Recall, in the passage from Cato V cited in
the previous entry in this present series, the manner by which George Clinton
sought to remind his countrymen how it was that a formerly virtuous people
could easily cease to be virtuous through no more invasive means than the
passage of time. “The progress of a commercial society begets luxury,” he
advised, “The parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy of restraint
[.]” For a man in his position as of the late 1780s this is potentially a very
revealing sentiment indeed. Clinton was the Governor of New York, after all,
perhaps the most commercially developed of the former Thirteen Colonies and
very soon to become the financial hub of the entire American economy.
Furthermore, recall that though Clinton most certainly benefited from his
state’s economic preeminence – inasmuch as a large quantity of the imported
goods sold in neighboring states had to pass through New York City, allowing
Clinton to raise high tariffs on imports and pass the cost along to people who
lacked the power to remove him from office – he was not himself a man of
business by either upbringing or experience. He had been a militia officer, a
privateer, a magistrate, and a country lawyer, but never a merchant or a trader.
Based on this fact, and judging from the association he was apparently given to
draw between commercial success and rising iniquity, Clinton may actually have
shared with certain of his patrician rivals in New York state politics a
general disdain for the world of commerce.
Granted, the dislike of business harbored
by families like the Schuylers and the Livingstons was almost certainly based
on class – successful merchants, in their minds, being too uncultured to spend
their money responsibly – while Clinton’s seemed to stem from a general
suspicion that excessive material wealth tended to promote “softness” and
indolence. Nevertheless, it did seem as though Clinton’s attitude towards the
cornerstone of his home state’s burgeoning economy was ambivalent at best. As
to why this might have been the case, one potential explanation does come to
mind. As mentioned in a previous entry in this present series, Clinton’s chosen
nom de plume, Cato, was almost
certainly intended to function as a reference on his part to a series of
polemic missives published under that name in the London Journal between 1720 and 1723 by John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon. Prompted by the
aforementioned collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720, Trenchard and Gordon
took to print in order to condemn the institutional corruption which this event
had made manifest before then expanding their critique to include all aspects
of contemporary British political life with which they found fault. Perhaps
unsurprisingly for the time – given the fairly recent incorporation of the Bank
of England in 1694 and the disdain for that institution harbored by
“Commonwealth Party” devotees like Trenchard and Gordon – the increasing taste
for luxury which contemporary British culture seemed to be acquiring quickly
enough became a subject of particular commentary and concern therein.
In Letter 17, for example, published in
1721, the authors in question sought to explain to their readers how it was
that a corrupt administration might very easily take hold of the organs of
state and direct the powers thereof to their own ends without alarming – or
even alerting – the general public. “It is the business and policy of traitors,”
they accordingly explained,
So to
disguise their treason with plausible names, and so to recommend it with
popular and bewitching colours, that they themselves shall be adored, while
their work is detested, and yet carried on by those that detest it.
As to the nature of
these, “Popular and bewitching colours,” Trenchard and Gordon went on to claim
that the aforementioned corrupt individuals would at length have cause to,
Promote
luxury, idleness, and expence, and a general depravation of manners, by their
own example, as well as by connivance and publick encouragement. This will not
only divert men's thoughts from examining their behaviour and politicks, but
likewise let them loose from all the restraints of private and publick virtue.
From immorality and excesses they will fall into necessity; and from thence
into a servile dependence upon power.
Excessive material
comfort, it seemed, served the function of both lure and trap. Not only would
it encourage people to overlook the abuses being committed against their
liberties, but it would breed successive generations to think only of
self-interest and to willingly sacrifice the justice that was their due to any
authority that could promise them further comfort.
Letter 18 contained a similar admonition,
this time in the form of a quotation from a recently-published history of
Ancient Rome written by French clergyman and historian René-Aubert Vertot
(1655-1735). “Pleasure succeeded in the room of temperance,” declared Vertot,
referring to the waning years of the Roman Republic,
Idleness
took place of the love of business, and private regards extinguished that love
of liberty, that zeal and warmth, which their ancestors had shewn for the
interest of the publick; luxury and pride became fashionable; all ranks and
orders of men tried to outvie one another in expense and pomp; and when, by so
doing, they had spent their private patrimonies, they endeavoured to make
reprisals upon the publick; and, having before sold every thing else, at last
sold their country.
Of particular note
in this passage is Vertot’s emphasis – and, by extension, Trenchard and
Gordon’s emphasis – on the degree to which “expense and pomp” encourage people
to adopt and cultivate social distinctions. So enraptured by thoughts of
splendor and self-love, individuals who might previously have given due consideration
to the needs of the state or of their fellow citizens instead willingly
sacrifice all competing concerns to the sole pursuit of luxury and fame.
