Similarly
intolerable to the author of Asserted and
Proved – and doubtless intended to appear more alarming to his British
readership than talk of corrupt magistrates in a distant land – was the latent
relationship Otis described as being at play in America between standing
armies, limited local oversight, and the lure of military glory. The principle
element in this unfortunate triumvirate was of course the continued existence
in America of a large British garrison after hostilities with France and Spain
had ended and peace had returned to the continent. As aforementioned, the
presence of these troops was the shared brainchild of Prime Ministers Lord Bute
and George Grenville, both of whom agreed on the necessity of keeping large
numbers of British officers commissioned and paid while also dissuading
potential revolts in newly acquired territory. Not only did this policy
irritate the political sentiments of many in the colonies whose inherited
British social mores rankled at the notion of maintaining standing armies in a
time of peace, but it once more seemed to draw a line under the fact that
Britain’s American subjects were somehow inferior to their British-resident
counterparts. There were no American MPs to vote for the relevant military
expenditures, after all, or to debate the selection of a commanding officer.
British representatives made those decisions, elected by British citizens for
whom America was almost certainly something less than a distant speck on the
horizon. In consequence, if the military forces in question abused their
authority, took advantage of the populations they were supposed to protect, and
in general made themselves the terror of the Crown’s American subjects,
recourse could only be had through remonstrance and petition at a distance of
three thousand miles.
And yet, Otis,
avowed, America would not be the only region of Britain’s vast and growing
empire to suffer from the stationing of military forces so far from the
relevant authorizing body. Granted, Americans stood to suffer first and
foremost, but Britain, too, would sooner or later feel the ill-effects.
“History is full of examples,” he thus cautioned,
That
armies, stationed as guards over provinces, have seized the prey for their
general, and given him a crown at the expence of his master. Are all ambitious
generals dead? Will no more rise up hereafter? The danger of a standing army in
remote provinces is much greater to the metropolis, that at home. Rome found
the truth of this assertion, in her Sylla’s, her Pompey’s and Caesar’s; but she
found it too late: Eighteen hundred years have roll’d away since her ruin.
It is perhaps not
terribly surprising in this instance that Otis should have resorted to a
reference to classical antiquity. His education – between the tutors his father
contracted for him and his siblings and his years at Harvard College –
certainly would have left him both prepared and inclined to describe the
political and philosophical questions he encountered through the lens of
ancient Greek and Roman history. At the same time, it perhaps isn’t clear
precisely whom the comparison of Classical Rome and 18th century
Britain was supposed to flatter. Was Otis, out of a sense of loyalty,
attempting to rouse the supporters of Pax
Britannicus to a keener suspicion of the military authorities they had seen
fit to commission in America? Or was he speaking on behalf of the British
people by seeking a pre-emptive defense against the rise of another tyranny on
the order of Caesar? The answer would seem to depend on which era of Roman
history he had intended to cite.
In terms of sheer numbers, the
scenario described by Otis – of a military commander in the provinces using his
popularity among his troops to cease power in Rome – was far more common in the
3rd century than in any other epoch of Roman antiquity. Indeed,
between the years 235 and 268 as many as a dozen men succeeded to the imperial
dignity through some form of military sponsorship. Maximinus Thrax (173-238),
for example, used his position as commander of the legions in Pannonia – now
the northern Balkans – to depose, assassinate, and replace Emperor Alexander
Severus (207-235). Trajan Decius (201-251) similarly seized the imperial throne
upon the acclamation of his troops during a campaign on the Danube, as did
Aemilianus (213-253) after defeating a Gothic invasion of present-day Anatolia.
