Friday, October 30, 2015

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part IX: Exaggerations

Having hopefully set in the minds of my readers a somewhat more definite sense of how Benjamin Franklin viewed the various governors that his fellow colonists had been saddled with, in terms of the words he used to describe them, it remains to determine, I think, whether his rather jaundiced view was an accurate one. Granted, this is not a question that absolutely needs to be answered. Whether Franklin was correct in his assessment or not weighs very little on whether he believed he was right, or whether his fellow colonists shared his sentiments. That being said, I confess myself curious. Was there a basis to Franklin’s characterization in Rules? Where the colonial governors, as a group, as disreputable as he made them out, or was he exaggerating the degree of their deficiencies so as to more forcefully make his desired point? While I don’t suppose even a brief survey of the careers and character of all thirteen appointed governors as of 1773 is something either of us wants to go through (my having to write it or your having to read it), perhaps a representative sample would suffice. To that end let’s lay aside the Crown-appointed governors of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, three of the most populous colonies under direct royal control, and briefly delve into their lives and livelihoods as of 1773.

Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780) was appointed to govern the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1771 and remained in office until 1774. Far from an aristocrat or a court favorite, Hutchinson was a Boston native who spent most of his life in public service with various branches of the colonial government, and who took special pride in exploring and preserving the history of his beloved Massachusetts. In spite of his avowed love of country, however, his politics did not always endear him to his fellow citizens. In the 1730s his career suffered as a result of his opposition to the use of bills of credit in the colony whose value he considered unstable. Because said bills were favored by certain populist elements in the colony Hutchinson subsequently lost his position as a Selectman for the city of Boston in the election of 1739. Similarly, following the death of his wife Margaret in 1754, he became involved in a humanitarian effort to support Acadian refugees (former inhabitants of French colonial possessions in the Canadian Maritimes) who had been expelled from their homes in Nova Scotia. Because the Acadians were Roman Catholics, Hutchinson lost further favor with the mainly-Protestant inhabitants of his home province. His reputation continued to decline among more radical sectors of the colonial population following his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor in 1758, his ascension to the office of Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court (in spite of possessing no legal training) in the early 1760s, and his lukewarm public position concerning the passages of the Sugar Act (1763) and Stamp Act (1765). Though Hutchinson was in fact opposed to the imposition of either tax, and sent written warnings to authorities in London not to proceed, he was nevertheless pegged as a closet supporter of the Acts because his public comments were restrained by a sense of propriety concerning his position and feelings of loyalty to the British government.

Anger towards the Lieutenant-Governor spiked after his brother-in-law Andrew Oliver was appointed “stamp master” for Massachusetts, charged with enforcing the tax on stamped paper goods, in 1765. Though by all accounts Hutchinson had no say in the selection his opponents charged him with nepotism, and on the evening of August, 26th a belligerent crowd descended on his mansion and proceeded to ransack the lot. Subsequent events, including the stationing of British troops in Boston in 1767 and the resulting Boston Massacre in 1770, drove a deeper wedge between the colonial population and the man who had been their acting-governor since 1769. Upon his formal appointment to the post of governor in 1771 he announced that, commensurate with instructions from London, the colonial legislature was to be relocated from Boston to Cambridge (away from the influence of the former city’s radicals). This met with yet another firestorm of criticism, which over the course of 1772 transitioned into a lengthy and vociferous written debate between Hutchinson and the Massachusetts General Court over the legitimacy of his authority, the limits of parliamentary power over the colonies, and the nature of taxation. As authorities in contemporary Britain rightly observed, this conflict contributed greatly to increasing the distrust felt by the colonial population towards their governor, and likely contributed to the radicalization of more than a few moderate voices. 

Virginia, meanwhile, was governed between 1771 and 1775 by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (1730-1809). Born in Tymouth, Scotland, Murray took part in the ill-fated Jacobite uprising of 1745 at the age of 15, was subsequently put under house arrest along with the rest of his family for their disloyalty to the Crown (the Murray’s having supported the pretender to the throne Charles Francis Stuart), joined the British Army in 1750, and inherited his father’s earldom in 1756. In 1770 Murray was appointed governor of the Province of New York and in 1771 left that post to become governor of the Province of Virginia. In spite of his brief tenure in this second office Lord Dunmore accomplished a great deal in only a few short years to disabuse the colonists under his authority of any lingering affection for Britain and its ministers. In an act which might have otherwise ingratiated him to the colonists, he made war on the Shawnee inhabitants of the Ohio Valley in an attempt to shore up Virginia’s claims there. Because he had previously attempted to govern while ignoring the elected House of Burgesses (the lower house of the colonial legislature), however, Dunmore was accused of colluding with the Shawnee to engineer a war as a means of depleting the colonial militia and preventing a potential rebellion. When he was finally forced to convene the Burgesses in 1773 as a means of securing the necessary tax revenue to fund the war in Ohio, the assembled delegates instead set about forming a committee of correspondence so as to communicate their displeasure concerning the enforcement of the Townshend Acts to the appropriate authorities in Britain. Dunmore immediately postponed the Assembly, whose members proceeded to convene at the nearby Raleigh Tavern and discuss their various grievances concerning taxation, perceived corruption, and Britain’s apparent lack of interest in the concerns of its North American citizens. The House of Burgesses were subsequently dissolved by Dunmore upon a second unsuccessful reconvention in mid-1774.

The governor of the Province of New York in 1773 was a British former soldier named William Tryon (1729-1788) who had previously served as governor of the Province of North Carolina between 1765 and 1771. Born on the Norbury Park, Surrey estate of his father Charles Tryon, William purchased a commission as a lieutenant in the 1st Regiment of Foot at age 22, and served in France during the Seven Years War (during which time he was wounded). In 1757 he married the daughter of the East India Company’s governor of Bombay, Margaret Wake, and received an accompanying dowry of £30,000 (the equivalent of £5,400,000 in 2013). Thanks to his abundant family connections Tryon was able to secure an appointment to the post of Lieutenant-Governor of North Carolina in 1764, and upon the death of incumbent governor Arthur Dobbs succeeded to the vacated office in 1765. Though personally opposed to the passage of the Stamp Act, Tryon prevented the colonial legislature from meeting between May, 1765 and November, 1766 so that the assembled delegates could not pass any resolutions expressing their opposition to the same. He further inflamed colonial opinion in late 1766 and early 1767 when he demanded at least double the £5000 authorized by the colonial assembly for the construction of a new governor’s mansion. Tryon claimed that even a modest structure would require at least £10,000, personally hired an architect to oversee the project, and sent to Philadelphia for workers because he claimed South Carolina artisans lacked the expertise to construct the dwelling he envisioned. Though Tryon was able to convince the provincial assembly to agree to an increased construction budget the taxes that had to be subsequently raised further tarnished his reputation in the eyes of North Carolinians. Consequently the new governor’s mansion, located in the town of New Bern, became sardonically known upon its completion in 1770 as “Tryon Palace.”

The taxes raised to fund the construction of Tryon’s Palace, along with the notoriously corrupt practices of the county officials responsible for their collection, sparked the formation of a protest movement known to history as the Regulators. Intent on purging the colonial government of corrupt practices (aimed at wealthy urbanites) and reduce the tax burden on North Carolina’s least wealthy inhabitants (aimed at poor rural dwellers), the Regulators gained widespread support in what were then the western counties of Orange, Anson and Granville. Acts of minor mischief by Regulators gave way to vandalism of government property, which gave way to organized resistance to colonial tax collectors and surveyors. This campaign culminated in Governor Tryon’s call for the colonial militia to quell the nascent uprising before it escalated further, which they did in 1771 at the Battle of Alamance. Thereafter, known supporters of the failed campaign were made to swear loyalty oaths, the property of active Regulators was seized and destroyed, further taxes were levied to pay for the militia’s salaries, and six of the uprising’s leaders were tried, convicted of treason, and hanged. Tryon departed North Carolina later in 1771 to take up the post of governor of New York, whereupon he promptly convinced the provincial assembly there to appropriate funds for the quartering of British troops, the establishment of a militia, and rebuilding of the fortifications surrounding New York City. In 1772 Tryon came out in favor of the Tea Act, though his plans to comply with its provisions were ultimately foiled by a powerful and widespread public sentiment to the contrary.

