older who had lived a year in the state, paid taxes, and defended government "on the authority of the people only ..." Except for the insistence of rural delegates that civic rights required faith in the Christian trinity and the divine source of the Bible, they produced the most democratic government of the Revolutionary years. John Adams recoiled at its "spirit of levelling" that gave voice to "every man who has not a farthing," and forced "all ranks to one common level."
Nevertheless, the new government replaced Pennsylvania's delegates in the Continental Congress, which quietly resolved on July 2 that the colonies were "and, of right ought to be, free and independent States." On July 4, it approved Thomas Jefferson's draft of a declaration, and, two days later, crowds gathered in the State House yard to hear a proclamation to which their representatives had been moving for months. Crowds cheered its public reading, as military Associators ripped the King's arms from the entrance to the State House.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Long Road to Harpers Ferry"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mark A. Lause.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction, 1,
PART ONE WORKING CITIZENS: FROM IDEAS TO ORGANIZATION,
1. Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Legacies and Challenges, 9,
2. Equality: The Mandates of Community and the Necessity of Expropriation, 29,
3. Solidarity: Coalescing a Mass Resistance, 47,
PART TWO WORKING CITIZENS TOWARDS A WORKING CLASS: FROM ORGANIZATION TO A MOVEMENT,
4. The Movement Party: Beyond the Failures of Civic Ritual, 67,
5. Confronting Race and Empire: Slavery and Mexico, 88,
6. Free Soil: The Electoral Distillation of Radicalism, 1847–8, 108,
PART THREE AN UNRELENTING RADICALISM: FROM MOVEMENT TO CADRES,
7. Free Soil Radicalized: The Rise and Course of the Free Democrats, 1849–53, 131,
8. The Pre-Revolutionary Tinderbox: Universal Democratic Republicans, Free Democrats and Radical Abolitionists, 1853–6, 150,
9. The Spark: Small Initiatives and Mass Upheavals, 1856–60, 169,
EPILOGUE Survival and Persistence: The Lineages and Legacies of the Early American Movement, 191,
Notes, 201,
Index, 257,