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Rethinking Royal Power and the American Revolution Tulsa Law Review Volume 51 Issue 2 Spring 2016 Rethinking Royal Power and the American Revolution Clement Fatovic Florida International University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/tlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Clement Fatovic, Rethinking Royal Power and the American Revolution, 51 Tulsa L. Rev. 225 (2016). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/tlr/vol51/iss2/2 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by TU Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tulsa Law Review by an authorized editor of TU Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Fatovic: Rethinking Royal Power and the American Revolution FATOVIC_3.7.16.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 3/7/16 10:57 PM RETHINKING ROYAL POWER AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Clement Fatovic* ERIC NELSON, THE ROYALIST REVOLUTION: MONARCHY AND THE AMERICAN FOUNDING (HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2014). PP. 400. HARDCOVER $ 29.95. Thanks in large part to the litany of grievances directed against King George III in the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution has long been identified with hostility to monarchical power. Despite significant differences between rival schools of interpretation, such as Lockean liberal1 and republican revisionist accounts2 that have tended to dominate studies of political thought in this period, there has been general agreement that the revolutionaries were deeply suspicious of executive power. The Roy- alist Revolution, an ambitious and provocative new book by Harvard political theorist Eric Nelson, poses a formidable challenge to standard historiographic depictions of the patriots as Whigs and republicans inimical to royal power. Far from being a revolt against the Crown, Nelson contends, the American Revolution “was, indeed, a rebellion in favor of royal power.”3 In contrast to the seventeenth-century English parliamentari- ans and Whigs who supposedly inspired and informed American ideas on resistance, Nelson argues that a group of leading patriots, including Benjamin Franklin, John Ad- ams, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Iredell, looked to the king—and more specifically to the revival of long-obsolete royal prerogatives—for the protection of * Associate Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University. 1. See, e.g., JOYCE APPLEBY, Liberalism and the American Revolution, in LIBERALISM AND REPUBLICANISM IN THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION 140 (1992); CARL BECKER, THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS (1958); LOUIS HARTZ, THE LIBERAL TRADITION IN AMERICA (1991); PAULINE MAIER, FROM RESISTANCE TO REVOLUTION: COLONIAL RADICALS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN OPPOSITION TO BRITAIN, 1765-1776 (1972). 2. See, e.g., LANCE BANNING, THE JEFFERSONIAN PERSUASION: EVOLUTION OF A PARTY IDEOLOGY (1978); J. G. A. POCOCK, Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought, in POLITICS, LANGUAGE, AND TIME: ESSAYS ON POLITICAL THOUGHT AND HISTORY 80 (1989); J. G. A. POCOCK, THE MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT: FLORENTINE POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE ATLANTIC REPUBLICAN TRADITION (1975); Robert E. Shalhope, Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography, 29 WM. & MARY Q. 49 (1972); Gordon S. WOOD, THE CREATION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 1776-1787 (1969). 3. ERIC NELSON, THE ROYALIST REVOLUTION: MONARCHY AND THE AMERICAN FOUNDING 2 (2014) (emphasis added). 225 Published by TU Law Digital Commons, 2015 1 Tulsa Law Review, Vol. 51 [2015], Iss. 2, Art. 2 FATOVIC_3.7.16.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 3/7/16 10:57 PM 226 TULSA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 51:225 liberties threatened by an overbearing and intrusive Parliament. In order to buttress their claims against the legitimacy of parliamentary interference in the colonies, “a great many [patriots] gravitated toward the political and constitutional theory of . the reviled Stu- art monarchs of the seventeenth century.”4 Although this ideological strand of the Amer- ican Revolution suffered a setback after the break with England, Nelson argues, the “neo-Stuart” conception of royal power enjoyed a resurgence with profound conse- quences for the development of the American presidency. Thus, the expansive powers granted to the president mark the Constitution not as a betrayal of the Revolution, as so many have claimed, but as its consummation. If Nelson is right about the role royalist conceptions of prerogative played in shaping the powers of the presidency, The Royalist Revolution would call for a wholesale rethinking of the U.S. Constitution. In many respects an exemplar of the Cambridge School approach to the study of