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.

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

As with his citation of the Dutch Revolt in Part II, Section IV of Observations, Price’s subsequent invocation of certain episodes from classical antiquity present a similarly awkward attempt to find broad – and rhetorically useful – parallels between the circumstances of British policy in late 18^th century America and specific incidents in European history. The first of these, offered in brief at the end of an already fairly succinct paragraph, took the form of an exhortation on the part of Price to his prospective audience. “Let any one read also,” he avowed,

The history of the war which the Athenians, from a thirst of Empire, made on the Syracusans of Sicily, a people derived from the same origin with them; and let him, if he can, avoid rejoicing in the defeat of the Athenians.

The event being here referred to is the Sicilian Expedition (415-413 BC), one of the final campaigns of the decades-long Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) between the respective alliances of regional hegemons Athens and Sparta. While Price seemed intent on presenting the incident as another tragic example of a thirst for empire bringing about one people’s unpardonable abuse of their own relations, however, the actual circumstances were nowhere near so cut and dried.

The people of Syracuse, for example, though most definitely of Greek derivation, were in fact the descendants of settlers from Corinth rather than Athens. As Athens was an Ionian city while Corinth was Dorian – these being two of the four tribes into which the Greek people divided themselves – this meant that the people of Syracuse would have spoken a different language, possessed a different culture, and partook of a substantially separate social identity that their nominal Athenian oppressors. Furthermore, while the Athenian motive for invading Syracuse was inarguably tied to Athens’ desire to cut off a potential source of food and military assistance to its Spartan rival, Syracuse was itself something of a local hegemon whose military and commercial resources had allowed it to effectively control the whole of Sicily. Indeed, the first Athenian expeditions dispatched to the island were sent in response to a plea for assistance from another Sicilian city – Leontinoi – whose inhabitants had been struggling for decades to assert their independence from either Syracuse or one of its rivals. Far from an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of a power struggle between rival empires, therefore, Syracuse represented a burgeoning empire in its own right whose interests largely paralleled those of the great powers of the ancient Greek world. 

In consequence of these circumstances, it was not the brutality of the Athenian campaign in Syracuse that sent shockwaves through the contemporary Aegean, or any horror which might have resulted from the sight of a powerful empire laying waste to a related people. On the contrary, what observers at the time found most striking was the degree to which Athens endured one reverse after another without retreating, as well as the scale of that city’s ultimate defeat. The expedition itself had in large part been the product of political maneuvering within the Athenian political scene – playing out as a struggle between pro-Spartan advocates of peace and anti-Spartan supporters of continued war – and accordingly progressed in a somewhat haphazard fashion. For example, while initially proposed in response to a plea for assistance from the Sicilian city of Segesta against a local rival, the pro-war faction advocated for Syracuse as the final target of the expedition – seeing as it represented the greater threat to Athenian interests – and succeeded in redirecting its resources over the course of the journey from Greece to Southern Italy. The scale of the endeavor was also the product of political intrigue, stemming from the efforts of pro-peace partisan Nicias (470-413 BC) to dissuade his fellow citizens from partaking in what he regarded as an unnecessary distraction. Stymied by the successful lobbying of pro-war advocate Alcibiades (450-404 BC), Nicias suggested a dramatic increase of the requested ships and men in the hope that the people of Athens would recoil at the thought of committing so many of their precious resources to what was obviously a needless foreign adventure. This tactic unfortunately backfired when, perhaps encouraged by the suddenly unanimous support for the Sicilian excursion, the assembled citizens enthusiastically approved the revised proposal, thus committing some five thousand men and one hundreds ships to the efforts at a time when Athens could ill afford to lose them.

This seeming comedy of errors continued upon the arrival of the assembled forces at Sicily. The three commanders assigned to lead the expedition – Nicias, Alcibiades, and a veteran soldier named Lamachus – frequently disagreed as to the nature and direction of their mission, with Nicias favoring a very limited campaign and Alcibiades and Lamachus arguing for a more expansive foray against the island’s major power centers. This dynamic was quickly interrupted, however, upon the arrest of Alcibiades by an envoy sent from Athens. Ostensibly accused of certain religious offenses – though in fact the victim of further political skullduggery – the primary advocate and architect of the venture was thus sent home almost before it began. He subsequently escaped from confinement, sought refuge in Sparta, and turned over any number of secrets to his former homeland’s hated rival. Accordingly left to command the expedition between them, Nicias and Lamachus then proceeded to lead an unsuccessful first assault on Syracuse, wintered in Southern Italy while awaiting reinforcements, engaged in a campaign of fortification building and blockades the following summer, and entirely failed to petition sufficient local allies for assistance. The death of Lamachus during this phase of the expedition was followed by the arrival of a relief force from Sparta and Corinth – dispatched, it bears noting, on the advice of Alcibiades – the uniting of all previously neutral Sicilian cities under Spartan leadership, a call for reinforcements from Athens – which Nicias hoped would be refused, and which, to his frustration, was not – and a final Athenian attempt to leave the island that was ultimately thwarted by a mixture of superstition and indecisiveness on the part of their commanders. Suffering a final defeat and surrender in 413 BC after having their ships destroyed and being forced to march inland, what remained of the expedition – between the initial force and subsequent reinforcements, some ten thousand men in total – were either executed, sold into slavery, or left to die of starvation and disease as prisoners of Syracuse.

