Penguin History of the United States of America (33 page)

Instead, it remains an inspiration to all democrats today, and especially to Americans. That is because Jefferson, by a process like that which engenders poetry, was able to distil in his preamble, as eloquence, centuries of historical experience.

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 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…

These splendid assertions were indeed self-evident to the revolutionaries – to all Americans: how could they doubt them? They expressed attitudes which everything in their experience as settlers had tended to stimulate and reinforce. Side by side, their grandfathers had set up new polities; their fathers, and then they themselves, had enjoyed the consequent responsibilities and rewards of self-government. Side by side, Americans had tamed a wilderness, or begun to, practically experiencing the fact that on the frontier all men (and women too) had equal needs and (said the Puritans) souls equally precious and equally in need of salvation, whether religious or economic (depending on whether one agreed with the minister or the fishermen of Marblehead). The marvellous abundance of their new world had proved in the most satisfactory manner that everyone could be prosperous, and therefore that everyone had a right so to be. Their republican (we would say democratic) habits were so ingrained that one of the reasons for the failure of the rebel invasion of Canada in the winter of 1775–6 was that whenever the New England volunteers were given orders to attack, they held an
ad hoc
town-meeting to decide in the manner they were used to, that is by voting, whether to obey or not. And even revolution was to them a practical matter, almost an institution, since they had been trained, not only by the controversy with Britain since 1764, but by the endless feuds with noble proprietors and royal Governors and between the diverse interests within the colonies themselves – say, between tidewater and piedmont – ever since the foundation of Jamestown.

The challenge to the governing principles of the British Empire and the British realm which America incarnated could not have been articulated with greater sharpness; but that was not all. The Americans were the vanguard of the West. They were, after all, the progeny of the Old World: an Old World whose social order was based ultimately on force, hierarchy and a religion which condemned the secular pursuit of happiness as delusory, since the only happiness really worth having was that awaiting the faithful beyond death. The thirteen colonies no longer accepted these principles. Original sin – that is, social inequality of various kinds – existed in America, but conditions were vastly more egalitarian and hopeful than anything in the Old World. Even if, with the growth of wealth and numbers, certain new tendencies were arising (one of the reasons why oligarchs such as Thomas Hutchinson had to be opposed by rising young men like John Adams was that the oligarchs were the forerunners of a very subversive
change) on the whole the thirteen colonies were still comparatively pristine, their challenge still untainted. Soon that challenge would find an echo in Europe itself. For America was only one of Europe’s offspring. The Protestant Reformation; the rise of literacy; the dawning of modern science and industry; the vortex of change summed up in the words Enlightenment, trade and whiggery – these were the forces which had made the successful emigration to America possible and were now fostering its work. They were also preparing new upheavals in their homeland. Jefferson’s words spoke of the European experience as well as the American; they crystallized certain thoughts to which many minds were moving (the phrase about ‘inalienable rights’ might have come straight out of Jean-Jacques Rousseau); the Declaration was a protest and a programme, not only for Jefferson’s countrymen, but for civilized mankind.

For the preamble, in the name of the people, denies that the strong may legitimately oppress the weak; and asserts that all men and women, whatever their age, condition or origins, shall not be cheated of their birthright into misery; that this theme, of human freedom and dignity, is what politics is about. As this message was heard, it seemed to many Europeans – perhaps especially to the French – that there was a new star in the West to steer by. It seemed as if John Adams’s favourite prophetic dream would come true. ‘I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,’ said he, ‘as the opening of a grand scene and design of Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.’ This soon became the universal faith of the Revolution.

