The Shaping of the "Second Europe" by Revolutions, 1750-1914

1776

Outline of Lecture

I. Introduction: the Beginnings of Revolution as a Human Right
II. John Locke's Justification of Revolution
III. Background to Revolution: Britain's North American Colonies
IV. Revolutionary War and Independence
V. Stating the Right to Revolution: the Declaration of Independence
VI. The Constitution of the U. S., the New Social Contract
VII. 1776 and the Second Europe

Introduction

The American Revolution of 1776 was the first revolution to be made as a human right. Both the American and French Revolutions were made in pursuit of "liberty and equality." (That age interpreted these terms more narrowly than we would.) Once begun and justified by such spokesmen as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, these revolutions became precedents and rationalizations for many subsequent revolutions. For instance, Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietnamese Communists, the Viet Minh, announced the movement for independence against the French in 1945 by issuing a Declaration of Independence which opened with the first lines from the American Declaration of Independence.

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Are you surprised that our Declaration of Independence was used by a party dictatorship which has never permitted its citizens the rights found in the document? Can you think of examples of American political, constitutional, or legal principles being used by those who are enemies of the American system? You are an American citizen caught on the battlefield (with weapons) siding with the enemy. What's the first thing you ask for?

John Locke's Justification of Revolution

John Locke, as we saw earlier, in Two Treatises on Government rejected divine-right monarchy as a basis for authority in the state and argued the and the right to rebellion. His ideas in the Second Treatise became an ideological handbook for revolutionaries. Locke saw the state as a secular institution, created by men to gain the advantages of living in society according to laws. Retaining their natural rights when they created society through a contract, they gave one power to the state--the power to preserve their life, liberty, and property. This power was delegated to agents of the state, rulers, but what if rulers overstep their proper limits? The ruled have the right to resist. The government is capable of, indeed tends towards, arbitrary rule. Who decides when things have gone far enough, or too far? Locke said, "The people shall judge." This was the Second Europe's, the Enlightenment's theory of the state, although absolute monarchies were more common than any other kind of polity. Thomas Jefferson and other Americans embraced Locke's ideas as self-evident, fundamental truths.

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1. You submit to the contract creating society when you immigrate here or, if born here, when you decide to stay. Agree?
2. What keeps the right to resist from degenerating into anarchy?

Background to Revolution: Great Britain's North American Colonies

What were the conditions which led American colonists to resort to Locke's arguments about the right to rebellion? By 1750 the settlers in the British colonies numbered about 2 million. They were a minority of Britain's total colonial population of about 15 million. Seen from London, the center of a world-wide empire, they were only a part, and not even the most lucrative part, of that empire.

Colonies were important to Britain mainly for economic reasons: they served as markets and sources of raw materials. But the American colonies probably cost Britain as much to administer and defend as they were worth in trade. After 1750 the British government and Parliament tightened up regulations governing trade and the collection of custom duties. Up to this point the colonists had paid little more than local taxes levied by their own assemblies. They evaded and avoided the duties and taxes on the books. So much so, that to London they seemed irresponsible about their place in the empire and even lawless in the way they flouted regulations and obligations. Doubtless many informed British thought their colonial subjects untrustworthy and unable to govern themselves. Colonists for their part resented efforts to regulate them, collect old taxes and make them pay new ones. Parliament, trying to levy a tax they would pay and assert its right to tax the colonies, settled on a tax on imported tea, an seemingly innocuous tax. But the Americans still resisted, claiming the right of "No taxation without representation." The British replied that the colonists were represented, "virtually" represented, by Parliament, and as well represented as any other British subject. So neither side could see the other side's arguments. The agitation in the colonies which began as a protest of grievances about British management soon turned to a movement to determine their own destiny. In this struggle, many scholars believe, the urban middle class led the way. But other groups also joined in when the arguments were made that without independence the colonists would always be subject to British imperial interests. One of the ablest propagandists in convincing the fence-sitters to join in was Thomas Paine. In Common Sense Paine put the arguments in Enlightenment terms: it defied reason and logic that a continent (America) should be ruled by an island. ". . .there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverses the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems: England to Europe, America to itself." (Paine's work in America was but the first of his international revolutionary crusades. In England he was indicted for treason in 1792, after publishing his famous Rights of Man. He escaped to France and became a member of the National Convention which was dismantling the monarchy and installing a Republic.)

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How is Thomas Paine different from a 21st century terrorist? True, he did not work in secret and he did not kill unarmed civilians, as far as we know. But he travelled across international boundaries to help overthrow established governments. So what makes him different?

Revolutionary War and Independence

By 1774 the colonists had gone from merely arguing against British authority to direct action. The Tea Party was the first of such acts. The British response was repression. They passed what the colonists called the Intolerable Acts which closed Boston harbor and revoked much of the Massachusetts charter. Denied the right to meet in a colonial assembly, Massachusetts' colonists protested the acts in county assemblies, declaring that the Intolerable Acts should be disobeyed because they were "attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America." Soon a Continental Congress convened with representatives from every colony. There they drew up a list of grievances and took action to end trade with Britain.