Granting that this series was never intended to devolve into a recitation of ancient battles or an accounting of the political intrigue which characterized the civilizations of Classical Greece, one may rest easy in the knowledge that the details cited above were offered with a very particular purpose in mind. To wit, while Richard Price seemed intent on characterizing the Sicilian Expedition as being substantially in parallel with the North Ministry’s campaign against the Thirteen Colonies – in that they were both conducted by major imperial powers against a related people who were comparatively overmatched – the facts just now related about the former clearly demonstrate that this was not at all the case. Syracuse was not a colony of Athens, the expedition was not undertaken in order to affirm any supposed Athenian right to rule the island of Sicily, the whole excursion was the product of, and subject to, the arbitrary decision-making of a relatively small number on intriguers and partisans, and the final defeat of Athens came in large part at the hands of its perennial rival, Sparta. There was little one could declare to be particularly unjust in Athens’ behavior towards Syracuse, rather much one could comparatively complain of in the Syracusan treatment of the defeated Athenians, and little in the way of substantial moral significance to the prosecution of the affair or its outcome. Nicias, it might be said, badly misjudged the temper of his countrymen, and Alcibiades might conceivably be chided for making too many enemies and for too swiftly turning on his fellow Athenians. It remains, however, something of an open question what any of this has to do with the war being waged at the time of Price’s writing between Great Britain and the American colonies. While the use of an episode from classical antiquity as reminder of where his countrymen’s sympathies ought to have laid may indeed have served his efforts well – particularly in light of the affection with which many members of the contemporary British elite regarded the history and culture of Classical Greece – the events of the Sicilian Expedition were plainly not what Price desired them to be.

Nor, it seemed, were the circumstances of the Social War (91-88 BC) which the author of Observations next proceeded to invoke. “Read the account of the social war among the Romans [,]” he thus declared.

The allied states of Italy had fought the battles of Rome, and contributed by their valor and treasure to its conquests and grandeur. They claimed, therefore, the rights of Roman citizens, and a share with them in legislation. The Romans, disdaining to make those their fellow-citizens, whom they had always looked upon as their subjects, would not comply; and a war followed, which ended in the ruin of the Roman Republic. The feelings of every Briton in this case must force him to approve the conduct of the Allies, and to condemn the proud and ungrateful Romans.

While this account might reasonably be pronounced be as being being broadly correct, it nevertheless fails to accomplish the objective for which Price deployed it for two basic reasons. First – and most glaringly – the Roman Republic was not ruined by the outcome of the Social War. If it had been, the subsequent transformation of said republic into one of the most powerful and most significant empires in the history of human civilization would surely not have occurred. And second, while the Anglo-American crisis concerned the efforts of certain dependent states of a larger empire to assert the primacy of their domestic independence against imperial encroachment, the Social War conversely stemmed from the desire of a collection of subjects peoples to enjoy a greater share of the rewards which resulted from their hegemon’s various imperial forays.

            Consider, by way of explanation, the nature of the Roman Republic just prior to the outbreak of the Social War. While the centuries which followed the founding of the republican phase of the Roman government – generally marked as taking place in 509 BC – witnessed repeated successful campaigns of expansion and conquest in such disparate regions as the Iberian Peninsula, Greece, North Africa, and Anatolia, Italy itself remained under something less than the complete control of the city of Rome well into the 80s BC. Rather than administer the various Italian provinces which fell outside the direct authority of the Senate via a series of appointed governors – as was the case with non-Italian possessions – power had instead been vested in the individual tribal communities that were native to the areas in question. The government of Southern Italy, for example, was left to indigenous peoples like the Samnites and the Lucani, central Abruzzo to the Marrucini, Vestini, and Paeligni, and Umbria to the Marsi. And while the relationships which these people enjoyed with their Roman cousins varied according to whether they had submitted peacefully to the authority of Rome or had been defeated in war, it was standard procedure for all of the local tribes to see to their own domestic needs while leaving foreign policy decisions to the Senate.

