Friday, July 17, 2015

Common Sense, Part IX: Facts and Figures, contd.

Having established, to his own satisfaction, the military feasibility of a challenge by the united colonies to the British Royal Navy and its various positive side-effects, not the least of which was a significant degree of economic stimulation, Paine thereafter considered in section four of Common Sense some of the other issues facing the Patriot cause that an unambiguous declaration of independence could potentially address. As before, the issues that he sought to address and the arguments he deployed were of a highly utilitarian nature. Rather than speak to theoretical violations of abstract philosophical principles, as did some of his contemporaries, Paine seemed intent on keeping the focus of his assertions sufficiently narrowed so as to apply to the everyday experiences of the average American colonist and the kind of knowledge they were likely to have acquired. The first of such arguments I’d like to draw attention to is covered in paragraph twenty-three, and concerns some of the lingering deficiencies of contemporary colonial government.

  Though he addressed Common Sense to the general population of all of the Thirteen Colonies then participating in the Continental Congress, Paine was himself a citizen of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, seat of colonial government, was his home, and he was most intimately familiar with that colony’s multi-faceted, multi-denominational politics. It should thus come as no surprise that, though he surely intended his comments be taken as a general caution to those living in any one of the thirteen, the particular example he cited was of Pennsylvanian origins. Specifically, he referenced a vote that had been held previous to the publication of Common Sense in the Provincial Assembly concerning the re-commissioning of the Philadelphia Associators. Organized previously in the 1740s and 1750s, the Associators were a voluntary militia force whose existence was first recommended by Benjamin Franklin, and whose purpose was to see to the defence of the city of Philadelphia in times of crisis. At the time the vote on their reactivation took place, Paine lamented, only twenty-eight members of the Assembly were present. Without knowing the total number elected it’s difficult to say how small a percentage of the whole this represented. That Paine found twenty-eight to be particularly distressing, though a vote still took place, would seem to indicate that this number represented a quorum, if only just.

Of those delegates in attendance, Paine continued, the eight representing Bucks County voted against the measure. Presumably it was not the case, based on how he phrased the following scenario, but in the event that a further seven delegates from Chester County voted against the Associators’ petition it would have been defeated by a count of fifteen to thirteen. In that case, Paine bemoaned, the fate of the city of Philadelphia, if not the fate of Pennsylvania itself, would have rested firmly in the hands of only two of counties. This is an example of what contemporary political philosophers referred to as the “tyranny of the majority.” Though twenty-eight delegates may have constituted a legal quorum, and though fifteen of those twenty-eight indeed constituted a majority, the democratic legitimacy of allowing fifty-one percent of the population to dictate to the remaining forty-nine was, and remains, highly questionable. The problem that faced Pennsylvania, Pain declared, was that there were a small number of voters, and a small and unequal number of representatives. Without a wider franchise the choice of representatives would remain in the hands of only a fraction of the overall population, effectively denying representation to certain economic and social sectors of colonial society. Without a larger overall number of representatives thin majorities were more likely to carry the day. In a group of ten, for example, a fifty-one percent (6-4) majority was more likely than in a group of fifty or one hundred. And so long as the number of representatives per county was uneven certain groups, say the delegates from Bucks County, could reliably dominate the legislative process at the expense of small county delegations. This, Paine argued, was something that an independent Pennsylvania, freed from seeking approval from either an absentee proprietor or a distant Board of Trade, could attempt to remedy though a more thoughtful apportionment of representatives.

Without knowing whether or not the kinds of occurrences that Paine described in paragraph twenty-three of section four of Common Sense were particularly common in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania, or if so for how long, a few basic facts and comments might help illuminate his point. Pennsylvania, as of 1775/76, consisted of only five counties: Bucks, Chester, Philadelphia, Montgomery and Northumberland. Bucks and Chester were the easternmost and southernmost counties, respectively, with Philadelphia occupying the banks of the Delaware River, Northumberland composing the western frontier, and Montgomery lying in between. Under the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Paine would have found the prospect of only two of five constituencies effectively governing for the whole (by 1790 some 400,000) somewhat troubling. It’s also worth noting that the charter of Pennsylvania in 1776, essentially a constitution known as the Frame of Government, had been last modified in 1701. It had remained relatively static during the intervening seven decades, and by the eve of the Revolution perhaps no longer represented the actual distribution of social and economic forces in the colony. Indeed, save for Georgia, which was established in 1732 and became a Crown Colony in 1755, none of the charters of any of the Thirteen Colonies had been substantially modified or amended after the 1710s. Though Paine spoke from specific experience with the political affairs of Pennsylvania, the flaws he observed doubtless affected more than just that colony. The colonial charters were notoriously hard to amend, most of them physically residing in Britain, and tended to require approval from the Crown before they could be changed or replaced. Without independence, Paine suggested, democratic imbalances like that which nearly torpedoed the adoption of a much-needed Philadelphia militia would remain largely intractable.

Though it may be impossible to say exactly how politically engaged the majority of Americans were in the 1770s, I think it speaks volumes that in a population of approximately 2.5 million Paine’s Common Sense sold something on the order of 500,000 copies and went through twenty-five editions in the first year of its publication. This made it far and away the most successful American work ever published. Clearly this would not have been the case had the pamphlet remained in the hands of an elite audience only. It would thus seem fair to conclude that Paine’s commentaries on, among other things, the flaws inherent in the political status quo, found a wide and receptive readership. It’s also important to recall that, though the majority of the overall population of the Thirteen Colonies were not entitled to vote in legislative elections, they were by no means stupid or uninformed. If they had been, the attempt at merging the governments of several northern colonies in the 1680s into the Boston-governed Dominion of New England would have succeeded. As it was, popular resentment boiled over into revolts in Massachusetts and New York that led to the disintegration of the Dominion and the reassertion of individual colonial charter government. The revolt in New York was led by a German-American merchant named Jacob Leisler; the Boston rebellion was centred on citizen militias whose core memberships were solidly middling. I don’t doubt that Paine was aware of these facts, just as he was of the numerous popular protests that had occurred in response to the Stamp Act and the Townsend Duties and the various demonstrations against the Tea Act, the most famous of which took place in Boston in 1773.

Americans had proven themselves by 1776 to be a politically-minded and politically-active people. The success of Common Sense, if not the fate of the Revolution itself, depended on it. Doubtless aware of these basic truths, Thomas Paine sought to speak through said pamphlet to the political consciousness of his fellow colonists. What better way to accomplish this than by shining a spotlight, not just on the larger questions of hereditary rule, international trade, or economic growth, but on the political grievances which most affected their everyday lives? Independence, he argued, could potentially provide solutions to a great many ills facing the Thirteen Colonies and their citizens in the long run. Attempting to prevent economic stagnation, for instance, was doubtless important to colonial Americans, particularly those engaged in commercial pursuits. But it was mainly a long-term goal whose fruits would not become apparent for some time, if at all. Allowing for much-needed alterations to the local political status quo, however, by altering the balance and composition of the legislative assemblies that did most of the day-to-day lawmaking that affected how people lived their lives no doubt smacked of a certain immediacy. This, I'm sure, was Paine’s intent; hit them where they live, as it were. By pointing to some of issues plaguing the government of his adopted home in Pennsylvania Paine helped demonstrate his own practical political awareness – no mere theorist, he – at the same time he demonstrated yet again how independence might positively affect the basic existence of colonial Americans.

No comments:

Post a Comment