Volume 4, Part 4, America Declares Independence
Volume 4, Chapter 25, America Polarizes
English Whigs and Radicals put up a gallant fight in Parliament in early 1776 against the hiring of mercenaries, but to no avail.
As a result, sentiment in America for independence increased greatly.
To the Americans, the hiring of the German mercenaries, generally called Hessians, was
proof that Britain would treat them as aliens and foreigners.
From observing British reactions, General Lee and the other radical leaders in the Continental
Army had already been convinced of the necessity of independence.
Lee began to pepper congressmen with urgings of greater militancy.
In early October 1775, he wrote to the receptive John Adams,
Now is the time to show your firmness.
If the least timidity is displayed, we are all ruined.
You ought to begin by confiscating the estates of all the notorious enemies to American liberty.
Afterward, you should invite all the maritime powers of the world into your ports.
Thus he gave the call for open ports and the confiscation of Tory property, which before
long became the key planks in the radical platform.
In another letter he put his finger on the main stumbling block to American independence.
Despite the general willingness to denounce parliament or the royal advisers, Americans
had been reluctant to break with the symbol of the king himself.
Now he could write that people began to suspect that the king is as bad as the worst of his
ministry. To have advanced such a proposition last year would have been thought treason
and impiety. Next year, he added prophetically, if you will have patience, king and tyrant
will be a synonymous term. Similarly, General John Sullivan of New Hampshire asked why Congress
did not have the courage to declare independence. Did they believe that such a declaration would
lead the British to throw their shot in the shells with more force than at present? Sullivan
insistently urged John Adams to destroy that spirit of moderation which, if not speedily
rooted out, will prove the final overthrow of America. General Nathaniel Green wrote
to a Receptive Fellow Rhode Islander, Delegate Samuel Ward, on behalf of independence, and
General Horatio Gates was preaching independence so openly and enthusiastically as to astonish
even Charles Lee.
Despite the fact that the inner logic of the accelerating conflict called for American
independence, Congress was by no means ready to take such a radical step. Congressional
Federal foot-dragging on the subject was in a large sense a function of opinions on independence
in the respective colonies, for Congress itself was a creature of the individual provinces.
Even if it wanted to, it could not declare American independence unless the respective
provinces desired to do so. Each of the provinces, it is true, had rapidly and spontaneously
The Royal Executive and the Royal Governor had been quickly swept away, so that only three Royal Governors remained in their provinces by the spring of 1776, and these had no political power whatsoever.
By far the most dangerous of the three, William Franklin of New Jersey was placed under house
arrest in March 1776 and shipped to a Connecticut prison. The popular and quiescent Robert Eden
of Maryland was shipped home during the same month, and John Penn of Pennsylvania and Delaware,
the last proprietary governor in the colonies, was sympathetic to the rebel cause and remained
in Pennsylvania as a Private Citizen.
In each province, the colonial assembly, which was part of the old royal structure, was abandoned,
replaced by elected provincial congresses or conventions.
These provincial legislatures retained the supreme legislative power of the colonial
assembly as well as the supreme judicial power that had belonged to the assembly and
to the executive.
A particular importance was the automatic liquidation during this process of the old bureaucratic
executive that had been removed from all popular or democratic check.
Replacing this ruling oligarchy were the legislatures themselves, which now appointed their own
committees of safety or councils of safety, which were totally subordinated to the elected
legislatures.
Philosophically, after all, the executive function is merely that of a hired hand to enforce the laws, so total subordination of the executive to the legislative power seemed the rational course.
The conclusion was redoubled by the threat of oligarchic rule cut off from direct popular check, a threat inherent in any independent executive power.
The separation of the executive and the legislature in England and other countries of the day
was not the result of a competing philosophical view of government, but of the history of
these institutions. The executive power had been vested as a result of previous conquest
in the oligarchic rule of a monarch and his aides, a rule which the monarch always strove
to be as absolute and unchecked as the traffic could bear. In Great Britain, Parliament became
the legislature as a result of an effort by part of the public to exercise a check reign
upon the king. Contrary to myth-makers on the English Constitution, the democratic wing
The wing of royal government was not the embodiment of reasoned philosophic principle of checks
and balances or separation of powers.
The democratic wing established itself in a pragmatic struggle to limit the power of
the royal government.
Originally, democracy was not so much a means of governmental rule as it was a means for
for the Popular Checking of Government.
Parliament did not begin as a way to rule.
It began as a means of telling the King that if he did not redress grievances and lower
his exactions and demands, the representatives of the public would not consent to paying
taxes to the Crown.
Democracy, in short, originated as a libertarian weapon against the State, rather than as itself
In the 18th century, however, it was America that had taken over the original libertarian role of democratic representation once played by the early institution of parliament.