Durable though this arrangement proved, certain aspects of it in time became a source of tension and resentment among the various non-Roman peoples involved. None of them, for instance, were granted the privilege of Roman citizenship, though they fought in large numbers in the Roman legions of the day. Indeed, by the 2^nd century BC, Rome’s Italian “allies” contributed between one half and two-thirds of the Roman field army, and were simultaneously subject to taxation in the form of annual tribute. In spite of having contributed their blood and treasure to Rome’s expansion, however, their collective disenfranchisement ensured that they would never enjoy the fruits of their efforts. Conquered land, held in public trust by the government of the republic, was more often than not doled out to wealthy Roman landowners rather than to those who had helped capture and secure it. In consequence, while certain Romans became richer as the republic expanded, the people doing the actual expanding received hardly anything for their trouble. And though, at the same time, though they remained generally unmolested in their home regions, the Samnites, Marsi, and Vestini were forced by their lack of standing within Rome’s domestic political scene to render up their fighting men whenever they were called upon to do so. Lacking citizenship, they had no place in Rome’s various tribal assemblies, no influence over the elections of its magistrates, and no voice in the Senate during discussion upon war and peace.

Marcus Livius Drusus (130-91 BC), a reformist Tribune of the Plebs – i.e. the elected representative of the common people of Rome – attempted to alter this unequivocally imbalanced state of affairs when he proposed legislation in 91 BC which would have extended Roman citizenship to all of Rome’s Italian allies. Having come to depend on the manpower that these various subject peoples provided, it doubtless appeared to him both good form and good sense to take such measure as would ensure that they had no cause to become unnecessarily disgruntled.  Having already aggravated the traditionalist element of the Roman elite with his incessant politicking over the course of the previous year, however, the proposal was rejected by the enemies of Drusus in the Senate – many of whom also feared the power he would accrue from instantly enfranchising entire communities of potential supporters – and he was subsequently assassinated near the end of his year in office under circumstances which still remain mysterious. Their nearest chance at political empowerment now dashed, the supporters of reform among the Italian peoples almost immediately raised the banner of rebellion. In the conflict that followed, the Italians and Romans alike raised over one hundred thousand men and suffered some fifty thousand casualties each. Despite a series of early defeats – and the death of one of its Consuls – Rome managed to endure the resulting onslaught long enough to carve out a victory for itself by the dawning of 88 BC. At this point, having perhaps absorbed the lesson embedded in Drusus’ support for citizenship reform, the Senate managed to see its way clear to passing a pair of laws intended to both end the Roman-Italian conflict and prevent its future recurrence. The first, approved in 90 BC, was the Lex Julia de Civitate Latinis et Socii Danda, the terms of which extended Roman citizenship to all Italian peoples who had not taken up arms in revolt. This measure was followed in 89 BC by the Lex Plautia Papiria de Civitate Sociis Danda, which further extended the franchise to those Italians tribes who had declared themselves independent two years prior. The Social War – so named after the Italian allies, or socii – came to an end shortly thereafter with the defeat of the inveterate Samnites and the restoration of peace in Italy.

Once again, in light of all that has just been cited, consider the degree to which the circumstances of the Social War compare to those of the Anglo-American crisis and the subsequent armed conflict. The allies were not colonists of Rome who had been planted in the various regions of Italy with the intention of extracting local resources and/or provided markets for Roman manufacturing. Indeed, this might rather be taken to describe the relationship between republican Rome and its various non-Italian provinces, the purpose of which was generally to secure the Roman homeland from attack while providing much needed commodities like grain and iron. Price’s focus was not on Rome’s somewhat dictatorial rule over its extended empire, however, but on its relationship with the Socii, none of whom were of Roman derivation. In consequence, it would also seem fair to conclude that the Social War did not constitute an attempt by a given authority to abrogate the rights or appropriate the wealth of a related people. On the contrary, the issue at the heart of the conflict was that the Italians had no rights within Roman society. It was not the violation of their liberties that prompted them to revolt, therefore, but the fact that their longstanding contribution to Rome’s imperial expansion had yet to be substantially recognized. The Italians, in short, did not simply want to be left to their own devices. Rather, they sought to partake of – and perhaps to some degree direct – the conquests of which their fighting men formed a central component.