political thought,5 the meticulously researched Royalist Revolution surveys an extensive range of materials produced on both sides of the Atlantic, including numerous pamphlets and speeches that have been largely neglected in scholarship on the American Revolu- tion. Nelson deftly navigates the reader through various twists and turns in arguments over the status of the colonies, the prerogatives of the king, the basis of representation, and the powers of the presidency. Like much of the republican revisionist scholarship that Nelson challenges, his book treats the ideas articulated in critical political and con- stitutional debates as sincere expressions of conviction rather than instrumental rationali- zations of either crude interest or otherwise predetermined positions. The underlying psychological assumption that the principal actors in the revolutionary drama were prin- cipled thinkers seeking to achieve theoretical coherence and consistency is as integral to Nelson’s case for Patriot Royalism as any specific historical claim that is advanced. If, in the years leading up to Independence, leading patriots modified their ideas (as opposed to their core convictions), it was not because they pursued whatever discursive strategies were most likely to be effective at any given moment, but because they were genuinely moved by what Jürgen Habermas would call the “unforced force of the better argu- ment.”6 As Nelson puts it, “[d]ebates” change what people think and, as a result, they of- ten change what people want.”7 Accordingly, the focus of The Royalist Revolution is on debates that took place in the rarefied air of constitutional theory, rather than the muck of material interest or the events that form the backdrop for and trigger theoretical reflec- tion.8 4. Id. at 3. 5. As Nelson notes in his Acknowledgments, he attended Cambridge University to study with its leading intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, to whom he warmly dedicates his book. Id. at 377. 6. See, e.g., JÜRGEN HABERMAS, BETWEEN FACTS AND NORMS: CONTRIBUTIONS TO A DISCOURSE THEORY OF LAW AND DEMOCRACY 306 (1992). Nelson associates his position on this point with Bernard Bai- lyn, Gordon Wood, and other scholars who have championed “ideological” or “idealist” explanations of revo- lutionary thought. Id. at 249 n.122. 7. Id. at 26. 8. The persuasiveness of Nelson’s claims about the royalism of certain patriots will depend to a large ex- tent on whether or not the reader accepts his assumptions about the motivations and behavior of political actors. In anticipation of objections to his interpretation of patriot utterances on royal power, he contends, “We do not regard our principles or arguments as instrumental rationalizations for what we pre-theoretically want. It seems to us that our beliefs very frequently determine what we want, not the other way around.” NELSON, supra note https://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/tlr/vol51/iss2/2 2 Fatovic: Rethinking Royal Power and the American Revolution FATOVIC_3.7.16.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 3/7/16 10:57 PM 2016] RETHINKING ROYAL POWER 227 I. THE NEO-STUART REJECTION OF PARLIAMENTARY AUTHORITY Nelson demonstrates that Patriot Royalism did not spring forth fully-grown but in- stead gradually took shape as the shortcomings of different arguments became apparent in the course of debates over the authority of Parliament to legislate for the colonies. Fol- lowing the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, many Americans disputed Parliament’s jurisdiction over the colonies by developing a series of distinctions that would ultimately prove untenable. First, they drew a distinction between legislation for the purpose of reg- ulating North Atlantic trade (which they generally considered to be valid) and taxation for the purpose of raising revenue (which they denied as illegitimate).9 Patriots such as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania later developed another distinction between “duties de- signed to regulate commerce and those designed to raise revenue.”10 According to this line of thinking, Parliament did have the authority to regulate imperial commerce, but jurisdiction over internal affairs (including taxation) rested exclusively with colonial as- semblies.11 But this distinction also proved unsustainable.12 When Parliament passed the Townshend Revenue Act, which imposed tariffs on colonial imports instead of resorting to direct taxes (as was the case under the repealed Stamp Act), the colonists realized that it was impossible to determine the real intent behind parliamentary acts (i.e., to regulate commerce or to raise revenue),13 making it impossible to tell valid from invalid exercises of parliamentary authority. In order to escape further parliamentary interference in colo- nial matters, Nelson maintains that Benjamin Franklin and others finally settled on a con-
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