Conceived in Liberty (200 page)

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

*
Knollenberg,
Growth of the American Revolution,
pp. 182, 190.

*
Willard M. Wallace,
Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), p. 26.

The accumulating conflict with Great Britain had led to armed revolution at Lexington and Concord. In addition, other forces had joined since the middle of the century to add strength to the revolutionary movement. One vital force was the further development and extension of libertarian thought in America. It was the general concepts of liberty and revolution that found expression in the specific revolutionary arguments against Great Britain.

One of the most important sources of the dissemination of libertarian thought in prerevolutionary America, England, and elsewhere, was Thomas Hollis V of Lincoln’s Inn, England. Hollis’s career is a stirring testament to the influence that can be wielded by the activities of one lone but dedicated man. An ardent libertarian, Hollis in 1754 conceived his “plan” of disseminating books on liberty throughout the world. To this he then dedicated his life and his ample fortune. Hollis lovingly collected and disseminated old libertarian works and republished those out of print. In addition to distributing liberal classics like Locke, Neville, Sidney, Milton, Nedham, Harrington, and Trenchard and Gordon, Hollis discovered and publicized such important but forgotten sixteenth-century writers as François Hotman, George Buchanan, and John Poynet, who anticipated Sidney and Locke, and Marian exile Christopher Goodman, whose work influenced the later doctrines of disobedience to the state. Libertarian medals, coins, prints, pictures, and manuscripts were also collected and sent abroad.

In the late 1750s and early 1760s Thomas Hollis distributed his libertarian gifts far and wide: to Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Poland, Italy, and France. But with the inception of the Stamp Act and other colonial struggles, Hollis turned the bulk of his attention after 1764 to the American colonies.
Hundreds of libertarian works regarded as subversive by the British government were sent to the library at Harvard College, with libertarian mottoes and characters stamped upon them. Hollis also carried on an extensive correspondence with two great liberal Congregational divines of Massachusetts: Jonathan Mayhew and Andrew Eliot. And not only did Hollis ardently sow the seeds of English radicalism in America, he also led in distributing the American views to the people of England. Hollis, indeed, was the source of most of the pro-American writings printed in England and elsewhere in Europe during the 1760s, including the essays of Mayhew and Eliot.

There was nothing namby-pamby about Hollis’s libertarianism. It was profoundly radical and stressed Hollis’s passionate devotion to “king-killing,” resistance to tyrants, and the revolutionary principles of seventeenth-century England. There was perhaps more truth than exaggeration in Tory Samuel Johnson’s blaming the activities of the indefatigable Hollis for the outbreak of the American Revolution.
*

Thomas Hollis was deep into the Wilkite movement, and a particularly active member of Hollis’s circle was the great radical writer and historian, Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, sister of one of the Wilkite leaders, Alderman John Saw-bridge. When Edmund Burke published his famous
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
(1770), which defined the principles of the Whig party, Mrs. Macaulay promptly attacked it from the republican and democratic left. This debate clarified the split between the regular or “moderate Whigs” and the libertarian, radical Whigs.

In America, the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew had been the leader of libertarian thought since his great sermon of 1750, which first gave public expression in colonial America to the sacred right and duty of resistance to tyranny. As a result of his extensive correspondence with Hollis from 1759 to 1766, the latter distributed Mayhew’s works throughout England. Mayhew, in turn, spread the message of the liberal and radical works sent him by Hollis—works such as Harrington, Sidney, Milton, and Hoadly. When the Stamp Act crisis arrived, Mayhew was perhaps the first to urge a network of committees of correspondence throughout the colonies and helped lead the opposition to the Stamp Act. In a sermon hailing repeal of the Stamp Act, Mayhew was among the first to envision America as a haven of liberty for the oppressed of other lands: “And if any miserable people on the continent or isles of Europe... should... be driven, in their extremity, to seek a safe retreat from slavery,... O let them find one in America... where our oppressed fathers once found it....”

