Cato, a Tragedy, Part VIII: “What If?” becomes “What Now?”

    Before getting into how the plot, characters, and message of Cato, a Tragedy figures into the American Revolution and potentially influenced some of its participants – which, you’ll recall, was supposed to be what this present series was about – a word or two remains to be said as to the significance of the thing itself. The two are related, which is why they are being addressed together, but one should most definitely be addressed before the other. What was Addison really trying to portray with Cato?” And, as a corollary, how did this figure into the American Revolution? In answer to the first question, the following hypothesis seems as likely as any. Given the political situation in Britain at the time that Addison first sat to pen his drama – with people being actively censured by the Tories in power for too avidly favoring the Hanoverian succession, a pretender to the throne waiting in the wings across the Channel with Louis XIV in his corner, and an army being increasingly purged of anti-Stuart elements – it would seem only natural for individuals of a Whiggish persuasion to have begun to feel some degree of despair. What were their chances, really, of seeing through the terms of the Act of Succession (1701)? What reason was there to assume that the impending death of Queen Anne wouldn’t give way to another civil war? If nothing else, the Whigs and their supporters were in need of something to rouse their spirits. But not, as conventional wisdom might suggest, a story about how everything would work out in the end if they all just held steady. No, that would surely have encouraged too many of them to become complacent. Rather, a story about loss – a tragedy, in fact – was the best possible answer. Show people what will happen if they fight and they lose. Make them fear such an outcome. Make them do anything to avoid it.

    This, arguably, is what Cato, a Tragedy is all about. It is the story, after all, of a civil war. Addison’s hero isn’t being hounded by some cruel foreign adversary, but by but one of his own countrymen. Indeed, by many of his own countrymen. Caesar is the presence whose shadow looms large over all that transpires, but it is Decius, one of Cato former colleagues, who delivers his tidings, and Sempronius, one of Cato supposed allies, who plots to defect to the side of the conqueror. The conflict at hand, as a result, is not one between strangers whose intentions are mutually unknown and unknowable, but rather between people of the same community and traditions. In spite of their common nationality, history, and at times even their common blood, however, these people – these Populares and these Optimates – are willing to kill each other over what is essentially a difference of opinion. People like Cato believe in the sanctity of the ancient Roman Constitution, the institutions that comprise it, and the customs that bound the lot of it together. People like Caesar, meanwhile, hold that the people themselves are the only true source of legitimate authority and that the institutions of the Roman Republic should be torn down or reformed if they obstruct the people’s prerogatives. While both Cato and Addison would claim that it does matter very much which of these perspectives is the correct one – and, in the end, which one succeeds over the other – they also do not shy away from acknowledging the tragedy inherent in such a disagreement ultimately coming to blows. Cato is most definitely willing to die for what he believes in, and in the end does die so as to rob his opponent of the triumph that would be his capture. But he also freely admits that the killing of Romans by other Romans would be a high price to pay even if victory were assured.

    At the time of Addison’s writing, of course, Britain was not in the midst of an out-and-out civil war. Queen Anne was still alive, the Act of Succession (1701) had yet to be either enacted or ignored, and the Whigs and the Tories were still just political adversaries. But what if this suddenly ceased to be the case? What if Queen Anne died unexpectedly in the wee hours of some midweek summer morning? What would the Whigs and the Tories become then? Partners, perhaps, in shepherding Great Britain through an uncertain period in its early history? Adversaries, perhaps, in promoting conflicting visions of what the relationship between Parliament and the Crown ought to look like going forward? Enemies, even, in securing the succession of their preferred heir to the throne and inaugurating a new era in British constitutional history? Any one of these outcomes was possible, if some were more than others. What Addison arguably tried to do with Cato was explore what might happen if the last of the three came to pass. What if Great Britain, like the ancient Roman Republic, was split asunder by a civil war? Bloodshed! Disaster! And what if the supporters of centralization won? Horror! Tragedy! Being shown such an outcome, who would not be moved? Witnessing the demise of such an honorable figure as Cato, who would not feel a weight upon their minds? Tories, certainly, and that rather goes without saying. But what good Whig could bear witness to such a noble sacrifice as that made by Addison’s Cato and not feel themselves bound to serve their chosen cause with greater passion? Who among them would not then resolve to give their all to prevent such a catastrophe from being visited upon themselves? Very few, Addison doubtless hoped. For preference, not a one.

