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

Consistent though Richard Price may have been in his general lack of regard for the ancient republics of Rome or Greece – sources of admiration for the classically-educated elite of Britain and America alike – the ways in which he seemed determined to elide, simplify, or misconstrue the circumstances of certain specific moments in history made for a comparatively uneven series of arguments as presented in Part II, Section IV of his Observations. Granting that there may yet have been some utility in drawing upon the memory of the Corsican Crisis while attempting to convince his countrymen that Britain’s behavior in contemporary American really was deplorable, the basic facts of the Dutch Revolt, the Sicilian Expedition, and the Social War rendered them comparatively ill-suited for a like attempt at conjuring the shame of Price’s fellow Britons. These three latter episodes – as discussed at length in the present series – embraced causes, motivations, personalities, and outcomes almost wholly unlike those present in the Anglo-American conflict.

The Dutch, for example, were fighting for the recognition of feudal privileges against a monarch whose authority was comparatively unchallenged by any codified legal prohibitions. The people of Syracuse were not colonists of Athens, were in fact considered tyrants in their own right by certain neighboring cities in Sicily, and ultimately visited upon their “oppressors” a particularly cruel and ruinous defeat. And the Italian socii turned their arms against Rome essentially to secure the privilege of turning them once more upon the world at large on terms more favorable to themselves. The same – or anything remotely close – could most certainly not be said of the American colonists within the context of their conflict with the government of Lord North. Indeed, the only substantial parallel between the proffered examples and the Anglo-American conflict – excepting the case of the Syracusans – is that the inhabitants of the communities being attacked were all deprived of any formal means of influencing the paramount authority to which they were otherwise bound to submit. Seizing upon this commonality, Price then appeared to twist, mold, excise, or reframe the various unique aspects of the relevant episodes so as to deemphasize their differences from, and accentuate their application to, the moral dimension of the Anglo-American conflict. In so doing, Price doubtless hoped that the disdain with which his countrymen viewed certain bygone examples of tyranny and oppression – on the part of Hapsburg Spain, ancient Athens, and republican Rome, respectively – could be harnessed and redirected towards their own government and its leaders on behalf of the suffering people of the Thirteen Colonies.

Despite the evident manipulation of fact inherent in such an approach, one need not impute dishonesty to the motivations or actions of Richard Price. Willful though his shifting of facts may have been, the sincerity which he otherwise demonstrated within the text of Observations on behalf of the beleaguered American colonists argues strongly in favor of an honest conviction supported by arguments that were more enthusiastic than accurate. Taking the collective implication of Price’s various assertions at face value – flawed though they may have been – once arguably comes away with the strong impression that his personal understanding of the Anglo-American crisis formed part of a much larger historical continuity stretching back several thousand years. Specifically, Price seemed to think that the Anglo-American crisis represented only the latest iteration of a trend which been recurring since at least the Peloponnesian War which famously roiled classical Greece. The powerful, he seemed keen to point out, always prayed on the weak, always abused their power, always attacked those nearest to them, and always committed the most heinous acts while attempting to preserve their power. Sometimes they succeeded – in the case of the French in Corsica and the Romans in Italy – and sometimes they failed – in the case of the Spanish in the Netherlands and the Athenians in Sicily – but justice always argued against their efforts. The Anglo-American crisis, for all its unique characteristics, embodied this same basic dynamic, and cast its major players in the same basic roles. Britain, under the auspices of the North Ministry, was the oppressor. Whether for reasons of political expediency, strategy, pride, or economic imperative, they had determined to direct their power against a comparatively weaker opponent. No matter if they should succeed or fail, their actions were fundamentally unjustifiable. The American colonies, meanwhile, were the oppressed. Seeking only to exercise the liberties to which they believed they were entitled, they suffered to have their freedom denied and their blood shed by a comparatively overpowering opponent whose interests lay only in exploitation and self-preservation. Whether they endured defeat at the hands of their persecutors or triumphed against their foes, their actions were fundamentally laudable.

Any historian worth their salt would of course be given to question such a broad characterization. Granting that, in general, the North Ministry’s actions in America had more in common with the 16^th century Spanish campaign against the rebellious provinces of the Netherlands than with, say, the Bonfire of the Vanities or the Greco-Persian Wars, the differences between them were still quite substantial. Said historian would thus likely cringe at the expressed conviction that the British government’s behavior in the American colonies during the 1760s and 1770s was essentially comparable to that which was exhibited by Hapsburg authorities during the Dutch Revolt. Simply put, the respectively rebellious Dutch and Americans had different priorities, drew upon different cultural influences, were faced with different circumstances, and nurtured different objectives. Just so, the Spanish and British operated from within fundamentally different assumptions as to the nature and extent of their power and the ends which they believed they were working to achieve. Bearing all of this in mind, the aforementioned conscientious historian would almost certainly conclude – and with ample reason – that the attendant arguments offered by Richard Price in Part II, Section IV of Observations were based on a series of false equivalencies, which a more thorough examination of the relevant facts would have shown.

