Cato, a Tragedy, Part IX: “His Baffled Arms, and Ruin’d Cause, Are Bars to My Ambition”

    One of the implications of identifying the American cause circa 1775 with that of Addison’s titular hero, Cato, of course, is that Cato’s adversaries are then necessarily cast in the role of the various adversaries of the Continental Congress. George III, for example, could conceivably be thought of as a kind of ersatz Julius Caesar. Granted, the reigning British monarch was not then attempting to overthrow the established constitutional order for the purpose of enlarging the authority at his disposal. On the contrary, the mere fact of his authority was indisputable and undisputed. But George III, like Caesar at the time that Addison’s Cato takes place, did have a great deal of power at his disposal, both direct and indirect. The British Army and the Royal Navy were at his command, Parliament had proven itself entirely willing to affirm his various prerogatives, and the customs of the British style of constitutional government still lent him a significant amount of executive discretion.

    Even just in terms of the patronage he wielded – the offices he could bestow, the titles he could grant, etc. – George III held a tremendous amount of influence over what transpired – or could conceivably transpire – within the confines of the British Empire. In that sense, while he bore little resemblance to Caesar in terms of his motivations or his relationship to the mechanisms and institutions of the state, George III nevertheless presented a very Caesar-like threat. Notwithstanding what his American subjects thought about how he made use of his prerogatives, or the things the British Army and the Royal Navy did in his name, it would have required a significant effort of will for a contemporary inhabitant of the Thirteen Colonies to confront the totality of what George III had at his command and still affirm that their nominal liege had committed a grave error. As Decius said to Cato during their meeting in Act II, “Rome and her senators submit to Caesar, / Her gen’rals and her consuls are no more, / Who check’d his conquests, and denied his triumphs.” Just as easily, it seems, a supporter of the Crown could have said to a supporter of Congress in 1775 that the entire Empire was at the disposal of King George III, with its armed forces awaiting his orders and Parliament in close agreement as to what must be done. Against all this, who were the rebellious colonists? What hope possible hope could they have of success? And why, given their circumstances, did they not just give in?

    The Continental Congress did not enjoy the support of every single inhabitant of the Thirteen Colonies, of course. In addition to those who generally wanted no part of the dispute that had arisen between certain individuals in British America and the British Parliament and Crown – amounting to roughly one-third of the total population – there were also those who explicitly agreed with the justifications put forward by the government of Lord North and felt that those of their neighbors who offered resistance to British authority were indeed some species of traitor or criminal. The presence of these people, known broadly as Loyalists, speaks to the truly internecine nature of the American Revolution. Loyalists raised local American regiments and joined existing British regiments for the purpose of serving the Crown, willingly submitted their communities to British military control, and generally made it that much more difficult for the forces at the command of Congress to operate safely in certain regions of the Thirteen Colonies. Their motivations naturally varied. Some were driven by a desire for official preferment. Others sought to serve out of a genuine sense of loyalty to the Crown. But the American revolutionaries tended to treat them all the same. Loyalists, to those who had cast their lot with Congress, were but lackeys and lickspittles who instinctively crawled towards the seat of power and to beg for cast-off morsels. Had Congress seemed the safer bet, they would have acclaimed themselves good Patriots. Fundamentally selfish and pitifully ambitious, they simply could not be trusted.

    From the perspective of the Continental Congress and its various military and civilian supporters, the figure who doubtless came to epitomize this archetype was none other than Benedict Arnold (1741-1801). A Connecticut-born merchant and an early supporter of the Revolution whose military exploits during the opening stages of the War of Independence gained him the personal respect of George Washington (1732-1799), Arnold’s later betrayal of the American cause and service to the British Crown thereafter caused him to go down as one of the most notorious traitors in the history of the American republic. The reason for this, beyond the mere fact of having switched sides in the middle of a war for national liberation, was that Arnold’s reasons for behaving as he did – as far as they are known – were so remarkably petty. Having served with distinction at the Siege of Boston (1775/76), led the stunningly successful capture of Fort Ticonderoga (1775), and commanded half the forces detailed for the ambitious but ill-fated Quebec Expedition, Arnold evidently came to believe, as the year 1776 gave way to 1777, that he was entitled to greater recognition than Congress seemed willing to give him. Often, he found himself in disputes with other officers whom he felt did not respect his command. Just as often, he haggled with members of Congress over promotions which he felt he deserved. More than once he attempted to resign, and every time Washington refused to comply and then spoke to Congress on his behalf.

