Political Discourse and the Pennsylvania Constitution, 1776 - 1790

Virtuous Democrats, Liberal Aristocrats: Political Discourse and the Pennsylvania Constitution, 1776 - 1790 Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie im Fachbereich 10 – Neuere Philologien der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität zu Frankfurt am Main vorgelegt von Thomas W. Clark aus Frankfurt am Main 2001 If we can agree where the liberty and freedom of the people lies, that will do all. - Colonel Ireton, The Putney Debates But, notwithstanding this almost unanimous agreement in favour of liberty, neither were all disposed to go the same lenghts for it, nor were they perfectly in unison in the idea annexed to it. - Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of a Life, Chiefly passed in Pennsylvania Fraud lurks in generals. There is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism. - John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren CONTENTS PREFACE vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xi 1. PART I REVOLUTIONARY PARADIGMS 1.1 Ex Uno Plures or The American Revolution as a Discourse Community 1 1.1.1 Truth and Difference, Republicans and Scholars 1 1.1.2 Revolutionary Pennsylvania as a Discourse Community 18 1.2 Revolutionary Ideology between Republicanism and Liberalism 36 1.2.1 Liberalism Versus Republicanism 36 1.2.2 Classical Republicanism 42 1.2.3 Liberalism 55 1.2.4 Transformation, Opposition, Permeation 61 1.3 Social as Political Conflict: The Few, the Many, the People 75 1.3.1 Rhetoric, Reality, and Radicalism 75 1.3.2 The Discourse of Popular Sovereignty 87 1.3.3 Limiting and Affirming the People: an Exemplary Analysis 96 1.4 Deference to Diversity: Politics and Society in Pennsylvania 105 1.4.1 Quaker Conflict and Hegemony 107 1.4.2 Ethnocultural Pluralism, Sectionalism and the Politics of Heterogeneity 115 1.4.3 Social Diversity and the Emergence of Popular Radicalism 124 1.4.4 Power Struggles, 1776-1790 136 2. PART II THE PUBLIC POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN PENNSYLVANIA 2.1 Sovereignty, Suffrage, and Representation: The American Scene 141 2.2 Ancient Constitution or Mechanical Polity? Thinking the Republic in 1776 152 2.2.1 Pinpointing the Moment of Constitutional Transformation 152 2.2.2 Radicals, Conservatives, and Constitutional Thought 157 2.3 The Constitution of 1776: Democracy, Rights, and Community 177 2.3.1 The Making of the Constitution 177 2.3.2 Individual Rights and the Interest of the Community 182 2.3.3 The Popular Foundation of Power 198 2.4 Democracy and Exclusion: Constituting the Virtuous Citizen 207 2.4.1 Equality: Expanding the Suffrage 209 2.4.2 Superiority: The Relocation of Competence and Virtue 222 2.4.3 War, Virtue, and Citizenship 228 2.5 Voice of the Opposition: The Conservative Radicalism of Benjamin Rush 240 2.5.1 Benjamin Rush, Political Scientist 242 2.5.2 Rush's Criticism of the Constitution and the Test-Acts 252 2.5.3 Rush's Remedy and Retreat 258 2.6 Unicameralism, Senates, and the Problem of Balanced Government 266 2.6.1 The Challenge of Unicameralism 266 2.6.2 Before the Constitution: Aristocratic Senates, Institutional Bicameralism, and the Single Assembly 272 2.6.3 The Unicameral Constitution: Defense and Dissent 295 2.6.4 A People's Senate and the Power of Property 301 2.7 Transitions and Conclusions: The Constitution of 1790 310 2.7.1 Franklin's Last Stand and Conservative Moderation 310 2.7.2 The Constitution of 1790 as a Moment of Consensus 316 3. PART III CONCLUSION 327 Appendix 1 – The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 332 Appendix 2 – Selected Provisions of the Constitution compared with Proposals of the Convention of 1789/90 345 Bibliography 346 Preface The project of analyzing the constitutional debate in Revolutionary Pennsylvania resulted from my fascination with the unusual frame of government the middle Atlantic Commonwealth adopted in 1776. It included such unusual provisions as the taxpayer franchise, a unicameral legislature, a plural executive, and various popular checks on government and was the only state constitution of its time guaranteeing freedom of speech. Because of its significant deviance from a Federal Constitution enshrined as the distilled wisdom of the greatest minds of the American Enlightenment it acquired an odious reputation. No more than a gross, dysfunctional mutation of republican principles, an embarrassing monument to its creators' political naiveté, zealotry and ignorance it could be confined to the dust heap of history in 1790 with a general sigh of relief. Although it played an important role in Revolutionary constitutional discourse, both as a platform for radical groups in other states and as a negative example to conservative Whigs it "has almost been forgotten," as a scholar noted while America was celebrating the Federal Constitution's bicentennial.1 My interest is not to defend this constitution. But I am sympathetic towards Constitutionalist ideas in that I am trying to understand the debate that surrounded them, accept their importance to many Pennsylvanians as a source of political identity, and see them as a valuable and historically fascinating contribution to Revolutionary discourse. 