The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XII: War and Peace contd.

     The Patriottentijd, or “Time of the Patriots” – to begin a long but hopefully interesting explanation – was essentially the product of three interconnected factors or trends which happened to exert an increasingly profound collective effect upon the fortunes and the prospects of the Dutch Republic as the 1770s gave way to the 1780s. On the one hand, the Dutch economy had entered a period of stagnation at the beginning of the 18^th century following a sustained period of growth and financial dominance over the course of the 1600s. Industry declined, the banking sector became dominant, and while incomes remained statistically stable, the actual gap between the richest and the poorest citizens widened considerably. At the same time, as the economic influence of the Dutch Republic declined, the middle classes in particular began to lose faith in the efficacy of the nation’s political systems. Whereas merchants and artisans has formerly been able to exert considerable influence within the country’s hierarchy of local, provincial, and national councils, the monopolization of influence within a static upper class of bankers and patricians which accompanied the aforementioned period of economic stagnation essentially cut off the middle strata from any hope of social or political advancement. Finally, as these two trends combined over the course of the 1750s and 1760s to produce an acute sense of disenfranchisement and frustration among a significant portion of the Dutch population, the emergence of an organized rebellion in distant British America set in motion a series of events which would bring the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands to the brink of civil war and, arguably, beyond.

    While, at its outset, the American Revolutionary War and the publication of the Declaration of Independence elicited little more than dismissive scorn from the leadership of the contemporary Dutch Republic – with Stadtholder William V memorably referring to the document in question as a, “Parody of the proclamation issued by our forefathers against king Philip II” – the chief officials of a number of the nation’s major merchants cities soon enough become deeply interested in the prospect of securing trade ties with the newly-proclaimed United States. The Dutch West India Company and its shareholders had long been frustrated by British attempts to monopolize all commerce to and from the Thirteen Colonies, and the emergence – and continued existence – of an independent American republic appeared to them a prime opportunity to corner this previously inaccessible market. Trade talks soon began, often behind the backs of the Stadtholder and his ministers, which led to the arrival of American emissaries, the extension of loans, and eventually to formal Dutch recognition of American independence. But while this all seemed to promise, in the long term, a significant financial return, the immediate effect, naturally, was yet another war between Britain and the Netherlands.

    In this instance, however, unlike in the two previous Anglo-Dutch Wars which had taken place in the 17^th century, the Dutch fared very poorly notwithstanding the strength of their navy. Citing “unreadiness” as the general state of the fleet, Dutch naval commanders consistently declined to do much of anything besides maintain their vessels in port. Britain’s Royal Navy, as a result, was able to attack Dutch vessels seemingly at will, and at length succeeded in establishing a total blockade of Dutch waters. The only major engagement, fought at Dogger Bank off the east coast of England in August of 1781, marked a strategic victory for the British and brought the competence of the Dutch navy further into question. Later, when the States-General – the republic’s national legislature – negotiated an agreement with the French to participate in a joint naval action requiring the repositioning of Dutch warships to a naval port in northern France, the force’s reputation suffered a further decline when the admiral responsible refused to follow his orders, citing “unreadiness” once again and a general distaste for cooperating with French authorities. As he was formally his nation’s commander-in-chief, Stadtholder William V shouldered the blame for all of these setbacks, further undermining the reigning regime in the eyes of the Dutch population.

    As all of this was occurring, the Declaration of Independence which William V had so casually scorned gradually began to exert a very significant effect upon the popular imagination of the Dutch middle classes. Lawyers, merchants, publishers, and journalists began to drift towards the conclusion that the American Revolution was indeed a close echo of their own forebears’ struggle for independence against the Kingdom of Spain and that it accordingly constituted something of a moral duty for the people of the Dutch Republic to offer their assistance to those of its American counterpart. Not only did this shift in public opinion make it much easier for the likes of American envoy John Adams to obtain the diplomatic and financial support which Congress had sent him to procure, but it also began to affect how many Dutch people viewed their nation, its system of government, and the prospect of institutional reform. Previous attempts at re-enfranchising the nation’s middle strata had, for a number of reasons, met with failure and reactionary entrenchment, but the idealism that the American Revolution self-consciously embodied – and the efforts of people like Adams and his middle-class allies to promote a sense of Dutch/American collegiality – seemed to lend a new spark to the cause of political liberalization. Pamphlets endorsing reform began to be published in large numbers, the most influential of which was Aan het Volk van Nederland – “To the People of the Netherlands” – by the radical aristocrat Joan Derk, Baron van der Capellen, and the so-called “Patriot” movement began to take shape.         