    At Saratoga, in October of 1777, Arnold served valiantly and well, sustaining serious wounds to one of his legs and enjoying the thanks of Congress as a result. Convinced that his subsequent elevation was the result of sympathy rather than respect, however, he determined to hold fast to his mounting sense of bitterness. In 1778, in the summer, he was given command of the recently liberated city of Philadelphia, and subsequently became embroiled in yet another series of disputes with local merchants and politicians. The following April, in 1779, Arnold married the young daughter of a local Tory-leaning merchant. And in May, the very next month, he had word sent to the British commander in New York, Sir Henry Clinton (1730-1795), that he was willing to offer his services, in whatever capacity, to the Crown. While this might seem like a rather sudden turn for someone who had willingly served the cause of Congress and the colonies since almost the moment shots were first exchanged at Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, a moment’s reflection on Arnold’s personality and career in fact makes plain the consistency of his actions throughout the period in question.

    A merchant, as aforementioned, with business interests in his native Connecticut, British Quebec, and the West Indies, his reaction to the passage of the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765) was very much that of a man of his vocation. Having pegged his livelihood to the ability of the ships he owned to transport goods freely between certain of Great Britain’s colonial possessions, he naturally rankled at the imposition of imposts and duties which threatened to cut into his profits. Not only that, but there seemed to be something in the heavy-handed enforcement regime that followed which did not sit well with Arnold’s sense of pride. He was an arrogant man by nature, easily offended and easily driven to jealousy, and the notion that officials half-a-world away should be permitted to tell him were to unload his goods and demand a fee on his cargoes for their trouble sorted quite poorly with his rather delicate ego. That he shortly thereafter joined the Sons of Liberty and began openly evading the relevant commercial regulations speaks to a consequent need on his part to push back against those whom he felt had wronged him. When his pride was wounded again after his military service in Quebec and the slights which he felt had been dealt him as a result, he reacted in much the same way by engaging in disputes and cultivating resentments. When he felt that Congress had knowingly passed him over for promotion, he complained, sought the opportunity to plead his case, and threatened to resign. And when he was wounded for a second time at Saratoga – his leg having earlier been shattered during the disastrous Battle of Quebec (1775) – and viewing his subsequent elevation as a gesture of pity, he once again funneled his sense of resentment into plans for making good. In this case, at first, making good meant using his position as military governor of Philadelphia to reassert his reputation as one of America’s preeminent businessmen. But when this venture, too, failed to live up to his expectations, he turned at last to the notion of trading allegiances. He had gotten involved in the struggle against Parliament and the Crown, after all, because he felt it would be in the interests of both his livelihood and his reputation. And while he had served with no small amount of distinction in numerous significant engagements, what had he really gained as a result? Slights upon his honor. Severe injury. Ingratitude. Disrespect. Congress, it seemed, could not give him what he wanted – nay, what he deserved. If His Majesty could, then so much the better.      

    Now, granting that the above may appear to be something of a digression from the topic at hand, one should accordingly attempt to recall the role which the character Sempronius played in Addison’s little drama. Is he not one of the protagonist’s countrymen whose support gives way to betrayal as a result of arrogance and ambition? For that matter, does Addison not given his audience ample reason to believe that the presence of Sempronius in Utica to begin with is less the result of loyalty and virtue than a degree of miscalculation? Sempronius seemed to believe, at the outset, that the safer bet was to side with the Optimates against Caesar. Perhaps he felt their eventual success to be likely. Or perhaps, as he admits more than once, his desire for Cato’s daughter, Marcia, gave ruin to his sense of reason. Having been refused, however, by Marcia, and viewing Cato’s, “Baffled arms, and ruin’d cause,” as “Bars to [his] ambition [,]” his thoughts have turned – like the aforementioned Arnold – to a change of allegiance. “Caesar’s favor,” he thus avows,

That show’rs down greatness on his friends, will raise me

To Rome’s first honours. If I give up Cato,

I claim, in my reward, his captive daughter.

