Reassessing Bernard Bailyn's the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution on the Occasion of Its Jubilee

Reassessing Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution on the Occasion of its Jubilee

gordon s. wood

ERNARD BAILYN’s Ideological Origins of the American B Revolution has stood up well over the past fifty years, and I believe it still remains the most important book ever written about the American Revolution. This issue of the NEQ recog- nizing its jubilee suggests as much. Bailyn’s book opened up entirely new ways of looking at the Revolution that have rever- berated throughout both the scholarly and the public worlds over the past half century. Even many of those who criticize or dismiss it have been influenced by it, often without realizing or acknowledging that influence. When Bailyn’s book appeared, it was immediately viewed as the culmination of a long-existing tradition of interpreting the causes of the Revolution in terms of ideas rather than social conflict. As Bailyn himself said in the foreword to his book, his study of the American pamphlets written in the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence “confirmed my rather old-fashioned view that the American Revolution was above else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not pri- marily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of the society or economy.”1 From the very beginning the revolutionaries knew that their Revolution was different from other revolutions. “In other

1Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), x.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 79 revolutions,” said William Vans Murray in 1787, “the sword has been drawn by the arms of offended freedom, under an oppression that threatened the vital powers of society.”2 But this seemed hardly true of the American Revolution. There was little of the legendary tyranny and the social misery that had so often driven desperate peoples into revolution. White American colonists were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing chains to throw off. Indeed, the Americans knew they were freer and more prosperous than any other people in the eighteenth-century world. To its victims, the loyalists, the Revolution was truly incomprehensible. Never in history, said the tory Daniel Leonard, John Adams’s newspaper opponent in 1775, was there ever so much rebellion with so “little real cause.”3 Since the objective social reality seemed incapable of explaining the Revolution, accounting for the upheaval has never been easy, either for the contemporaries or for many subsequent historians. Because the American colonists were not suffering from actual oppression, many interpreters concluded that they must have reasoned themselves into revolution. The Revolution thus became essentially an intellectual affair, an endorsement and justification of the society that had naturally developed in America since the settlements of the seventeenth century. Be- cause the American Revolution was designed not to change but to preserve the society, it seemed to be very much a moderate, even conservative affair, especially in contrast to the turbulent and violent French Revolution that followed. By the late nineteenth century, this intellectualist interpretation was summed up about as fully and frankly as possible by

2[William Vans Murray], Political Sketches, Inscribed to the Excellency John Adams (London, 1787), 48. 3[Daniel Leonard], “Massachusettesis,” January 9, 1775, in John Adams: Revolution- ary Writings, 1755–1775, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2011), 1: 364. See also Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (San Marino, CA: Huntington Li- brary, 1963), 3, where Oliver expressed his amazement at this “unnatural Rebellion” that had occurred among a people who suffered from no “severe Oppressions” indeed, “had been indulged with every Gratification that the most froward [sic] Child could wish for.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 80 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Moses Coit Tyler, the presumptive founder of American Stud- ies. The American Revolution, said Tyler, was “preeminently a revolution caused by ideas and pivoted on ideas.” All revolutions contained ideas, but in those other revolutions, like that of the French, the ideas had been mobilized only when the social reality had caught up with them, only when the ideas had been given meaning and force by “real evils.” The American Revolution, said Tyler, had been different. It was directed “not against tyranny inflicted, but only against tyranny anticipated.” Hence the American Revolution had been “a strife of ideas,... in which the marshalling of arguments not only preceded the marshalling of armies, but often exceeded them in impression upon the final result.”4 By the 1920s, this traditional intellectual interpretation of the origins of the Revolution had been refined and transformed into the formal discourse of constitutional and natural rights theories. These interpretations saw the Revolution as a high- level act of enlightened constitutional reasoning. In fact, scholars in government departments in the 1920s and 30s, such as Andrew McLaughlin, Edwin S. Corwin, Charles McIlwain, and Benjamin F. Wright, were writing some of the best work ever done on the constitutional and political ideas of the Revolution. At the same time as these intellectual and constitutional interpretations were being developed and refined, they faced a powerful challenge from the emergence of new theories of human behavior—a challenge that forever changed the nature of history-writing. Marx, Freud, and modern behaviorist social science told scholars that they had to rethink the role of ideas in human behavior. More often than not, it was claimed, ideas were simply epiphenomenal rationalizations of the underlying interests, passions, and drives that actually determined human behavior. This was all part of a massive revolt against formalism that took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century.5

4Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 1:8–9. 5Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 81 Consequently, beginning around 1900 and coinciding with the Progressive Era, several generations of academic historians sought to show that the Revolution was anything but a high- minded act of enlightened reason. All that they had learned about the psychology and sociology of human behavior demon- strated that the simple-minded notion, that people’s professed beliefs—“no taxation without representation” or “devotion to our country”—were the actual motives for the colonists’ behavior, could never be convincing. For these scientifically savvy Progressive historians, the assumption that formally expressed ideas were the causes of people’s actions was utterly naïve and unrealistic. Tough-minded realists like the British historian Lewis Namier were always there to set scholars right. “What matters most,” said Namier, “is the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of a very infe- rior quality.”6 Everyone who had any sense knew that what politicians claimedintheCongressional Record, for example, was not really what was going on. One had to go into the backrooms to discover political reality. As Charles Beard, the most famous of these Progressive historians pointed out, previous scholars had assumed that ideas were “entities, particularities, or forces, apparently independent of all earthly considerations coming under the head of ‘economic.’” It was Beard’s aim, as it was the aim of many of his contemporaries, to bring into historical con- sideration “those realistic features of economic conflict, stress, and strain” that previous interpreters of the Revolution had largely ignored.7 The result was an extraordinary profusion of books over the first half of the twentieth century that sought to explain the Revolution in terms of socio-economic relationships and interests rather than in terms of ideas. These Progressive historians knew that many ideas had been expressed by the Revolutionaries, and these ideas had to be accounted for. However prevalent, the ideas never expressed

6Sir Lewis Namier, Personalities and Power (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 2. 7Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York: Macmillan, 1935), x, viii.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 82 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY anything meaningful about their users, and, as the best social science of the day claimed, they could never be taken at face value. Consequently, these Progressive historians tended to treat all ideas as propaganda, that is, as ideas self-consciously used by agitators to manipulate and shape public opinion. The distinguished historian Carl Becker even believed that the Dec- laration of Independence could be best understood as propaganda. All the indictments of the king were simply contrived weapons, conjured up to justify a rebellion whose sources lay elsewhere. In fact, Becker suggested that the colonists even regarded the natural rights philosophy of John Locke and other serious thinkers as a legal brief that they had adapted to make their case. “Thus step by step, from 1764 to 1776, the colonists,” said Becker, “modified their theory to suit their needs.”8 Many of the ideas voiced by the Revolutionaries were expressed in such bombastic and overwrought language that they had to be propaganda; otherwise it was impossible to take them seriously. The tories were all “wretched hirelings and execrable parricides.” George III was the “tyrant of the earth,” a “mon- ster in human form.” The British soldiers were “a mercenary, licentious rabble of banditti” who aimed to “tear the bowels and vitals of their brave but peaceable fellow subjects, and to wash the ground with a profusion of innocent blood.”9 According to the Progressive historians, such extravagant and emotional words were simply calculated distortions, gross ex- aggerations designed to incite and inflame a revolutionary fer- vor that the political and social reality could not support.10 “The stigmatizing of British policy as ‘tyranny,’ ‘oppression’ and

8Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Polit- ical Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1922), 207, 133. 9Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 141, 373, 150. 10The rules of rhetoric in the eighteenth century made speech resemble our modern notion of propaganda. The speaker designed his language not to express his personal emotions but to arouse the emotions of his audience. See Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1971); Warren Guthrie, “The Development of Rhetorical Theory in America, 1635–1850,” Speech Monographs 13 (1946): 14–22; 14 (1947): 38–54; 15 (1948): 61–71.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 83 ‘slavery,’” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., the dean of the Pro- gressive historians, “had little or no objective reality, at least prior to the Intolerable Acts, but ceaseless repetition of the charge kept emotions at a fever pitch.” With their conception of ideas as propaganda, the Progressive historians were able to explain how a minority of agitators skillfully manipulating public opinion were able to bring about a revolution in a society whose levels of prosperity and freedom seemed to make a revolution implausible. In fact, said Schlesinger, “no disaffected element in history has ever risen so splendidly to the occasion.”11 These, then, were the two prevailing interpretations of the origins of the Revolution confronting Bailyn in the 1960s—one that was preoccupied with formal high-level constitutional reasoning and the other that claimed that all ideas were simply instances of manipulated propaganda. Bailyn believed he had found something in the pamphlets that he was editing for the John Harvard Library that enabled him to resolve what he saw as the “striking incoherence” that lay at the heart of both these interpretations. Since he pointed out that the major works setting forth these interpretations had appeared roughly fifty years prior to the moment he was constructing his own interpretation, it seems especially appropriate that scholars today should be assessing his own work fifty years after it appeared.12 Bailyn concluded that both these two principal interpretations were wrong. “Both,” he said, “lead to hopeless confusion in interpreting an event like the Revolution.”13 But he found from his work in the pamphlet literature that he could encom- pass and absorb both of these interpretations, which misunder- stood the role of ideas in human behavior, and at the same time still maintain that ideas were the principal force driving the colonists into resistance and revolution.

11Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain: 1764–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1958), 34, 20. 12Bernard Bailyn, “Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,” in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (New York: Norton, 1973), 4–6. 13Bailyn, “Central Themes,” 11.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 84 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY In setting forth his “rather old-fashioned view” of the Revo- lution as an ideological and political struggle, Bailyn certainly did not intend to become identified with the “consensus” historians of the 1950s, who stressed the sincerity of the colonists’ devotion to principle. These historians, like Edmund S. Morgan and others, had tended to interpret the Revolution as a constitutional movement to preserve American democracy and rights from a fumbling, if not tyrannical, British imperial government. Bailyn never thought that the Revolution was simply a colonial rebellion designed to preserve democracy: there was too much evidence that the revolutionaries themselves thought they were involved in a real revolution, that they were introducing a new era in human affairs, and that they took deliberate steps to re- shape institutions in light of the most advanced Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, Bailyn entitled the original version of his book, “The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution.” It appeared in 1965 as the general introduction to the first volume of what were to be four volumes of edited pamphlets. This introduction emphasized the dynamic character of the Revolution that seemed to transform the society without anyone actually willing it. “In no obvious sense,” Bailyn wrote, “was the Ameri- can Revolution undertaken as a social revolution. No one, that is, deliberately worked for the destruction or even the substan- tial alteration of the order of society as it had been known.” Yet, said Bailyn, the social order was in fact transformed—not through the confiscation and redistribution of loyalist property or through economic dislocations, but through “changes in the realm of belief and attitude,” in “the views men held toward the relationships that bound them to each other.”14 When two years later Bailyn’s introduction to the volume of pamphlets had become a book, the title had changed to The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution—a switch that Bailyn has not explicitly explained; but his downplaying

14Bernard Bailyn, “The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution,” in Pamphlets of the American Revolution. 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1965), 190.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 85 of the social origins of the Revolution remained, indeed, was strengthened.15 The revolutionaries, he said, may have been eighteenth-century radicals, but they talked only in political terms and were concerned “not with the need to recast the social order nor with the problems of economic inequality and the injustice of stratified societies but with the need to purify a corrupt constitution and fight off the apparent growth of pre- rogative power.”16 But since the eighteenth century could scarcely conceive of society apart from government in any modern sense, those political terms necessarily possessed social significance. The social distinctions and economic deprivations that we today think of as the consequence of class divisions, business exploitation, or various isms—capitalism, racism, etc.—were in the eighteenth century usually thought to be caused by the abuses of government. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts—in fact, all social evils and social deprivations—seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical authority. This was why radicals like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were such zealous advocates for minimal government; they wanted to separate private property and private rights, including religion, from public power and turn government into something other than what it had been in the an- cien régime: private property and private interests writ large. So that when Anglo-American radicals talked in what seems to be only political terms—purifying a corrupt constitution, eliminating courtiers, fighting off crown power, ending plural office-holding, and, most important, becoming republicans with

15In a review of Ideological Origins in 1967, Richard D. Brown pointed out that the chapter on “Sources and Traditions” was enlarged in the new book edition. He cited Bailyn’s statement in the Foreword to the new book that “the configuration of attitudes and ideas that would constitute the Revolutionary ideology was present a half-century before there was an actual revolution.” If so, Brown wondered whether there could be, as Bailyn claimed, a revolutionary transformation of ideology in the 1760s and 70s after all. Brown, “Review of Ideological Origins,” The New England Quarterly 40 (1967): 577–79. 16Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 283.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 86 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY elective offices everywhere—they nevertheless had a decid- edly social message. Changing the role and capacity of government necessarily meant changing society. The American patriots were involved in more of a social revolution than Bailyn gave them credit for.17 As intellectual history, Bailyn’s book was very sophisticated stuff. Although he often used geological images in his other works, positing layers below layers and depths below depths in people’s thinking, in Ideological Origins, as Jack N. Rakove has pointed out, the images tended to be geographical: exploring, pressing against, and sweeping past frontiers.18 In Ideological Origins, the words and concepts the colonists used, according to Bailyn, were “strangely reshaped, turned in unfamiliar directions, toward conclusions they could not themselves clearly perceive.” As the colonists stumbled into a new world of political thought, they “touched its boundaries, and, at certain points, probed its interior”; but then, in confusion, they often “withdrew to more familiar ground.” Sometimes “the movement of thought was rapid, irrecoverable and irresistible. It swept past boundaries few had set out to cross, into regions few had wished to enter.” But then the colonists reached the edge of things, “where the familiar meaning of ideas and words faded away into confusion, and leaders felt themselves peering

17Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 4–5, 81, 84, 187. Jefferson, for example, always thought that the differences between the societies of France and America were due solely to the two countries’ different forms of government. Jefferson to Eliza House Trist, August 18, 1785, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 8:404. He was not wrong about that. The problem the French revolutionaries confronted in 1789 was to create a modern kind of private property that was separated from public power. On this problem see Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarca- tion: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Jefferson and other American revolutionaries faced some of the same problems in separating private life from public power, ensuring, for example, that office-holders could not claim their private character gave them an inherent right to their offices. See Jefferson to the New Haven Merchants, July 12, 1801, Jefferson Papers, 34:554–58. 18Jack N. Rakove, “‘How Else Could It End?’: Bernard Bailyn and the Problem of Authority in Early America,” in The Transformation of Early American History: So- ciety, Authority, and Ideology, ed. James Henretta et al. (New York: Knopf, 1991), 63.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 87 into a haze, seeking to bring shifting conceptions somehow into focus.”19 What Bailyn discovered in the pamphlets was not just a scattered collection of principles and values but, more important, an elaborate pattern of mid-level ideas and beliefs that formed a map of social reality that no historian had quite seen before. Although Bailyn drew on the work of Caroline Robbins and other scholars to create this pattern of ideas, he was the historian who put the diffuse parts together, combing radical Whig commonwealth thinking with nostalgic tory notions into a com- prehensive whole and applying this body of ideas and beliefs to the eighteenth-century American colonies. Most of these ideas and beliefs had emerged out of the trau- matic experiences of seventeenth-century England, especially out of the writings surrounding the Exclusion Crisis of 1679- 1681. All of these ideas and values emphasized a heightened fear of power and an intense love of liberty and sensitized people to all political activity. Although such radical ideas and values tended to exist largely on the edges of political life in England itself, they fitted the peculiar circumstances of Amer- ican political life in the eighteenth century and thus were far more meaningful for the colonists than they were for Britons in the mother country.20 Bailyn found that this body of ideas was capable of bringing together and embracing the two competing interpretations of why the colonists revolted. As Bailyn explained in his “Central Themes” essay written several years after the Ideological Ori- gins, that even though the two rival interpretations of the Revo- lution were both wrong, they were “resolvable into the concept of ‘ideology.’” Bailyn used Clifford Geertz’s concept of ideology to help explain what he had been getting at in his book. Formal discourse—the contents of all the essays, pamphlets, and sermons of the Revolutionary period—was significant not because in some simple sense it constituted motives or some form of propaganda. Rather, he said, all that discourse became

19Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 90, 161, 231–32, 272. 20Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 88 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY politically powerful when it became ideology, when it articu- lated and fused into effective formulation of opinions and attitudes that were otherwise too scattered to be acted upon, when it crystallized and clarified otherwise inchoate social and political instincts and urges and turned them into attainable goals. Prior to the Revolution Americans had drawn on this body of ideas but only casually and unsystematically. Then, in the 1760s and 70s, the colonists found this complex pattern of ideas and beliefs capable of explaining what they took to be a calculated design by the English government to deprive them of their liberty. This kind of ideological thinking, this integrated body of ideas and values, was not confined to a few educated Americans as some historians have suggested. Bailyn himself noted that even members of the revolutionary riots and mobs expressed the same ideological thinking. “Far from being empty vessels,” wrote Bailyn, the rioters “shared actively the attitudes and fears of the political and intellectual leaders of the Revolutionary movement.”21 Although some critics claimed that Bailyn’s concentration on the pamphlets gave him a limited elitist view of the patriots’ ideology, Bailyn maintained that the ideology was present in more than just the pamphlets. Since Bailyn focused on the pamphlets because they were what he was editing, he knew that the newspapers, broadsheets, and even private corre- spondence were also full of this radical Whig thinking. Conse- quently, many ordinary Americans in the eighteenth century, and not, as critics have claimed, just a few “well-connected, well-educated, well-heeled whites in their libraries,” shared much of this ideology.22 Otherwise why in September 1774 would over ten thousand minutemen from the New England countryside, most of whom were very ordinary people—from as far away as Rhode Island, Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and New Hampshire—pick up their weapons and march toward Boston upon hearing a rumor (which turned out to be

21Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1:583. 22Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the Amer- ican Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 13.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 89 false) that the British redcoats had bombarded the Bay colony’s capital and were planning an assault on Cambridge.23 Bailyn used an image of an intellectual switchboard to help clarify what he meant by positing this peculiar configuration of ideas, this ideology that subsumed and encompassed both high- level constitutional thinking and low-level propaganda. This switchboard, he said, was “wired so that certain combinations of events would activate a distinct set of signals—danger signals, indicating hidden impulses and the likely trajectory of events impelled by them.”24 Suddenly in the 1760s and 70s, the actions of the British government triggered a set of signals on this intellectual and emotional switchboard that ultimately convinced the colonists “that they were faced with conspirators against liberty determined at all costs to gain ends which their words dissembled.”25 Because of their assumption that evil effects could result only from evil motives, Americans necessarily concluded that the harmful consequences of British actions in the 1760s and 70s had to come from the malign intentions of British officials in London. British officials’ professions of having the colonists’ interests at heart merely confirmed their duplicity in colonial eyes.26 In every way, the colonists were ideologically prepared to attribute the worst possible meaning to the British actions of the 1760s and 70s. Their switchboard signaled meanings to them that told them that they faced “nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and in America.” These meanings constituted

23T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 129–59. 24Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 22–23. Jack N. Rakove thinks the “throwaway metaphor” of the intellectual switchboard “does not merit the fussy commentary it has received.” Bailyn, he says, replaced it with the image of a map in his “Central Themes” essay. Today, of course, Bailyn could have the entire world of cyber imagery to draw upon. Rakove, “‘How Else Could It End?’” in Henretta et al., eds., Transformation of Early American History, 275. 25Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 95. 26Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: Penguin, 2011), 81–123.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 90 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY overwhelming evidence of a conspiracy against liberty both in the colonies and in the mother country itself, and they explained the colonists’ often hysterical-seeming reactions to events. In the end, these meanings created a logic that justi- fied what Bailyn called the “only one rational response” they could make.27 Because of this peculiar pattern of fears in their culture, the colonists had become super-sensitive to nearly all political actions undertaken by the authority of the Crown. This is what Edmund Burke was getting at in his famous 1775 speech on conciliation with the colonies. The Americans loved freedom, said Burke. Indeed, “this fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people on earth. . . . They auger misgovernment at a distance, and snuff tyranny in every tainted breeze.”28 Even students at Harvard College in the late 1760s were predisposed to regard nearly every innovation attempted by the faculty as an abuse of power, which they then defied, calling themselves “true Sons of Lib- erty.”29 Bailyn’s book explained why all this was so. He made sense of why the colonists rebelled when they did as no other historian ever had. That is why his book has had so much stay- ing power.30 Although Bailyn’s switchboard explained the colonists’ unusual sensitivity to all British actions between 1763 and 1776, the outbreak of war did not change that sensitivity—despite the claims of a recent highly acclaimed book. The colonists did

27Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 95, 23. 28Edmund Burke, “Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775” (New York, 1775), in The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 1764–1776, ed. Gordon S. Wood, 2 (New York: Library of America, 2015): 544, 548. 29Conrad Edick Wright, ed., Pedagogues and Protesters: The Harvard College Stu- dent Diary of Stephen Peabody, 1767–68 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), 169. 30Actually, Bailyn needed the argument of Pauline Maier’s book, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), to clinch his case for why the Revolution occurred precisely when it did. As Maier pointed out, for the “one rational response” to occur, a series of conditions had to be met in order to justify each stage of the colonists’ escalating process of resistance that culminated in the Revolution of 1776.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 91 not need “a new script to animate a new kind of resistance.” They did not need “war stories” to arouse their anti-British feelings.31 Robert G. Parkinson’s book, Common Cause, which makes these claims, was written to try and solve the same problem that has confronted all historians of the Revolution: How to explain a revolution erupting in “the least taxed, most socially mobile, highest landowning, [and] arguably most prosperous people in the western world.”32 As Annette Gordon-Reed pointed out in a sympathetic review of Parkinson’s book, ”Elo- quent words about abstract rights would not do.” Some other explanation had to be found. “History,” she said, “has taught the sad lesson that fear and contempt are the most predictably powerful motivators for galvanizing one group to move against another.”33 Parkinson realized that to survive the patriot leaders “had to destroy as much of the public’s affection for their ancestors as they could”; they needed to turn the British into “strangers, into “suspicious foreigners.” “To accomplish this vital, difficult task,” the American colonists, wrote Parkinson, “embraced the most powerful weapons in the colonial arsenal: stereotypes, prejudices, expectations, and fears about violent Indians and Africans.” Parkinson argued that the American leaders were successful in making blacks, Indians, and for a while Hessian mercenaries “proxies” for George III and the British government. The patriots used newspaper stories of British incitement of slave revolts and Indian attacks to dissolve the natural loyalty that the colonists had felt for the former mother country.34 But Bailyn had already solved this problem of explaining why the Americans so readily turned against their British ancestors. All the British actions, including inciting slave revolts, provoking Indian attacks, and using mercenaries were immediately meaningful to the colonists because of their ideological

31Parkinson, Common Cause, 8. 32Parkinson, Common Cause, 21. 33Annette Gordon-Reed, “The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame,” New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017. 34Parkinson, Common Cause, 21–22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 92 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY predisposition to mistrust everything the British government did.35 The series of British provocations in the 1760s and 70s had inevitably triggered danger signals in the switchboard and convinced many Americans that a plot was afoot to deprive them of their liberty. The war stories that followed only rein- forced the Americans’ ideological predilections to hate and fear all British actions. What is most extraordinary about the Revo- lutionary War is how few tories and loyalists, especially in the North, the British forces were able to recruit to their cause, even when they were militarily successful.36 However much of the origins of the Revolution that Bailyn’s book explains, many historians have usually categorized it as just another neo-Whig intellectualist interpretation that contrasts with a neo-Progressive interpretation based on interests. In fact, most new interpreters of the Revolution begin by positing a straw man of Bailyn’s argument in order to blow it away and replace it with their own. So, as one such notable work declared, Bailyn and his school of “ideological historians tend to reify assumptions and beliefs, assigning extraordinary powers of motivation to abstract ideas without first demonstrating how these ideas provided an emotional link between the experiences of everyday life in diverse communities and families and the larger collectivity of Americans who actually achieved independence from Great Britain.”37 In the historiographical debates over the origins of the Rev- olution that have taken place over the past fifty years that is more or less how it has gone. Most historians have engaged in a

35Despite the incredibly dire conditions in the British P.O.W. ships, especially in the Jersey.RobertP.Watson,The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn: An Untold Story of the American Revolution (New York: Da Capo, 2017), points out that very few American prisoners chose to join the British army as a condition of their release from these hell- hole prisons. This contrasts with the impressive number of British and Hessian soldiers who deserted and became Americans. Mark Edward Lender and Garry Wheeler Stone, Fatal Sunday: George Washington, the Monmouth Campaign, and the Politics of the Battle (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 149. 36Lender and Stone, Fatal Sunday, 10–11, 146–47. Far more effective than the “war stories” in reinforcing the Patriot cause were the many cases of plundering by the British and Hessian armies. 37T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 93 continual see-sawing of interpretations between ideas and interests in order to explain why the colonists revolted. The plac- ing of Bailyn’s supposed idealist or neo-Whig interpretation in opposition to a materialist-realist or neo-Progressive one rein- forces what I believe is a false dichotomy between ideas and interests that has plagued the historical profession for generations. As historian Daniel T. Rodgers has reminded us, many of the debates historians have with one another, especially over the Revolution, have long been “reflexively dualistic: ideas versus behavior; rhetoric versus ‘the concrete realities of life’; propaganda and mystification on the one hand, the real stuff on the other.”38 What is more regrettable is that a new younger generation of historians seems to be continuing this wrong-headed separa- tion of ideas and interests. In an introduction to a recent collection of essays on violence in the American Revolution, Patrick Griffin apparently thinks that the conflict between the idealist and the neo-Progressive behaviorist interpretations of the Revolution is still alive and well. He appears to believe that each of the polarities results in a particular interpretation of the Revolution, with the idealists or neo-Whigs portraying an elitist and conservative revolution and the behaviorists or neo- Progressives describing a radical socially-based revolution, in- volving the masses of ordinary people. Ultimately Griffin seeks to solve the problem by equitably dividing up the interpretations of the Revolution between the two groups of historians, granting the origins of the Revolution to the idealists and ced- ing the outcome of the Revolution to the social behaviorists.39 Some historians seem to think of ideological and social explanations, ideas and interests, mind and body, in zero-sum terms as mutually exclusive: emphasizing one necessarily takes away from the other. “If we begin an investigation of revolution with ideology—as many historians have done—,” a critic of Bailyn

