Volume 4, Chapter 29, Massachusetts Turns Conservative
By far the most influential rebuttal to common sense, however, came not from the fading Tories, but from a rapidly emerging right wing within the independence movement.
Until 1775, virtually the sole focus of political conflict in the colonies was the anti-British
resistance movement, on what side to take and how fast to travel.
But after Lexington and Concord, another great problem confronted the Americans, the structure
of the Internal Polity Within Each Colony and as independence drew nearer the internal problem,
the problem of who should rule at home in the famous phrase of Carl Becker came increasingly
to the fore as compared to the older problem of home rule.
Of course this separation can be overdrawn and clearly British rule had created and propped
In the late 19th century, a radical left-right conflict centered around the struggle with
Great Britain.
After that point, a new set of conflicts emerged. Historians have long quarreled about the existence
of internal conflicts and about the possible continuity of the various ideological factions
over the years. The first thing that can be flatly asserted is that the conservatives
on the British question became arch-conservatives on the domestic scene, believers in strong,
Central oligarchic government from abroad also desired strong central oligarchic government at home.
Some of the conservatives became outright Tories and thereby put themselves outside the American dialogue.
Others, as we shall see below, opposed independence up to the last moment
and finally opted for the rebel cause in deep resignation in order to guide it in a conservative
direction. In short, they were more flexible and adaptable than their outright Tory brethren.
These conservatives particularly predominated in the quasi-Tory provinces of New York and
and Pennsylvania. Among conservatives, then, continuity prevailed before and after 1775.
The ultra-right before was the ultra-right afterward. There were no cases of quasi-Torres
later shifting to become radical on domestic issues. The same continuity did not apply,
However, to the pre-1775 left, to those who had led the radical fight against Great Britain.
Out of this increasingly victorious group, there began to emerge a cohesive faction who
were radical on independence and yet highly conservative on domestic affairs. In one sense,
This lack of continuity is understandable, for as the unifying British question began
to give way to consideration of domestic matters, temporarily suspended differences among the
radicals inevitably came to the fore. Every revolution, after all, splits as it advances
from one stage to the next, and former advocates fail to adhere to its inner logic and go over
were into opposition. But in this case the split was particularly poignant for those
who remained radical on domestic questions simply wanted to fulfill at home the grand
rhetoric of liberty and democracy which both wings had effectively employed in the fight
for America against Great Britain. In the case of the powerful center of the Virginia
of Oligarchy, this split was to be expected. It was clear from the beginning, for example,
that Washington was a radical on Britain and independence, and yet a staunch conservative
domestically. This rare centrist quality was one of the main reasons for his selection
as Army Commander-in-Chief. But the real shocker was Massachusetts. Massachusetts had always
has always been the home of radicalism, the spearhead and vanguard of the American left.
Now it was Massachusetts that was to turn almost en masse to deep-dyed conservatism
on domestic issues. Certainly one great reason for this was a lack of opposition on which
to hone one's edge. In contrast to Pennsylvania or New York, for example, where conservatism
had always been dominant and radicalism precarious.
Toryism had always been inherently feeble in Massachusetts.
With little opposition on which to develop a cutting edge,
the tendency for Massachusetts radicalism
was to grow lax and conservative on domestic affairs.
A second problem was a crisis of leadership.
John Hancock, as we have seen,
turned sharply rightward, largely out of peak.
More serious was the collapse of the great Massachusetts leaders, the Adamses.
The brilliant young John Adams not only turned sharply rightward on domestic matters, he
was quickly to stamp himself as the major theoretician of conservative American polity,
a polity that would eventually end up as British rule without Great Britain.
And Sam Adams, now that the domestic scene was inevitably growing in importance, lost
his former marvelous sureness of step. Uncertain, adrift in unfamiliar waters, he was from then
on to drift and veer erratically leftward and rightward, his basically radical instincts
at war with the influence of his brilliant cousin John, and with Adams's shifting the
The faithful followers of the Massachusetts Left shifted with them.
The basic issue in internal affairs was simply, would the American governments remain as they
had emerged at the outset of the revolution, spontaneous, libertarian, democratic and responsive
to the checks of the people? Or would they revert to something very like oligarchic British
would oligarchic power be resumed by a new set of tory lords in another guise?
This is what the internal struggle in the years after Lexington and Concord was basically all about.
And this is why the separation of home rule from rule at home can be highly artificial.
For in a profound sense, those who remained radical on the domestic front were caring
to completion the meaning of the struggle against Britain.
After all, their objection was not only to a certain set of Tory and monarchal rulers,
Their objection was also directed to governmental power itself, to executive oligarchy, to
taxes and restrictions, and to big government.
They did not propose to overthrow one set of masters in order to raise up another.
If Tom Paine became the ideological spokesman of the New Left, John Adams was the theoretician
of the New Right.