1 Robert F. Williams, "The Influences of Pennsylvania's 1776 Constitution on American Constitutionalism During the Founding Decade," PMHB 112 (1988), 25-48. vi A number of historians has written on the Revolution in Pennsylvania, but apart from the problem of their mainly pejorative perspective on the Constitution it is the shift in intellectual history and particularly the recent development in the historiography of Revolutionary ideas that require a reexamination of the subject. The three themes that underlie this study are discussed in the subsequent chapters of the introductory part: they are the view of the American Revolution as a discourse community, the paradigmatic complexes of classical republicanism and liberalism; and the notion of social difference as a source of political conflict. The Pennsylvania debate is probably the most important political discourse prior to the Constitutional Convention. The embattled Constitution served as a focus organizing the political energies of the state in the shape of two distinctive groups, Constitutionalists and Republicans, who struggled to define the meaning of republican government. In the process they created a relational web of texts which interacted to ascribe, prescribe, and proscribe political behavior, which offered definitions of sovereignty, equality, virtue, and liberty that shaped the political self-perception of individuals and determined structures of power. This discourse can be viewed as occurring somewhere in- between two ideological paradigms which have both been claimed as representing the discursive universe of the Revolution. I am referring to the lengthy historiographical debate on whether the American Revolution is best understood as a triumph of liberalism or as "the last great act of the vii Renaissance" to use J.G.A. Pocock's provocative formulation.2 My study adopts the position that these paradigms can serve as useful conceptual categories for historians living in a world where liberal ideology is still in many ways the measure of all things. They can clarify our view of a world in which liberal thought was only emerging, still woven into the fabric of other, older political traditions; an eighteenth-century polity in which what scholars retrospectively identify and differentiate as classical and liberal thought was not categorized in this way. My initial question was: How can the debate between Constitutionalists and Anticonstitutionalists in Pennsylvania be analyzed in terms of the historiographical paradigms of republicanism and liberalism? And how does this debate manifest itself in constitutional and political practice? We are dealing with three interrelated tiers: first of all, republicanism and liberalism as paradigms of historiography. Secondly, the political theories articulated in the public debates over the Pennsylvania Constitution, which are politically, socio- economically, and culturally determined amalgamations of republican and liberal idea(l)s. Lastly, the institutional manifestations of these theories in conceptions of citizenship and the suffrage and the structure of government. I am uncertain whether the answers I have found are satisfying, but new questions have certainly appeared which I believe have been worth the effort. The study of republican ideas of the past, antiquarian as it might appear to some, has, I believe, a great practical value in throwing a different light on our own political ideas and rationalizations which we easily become so accustomed to as for 2 J.G.A. Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972), 119-134, 120. viii them to nearly become invisible as intellectual constructions and instead appear as natural and self-evident truths. The key question around which much of the conflict in Pennsylvania revolved, a fundamental question, indeed, for all polities since Plato's Protagoras, is still ever-present in our present-day discussions on the meaning of democracy: what is political competence and who is politically competent? In a globalized world of migrating populations and ideas, where saturated post-industrial media democracies exist beside archaic societies marked by material and intellectual deprivation answers remain tentative at best. This study was made possible through research grants by the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as well as the research and study time amply and graciously provided during my five years as an academic assistant at the Institute of English and American Studies at Frankfurt University. While I am solely responsible for the bad and the ugly, some friendly spirits made kind contributions to the good. Willi Paul Adams gave me valuable advice and encouragement at the inception of the project in 1995; Jürgen Heideking did the same at a critical stage in 1999. Astrid Franke graciously volunteered to be pestered with half-wrought chapters which her comments endowed with more argumentative clarity.

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