38 Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of Amer- ican History, 79 (1992), 25. 39Patrick Griffin, “Introduction,” Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, ed. Patrick Griffin et al. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 1–2, 4.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 94 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY has said, “we inevitably discount the social conditions that en- ergized these ideas for the men and women who stood to lose the most in a conflict with Great Britain.”40 Perhaps it is possible to show that that this sort of polarized thinking is mistaken. Maybe ideas and interests are not mutually exclusive after all. Since some philosophers are contending that the long-existing dualism of mind and body has been ex- ploded, it is possible that there are no interests without ideas and no ideas without interests, especially if we understand that there are non-material interests. Then Bailyn’s book properly understood can transcend the crude categorizations that historians have used to sort out the various interpretations of the Revolution. In an essay written several years after the book, Bailyn tried to head off any sort of pigeon-holing of his interpretation. He claimed that his explanation of the Revolution was “no more ‘intellectual’ or ‘idealist’ or ‘neo-whig’ than locating the origins of World War II in the fear and hatred of Nazism.” If this was what he meant, then all the controversy over The Ideological Origins has been very much overblown. For at the high level of generality suggested by his analogy, we can probably accom- modate both ideas and interests in interpreting the origins of the Revolution. When Bailyn denied that the Revolution was undertaken by social groups seeking to force changes in the organization of the society or economy, he was not claiming that no social or economic interests were prevalent in this period. Instead, he was merely saying that the severe social and economic causes of the sort that lay behind other revolutions could never by themselves persuasively account for the American Revolution. Some recent neo-Progressive historians have tried once more to make a case for an economic interpretation of the Revolution, some even suggesting poverty and deprivation as explanations for the rebellion; but such arguments have never been very convincing. People in debt or experiencing some economic dif- ficulties such as the colonists were experiencing do not usually

40Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, xiv.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 95 resort to rebellion as a solution, especially since most of the colonists (or at least the white proportion of them) were enjoy- ing the highest standard of living in the world.41 At the same time Bailyn has never denied the reality of debt and economic interests in the colonists’ lives. I believe critics are greatly mistaken in claiming that Bailyn’s book “made the history of the American Revolution a history that happened pri- marily in the mind, not on the battlefield or in people’s pursuit of their worldly aims.”42 Quite the contrary. Bailyn’s argument is such that he can concede all of the economic problems and social aspirations, all the hidden selfish interests motivating the patriots, indeed, everything the Progressive historians and others have put forth to make their case that social and economic dissatisfaction lay behind the Revolution, and still legitimately maintain that it was the colonists’ belief in a conspiracy against liberty that in the end propelled them into Revolution. Even the patriot propaganda can be integrated into Bailyn’s pattern of ideas and values. Although Bailyn declared that the “modern meaning” of propaganda (by which he meant the in- fluencing by rhetoric “the inert minds of an otherwise passive populace”) was not useful when applied to the writings of the American Revolution, nonetheless I believe that his intellectual map of social and political reality can absorb and account for all the examples of propaganda expressed by the Revolutionary leaders to incite emotions and passions of the populace.43 In fact, historians have recently recovered the notion of propaganda as a means of explaining the role of ideas in the Rev- olution, only now some of them are calling it “propagation.”44

41Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly, 68 (2011): 597–630; Gary B. Nash, “Social Change and the Growth of Pre- revolutionary Urban Radicalism,” in The American Revolution: Explorations in the His- tory of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 1976), 6. 42Michael Zuckerman, “Conclusion: Beyond the Rebirth of the Revolution: Coming to Terms with Coming of Age,” in The American Revolution Reborn, eds. Patrick Spero and Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 306. 43Bailyn, Ideological Origins, xiii. 44Russ Castronovo, Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Commu- nications in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10–12; William

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 96 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY There is really nothing wrong with applying the concept of propaganda to the use of some ideas in the past, as long as it is defined as “publicly disseminated knowledge that serves toin- fluence others in belief or action,” and not as just the pouring of ideas into the inert minds of a passive populace.45 We know from our experience today that we have lots of propaganda surrounding us, that people with agendas are con- tinually trying to find the right language, the right words, the right meanings, to convince us of the merits of their cause or the quality of their product. The patriots were no different. In 1769 John Adams noted in his diary that he and Samuel Adams, James Otis, and the printers of the Boston Gazette, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, spent the evening of Septem- ber 3 “in preparing for the Next Days Newspaper.” It was “a curious Employment,” he admitted, “Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurrences, &c.—working the political Engine.”46 But in cooking up their propaganda Adams and his colleagues could not just create anything they wished. Even if they exaggerated incidents and events or even invented fake news, what they cooked up had to seem meaningful and persuasive to their readers. If these patriots cooked up something that had no resonance with their readers, if what they said was too bizarre, too peculiar, and too strange, it would have been unacceptable to the public they wanted to persuade. Adams accused the tories in Massachusetts of “pouring forth the whole torrents of their billingsgate, propagating thousands of the most palpable falsehoods.”47 But such tory propaganda did not have the ap- peal and resonance of Adams’s own patriot propaganda. Adams

B. Warner, Protocols of Liberty: Communication, Innovation, and the American Revo- lution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Parkinson, Common Cause, 17–18. 45Castronovo, Propaganda 1776, 10. 46L.H. Butterfield et al., eds. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1:343. In his autobiography Thomas Jefferson used the same phase, “cooked up,” to refer to the creation of the resolution by him and his colleagues in the Virginia House of Burgesses making June 1, 1774, a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer in support of the Bostonians suffering from the Intolerable Acts. Merrill Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 8. 47Adams, “Novanglus,” Wood, ed., Adams: Revolutionary Writings, 1:416.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 97 and the other patriots had Bailyn’s intellectual switchboard, his set of Whig meanings, that they could activate; the tories had nothing comparable, which was why the debates between the Whigs and tories were never equal. Of course, any attempt to maintain that ideas “caused” the Revolution will be met by the ridicule of the realists. If truth be told, it is difficult, if not impossible, to apply the physical or mechanistic concept of “cause” (one billiard ball hitting another) to ideas and human action. We have to turn causes into motives and this has its own difficulty. How do we know the motives of actors? The eighteenth century tended to deduce motives from effects, but we in the twenty-first century who know about the unanticipated consequences of purposive action can not do that very easily.48 In searching out motives, all we historians can do, it seems, is multiply the citations to the documents in which the ideas were expressed and stress our conviction that the historical participants were really sincere when they said they acted in accord with their professed beliefs. Hard-nosed realists will simply smile knowingly at the naivety of those who would make ideas the cause of human behavior and dismiss them as inno- cents who know little about the “real” world of human experience. The distinguished historian Richard B. Morris, who was certainly hard-nosed, dismissed as mere “rhetoric” all the Revo- lutionaries’ talk of conspiracy that Bailyn had described so fully in his book. Although Morris admitted that such conspiratorial language infected the dialogue of the time, he declared that “it is dubious whether sensible and sophisticated men put much stock in such talk.” Certainly, he concluded, no serious person gave it much credence.49 Yet even if we cannot prove that ideas “cause” behavior, it does not follow that they are unimportant and are merely epiphenomenal rationalizations that have little or no effect on behavior. Obviously, ideas are important for human behavior or

48Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style,” in Wood, The Idea of America, 118. 49Richard B. Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 38.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 98 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY we would not spend such an inordinate amount of time and en- ergy trying to convince each other of the rightness of our ideas. It is possible to concede the realist or materialist position— that passions and interests lie behind all our behavior—without deprecating the role of ideas. I believe that Bailyn’s argument enables him to do just that. Even if ideas are not the underlying motives for human actions, they are constant accompa- niments of those actions. Even if all human actions are selfish and based on hidden interests and emotions, the actors always need ideas to justify, explain, or make meaningful those interests and emotions. Ideas structure our social world and give meaning to all human actions; there is almost nothing that we humans do, even something as simple as a wink, to which we do not attribute meaning. Of course, we are not free at any moment to give what- ever meaning we wish to our behavior. Ideas are not the easily manipulated entities that the Progressive historians suggested; they are not mere simple-minded propaganda. We cannot simply create or cook up new words and new meanings to justify and explain our actions. The meanings we give to our behavior are public ones, and they are defined and limited by the con- ventions, ideas, and values available to our culture. If people push beyond or distort the available meanings of the culture in attempting to justify and make sense of their actions, they are apt to find themselves isolated and their actions regarded as meaningless and unconvincing. Clifford Geertz gave the example of organized labor’s effort to derail the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 by labeling it a “slave-labor act.” In light of the postwar revelations of the horrific Nazi concentration camps and Stalin’s prison camps in the gulag, the effort was blatant overkill and its effectiveness, its meaningfulness, was lost.50 In this sense the culture—the collection of meanings available to the historical participants—both limits and creates behavior. It does so by forcing people to describe and justify their actions in terms of the ideas, the meanings, available to them.

50Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 209–13.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 99 What they cannot make meaningful in some sense, they cannot do. Therefore, although ideas may not be convincing motives for behavior, the ideas that we invoke to make our behavior meaningful do decisively affect and circumscribe that behavior. Not only are they not mere superstructure or epiphenomena, but, in some sense, they create or make possible our behavior.51 Although Bailyn never spelled out the nature of ideas as a collection of meanings in this way, the configuration of ideas that he set forth in Ideological Origins can be considered as a powerful array of accessible meanings that the patriots could draw upon to explain, understand, justify, and rational- ize their resistance to British actions. Even if we concede that the colonists had many selfish interests and hidden motives, we can still claim that it was only their ideology, their pattern of Whig ideas, that made those interests and motives meaningful; and thus it is entirely intelligible to argue that ideas ultimately account for the American Revolution. It seems to me therefore that the issue separating Bailyn’s work from his critics should no longer be the dichotomy raised by the Progressive historians of the 1920s and 30s, interests versus ideas, economics versus ideology. Maybe the colonists were in fact as the neo-Progressive historians have pictured them—“greedy hypocrites motivated by their economic interests.” Maybe the patriots like John Adams were in fact as the loyalist Peter Oliver described them—men of overween- ing ambition, jealousy, and resentment who were ruled by an “Acrimony of Temper” that “settled into Rancor & Malig- nity.” Maybe the colonists, as Oliver charged, did have “selfish Designs” and “disguised their Private Views by mouthing

51My approach to the role of ideas has been very much influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner. See James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). For concrete examples of Skinner’s approach applied to history, see “The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole,” in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa, 1974), 93–128, and John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 26–38. See Gordon S. Wood, “Intellectual History and the Social Sciences,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul Conkin, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 100 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY it for Liberty.”52 Nevertheless, all of these interests, all of this hypocrisy can be incorporated into Bailyn’s account. Interests and ideas are compatible; in fact, interests always need ideas to justify themselves. If the extreme realists are right that everyone ultimately is self-interested, then hypocrisy to one degree or another is necessarily built into all human affairs. “Hypocrisy,” as La Rochefoucauld said, “is the homage vice pays to virtue.” Because ideas are essential to all human activity, Bailyn’s argument and its emphasis on his intellectual switchboard properly understood can accept the existence of underlying passions and self-interest motivating people. Unfortunately, so objectionable has Bailyn found the interpretations of the neo-Progressive historians that he has tended to dismiss evidence of any significant social conflict in the years following the Declaration of Independence. He claimed that the role of ideas changed in the decades following Indepen- dence. “Passions cooled as ordinary life reasserted itself, and cultural,sectional,andsocialdifferences...becameimpor- tant.” Consequently, he said, the themes of this subsequent period “cannot be understood in essentially ideological terms”—a remarkable statement that implies that cultural, sectional, and social differences somehow do not produce ideology that needs to be deciphered. It is almost as if he had forgotten his chapter on “The Contagion of Liberty.” Thus, according to Bailyn, the Americans glided rather naturally into the making of the new federal Constitution of 1787. In a concluding chapter entitled “Fulfillment: A Commentary on the Constitution” added in 1992 to a revised edition of Ide- ological Origins, he claimed that the formation of the Consti- tution in 1787 was simply “the final and climatic expression of the ideology of the American Revolution.53 Bailyn seems to pass rather blithely over the fact that nobody in 1776 in their wildest dreams even imagined anything resembling the remarkably formidable federal government that was

52Lynd and Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery,” 602; Adair and Schultz, eds., Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, 83, 65 53Bailyn, “Central Themes,” 18–19.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 101 created in 1787. He considered the framing of this extraordi- narily powerful national government as simply the third logical phase in the ideological history of the Revolution, the first being the imperial debate of 1764-1776, and the second being the formation of the state constitutions between 1776 and 1780. Al- though he admitted that the building of “such a nation-state to replace the power system from which they had only recently escaped seemed to reverse the direction of the ideological revolution they had created,” the framers of 1787, he contended, actually sought “to return to their ideological origins, rethink the principles that had guided them into and through the Rev- olution, refine them, modernize them, and then reapply them in this new situation.” Thus he concluded that the framers of 1787 did not do anything radical; they simply fulfilled “their original goals by creating power, on new principles, not by de- stroying it.”54 That is certainly what the supporters of the Constitution, the Federalists, wanted everyone to believe. But it was not what the opponents of the Constitution thought. Bailyn’s interpretation of the origins of the new federal government, scarcely does justice to the views of those opposed to the new Con- stitution, the Anti-Federalists. He admitted as much; he con- ceded that most of the Anti-Federalists instinctively summoned up the same words, fears, dangers, and conspiracies that had been invoked by the colonists in the 1760s and 70s. “The identity between antifederalist thought and that of the most fervent ideologists of ’76,” he wrote, “is at times astonishing.”55 Indeed, it is astonishing, and it suggests that the Constitution was not such a natural fulfillment of the Revolution as Bailyn maintained. There is nothing natural about the Constitution; in fact, explaining the origins of the new federal government is as difficult as explaining the origins of the Revolution itself. The new national government was so strong, so surprising, so unexpected, and so contrary to the ideas Bailyn set forth to account for the Revolution that something awful had to have