So common was this practice that historians – doubtless for the sake of
convenience – have since taken to describing these men as the “barracks
emperors,” and the era in which they rose and fell as the “Crisis of the Third
Century.” If this was the context to which Otis intended to allude, his
comparison of Rome and Britain would indeed appear a flattering one. Granted,
the Roman state of the third century was notoriously weak, corrupt, and bereft
of capable leadership – thus opening the door for successive coups and
usurpations. Nonetheless, it remained the most extensive empire the world had
yet seen. That Britain could reasonably claim this same mantle in 1764 was very
much a source of pride and confidence for its citizens and statesmen alike. The
warning that Otis offered in Asserted
and Proved could therefore easily have been aimed at protecting this glory
from the chaos and tyranny previously suffered by imperial Rome.
Preserve the liberties of the
American people, Otis appeared to assert, and protect those of their British
brethren in turn. This equation only makes sense, of course, if it can be
believed that any of the military commanders appointed by Parliament to oversee
the garrisons stationed in America following the Seven Years War were capable
of either threatening the legitimacy of the sitting monarch or declaring the
colonies a rival empire under their own authority. Certainly, these were the
two paths universally trod by the barracks emperors of Rome’s tumultuous 3rd
century. But while a lack of oversight did much – had done, would do much – to
create opportunities for ambitious generals to seize the initiative and succeed
in rallying their troops to their own personal standard, this was perhaps the
only similarity between the conditions existing in Rome’s provinces in the 3rd
century and Britain’s American colonies in the 18th. British
commanders in far-flung Quebec, in the region of the Great Lakes, and in
chronically insecure Georgia indeed enjoyed significant flexibility – thanks to
three thousand miles and three months distance – as to how and where their
directed their troops. That being said, politics and the military were not so
intrinsically intertwined in 18th century Britain as they had been
for nearly the entire duration of Roman history. British commanders during the
18th century were not politicians-in-waiting in the way that their
Roman counterparts traditionally had been, inclining instead for careers spent
entirely in military service. In addition, while the pay of a soldier serving
in the Roman Legions was in large part determined by the success of his
commander in securing sources of plunder, British regulars in the 18th
century were paid a daily salary at the behest of the Treasury. In consequence,
while the average solider in British service in the 1760s may well have felt a
deeper sense of affection and loyalty towards his commander than his
government, his commander could not guarantee his pay. Thus, without managing
to secure some means of independently financing a rebellion against Parliament
and the Crown – or of guaranteeing success on a short enough timeline as to
ensure continuity of payment – the manner of usurpation Otis warned of in Asserted and Proved would have been next
to impossible to carry out.
Bearing all of this in mind, let us
return to the quotation cited above and consider more closely the choice of
words therein. While ostensibly attempting to warn his fellow subjects of the
threat to the Crown posed by the loosely-supervised military forces then
stationed in British America, Otis notably described the analogous danger to
ancient Rome with the phrase “her Sylla’s, her Pompey’s and Caesar’s.” That
Otis would have chosen Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BC), Gnaeus Pompeius
Magnus (106-48 BC), and Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) as the collective
embodiment of the perils of military tyranny would seem to cast a different
light indeed on his perspective and intentions. These were not figures from
Rome’s imperial history, after all, but rather three of the most prominent
soldier-statesmen of its late republican era.
Sulla, talented
general and statesman, marched on Rome twice in pursuit of his populist rival
Gaius Marius (157-86 BC), thus famously breaking with ancient proscriptions
against the presence of armies within the city limits. During his second
occupation of the city (82-81 BC), after having convinced the Senate to grant
him the office of Dictator, he put to death thousands of people deemed enemies
of the republic and restructured the Roman constitution in a way that shifted
power away from the common citizenry and strengthened the traditional elites.