Taking these three men, their lives, and their careers as a yardstick, it would seem that the  veiled denunciation Franklin offered in Rules of the quality of British America’s colonial governor’s represent something on an exaggeration. Tryon seems to at least lean in the direction of Franklin’s prodigal, pettifogging, stock-jobbing, gamester. He came from wealth, married into wealth, and seemed little concerned by the prospect of spending colonists’ money on his own lavish domicile. He wasn’t a lawyer, or a financier of any kind, but a spendthrift, perhaps. Dunmore wasn't a legal professional either, wrangling or otherwise. He and Tryon both waged war during their tenure in office – one against Natives on the frontier, the other against rebellious members of the colonial population – and suffered for trying to raise the appropriate funds. Both also attempted to silence their respective colonial assemblies in their attempts to speak out against contemporary British tax policy. Admittedly Tryon seemed willing to negotiate with his legislators, often quite successfully. Perhaps this qualified him as wrangling or pettifogging. Dunmore conversely tried to govern by cutting the House of Burgesses out of the loop altogether, an act which I'm sure Franklin disapproved of but which he failed to find an epithet to describe. Certainly neither man came away from their time in colonial governance with a reputation for sterling honesty and integrity, though this perhaps had less to do with inherent defects in their character than Franklin intimated in 1773. Rather, it would seem their respective responses to the increasingly volatile state of colonial public opinion in the 1760s and 1770s are what shaped how they were perceived by the people they attempted to govern.

Hutchinson, who you’ll notice I set aside until just now, strikes me as a somewhat exceptional, and rather tragic, case. He fits none of the molds that Franklin laid out in Rules, being neither a profligate gambler nor a financier or a legal professional of any stripe. Rather, he was a scholar, a public servant, and an amateur historian. He was also not a well-born British transplant, the youngest scion of some distinguished house or other sent to the colonies because their family was too important for the Crown to deny a request of employment. He was, as aforementioned, a native son of Massachusetts, and very proudly that. He was not, in his manner of governance, overly obsessed with minute details, though his dealings with the colonial legislature might be taken to constitute either wrangling or very brisk debate. In all I’d peg him as a dedicated, hardworking, compassionate man who cared a great deal about his country (Massachusetts, I mean) and whose greatest desire was to serve. His great sin, the unpardonable transgression for which he was lambasted by contemporary Bostonians, was that his political sensibilities were somewhat out of step with those of his fellow colonists.

Hutchinson objected in the 1730s to the use of paper currency because he felt it was unstable. This was not an inherently reprehensible position to take, though it earned him derision because it was not in keeping with the views of the progressive majority of Boston’s merchant class. He advised London against the passage of the Sugar and Stamp act, but did not think it his place as governor to publicly voice opposition to policies set by Parliament. Again, this was not an immoral or malevolent policy, but it cost Hutchinson a great deal of favor because it was at odds with contemporary public sentiment. Unlike Dunmore or Tryon, who both acted somewhat imperiously when confronted with an increasingly discontented colonial public, Hutchinson behaved in a manner he believed was commensurate with the dignity of his office and consistent with its attendant duties. Yet his conception of the British Empire and the place that Massachusetts occupied within it were ill at ease with the activist political culture that was emerging in the British American in the 1770s. For that reason he was pilloried and denounced, and in 1773 his recalled was requested by the Massachusetts colonial assembly. He departed for London a year later in order to defend himself before a meeting of the Board of Trade. He would never return to his native Massachusetts, and died in exile six years later.

As you doubtless wipe away a tear for poor Hutchinson I ask you to consider what all of this means. As I described at the end of last week’s post, many of Franklin’s fellow revolutionaries, the men with which he is most closely associated, could have been fairly described in terms as harsh as those he reserved for the governors of Britain’s North American colonies. And, in light of the above outlines of the lives and careers of three of those governors, it would seem that not all of the magistrates assigned by Britain to positions of power in said colonies were indolent wastrels, unscrupulous financiers, or the 18th-century equivalent of ambulance-chasers. Rather they were, like the Founders themselves, a varied group of men whose backgrounds and personalities could not be fairly summed up in a single adjective, save perhaps for “human.” Tryon spent a great deal of money belonging to the citizens of North Carolina on a lavish residence for himself, and Robert Morris attempted to use his knowledge of government policy in order to increase his already sizeable wealth. Yet, which was the prodigal? Which was the broken gamester? Thomas Hutchinson was in many ways a better man, by the standard that Franklin laid out in Rules, than some of the best-regarded among the Founding Fathers. Indeed, Franklin had even collaborated with the future governor during the Seven Years War on an aborted plan for uniting the various colonies under a centralized government. This man was a cause of tension between the Thirteen Colonies and the Crown? His behavior was so reprehensible as to help bring about a severing of the former from the latter?

To this I have two further points to contribute before I call this series of posts to a close.

The first, and most immediate, is in answer to Franklin’s apparent hypocrisy. How could he have accused the governors of colonial America of possessing such low character when some of the leading lights among his fellow colonists were guilty of the same? Well, it has to do again with the nature of Franklin’s chosen art. I mean, if you recall, satire. Perhaps Franklin knew that not every governor assigned to oversee affairs in the Thirteen Colonies was a completely reprehensible example of humanity. Indeed, I rather think he was aware of this. Few people as perceptive as he was, who had lived as long and shaken as many hands, could have come away from their experiences without developing a keen appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses inherent in mankind and the near-infinite variety in which they occur. For the same reason I would find it very hard to believe indeed that Franklin was not cognizant of the flaws possessed by his own friends, collaborators, and fellow revolutionaries. He had, after all, made his bones as a young printer and editorialist by poking fun at the deficiencies he perceived in the people around him, their manners, and their pretensions. Among the Founding Generation, few were more perceptive, more attuned to the quirks of human nature, or more capable of tapping into people’s desires, prejudices and sensibilities than he. To this Franklin owed his success as an editorialist, his success as a public intellectual, and his success as independent America’s first and foremost diplomat.     

That being said, Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One was not intended to be a treatise on the nuances of human behavior or the universality of human weakness. It was, again, a piece of satire. A sober and matter-of-fact assessment of the state of affairs in colonial American as of 1773 was no doubt well within Franklin’s capability to produce, but to what end? He was not a journalist. He did not seek to merely inform people. He wanted to move them, shock them, force them to consider an issue they had not previously deemed urgent. He wanted to show people how ridiculous their own behavior really was, make them self-conscious, and force them to change. He wanted people who had not considered themselves involved in the crisis then unfolding between the Thirteen Colonies and the Crown to feel compelled to choose a side. Rules was a mechanism of persuasion, an attempt to check the behavior of those in power, and exaggeration was the means by which it functioned. Informing his audience that the various governors assigned to the colonies were at best mixed bag – some rather indiscreet, others a bit too conservative for their own good, but on the whole not a bad sort – would likely not have moved anyone to sympathize with the plight of the beleaguered colonists. Calling them profligate and wasteful, however, and accusing them of mercenary financial manipulation and legalistic pomposity doubtless went a damn sight further towards grabbing and holding the attention of a reader and ultimately cultivating their sympathy and support. Call it hyperbole, sensationalism, or even outright falsification, but to Franklin it was just business.