This new right was, of course, of inestimable value to the conservative cause. The New York
and Philadelphia aristocrats, for example, who had to be dragged into independence, would
have never been accepted as leaders of a new independent America. But John Adams and the
Massachusetts men, impeccably in the forefront of the revolution, their presence in the conservative
of Camp could not but lend that camp the color of patriotic respectability, which it so desperately
needed after independence.
In contrast to most believers in independence, Adams was angered rather than exhilarated
by common sense.
A vain and petulant man, he was patently envious of the popular success of one whom he considered
and a Johnny-come-lately in the independence movement.
More than that, the democratic libertarian sentiments went against his grain.
Already, he had set forth his views on the proper government to fellow congressional
delegates from other provinces who had sought his valued advice.
Now, to counteract Payne's influence, Adams hastened to publish these views in his Thoughts
on Government, a highly influential work that would prove to be a virtual political manifesto
of American conservatism.
Adams' aim was frankly the counter-revolutionary one of restoring as nearly as possible the
status quo ante, the pre-revolutionary form of government, especially a powerful executive
and Judiciary separate from the popular assembly and independent of it.
His political system, akin to that of Blackstone and Montesquieu, rested on a separation of
powers, especially a separation from the checks of democratic procedure.
In order to limit and overcome the democratic arm, an independent executive power, wielded
by a New Governor and Council was to be added to the popularly elected revolutionary committees,
this executive to have an absolute veto over the legislature. Within the legislature an
upper house removed from the people was to be created, supposedly as an aristocratic
element in the polity, and Adams looked forward happily to the two houses being in perpetual
Each house was to have an absolute veto over the other, and to make sure that the executive officials were to have little dependence upon the public, he proposed that the lower house choose the upper house and that they would together select the governor.
Even this hedged in and ringed about democratic assembly was to be chosen only by property-owning voters.
Furthermore, in contrast to the royal system of judges strictly under the control of the
executive and the crown, Adams urged an independent judiciary holding life terms, a patent device
to remove the judges completely from checks by the populace.
The judiciary in America had never been, in the least, independent.
The colonial assemblies had always had judicial functions and in the 17th century the Maryland,
Virginia and New England assemblies were the highest courts of appeal in their respective
colonies. By the 18th century, however, the judiciary was appointed by the Crown and became
an organ of the executive. Life or good behavior, judicial appointments were originally advanced
just as a means of removing judges holding their offices at the king's pleasure of curbing
the absolute control of the crown.
But with the royal power gone, life tenure of judges would be a backward step away from
popular control.
The emergence of John Adams as the primary theoretician of domestic conservatism was
was paralleled by a conservative course of the colony and of leaders who had formerly led the radical vanguard.
Of all the colonies, Massachusetts in particular faced an easy political path and quickly took it.
The British coercive acts, after all, had been directed against the Massachusetts Charter.
What more apt and more safely conservative course than simply to reassert the charter of the status quo ante?
And this is precisely what the Massachusetts Provincial Congress did when the Continental Congress in early June mildly advised it to do so.
Of course, no governor could yet be found.
But the General Court, Legislature, was reconstituted in elections, and the Council was selected, as before, by the elected House, now to take on temporarily the entire executive power.
The General Court resumed in mid-July 1775 for a very long session.
The leaders of Massachusetts were highly contented with their scarcely visible and conservative
glide back to the Precoercive Act Charter, achieving Adams's frankly stated aim to contrive
some method for the colonies to glide insensibly from under the old government into peaceable
and contented submission to new ones. In short, veneration for persons in authority of every rank.
The former radical, James Warren, quickly concurred. Nor were the congregational clergy,
especially in the seaboard towns, slow to inculcate such supposed virtues in their congregations.
In his important election sermon before the General Court in 1776,
The Reverend Samuel West of the town of Dartmouth, a close friend of Hancock, urged everyone
to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates.
With the newfound veneration of power came also its perquisites, and the less scrupulous
of the Whig leaders made full use of their new appointment powers. Thomas Cushing, for
for example, managed to obtain five important judicial posts from the council for himself.
But not all the old radicals were content to celebrate the status quo and a relatively
small band of new radicals emerged who fought for further libertarian changes in Massachusetts
government. Many radicals were unhappy at the continuation of the established congregational
of the Church in Massachusetts. Isaac Bacchus, the leading Baptist of New England, presented
a strong plea to the General Court for disestablishment and religious liberty, but his petition was
quietly buried. Also prominent in the vain fight in the General Court for disestablishment
was Joseph Hawley, an eminent lawyer of Northampton and leader of the Radicals in Western Massachusetts.
And a writer in a Boston paper denouncing such glaring instances of religious tyranny as the establishment of the Congregational Church asked if they were contending for liberty that we might have it in our power to trample on the rights of others.
The plural office holding engaged in by Cushing and others was widely protested in the press.