Pompey, an acolyte of Sulla, was likewise an exceedingly successful commander
and politician whose popularity following a successful campaign in Anatolia
made him a threat in the eyes of the Roman Senate. Thus stymied in his attempts
to secure the passage of populist legislation in 60 BC – guaranteeing, among
other things, the distribution of land to veterans and the urban poor – he
formed an alliance with Marcus Licinius Crassus (115-53 BC), the wealthiest man
in Rome, and the aforementioned Caesar that sought to set the direction of
contemporary Roman politics via the popularity and patronage that the three men
had at their collective disposal. When, following the death of Crassus at the
hands of an Iranian dynasty called the Parthians, Caesar refused to surrender
control of the armies under his command after eight years spent “subduing” the
Celtic tribes in what is now France, this alliance collapsed and Rome was
plunged into a civil war (49-45 BC) that saw the republic wholly undermined,
Pompey killed in exile, and Caesar himself declared Dictator-for-life.
Granting that
Sulla was considered essentially a conservative who championed the traditional
prerogatives of the Roman ruling class while Pompey and Caesar were by and
large populists whose support came primarily from the lower classes and the
army, these three men nevertheless shared responsibility for fatally
undermining – and later destroying – the foundations of republican government
in ancient Rome. Doubtless this was precisely what Otis was driving at by
naming them in Asserted and Proved.
The barracks emperors of the 3rd century may have been more numerous
and perhaps more brazen in their attempts to seize the imperial throne by
force, but they damaged nothing with their actions that wasn’t already in a
state of decay. Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, however, through their greed,
ambition, and pride, brought about the collapse of a republic whose quality and
virtue were idolized by men like James Otis. This evident disdain for Caesar in
particular was made clearer still in a subsequent passage upon the same topic
as cited above. “Whereas a good provincial militia,” Otis avowed,
With such
occasional succors from the mother country, as exigencies may require, never
was, and never will be attended with hazard […] The experience of past times
will show, than an army of 20 or 30,000 veterans, half 3000 miles from Rome, were very apt to proclaim Cesars. The first of the name, the
assassin of his country owed his false glory, to stealing the affections of an
army from the commonwealth.
Again, while the
scenario here described very much applies to the aforementioned
soldier-emperors of the late Roman Empire, Otis’ fixation upon the figure of
Caesar gives plain enough evidence of what he really feared.
Doubtless influenced – as were any
number of his countrymen who later supported the cause of American independence
– by the works of British republican scholars and artists like Joseph Addison
(1673-1719) and the aforementioned John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Otis was
inclined to see in the image of renegade generals a threat to the liberties of
the common people before any particular danger to the political status quo. The
Roman Republic – regarded by contemporary Anglo-American critics of arbitrary
government, corruption, and public immorality as an ideal of socio-political
balance and integrity – had been brought low by the maneuverings of generals
whose ambitions exceeded their virtue. They disregarded the great taboos of
Roman political life in pursuit of the triumphs that their pride demanded and,
in so doing, transformed an oligarchic republic into an autocratic
dictatorship. Admitting that the rise of a figure like Caesar was unlikely to
replay itself in any part of Britain’s 18th century empire for the
reasons cited above, however, could not obviate the danger posed by the
equivalent emergence of ambitious British generals in America. So long as these
military officials were permitted to exercise their power at so great a
distance from the body responsible for holding them to account, and so long as
they accordingly pursued their stated objectives without any need to respect
the liberties of their people among whom they were stationed, the rights of
every British subject were in substantial danger.
As Otis asserted during a discussion
of the implications he perceived at the center of the Sugar Act, even
longstanding prohibitions were next to impossible to reassert once they had
been violated. “This barrier of liberty being once broken down,” he
wrote of the traditional British proscription against taxation without
representation, “all is lost.” This same caution would seem equally applicable
to Otis’ warnings against the garrisoning of standing armies in America. Just as
Sulla’s violation of the pomerium of
the city of Rome – being a ban upon the entrance of armies into the city –
weakened the political conventions of the republic sufficiently to clear the
way for Caesar to do the same, so Asserted
and Proved seemed to argue that the violation of the rights of British
subjects living in America by the commanders of standing armies would make
their subsequent abrogation by these same figures in other parts of the empire
that much easier. For the people of Britain to allow a general stationed in
America to abuse the liberties of the populations he had ostensibly been
ordered to protect – in the name, say, of promoting the collection of taxes
approved by Parliament – would therefore potentially open the way for armies
garrisoned in Cheshire, Middlesex, or even London itself to be put to work
enforcing ministerial prerogatives at the expense of the rights of the general
citizenry. The Crown had no reason to fear this eventuality. The Houses of
Parliament would in all likelihood remain safe from harassment. It was the
people who would suffer – American and British like – as that element of the
British constitution thought of by critics of political centralization and the
growth of patronage as being most republican and classically Roman in character
was eroded by the greed and ambition of a well-placed few.
