I think by now it has become
clear to my readers – all twelve of them – that there are certain rhetorical
themes relating to the American Founding about which I am more or less
preoccupied. I’m sure, for instance, that I’ve said it enough times for it to
have become a personal aphorism that the American Founders were complex, flawed
human beings, and that it is important to understand them as such. I also know
for a fact that more than one of the essay series presented here have touched
upon the notion that the American Revolution was not a political or
intellectual event that occurred in isolation from the rest of the world.
Intellectual and religious concepts born of the Old World clashed, combined,
and evolved in the New World during the 17th and 18th
centuries and produced a social and political environment that was ripe for a
renewal of existing notions of statehood and state power. These themes, ideas,
concepts, or whatever you want to call them, are extremely important to
developing a nuanced understanding of the origin of the United States of
America, and for that reason have been, and will be, repeated.
If anyone among my audience finds
this to be unnecessary, tedious, or irritatingly didactic, I do apologize. It’s
just that I find the American Founding is so easily and widely misunderstood or
misinterpreted. National origins can inform a great deal about national culture.
Or, to put it another way, where we came from can tell us a lot about who we
are. If the general population of the United States were to come to a
realistic, subtle, and complex understanding of their nation’s founding, I do
believe they would be better equipped to tackle the political and social
challenges that seem to threaten their sense of self than now appears to be the
case. And though I don’t for a moment believe that my provincial scribblings
have any real chance of moving the needle of American popular identity in this
positive direction, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to clearly present what I
think are the most important aspects of the Founding for a readership I choose
to assume is keen to learn. Changing the world can sometimes be as simple as
changing the right mind. Only time will tell how the reimaging of the Founders
presented by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,
or Senator Bernie Sanders’ fearless interrogation of the 21st
century status quo, will reverberate in the culture. Rest assured, however,
they will. Pennies make pounds, and pounds make profits, the British say. Every
little bit helps.
That being said, I don’t
particularly enjoy repeating myself any more than the next person. I have,
therefore, attempted to vary the subject matter of these posts so as to present
the Founders themselves in as varied a light as possible. I’ve discussed the
writings of lawyers, farmers, plantation-owning polymaths, at least two radical
demagogues, an immigrant college student, and a self-educated housewife and
political theorist. Many of them have been examined with an eye towards
reinforcing the same themes stated above, but each has hopefully been given the
chance to breathe and to live and to affirm themselves as individuals. Because
the Founders weren’t really a group, with membership cards, and a meeting hall,
and a rotating chair. They had different perspectives, were subject to
different influences, and brought different approaches to the same set of
problems. They worked together and at cross-purposes, and they loved each other
and hated each other, and each of them had something distinct to say about what
they believed to be the purpose of their nation and its place in the world.
Consequently, understanding the Founders requires more than just a cursory
knowledge of, say, Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. John Dickinson, and
Elbridge Gerry, and James Monroe, and Benjamin Rush were Founders, too, and knowing
them makes it possible to know American better.
In that spirit, I’d like to take
a look at a pamphlet written in 1768 and published in 1774 by a man named James
Wilson. Not alone among the Founders, though certainly unusual, Wilson was an
immigrant to the American colonies. A native of Scotland, his British education
imbued him with a perspective unlike that of his colonial contemporaries, and Considerations on the Nature and Extent of
the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament manifestly bears this
out. Drafted in the heat of the Anglo-American crisis of the late 18th
century, when Parliament and the colonies battled back and forth over the
proper characterization of their shared political and legal relationship,
Wilson’s essay struck a tone of temperance, peerless attention to detail,
careful deliberation, and transparency. Far from the rabble-rousing of Ethan
Allen, the fiery denunciations of Thomas Paine, or the vaguely self-righteous
pontification of Thomas Jefferson, Wilson’s Considerations
treated the conflict between the colonies and Parliament almost as if it were a
legal dispute in need of litigation. Precedent was evidently what mattered to a
man of Wilson’s thinking, and logic, and respect for the rule of law. What the
contemporary British government and the citizens of British America failed to
agree on, he argued, was not what or how much to tax, but rather from where the
reigning ministry summoned the right to extend parliamentary authority over
populations it did not formally represent. Though a highly relevant point of
debate in the late 1760s and early 1770s, this rather nuanced position would
seem to fall outside the modern popular understanding of what the American
Revolution was about. For this exact reason – and because of Wilson’s reliance
on and affection for British/English legal culture – Considerations and its author are worth studying and understanding.
But first...
Born in 1742 in Caskerdo – now
the village of Ceres – in the east of Scotland near the royal burgh of St.
Andrews, James Wilson’s outwardly humble origin as the son of Presbyterian
farmers belies the rich literary and scientific culture he was exposed to in
his homeland. 18th century Scotland, thanks in no small part to the
Act of Union (1707) eliminating the Scottish Parliament and planting the new
kingdom of Great Britain’s political establishment firmly in London, was a
society dominated by a highly-skilled and educated elite of lawyers,
professors, artisans, scientists, and clergymen. Combined with a densely-woven
network of parish schools – the product of a Calvinist religious establishment
that prized literacy – and some of Europe’s oldest universities, Scotland
emerged from its union with England as a centre of literacy, philosophy,
economics, and scientific thought. Young James was accordingly afforded the
privilege of studying divinity, the classics, and political philosophy at the
Universities of St. Andrews (founded in 1413), Edinburgh (founded in 1583), and
Glasgow (founded in 1451) long before his arrival in colonial Pennsylvania.
