Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part XVI: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain, contd.

            The justice – or rather injustice – of the burgeoning conflict between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies having been well and fully established over the course of Part II, Section III of his Observations, Richard Price next proceeded to discuss in Section IV the extent to which he believed that the honor of the British state and people were particularly entangled with the outcome of said struggle. The resulting examination, presented under the title “Of the Honour of the Nation, as affected by the War with America [,]” though adopting a rather broad view of the subject at hand, nevertheless managed to frame the position and actions of the contemporary British government with a remarkable degree of moral clarity and rhetorical force. History was Price’s medium of choice, both recent and ancient, and his aim was to translate the shame and odium his countrymen might have been given to feel about a specific incident from the past into a clearer understanding of what their own government was attempting in the present. In so doing, the author of Observations effectively demonstrated the consistency of some of his most loudly-voiced convictions, his continued ambivalence – if not outright disdain – towards the moral character of classical antiquity, and his urgent belief that the events then transpiring in distant America embodied ill portents for the people of Britain proper.

             

            As with previous sections of Observations, Section IV began with Price’s citation of the particular claim he intended to refute. Specifically, it was that which purported, on behalf of the sitting government, “That our honor is engaged; and that we cannot recede without the most humiliating concessions.” Price’s first point in opposition to this stance was a relatively simple one, though by his own admission he rather regretted the fact of it. “A distinction should be made [,]” he avowed,

Between the nation and its rulers. It is melancholy that there should be ever any reason for making such a distinction. A government is, or ought to be, nothing but an institution for collecting and carrying into execution the will of the people. But so far is this from being in general the fact, that the measures of government, and the sense of the people, are sometimes in direct opposition to one another; nor does it often happen that any certain conclusion  can be drawn from the one to the other.
         

Perhaps the most striking element of this passage is the evident gulf it described between the optimism with which Price envisioned government and the sense of mistrust with which he observed it. Granted, previous sections of his Observations attested quite powerfully to his believe that the institutions of the contemporary British state no longer served to accurately represent the interests of the general population. He had also already made it substantially clear that he perceived the British ministerial elite as being almost wholly in thrall to a coterie of bankers, financiers, and merchants whose overriding commercial interests where largely at odds with those of the British people as a whole.

To some extent, however, these specific criticisms constituted  mere sideswipes at a much larger issue. Describing Parliament as unrepresentative and government as corrupt was, after all, something less than stating plainly and simply that the British state and the British people had become separate to the point of working at cross purposes. Corruption and a lack of representation in government were most definitely serious causes of dysfunction to which Price was justifiably motivated to seek some form of remedy. But a state of affairs in which the people wanted fundamentally different – even opposing – things than their government could fairly be characterized as a full-blown disorder. Price’s admission that, “The measures of government, and the sense of the people, are sometimes in direct opposition to one another” could therefore be said to constitute his gravest evaluation yet of the health and wellbeing of contemporary British civilization. After all, a government that works directly against the wishes of its constituents essentially constitutes a rejection of the very definition of government itself. It is not merely dysfunctional, but broken. It does not simply function badly, but rather ceases to function at all.

Interestingly enough, though Price was speaking from within the context of late 1770s Britain – a time and place freighted with any number of very specific issues and influences – exactly this kind of sentiment became a staple of mainstream American political discourse beginning in the middle 1790s. Driven to increasingly virulent factionalism by the pressures exerted on the nation’s yet nascent political culture during the tumultuous post-war years and the debates which accompanied the ratification of the United States Constitution, Americans entered the last decade of the 18^th century arguably more disunited politically than they had been since the first stirrings of the Revolution in the middle 1760s. And while formal political parties were slow to form – consequent to widespread opposition to the concept – the ideological cleavages which would come to define the next several decades of American political life were very much in evidence. Generally speaking, these divisions resolved themselves around two basic philosophical poles, being advocacy for a powerful central government and support for powerful state governments, respectively. The former, falling under the label of Federalism, argued for the creation of national means to address national priorities – from debt, to infrastructure, to the military, to trade – and tended to find its strongest supporter among merchants, financiers, manufacturers, and soldiers. The latter position, adopting the equally vague title of Republicanism, meanwhile conversely advocated for political decentralization as a means of preserving civil liberties, championed policies like easy access to credit and free trade, and was most popular among Southern plantation owners, yeoman farmers, and urban tradesmen.

It ought to come as no surprise that it was the Republican faction – or Republican Party, or Democratic-Republicans – whose leaders and scribes very soon found cause to echo many of the sentiments expressed by the likes of Richard Price in their attempts to describe the dangers they perceived in the governments of President George Washington (1732-1799) and President John Adams (1735-1826). The Federalists who then held the reins of power – led though most of this period by Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) – were variously accused by opposition Republicans of being pseudo-monarchists, slavish Anglophiles, tyrants-in-waiting, and corrupt aristocrats whose financial interests and lust for power had long since overpowered whatever conviction they might once had held to preserve the liberties of their fellow Americans. Republican faction leader Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) captured the extent to which he believed this served to separate the Federalists in power from their nominal constituents in a 1798 letter to fellow Virginian John Taylor (1753-1824), stating that,  

The body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the Union. It was the irresistible influence & popularity of Gen Washington, played off by the cunning of Hamilton, which turned the government over to anti-republican hands, or turned the republican members, chosen by the people, into anti-republicans.