Evaluating these same arguments from a slightly different angle, however, a similarly diligent student of history might simultaneously point out that the accuracy of Price’s assertions is somewhat less important to determining their significance than the mere fact of them alone. Whether the author of Observations was right or wrong in what he attempted to argue, the fact of the matter is – taking him at his word – that he believed what he said to be true. And Richard Price believed, by all indications, that the Anglo-American crisis was not a unique occurrence in human history. Indeed, notwithstanding certain circumstantial differences, it represented the latest repetition of a longstanding pattern. Whether he was right or wrong to make this assertion is fairly a matter for debate. What is much clearer, however, is that Price was not alone. Particularly among the American supporters of resistance to British authority, there were many prominent voices who seemed similarly inclined to think of the conflict in which they were engaged as bearing no small relation to prior episodes from within the course of human history. Consider, to that end, a passage from the text of the Declaration of Independence, published in the same year as Price’s Observations and drafted principally by Thomas Jefferson. Reflecting upon the necessity of rebellion against Great Britain, said document explained that, “All Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.” In seeking moral justification for the radical act that he and his countrymen were about to initiate, Jefferson was evidently given to consider that while historical precedent was on the side of maintaining even particularly obnoxious forms of government, the actions of the North Ministry had made necessary an otherwise unprecedented outcome. Where this sentiment aligned with that earlier expressed by Price was in their shared characterization of history as continuity. The past, in effect, formed the prologue of what both the Declaration of Independence and Observations were attempting to articulate, thus placing the Anglo-American crisis at the culmination of a series of events stretching back to the dawn of human history.

That this perspective indeed formed a significant aspect of Jefferson’s personal ideology is well-attested by certain observations he offered over the course of his life and career. In the text of his celebrated Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), for example – a kind of textbook exploring the ways in which he believed Virginia represented the ideal physical and moral society – the Sage of Monticello expressed the belief that a thorough knowledge of past events was instrumental to the character of a free and virtuous people. “History,” he thus declared,

By appraising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, defeat its views.

Like Price, it seemed, Jefferson was of the opinion that historical events could and did contain some kind of intrinsic moral or practical significance, and that their relation to the present was so near as to make knowledge of them essential to avoiding errors and charting a successful course through the world. Indeed, the cited arguments offered in Part II, Section IV of Observations would seem to serve – or seek to serve – exactly this purpose. Eager to put a stop to actions being taken by his government which he knew to be in error, Price sought evidence and justification in historical example. By thus taking the opportunity to, “Avail [themselves] of the experiences of other times and other nations,” his fellow Britons might accordingly avoid committing the same crimes of which previous generations had been guilty.  

            Jefferson also seemed to align with Price in their shared belief in repetition as a common factor in human history. The arguments cited above from the text of Part II, Section IV of Observations certainly speak to this aspect of the latter’s perspective. Faced with the disagreeable circumstance of his own government making war upon the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies – a people who, in Price’s eyes, had done nothing more than defend the rights to which they were entitled – he was given to reflect that much this same dynamic had played itself out time and again across the length of human history. The purpose of this observation was ostensibly to point out the degree to which the British government in question was effectively ignoring centuries of negative precedent in the evident belief that its own actions were virtuous and permissible. The North Ministry, in short, failed to perceive any faults in its own behavior because its members did not or could not locate their own actions within the larger context of human history. Far from being exceptional, they were in fact only the latest victims of the same tragic tendencies that had been plaguing humankind for millennia.