While he failed to attain a degree from any of these institutions, their
influence on his later writings should not be underestimated. The Scottish
Enlightenment – as the country’s 18th century has become known –
gave rise to the Utilitarianism of Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), the
Empiricism of David Hume (1711-1776), the Common Sense Realism of Thomas Reid
(1710-1796), the economics theories of Adam Smith (1723-1790), and the poetry
of Robert Burns (1759-1796). Born and raised in a society so awash with
creativity, innovation, and intellectual rigor, Wilson would have had to be
particularly dense not to have his mode of thinking fundamentally affected.
Without being able to say why –
it may have had something to do with being one of seven children, likely not
the eldest, and thus ineligible to inherit the family farm – Wilson immigrated
to British America at some point in 1765. He lived first in New York for a
time, and then settled in Philadelphia in 1766. Thanks to the letters of
introduction that accompanied him he was able to secure a tutoring position at
the Academy and College of Philadelphia – a “charity school” founded in 1749
by, among others, Benjamin Franklin – while also studying law under noted
Pennsylvania solicitor John Dickinson (1732-1808). Wilson thereafter attainted
the colonial bar, moved to nearby Reading, and established a remarkably
successful law practice. By 1767 he had done well enough to purchase a farm in
Carlisle, on the west bank of the Susquehanna River, and in a few short years
attained a reputation for himself as one of the finest lawyers in the colony –
if not in all of the colonies. In 1773 he became one of the founding trustees
of the Carlisle Grammar School, then intended to serve the needs of
Pennsylvania’s western frontier landholders, and in 1776 he was chosen to
represent the colony at the Second Continental Congress (1775-1781). Thereafter,
Wilson attended the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, served as a delegate at
Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention, and in 1789 was appointed by George
Washington as one of the original six Justices of the United States Supreme
Court.
Based
on this relatively brief biography, there are a few characteristics James
Wilson brought to the American Founding that are worth pointing out in
particular. As noted earlier, he was an immigrant – and more specifically a
British immigrant. Unlike, say, Thomas Jefferson or John Adams, who were born
and raised in Virginia and Massachusetts, respectively, and were accordingly
forced to perceive and understand “the Mother Country” at a considerable
geographic and cultural distance, Wilson spent the first twenty-three years of
his life in Britain. It was less likely, then, that British law, British
culture, and British politics existed for him as the abstractions – nefarious
or benign – they often became in the colonial American popular imagination.
This, he had in common with Thomas Paine; British natives both, their
understanding of how Parliament functioned, or how authority in Britain asserted
itself more generally, was the result of more intimate experience then
that enjoyed by their various colonial contemporaries. Without stating
unequivocally that this familiarity allowed either of them to speak with
greater authority than most on the subject of Great Britain or its parliament,
it would at least seem fair to conclude that Wilson, like Paine, saw his
homeland through different eyes than his American-born colleagues.
Wilson’s
education also surely set him apart from the great majority of his adopted
countrymen. Whereas most young men in the colonies – outside of New England, at
any rate – were homeschooled until they reached the appropriate age to be
admitted (if they were wealthy enough) to an institute of higher learning – the
College of New Jersey, for instance, or Harvard, or Yale, or Virginia’s College
of William & Mary – Wilson was the beneficiary of 18th century
Scotland’s aforementioned well-developed education system. Having attended
parish schools and three of Europe’s finest universities by the time he was in
his early twenties, he doubtless would have been considered, by the standards
of 18th century America, exceptionally learned. Even without a
structured primary education, this likely would have been the case. Without in
any way denigrating the quality of colonial America’s post-secondary
institutions, their Scottish equivalents benefitted from a deeper talent pool
from which to construct their respective faculties. Situated in Europe –
albeit, cold, damp, Northern Europe – the University of St. Andrews, or the
University of Edinburgh, could potentially attract scholars from across
Britain, or even from distant outposts of the larger British Empire, to provide
instruction to their students. King’s College, for example, though the premier
centre of learning in 18th century New York, was far less likely due
to its distance from the centres of Anglo-American culture to be able to draw
upon the same expansive reservoir of talent and expertise. Having been on the
receiving end of the same, Wilson would have been, if not better equipped than
certainly differently equipped, to perceive, interpret, contextualize, and
react to the political convulsions that wracked the late 18th
century Anglo-American relationship compared to most residents of the colonies.