54Bailyn, Ideological Origins, vii. 55Bailyn, Ideological Origins, vii

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 102 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY happened in the decade following Independence to get so many Americans to change their minds about erecting the kind of far-removed political power they had just thrown off. The new national government was anything but a logical fulfillment of the Revolution; rather it was a sign that some leaders thought the Revolution was going awry and needed to be rescued by an entirely new and unanticipated political structure.56 The intellectual and political division between the Federal- ists and the Anti-Federalists over the Constitution was as great as the division over the Declaration of Independence; in fact, the proportion of people in 1787-1788 opposed to the new Constitution was probably greater than those patriots who sup- ported independence in 1776. Ideology did not disappear from Americans’ lives in the post-war years. The ideas may not have formed a switchboard, but they were just as meaningful, just as important, for the historical participants as they sought to make sense of what was happening. People at the time described a social clash between aristocracy and democracy which we historians can not dismiss out of hand. Even if we believe they were mistaken in using such terms, we have to explain what they meant and why they used them. They were words that had meaning for the people at the time, and we have to take them as seriously as we take the ideas of the patriots in the 1760s and 70s. Although Bailyn admitted that the social order was uninten- tionally transformed by the Revolution, these changes, he said, took place only “in the realm of belief and attitude.” Actual changes in the society were “superficial”; “they affected a small part of the population only, and they did not alter the organization of society.”57 I believe Bailyn underestimates the extent of social change that took place after the Declaration of Independence. There may have been no massive upheaval with one class replacing

56On the formation of the Constitution as a counter-revolution see Michael J. Klar- man, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 57Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 302.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 103 another, but in the 1780s, middling people in the states were certainly emerging in increasing numbers to challenge the authority of the existing “aristocracy,” the term they shrewdly applied to the established elites. James Madison and other so- called aristocrats did not dismiss these democratic challengers as “superficial.” Indeed, they sensed what was happening socially and became deeply alarmed by the extent to which new middling men—parochial, illiberal, narrow-minded men—were using their popular arts to take over the state legislatures and pass a multitude of mutable and unjust laws that were disrupt- ing the social order and oppressing minorities. These “vices of the political system of the United States,” as Madison called them, were bringing majority rule and republican government into disrespect. Madison and other like-minded aristocrats did not want to move the country toward monarchy, as some suggested, but instead he and his colleagues sought to save the Revolution by creating a republican remedy for republican ills. By the mid-1780s nearly the entire political nation was prepared to add some amendments to the Articles of Confed- eration, especially the powers to tax and regulate trade. In effect, Madison and his colleagues hijacked this effort to reform the Articles and used it to create a new powerful central government that few who wanted changes in the Articles ever expected. The Federalists, the supporters of the new Consti- tution, hoped that the new national government would temper and control the emerging middling democrats who were behav- ing so viciously and unjustly in the state legislatures. Paper money became a manifestation, a symbol, of these rising entrepreneurial-minded middling sorts. The states’ excessive issuing of paper money in the 1780s has often been mistakenly dismissed by neo-Progressive historians as simply a device to protect beleaguered debtors. But we need to ask why so many Americans were borrowing so much money and taking on so much debt. It was not just to pay their taxes. Many people were borrowing money to invest in land, livestock, and other capital goods. Indeed, paper money in the early nineteenth century became the dominant mechanism by which middling

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 104 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY people, especially in the North, came to dominate both the economy and the society. The Constitution was designed in part to prevent the excessive issuing of paper money by the states, which was one of the principal vices Madison and others complained about in the 1780s. In his Virginia Plan Madison had proposed granting Congress a veto or a negative over all state legislation as the best means of curbing vicious law-making by the states. But the Convention regarded his proposal as too impractical and transformed it into Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution, which prohibited the states from doing certain things, including the printing of paper money. Without paper money, however, the economy of the early republic would have been stifled. Consequently, the states got around this prohibition by chartering banks, hundreds of them, that printed the millions of dollars of paper money that middling people wanted and needed. This profusion of money was not just a means of relieving debts; it became the capital that fueled the extraordinary expansion of the middle-class economy of the early Republic. Tiny Rhode Island had been notorious as a colony in its excessive printing of paper money, and now as a state it contin- ued its infamous ways by chartering an extraordinary number of banks that flooded the Northeast with paper money. By 1819 there were thirty-three banks in the state. As Pease’s Gazetteer of 1819 pointed out, “the amount of banking capital here [in Rhode Island] is much greater, in proportion of population, than in any other state.” And those banks were scattered all over the state, even in agricultural districts, the only state in the Union, said the Gazetteer, to try this “experiment, as to the utility of the general distribution of banks.”58 In the process of creating those many banks, the little state of Rhode Island

58John C. Pease and John M. Niles, A Gazetteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island (Hartford, 1819), 314–15. (I owe this citation to Patrick T. Conley.) Pe- ter J. Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island, 1790–1860 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1963). On banking in Rhode Island, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “The Structure of Early Banks in Southeastern New England: Some Social and Economic Implications,” Business and Economic History, 13 (1984), 171–84.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 105 became in the course of the nineteenth century an economic powerhouse, with five of its manufacturing firms eventually coming to dominate not just the United States but the world.59 Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and most other leading patriot gentry railed at all these banks and all this paper money that they believed was corrupting the society with little or no appreciation of the important role it was playing in the new middle-class economy. In other words, the Revolution that began as a colonial rebellion triggered by British actions upon an ideologically primed society eventually unleashed momentous social forces that brought about a middle-class revolution, particularly in the North. Although much of the political leadership may have remained largely in the hands of the aristocracy or would-be aristocracy, the data for the makeup of the state legislatures compiled by Jackson Turner Main shows that a good deal of democratization in politics was taking place with a rapid increase in the numbers of politicians resembling the likes of William Findley, Mathew Lyon, and Jedediah Peck.60 Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant leader of the Federalists with his noble dreams of glory for America and for himself, was not wrong when he declared in 1802 “that this American world was not meant for me.”61 From the 1780s on those who thought of themselves as aristocrats were always on the de- fensive as the unleashed democracy and defiance of authority that Bailyn spoke about spread widely throughout the society, but especially in the North and West. The so-called Jacksonian

59By the 1890s Rhode Island dominated manufacturing in textiles, steam engines, baking powder, jewelry, silver, and small tools. Five factories—the Corliss Steam En- gine Co., Nicholson File Co., Gorham Manufacturing Co., American Screw Co., and Brown and Sharp Manufacturing Co.—were the largest of their kind in the world. 60Jackson Turner Main, “Government by the People: The American Revolution and the Democratization of the Legislatures,” WMQ, 23 (1966): 391–407, and Main, The Upper House in Revolutionary America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). 61Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, February 29, 1802, Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E, Cooke, eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton 25 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1987): 544.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 106 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY revolution of the 1820s and 30s was a consequence, not the cause, of these social changes brought about by the Revolution. As the society changed, the culture was transformed. How- ever genteel the northern political leaders were, they had to restrain their aristocratic tendencies and show a heightened re- spect for common people and for evangelical religion. The remarkable growth of the Baptists and Methodists in the decades following the Revolution was another indicator of the middling social forces released by the Revolution. With his description of Sunday parlors, Richard Bushman in his Refinement of Amer- ica has captured some aspects of this middle-class revolution, but it is largely a story yet to be told. Although some historians are still fighting the old historiographical battle between ideas and interests, I believe a much more serious problem has come to divide Bailyn’s work from his critics—the basic role of historians in the society. Bailyn believes that historians have an obligation to recover the past as accurately as possible, and that in itself will meet the needs of the present. Many of the recent Neo-Progressive historians do not share that belief. They want a history that is more an overt instrument of reform than simply recovering an accurate past. The present-day issues of race, class, and gender demand that history be mobilized to meet contemporary progressive needs. Perhaps American history-writing has always been un- usually instrumental—certainly British observers have thought so—but it certainly seems to have become more blatantly so at present.62 One historian has called for “a critical, socially engaged his- toriography” of the Revolution. “What is needed now,” he said,