Ever since 1776 Americans have returned to rekindle their patriotic self-dedication at the flame of the Declaration. For it answers a question which was to trouble the new nation throughout its history: what is America
about
? History and geography had forestalled any such question for most of the other peoples of the world; but the immensity of the nearly empty continent, and the break with the past which every settling family had made, posed it acutely for the Americans and would necessarily do so at least until all the wilderness was conquered. The problem of political institutions and of a national identity could hardly wait until then. America needed a blueprint, and by luck the long processes of her colonial history, which had already made so many inexorable decisions, fathered one on the genius of Thomas Jefferson. ‘All men are created equal… life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ These words have never ceased to sound in America; as one historian has said, ‘The history of American democracy is a gradual realization, too slow for some and too rapid for others, of the implications of the Declaration of Independence.’
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The future to which they pointed was not all bright. It contained chains, cannon-fire, fiery crosses and the
sign of a clenched fist as well as the Bill of Rights and the New Deal; but for weal or woe, the Declaration had shown the way. No wonder the Fourth of July is still a high festival.
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Lee’s Resolutions and Jefferson’s Declaration (neither writer’s name was announced) were enthusiastically welcomed throughout the states, from Philadelphia, where, according to John Adams, the church bells were rung and the local militia fired ‘the Feu de Joy, notwithstanding the Scarcity of Powder’, to the backwoods of South Carolina, where a nine-year-old boy named Andrew Jackson was deputed to read the Declaration to ‘thirty or forty’ of his less literate fellow-citizens. General Washington, who had long been urging the final step, paraded his regiments at six in the evening to hear the Declaration read out. To the patriots, it was clear what the great departure meant. At last the incubus had been thrown off, and a bitter debate was ended. The happy era of patriotism and republicanism had arrived. There would be no more ‘jars and contentions’; no more English meddling, and hence no more disputation between town and country, Whig and Tory, Governor and assembly. These hopes were not entirely realistic. Although acceptance of the Declaration, which, with its pledge of ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour’, was among other things a loyalty oath, did put a formidable barrier in the way of any backsliding, so that compromise with Britain was virtually ruled out, there were still plenty of Tories and traitors to make life difficult, not to mention the British army; but for the moment the Declaration swept all before it. Congress, amid much wrangling, drew up Articles of Confederation to act as an instrument of government for the new Union of States.
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They formalized the
ad hoc
arrangements which had already emerged: the alliance of the states in Congress assembled was confirmed as a government, and Congress was empowered to appoint ministers to execute its policies. Eight of the states proclaimed new constitutions for themselves; in the enthusiasm of the moment these documents were mostly extravagantly democratic, whether in the twentieth-century or the eighteenth-century meanings of that word. State legislatures were to be supreme; the people they represented were to be consulted as often as possible on as much as possible; the executive power was kept deliberately weak; and the very soul of the old order was throttled by provisions in several of the constitutions expressly outlawing class privileges and hereditary public offices (there was to be no opportunity for a revival of the Oliver-Hutchinson oligarchy and its counterparts). Whether any of these instruments (including the Articles of Confederation) would work in practice remained to be seen.

Apart from these institutional arrangements, a general liberalizing programme
was widely undertaken. Established churches were stripped of their privileges (except in New England); bills of rights, securing the liberties of the individual citizens, were passed into law; land was redistributed (at the expense of refugee Loyalists); the 1763 British Proclamation was formally overthrown, thus opening the trans-Allegheny West to legal settlement; and voices began to be heard asking if slavery could be reconciled with patriot principles. As early as 1773 Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a patriotic physician, who later became one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and a friend of Jefferson’s, had attacked what he called ‘Slave Keeping’, and urged his fellow ‘advocates for American liberty’ to be consistent. ‘The plant of liberty,’ he wrote, ‘is of so tender a nature that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery. Remember, the eyes of Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.’Jefferson himself, slave owner though he was, attacked the institution in the following year; and the Reverend John Allen of Massachusetts took up the cry:

Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom! ye trifling patriots!… for while you are fasting, praying, nonimporting, nonexporting, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading for a restoration of your charter rights, you at the same time are continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of enslaving your fellow creatures.

News of the nascent anti-slavery movement in England travelled to the West, and so, perhaps, did a report of Dr Johnson’s scornful opinion of slave-holders who rebelled in the name of liberty. At any rate, by 1776 a powerful preacher of Rhode Island could argue that the patriot cause could never win God’s blessing and prosper until the sin of slavery was removed: the ‘Sons of Liberty’ were nothing but fathers of oppression. These arguments were not without effect: Puritan New England, Quaker Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania’s little pendant, Delaware, all outlawed the slave-trade. Still more important was the non-importation agreement. In April 1776, Congress directed that, as a war-measure, no slaves were to be imported into any of the thirteen colonies.
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It thus became possible for enlightened Americans to hope that in the not-too-distant future their new country would live up to its liberal slogans.