John Locke continued to be the major fountainhead of libertarian theory in America, and his works and influence spread even more widely after midcentury. By the 1760s and early 1770s, for example, the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale contained the numerous works of Locke. Locke’s more revolutionary side, however, began to be stressed late in the colonial agitation, especially after the American printing of his
Civil Government
in 1773. Many writers have stressed the influence upon Americans of the American printing of William Blackstone’s
Commentaries
in 1771, but this work was used largely for its tactical strength as a source for quoting the eminent English Tory jurist against Great Britain. Actually, as Clinton Rossiter admits, “The Americans read the eclectic
Commentaries
in a shrewdly selective manner, citing this oracle repeatedly and effectively in support of all manner of Whiggish doctrines. Two of the most popular borrowings... were Blackstone’s memorable salutes to natural law and natural history.”
*

The Lockean emphasis on natural rights was further strengthened by the influence of the distinguished philosopher of the German Enlightenment, Christian Wolff, in the
Institutiones
(1750). Wolff emphasized more consistently than Locke that man’s natural rights are inalienable and cannot therefore be alienated to the state by any social contract. Wolff’s rigorously systematic work was highly influential and not only in Germany. In France, the important journals featured Wolff’s writings, and Voltaire was an enthusiastic student of Wolff’s work. The
Institutiones
was translated into French in 1772, and Thomas Jefferson is known to have had a copy in his library—a copy in which passages on the asserted right of revolutionary war are specifically marked. Wolff’s views were also carried to America by the Swiss writer on the law of nature, Emerich de Vattel, whose book, published in French in 1758, influenced Jefferson, Otis, and the Adamses.

As the Revolution drew near, Algernon Sidney’s influence continued to be strong. His martyrdom at the hands of Great Britain now had a personal meaning for the American radical leaders. Thomas Hollis had spread Sidney’s writings, including his famous revolutionary motto, throughout the colonies, the maxim soon to be enshrined as the official motto of the revolutionary state of Massachusetts. The English translation of the Latin motto by John Quincy Adams runs as follows:

This hand to tyrants ever sworn the foe,

For freedom only deals the deadly blow,

Then sheathes in calm repose the vengeful blade,

For gentle place in freedom’s hallowed shade.

And as the anxious American rebels prepared for the outbreak of conflict, the Boston radical, Josiah Quincy, stirringly wrote: “America hath in store her Brutii and Cassii, her Hampdens and Sidneys, patriots and heroes, who will form a band of brothers; men who have memories and feelings, courage and swords.”

Beginning in the 1760s, the French Enlightenment began to have notable influence in America; especially was this true of the great liberal Voltaire. Voltaire issued several important works during the 1760s, and an English translation appeared of his
Collected Works.
Americans steeped in Lockean thought recognized the French, especially Voltaire, as heirs to that tradition. Jonathan Mayhew, having read Voltaire’s
Philosophical Dictionary
and
Philosophical History
shortly after they appeared, wrote to Thomas Hollis praising these works, although stating that he could not agree with the Frenchman’s antireligious views. Howard Mumford Jones has shown, contrary to many historians, that Voltaire’s influence on American thought was far greater than that of his conservative contemporary Baron de Montesquieu, whose
Spirit of the Laws
(1748) stressed state building, and checks and balances in that state, rather than natural rights or individual liberty. Jones shows that while Voltaire was the most popular French author in America in the second half of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu was only the sixth most influential. Moreover, Montesquieu’s influence was exerted only in the later state-building period of America, during the last quarter of the century, rather than in the third quarter when the revolutionary American ideology was being forged. The annual number of newspaper advertisements during the last half of the century averaged, in New York, thirty for Voltaire and eight for Montesquieu, and in Philadelphia forty-five for Voltaire and seventeen for the latter. It is true that American revolutionary tracts cited Voltaire minimally, but this proves little, since any such references to the great French radical would have been as tactically unwise as the window-dressing references to respectables like Blackstone or Montesquieu were shrewd. Voltaire’s works, furthermore, permeated a wide segment of the American public; the general public absorbed his political and social thought by reading his literary works, while the influential elite read his political and social philosophies directly.

