Conceived in Liberty (230 page)

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. 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 Pittsfield 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 county, and the indefatigable leadership of the Reverend 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 travelled 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 posts 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 rescinders of the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768, and Mark Hopkins of Sheffield and Jahleel Wood-bridge 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 Constitutionalists’ 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 Allen’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 end this libertarian idyl. “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 and the town of Pittsfield insisted on the right to annul 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 Allen 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 and 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 bowdlerizing 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 payment 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 to innkeepers at a fee of six shillings and more and then dividing the fees among themselves. Allen 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 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 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 Burgh and his work
Political Disquisitions.
Burgh, an elderly Scottish schoolmaster, published the
Disquisitions
in England in 1774; it was reprinted in Philadelphia the following year and soon became a highly influential bestseller throughout the colonies. It was eagerly read by the leaders and the common people alike. Burgh 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 Burgh 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 placemen should be abolished, he wrote, thus ending the economic dependence of members of Parliament on the crown. To effect 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. Burgh 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, Burgh bitterly attacked taxation without representation and the oppressive measures against America.
*

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.”

*
For documentation of this controversy see Robert J. Taylor, ed.,
Massachusetts: Colony to Commonwealth: Documents on the Foundation of Its Constitution
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.)

*
The Handlins’ attempt to downgrade the radical content and influence of Burgh’s
Disquisitions
is unconvincing. Oscar and Mary Handlin, “James Burgh and American Revolutionary Theory,”
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society
(1961), pp. 38–57. But see Caroline Robbins,
The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 364–68.

As we have already learned, although New England was ready for independence from Great Britain, torpor reigned in the Continental Congress through February. Cushing retained his seat until February so that the Massachusetts delegation was not yet under control of the pro-independence faction. And Virginia, the great mainstay of radicalism outside New England, was torn with dissension on this issue; furthermore, the radical leaders, Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson, were temporarily back home, and the other independence stalwarts, George Washington and Patrick Henry, were serving in the armed forces, so that the majority of the Virginia delegation remaining in Philadelphia were arch-conservatives.

In late February 1776, opinion in the Continental Congress shifted sharply leftward toward independence. The shift was spurred by news of the British Prohibitory Act as well as the Proclamation of Rebellion and the impact of
Common Sense,
and was quickened by the arrival in Philadelphia of Elbridge Gerry—an arrival which swung the opportunistic Hancock back to the radical line. Furthermore, Lee returned to his seat at Philadelphia to lead the Virginia radicals, and the conservative Virginia oligarch, Benjamin Harrison, shifted into the radicals’ camp, thus giving them the vital majority of their delegation. The Continental Congress then had a probable majority for independence, a majority intensified by the good news of the British evacuation of Boston. On March 20, Congress urged Canada to set up a new government and join the “united colonies,” and significantly, there was no mention of eventual reconciliation. This was a move hinting strongly of independence. The hint became stronger
still in the great April decisions, including winning French aid and throwing open American ports to all countries, all of which did everything up to the brink of a declaration of independence itself. Beyond this Congress could not go, for it could not bind the separate colonies to independence. Indeed, some of the provincial delegations were instructed against independence by their constituencies. The final push for independence had first to be taken by the separate colonies themselves.