A writer in the Boston, Massachusetts, spy charged that the members of the assembly have divided
among themselves and their particular friends all the civil and military offices in the colony.
Another decryer of the new oligarchy warned that they might be fighting against a foreign slavery
only to suffer a domestic one to spring up in our country.
The center of the rapidly emerging new radical movement, however, was the farthest western county of Berkshire.
The Berkshire towns had been radically anti-British for several years,
led by college graduates, generally from Yale, who had entered law, politics or the ministry.
History. Also strongly Whig in Western Massachusetts had been physicians, merchants and storekeepers.
Most of the lawyers in the West, heavily dependent on royal patronage, had been Tory. But the
substantial number of Whig lawyers were led by the veteran Joseph Hawley. The Congregational
Ministry in the West had been strongly radical, led by the young Reverend Thomas Allen of
Pitsfield in Berkshire County and the Reverend Joseph Lyman of Hatfield.
Now that the war had begun and the focus of radicalism was shifting to internal liberty,
Berkshire took the lead of the new left.
There are two factors that in part account for the activity in Berkshire.
The relative youth of the Berkshire leadership, due to its status as a newly settled frontier
and the indefatigable leadership of the Rev. Thomas Allen, who stumped the county organizing the new opposition to the status quo.
Allen's friend, Joseph Hawley of Northampton, much further east, would have been a natural leader of the movement, but chronic illness allowed him to be effective only sporadically.
Having traveled throughout the West, calling for a new and more libertarian constitution,
Allen became known as the leader of the Berkshire constitutionalist movement.
In mid-December 1775, he called a Berkshire county convention of town committees of correspondence
to meet at Stockbridge in the southern part of the county,
an area much less devoted to the radical cause than was the north.
The resolves of the Stockbridge Convention were simple and straightforward.
The people of Berkshire should at least be able to nominate men for county offices
from which the Massachusetts Council could select its choices.
From this simple and almost innocuous request,
the delegates from eight towns in southern Berkshire issued an angry protest.
The right-wing dissenters bitterly attacked the Stockbridge resolution, charging that the leaders of the convention were men whose principles would tend to dissolve all government and introduce dissension, anarchy and disorder.
Five of the prominent conservative dissenters were, not coincidentally, recent council appointees to the very county post in contention, and hence had a vested interest in the defeat of the constitutionalist movement.
Of these, three were understandably under particular popular suspicion. John Ashley of Stockbridge, one of the hated 17 Tory recinders of the Massachusetts circular letter of 1768, and Mark Hopkins of Sheffield and Jaleel Woodbridge of Richmond, formerly justices of the peace by royal appointment.
Stung by the conservative dissent, Allen drew up a remonstrance of the town of Pittsfield
to the general court, setting forth his and other constitutionalist views systematically
and at great length.
It turned out that the conservatives from South Berkshire had not been far wrong in
analyzing the ultimate position of Allen and his supporters.
For many months the towns and counties of Massachusetts had nullified the royal appointments
and therefore closed the local courts.
They had all been living in a state of nature, a state close to anarchy, and they enjoyed
the experience.
As Alan's petition strongly put it, since the suspension of government, we have lived
in Peace, Love, Safety, Liberty and Happiness.
The only governmental power was the local committees, and these were largely devoted
to crushing Tories. But now the men of Pittsfield saw with dismay that assumption by the General
Court of the old executive power to appoint county judges and officials would shortly
and this libertarian idol.
We find ourselves in danger of returning to our former state and of undergoing a yoke
of oppression which we are no longer able to bear, a yoke of unlimited passive obedience
and non-resistance to governmental power.
For their practical demands, Allen in the town of Pittsfield insisted on the right to
annull the central appointive power by electing or at least nominating all of their local
county officials.
Heedless of the radical opposition, the general court tried to establish a county court in
Berkshire.
The local committee of inspection forcibly prevented the court from opening and Allen
repeatedly denounced the charter government of Massachusetts as oppressive, defective
and Rotten to the Very Core, which ought not by any means to be submitted to.
Significantly, he was supposed to have based his argument in part on Paine's Common Sense,
which had just been published.
To the east, neighboring Hampshire County, in a convention of delegates from its towns
on March 11, decided by a narrow majority to close its county courts.
This court closing movement was led by Joseph Hawley and by the leaders of Chesterfield
and other towns of far western and northern Hampshire. The resolution was opposed by the
older trading centers of the county on the Connecticut River, Springfield, Hatfield and
Northampton.
Allen's subversive discourses were reported in great detail to the general court by John
Ashley and his fellow Berkshire Conservatives, and Alan was denounced as an incendiary and
sower of anarchy. He was reputed to have declared that it was the duty of the people to oppose
the rotten charter government, and that he would rather be without any form of government
than to submit to this constitution. And again, the people of this province had lived in peace
in good order for more than a year without government.