For his part, Thomas Jefferson expressed what amounted to the same sentiment in a passage from his autobiography, drafted a scant five years before his death in 1826. “There are,” the former President wrote, “Three epochs in history signalized by the total extinction of national morality. The first was of the successors of Alexander, not omitting himself. The next was of the successors of the first Caesar, the third of our own age.” Evidently somewhat embittered by having witnessed the French Revolution – to which he was ardently and famously sympathetic – give way to the autocratic empire of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), the Sage of Monticello now seemed prepared to admit that, far from embodying the death knell of arbitrary authority, the fall of the French monarchy in the early 1790s was but another in a long sequence of instances in which old, staid power structures were replaced by more dynamic – if no less virtuous – ones. In an interesting wrinkle, the party guilty of having ignored the significance of this repeated pattern to the events he was then witnessing was in this case Jefferson himself. In spite of being an avid student of history, and precisely the kind of person who would decry the rise of populist tyranny in public life by making reference to Julius Caesar, he had allowed himself to be blinded to the possibility that the French Revolution represented a historical continuity rather than a historical exception. Had he – and those like him – been more clear-eyed, perhaps the excesses of the Napoleonic era could have been mitigated, the recurrence of the same tired pattern been avoided, and a new era well and truly forged. This was not to be, of course, and so Jefferson was left only to lament – as a man of seventy-eight whose political career was years behind him – that the era in which he lived was not as precedent-shattering as he might have hoped, and in fact represented little more than a somewhat novel variation on a well-trod theme.

A yet more substantial example of this kind of historically-minded thinking within the Revolutionary American tradition can be found in the text of the venerable Federalist Papers, drafted in the aftermath of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 for the purpose of promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution. No. 16 though No. 20 of this series, written by Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) and James Madison (1751-1836) for the purpose of highlighting the weaknesses they believed to be inherent in the confederation of states that then existed in America. The authority of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, Hamilton began by asserting, was limited in its effectiveness by being unable to make laws that could bind the states which were nominally under its authority. He thereafter went on to explain that the impossibility of working around this basic fault without totally altering the nature of the union in question, “Is equally attested by the events which have befallen all other Governments of the confederate kind, of which we have any account, in exact proportion to its prevalence in those systems. The confirmations of this fact will be worthy of a distinct and particular examination.” A premise thus established, Hamilton and Madison proceeded to cite reams upon reams of evidence in an attempt to prove the validity thereof.

Without delving too extensively into what proved to be a fairly lengthy and rigorous historical study, certain citations thereof are most certainly worth making. Consider, for example, the following. “Among the Confederacies of antiquity,” Madison declared at the opening of No. 18, “The most considerable was that of the Grecian Republics, associated under the Amphictyonic council. From the best accounts transmitted of this celebrated institution, it bore a very instructive analogy to the present Confederation of the American States.” Had it not yet been made obvious the purpose to which the authors of the Federalist were presently applying themselves, this statement would surely have accomplished as much at a stroke. History – specifically that of confederate governments – was to be applied to the needs of the present by way of positive and negative example in order to divine the best way forward. Bearing this purpose in mind, Madison proceeded to observe, among other things, the degree to which the aforementioned “Amphictyonic council” was weaker than the “Confederation of American States,” the degree to which it was stronger, the stresses that the former faced as compared to those suffered by the latter, and the extent to which errors committed by these ancient confederates might give notice of the miscalculations which the United States would do well to avoid. On this last count, Madison notably observed, quoting a “judicious observer,” that, “Had Greece […] been united by a stricter Confederation, and persevered in her Union, she would never have worn the chains of Macedon; and might have proved a barrier to the vast projects of Rome.” Few commentaries upon a matter of historical import would surely have seemed more relevant than this to the wellbeing of a collection of newly-independent states surrounded on all sides by the territory of powerful foreign empires.

Federalist No. 19, also by Madison, attempted to turn the histories of the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederacy to a similar purpose as that explored in No. 18. In both instances, the fundamental weakness to which the author attempted to draw the attention of his readers was the tendency of weak confederal government to nurture civil discord, reward narrow ambition, and encourage foreign interference. The Holy Roman Empire, Madison accordingly explained, though it nominally vested paramount executive authority in the office of an emperor elected from among the nobility by a college of his peers, in actual fact consisted for the better part of its history of a fractious collection of kingdoms, duchies, counties, and religious estates whose respective sovereignty was for the most part unchallenged by anything like a national administration. The reason for this was simple enough. “The fundamental principle on which it rests,” Madison avowed,

That the empire is a community of sovereigns; that the Diet is a representation of sovereigns; and that the laws are addressed to sovereigns; renders the empire a nerveless body, incapable of regulating its own members, insecure against external dangers, and agitated with unceasing fermentations in its own bowels.

The issue, as here indicated, was essentially one of power. While the Empire as a whole indeed constituted a formidable collection of princes, dukes, counts, and bishops, there existed within its bounds no authority that could compel all of these sovereigns to act in concert. The Emperor was only as strong as the lands he could claim by hereditary right made him, and his empire was only as powerful as the princes sitting in the Imperial Diet would allow.

