Conceived in Liberty (233 page)

The radicals readily concluded that Pennsylvania was the key to their problem. If that great ultraconservative province should capitulate to the radicals and independence, the other colonies would have to swing into line. Maryland and Delaware, caught between Pennsylvania and the South, could not hold out, and neither could a New York isolated from all of her sister colonies. But to accomplish such a drastic change would require something on the order of a veritable internal revolution.

The key to Pennsylvania politics was its almost unique status as a proprietary colony—a status it shared only with Maryland and Delaware, the latter being associated with it in the proprietorship of the Penn family. Directly under a sympathetic proprietary rather than the crown, Pennsylvania did not have to confront the royal tyranny directly or have its assembly dissolved or humbled by Great Britain. In contrast to the other colonies, therefore, Pennsylvania was not propelled into a “state of nature” and thence to a rule by spontaneously formed local committees and provincial congresses. Instead, throughout 1775, its colonial government continued complacently unaltered. Continuing in power were Pennsylvania’s thoroughly undemocratic and malapportioned assembly as well as its executive and judiciary appointed by the proprietary. Controlling the assembly with an iron hand was archconservative John Dickinson along with the Quaker and financial oligarchy of Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania, all strongly opposed to independence. The Quakers and the proprietary party, formerly enemies, were now united in opposition to independence and in favor of the existing political structure. In Pennsylvania there was no confusion between internal and external issues among the radical and conservative camps; the conservatives were opposed to independence and domestic reform, and the radicals were squarely on the side of both. Indeed, the issues were conjoined, as neither aim could be achieved without the other.

One vital factor aiding the Pennsylvania Left was the presence of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; heavily committed to independence, the Congress, especially since its resolution of May 15, 1776, exerted continual pressure on behalf of the Pennsylvania radicals. Over a month of agitation led by Joseph Reed, Washington’s former aide, brought the assembly to enlarge its membership in mid-March, but this was a mild reform, and Dickinson, Robert Morris, and their conservative allies were still in comfortable control.

While local committees had not assumed power in Pennsylvania, they were in existance and a growing force in the province. They were a vital part of the protest movement against Great Britain; and a provincial convention of these committees during January 1775, while effectively hobbled by Dickinson and the conservative leaders, had marked the beginning of influence by the spontaneous organs of public sentiment. After Lexington and Concord, county committees formed voluntary militia units called “associations.” While the county associations were governed by the assembly, friction developed as the radicals, eager to get on with the Revolution, demanded either conscription of or special taxation upon the numerous conscientious objectors in the province. And in September 1775 the Philadelphia committee declared outright that free speech had to end when used for “counteracting... virtuous exertions against injury and oppression.” In such cases the human and divine laws “justify the punishment of such licentiousness.” William Nelson rightly adds that the “committee thereupon adopted the tyrant’s usual plea of necessity: ’no person has a right to the protection of a community or society he wishes to destroy.’ “
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Thus Pennsylvania pacifists as well as Tories were subjected to invasions of their liberty—in the name of liberty.

The restiveness of the associations was seen in the bitter attack by the association of Lancaster County upon the pacifism of the Mennonites, demanding taxation of the Mennonites for military measures. Indeed, the living example of pacifism proved catching, and the Philadelphia association refused to serve as minutemen after contemplating the total exemption of the Quakers from the war machine. The leaders of the Philadelphia association also demanded a tax on conscientious objectors and a transformation of the libertarian institution of voluntary military association into the more familiar compulsory provincial militia. The assembly partially bowed to the pressure by levying a heavy tax of over two and a half pounds upon all nonassociators.

More important for the political structure of Pennsylvania was the radicalizing experience of belonging to the military associations, which were especially prominent in the west. For the masses began to wonder why they should risk their lives for the revolutionary cause and yet not —in the words of the Committee of Privates headed by Dr. James Cannon at the end of February—“be admitted to the enjoyment of all of the rights and privileges of a citizen of that county which they have defended and protected.” The assembly’s brusque treatment of the committee’s petition, as well as its presuming to appoint their military officers, led the Committee of Privates to the revolutionary repudiation of the authority of the constituted Pennsylvania government. Furthermore, the committee was
perceptive enough to apply the argument of taxation without representation to affairs at home; since they were not represented proportionately in the assembly, the authority of the government need not be recognized. Moreover, they moved to elect their officers and in many cases to make their military decisions by majority will of the particular military company. It is not surprising that the associators were noted for their individualistic spirit and their failure to abide by orthodox military rules of hierarchy and submission.

That internal liberal democracy and independence were two sides of the same Pennsylvania coin was fully recognized by the Pennsylvania Right. During the spring of 1776, John Dickinson declared retention of the British royal power “indispensable” to protecting the colonies from civil war and democracy, and his views were echoed more circumspectly by James Wilson. The looming threat of independence and internal reform propelled many ultraconservatives into a quasi-Tory position, and many of them wrote pamphlets and articles denouncing independence. Thus, the Anglican clergyman William Smith cited Montesquieu in praise of the English form of government as the best guarantee of “liberty.” And “Civis” railed against a republicanism that would lead to a government by a “set of men whom nobody knows,” by apprentices and immigrants. George Chalmers, the young author of the pamphlet
Plain Truth,
an attack on
Common Sense,
also cited Montesquieu and attacked Paine for not resigning himself to the necessary imperfections of mankind’s state, especially man’s laws.