While Addison could not possibly have meant it so, the parallels between his portrayal of frustrated ambition and the opinions which supporters of Congress tended to harbor for their Loyalist opponents during the Revolutionary War is nevertheless quite striking. What is Sempronius if not an ancient Roman Loyalist? Not, mind you, in the sense that he prefers the status quo to some alteration thereof. In that sense, George III and Caesar are rather on opposite ends of the spectrum. But in as much as Sempronius has decided that power is preferable to principle, he would seem to conform rather closely to the American Patriot perception of contemporary Loyalism and its adherents.

    Indeed, he rather seems a close echo of Benedict Arnold himself. Again, this could not have been the case, strictly speaking. Arnold’s betrayal of the American cause took place some sixty years after Addison died in 1719. All the same, the two men – one real (Arnold), one fictional (Sempronius) – seemed to follow a vary similar path. Both of them, despite their fundamentally mercurial nature, were well-regarded by the leaders of the factions with which the initially identified. Cato, until the moment he hears of the treachery and death of Sempronius, never fails to address him as anything less than an erstwhile friend and colleague to whom the most sensitive errands – like, say, the disposal of a band of mutinous soldiers – may safely be entrusted. And Washington, though hardly aloof from the factionalism and infighting which arguably became one of the hallmarks of the officer ranks of the Continental Army, often came to Arnold’s defense whenever the latter complained that his service had not been adequately recognized by Congress. Ironically enough, Washington even once praised Arnold for his actions in Quebec by way of a paraphrase from Addison’s Cato. “It is not in the power of any man to command success [,]” the Commander-in-Chief thus wrote to his subordinate in 1775, “But you have done more—you have deserved it” While the original quotation is delivered by Cato’s son, Portius, rather than the great man himself, it is fittingly directed at the traitorous Sempronius.

    Another point of commonality between the primary villain of Addison’s drama and one of the prototypical villains of the entire Revolutionary era is the manner in which they each sought to change their respective allegiances. Sempronius, having decided that continuing his association with Cato no longer suits his purpose, endeavors to contact Caesar in secret and make plain his intention to defect as soon as possible. His offer in exchange for Caesar’s embrace? Utica, Cato, Juba; the lot. For the latter, the Numidian prince, Sempronius envisions a particularly cruel fate. “He’ll make a pretty figure in a triumph,” he remarks to his co-conspirator, Syphax, “And serve to trip before the victor’s chariot.” The “triumph” in question was a kind of celebratory parade granted to certain military figures in the ancient Roman Republic as a mark of their success, and which invariably involved displays of plunder and captured slaves. Sempronius thus seems to view at least some of those who stand in his way as little better than ornaments of his preferred patron’s eventual victory. While Arnold, for his part, did not go quite so far as this, he nevertheless adopted a similar tack when he finally determined to throw in his lot with the British Crown. First, as Sempronius sought to accomplish via the cooperation of the messenger, Decius, Arnold made use of his personal connections – or, more specifically, the connections furnished by his Tory-leaning wife, Peggy Shippen (1760-1804) – to reach out to British forces in New York in order to make known his desire to render service. Then, once a connection had been established, Arnold attempted to negotiate an exchange for his defection. Having played his hand carefully, maintaining good relations with Washington and gaining a valuable posting for himself at a key defensive point on the Hudson River, he was accordingly able to offer British General Clinton the American fortress at West Point. While the resulting plot was ultimately foiled – thanks in large part to the capture of Arnold’s “handler,” British Major John André (1751-1780) – Arnold was nevertheless rewarded for his efforts with a commission as a brigadier general in the British Army, a lump sum of six thousand pounds, and an annual pension of three hundred and sixty pounds.