The second, and last, point I want to make concerns a theme I've touched on already but would like very much to reiterate. In spite of how they are often portrayed in media and how they are often talked about, the Founding Fathers of the United States were human beings. They were not perfect, nor did they claim to be, and it’s extremely important to try to come to an understanding of their flaws as well as their virtues if any of what they did is to have any real meaning. There would be nothing remarkable, after all, in men who were blessed with almost supernatural intellect and wisdom guiding a series of backwater colonies towards independence. There would be very little to celebrate in men who were literally infallible sitting down to craft a constitution that has stood the test of centuries. When gods move mountains it should come as no surprise. But the Founders were not gods, as I’ve tried to point out. The Founding Fathers were not great because they were born that way. They were great because they were born men, and found ways to surmount their limitations in order to do great things. Franklin was no different. He was a moralist who became notorious for his roving eye. He greatly valued truth and reason, and yet as a satirist engaged in the most fantastic hyperbole in order to get across his desired point. He was a man, and his accomplishments shine brighter for it.     

That being said, discussing the qualities of the various colonial governors Franklin attempted to excoriate in Rules calls to mind a further admonition. The Founders were emphatically human, but so too were their opponents. As members of the Founding Generation are often portrayed or spoken of as heroes, saints or demigods, the British colonial officials, government ministers, and Loyalists who opposed them are generally viewed in popular imagination as unsympathetic, thoughtless, or greedy. They are the villains in the story of America’s founding, stock figures who cackle and drink tea and try to stamp out freedom because it offends their delicate sensibilities. But they were men, too. They were complex individuals, possessing flaws and virtues in equal measure, and it’s as important to understand their thoughts and motivations as those of the Founders themselves. William Tryon may well have been something of a spendthrift, but he had also been a soldier who risked his life in service to his country. The Earl of Dunmore attempted to disregard the will of the elected representatives of Virginia, yet in his youth he took up arms against what he felt was a false and tyrannical monarch. Thomas Hutchinson defended the traditional prerogatives of the British Crown and stood in steadfast opposition to what he viewed as the chaos of populism, though he was a Massachusetts man to the core and sought to serve his country all his life. These men, and so many like them, worked, and struggled, and fought for what they believed in. That we judge them now to have been on the “wrong side of history” should in no way stop us from attempting to develop a nuanced understanding of who they were, where they came from, and why they did what they did. Because the American Revolution was not a battle between good and evil, but a clash between differing interpretations of contemporary politics, diplomacy, commerce, and philosophy. We may each of us hold our opinion of who was right and who was wrong, but even to those we disagree with we owe the courtesy of trying to grasp them for all that they were and all that they stood for. 

That’s all I have to say about that.

For now.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part VIII: Epithets

          Even greater insight into the specific nature of Franklin’s views on the behaviour of British authorities towards the Thirteen Colonies can be found in step five of Rules. Therein Franklin, once again in the guise of offering advice, gave comment as to the quality of the governors that had been appointed to oversee the various colonies. The particular passage I'm thinking of is located at the end of the paragraph, and will be excerpted here in full because it is quite honestly too delicious to attempt to dismember. To his theoretical British ministers Franklin wrote,

If you can find Prodigals whoa have ruined their Fortunes, broken Gamesters or Stock-Jobbers, these may do well as Governors; for they will be rapacious, and provoke the People by their Extortions. Wrangling Proctors and pettyfogging Lawyers too are not amiss, for they will be for ever disputing and quarrelling with their little Parliaments, if withal they should be ignorant, wrong-headed and insolent, so much the better.

There is a great deal to unpack in this statement, and consequently a great deal to be learned about Franklin’s particular state of mind in 1773. To begin, let’s look at the terms he used to describe the ideal candidates for colonial governorship.

          To call someone a prodigal in the late-18th century was to accuse them of being a spendthrift – wastefully, even destructively, extravagant far beyond their means – while the term gamester was generally used to describe an inveterate gambler. In the Anglo-American context both terms were connected to the persona of the rake, a term applied to a type of mainly aristocratic womaniser, drunkard, gambler, and profligate that emerged during the Restoration Era (1660-1688) in Britain. Partly a reaction to the end of the morally rigid era of Puritan dominance that followed the English Civil War, the rake stereotype was so popular during its time that it developed into a stock figure in Restoration Era theatrical comedy. Following the Glorious Revolution, however, the subtext of the rake personality became far more squalid. From rugged manliness and comic non-conformity, the rake degenerated over the course of the 18th century into a figure more likely associated with excessive debt and imprisonment, venereal disease, morally unacceptable behaviour, and even insanity.

          In a gesture common of this more censorious view of rakishness, the famous artist and printer William Hogarth (1697-1764) synthesized these various reprehensible associations into a series of eight painting entitles A Rake’s Progress that were subsequently engraved and published in 1735. Known for his visual criticisms of drunkenness, licentiousness, and aristocratic manners, Hogarth portrayed in this particular series the rise and fall of the reckless son of a wealthy merchant who spends his father’s money with abandon and ends up committed to a mad house. Having been raised in an environment dominated by the dictates of Puritan social morality, and having spent a good number of his adult years in Britain, it would not seem unreasonable to conjecture that Franklin was perhaps familiar with Hogarth’s work and sympathetic to the artist’s aims. Even if this were not the case, it would still seem fair to conclude that Franklin was at least of a similar frame of mind to Hogarth and other 18th-century cultural commentators who sought to censor and cultivate public morality through their work. Much of Franklin’s satire was in this exact vein, and it would likewise seem fair to describe him and Hogarth as contemporaries in substance if not in means.

          Unlike Franklin’s use in Rules of rakish terminology to describe the various governors of the Thirteen Colonies, his use of the term “Stock-Jobber” as an insult came from a slightly different social context. Without going into great detail as to the inner workings of sophisticated global financial systems, which I am frankly not qualified to dispense, a stockjobber was a person or organization that acted as what is known as a “market maker” within stock exchanges. Their function was to act as a direct agent for the purchase and sale of stocks by a broker on behalf of their client. Though this in no longer necessarily the case, every stock that was bought and sold on the London Stock Exchange in the 1770s passed through a “jobber’s book” as part of everyday transactions. While there is nothing inherently nefarious about this particular financial office, Franklin’s use of the title in a derogative mode aligns him fairly clearly with the strain of contemporary political thought that disdained banking, debt, and the various other kinds of sophisticated financial machinery that had in many ways come to dominate 18th-century Britain. To believe that “Stock-Jobber” was an insult was to conceivably consider that the very concept of a stock exchange was immoral, wasteful, or corrupt.

          This was, in truth, an opinion shared by a fair number of Franklin’s revolutionary compatriots – perennially-indebted Jefferson in particular turned a jaundiced eye towards banking, debt trading, and related financial enterprises – and stemmed in part from the aforementioned conflict between the Country Party Whigs and their Court Party opponents. Whereas the latter championed the economic growth facilitated by the availability of credit and the creation of a national debt that followed the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, the former decried the avarice and corruption which they believed commercial and state banking had helped make endemic to the British political system. Unlike a trade – farming, say, or small scale manufacturing – trading stocks or trafficking in loans generated wealth based on the market value of a commodity rather than its inherent value (the price it could fetch on a given day, rather than its “actual” worth). This idea, that wealth could be generated by “playing the market” rather than by an application of efforts or patience, came to be identified with the term “speculation.” Because such financial enterprises were also easily manipulated and tended only to benefit the most socially advantaged groups in a given society, the mounting size and sophistication of the British economy in the 18th-century nurtured its fair share of ideological opposition. Members of the Country Party identified the Bank of England in particular and the credit it offered as the keystone of contemporary ministerial corruption and government patronage, and so they became identified with calls for economic simplicity and transparency. As Franklin and his fellow revolutionaries considered themselves the philosophical heirs to the Country Whig tradition, so too they inherited that group’s antipathy for the complex and often opaque financial status quo of Georgian Britain.