If, in consequence, a particular member-state of the Empire – the Duchy of Bavaria, for example – determined to assert a claimed right of sovereignty over another, weaker member-state – the County of Neuchatel, let’s say – the only thing that could have stopped the annexation of the latter by the former was the will of a sufficient number of their fellow imperial subjects as would militarily preclude Bavaria from acting. This coalition might include the Emperor, or it might not; it might stubbornly refuse to give way to Bavaria’s demands, or it might fold very quickly when pressed. Lacking any mechanism by which to appeal for aid, restrain the rapacity of its neighbors, or dispute the validity of a claim against its independence, Neuchatel – or any state like it – would in consequence be forced to vest any and all hope for its continued existence in the whims of potential aggressors and the strategic decision-making of potential supporters. The result of such a tenuous power dynamic, Madison accordingly affirmed, was that,

The history of Germany is a history of wars between the Emperor and the Princes and States; of wars among the Princes and States themselves; of the licentiousness of the strong, and the oppression of the weak; of foreign intrusions, and foreign intrigues; of requisitions of men and money disregarded, or partially complied with; of attempts to enforce them, altogether abortive, or attended with slaughter and desolation, involving the innocent with the guilty; of general imbecility, confusion, and misery.

While the fear and anxiety likely to be occasioned by the prospect of any of these eventualities befalling the United States of America surely justified Madison’s invocation thereof, the notion of “foreign intrusions, and foreign intrigues” doubtless hit particularly close to home. Having just recently secured their independence from Great Britain after a long and costly war, and in the meantime surrounded on all sides by powerful European empires, the inhabitants of the various American states had ample reason to fear being preyed upon, manipulated, or even turned against each other by the great powers of the late 18^th century world. Without a strong central government that might prevent such an outcome – or, indeed, any of the outcomes cited above – by preventing states from pursuing their individual priorities at the behest of the needs of the greater American union, the fate which befell the Holy Roman Empire may yet have transpired within the bounds of the United States.

            The Swiss Confederacy, while inarguably more stable and less given to internal division and bloodshed than the Holy Roman Empire, nonetheless provided no better example to the nascent United States of America of how a confederacy might reasonably be organized. The reason for this, Madison accordingly avowed, was that the historical success of the Swiss was principally a consequence of the multitude of common interests and characteristics which existed among them. Rather than a strong, stable, or robust national administration, their union was sustained by,

The peculiarity of their topographical position; by their individual weakness and insignificancy; by the fear of powerful neighbors, to one of which they were formerly subject; by the few sources of contention among a People of such simple and homogeneous manners; by their joint interest in their dependent possessions; by the mutual aid they stand in need of, for suppressing insurrections and rebellions, an aid expressly stipulated, and often required and afforded; and by the necessity of some regular and permanent provision for accommodating disputes among the Cantons.

Though the contemporary American states might have been said to possess some of these same aspects and priorities in common, the degree to which they were otherwise at odds did not portend favorably for the creation of a confederacy on the Swiss model. Certain of them were indeed quite small – and, by extension, lacking in manpower or natural resources – though others, like Virginia, Massachusetts, or New York, were decidedly not. For that matter, there were plenty of sources of contention among them – from the propriety of slavery to various outstanding land claims – and few dependent possessions to speak of. Bearing this in mind, Madison doubtless hoped it would be plainly evident that the union of American states would require a more robust form of political association than had so far bound the various Swiss cantons if it were to survive the coming 19^th century without devolving into a series of hostile camps or witnessing the annexation of its weaker members by the stronger.

Though differing in their specific focus, all of the citations offered above – from the pens of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison – show in common with the arguments put forward by Richard Price in Part II, Section IV of Observations a decided interest in applying the examples furnished by the past to the practical needs of the present. History, it seemed, for these American statesmen and this British radical preacher alike, functioned as both prologue and proscription for all that followed. Granted, Jefferson’s endorsement of historical education was offered in only a very general sense – both in terms of mechanism and application – while the authors of Federalist No. 15-20 and Observations, respectively, were alternately seeking to justify the adoption of a new form of government and discourage the continuation of a particular course of action. But they were all of them united in a shared belief that the period in which they lived formed part of a larger continuity of events to which they were ultimately beholden. The sense of universalism inherent in this perspective is not only worth remarking upon, it arguably represents the whole of what set this kind of thinking apart within the context of the late 18^th century Anglo-American world. Whereas Lord North and his predecessors seemed given to characterize the issues they daily confronted strictly in terms of the practices and prejudices of the present moment – which is to say, the laws and precedents they were obliged to obey and the desires of those they were indebted to for support – Price and his American compatriots appeared instead to apply to a given problem the whole sum of human experience and knowledge, and to cut across moral, legal, and philosophical dimensions in search of solutions.