The second most popular French writer in America was that confused and inconsistent radical, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Again and again he was referred to in America as “the ingenious Rousseau” or the “celebrated Rousseau.” Like those of Voltaire, Rousseau’s ideas were absorbed on two levels, the masses reading the novels
Emile
(1762) and
La Nouvelle Eloise
(1761) and the more serious-minded studying the
Social Contract
(1762), all of which were translated into English shortly after publication. Indeed, an English translation of Rousseau’s collected works appeared in 1774. John Adams had read the
Social Contract
as early as 1765, and he eventually accumulated four
copies in his library. James Otis, in his pamphlets of the early 1760s, approvingly cited the radical Rousseau as well as John Locke.
*

In his writings, Voltaire praised Locke’s motto, “Liberty and Property,” upheld revolution in behalf of liberty, and attacked despotism and war. In the article on war in his
Philosophical Dictionary,
Voltaire acidly compared warring states to armed gangs and observed that “the marvelous part of this infernal enterprise is that each chief of the murderers causes his flags to be blessed and invokes God solemnly before going out to exterminate his neighbor.” Revolution for liberty against the state, on the other hand, was a different question. In rebuttal to the age-old conservative attack upon revolution for using violence, Voltaire, in the
Philosophical Letters,
trenchantly pointed out that all political history has rested upon violence. Violence was permanently foisted upon the people by the state, declared Voltaire, and the difference between England and the other countries of Europe was that violent revolution had succeeded in England (at least in Voltaire’s romanticized model) but had failed elsewhere:

To establish liberty in England had been costly, no doubt; the idol of despotic power has been drowned in seas of blood; but the English do not think they have purchased good laws too dearly. Other nations have had no less troublous times; but the blood they have shed for the cause of their liberty had only cemented their servitude.

In striking contrast to Voltaire, Montesquieu was opposed to revolution and was a defender of the concept of preventive war (which Voltaire bitterly scoffed at as “clearly unjust”). In his
Spirit of the Laws,
Montesquieu joined in the important debate between two important French historians. In 1727, the Comte de Boulainvilliers had concluded from his historical researches that the existing French government was rooted in conquest and that the current political structure was therefore the frozen embodiment of that past conquest. The current ruling class was the heir of the tribal conquerors; the ruled masses were the descendants of the subjugated. To the reactionary Boulainvilliers, this insight was only a support for complete domination by the ruling class, built on the presumed right of conquest. But to the philosopher and historian Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1734), the origin in conquest of the ruling class made all the more necessary the restoration of freedom to the people by
ending the power of the rulers. Montesquieu, evading the obligation to weigh existing institutions on the basis of natural moral law, presumed instead to be a political “scientist” who takes existing institutions as his given—and therefore, of course, implicitly took as his undefended axiom the wisdom of the essentially feudal status quo. Indeed Montesquieu, fundamentally a reactionary, wanted to return to stronger feudal checks against the Crown. As a political scientist defending the basis of the status quo, Montesquieu, accepting the facts of original and permanent conquest, undertook to defend the existing ruling-class structure against possible revolution from below. It is no coincidence that Montesquieu’s popularity in the New World was suited rather to the state-building than to the revolutionary age in America.

For all his confusions, contradictions, and romantic irrationalism that opened the doors to future forms of tyranny, Rousseau staunchly supported the people against the despotic ruling classes of his day. He therefore must be regarded overall as a vital part of the broad radical-liberal movement of the era. In his
Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences
(1750; English translation, 1752), Rousseau condemned the accretion of centuries of coercive government—with its hordes of officials and auxiliaries of power in the legal profession, as contrasted to the more natural or voluntary government of the past. A trenchant attack on the ruling class was contained in Rousseau’s
Discourse on Inequality
(1754). Building on Locke’s insight that private property began in the mixture of people’s labor with land and natural resources, Rousseau described how the state arose in the imposition of violence on such properties and their owners. This violence resulted in a ruling class imposing slavery and domination over the body of the ruled. From the state flowed the institutionalization of violence in “perpetual conflicts” between the original property owners and the ruling class. As Rousseau slashingly put it,