          The final pair of disdainful descriptors Franklin offered in step five of his satirical Rules, unlike those that preceded them, appear to have been more a reflection of his personal taste than of the broader cultural trends or political associations he was party to. Whereas a rake or a stockjobber might well have been considered an object of ill-repute in late-18th century North America, particularly among the social class Franklin originated from and the intellectual class he later joined, Proctors and lawyers were not generally ill thought of. Yet Franklin identified a wrangling member of the former profession and a pettifogging (needlessly obsessed with minor details) member of the latter as ideal candidates for the colonial governorships which his fellow colonists had come to associate with ineptitude, callousness, greed, and corruption. The exact reasons for this are not immediately obvious, though a few basic facts suggest themselves. Franklin was himself not a member of the legal profession, for one. Many of his fellow revolutionaries were, including John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Jay. But Benjamin Franklin was a printer and editorialist by trade and a scientist and inventor by inclination. This might possibly be taken as indication of his dislike for the law, or at least his disinterest. That law was also customarily the domain of the wealthy and powerful, those most likely to find themselves targets of his satire, was perhaps further reason for Franklin to look upon the profession with some degree of derision. A man of humble origins, studying the law was likely not an option he could possibly have pursued as a youth, and so in spite of his later social prominence its practitioners would ever remain his social betters.

          Then again, perhaps the distrust of legal professionals Franklin displayed in Rules stemmed from the immediate circumstances confronting him in 1773. In his era as in ours, the study of law was commonly seen as an avenue to power. Many of the ministers and members of Parliament who were seen in America as the source of the breach between the colonies and the Crown were accordingly lawyers themselves, and brought their legalistic, nay pettifogging, outlook to bear on the creation of tax and commerce policies intended to drain the colonies of any and all valuable resources. Without being able to say so for certain, it seems at the very least possible that this contributed in some way to Franklin’s apparent contempt for members of the legal profession. This is, again, a theory on my part. Perhaps Franklin simply meant what he said. Perhaps he didn't intend to offer insult to all lawyers, among whom he counted many friends, but simply wished to identify the perceived deficiency of the governors usually sent to oversee the various colonies with a particular kind of pedantic, minutiae-obsessed, obstinate legal practitioner. In so doing he must have counted on the fact that his audience would know what he was referring to, and so it strikes me as rather amusing that as long ago as the 1770s stereotypes concerning lawyers were evidently as prevalent as they are today. More amusing yet is the fact that, again, so many of Franklin’s later allies and partners during the Revolution, in Congress as well as during the drafting of the United States Constitution, were lawyers of some type or another. One wonders, or at least I do, whether any of them ever raised an eyebrow at the ease to which their compatriot seemed willing to resort to slights at the expense of their chosen profession.

          In point of fact, Franklin’s law-slinging associates were not the only ones he perhaps inadvertently slighted in the particular passage of Rules just now under examination. In addition to calling into question the worth of legal professionals, to the potential chagrin of collaborators like John Adams (not that he ever needed much of a reason to be offended) or Alexander Hamilton, Franklin feasibly also cast doubt on the quality of men like Thomas Jefferson, and fellow Pennsylvania Robert Morris. Jefferson, like most Southern men of his class, spent a goodly portion of his life attempting to acquire the accoutrements of a “gentlemanly” lifestyle. Items of frequent purchase included clothing, works of art, fine wines, and books. This acquisitive side of Jefferson frequently led him to spend money his simply didn't have, and left him deeply in debt at the time of his passing in 1826. Could he not be considered, in terms of his spending habits at least, a prodigal? Robert Morris was one of the wealthiest men in North America at the dawn of the Revolution, and was appointed Superintendent of Finance by the Continental Congress in recognition of his unequalled financial acumen. He was also one of America’s most notorious, and least successful, land speculators. By the manner in which Morris overextended his finances, attempted to make us of his government connections for personal gain, and was ultimately ruined for it, could he not be considered some species of broken Gamester of Stock-Jobber? Even George Washington, a man renowned for his probity, wisdom, and keen judgement, played the market via his duties and connections as a surveyor of western lands. Did this not qualify him for a measure of Franklin’s ire?

          In all it would seem that Benjamin Franklin’s own closest allies and collaborators were not free of the sins he would have damned the governor’s assigned by distant London for committing. Was this hypocrisy? Ignorance? Or did he simply apply a different standard of behaviour to those who occupied the halls of power from that which touched upon everyone else?  The answers to these queries will doubtless turn out to be terribly unsatisfying, as is so often the case. I do, however, believe they will at least be near the truth.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part VII: Injustice

          After having spent six weeks hemming and hawing about satire, reconciliation, and (for some reason or another) English legal history, I suppose now it’s only fitting and proper that the focus of this blog turn finally towards why it was in 1773 Benjamin Franklin had his dander up to such a degree as to pen the satirical essay presently under consideration. This, I’ll grant, might seem unnecessary to some. The causes of the American Revolution, the myriad grievances nurtured by the American colonists against their British oppressors, have been recorded and studied at length these last two centuries and change. What more might an examination of the particular ills recalled in Franklin’s Rules possibly reveal about the how and why of colonial discontent? Their taxes were heavy? Their governors’ were corrupt and callous? They felt themselves distrusted, abused, and neglected? As I do believe the saying goes, “please to inform me of something of which I am not already in a state of awareness.”

          Yet, though Rules indeed speaks to each of the grievances so named above, and indeed to several others one might consider almost stereotypical of the writings of the Revolutionary era, a closer examination of the same is by no means a fruitless exercise. The American Revolution, as I'm sure I've argued previously, is one of those socio-historical subjects that loom so large in popular culture as to breed a sense of casual familiarity among the general population. Everybody knows about the Revolution. Everybody knows the British lost, and everybody knows it was about taxes, or whatever. It is, on the one hand, heartening that an event so firmly rooted in the intellectual and cultural context of the 18th century continues to enjoy such widespread recognition and claims at understanding here at the beginning of the 21st. On the other hand it is troubling, if to no one else but those with whom I share a particular sickness, just how much this thin veneer of popular understanding tends to obscure. As I offered at the end of my very first series of posts, very much is said in modern popular media about the Revolution and the Founders by people who clearly possess only the barest knowledge of either.

          I in no way mean to aim any accusations to this effect at my small and inexplicably dedicated band of readers. That you come back week after week, in spite of the sheer magnitude of things you could be filling your time with, is indication enough of your desire to cultivate more than a surface understanding of the Founding Fathers, their times, and their legacy. Only, it occurred to me when I began to pen this very post that much of what Franklin complained of in Rules is completely in keeping with what is commonly known of the Revolution and its causes. If this was a thought that so easily occurred to me it could not have been wholly original, and therefore I felt it behooved me to address the same and speak to any doubts that might be forming in the minds of those who deign to cast their eyes upon my provincial scribblings. In essence the question that occurred to me, and you will forgive if I am putting words where they do not belong, is, what can studying documents written by the Founders tell us about the why and wherefore of the Revolution that isn't already very well known?

          A great deal, as it turns out, if not always in the most obvious way. The Founding Fathers, as I'm sure you've picked up by now, where a diverse group. Between them they possessed a goodly number of different cultural, intellectual, religious, and occupational experiences and their myriad outlooks on the same set of events is part of what makes them such a compelling group. In short they did not think or feel exactly the same way about nearly anything, and so studying their lives, careers, and literary outputs becomes an exercise in both scholarly research and psychological profiling. They may have all been on “the same side,” worked toward the same basic set of goals, but they each had their personal reasons, their own thoughts, and observations on the events in which their partook. Benjamin Franklin was as ardent a supporter of the Patriot cause as one is likely to find, and the reasons for his support where widely shared among his noble compatriots. Yet, as many during his lifetime would likely have agreed, there was only one Ben Franklin. The lens through which he viewed the world was his and his alone. By attempting to understand this, and by trying our utmost to pierce the veil of time that separate his and our perspectives, it becomes possible to gain insight into a facet of human history most usually obscured by the fog of “common knowledge.” In this way we are able to understand the past with the complexity appropriate to any enterprise in which human beings are the prime movers.