He also trenchantly informed the people that they were not simply fighting Great Britain
but all tyranny.
If the Congress abused its power, it should be opposed in the same manner as the King
and Parliament.
He cautioned, Whilst we are fighting against oppression from the King and Parliament, we
must not suffer usurpers rising up amongst ourselves.
Worried by the criticism relayed to the General Court, Allen and the town of Pittsfield sent
another remonstrance to the legislature in May 1776, elaborating and also boldlarizing
their position. They took hasty pains to assure the General Court of their belief in the absolute
necessity of legal government to prevent anarchy and confusion, and to deny false charges that
They were a mere mob of debtors eager to close the courts so as to avoid payments of their
debts. They assured the legislature of their belief that legal government is a great blessing.
In this petition they warned of the potential of domestic tyranny rising up to replace the
old. A particular complaint was the practice of the county judges of handing out licenses
Alan then set forth their political theory that the people are the fountain of power,
that since the dissolution of British power these colonies have fallen into a state of
nature and that the first step toward the restoration of civil government would be to
to form a fundamental constitution as the basis and groundwork of legislation, and to
check the strong bias of human nature to tyranny and despotism by a wanton exercise of power.
Furthermore, a new constitution being above the legislature could not be made by the legislature
Pressure itself, it must be effected by a true compact among the majority of the people.
The Massachusetts General Court responded to this pressure by reducing all court fees
in the province, but this was hardly enough to satisfy the Berkshire demand, and the courts
in Berkshire and Hampshire counties remained closed.
The one writer cited by Allen as a most respectable authority for these views was James Berg and
his work Political Disquisitions. Berg, an elderly Scottish schoolmaster, published The
Disquisitions in England in 1774. It was reprinted in Philadelphia the following year and soon
Berlin became a highly influential best-seller throughout the colonies. It was eagerly read
by the leaders and the common people alike. Berg had turned his searchlight on the tyranny
and corruption of the English parliament of his day. Slashing away at the tightly controlled
oligarchy constituting parliament, the radical liberal Berg called for thoroughgoing political
Reform, Corrected Representation, Annual Parliaments, Secret Ballots by the Public, Open Debates
in Parliament, and Universal Manhood Suffrage, except for Men on Relief.
Government, pensioners and placements should be abolished, he wrote, thus ending the economic
dependence of Members of Parliament on the Crown.
To affect these aims, he saw that mere pleas to the extant Parliament would hardly suffice.
Instead, the people of each parish and county in the land should band together in a great association to put severe pressure upon the government and even, implicitly, serve as the potential nucleus of revolution if other means should fail.
The failure of reform would lead the people to prefer the temporary evils of revolution to the permanent evil of tyranny, distressing and debasing the human species from generation to generation and deluging the world in a never ebbing sea of blood.
Not only did he thereby anticipate the English association movement, but he also gave implicit backing to the burgeoning association movement in America, which fulfilled these very concepts.
Berg also hailed Algernon Sidney's justification of rebellion, as well as the writings of Trenchard and Gordon and attacked the practice of hiring mercenary troops.
On specifically colonial problems, Berg bitterly attacked taxation without representation and the oppressive measures against America.
The Handlin's attempt to downgrade the radical content and influence of Berg's disquisitions is unconvincing.
If the Reverend Thomas Allen was the political leader of the Massachusetts Left, the anonymous author of the brief pamphlet,
The people the best governors or a plan of government founded on the just principles of natural freedom was, in a sense, its intellectual leader.
This trenchant libertarian writer declared that the people best know their wants and necessities and therefore are best able to govern themselves.
He attacked upper houses armed with veto power and not directly responsible to the people as engines of oppression.
A small council chosen by the assembly might be admirable for the sake of efficiency,
but it should merely prepare material for the assembly and have no veto power over it.
This writer not only wanted representation proportionate to the population,
He called boldly for universal manhood suffrage, shorn of any property qualifications, which would lead to tyranny over the poor by the rich.
He would have a judiciary and perhaps an executive elected annually by the people, but interestingly, the executive would be denied any veto over the legislature.
Thus, he sensibly opposed not so much a judiciary independent of the legislature as a judiciary
independent of the people.
He also suggested that in each colony a House of Representatives armed with some judicial
power be the Supreme Court of Appeals in the province, especially since, as he perceived,
judges' decisions are often a camouflaged form of legislation.
The author of The People, The Best Governors grounded his program squarely on natural rights
and natural law.
God gave mankind freedom by nature, made every man equal to his neighbor, and has virtually
enjoined them to govern themselves by their own laws.
Everyone's right to freedom is the same.
This identical right to freedom for all men is evidently what the author meant by equality.
Any property qualification for voting or oligarchic organs of government would deny this natural
equal freedom and make an inequality among the people and set up a number of lords over
the rest.