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 18^th-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-18^th 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 18^th-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 17^th-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 17^th and 18^th-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 18^th-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 17^th-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-17^th-century English political consciousness, and all were alive and well in the 18^th-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 the18^th-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.