The
point that Otis was trying to make with Asserted
and Proved, of course, was that this need not have been the case. The
Crown’s subjects in America need not have suffered the presence of military
forces commissioned and paid by a government over which they held no influence.
Nor did the citizens of Britain proper need to endure the abrogation of their
liberties at the hands of generals empowered by the free reign their brethren
were permitted in America. Allow the citizens of British America to elect
representatives to sit in Parliament, Otis avowed, and these looming ills may
yet be averted. Even in the face of the revocation of the various colonial
charters – something which many of his countrymen particularly dreaded – the
author of Asserted and Proved held to
the efficacy of this proposition. “Even when the subordinate right of
legislature is forfeited,” he wrote accordingly,
And so declared, this cannot
affect the natural persons either of those who were invested with it, or the
inhabitants, so far as to deprive them of the rights of subjects and of men [.]
This was an intriguing claim on
the part of Otis, in light of both his largely Anglo-centric approach in Asserted and Proved and the significance
his predecessors and countrymen had customarily attributed to the
aforementioned colonial charters.
Across the history of the
English/British colonial project in America, these selfsame documents were
often closely – one might say at times jealously – guarded by the inhabitants
of the various polities they described. The formal abrogation of the charters
of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New
Jersey as part of their amalgamation into the Dominion of New England between
1686 and 1688 was notably marked by widespread discontent, resentment, and acts
of civil disobedience. The government of Connecticut was famously slow to acquiesce
to this process, forcing Dominion officials to travel to Hartford in 1687 to
take possession of the relevant charter in person. While it cannot now be
conclusively proved, it was reported and believed thereafter that the document
was then hidden in the trunk of a nearby oak tree and a copy presented to the
waiting officials. Two years later, upon the deposition of James II and the
ascension of William & Mary, the Dominion government collapsed amid an
outpouring of popular frustration, caused in no small part by the nullification
of property rights and local governments previously guaranteed under the
revoked charters. The years that followed witnessed the rapid reassertion of
the primacy of these documents and the governments they described, as well as
the 1691 merger of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the formerly charter-less
Plymouth Colony into the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
As this saga alone would seem to demonstrate,
the documents upon which the various colonies of British America were grounded
occupied a special place in the minds of many of the inhabitants therein.
Perhaps it was parochial of them to think so, but some portion of Connecticut’s
governing officers serving in 1687 evidently believed the piece of paper that
described the nature and limits of their authority to be of such great
importance that they could ignore the directives of their nominal superiors so
long as it remained in their possession. At the same time, the citizens of
Massachusetts Bay were well-justified in lamenting the loss of their own
colonial charter when its nullification resulted in the potential dissolution
of their existing land grants and the wholesale restriction of their beloved
town meetings. For James Otis Jr. to thus claim that America liberty, at its core,
was not dependent upon the sanctity of these documents was a novel – perhaps
even alarming – thing indeed. To his thinking, it seemed, being a British
subject of any kind – whether one lived in Bermuda, Bath, or Boston,
Massachusetts – entitled a person to the inalienable enjoyment of certain
fundamental rights. “Deprived however of their common rights as subjects, they
cannot be,” he thus declared, “while they remain such.” Full representation in
Parliament was accordingly the best means of asserting that this essential
moral truth was also a practical, undeniable fact.
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