The British governor of Massachusetts dissolved the colonial legislature. Defiantly, the legislators met anyway and raised their own militia called "minutemen". This was the final step to outright rebellion. Efforts in Britain toward conciliation were too late. In April, 1775, minutemen fired upon British troops who were returning from destroying arms and ammunition at Concord and the war was on.

The Continental Congress enlisted minutemen from Boston as the first units of a Continental Army and put George Washington in charge. The war lasted six years and neither side performed well. The British were distracted by other conflicts and hampered by long lines of communication and supply. Their commanders were generally incompetent. Colonial forces were in no better shape. They too were badly supplied. But they were better led by Washington and other generals. Foreign aid probably made the difference. France and other European powers sided with the colonists to get back at Britain for earlier defeats and gave the colonists arms, financial assistance, and naval support. When Washington was able to bottle up British forces at Yorktown and effect their surrender, the war soon ended. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 formally recognized the United States of America as a sovereign power.

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The same question posed about Paine could also be asked about the American revolutionaries and their leaders. Ben Franklin knew what he and his colleagues were doing and what their fate could be if they failed. He said on July 4, 1776, "We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." So what makes an American revolutionary a hero and another revolutionary somewhere else a villain?

Stating the Right to Rebellion: The Declaration of Independence (1776)

The independence of the colonists was proclaimed in 1776 only after fighting had been going on for a year. The Second Continental Congress in June, 1776, appointed a committee to prepare a declaration only after the feeling for independence became widespread. This committee, among others, included Benjamin Franklin and two future U. S. Presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson got the job of drafting the document because, as Adams said, he could write ten times better than anyone else. He produced the draft in two weeks. After Congress voted independence on July 2, it turned to debate of the Declaration. On July 2, 3, and 4 the debate went on. Jefferson commented later that he suffered the anguish of any author whose cherished product is dissected and questioned and revised. He attributed the quick passage to the summer heat and the horse flies from a nearby stable which kept members from debating the document as long as they might have. Congress approved the Declaration on July 4, and after it was published on parchment every member signed it on August 2.

This document proved to be the Continental Congress' most memorable achievement. It is a masterpiece of revolutionary argument linking the American cause with the universal truths of the Enlightenment. Its opening lines bear quoting again:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

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1. How far may one take the concept of natural rights as inherent in created beings? Do they extend to animals? Other living organisms? Have you heard of an organization called PETA? The name is an acronym for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. You may think you are an animal lover. PETA, however, believes that animals are not to be eaten, worn, experimented on, or used for entertainment. Is this taking natural rights too far? For a debate on this topic see the following link.

2. Thomas Jefferson drafted a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence which condemned the slave trade:

He [George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative [royal veto] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.... He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Why did the Continental Congress decide to omit this paragraph?

The Constitution of the United States (1787)

Independence did not solve the United States' problems, the most pressing of which was the need for a central governing system. The first system, the Articles of Confederation, adopted to placate the strong "states rights" tendency of the former colonies, proved inadequate to meet the needs of commerce and defense. So in 1787 the states sent delegates to Philadelphia to revise the Articles. Instead, the body drafted and adopted a new document "in Order to form a more perfect union." This Constitution is the oldest written constitution of a major country still in use. Approved after bitter debate in the 13 states, it went into effect in 1789. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were ratified by 1791.

This new document and its amendments fired the imagination of Enlightenment intellectuals everywhere. John Locke's contract had become reality. Titles and sovereigns had been abolished and power placed in the hands of the people. Built into the Constitution were many of the fundamental ideas of Enlightenment political theory. There were checks and balances to prevent tyranny. Federalism--the division of powers between the states and the central government, with the individual holding dual citizenship in both the states and the nation--also prevented too much power from slipping into the hands of the central government. Then too there were the amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, which protected natural rights: freedom of worship; freedom from an established church; freedom of expression; freedom to petition; to assemble; the right to keep and bear arms; the right to security of the person and the home; and due process of law.

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1.The Constitution was produced in secret by 55 white males from the upper economic and social classes. What would be the reaction today to any endeavor by such a group? Do the circumstances of its creation have any effect on the Constitution? How? Why?
2.With all the problems of our society, is there another like it anywhere else? Would you change places with anyone else anywhere else in the world?

1776 and the Second Europe

Although there were many aims and motives at work in the American Revolution, it was the first to be argued for in Enlightenment terms. It came to be the hope and model for later revolutions around the world. It helped to spark the French Revolution of 1789 which violently unsettled Europe. But unlike the French Revolution, this one caused no revulsion against Enlightenment ideals. On the contrary, it seemed to demonstrate those self-evident truths about man, the world and human society which thinkers of that time held out as the hope and right of mankind.