          But I digress, as seems to be my custom.

          Returning to the text at hand, there would seem to be in Franklin’s Rules a general list of grievances one could compile unambiguously aimed at the Thirteen Colonies’ British colonial administrators. These offences include the quartering of troops among the colonial population, the incompetence of the various colonial governors, the meeting of petitions with delay, expense, rejection, and humiliation, the continued imposition of theoretically limitless taxation, the miscarriage of justice by undercutting the authority of colonial courts, the dispatching of overpaid and unsympathetic tax-collectors, the widespread rewarding of ministerial corruption and avarice, the abuse and diminishment of colonial legislatures, and the pitiless enforcement of commerce laws intended to enrich the motherland at the expense of the colonies. Combined these seem a damning indictment of British authority in colonial America, if not a wholly original one. The value of these complaints, rather than in the aggregate, lies in the specific phrasing Franklin deployed in each case. Yes, Franklin complained about taxation and the Navigation Acts. What American, in 1773, didn't feel at least slightly aggrieved by these measures? But how did he complain? What did he emphasize and what did he elide?

          In spite of seeming just now to have argued against the idea, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that in certain cases these questions are answered fairly easily, and that some of Franklin’s complaints were very much in keeping with the consensus of the colonial opposition of the day. His characterization of the manner in which British authorities treated American petitioners for redress, for example, has a common ring with the offences Thomas Jefferson later attributed to George III and his government in the Declaration of Independence. Just as that latter document accused the Crown of meeting “repeated petitions” for compensation as the result of some heavy-handed policy or other with “repeated injury,” so Franklin’s Rules advised its ministerial audience to, “Let the Parliaments flout [the colonists’] claims, reject their Petitions, refuse even to suffer the reading of them, and treat the Petitioners with the utmost Contempt.” Both Franklin and Jefferson, it seemed, perceived the rough treatment colonial supplicants received at the hands of British authorities with much the same sentiment. Furthermore, because said Declaration was subsequently reviewed and ratified by the assembled members of the Continental Congress it would seem fair to say that the attitudes expressed therein represented the views of the majority of that first class of Founders in 1776. Thus any similarities between the views expressed by the Declaration of Independence and those found in Franklin’s Rules can logically be taken to indicate agreement between Franklin himself and the majority of the American revolutionary mainstream as of the late 1770s.

          This argument is strongly supported by a further comparative examination of the Declaration of Independence and Franklin’s Rules. As the latter complained of the excessive taxation levied upon the residents of colonial American, to the point of seeking to convince the colonists that, “Under such a Government they have nothing they can call their own,” so the former very simply accused George III of, “Imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” As Franklin sardonically recommended the formation of, “A Board of Officers to superintend the Collection [of taxes], composed of the most indiscreet, ill-bred and insolent you can find,” who would collect “large Salaries out of the extorted Revenue,” and live in “open grating Luxury,” Jefferson somewhat more soberly declared that the king had, “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Franklin perhaps expressed himself in somewhat more jocular or emotional language, but the core understanding from which he argued in much of Rules seems very much in line with the position later adopted by the aforesaid Congress.

          The similarities extend beyond taxation and into more subtle realms as well. One particularly to be noted, in part because I do believe it so subtle as to likely slip the notice of modern audiences, concerns the manner by which judicial officials in the colonies were to be paid. As Franklin pointed out in Rules, in a tone of displeasure disguised as cheerful recommendation, because judges in the colonies were appointed to serve at the pleasure of the monarch it followed that they should receive their salaries from that same source. The Declaration of Independence confirmed the existence of this practice when it stated that George III had, “made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” Said Declaration has no more to say on the matter, and so the significance of this passage might today seem somewhat opaque. Granted, the appointment of judges to serve in the colonies by a monarch many thousands of miles distant, who are in turn responsible only to said monarch, seems clearly enough a violation of the right of a free people to receive the equitable and unbiased administration of justice. The relevance of how these judges were to be paid, however, is perhaps somewhat less clear. Or rather, it would be had not Franklin provided the answer already. If officers of the colonial courts had been paid out of revenues collected and distributed by the colonies themselves, he warned his theoretical ministerial audience, such, “Judges may be thereby influenced to treat the People kindly, and to do them Justice.” Franklin’s fellow colonists, it seemed, would have gladly taken on the added expense of employing judges or other court officers themselves if it meant they could expect justice in the colonies to be administered in a more responsive and less arbitrary fashion. In spite of this elaboration, however fascinating, the fact remains that the core concept Franklin sought to illuminate was very much in keeping with what the majority of the Founders would later endorse in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Franklin may have been somewhat more verbose, more freewheeling in his mode of expression, but at least some of the sentiments he expressed were not comparatively all that novel.

          Others, however, were; in full or in part. Take, for instance, the quartering of troops, connected in the republican political tradition to the threat represented by a standing army. Franklin opined in step four of Rules that such a measure would in fact cause the trouble it hoped to prevent. Housing soldiers among the colonial population, he argued, “Who by their Insolence may provoke the rising of Mobs, and by their Bullets and Bayonets suppress them […] may in time convert your Suspicions into Realities.” While this passage does indicate Franklin’s displeasure with the prospect of the colonies playing host to British regulars, a far from uncommon sentiment at the time, his specific reasoning would seem to have been anything but. As aforementioned, Franklin was still a reconciliationist as of 1773. When he wrote his satirical Rules he had yet to abandon hope that Britain and the Thirteen Colonies might settle their differences and move towards a prosperous shared future. Accordingly Franklin’s dismay at the housing of soldiers among the colonial population, though shared by some of his less sanguine colleagues (as the text of the Declaration of Independence attests), was colored by his generally optimistic outlook. Rather than decry the presence of armed soldiers in the colonies in and of itself, which many did, Franklin phrased his complaint as a something more like a warning, caution, or remonstrance. It was not a tone of outrage he adopted, but a tone of scolding. British authorities had been suspicious of colonial intentions, he acknowledged, and by their overreaction fostered greater discontent than they had hoped to allay. Again, by attempting to explain to a British audience exactly how British actions had contributed to the crisis then unfolding Franklin engaged in an exercise that was both cathartic and substantive. At the same time that he helped vent his fellow colonists’ general frustrations, he perhaps also hoped to cajole the appropriate authorities in Britain into rectifying the policies that had given rise to said frustrations.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part VI: Memory, contd.

          Among the other distinctly English liberties that Franklin saw fit to explicitly name in Rules was the core legal concept of Habeas Corpus. Essentially a guarantee against unwarranted detention, Habeas Corpus (or “the Great Writ”) remains among the most fundamental rights inherent in Common Law jurisprudence. Its exact provenance is somewhat vague, owing to its extreme age, but its existence as a legal protection within the English judicial system dates back at least as far as the 13th century. Indeed, no less monumental a charter than the Magna Carta (1215) mandated that, “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.” Considering that the rebellious barons who forced the Magna Carta on John I claimed they were attempting to reassert rights and guarantees that had been lost following the Norman Invasion in 1066, it seems a safe conclusion that origins of Habeas Corpus go back considerably further. At various points during the proceeding centuries of English history the Great Writ was eroded, suspended, or was subject to renewed guarantees. The last word on Habeas Corpus as of the 1770s, from a legal standpoint, was the aptly-named Habeas Corpus Act (1679) passed by the third parliament of Charles II’s reign.