Consequent to the above, Price’s affirmations that Rome was ruined by the outcome of the Social War, and that every one of his countrymen would doubtless sympathize with the Italian allies and condemn the Romans, should appear exceptionally curious. What, in truth, had either of these points got to do with the actions of the North Ministry against the Thirteen Colonies? Rome was not ruined by the Social War. Indeed, as of 88 BC, the Romans had barely begun the historic chain of conquests which would ultimately render them the most powerful empire in the known world. And what if the British people did sympathize with the allies? Given though they may have been to identify the glory of their own expansive domain with that of Augustus (63 BC–14 AD) and his successors, there was no reason certain of them wouldn’t be given to compassion when asked to consider the plight of a people so completely subjugated in their foreign affairs to the discretion of an authority they could not themselves control. What of it? The American colonists were fully subjects of the British Crown, protected by their charters and by the terms of the Bill of Rights. Far from contributing to an empire in which they had no share, they benefited greatly from access to markets for their produce, from military and diplomatic protection, and from the ability to purchase some of the finest manufactured goods then available in the world. How, in light of all this, could they possibly compare to the benighted Socii?

Granted, the colonists and the Italian allies alike suffered to have their fates in some part decided by a government in which they had no part. But there the similarity between them substantially ends. Notwithstanding Price’s implication to the contrary, the behavior of the North Ministry towards the Thirteen Colonies did not much resemble the relationship between the Roman Republic and the various Italian client tribes tied to it by treaty. Apart from the conflicts which arose surrounding attempts made to curtail colonial expansion into territories ostensibly set aside for Britain’s Native American allies – a noteworthy but ultimately secondary source of tension within the Anglo-American relationship – the American colonists showed no outward interest in the 1760s and 1770s in receiving a greater share of the spoils of Britain’s continued global expansion. Unlike the Socii, they were not called upon to serve in British campaigns outside of their native environs – in India, say, or Africa, or Europe – and thus had no reason to either expect compensation for the foreign service they had rendered or to be concerned about how they were going to next be put to use. When Americans fought under the British banner, they fought in America, for the purpose – directly or indirectly – of protecting their homes. What concerned them, then, rather than any lack of compensation or consent in the realm of military affairs, was the sanctity of the liberties to which they believed their citizenship and their governing charters entitled them.

The Socii, by comparison, seemed to nurture far more martial intentions. Their primary interaction with Rome was in the realm of military service, and it was through that service that they sought to assert themselves politically. This, in essence, is what the Social War was all about. Having failed to carve out a space for themselves within Rome’s burgeoning empire by taking up arms on behalf of that selfsame republic, the Italian peoples instead sought to achieve the same objective by turning their swords upon their former masters. Noble though such an effort may seem, however – and though Price endeavored to make it appear – subsequent events within the history of the Roman Republic arguably cast some doubt upon the righteousness thereof. Having secured, at great cost, the right to share in the planning and outcome of Rome’s expansionist conflicts, the same Samnites, Marsi, and Lucani with whom Price implored his readers to sympathize proceeded in the centuries that followed to conquer half the world alongside their fellow Roman citizens. Far from endeavoring to seek a voice in Roman politics for the purpose of promoting peace, they instead seemed only desirous of waging war on more favorable terms. One naturally struggles to maintain a degree of sympathy when liberty, hard won, is turned to such ignominious purposes. Price having earlier condemned the Roman Republic for the tyrannical way it governed its provinces in part I, Section III of Observations, he would surely have been of this same sentiment himself. That he appeared to have forgotten the role which the various tribes of Socii must have played in securing these provinces to Roman control would therefore seem to represent either a lapse in memory on his part or an unfortunate side-effect of a particular rhetorical conviction. 

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

The next example Price offered in Part II, Section IV of his Observations, while delving further back into European history, adopted essentially this same approach as his analysis of the Corsican Crisis. The colonies, in this case, were represented by the provinces of the Netherlands which would go on to form the Dutch Republic at the end of the 16^th century, with Britain’s equivalent accordingly being the Kingdom of Spain as ruled by the House of Hapsburg. “The United Provinces of Holland [,]” Price accordingly explained,

Were once subject to the Spanish monarchy; but, provoked by the violation of their charters, by levies of money, without their consent; by the introduction of Spanish troops among them by innovations in their antient modes of government; and the rejection of their petitions, they were driven to that resistance which we and all the world have since admired; and which has given birth to one of the greatest and happiest Republics that ever existed.

