WEBVTT NOTE 25. America Polarizes 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Volume 4, Part 4, America Declares Independence 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:11.000 Volume 4, Chapter 25, America Polarizes 3 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:22.000 English Whigs and Radicals put up a gallant fight in Parliament in early 1776 against the hiring of mercenaries, but to no avail. 4 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:29.000 As a result, sentiment in America for independence increased greatly. 5 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:35.400 To the Americans, the hiring of the German mercenaries, generally called Hessians, was 6 00:00:35.400 --> 00:00:40.800 proof that Britain would treat them as aliens and foreigners. 7 00:00:40.800 --> 00:00:45.800 From observing British reactions, General Lee and the other radical leaders in the Continental 8 00:00:45.800 --> 00:00:52.120 Army had already been convinced of the necessity of independence. 9 00:00:52.120 --> 00:00:57.400 Lee began to pepper congressmen with urgings of greater militancy. 10 00:00:57.400 --> 00:01:03.260 In early October 1775, he wrote to the receptive John Adams, 11 00:01:03.260 --> 00:01:05.760 Now is the time to show your firmness. 12 00:01:05.760 --> 00:01:09.640 If the least timidity is displayed, we are all ruined. 13 00:01:09.640 --> 00:01:15.960 You ought to begin by confiscating the estates of all the notorious enemies to American liberty. 14 00:01:15.960 --> 00:01:22.160 Afterward, you should invite all the maritime powers of the world into your ports. 15 00:01:22.160 --> 00:01:29.120 Thus he gave the call for open ports and the confiscation of Tory property, which before 16 00:01:29.120 --> 00:01:33.820 long became the key planks in the radical platform. 17 00:01:33.820 --> 00:01:40.360 In another letter he put his finger on the main stumbling block to American independence. 18 00:01:40.360 --> 00:01:46.360 Despite the general willingness to denounce parliament or the royal advisers, Americans 19 00:01:46.360 --> 00:01:51.720 had been reluctant to break with the symbol of the king himself. 20 00:01:51.720 --> 00:01:58.080 Now he could write that people began to suspect that the king is as bad as the worst of his 21 00:01:58.080 --> 00:02:04.540 ministry. To have advanced such a proposition last year would have been thought treason 22 00:02:04.540 --> 00:02:13.080 and impiety. Next year, he added prophetically, if you will have patience, king and tyrant 23 00:02:13.080 --> 00:02:21.080 will be a synonymous term. Similarly, General John Sullivan of New Hampshire asked why Congress 24 00:02:21.080 --> 00:02:27.600 did not have the courage to declare independence. Did they believe that such a declaration would 25 00:02:27.600 --> 00:02:34.160 lead the British to throw their shot in the shells with more force than at present? Sullivan 26 00:02:34.160 --> 00:02:41.200 insistently urged John Adams to destroy that spirit of moderation which, if not speedily 27 00:02:41.200 --> 00:02:47.280 rooted out, will prove the final overthrow of America. General Nathaniel Green wrote 28 00:02:47.280 --> 00:02:53.960 to a Receptive Fellow Rhode Islander, Delegate Samuel Ward, on behalf of independence, and 29 00:02:53.960 --> 00:03:00.800 General Horatio Gates was preaching independence so openly and enthusiastically as to astonish 30 00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:03.440 even Charles Lee. 31 00:03:03.440 --> 00:03:08.600 Despite the fact that the inner logic of the accelerating conflict called for American 32 00:03:08.600 --> 00:03:15.760 independence, Congress was by no means ready to take such a radical step. Congressional 33 00:03:15.760 --> 00:03:21.960 Federal foot-dragging on the subject was in a large sense a function of opinions on independence 34 00:03:21.960 --> 00:03:28.960 in the respective colonies, for Congress itself was a creature of the individual provinces. 35 00:03:29.300 --> 00:03:35.240 Even if it wanted to, it could not declare American independence unless the respective 36 00:03:35.240 --> 00:03:42.240 provinces desired to do so. Each of the provinces, it is true, had rapidly and spontaneously 37 00:03:42.240 --> 00:04:09.240 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. 38 00:04:09.240 --> 00:04:15.760 By far the most dangerous of the three, William Franklin of New Jersey was placed under house 39 00:04:15.760 --> 00:04:24.840 arrest in March 1776 and shipped to a Connecticut prison. The popular and quiescent Robert Eden 40 00:04:24.840 --> 00:04:32.400 of Maryland was shipped home during the same month, and John Penn of Pennsylvania and Delaware, 41 00:04:32.400 --> 00:04:38.600 the last proprietary governor in the colonies, was sympathetic to the rebel cause and remained 42 00:04:38.600 --> 00:04:42.020 in Pennsylvania as a Private Citizen. 