Also
worth noting, more in relation to the general context in which Wilson found
himself, are the exchanges that had taken place between the colonies and
Parliament at the time Considerations was
written in 1768 and published in 1774. The passage of the Stamp Act in 1765,
intended to raise revenue meant to pay for the maintenance of a large British
military presence in North America, raised ire across the colonies and resulted
in a veritable fusillade of negative press, public demonstrations, and
organized resistance. Unlike previous taxes levied upon the citizens of
Britain’s American dependencies with the intention of regulating commerce, like
the Molasses Act (1733), the Iron Act (1750), and the Sugar Act (1764), the
Stamp Act applied to transactions and purchases made within the colonies rather
than to products imported from without. Colonists from Maine to Georgia
objected to the resulting ubiquity of the levy, and to the fact that it was
explicitly intended to help fill the coffers of the British government.
Accepting that governments were entitled to raise funds in order to defray
administrative and security costs, many American colonists argued – through
street protests, written petitions, and public orations – that said governments
could only tax those whom they adequately represented. Lacking representation
in Parliament, it followed that the colonies could not be made subject to
direct, internal taxes such as was mandated by the Stamp Act. In June of 1765,
three months after said act was granted royal assent, the legislative assembly
of Massachusetts proposed that the various colonies consult with one another in
order to formulate a formal, collective response. Nine colonies responded to
the summons in the affirmative – New Hampshire chose not to participate, and
Virginia and Georgia were prevented from doing so by their governors – and
accordingly sent delegates to the resulting “Stamp Act Congress” in New York
City.
Among the petitions and remonstrances that the Congress
ultimately drafted – intended to convince the House of Common, the House of
Lords, and the Crown to seek the repeal of the offending legislation – perhaps
the most revealing document to come out of the Stamp Act Congress was the
so-called Declaration of Rights and Grievances. Intended mainly for domestic
consumption, it took the form of a manifesto by which the various participating
colonial governments attempted to balance their continued loyalty to the
British Crown with an understanding of British law and custom that rendered the
Stamp Act injurious to the rights enshrined in the British Constitution. “The
members of this congress,” it opened, were, “Sincerely devoted, with the
warmest sentiments of affection and duty to his majesty's person and government
[and] inviolably attached to the present happy establishment of the protestant
succession [.]” To this conciliatory preamble, the delegates added a catalogue
of thirteen numbered grievances that attempted to couch their collective
discontent in terms intended to portray the colonial position as being entirely
compatible with the well-being and self-interest of the greater British Empire.
The second point, for example, declared that, “His majesty's
liege subjects in these colonies are entitled to all the inherent rights and
privileges of his natural born subjects within the kingdom of Great Britain,”
while the third asserted that it was,
Inseparably
essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted rights of Englishmen,
that no taxes should be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given
personally, or by their representatives.
Both of these clauses invoked the
concept of individual rights that were “inherent” or “undoubted,” core to the
notion of being a British subject or an Englishman, and carried with them
certain inviolable guarantees. By calling upon them, the colonists were thus
merely attempting to assert the existence of something that all British people
– living in Britain proper, the West Indies, or rural Massachusetts – were
entitled to, relied upon, and had more than once proven themselves willing to
protect with force of arms. The sixth grievance drove home the perceived
incompatibility of the Stamp Act with British law further still by combining
the hallowed personage of the British Constitution with a rather stark turn of
phrase doubtless intended to deprive the stamp tax of any shred of legitimacy.
“All supplies to the crown,” it read,
Being free
gifts of the people, it is unreasonable and inconsistent with the principles
and spirit of the British constitution, for the people of Great Britain to
grant to his majesty the property of the colonists.
Whereas as tax might be explained
away as an instrument intended to help balance the trade of certain commodities
across a complex economy – a justification many American colonists were willing
to concede – an act of law effectively granting the people of one country the
authority to take at will the property of the people of another was another
beast entirely. To those who truly believed in “the principles and spirit of
the British constitution,” so ran the implication, there was no power on earth
that could make such an act acceptable, or even possible.
Accordingly, the Declarations and
Grievances of the Stamp Act Congress is best thought of as an inherently
conservative document. Rather than deny the appropriateness of something that
had the power of precedent behind it, the assembled delegates asserted that
Parliament was the one guilty of baseless innovation. The government of Prime
Minister Grenville had broken with tradition and violated the terms of the
British Constitution by taxing citizens it could not claim to represent. The
colonists, displeased and distressed by the implication of allowing Parliament
to extend its reach across the Atlantic, countered by claiming only that they
wished to uphold what they understood to be the right and proper legal and
constitutional order of the British Empire. Indeed, the conclusion of the Stamp
Act Congress’s Declaration characterized this impulse as a kind of sacred
obligation. “It is the indispensable duty of these colonies,” it stated,
To the best
of sovereigns, to the mother country, and to themselves, to endeavor, by a
loyal and dutiful address to his majesty, and humble application to both houses
of parliament, to procure the repeal of the act for granting and applying
certain stamp duties [.]
It is worth remarking upon that at
this juncture in the Anglo-American crisis of the late 18th century
neither revolution nor independence was being given serious public
consideration. Far from discarding their relationship with Britain, the
American colonies seemed keen to preserve it – albeit, on the terms they
understood to be correct and justified. James Wilson’s Considerations was drafted three years after the adjournment of the
Stamp Act Congress in October, 1765, and followed very much in the footsteps of
that group’s conservative manifesto.
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