While, somewhat curiously, nothing more than this was offered in the aforementioned passage of Observations, the thrust of Price’s intention would nevertheless seem fairly evident. Spain, he endeavored to remind his audience, had brought about the loss of its territories in the Netherlands by precisely the kind of overestimation of its authority that Britain had itself arguably committed in relation to the Thirteen Colonies. Doubtless seeking to drive this point home further, the offences cited by Price as having been committed by the Spanish against the inhabitants of the Netherlands very closely aligned with those the North Ministry had been lately accused of in America. Spain – like Britain, it seemed – had provoked rebellion in one of its dependent populations by, “The violation of their charters, by levies of money, without their consent; by the introduction of […] troops among them by innovations in their antient modes of government; and [by] the rejection of their petitions [.]” If it could be agreed, then, that the subsequent revolt and independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands was wholly justified by these abuses – an opinion which Price most certainly held, and which he seemed willing to attribute to the majority of his countrymen –it seemingly followed that the North Ministry’s parallel policies in America likewise provided ample justification for colonial resistance.

            As with his previous citation of the Corsican Crisis, however, Price’s treatment of the Dutch War of Independence was somewhat lacking in nuance. His citation of the “charters” of the Dutch provinces as having been violated by the Spanish monarchy, for example, somewhat misconstrues the nature and character of the contemporary Spanish Netherlands. Unlike the American colonies to which they were being directly compared, the various counties and duchies which collectively comprised the “Low Countries” were not the product of communal/imperial efforts at exploration, expansion, or commerce. The County of Flanders, for example, was not founded by Spanish settlers in cooperation with royal authorities or with the aid of private capital. Rather, the provinces of the Netherlands were separate feudal possessions which over time were successively inherited by the Dukes of Burgundy (1384), the Archdukes of Austria (1482), and the Kings of Spain (1556). Throughout these periodic transfers of sovereignty, the individual lordships, manors, towns, and church holdings within the provinces began to normalize certain procedures, affirm precedents within the context of their various feudal relationships, and delineate specific privileges as having become, by custom, effectively inviolable. Attempts by Burgundian and Hapsburg authorities to abrogate or elide the primacy of these traditional forms – generally in pursuit of a more centralized model of administration on the model of contemporary France – frequently met with armed resistance, notably culminating in the granting by Duchess Mary (1457-1482) to the States General – a kind of representative assembly of the various provincial authorities – of the so-called “Great Privilege” in 1477. While this guarantee was shortly thereafter abrogated by Mary’s husband, Maximilian of Austria (1459-1519), the memory of its existence arguably served as a kind of rallying point for subsequent revolts against Hapsburg rule.

            By the time the Dutch Revolt began at the end of the 1560s, the formal administration of the Netherlands could thus hardly have been described as streamlined, rational, or harmonious. Indeed, it rather represented something of a patchwork of local, regional, and imperial authorities. Power was shared – unevenly, it must be said – amongst municipal governments, the local nobility, provincial governments, imperial officials, the States General, and whatever governor had been appointed by the Spanish Crown. Perhaps unsurprisingly, hardly any of this arrangement was codified, and there remained an underlying tension between the provincial interests of the various local power-brokers and the centralizing ambitions of their nominal Hapsburg rulers. While this latter characteristic could perhaps also be fairly ascribed to the Anglo-American relationship during the majority of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the history and dynamics of the English/British colonial project were otherwise wholly unlike those which characterized Hapsburg rule in the Netherlands. Whereas the aforesaid counties and duchies were secured in their privileges by a web of customs, traditions, local and regional institutions, and a continually shifting balance of power – almost none of which, it bears repeating, was codified by law – the various colonies all possessed written charters, granted to them under the authority of the Crown, which clearly defined both the nature and style of their respective governments and the character of their relationship with the relevant imperial authorities. To claim, therefore – as Price seemed intent on doing – that the Dutch provinces suffering to have their “charters” violated by the Spanish Crown was the same as the Thirteen Colonies having their governments violated by the British Crown represents something of an awkward and ultimately flawed comparison.

            There could be no question that Parliament and the Crown had violated the sovereignty of The Province of Massachusetts when, in May, 1774, they respectively approved and gave sanction to an act of law revoking the charter of the same. The very fact of the charter indicated the existence of a compact between two parties – the inhabitants of Massachusetts and the British Crown – which could not be independently abrogated or altered by either, and which gave fairly unequivocal evidence that the sovereignty of the one was fundamentally separate from the sovereignty of the other. Just so, while the governing charters of the other American colonies did not necessarily declare and affirm that the British Parliament could not make laws which acted upon them – in the form of taxation, for example, or commercial regulations – the explicit codification of separate legislative bodies would seem quite clearly to indicate that Parliament was never intended to govern America directly. The actions of the North Ministry – and those of the Grafton, Chatham, Rockingham, and Grenville ministries before them – could therefore reasonably be described as standing in unequivocal opposition to the dictums of a relationship that had theretofore been well and clearly established and attested.