Note the dichotomy that this description presents. The people, Jefferson affirmed, were naturally republican, while the government, by way of influence and cunning, was anti-republican. The difference being inherently artificial and contrived, the natural state of government in America – and thus the natural connection between the people and their administrators – had thus by definition been disrupted.

            A more specific – and arguably more significant – example of this same characterization can be found in the public criticisms Jefferson offered to certain Adams Administration policies in the so-called Kentucky Resolutions. Alarmed by the passage and implementation of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), Jefferson – then serving as Vice-President under Adams – anonymously penned a series of condemnations that were subsequently ratified and published by the Kentucky state legislature. The general thrust of these remonstrances was that the relevant statutes appeared to place the national government above the authority of either the Constitution or the American people. Under their terms, Jefferson explained,

The general government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes, and punish it themselves, whether enumerated or not enumerated by the Constitution as cognizable by them […] they may transfer its cognizance to the President […] who may himself be the accuser, counsel, judge, and jury, whose suspicions may be the evidence, his order the sentence, his officer the executioner, and his breast the sole record of the transaction […] And the barriers of the Constitution thus swept from us all, no rampart now remains against the passions and the power of a majority of Congress, to protect from a like exportation, or other grievous punishment, the minority of the same body, the legislatures, judges, governors, and counsellors of the states, nor their other peaceable inhabitants, who may venture to reclaim the constitutional rights and liberties of the states and people [.]

Of particular note in this passage is Jefferson’s identification of the President and Congress alike as shared source of distress, as well as his evident belief in the efficacy of the Constitution. It was not the very notion of a national government that the leader of the Republican faction feared, it seemed – though his other writings would show that he certainly harbored concerns – but rather the way that said government was used.

The “barriers of the Constitution” and its various enumerated powers were unfortunately only as dependable as the parties involved desired them to be. That the Federalists in Congress and in the cabinet of President Adams had, by Jefferson’s reckoning, chosen to ignore these essential protections in service of their own partisan pursuits thus formed the core of his criticism. Like the North Ministry – whom many of its members had ironically risked their lives to oppose in the 1770s and 1780s – the contemporary Federalist establishment embodied to Jefferson and his Republican cohorts a thing apart from the people whose interests they claimed to represent. The general population, he affirmed in his aforementioned letter to John Taylor, were “substantially republican” while the government was somehow in the hands of “anti-republicans.” The people had chosen to ratify a Constitution blessed with numerous checks upon the abuse of legislative or executive power – ranging from prohibitions against concentrations of authority to protections of due process – while the Adams Administration had seemingly made it possible for the President to act in certain matters of criminal justice as, “The accuser, counsel, judge, and jury,” and left vulnerable, “The minority of [Congress], the legislatures, judges, governors, and counsellors of the states, [and] their other peaceable inhabitants [.]”

One could arguably come no closer than this to the criticism Richard Price had leveled at his own government two decades earlier. For that matter, the further similarities between Price’s condemnations of contemporary British society and the standard Republican appraisal of the culture of government and business fostered by their Federalist opponents – i.e. a denunciation of excessive wealth and corruption, advocacy for political de-centralization, etc. – would seem to affirm the existence of a strong ideological connection between the pre-Revolutionary Old Whig reformism of dissident British intellectuals and statesmen like Richard Price and the post-Revolutionary agrarian populism of opposition figures like Thomas Jefferson. And though the question of whether this connection was direct or indirect – conscious or unconscious – is almost certainly too involved to delve into here, the possibility nevertheless bears acknowledging that some of the core tenets of Jeffersonian Republicanism may have been as much a product of and development from earlier trends in British political culture and public discourse as Hamiltonian Federalism, American Constitutionalism, or the very impulse to resistance that sparked the American Revolution. 

         

            All that being having said, the subject at hand once more demands attention. Price, though evidently keen to point out very early in Part II, Section IV of his Observations that the British government and the British people were not necessarily of like minds in all things – and that he furthermore wasn’t certain whether a dishonor suffered by said government would necessarily reflect at all upon the integrity of its constituents – nevertheless seemed quite willing to put this same assertion aside when examining the fundamental moral implications of the North Ministry’s campaign to quell the ongoing rebellion in British America. Whether the British people generally agreed with Lord North or not was evidently of little consequence in this particular context. In either case, Price avowed, “The disgrace to which a kingdom must submit by making concessions, is nothing to that of being the aggressors in an unrighteous quarrel; and dignity, in such circumstances, consists in retracting freely, speedily, and magnanimously.” This declaration, like so many of Price’s condemnations of the North Ministry’s conduct, served to deconstruct the orthodox British government position by essentially turning it on its head.

To the argument that the nation’s honor had become so wholly tied to the successful pacification of America that no retreat was thought possible without suffering disgrace, Price accordingly countered that there could be no honor in the victory then being pursued. The British cause was fundamentally unjust, the war a wholly unnecessary conflict between members of the same imperial family, and honor could only be salvaged – not won, but salvaged – if wrong was admitted and magnanimity freely offered. Seeking perhaps to place a final emphasis on the validity of this position, Price then proceeded to offer a quote from William Pitt (1708-1778), Whig statesman, staunch opponent of institutional corruption, and noted friend of the American colonies. “RECTITUDE IS DIGNITY [,]” Price cited the former Prime Minister as having said, “OPPRESSION ONLY IS MEANNESS; AND JUSTICE, HONOR.” Having failed to abide by this maxim, the North Ministry and its supporters could make no claim to the possession of honor in their pursuit of victory in colonial America.