43 00:04:42.020 --> 00:04:49.740 In each province, the colonial assembly, which was part of the old royal structure, was abandoned, 44 00:04:49.740 --> 00:04:55.200 replaced by elected provincial congresses or conventions. 45 00:04:55.200 --> 00:05:00.360 These provincial legislatures retained the supreme legislative power of the colonial 46 00:05:00.360 --> 00:05:06.520 assembly as well as the supreme judicial power that had belonged to the assembly and 47 00:05:06.520 --> 00:05:07.880 to the executive. 48 00:05:07.880 --> 00:05:14.360 A particular importance was the automatic liquidation during this process of the old bureaucratic 49 00:05:14.360 --> 00:05:20.080 executive that had been removed from all popular or democratic check. 50 00:05:20.080 --> 00:05:26.460 Replacing this ruling oligarchy were the legislatures themselves, which now appointed their own 51 00:05:26.460 --> 00:05:33.200 committees of safety or councils of safety, which were totally subordinated to the elected 52 00:05:33.200 --> 00:05:34.600 legislatures. 53 00:05:34.600 --> 00:05:48.600 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. 54 00:05:48.600 --> 00:05:59.600 The conclusion was redoubled by the threat of oligarchic rule cut off from direct popular check, a threat inherent in any independent executive power. 55 00:05:59.600 --> 00:06:06.240 The separation of the executive and the legislature in England and other countries of the day 56 00:06:06.240 --> 00:06:12.280 was not the result of a competing philosophical view of government, but of the history of 57 00:06:12.280 --> 00:06:19.560 these institutions. The executive power had been vested as a result of previous conquest 58 00:06:19.560 --> 00:06:26.260 in the oligarchic rule of a monarch and his aides, a rule which the monarch always strove 59 00:06:26.260 --> 00:06:34.460 to be as absolute and unchecked as the traffic could bear. In Great Britain, Parliament became 60 00:06:34.460 --> 00:06:41.900 the legislature as a result of an effort by part of the public to exercise a check reign 61 00:06:41.900 --> 00:06:49.780 upon the king. Contrary to myth-makers on the English Constitution, the democratic wing 62 00:06:49.780 --> 00:06:57.220 The wing of royal government was not the embodiment of reasoned philosophic principle of checks 63 00:06:57.220 --> 00:07:01.340 and balances or separation of powers. 64 00:07:01.340 --> 00:07:08.620 The democratic wing established itself in a pragmatic struggle to limit the power of 65 00:07:08.620 --> 00:07:10.700 the royal government. 66 00:07:10.700 --> 00:07:18.660 Originally, democracy was not so much a means of governmental rule as it was a means for 67 00:07:18.660 --> 00:07:22.900 for the Popular Checking of Government. 68 00:07:22.900 --> 00:07:25.080 Parliament did not begin as a way to rule. 69 00:07:25.080 --> 00:07:31.540 It began as a means of telling the King that if he did not redress grievances and lower 70 00:07:31.540 --> 00:07:37.840 his exactions and demands, the representatives of the public would not consent to paying 71 00:07:37.840 --> 00:07:40.340 taxes to the Crown. 72 00:07:40.340 --> 00:07:48.360 Democracy, in short, originated as a libertarian weapon against the State, rather than as itself 73 00:07:48.360 --> 00:07:55.360 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. 74 00:08:18.360 --> 00:08:24.800 The main function of the colonial assemblies was to check as much as possible the power 75 00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:27.400 of the royal bureaucracy. 76 00:08:27.400 --> 00:08:33.040 The assemblies were the arm of the public that combated and kept vigilance over the 77 00:08:33.040 --> 00:08:37.040 growth of royal executive power. 78 00:08:37.040 --> 00:08:44.100 One effective means to this end was keeping control of executive salaries firmly and day-to-day 79 00:08:44.100 --> 00:08:46.440 in an assembly's hands. 80 00:08:46.440 --> 00:09:04.440 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. 81 00:09:04.440 --> 00:09:13.440 As was true of so many aspects of the American Revolution, this was truly a revolutionary act for liberty and democracy. 82 00:09:13.440 --> 00:09:20.440 And at one unspectacular stroke, it profoundly changed American political institutions. 83 00:09:20.440 --> 00:09:28.440 Not only was royal ruled liquidated, but so too, for the time being, was the bureaucratic oligarchy. 