62The instrumental character of American history-writing can be traced back to the “new history” of James Harvey Robinson at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Robinson and others criticized their predecessors for overemphasizing the past at the expense of the present. What he and his colleagues wanted was a new history that met the needs of the present, a not unworthy aim but one that can be easily abused. See James Harvey Robinson, The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Histor- ical Outlook (New York: Macmillan, 1922); and James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History, 2 vols. (New York: Ginn & Co., 1907), 1:1–3. Both Isaiah Berlin and J.R. Pole at different times commented on the unusual instrumental character of American history-writing.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 107 “is a new form of presentism that blocks false identification with the past but still disrupts the security of the present.”63 Another historian actually described his role as “a critic of culture.” Instead of seeking to recover the past as accurately as possible, he admitted he was trying “to illuminate conditions of the present by casting a harsh light on previous experience.”64 No wonder Bailyn came to believe that Neo-Progressive interpretations like these were essentially unhistorical. They tended to violate the historian’s central concern for the authenticity of the past, and they bred anachronism—what Marc Bloch called “the most unpardonable of sins” that historians can commit.65 By contrast, Bailyn is an out-and-out contextualist, someone who is acutely sensitive to the differentness of the past and who is determined to recover that different past as accurately as possible.66 He said that Ideological Origins “emerged from a deeply contextualist approach to history.” He had immersed himself “in the detailed circumstances of a distant era” and had sought “to understand that world not as it anticipated the fu- ture but as it was experienced by those who lived in it.”67 Of course, for many of his critics being a contextualist historian is itself a political stance, somehow justifying the rightness of the Revolution and America. Some present-minded historians have actually criticized Bai- lyn’s book for being too contextualist. In Ideological Origins, wrote one critic, a former student no less, “the Revolution appears as an episode essentially of the eighteenth century, devoid

63Michael Meranze, “Even the Dead Will Not Be Safe: An Ethics of Early American History,” WMQ 50 (1993): 372. 64Daniel k. Richter, “Whose Indian History?” WMQ 50 (1993): 388. 65Bloch, quoted in Namier, “The Profession of Historian,” Personalities and Power, 11. 66Bernard Bailyn, “Context in History,” in his Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (New York: Knopf, 2015), 18–52. Bailyn approach to the past resembles Philip Roth’s approach in his novel The Plot Against America (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2004). Roth said that he wrote his book “not so as to illuminate the present through the past but to illuminate the past through the past.” New York Times, February 20, 2017. 67Bailyn, Ideological Origins, v.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 108 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of subsequent significance.”68 While this was scarcely an accurate statement (try telling Daniel Ellsberg that Bailyn’s book has had no subsequent significance), it does reveal the strange unhistorical present-mindedness of some recent historians who have come to see history-writing as engaging in present-day politics by other means. Right now, the Revolution, like our progressive politics, has become all about race, gender, and identity. “Those marginalized by former histories,” writes Alan Taylor, in an introduction to some recent scholarship, “now assume centrality as our stories increasingly include Native peoples, the enslaved, women, the poor, Hispanics, and the French as key actors.”69 No doubt it is time for these stories to be told, but if these formerly marginalized people become the key actors, as they do in Tay- lor’s recent narrative history of the Revolution, the account is bound to emphasize the Revolution’s dark and sordid side with little room for any other side. White male supremacy and the “genocidal” treatment of the Native peoples necessarily dominate his story. In the end, Taylor does see a revolution that was more transformative than other recent scholars seem willing to admit; he concedes that middling white men emerged victorious from the upheaval, but their victory had to come at the expense of others. “By serving common white men,” Taylor concludes, “the revolution often worked against blacks, Indians, and women.”70 Even scholars sympathetic to this viewpoint realize that the picture of the Revolution presented by academic historians

68Michael Zuckerman, “Fiction and Fission: Twentieth-Century Writing on the Founding Fathers,” in Religion and Ideology and Nationalism in Europe and America: Essays Presented in Honor of Yehoshua Arieli, eds. H. Ben Israel, et al., (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman Shazar Center, 1986), 241. 69Alan Taylor, “Introduction: Expand or Die: The Revolution’s New Empire,” WMQ 74 (2017): 620. Taylor’s article and Serena R. Zabin, “Conclusion: Writing To and From the Revolution,” were simultaneously published in the William and Mary Quarterly and in the Journal of the Early Republic, 37 (2017): 771–783 bookended eight articles, four in each journal, on aspects of the Revolution, as part of a collaborative effort by the two journals to look at the Revolutionary era from both sides, both as the culmination of colonial history and as the foundation of the early Republic. 70Alan Taylor, The American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 265, 356.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00661 by guest on 02 October 2021 REASSESSING BAILYN’S IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS 109 has become “bleak.” Most present-day scholars, writes Serena R. Zabin, believe that “the American Revolution, if it made any difference at all, intensified and accelerated trends toward racial chattel slavery, westward expansion, and state power, all in order to solidify elite control over land and enslaved people.” For her at least, these dark and sordid scholarly interpretations of the Revolution, in which “slavery, dispossession, and power are intrinsic,” present something of a problem. They “reveal an enormous gap between the popular narrative of democracy’s heroic birth and the scholarly account of an imperialist and racist nation’s origins.” How to bridge “this chasm between these positive (popular) and negative (scholarly) stories of the American Revolution” remains a challenge that few academics have been willing to take on. Since “the public, and even some scholars, have a hunger to know also the hopeful if often unful- filled potential of our origins,” Zabin believes that her scholarly colleagues ought to try to find a way forward “to satisfy that hunger so as not to leave it to journalists and television.”71 Alas, if scholars don’t attempt to meet that challenge, they will find more and more non-academic historians fulfilling the popular hunger for impartial and balanced histories of the nation’s origins, all the while their own politicized monographs lie moldering in university libraries read, if they are read at all, only by other scholars.72

71Zabin, “Conclusion: Writing To and From the Revolution,” 754–55. 72On the significance of the gap between academic and popular history-writing, see Gordon S. Wood, “Remarks on Receiving the John F. Kennedy Medal,” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 1–5.

Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Pro- fessor of History Emeritus of Brown University.

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