Consider, by way of example, the Anglo-American crisis itself. Having determined that the outcome of the Seven Years War required the raising of a substantial revenue from the American colonies, the ministries of George Grenville, the Marquess of Rockingham, William Pitt, the Duke of Grafton, and Lord North thereafter attempted the extraction of the relevant funds in accordance with what they knew to be legal and proper within the context of late 18^th century Britain. In consequence, each of these governments adopted such measures as their members knew to be in compliance with the British Constitution, the statutes then on the books, and such precedents which existed within the Anglo-American relationship. Granted that in certain respects they arguably failed to live up to even this standard, their general approach was a relatively consistent one. Successive British governments, faced with an objective they were determined to achieve, charted the path which appeared most likely to produce success in keeping with the laws and practices extant in Great Britain in the 1760s and 1770s. While no doubt the likes of Price, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison would have agreed that this was a reasonable place to start, the citations offered above would seem to indicate that these four – and other of like mind – would have delved much deeper and wider in search of both inspiration and guidance.

What mattered to Price and to the relevant members of the Revolutionary elite, it seemed, was more than just the laws then in force and the precedents nearest at hand. Such things were important, of course, but a blind devotion to them alone could very easily and unintentionally lead to tragically myopic outcomes. There were the statutes approved by Parliament, yes, and the rights and protection enshrined in the British Constitution, both of which deserved due consideration. But there was also the whole history of human society and government to consider, from Ancient Greece, to Republican Rome, to the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss Confederacy, the Dutch Republic, and contemporary Corsica. Each epoch, incident, or episode carried with it a potential lesson, warning, or insight, and each was no less applicable to the issues which collectively comprised the Anglo-American crisis than were the laws and history of Britain alone. The difference, in essence, was a matter of perception. Lord North and his predecessors, for whatever reason, did not seem to perceive the larger scope of human history as having particular application to the challenges they were made to confront. Given though they may have been, privately, to condemn the actions of the Spanish Hapsburgs in the 16^th century Netherlands, or shake their heads at the haughtiness of Roman statesmen who refused to offer citizenship to those Italians whose blood they freely shed in seeking to expand their burgeoning empire, they appeared not to think that that these cases – or the moral dimensions thereof – should have had anything to do with the decisions they were daily called to make. So what, they seemed to say, if Britain’s treatment of its American subjects appeared to mimic Spanish behavior in the Netherlands? 18^th century Britain was nothing like 16^th century Spain, and the Americans nothing like the Dutch. Whatever similarities one might draw between them, therefore, could not but be wholly circumstantial.

As their cited assertions would strongly indicate, of course, Richard Price, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison would all have had cause to vehemently disagree. To their thinking, the events and implications of the Dutch Revolt did apply to the Anglo-American crisis, as much as the faults inherent in the Holy Roman Empire had some lesson to offer the inhabitants of the nascent American union, or a general knowledge of the past could help to guide a curious citizenry towards the creation of a more just and virtuous society in the present. Rather than see the laws and traditions of a given society – that of Britain, say, or America, or Virginia, – as the only forces capable of shaping political action therein, they argued – implicitly if not explicitly – that the rightness of wrongness of any decision was bound to be measured against the whole of human experience. Not only was this wise, they doubtless would have asserted – bringing to bear a great deal more knowledge and experience than would otherwise be the case – but it was plainly also just and proper. The millions, Hamilton and Madison would surely had affirmed, who perished amidst the chaos and bloodshed engendered by the weakness of the Holy Roman Empire should not be allowed to have died in vain. The equal number, Jefferson would doubtless have agreed, who lost their lives as a result of the warmongering wrought in the ages of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar should not have been made to render this ultimate sacrifice without humanity deriving some useful lesson from it for when such events inevitably reoccur. Any given moment in history, it naturally follows from this kind of thinking, is effectively the culmination of all that has come before it. All the errors committed and warnings derived bear upon the choices made therein. That Richard Price was likewise of this opinion – though not a member of the American Revolutionary elite, where such thinking appears to have been particular common in the 18^th century – should be plain enough from the substance of his arguments as offered in Part II, Section IV of Observations. British though he may have been, in upbringing and education, he appeared in this aspect of his personal philosophy to be as unlike the majority of his countrymen as were the American insurgents with which he freely sympathized.