          Said act was introduced and supported by members of the Country Party who wished to exclude James, Duke of York, brother and heir of Charles II, from the line of succession. In the event that their efforts failed and James ascended to the throne (which he ultimately did in 1685), the so-called Exclusionists feared that the new king would drag the monarchy back toward absolutism by ruling in a generally arbitrary fashion. Whether there was any truth to this notion, particularly given James’ ardent support for religious toleration during his time as proprietor of the Province of New York, is neither here nor there. The point is that certain members of the Country Party, who as aforementioned already distrusted the contemporary political and economic status quo, believed that Catholic James taking the throne represented an imminent threat to the constitutional style of government embraced in Britain in the aftermath of the English Civil War. One of their parliamentary leaders, the Earl of Shaftsbury, accordingly led an effort to more clearly and definitely enshrine the writ of Habeas Corpus in contemporary British law. The resulting Act of Parliament, which passed by a slim margin in the House of Lords of fifty-seven to fifty five, mandated that, except in cases of treason or felony, all prisoners or those acting on their behalf possessed the right to challenge their arrest by submitting a petition to the appropriate authorities. Such a petition required an answer no later than three days after it was submitted, and the requesting prisoner was then required to be brought before the judge or court that first authorised their arrest in order that their case be reviewed and their detention either upheld or dismissed. Jailers were also forbidden by the act from moving their prisoners from one location to another in order to avoid the enforcement of the writ, and a schedule of fines was included in case of disobedience.

          The reason that any of this matters to the present conversation (as no doubt you were asking yourself) is because of what it says about the state of British law and in particular the writ of Habeas Corpus at the end of the 18th century. By the time Benjamin Franklin wrote Rules in 1773, or even by the time of the Stamp Act (1765) and the beginning of the imperial crisis between the American colonies and the British Crown, a strong guarantee of one of English law’s most fundamental rights had been on the books for almost a century. That the next piece of legislation concerning the Great Writ was not passed until 1803 would seem to further indicate that the provisions of the 1679 effort were considered to be sufficiently thorough, and proved durable enough to survive the brief tumult of the Glorious Revolution unscathed or unaltered. Furthermore, it should not have gone unnoticed that the sponsors of the 1679 Act were members of the abovementioned Country Party. Self-appointed defenders of liberty and enemies of corruption, the Country Party and their philosophy were lionized among the population of British North America precisely because of their strong stand in support of traditional rights. In all it would thus seem far from unusual for Franklin to have cited Habeas Corpus in his satiric Rules as among his fellow colonists’ most dearly-held individual liberties.

          It’s important to remember that even as late as the 1770s and the eve of the American Revolution there were still many people living in the Thirteen Colonies, a good number of whom ultimately sided against the Crown, who still regarded themselves with a great deal of pride as being English men and women. Not every colonist felt this sense of identity with equal strength, it must be said, but to ignore it or to imagine that the later American sense of self and national purpose owed nothing to a series of strong English antecedents would quite simply be wrong. That being said, the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus was almost certainly at the core of the colonists’ shared, if not always consistently felt, sense of Englishness. It is possible that the colonists looked upon it a little differently than their cousins across the Atlantic, however. Habeas Corpus had been, after all, one of the legal concepts championed by a group of statesmen, the Country Party, whose political and philosophical influence in the colonies was many times what had it been in Britain. This association between said writ and the Country Whigs, of whom American critics of perceived British tyranny considered themselves the ideological descendants, could thus be thought of as a bridge by which distinctly English values were transformed into distinctly American ones. Accordingly, though Habeas Corpus was, and is, a concept deeply rooted in English history and legal tradition, it should hardly be thought of as contradictory for Benjamin Franklin to have regarded it as also being absolutely fundamental to his fellow American colonists’ own emerging sense of political and philosophical identity.

          The last distinctly English individual liberty that Franklin cited in step ten of Rules about which a few words ought to be said is the, “Right of Trial by a Jury of our Neighbours.” Like Habeas Corpus, trial by jury is a concept whose origins in English history are somewhat vague. There is no single document, no statute one can point to as the unequivocal inception of jury trials, though a fair bit of scholarship exists that has attempted to trace the lineage of the concept. The general understanding of academia at this point is that the notion of trial by jury accreted slowly over a period of centuries, from an offshoot of the Scandinavian thing (a kind of assembly presided over by legal authorities known as lawspeakers), to the Anglo-Saxon assembly of thegns (minor nobles), to the system set up by Henry II (1133-1189) as a means of arbitrating local land disputes. The same passage of the 1215 Magna Carta cited above as evidence of an early understanding of Habeas Corpus likewise speaks to the importance attached in that period in English history to trial by jury. “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned,” it stated, “or exiled or in any way destroyed […] except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.” While “the law of the land” speaks to the Great Writ, “the lawful judgement of his peers” is a clear reference to jury trial.

          So important was this specific passage of the Magna Carta and the legal principle contained therein to English political and legal identity that it was cited as justification over four hundred years later when the Parliament of Great Britain passed legislation abolishing the practice of the Star Chamber.  So called because it was physically located in a richly decorated room whose ceiling was bedecked with gold stars on a blue backdrop, this legal body was composed of Privy Councillors and Common Law judges and functioned as both a high court of appeal as well as a court of equity (referring to morals or legal norms). The Chambers was initially convened during the Tudor era as a means of ensuring justice was meted out even to those often considered powerful or influential enough to evade the influence of lower courts. Over time, however, it became an instrument of oppression due to its members’ nakedly political motivations and the arbitrary application of their equity court prerogatives (mainly by handing down punishments for offences which were not illegal but which they considered to be improper or immoral). The Act of Parliament that finally abolished the Star Chamber in 1641 made explicit reference to the aforementioned passage from the Magna Carta, with its reference to both Habeas Corpus and trial by jury. “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned,” it stated, “or disseised of his freehold or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled or otherwise destroyed […] but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land [.]”

          That the Star Chamber was abolished by an Act of Parliament and that the specific reasoning cited above was given are important to the present discussion for at least two reasons. The first is that it represents an instance of one arm of the English government checking or curtailing the power of another. Granted it was a long time coming, the Star Chamber having been in use for over a century at the time of its abolition. Nonetheless, the ability of a government to maintain a sense of equilibrium among its constituent parts in a manner such as this is precisely what English Whigs and republican-sympathizers like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin believed was central to successful governments staving off corruption and combating the emergence of tyranny. The second reason that the abolition of the Star Chamber is worthy of discussion under the present circumstances is that the authority being curtailed, belonging to the judicial branch of the contemporary English government, was so limited because it was seen to be in conflict with, among other things, the ancient right of trial by jury. This seems a clear enough demonstration that in 1641, on the eve of perhaps the most tumultuous century-and-a-half in English history, certain fundamental political and legal norms had become sufficiently ingrained as to successfully circumscribe the ability of government at the highest level to successfully project its power.

          Though the act eliminating the Star Chamber remains among the most important defences of trial by jury in English legal history, it was not, as of 1773, the most important or the most recent. As discussed previously, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent passage of a Bill of Rights in 1689 represent between them a fundamental turning point in the history of English government away from absolutism and towards constitutionalism. These latter events were particularly significant among the residents of the Thirteen Colonies, in no small part due to their own historical struggles with distant governments that seemed unresponsive or unsympathetic and their desire for the restoration of what they regarded as their accustomed rights and privileges. Bearing this in mind it is worth noting that one of the accusations levelled at the departed James II in said Bill of Rights was that policies put in place under his leadership led to the service of incompetent people on trial juries. In fact the Bill stated specifically that said persons were “partial corrupt and unqualified,” and added that certain others who had served as jurors during treason trials had also not been freeholders. These accusations constituted a violation of the underlying principle of the right to trial by jury because of the way they potentially biased the outcome of a prospective trial, because they meddled with the ability of an accused person to be judged by a fairly-selected assembly of their peers, and because they potentially placed the fate of said accused in the hands of those who had not been chosen for their impartiality. Any one of these could have fairly been considered an unpardonable desecration of a long-established right; combined they served to reinforce the unsuitability of James II to continue his reign, so out of step was he with English political and legal culture.         