    Thinking about Cato as a kind of speculative morality tale intended to shape the outcome of a potential civil war would seem to cast its popularity in Revolutionary America in a rather interesting light. Notwithstanding the fact that the Revolution did, ultimately, result in the creation of an American republic wholly and perpetually separate from Great Britain, the conflict more closely resembled a civil war in its earliest stages than a war of liberation. It was only after all hope of reconciliation had been exhausted in the hearts of the majority of the leadership of Congress – helped along, in large part, by George III’s Proclamation of Rebellion in August of 1775 – that the goal of the American revolutionaries became de jure independence. Prior to that, in the 1760s and early 1770s, the various disagreements, protests, and remonstrances that eventually set the wheels of separation in motion took place very much within the context of a conversation on the nature of the British Empire and British rights. What the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies seemed to want more than anything during this earlier period – prior to be labelled as criminals by their nominal sovereign, of course – was to be more thoroughly integrated into the legal framework of the British state. They fulfilled their share of responsibilities to the Crown – from paying taxes, to supplying troops, to obeying the commercial regulations which successive British governments deemed to be desirable – and in exchange felt themselves entitled to certain basic civil rights. If they were going to be taxed and required to risk their lives at Parliament’s behest, they thought it only reasonable that they should allowed to elect members to the same. The Bill of Rights (1689) guaranteed the rights of Parliament at the expense of the Crown, it was true, but what good were such guarantees if the right of the people were not also guaranteed at the expense of Parliament? Were the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies not citizens of the Crown? What did the guarantees enshrined in the Bill of Rights mean if moving physically beyond a certain boundary left one outside of their protections? No, the colonists adamantly concluded, if British citizenship mattered anywhere then British citizenship mattered everywhere.  

    Successive British governments, of course, rather vehemently disagreed. Whatever arguments there were to be made concerning the validity of British citizenship rights outside the boundaries of Britain proper – and there were, doubtless, a number – it was the concerted opinion of Whig and Tory administrations alike across the 1760s and 1770s that the demands put forward by various reform-minded groups of American colonists simply weren’t feasible. The distance between the Thirteen Colonies and London, for one thing, was simply too great, and the travel time too lengthy, to facilitate elections, constituency visits, or the calling of emergency sessions in anything like a reasonable fashion. House of Commons elections already took something on the order of a month to resolve. Adding travel time back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean at regular intervals to this timetable would surely have slowed down the business of Parliament to something approaching a snail’s pace. And for another thing, admitting that the American colonists had the right to be represented in Parliament because they were bound by its laws would doubtless have set a precedent to which Britain’s political class would have been loath to adhere. The Irish, for one, whose government was technically separate from that of Britain but functionally subordinate to the same, would have been able to make a much stronger case for either severing ties between the British Parliament and their own or allowing Irish MPs to sit in the British House of Commons. And then there was Canada, Britain’s expanding presence in India, the colonies in the Caribbean, and any other possessions which might be acquired in the future. Part of what allowed Britain’s global empire to function as it did as the 18^th century came to a close was that the bulk of decision-making was heavily centralized. Allowing the inhabitants of every far-flung colonial outpost – or even just the European-descended Protestants among them – to weigh in on how their resources were going to be disposed of and to what extent they were going to be taxed would surely have slowed the pace at which British authorities were able to act and rendered a distinct disadvantage as compared to Britain’s various imperial rivals.

    The disagreement at hand accordingly came down to a kind of standoff between moralism and pragmatism. The American colonists believed, the practical consequences notwithstanding, that if they were going to be taxed, they were entitled to representation; and unless they had representation, they should not be taxed. As commonly articulated, this was very much a moral stance. Recognizing the British citizenship of the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies was simply the right thing to do. British authorities, on the other hand, believed that the Empire functioned best as it was, and that granting representation in Parliament to distant populations would only end up hampering it prospects in the ongoing European contest for global commercial and military hegemony. What was right was certainly important, but not so much as what demonstrably worked. Granting that there was almost certainly no easy way to resolve this dispute – with people in the Thirteen Colonies and in Britain coming down on either side and there being no obvious means of securing mutual agreement – it would be difficult to imagine that anyone involved believed civil war to be the likeliest outcome. Domestic political conflict had given rise to armed conflict in the past, it was true. Indeed, between the Bishop’s War (1639-1640), the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689), the 17^th century had been a particularly tumultuous era in British history during which force of arms seemed to be the only means by which particularly sticky political conflicts were likely to get resolved. That said, the 18^th century had been comparatively quiescent. Even a dispute over something as fundamental as who should sit on the throne came to a peaceful resolution when the death of Queen Anne in 1714 was followed by the relatively uneventful ascension of George I. Why, then, should a disagreement over the payment of a few taxes result in anything more costly than a riot or two and a lot of fevered correspondence? Why should Addison’s prediction have finally come true in the 1770s if the circumstances which gave rise to it in the first place some sixty years prior did not succeed in producing such an outcome?