This same basic theme appeared again in the
text of Letter 24 during a discussion of what Trenchard and Gordon considered
to be the talents required of a people if they were to successfully apply
themselves to the task of self-government. “The administration has been always
best executed,” they avowed,
And the
publick liberty best preserved, near the origin and rise of states, when plain
honesty and common sense alone governed the publick affairs, and the morals of
men were not corrupted with riches and luxury, nor their understandings
perverted by subtleties and distinctions.
As with the
quotation cited in Letter 18, this passage of Letter 24 shows the particular
concern which Trenchard and Gordon seemed to attach to the concept of social
inequality. Not only did they seem to believe that an attachment to luxury make
people dependent on those who could maintain them in a state of material
comfort, but it also served to distract them – by way of cultivating an
obsession with their status vis-à-vis their peers, neighbors, and rivals – from
jealously guarding the rights whose expression was ultimately of much greater
value. Equality accordingly seemed to serve a very practical social purpose to
the authors of Cato’s Letters – and to the aforementioned Vertot. Inasmuch as
people who were acutely conscious of the distinctions under which they labored
within a given society would naturally seek to enhance their position – and its
associated rewards – by whatever means at their disposal, people who were
broadly equal with one another would be less likely to see the profit in
attempting to raise themselves above their neighbors. Thus free from the
distractions wrought by having constantly to measure and shore up their standing,
they might more effectively guard those liberties which formed their
fundamental birthright from subversion by some self-interested cabal looking to
seize control of the organs of public administration.
Bearing this conviction in mind, George
Clinton’s stated belief in the corrupting power of luxury appears somewhat
nearer to being explicable. “The progress of a commercial society begets
luxury,” he wrote, “The parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy
to restraint [.]” Note the connection which the author of Cato V appears to
draw between luxury, inequality, and iniquity. One, he seemed to be saying, begets the other, begets the other. And
while Clinton did not go on to explain why it was he believed that excessive opulence
would ultimately lead a society to cease prizing virtue above all, the general
framework he posited most definitely conforms to that which was earlier set out
by Trenchard and Gordon in the text of Cato’s Letters. Given Clinton’s use of
the same pseudonym as these venerable polemicists, it would seem exceptionally
unlikely that the evident similarities between their commentaries on the nature
of political corruption in 1720s Britain and his admonition on that same topic
to his fellow Americans in the late 1780s was purely the product of
coincidence. On the contrary, it would seem to have been more likely the case
that Clinton – far from alone among this countrymen – had read and been
influenced by Cato’s Letters at some earlier point in his life and career and
thereafter internalized certain of the assertions contained therein as to the
relationship between prosperity, liberty, and political society.
Part of what makes the connection between
Clinton’s expressed principles and those of Trenchard and Gordon so interesting
is what it arguably has to say about the convictions harbored by certain
members of the Founding Generation. Though George Clinton had doubtless been
influenced by a great many different strands of 18th century
European philosophy – a consequence, no doubt, of having access to his father’s
personal library – it would appear that no small part of his essential
convictions were specifically derived from the writings of two
anti-establishment polemicists whose work was published in a country he had
never visited – and would never visit – almost twenty years before he was born.
The authors of Cato’s Letters, though they doubtless hoped that their insights
would maintain some degree of significance even if removed from the context in
which they were offered – i.e. 1720s Britain in the aftermath of the South Sea
Company bubble – surely could not have guessed that this would be the case.
Perceptive though these men most certainly were, surely nothing in their shared
experiences could possibly have led them to imagine that the critiques which
they offered of the conduct of successive British governments at the beginning
of the 18th century would at length serve to inspire the actions and
convictions of one of a cohort of revolutionary nation-builders in the former
Thirteen Colonies almost seventy years later. In spite of the improbability of
such an outcome, however, that is exactly what transpired. Decades after the
“Commonwealth Party” tradition to which Trenchard and Gordon belonged had faded
into obscurity – having wrought little, if any, change to the character of
contemporary British political culture – one of a band of provincial radicals
in a far-flung colonial backwater sought to reassert the significance of many
of the convictions espoused by this selfsame faction in the name of
constructing a republic the likes of which generations of European philosophers
and political theorists could only have imagined.