          In order to repair the damage they claimed James II had wrought upon the England’s green and pleasant land, the authors of the Bill of Rights stated quite simply in the text of the same, “That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders.” That they felt no need to delve into further detail is telling. Had the concept of trial by jury been, in 1689, a novel one it would doubtless have seemed necessary to explain at length the how and why of its unbiased and impartial operation. Because trial by jury had existed in a form recognizable to the 17th-century English mindset since at least the 13th century, however, and because it had been challenged and emerged triumphant as recently as the 1640s no such explanation was required. The Whigs that supported the passage of the Bill of Rights, as well as those in later decades and centuries that cited its importance, understood that document’s purpose as being conservative rather than innovative. In light of the perceived abuses of James II and the sudden change in government represented by his overthrow, a guarantee of the fundamental, customary, inherited rights of the English people was called. This guarantee was the Bill of Rights of 1689, one of the most important documents comprising the unwritten British constitution and one of the prime exemplars of natural rights cited by American critics of British administrative abuses in the 1760s and 1770s.

          See what I did there?

          Hopefully my lengthy (so very lengthy) diatribe concerning the origins and late-17th century trials and tribulations of the right of trial by jury in England has succeeded in emphasizing just how important said right was, and is, to the English sense of political identity. Provided, of course, it hasn’t rendered you completely and perhaps fatally unconscious. The need to preserve trial by jury effectively led to the defeat the Star Chamber, and helped bring down one king and make another. How this relates to Benjamin Franklin and his terribly humorous but no less important Rules is fairly straightforward. Trial by jury was important to the English sense of political identity, clearly. And at the very root of the pre-Revolutionary American identity was a strong sense of Englishness and a respect and admiration for traditional English liberties. Thus, the right of trial by jury, even as late as 1773, was as fundamental to the self-identification and political consciousness of colonial Americans as it was to their cousins across the Atlantic.

          In fact the abuse said colonists suffered at the hands of incompetent, callous and self-interested British ministers over the course of the late-18th century, rather than disabuse them of any affection for all matters English, arguably strengthened their attachment to such core values as Habeas Corpus and trial by jury. Just as 13th-century barons who felt ill-used by the policies of King John had sought refuge in the reassertion of what they regarded as their traditional rights, and just as 17th-centruy Whigs sought to guard against the erosion of the same by helping usher in and then reinforcing a government whose respect for traditional liberties was more in line with their own, so late-18th century colonial Americans held such rights as Habeas Corpus and trial by jury as an unassailable bastion against the relentless, creeping influence of English ministerial and Parliamentary overreach. And by effectively re-enacting the efforts of their forefathers and reinforcing their shared attachment to the same set of values, colonial Americans began to transform themselves into a new and different people with a destiny all their own.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, Part V: Memory

          In addition to offering valuable insight into the world of 18th-century political satire, as well as the perspective of some pro-reconciliation pre-Revolutionary Americans, Benjamin Franklin’s Rules also provides evidence of which aspects of Anglo-American history to which citizens of the Thirteen Colonies attached the greatest value. As discussed in week previous, during examinations of topics like the Declaration of Independence, John Adams’ Thoughts on Government, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, late-18th century colonial Americans possessed a relatively strong sense of their rights, the importance of defending them, and their origins in earlier English precedents. Granted not every farmer in rural Massachusetts or merchant in urban South Carolina had read the works of political philosopher Lord Bolingbroke, or knew playwright Joseph Addison’s Cato as intimately as Washington. That being said, colonial Americans’ sense of “Englishness” was overall dearly held, and rooted in a knowledge of and respect for English history and political culture.

          At the same time, however, the events of the 1760s and 1770s began to exert a powerful influence on the political and cultural identity of the population of the Thirteen Colonies. While many colonists as late as 1774 still believed that the restoration of their accustomed “English liberties” was the desired end of any reconciliation with Britain, the struggle to secure said reconciliation had already started to alter their political and social values in a distinctly un-English direction. The imposition, protests over, and repeal of the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts, the stationing of British troops in American cities, innumerable riots and demonstrations, and the Boston Massacre and resultant trial – combined a panoply of shared suffering, shared loss and shared victory – all played a role in defining a uniquely American identity. Going back even further, the experience of fighting the Seven Years War alongside British regular armies and the ongoing efforts to enforce the Navigation Acts (passed between 1651 and 1696 in an attempt, among other things, to funnel all colonial shipping to and from Britain) played similar roles in creating a distinct sense of what it meant to be an American versus what it meant to be English. Nothing if not an astute observer of and commentator on colonial culture, Benjamin Franklin was well aware of the elements of English and American history, respectively, that his fellow colonists most responded to. His satirical essay of 1773, Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, contains ample evidence of the same, and thereby affords useful insight into how colonial Americans viewed themselves based on what they remembered and how.

          The first significant example of this acute appreciation for cultural memory on Franklin’s part can be found in the aforementioned step three of Rules. Therein, after first recommending that his ministerial audience direct resentment at their American charges in exchange for the latter’s consummate support, Franklin added, “If they happen to be zealous Whigs, Friends of Liberty, nutur’d in Revolution Principles, remember all that to their Prejudice, and contrive to punish it: for such Principles, after a Revolution is thoroughly established, are of no more Use, they are even odious and abominable.” Within this sentence Franklin deployed a series of very important intellectual connections, about which should be noted several key things. The first is that the Whigs referred to were a British political faction derived from the Roundheads or Parliamentarians of the English Civil War. The Roundheads opposed the disrespect and disregard paid Parliament and its authority by King Charles I, and in the decades that followed the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s gradually evolved into the Whig movement. Their chief aims were the safeguarding and promotion of Parliamentary supremacy, toleration of Protestant dissenters (non-Anglicans), and opposition to Catholicism and political absolutism. In the American context, identifying as a Whig or holding Whig principles meant more specifically associating oneself with the disaffected members of the Country Party, a Whig faction whose members opposed the shift in power from Parliament to the office of Prime Minister as held by Robert Walpole, and who spoke out against corruption and patronage and in favor of traditional liberties and balanced government.

          The second thing to take note of from the above-quoted passage is the use of the term “Revolution” and the phrase “Revolution Principles.” While in the American cultural lexicon there are few more loaded terms, Franklin’s 1773 usage obviously predates the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775. Rather he intended to refer to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and in turn to the philosophical and political principles commonly associated with it and its aftermath. Assuming (rightly or wrongly) that my readers still recall the basics of said event from a summary I provided in weeks past, it will suffice here to say that the revolution and the accompanying Bill of Rights of 1689 finally and firmly established Parliamentary authority over monarchical power in England. Thereafter the revolution lingered in English cultural memory for generations as a symbol of the triumph of liberty over tyranny and the rule of law over the arbitrary exercise of political authority. Late 18th-century colonial Americans, many of whom had either been born in England or were of English descent, likewise possessed a deep respect for and attached a great deal of value to the memory of the Glorious Revolution, and in particular to the uninfringeable liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

          This leads us to the third element of Franklin’s rhetorical construction particularly worth noting. Of the so-called “Revolution Principles,” Franklin wrote, “After a Revolution is thoroughly established, [said principles] are of no more Use,” going so far as to describe them as “odious” and “abominable.” Though the significance of this phrasing is most likely lost on a modern audience (no offence meant), it in fact denotes Franklin’s and his fellow colonists’ specific identification with the aforementioned County Party. Said party was in reality more an informal band of “country squires” who believed that the radical transformation that overtook the political and economic status quo in late 17th-century England threatened to erode the principles of integrity, respect for traditional rights, and good government supposedly embodied by the Glorious Revolution. Members of the Country Party identified as such because they felt that they represented the country as a whole, unlike the bankers, financiers, career politicians, and royal favorites who made up the so-called “Court Party.” At the head of this second faction was the first recognized Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745). Though a Whig himself, Walpole and his devotees were accused by the disaffected Whigs of the Country Party of distorting the principles of 1688 and hastening the demise of English liberty by supporting measures like high taxation and high tariffs, a standing army, infrequent elections, and the strengthening of cabinet government. While both sides of this apparent dichotomy either identified as Whigs or believed they were upholding Whig principles, the strident agitation by the Country Party on behalf of traditional liberties and “Revolution Principles” was viewed by establishment Whigs like Walpole as naïve and obstructive. To their thinking, the Glorious Revolution had settled the constitutional status quo once and for all; what Britain required was competent administration, economic stability, and domestic tranquillity.