    Prior to the exposure of Arnold’s treachery in the autumn of 1780, mind you, there was still ample reason for an American audience to see in the character of Sempronius an accurate reflection of contemporary Patriot attitudes towards the Loyalists and their motives. Loyalists, as far as the supporters of Congress were concerned, were self-serving, greedy, and ambitious, and pursued service to the Crown only as a means to protect or to improve their personal fortunes. Some were colonial officials whose professional success plainly depended on maintaining positive relationships with Parliament and the Crown. Others were merchants in places like New York, or Philadelphia, or Charleston who were bound to view conflict between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain proper as disruptive to their livelihoods. And others still were Anglican clergymen who understood their position as tending to preclude rebellion against the same monarch who was also Supreme Governor of the Church of England. But while each of these represents perfectly explicable perspectives on the prospect of taking up arms against one’s own nominal countrymen, those who came to support the cause of resistance – and eventually independence – were not inclined to be all that understanding. In their eyes, Loyalists were willing to sacrifice the lives and liberties of others for personal comfort, professional advancement, and profit. Is this not Sempronius to the letter?

    To be sure, Addison’s villain did not accurately reflect the true intentions and motivations of the American colonists in the 1770s who chose to remain loyal to the Crown and Parliament. But neither, for that matter, did he very accurately represent the Tories of Addison’s own era whose principles the playwright opposed with such vehemence. In both cases, Sempronius embodied emotional truth rather than factual truth. Audiences were supposed to see in him a reflection of what they felt, or believed, or suspected, rather than what they knew. And while Addison could not possibly have envisioned that his rapacious, duplicitous, self-serving pastiche of early 18^th century Tory behavior would decades later come to stand in for another political community’s views on their distrusted opposition, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that this is indeed what came to pass. Not only were the Whigs and the Tories still the primary political divisions in the Anglo-American world as of the 1760s and 1770s, but the respective supporters of Congress and the Crown in the contemporary Thirteen Colonies grounded their central dispute along much the same lines.

    The Tories, in Addison’s day, believed that the British Crown was not something which Parliament ought to trifle with, and that – up to a point – its traditional prerogatives ought to have been respected. Just so, while the issue at hand was of a different origin altogether, the American Loyalists of the 1770s adopted a very similar attitude. Notwithstanding the injustice of the taxation scheme which successive British governments had attempted to enforce – a point which many people who came to oppose the Revolution initially admitted – Loyalists tended toward the position that radical opposition to the authority of Parliament was impossible to justify. Precedent, they felt, demanded submission to Parliament, whether one agreed with its decisions or not. To claim otherwise – in light of the tradition of Parliamentary supremacy and the resources at the disposal of the same – was purest foolishness. The result was an attitude much like that of the Tories of the 1710s – i.e. submission to authority, aversion to reform, faith in tradition, etc. – among a very similar group of people. Granted, there were no landed gentry in America – no Tory magnates seeking after ennoblements – but the essential character of the two groups was still broadly the same. Loyalists, like Tories, tended to be wealthy, connected, and own substantial properties. And Loyalists, like Tories, tended to identify very closely with the supremacy of the Church of England. Were the Whigs in Addison’s day all that much different? No, in truth, they were not. But for the supporters of the Continental Congress in the 1770s, the Whigs were heroic figures, virtuous and inspirational. They accordingly declared themselves to be American Whigs, heralded figures like William Pitt the Elder (1708-1778), and proudly claimed to be the inheritors of the traditions laid down by those who had previously supported the Hanoverian succession. It is no wonder, then, that Cato appealed to them, and that a figure like Sempronius seemed so familiar. Cato was their story, just as much as it had been the story a succession crisis some sixty years prior. This most certainly could not have been intended, but it most certainly was the case.