What
this would seem to mean, in essence, is that the antipathy which Clinton
expressed in the cited text of Cato V towards the influence of commerce and
luxury on the political character of the American people, while most certainly
a reflection of then-current trends in the socio-economic development of the
nascent American republic, also represented a kind of attempted resuscitation
of a political dialogue that had its origins in early Georgian Britain. The
author of Cato V was not alone in this, it bears noting. A significant number
of his fellow Founders also appeared to adopt the language and convictions of
earlier generations of British radicals in their attempts to first castigate
what they viewed as the gross mistreatment of the inhabitants of the Thirteen
Colonies by contemporary British authorities, and then to justify rebellion
against the same. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) spoke glowingly of “revolution
principles” – in reference to the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 – in his
satirical takedowns of British behavior vis-à-vis the American colonies in the
1760s and 1770s. John Adams (1735-1826) directed his readers to the works of
British republican statesmen and theorists like Algernon Sidney (1623-1683),
Marchmont Nedham (1620-1678), Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), and Benjamin Hoadly
(1676-1761) in his 1776 pamphlet, Thoughts
on Government. And Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) paid homage across a number
of his most influential published works to the version of the “social contract”
advanced by John Locke (1632-1704) in his Two
Treatises on Government (1689). The result of this ongoing dialogue between
past and present would seem to have been essentially twofold.
On one hand, the members of the Founding
Generation who took inspiration from the recent history of British radicalism
effectively ended up actively working to validate a set of assertions and
convictions whose soundness had long been almost completely discounted in their
authors’ country of origin. In this sense, the American revolutionaries were
affirming their collective status as the philosophical heirs of Locke, Burnet,
and Sidney, as well as Trenchard and Gordon and their fellow Commonwealth Party
devotees. Far from springing spontaneously out of a provincial backwater with
no philosophical tradition of its own to speak of, the American Revolution
could thus more accurately be characterized as the continuation – indeed, the
realization – of a number of established radical political traditions rooted in
16th and 17th century Britain. And on the other hand,
while in no way discounting the influence of contemporary events and
contemporary attitudes, it would likewise seem reasonable to describe the
various perspectives articulated by a number of the Founding Generation’s most
prominent members as having their origins and foundations rooted firmly in a
much earlier era in the Anglo-American past. Consider, by way of example,
George Clinton’s aforementioned antipathy towards the increasing economic
commercialization then taking place in certain regions of the contemporary
United States.
New York City, as of the late 1780s, was
perhaps the single-most important port-of-entry in the nascent American
republic. As produce from New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York itself flowed
out of its dockyards to be sold in Europe – and in the West Indies, albeit
indirectly – manufactured goods flowed into the same facilities to be sold on
to merchants in smaller population centers across the Atlantic coast. While
less dominant than New York, Boston performed a similar function for the states
in upper New England – with an added emphasis on shipbuilding – as Philadelphia
did for the Mid-Atlantic and Baltimore for the Upper South. Notwithstanding the
overwhelming percentage of the total American population who still made a living
from principally agricultural pursuits, commerce accordingly accounted for an
increasingly significant portion of the American economy. In spite of the
benefits that this trend seemed to offer, however – i.e. access to export
markets for American produce, the ability to purchase manufactured goods that
were otherwise unavailable, the concomitant growth of firms offering purchases
on credit, etc. – people like George Clinton and Thomas Jefferson maintained
that the growing dependence of the American economy on commerce represented a
potentially disastrous development.
Granted, people like Jefferson and his friend and political collaborator James Madison (1751-1836)
harbored a number of personal reasons for their tendency to reject the
increasing commercialization of the American economy. Being farmers by trade –
inasmuch as someone who owns the people that do the actual tilling can really
be considered a farmer – they had cause to resent both the loss of influence
which the decreased importance of agriculture would have precipitated as well
as the increasing presence of merchant firms whose offers of credit they
required to make a living but whose ownership of their debts was a source of
persistent frustration. But George Clinton wasn’t a farmer. Far from suffering
a loss of influence or financial independence as a result of the growth of his
home state’s commercial economy, his status as Governor of New York had if
anything been strengthened by the revenues generated by the high import tariffs
that New York City’s financial dominance had made possible. The likeliest
explanation for his distrust of commerce – and the luxury and corruption which
he felt it would inevitably breed – would therefore seem to lie in political
philosophy rather than personal stakes. Having evidently absorbed the essential
convictions of the Commonwealth Party through the writings of Trenchard and
Gordon, Clinton accordingly seemed to view the events of the 1780s in the
nascent United States through much the same lens as these selfsame radical
polemicists had viewed the events of the 1720s in Great Britain.
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