Conversely, the same could almost certainly not be said of the actions of the Spanish Crown in the Netherlands in the 1550s and 1560s. As cited above, the privileges, customs, and institutions that largely served to shape the character of Hapsburg administration in the Low Countries were more precedential than explicit. The powers exercised by a given city, noble, or province were not infrequently subject to invalidation, enlargement, or repression depending on the nature of their relationship with either the reigning monarch or their appointed regent, and local potentates were often forced to compete for influence with royal officials imported from some other corner of the House of Hapsburg’s extensive domains. Even if the various privileges had at some point been made explicit, however, this somewhat ambiguous state of affairs would arguably have remained. The fact that the Hapsburg King of Spain was also the recognized feudal lord of the individual provinces of the Netherlands – he was the Count of Flanders, for example, and the Duke of Brabant, and the Count of Holland, and so forth – combined with the inability of either the States General or its various provincial counterparts to exercise much legislative authority, would still have made it something of an open question whether or not the provinces themselves had any standing upon which to offer protest to a claimed violation of their traditional rights. The authority and sovereignty of the individual states of the Hapsburg Netherlands were simply too nebulously-defined, or if defined, unrecognized, or if recognized, unenforced. An honest appraisal of the circumstances immediately preceding the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt in 1568 would therefore arguably have revealed that it wasn’t necessarily clear what the Spanish Crown or its representatives could or couldn’t do, what the cities, nobles, and states could or couldn’t expect, and with whom, in the end, paramount sovereignty ultimately resided.  

Bearing this is mind, the other parallels that Price attempted to draw between the abuses of the British Crown in America and of the Spanish Crown in the Netherlands become somewhat harder to reconcile. The North Ministry absolutely violated the charter of Massachusetts, for example, and arguably violated the charters of the other colonies as well. By comparison, it would be difficult to say that Spain violated the charters of the various provinces of the Netherlands because, as aforementioned, there weren’t really any charters in place to violate. By the same token, while successive British governments did levy taxes upon the American colonies in violation of their sovereign right to be taxed only by a government in which their enjoyed some measure of representation, the King of Spain – Philip II (1527-1598) – arguably possessed the right and authority to do exactly that in the provinces of the Netherlands as the sovereign ruler of the various counties and duchies therein. Furthermore, though the North Ministry did authorize the stationing of troops within the bounds of the Province of Massachusetts without the consent of either the inhabitants or government thereof, thereby violating the spirit – if not necessarily the letter – of one of the key guarantees of the Bill of Rights, Philip II’s earlier use of this same measure could not rightly be regarded in exactly the same light. Revolts having occurred in the Netherlands under both the Burgundians and the Hapsburgs since at least the mid-15^th century, the presence of armed soldiers could hardly be said to have represented an innovation. Granted, popular resentment at the appearance of, say, a garrison of German soldiers dispatched from some possession or other of the Hapsburgs was certainly far from uncommon during that family’s period of rule over the Netherlands. But the fact remains that there were no formal legal prohibitions in place which would either have prevented the relevant authorities from taking such actions or offered censure in the event that they did.

This, in truth, forms the crux of the weakness embedded in the comparison Price attempted to offer. Rhetorically, his approach was sound enough. As with his evocation of the shame and frustration which surrounded the Corsican Crisis, his intention seemed to be to unfavorably compare Great Britain to one of its European rivals. In this case, rather than France, Price set his sights upon Spain, perennial bastion of Catholic supremacy, home of the Inquisition, and unrepentant practitioner of political absolutism. If, he ostensibly determined, he could convince his readers that Britain’s actions in America were as deplorable as Hapsburg Spain’s had been in the Netherlands, some people might actually be shocked into agitating for an end to the North Ministry’s military campaign. While the success of such an attempt would have required the average British reader of Observations to tacitly sympathize with the Dutch Republic and its inhabitants – a less than obvious impulse, given the fraught history between the British and Dutch peoples in the realms of commerce and naval superiority – it remained, on its face, a fairly reasonable approach. Price arguably spoiled it, however, by failing to recognize that Britain’s behavior in America was in many ways substantially worse than that of the Spanish Crown in the 16^th and 17^th century Netherlands.