The main function of the colonial assemblies was to check as much as possible the power
of the royal bureaucracy.
The assemblies were the arm of the public that combated and kept vigilance over the
growth of royal executive power.
One effective means to this end was keeping control of executive salaries firmly and day-to-day
in an assembly's hands.
Then, when royal government was swept away, the spontaneous local and provincial revolutionary bodies freely and frequently elected and thereby, subject to popular check, took over governmental functions, deposing the old oligarchy.
As was true of so many aspects of the American Revolution, this was truly a revolutionary act for liberty and democracy.
And at one unspectacular stroke, it profoundly changed American political institutions.
Not only was royal ruled liquidated, but so too, for the time being, was the bureaucratic oligarchy.
Not only was the executive oligarchy swept away by the act of revolution, but so too were the councils,
The Glorification of Separation of Powers in Bicameral Legislatures, by such Tory-minded theorists as Montesquieu,
was a method of keeping democracy in severely narrow bounds and preserving the dominance
of arbitrary oligarchic rule. In recent years, neoconservative writers have sharply contrasted
liberty and democracy and have loudly protested any identification between them. Their case
These rest on two broad grounds. Philosophically, because liberty refers to what government
should do, while democracy refers to who should rule in the government. And empirically, because
the main threat to liberty has allegedly been totalitarian democracy. But historically,
For the late 18th and for earlier centuries, waving later centuries at this point, democracy
and liberty were conjoined.
Democracy was precisely the major instrument by which the libertarian revolt exerted pressure
upon the tyranny of the ruling caste.
The threat, or rather the reality, of continuing invasion of liberty came from the state apparatus
and its privileged ruling castes.
The popular democratic upsurge against this prevailing old order was the concrete form
necessarily taken by the libertarian idea.
The preeminent libertarian task was to end the dictation to and exploitation of the people
by the rulers of the state apparatus.
In England, as everywhere, the state began in conquest and a democratic upsurge was the
clearly indicated path by which the people could pursue libertarian goals.
In addition to these historical reasons for democracy and liberty to go hand in hand,
there is the further philosophic point that any direct popular thrust for tyranny is bound
to be fleeting and episodic. Even as ugly as happening as the democratic lynch mob is
necessarily erratic and short-lived. For one thing, the mass of the people generally have
Neither the time nor the interest to engage in continuing organized expressions of power
or plunder. The average man is too busy at the tasks of everyday life to be even concerned
about, much less active in such matters. Hence the much deplored phenomenon of political
and Political Epathy. Only in revolutions does much mass interest in political affairs arise and this is one of the main reasons why revolutions, disturbing as they are to regular routine, are so difficult to launch.
Threats to liberty, therefore, will tend to come not from the formless and remote masses but from professionals, people directly and fully concerned day in and day out in political affairs, from an oligarchy, either government bureaucrats or those who can persuade or manipulate those bureaucrats to grant them special privilege and pelph, the ruling classes, the natural, though not perfect,
The radical wing, the left, of the American revolutionaries, enhanced their continuing concern to maintain governmental forms as close to popular democracy as possible, hence, too, their constant vigilance against any recrudescence of executive oligarchy after the royal forms were swept away at the beginning of the revolution.
The rich American province then quickly found itself, after Lexington and Concord, with a new revolutionary governmental structure, consisting of a provincial unicameral legislature, and town and county governments, and committees of safety.
To adopt a formal constitutional frame would be an important step toward proclaimed independence.
As spontaneous creatures of local committees of rebels, the new revolutionary assemblies were remarkably democratic in the sense of participation by the great bulk of the non-Tory population.
Every one of the thirteen colonies had had freehold, landed, or personal property qualifications for voting in provincial and town elections.
Although five colonies allowed a minimum of personal property as an alternative, and in New York and Virginia, long-term tenants were included as freeholders.
Historians formally believed that this colonial suffrage was severely undemocratic, disenfranchising
most of the adult male population.
Recent researches reveal the fallacy of this gloomy view, indicating that the average proportion
of eligible adult males in the colonies ranged from 50 to 75 percent.
It should be recognized, however, that this situation was far from idyllic and that one-quarter
to one-half of white adult males of the American colonies were disfranchised, including the
slaves drags down the percentage of eligible voters still further, and even the few pre-negroes
were barred from voting in the four southern colonies.
At the end of the colonial period, eligible voters constituted 90 percent of adult white
males in New Hampshire, higher in local town elections, approximately 75 to 80 percent
in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, over 80 percent in North and South Carolina
and generally over 70 percent in Georgia.
In contrast to these high percentages, eligibility in New York and New Jersey ranged from 50
In the lowest strata were Virginia, whose eligibility was approximately 50 percent, and Pennsylvania and Maryland, where it ranged from 35 to over 50 percent.