    The thing that the reformist Patriots focused on in the immediate – as opposed to the reactionary “Orangists,” who broadly supported the continued domination of the Stadtholders of the House of Orange – was the rejuvenation of their republic’s system of local militias. These paramilitary formations, or schutterij, had played an integral role in the opening stages of the Dutch Revolt (1566-1648) by helping to fight off early attacks by troops loyal to the Spanish Crown, the result of which was that the schutterij became an integral element of the Dutch Republic’s founding mythology and a cornerstone of its political culture. And as these city militias were dominated by members of the middle strata of Dutch society – being those able to afford their own arms and supplies – and as their officers were customarily elected by the membership at large, the character of the schutterij tended to be less patrician than the municipal councils while still exerting significant influence upon municipal affairs. But while the image of the urban militia continued to occupy a special place in the popular imagination of the citizens of the Dutch Republic well into the 18^th century, their practical significance had steadily waned since some time in the middle of the 17^th century. At the hands of the regenten – being the pseudo-hereditary patrician class who came to dominate the administration of the republic’s major urban centers – the militias were brought under the direct control of the municipal councils, their elected officers were replaced with appointed local favorites, and what were once military organizations became little more than sporting clubs. In the eyes of the aforementioned Patriots, this process of decline was emblematic of the waning fortunes of the Dutch Republic itself, and they accordingly adopted the project of revivifying the local militias as emblematic of their desire to breath new life into the nation as a whole.

    Efforts to this end commenced in 1783, when various Patriot organizations began to form their own militias entirely independent of the much-reduced schutterij. Characterized as private organizations which were open – unlike the city militias – to members of any religious denomination, the vrijcorpsen, or “free corps,” resurrected the practice of electing their own officers and took to drilling themselves regularly and often very publicly. In some cases, the result was simply that certain municipalities now had two militia formations, one public and one private. In other cases, however, the vrijcorpsen were able to absorb the existing schutterij and effectively take their place within the local political hierarchy. Often enough, the regenten were pleased to allow this to happen, jealous as they were of the power which the Stadtholder had come to wield over the militias in the various cities. But in time it became clear, as the Patriot militias gained more and more influence, that the revitalization of the schutterij was only the beginning of what was to come. Having succeeded in inserting themselves into the political framework of a number of municipalities, the members of the vrijcorpsen accordingly started to agitate for further, more radical reform. Meetings were thus held, beginning in 1784, between representatives of the new militias drawn from across the Dutch Republic. And the end result of these gatherings, among other things, was the drafting of manifestos and compacts by which the gathered members pledged themselves to both the mutual defense of their constituent organizations and the restructuring of the nation’s political institutions.

    Publicized with the aid of Patriot-controlled newspapers, these declarations went on to form the core demands of a series of vrijcorpsen-led movements whose stated aim was to encourage the nation’s major centers of power to disregard much of the customary authority wielded by the Stadtholder and then to adopt new provincial charters based on democratic principles. In Utrecht in 1785, this took the form of a lengthy confrontation between the regenten-dominated city council and the Patriot-led vrijcorpsen whereby negotiations gave way to a series of armed demonstrations and threatened revolts, the final result of which – after more than a year of agitation – was the creation of an elected city government dominated by members of the local middle class. A similar series of events played out in Amsterdam the following spring, with Patriot and Orangist militias and magistrates trading threats of violence and attempting to negotiate with each other and the Stadtholder until finally the former group managed to rally sufficient popular support to have the conservative members of the city council removed. The governments of many other cities gradually followed suit, with the “liberation” of Delft in particular granting the Patriots access to the nation’s largest store of arms and gunpowder, and by 1787 there seemed to be no stopping their movement on its forward trajectory. One by one, the provinces were giving way. All that remained was to confront the Stadtholder himself.

    This confrontation finally occurred – not at all unlike the American Revolutionary War – at the end of a long and tense period of military maneuvering. Confrontations between groups of Orangist and Patriot civilians beginning in the summer of 1785 first led to calls for intervention on the part of the Stadtholder, which then led to a great deal of military repositioning on the part of both the Patriots and the Orangists. At length, when the Orangist-controlled assembly in the province of Gelderland asked the Stadtholder to dispatch troops in response to Patriot efforts to fortify the various municipalities that they controlled there, the force dispatched from Nijmegen proceeded to sack the cities of Hattem and Elburg. The Patriots, duly incensed, demanded that the government of the province of Holland remove William V from command of those portions of the republic’s mercenary States Army which they were then actively financing. When the members of the provincial assembly agreed to do so in July of 1786, the number of troops at the Stadtholder’s disposal was approximately cut in half. Uncomforted, the Patriots who controlled the city of Utrecht then began to fortify their own positions in fear of an attack by what remained of the States Army under William V, the result of which – following the deployment of government troops to a vital strategic location in the area – was the so-called Battle of Jutphaas (May 8^th, 1787), the first and arguably only major engagement between Patriot and Orangist military forces. The Patriots emerged from this skirmish victorious, the Stadtholder’s wife, Wilhelmina of Prussia (1751-1820) was then detained the following month while attempting to return from Guelders to the Hague, and William V was forced to acknowledge the fact that he could no longer hope to preserve his reign with the military forces at his disposal.