Make no mistake, the attempts made by Philip II to excessively tax his Dutch subjects, to station foreign troops among them, and, crucially, to stamp out the burgeoning Protestant faith by persecuting non-Catholics and creating a Netherlands chapter of the Inquisition – a point notably absent from Price’s evaluation, it bears noting – were cruel, imperious, and morally unjustifiable. But neither Spain nor the extensive dominions of the Hapsburgs recognized anything like the guarantees written into the 17^th century British Constitution which prohibited taxation without consent or the arbitrary use of standing armies. At the same time, the guarantees which the various provinces of the Netherlands believed they were entitled to took the form of unwritten customs rather than codified – and mutually agreed-upon – charters. Spain’s actions in the 16^th century Netherlands, therefore, while by any measure undeniably deplorable, could not be said to have violated any unambiguous legal proscriptions, injunctions, or agreements. By comparison, the policies enacted by successive British governments and directed at the American colonies over the course of the 1760s and 1770s flagrantly infringed upon a number of explicitly enumerated constitutional protections embedded in both the Bill of Rights and in the various colonial charters to which the Crown was a party. That Price, as aforementioned, failed to recognize this fact, and thus failed to make use of the rhetorical power it embodied, would seem to represent something of an error on his part. His argument, in short, could have been stronger.

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

            Next seeking evidence of the kind of behavior he believed his countrymen would have no trouble identifying as wholly dishonorable – and which, by comparison, might expose the dishonor in the actions of the North Ministry – Price turned his attention to a wide swath of European history ranging from the recent past to distant antiquity. The first of four examples he thus endeavored to present was one which could not but have still been fresh in the minds of his prospective audience, encompassing, as it did, events which took place less than a decade prior. “How have we felt for the brave Corsicans,” Price accordingly inquired, “In their struggle with the Genoese, and afterwards with the French government?” The occasion being referred to was the so-called “Corsican Crisis” of 1768-69, the outcome of which had caused the downfall of the government of the Duke of Grafton (1735-1811). Corsica, being a small island in the Mediterranean Sea located south of the coast of Liguria and north of the larger island of Sardinia, had been under the control of the Republic of Genoa for the better part of five centuries when, in the 1750s, a revolt broke out among its native inhabitants. The revolutionaries, led by one Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807), managed to successfully fight off Genoese authorities for nine years, at which point – despairing of success – the Genoese turned to the Kingdom of France for aid. France obliged, dispatched troops to the island in 1764, and erected a blockade of its major fortresses and ports. When this effort likewise resulted in failure – and with the Genoese now in debt to France for their assistance – a treaty was signed in 1768 whereby Corsica was effectively sold to the French in exchange for their forgiveness of Genoa’s obligations.
         

            The point at which this ostensibly regional power struggle became a matter of international importance – to the point of collapsing a British government by its outcome – lay chiefly in the relationship which the aforementioned Paoli sought to forge between his own provisional government and that of Great Britain. Under the leadership of Paoli, the self-proclaimed Corsican Republic adopted an exceedingly liberal constitution whereby all men aged twenty-five or above possessed the right to elect representatives every three years to a national legislature that met in the capital of Corte. News of this development – and of Paoli’s noted admiration for the British form of government – was well-received by authorities in Britain, many of whom both sympathized with the Corsican plight and perceived in the rebellion a means of thwarting the territorial ambitions of the Kingdom of France. In spite of these warm feelings towards the people of Corsica, however, the government of the Duke of Grafton declined to intervene upon France’s invasion of the island in 1768. While both Grafton and his foreign secretary, future Prime Minister Lord Shelburne (1737-1809), expressed alarm at the Corsican’s increasingly desperate state of affairs, they both likewise agreed that Britain was neither equipped nor inclined to interfere. Events then playing out in Britain’s American dependencies appeared to them of more pressing concern, and it was felt by them safer to appease the French than antagonize them unnecessarily.

            The result, for the Grafton ministry, was something of a paradox. Thanks to the efforts of people like James Boswell (1740-1795), a Scottish biographer who popularized sympathy for Corsica with the publication of a first-hand account of his 1765 journey to the island, British public opinion was very much on the side of military intervention. Donations were solicited and dispatched to the embattled islanders, a brace of cannons was ordered and sent from the famous Carron Ironworks in Falkirk, and public agitation steadily mounted for some form of rescue, either by Britain alone or in alliance with other states. Unfortunately for the Grafton Ministry, neither option appeared at that time to be particularly attractive. Having lost most of its traditional allies in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1754-1763), Britain was in the midst of a period of diplomatic isolation at the time that the Corsican Crisis emerged. What little effort the aforementioned Shelburne expended to forge an anti-French coalition accordingly met with a lukewarm reception, and such efforts were ultimately and quickly suspended. As unilateral action at the same time appeared unwise due to the resources it would draw away from the increasingly restive American colonies, Grafton opted instead to do nothing at all. In due course, this proved a disastrous choice for Britain’s global reputation and the integrity of its government.