    While the reasons, in truth, are many, it will suffice for the present discussion to simply say that it did. In consequence, whereas a member of Addison’s intended audience was apt to read Cato, a Tragedy as a cautionary tale – in a “there-but-for-the-grace-of-God” kind of way, ultimately – an American colonist living in the middle 1770s was much likelier to view the conflict described therein as a close reflection of the struggle that was beginning to take shape around them. The result, arguably, would seem to be a crucial alteration in the drama’s apparent emphasis. In 1712, Addison had seemingly been asking of his fellow Whigs what they would do if something like that which he depicted – i.e. a civil war resulting in the erosion of public virtue – came to pass. Or, perhaps more to the point, what would they be willing to do to prevent it? In 1775, however, an American reader of Addison – who nevertheless also thought of themselves as a Whig in good standing – would surely be presented with a different set of questions. For them, it would not be a matter of “what if?” but “what now?” Not a question of prevention, but of response.

    As to what, specifically, an American colonist in the 1770s might have seen when they either read or took in a performance of Addison’s Cato, the way that the intended Whig/Tory dynamic likely mapped onto their present context carries with it some interesting implications.    Granting that the individual in question was as incensed by the behavior of the government of Lord North (1732-1792) in particular as Addison seemed to be by the actions of Tories like Harley and Bolingbroke, they were most likely to see in the titular Cato and his followers a manifestation of their own values and struggles as they were then playing out. Like the Whigs of Addison’s day, the American Whigs of the 1770s – as they had indeed come to be known – were a community defined by their adherence to a particular brand of British constitutionalism wherein the supreme authority of Parliament was directly tied to its ability to represent the people to whom the laws it created directly applied. And like the Optimates to which Cato ostensibly belonged, the American Whigs also valued consistent adherence to established procedure. Addison’s hero, recall, wasn’t necessarily bothered by the notion that Caesar sought to use the military resources at his disposal to achieve a particular objective. Conquest, after all, was what had given rise to and long sustained his beloved Roman Republic. Rather, it was that Caesar was exercising military authority outside of – and in opposition to – the legitimate dictates of the Senate. Just so, it wasn’t just that Parliament was levying taxes upon the American colonists that so profoundly aroused the ire of the latter. The duties in question were, in practice, rather slight, and hardly represented much a burden on the colonial economy. It was that successive majorities in Parliament had decided to recognize the rights of British citizenship on what was essentially a selective basis. Those citizens who lived in Britain proper could count on being at least nominally represented in the body whose privilege it was to determine which of their private monies they owed to the Treasury. But for those who had relocated to distant climes within the Empire, or whose parents, or grandparents, or distant ancestors had done so, this was not to be the case. They were to be taxed without even so much as the illusion of having a say in the matter. Not only was this arrangement fundamentally unjust, but it was also – horror of horrors – highly irregular.

    It would seem to make perfect sense, then, for an American Whig to see their values and their struggles closely reflected in those of Cato and his followers. Cato was not a traitor, regardless of what Caesar’s messenger Decius argued in an attempt to goad him into surrendering. Though Caesar had Rome itself, most of the legions, a good portion of the Senate, and probably most of his fellow countrymen on his side, he could not claim legitimacy in the eyes of one such as Cato. On the contrary, it was Caesar who was the traitor; Caesar who had betrayed the basic values of the Roman Republic; and Caesar who would be held responsible for destroying what he claimed to love. Cato may have been isolated, exiled from the halls of power, and possessed of only the slimmest chance of success, but he knew that he was fighting for what was good, and right, and true. An American Whig, circa 1775, would doubtless have taken solace in such a pathetically heroic depiction. They were being accused, in that moment, by their countrymen of insurrection. They had been told by Parliament, by the Crown, by their supposed compatriots in Britain, and by certain of their neighbors in the Thirteen Colonies that they had strayed from the path of the law-abiding and were venturing dangerously close to treason and rebellion. But did they bend? Did they surrender to the urgings of the powerful and the numerous? No. Like Cato, his allies, and his children, they refused. For they knew, as Addison’s hero knew, that material circumstances – wealth, power, military might, etc. – could not change truth into falsehood or falsehood into truth. The American Whigs knew it for a fact that they were right, and like Cato they would hold out no matter how desperate their cause became.