A particularly interesting statement of the right-wing position in Pennsylvania was that of the Tory Anglican priest, Charles Inglis. His pamphlet,
The True Interest of America Impartially Stated,
was specifically designed as a rebuttal to
Common Sense.
Since its entire first printing was destroyed by a radical mob, it did not have any influence on the struggle over independence. Nonetheless, Inglis’ arguments provide important insights into the thinking of the conservatives. He began with a statement of fundamental opposition to Paine’s allegedly Utopian individualism. Man was not born free in a state of nature, he maintained, but born necessarily into society, and therefore supposedly born under innate social obligations. Inglis saw that Locke’s and even Hobbes’ ultimate individualism had to be repudiated in order to uphold the Tory cause. He maintained that man could not exist without society, society could not exist without law, and that law could not exist without government. After employing this string of non sequiturs to imply that government was anterior to man, he naturally concluded that government was not a “necessary evil” but a necessary good. He further adopted the classical Tory equation of government with human civilization. Thus the clash of Paine and Inglis posed critical questions of political philosophy, among which were: Is the individual logically
anterior to society? Is society or civilization to be equated with or clearly distinguished from the State apparatus? Inglis, of course, deduced from his thesis that Americans were naturally and inherently part of English society and government, and therefore must not assert their independence; moreover, he turned to Montesquieu to support the need for monarchy and aristocracy as well as to eulogize British institutions.

One assiduous radical writer perceptively charged that when the conservatives talked of their preference for the “mild and wise laws of Great Britain” as contrasted to the “tyranny of the many,” they were really protesting at the prospect of losing their own special privileges, at being “governed by any laws that will effectually secure the liberty and property of the people from their ravenous clutches.”
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To this end, one radical, “Elector” (who may have been the radical theoretician Dr. Thomas Young), went beyond his fellows to advocate suffrage for all adult members of military associations in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania radicals were handicapped by a lack of eminent leadership; the well-known and well-born were almost completely on the Right. Even Joseph Reed was not a radical and was not really ardent about independence. But this lack of “status” was one of the main reasons for the unique intensity of Pennsylvania radicalism. Its leaders came from outside the Pennsylvania power structure; these were new independent men, free from vested interest in the status quo. The leadership of the revolutionary Left included two mathematicians, the eminent astronomer David Rittenhouse and Prof. James Cannon of Philadelphia College; the roistering Philadelphia mechanic and retailer Timothy Matlack; Col. Daniel Roberdeau; and two great theoreticians of the radical libertarian movement, Dr. Thomas Young, the former Massachusetts mentor of Ethan Allen in liberalism and deism, and, of course, Thomas Paine. Virtually the only radical leader who had been prominent in the movement against Britain before the war was the Philadelphia merchant George Bryan. Cannon, writing as “Cassandra,” came to the defense of
Common Sense
against its enemies, and other radical pamphleteers called for extensive widening of the suffrage.

Paine was a host unto himself, and in the “Forester’s Letters,” published in April 1776, he counterattacked his critics and elaborated his libertarian doctrine. In his third letter, he answered the common conservative contention that the evil inherent in human nature requires a strong State to repress it: “If all human nature be corrupt, it is needless to strengthen the corruption by establishing a succession of kings, who be they ever so base, are still to be obeyed....” Furthermore, he argued, it is far more consistent for freemen to choose their governors than to be ruled by mere
birth. Certainly, it is both folly and tyranny to give any one man power over all: “No man since the fall hath ever been equal to the trust....” As to whether America could be happy under its own government, Paine sensibly replied: “As happy as she pleases; she hath a blank sheet to write upon....” Let America make what it will out of this
tabula rasa.

Paine also stressed in this letter the libertarian importance of trial by jury as the
people’s
way to completely circumvent the government in making judgments: “Here the power of kings is short cut. No royal negative can enter the court. The jury... is a
republic,
a body of
judges chosen from among the people. “
He pointed out that, typically, the Magna Carta that secured this liberty had not been granted by the largesse of the crown, but had been forced out of the king by irresistible pressure from below.

Paine also emphasized the goal of an isolationist foreign policy for the new republic that he envisioned on the horizon. America, he urged, will make peace with Britain as with an enemy; then, independent, it will live in peace “remote from all the wrangling world... bounded by the ocean, and backed by the wilderness, who has she to fear but her God?”

During May, the Pennsylvania Left was reinforced by the news of the hiring of Hessian mercenaries, followed by Virginia’s electrifying decision for independence, and it stepped up its demand for a democratic provincial convention elected by all the freemen of Pennsylvania. But the major impetus to the radicals was the Continental Congress’ resolutions of May 10 and 15, denouncing all allegiance to the enemy George III and calling on all colonies to form their own governments independent of Great Britain. The main resolutions were implicitly directed against Pennsylvania, the only province, along with its associated Delaware, that was still dominated by its old British-directed government.

The Congressional resolutions acted as a mighty signal (perhaps prearranged) to the Pennsylvania Left. The radical leaders, urged on by John and Sam Adams, now saw that they could put together the long-sought radical alliance of Philadelphia mechanics and artisans and western frontiersmen. Swiftly, on the night of May 15, the radical Philadelphia Committee, of which James Cannon was secretary, met to consider the formation of a new government. The opportunistic Delaware lawyer Thomas McKean was in the chair at the meeting, but the power resided in a steering committee that included Cannon, Young, and Paine. In presumed obedience to congressional advice, the committee called for a provincial conference of county committees to demand a vote for independence, and a constitutional convention—outside the stultifying structure of the assembly—to form a new and democratic revolutionary government for Pennsylvania. A mass meeting of nearly five thousand people, whipped up by Paine and others, gathered on May 20 at the behest of the
Philadelphia Committee, with Colonel Roberdeau in the chair. The meeting denounced the assembly as holding its authority from the king and for being based on a narrow elecorate; it also called for a constitutional convention for Pennsylvania. A provincial conference of committees was set for June 18 to organize a constitutional convention, and associations throughout the province enthusiastically endorsed the lead of the Philadelphia Committee.