84 00:09:28.440 --> 00:09:35.440 Not only was the executive oligarchy swept away by the act of revolution, but so too were the councils, 85 00:09:35.440 --> 00:10:05.440 The Glorification of Separation of Powers in Bicameral Legislatures, by such Tory-minded theorists as Montesquieu, 86 00:10:05.440 --> 00:10:12.460 was a method of keeping democracy in severely narrow bounds and preserving the dominance 87 00:10:12.460 --> 00:10:20.420 of arbitrary oligarchic rule. In recent years, neoconservative writers have sharply contrasted 88 00:10:20.420 --> 00:10:29.040 liberty and democracy and have loudly protested any identification between them. Their case 89 00:10:29.040 --> 00:10:37.080 These rest on two broad grounds. Philosophically, because liberty refers to what government 90 00:10:37.080 --> 00:10:47.120 should do, while democracy refers to who should rule in the government. And empirically, because 91 00:10:47.120 --> 00:10:54.800 the main threat to liberty has allegedly been totalitarian democracy. But historically, 92 00:10:54.800 --> 00:11:02.320 For the late 18th and for earlier centuries, waving later centuries at this point, democracy 93 00:11:02.320 --> 00:11:06.220 and liberty were conjoined. 94 00:11:06.220 --> 00:11:14.120 Democracy was precisely the major instrument by which the libertarian revolt exerted pressure 95 00:11:14.120 --> 00:11:17.800 upon the tyranny of the ruling caste. 96 00:11:17.800 --> 00:11:26.520 The threat, or rather the reality, of continuing invasion of liberty came from the state apparatus 97 00:11:26.520 --> 00:11:30.160 and its privileged ruling castes. 98 00:11:30.160 --> 00:11:36.000 The popular democratic upsurge against this prevailing old order was the concrete form 99 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:40.780 necessarily taken by the libertarian idea. 100 00:11:40.780 --> 00:11:48.660 The preeminent libertarian task was to end the dictation to and exploitation of the people 101 00:11:48.660 --> 00:11:52.060 by the rulers of the state apparatus. 102 00:11:52.060 --> 00:11:58.820 In England, as everywhere, the state began in conquest and a democratic upsurge was the 103 00:11:58.820 --> 00:12:06.060 clearly indicated path by which the people could pursue libertarian goals. 104 00:12:06.060 --> 00:12:12.780 In addition to these historical reasons for democracy and liberty to go hand in hand, 105 00:12:12.780 --> 00:12:19.460 there is the further philosophic point that any direct popular thrust for tyranny is bound 106 00:12:19.460 --> 00:12:26.780 to be fleeting and episodic. Even as ugly as happening as the democratic lynch mob is 107 00:12:26.780 --> 00:12:33.220 necessarily erratic and short-lived. For one thing, the mass of the people generally have 108 00:12:33.220 --> 00:12:40.700 Neither the time nor the interest to engage in continuing organized expressions of power 109 00:12:40.700 --> 00:12:47.300 or plunder. The average man is too busy at the tasks of everyday life to be even concerned 110 00:12:47.300 --> 00:12:54.380 about, much less active in such matters. Hence the much deplored phenomenon of political 111 00:12:54.380 --> 00:13:12.380 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. 112 00:13:12.380 --> 00:13:42.380 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, 113 00:13:42.380 --> 00:14:11.380 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. 114 00:14:11.380 --> 00:14:29.380 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. 115 00:14:29.380 --> 00:14:36.380 To adopt a formal constitutional frame would be an important step toward proclaimed independence. 116 00:14:36.380 --> 00:14:50.380 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. 117 00:14:50.380 --> 00:15:02.380 Every one of the thirteen colonies had had freehold, landed, or personal property qualifications for voting in provincial and town elections. 118 00:15:02.380 --> 00:15:13.380 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. 119 00:15:13.380 --> 00:15:22.980 Historians formally believed that this colonial suffrage was severely undemocratic, disenfranchising 120 00:15:22.980 --> 00:15:26.580 most of the adult male population. 121 00:15:26.580 --> 00:15:33.340 Recent researches reveal the fallacy of this gloomy view, indicating that the average proportion 122 00:15:33.340 --> 00:15:40.420 of eligible adult males in the colonies ranged from 50 to 75 percent. 123 00:15:40.420 --> 00:15:46.700 It should be recognized, however, that this situation was far from idyllic and that one-quarter 124 00:15:46.700 --> 00:15:53.220 to one-half of white adult males of the American colonies were disfranchised, including the 125 00:15:53.220 --> 00:16:00.820 slaves drags down the percentage of eligible voters still further, and even the few pre-negroes 126 00:16:00.820 --> 00:16:04.900 were barred from voting in the four southern colonies. 127 00:16:04.900 --> 00:16:11.020 At the end of the colonial period, eligible voters constituted 90 percent of adult white 128 00:16:11.020 --> 00:16:17.540 males in New Hampshire, higher in local town elections, approximately 75 to 80 percent 129 00:16:17.540 --> 00:16:24.580 in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, over 80 percent in North and South Carolina 130 00:16:24.580 --> 00:16:28.780 and generally over 70 percent in Georgia. 131 00:16:28.780 --> 00:16:34.820 In contrast to these high percentages, eligibility in New York and New Jersey ranged from 50 132 00:16:34.820 --> 00:16:41.820 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.