The French managed to inflict a final and crushing defeat upon the Corsicans at the Battle of Ponte Novu in May 1769, thus bringing an end to the Corsican Republic and driving many of its leaders – including Paoli himself – into exile abroad. In light of Britain’s accompanying inaction, authorities in France thereafter concluded that though the British still likely possessed the most powerful fleet in the world, their evident unwillingness to use it substantially reduced the threat it might have presented to French ambitions in Europe and elsewhere. Potential British allies were likewise dismayed by Grafton’s willingness to stand by in the face of French aggression, causing Britain’s political isolation to deepen even further. At home, meanwhile, the Grafton ministry was beset internally by ministerial disagreements and externally by a series of anonymous and highly critical letters under the penname “Junius” published in the London Public Advertiser beginning in January 1769. Seeing no way to recover from the associated setbacks – the loss of prestige among the nations of Europe, the loss of confidence among the British people – Grafton resigned in January, 1770 in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord North.

The conclusion which Richard Price attempted to draw from this series of events some eight years later in 1776 was essentially that the behavior of the Genoese and the French vis-à-vis their nominal Corsican subjects – a source of intense public displeasure in Britain at the time – was in fact no worse than the manner in which the North Ministry had thus far conducted itself in relation to the Thirteen Colonies. “Did GENOA [,]” he accordingly inquired, “Or FRANCE want more than an absolute command over their property and legislations; or the power of binding them in all cases whatsoever?” The answer to this question, though left unvoiced by Price, was an implicit “no,” thereby drawing a parallel between Britain’s claimed power to make such, “Laws and statutes [as] to bind the colonies and people of America [...] in all cases whatsoever” and France’s successful campaign to stamp out the liberal Corsican Republic and establish itself as the sole authority on the island. Truly, Price thus begged his readers consider, what was the difference? If, indeed, there were none, the implications became increasingly sinister.

The Corsicans, for example, had initially been subjects of the Republic of Genoa, and were then effectively traded to France in exchange for the forgiveness of a debt. “All such cessions of one people to another,” Price declared, “Are disgraceful to human nature. But if our claims are just, may not we also, if we please, CEDE the Colonies to France?” Again, the purpose of this kind of comparison was to cast doubt on the relevant policy of the sitting British government. If, as Price affirmed, the North Ministry regarded the colonies in essentially the same manner as the Genoese and the French had regarded Corsica, then it stood to reason that Lord North could, if he so desired, sell, cede, or donate Virginia, Massachusetts, or indeed any one of their number to any foreign power for any reason. Such an action would, after all, have fallen well within the bounds of “binding” the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” and woe betide any authority in America who would dare to argue against it. The only guarantee with which the luckless colonists might take comfort – indeed, the principle difference Price was willing to admit between the Franco-Corsican relationship and that which existed between Britain and America – was the fact that, “The Corsicans were not descended from the people who governed them, but that the Americans are.” Sentiment, then, was the only check on the British government’s use of a power which it tacitly claimed to hold. Having lately witnessed the extent of British sentiment – at Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill – the inhabitants of America thus protected from being treated like chattel could surely have been forgiven for finding this cold comfort indeed.

Price’s aim, of course, was as much to shame his countrymen into righteous action as offer sympathy to the suffering inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies. Citing the Corsican Crisis arguably helped to accomplish the former by both recalling the feelings of anger and frustration its outcome had inspired as well as casting the government of Lord North in the same role in 1776 as the aggressive and imperious French had played in 1769. A less flattering comparison would indeed have been difficult to conceive of, France being Britain’s inveterate rival for continental – and, increasingly, global – hegemony and as well as its spiritual and moral opposite. Whereas the British held fast to the Anglican faith – a religion, they claimed, befitting a free people – the French were dedicated Catholics whose practices appeared to mainstream British perception to be invariably steeped in superstition, secrecy, and an excessive submission to authority. Likewise, while the British people beheld their system of government – over which every county and borough could claim its share of influence – with surpassing pride, their counterparts in France were comparatively uninvolved in their country’s administration, power having long been concentrated in the hands of the monarch, his ministers, the aristocracy, and the church. Granting that reality was, as ever, more complicated than these generalization otherwise indicate – Britain having had its share of Catholic, France its share of Protestants, and neither government being as virtuous or as tyrannical as most British observers would have claimed – contemporary British sentiment towards France nonetheless largely pivoted on exactly these kinds of oversimplifications and half-formed prejudices. For Price to equate Great Britain with France, therefore, in the context of the contemporary Anglo-American relationship, would have been more or less the equivalent of accusing an exceptionally pious Christian of giving aid and comfort to Satan himself. Provided that the claim was not dismissed out of hand, one might fairly expect a great deal of soul-searching to follow as the accused endeavored to account for their transgressions and make sincere and immediate amends.

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.