    The events that would follow in September and October of 1787, while collectively constituting the abrupt resolution of the Patriottentijd, are unfortunately outside the purview of this present examination. Pierce Butler, in referencing the late behavior of the Stadtholder in mid-September of 1787, could not have known what was to come in the days and weeks ahead. What he did know, however, assuming that the news he received was accurate, was that William V had already behaved quite alarmingly towards his own people. The Stadtholder, to be sure, was not what one might call a tyrant in the classical sense. By all accounts a diffident and indecisive leader, he often hesitated when challenged and could hardly have been described as a latter-day Julius Caesar. That being said, he did make at least one very fateful decision over the course of the events described above. As his authority as Stadtholder was steadily eroded by the successful efforts of the Patriots to reform the governments of the various provinces along broadly democratic lines, William V gradually seemed to arrive at the conclusion that the use of military force was going to be necessary if he were to preserve his position as the head of state of the Dutch Republic. The provinces themselves, under the Dutch federal model, were nominally free to govern themselves as they saw fit, to adopt new constitutions, and to form or to recognize whatever militia formations they deemed necessary. The Stadtholder’s authority in these areas was mostly customary. Indeed, one of the few organs of state over which William V could claim formal authority was the States Army, of which he was Captain-General. When the Orangists who controlled the government of Gelderland requested the Stadtholder’s assistance against what they perceived to be the mounting Patriot threat, William was accordingly within his legal rights to deploy the forces under his command to the affected cities. But while William’s authority over the States Army was not in question at the time, the wisdom of his response and of the behavior of the forces under his command were both severely lacking.

    Seemingly out of fear for what further vacillation might cost him, William V allowed the troops under his command which he ordered to the relief of the Orangists in Gelderland to effectively have their way with the cities of Hattem and Elburg. There was little physical violence involved, it bears mentioning, as the Patriots who initially held the cities offered little resistance when the States Army arrived. Nevertheless, both communities suffered significant looting as well as the purported desecration of their local places of worship. Then, when the Patriots who were at that time in control of the province of Holland succeeded in removing the forces which they were responsible for funding from the Stadtholder’s command, William’s response was to strike out once more with what remained of his forces. A detachment was sent to Vreeswijk in Utrecht to counter a gathering of Patriot militias there and in short order the two forces – some might say inevitably – came to blows. The resulting engagement – commonly known, as aforementioned, as the Battle of Jutphaas – while not a particularly large or costly one, did nonetheless result in its share of casualties. Men were killed, including two of the leaders of the Patriot militias, and all because the Stadtholder could not stand the thought of losing his position. The blame, of course, lay primarily with William himself. Legally justified though he may have been to command the States Army in whatever fashion he wished, nothing could have possibly excused his decision to turn the forces intended to protect the people of the Dutch Republic against some disagreeable contingent of the citizens of the same. That being said, if one were to accept the fact that men like the Stadtholder will essentially always exist – men who, once granted power, will do anything to keep it – the issue at hand becomes institutional rather than personal. The problem, in essence, was not that William acted selfishly, but that the government of the Dutch Republic had no formal checks in place to counter the emergence of a particularly selfish Captain-General.

    This, no doubt, is what Mr. Butler was hoping to communicate. The Dutch Republic and the American republic were very different in many ways. They shared a common origin, it was true, in rebellion against European imperialism, but their respective political cultures and institutions had very little in common. That being said, the two had arguably become bound together over the course of the preceding decades by a kind of reciprocal relationship of amity and inspiration. The Founders of the United States, for example, during the early stages of the American Revolution in the middle and late 1770 , often directly cited  the positive example which they felt the Dutch Republic embodied as the product of a successful republican revolt against an ostensibly overpowering European empire. Likewise, certain of the delegates who attended the Philadelphia Convention in the late 1780s argued in favor of a central government on the Dutch model, particularly in regard to the powers of the nation’s chief executive. And while, as aforementioned, certain authorities in the Dutch Republic looked upon these acclamations with disdain, American notions of liberty and justice nevertheless began to exert a power influence on the Dutch middle classes over the course of the 1780s. While it did still remain true at the time that Mr. Butler was speaking that the chief executive described in the text of the proposed constitution would not much resemble the Stadtholder – whose office, as of the late 1740s, had formally become hereditary – it would still accordingly have felt to many of those in attendance in Philadelphia that the fates of the two republics were somehow tied together. What happened in one of them, to that end, might have seemed prophetic upon the destiny of the other, with failures and successes serving as object lessons which it would not have been wise to ignore.