          Stay with me…      

          While the Country Party certainly had its noteworthy advocates, including members of the landed gentry like Lord Bolingbroke and writers like Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, its influence was never all that strongly felt in England. By the 1760s power had transitioned to the opposition Tory Party, and the principled, disgruntled, vociferous Country Party faded into relative obscurity. Or at least in Britain they did; their passionate calls for preserving the principles of 1688, extending toleration to non-Anglican Protestants, and holding government to a high standard of integrity found a highly receptive audience in 17th and 18th-century North America. The writings of Bolingbroke in particular, who declared that true liberty meant being free, “not from the law, but by the law,” found new life among a population who had long suffered at the hands of a distant government that was ever claiming prerogatives and ignoring rights. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in particular were known to be ardent admirers, and their subsequent efforts on behalf of both American independence and American republicanism were intensely suffused with a deep regard for the post-Glorious Revolution conception of liberties and rights. Consequently, when Franklin reminded his British audience in Rules that revolutionary principles were dangerous once a revolution was settled he was effectively hearkening back to and identifying his fellow colonists’ struggle with the Country Party and their principled stand against what they perceived as corruption, patronage, and a disregard for traditional rights.
    
          The last element of Franklin’s above-cited commentary on Whigs, principles and revolutions specifically worth noting is one I’ll grant I may be projecting. To my reading it appeared as though Franklin believed only a portion of the colonial population could be said to identify with the aforementioned Whig principles. The phrase “If they happed” implies to me that it was not a given that every citizen of every colony felt as strongly that their struggle against perceived British tyranny was either connected to or a continuation of the earlier English liberal battle against monarchical authority. This apparent admission would seem to be an important one because it potentially reflects what is commonly known to be the reality of pre-Revolutionary American culture; namely that not everyone was as politically conscious as Franklin and his revolutionary cohort. Whig principles indeed ran deep in colonial America, almost certainly deeper than they did in contemporary Britain, but there were still large swaths of the population for whom the literature and philosophy of the Country Party were hazy at best. Americans were, again, more conscious of their political rights than most 18th-century peoples, but on an individual basis this consciousness was not always terribly strong or terribly coherent. That Franklin identified Whig principles and the memory of the Glorious Revolution as having value among the population of the American colonies, enough to mention it in a satirical essay directed at a British audience, speaks volumes as to how important those ideas were to contemporary Americans’ sense of themselves and their ongoing struggle against arbitrary British authority. That he also possibly admitted, if not explicitly, that said principles and memories were not valued by one hundred percent of the colonial population would seem to be similarly important. Contrary to common media depictions and popular memory, not every American colonist supported the Revolution when it came, in no small part because not every American identified with the Whig principles that were central to the revolutionary ideology. Again I admit that I may be reading into something that simply isn’t there, but do I believe the balance of the argument, that Americans in the 1770s were as varied in their political convictions as Americans of today, holds essentially true.

          Less oblique or speculative are the references to specific traditional English liberties Franklin deployed in step ten of his sardonic Rules. As the previous nine steps outlined a campaign by which a colonial administrator might gradually but inexorably burden a free people with any number of restrictions on their political and economic well-being, step ten initially seemed to offer a degree comfort to the benighted citizens of the colonies in question. “Though we have no Property,” Franklin imagined a member of this hypothetical group saying,

We have yet something left that is valuable; we have constitutional Liberty both of Person and of Conscience. This King, these Lords, and these Commons, who it seems are too remote from us to know us and feel for us, cannot take from us our Habeas Corpus Right, or our Right of Trial by a Jury of our Neighbours: They cannot deprive us of the Exercise of our Religion, alter our ecclesiastical Constitution, and compel us to be Papists if they please, or Mahometans.

Though I’ll note that Franklin followed this informal charter of values with instructions on how to undermine the very principles listed, the values themselves are what should draw out attention. The liberties that Franklin believed his follow colonists held most dear, those that they would turn to with a sense of pride and comfort in times of strife, were all of distinctly English origins. In truth, how could they be otherwise? In 1773 there really was no American law or American philosophy. The colonies that would in time be transformed into the United States of America were founded almost entirely by Englishmen. Many of them brought novel ideas to bear in the construction of governing frameworks for their new communities, but their fundamental understanding of law, justice, and individual rights could not but have been shaped by their lives and upbringings in 17th-century England. Consequently the basis upon which all colonial governments were founded was an English one. Common law, Parliamentary supremacy, natural rights, and even the concept of a religious establishment; all were core to the post-17th-century English political consciousness, and all were alive and well in the 18th-century Thirteen Colonies in one form or another.

            Consider, for example, the principle of freedom of conscience, or as Franklin put it on behalf of his fellow colonists, “the Exercise of our Religion.” By the 1770s religious freedom had undergone a long and often brutal evolution over the course of early-modern English history. Between the foundation of the Anglican Church by Henry VIII in 1534 to the ascension of Elizabeth I to the throne in 1558, English Catholics and English Protestants both suffered wild swings of fortune as the monarchs of the day either embraced or violently persecuted their chosen faith. What followed were somewhat lengthier periods of relative peace and utter turmoil, between the solidification of the Church of England under Elizabeth and James I, the Catholic sympathies of Charles I, and the Puritan seizure of power during the English Civil War. By the time Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, English religious sensibilities were in a state of relative disarray. The first parliament assembled under Charles II responded by putting in place a series of laws discouraging all forms of nonconformity by effectively disenfranchising those who adhered to faiths other than the Church of England. This last gasp of Anglican supremacy began to erode during the reign of James II, a self-acknowledged Catholic whose presence on the throne managed to unite the various strains of Protestantism in England behind a fairly durable anti-Catholic front.

          Thereafter when James II was deposed by his daughter Mary and son-in-law William in 1688 (the aforementioned Glorious Revolution), the joint-monarchs and the Parliament that supported them were quick to authorize a series of legislative acts that aimed to solidify the new status quo. Among these was the so-called Act of Toleration (1689), which permitted freedom of religious practice and local religious education to all non-Anglican Protestants. Though said act did not apply to Catholics, and still excluded non-Anglicans from holding political office or accepting positions at universities, it nonetheless became a central plank of the post-Glorious Revolution political settlement. Recalling that many of the founding populations of the various Thirteen Colonies had been members of non-conformist denominations who had departed for America in order to escape persecution under the Anglican Establishment, it should come as no surprise that the Act of Toleration was well-regarded by many among the18th-century colonial population. Even the colonies of Puritan New England, whose zeal for enforcing a religious establishment rivalled that of their English forbears, accepted the alteration to the confessional status quo. Accordingly it would seem quite appropriate for Franklin to have referred in his satiric Rules to freedom of religion as being among the most cherished rights possessed by his fellow colonists. The absence of the same in England was among the chief reasons why many of their forefathers had departed to begin with, as was the promise of constructing societies in the New World for which freedom of conscience was a matter of course. In the intervening century the Act of Toleration and the principles it enshrined in the (shudder) unwritten British constitution became a part of the common legal and philosophical heritage of the English people. In turn their colonial cousins, descended in the main from the same stock and educated via curricula deeply informed by “Revolution Principles,” doubtless developed a matching respect and affection for the guarantee of religious freedom firmly lodged in the concept of English liberties.