    Pierce Butler’s admonition, therefore, was that his colleagues pay due heed to the institutional failures recently witness by the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic. Under their system of government – which was historically strongly federal but which had become increasingly centralized under the House of Orange – the office of Stadtholder was mostly customary and ad hoc. Indeed, one of the only spheres over which its authority was grounded in something more than tradition was that of the nation’s combined military forces. And while it was true that previous struggles between the provinces and the House of Orange had taken on a military dimension, no substantial reforms had been made that might have placed limits upon the authority of the Stadtholder over the States Army. The result, as a spontaneous popular movement whose basic principles were antithetical to the concept of hereditary and deeply centralized executive authority gained increasing momentum over the course of the 1780s, was that while the provinces were legally entitled to undertake whatever internal reforms they desired, the Stadtholder remained in full control of the nation’s military apparatus. Under these kinds of circumstances, why should anyone have expected William V to do anything other than seek to preserve his authority? If the power to stymie the Patriot movement yet remained at his disposal, for what possible reason might he have chosen to stay his hand? The efforts of his forebears had placed great power in the Stadtholder’s hands, and he was not about to lose that power if there was something he could do to preserve it.

    This, to be sure, was what Mr. Butler was worried might occur if he and his fellow delegates did not attend to their responsibilities with care. Granted – and as Nathaniel Gorham noted explicitly – while the President of the United States would also fill the role of Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces, the power to declare war would rest solely with Congress, thus seeming to limit the amount of mischief in which the former might indulge. But was this an entirely sufficient check upon the American chief executive? Might not a given President be tempted, especially during a state of war, to make use of their military authority for the purpose of either augmenting or preserving their position? Imagine a scenario in which a war is declared by Congress, it proceeds very poorly, the sitting President takes most of the blame, and disgruntled citizens begin to agitate for his removal. As the Commander-in-Chief, the President in question might then come to the conclusion that said agitators represent a threat to his continuation in office and direct the military to quell the aforementioned dissent. And now imagine that the dissenters resist, take the President’s actions as cause for further agitation, and begin to organize themselves into paramilitary formations. To what extent ought the President be permitted to direct the military to make war upon these dissenters, and to what extent should his powers in this sphere be curtailed? As the supreme authority over the nation’s military forces, his ability to direct the deployment of troops as he sees fit would seem to be amply justified by the law. And during a state of war, when the integrity and security of the nation as a whole is theoretically at stake, shouldn’t the President be given even more leeway than usual?

    Mr. Butler, for his part, answered very much in the negative. As recent events in the Netherlands had very clearly shown, it was not wise to trust an executive with virtually limitless military power. Such a grant, to be sure, made sense in certain contexts. A single individual could doubtless respond to a sudden foreign invasion much faster than could an assembly of equals over whom no one person could claim supremacy. But it also stood to reason that a single individual was more likely to abuse their military authority than a collective body whose members each professed different intentions and ambitions. The Dutch Stadtholder had shown the wisdom of this latter axiom in a particularly dramatic fashion when he turned the authority which had been granted him in good faith against some portion of the people that he was otherwise bound to protect. His formal duty, as the Dutch Republic’s head of state, was not to preserve the integrity of his own position, but rather to see to the safety of the citizens thereof. And while it was true that the Stadtholder was an aristocrat to the core, and that the Dutch Republic as a whole was no stranger to authoritarian leadership, it would have been the height of foolishness to imagine an American chief executive to be immune to the same kinds of temptations to which William V fell prey. A President, thus empowered, might not necessarily abuse their authority. Chosen specifically for the signal virtues which they possessed, they might reasonably be trusted not to seek after opportunities to further strengthen their position. But what if they were not so virtuous? What if they only played at virtue so as to successfully ascend to the pinnacle of political power? What if they turned the military, which was theirs to command by law, against all those who would challenge the indefinite continuation of their reign? The United States, Pierce Butler reasoned, should not leave itself vulnerable to such an outcome, and it was the events of the Patriottentijd that helped to make this quite clear.