The war, meanwhile, went on. General Howe moved late and sluggishly, but also effectively. He fought and manoeuvred Washington off Long
Island, out of New York city, off Manhattan Island, across and out of New Jersey. By December 1776, it seemed all too likely that the British would celebrate the New Year in Philadelphia, while the continental soldiers, their time expired, left their commander and went home. The New Jersey Loyalists came out to celebrate and collaborate with the victor – rather too soon, for at Christmas Washington turned, and in two lightning attacks across the Delaware river defeated the royal forces at Trenton and Princeton. In terms of the numbers engaged these battles were tiny; but, as at Boston, their strategic effect was important. They saved Pennsylvania for the time being and cleared most of New Jersey. Patriot morale, which had been very low, made a rapid recovery. Washington could live to fight in the spring (supposing only that his freezing, tatterdemalion army survived that long). He had won precious time and prestige for America: time for an alliance to ripen, prestige to clinch it.

The French, looking for revenge on England, had been covertly sending munitions to the rebels almost since the rebellion started. The longer it lasted, the likelier their full-scale intervention became. Dr Franklin, most urbane of Americans, arrived in Paris on 20 December 1776 to use his charm and scientific prestige to lure Louis XVI and his ministers into the war.

He had a staggering personal success. The ladies of Paris were enchanted by him,
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the scientists welcomed him as a brother, he was ceremonially embraced by Voltaire at the Académie des Sciences and impressed everyone as another, nicer Rousseau because of his (somewhat studied) simplicity of manner and dress. Fur hats
a la
Franklin became the fashion. He was hailed as
‘le bon Quacker’
(of course he was nothing of the kind), as a child of Nature, father of his country, worthy representative of the virtuous foresters who were struggling for liberty against corrupt England. More important, he had the goodwill of Vergennes, the Foreign Minister and leader of the war-party, who encouraged the Doctor in his activities as propagandist, diplomatist and spy. Some at Versailles, notably the great Turgot, recently fallen from his post as Controller-General of the Finances, foresaw the danger to France, not yet recovered from the Seven Years War, of another struggle; but Franklin worked up the general French enthusiasm for his cause, and at Court the war-party was dominant, only waiting for an excuse to fight. Such an excuse the British quickly provided.

From George Ill’s point of view the war had already gone on much too long. Already he was having to bolster the fainting morale of his Prime Minister with his own robust courage. This impatience in London led to the disastrous adventure of Burgoyne at Saratoga. That general – a normally complacent, dilatory British officer, despising the Americans, always intriguing for his own advancement, rash in action – ‘a vain, very ambitious man, with a half-understanding which was worse than none’, according to
Horace Walpole – hoped that by plunging south from Canada with 7,000 men until he reached the line of the Hudson river he could cut the rebellion in two. Thus to break Washington’s line of communication with New England would have been a notable stroke, but Howe’s unbusinesslike dispatches to London confused the planners, and there was none of the co-operation with Burgoyne that was essential if the latter’s scheme was to succeed. Howe went off to capture Philadelphia while Burgoyne’s army, laden down with superfluous equipment, moved too slowly southwards, losing touch with its base as it did so. The word went forth, ‘Now let all New England turn out and crush Burgoyne.’ There was a hearty response by the militia: this was ideal country for the sharpshooters of the wilderness. It was the retreat from Concord on a far larger scale. Burgoyne’s flanks were mercilessly harried. Too vain to admit failure, he struggled on when he should have turned back, and at last, his rations nearly exhausted, his retreat cut off, his army badly mauled after a couple of pitched battles, he had to surrender what was left of his force (which he saw fit to blame for his mishap) to General Horatio Gates at Saratoga on 17 October 1777. Gates had done well; his second-in-command, Benedict Arnold, with whom he was always quarrelling, had done better; but the real glory belonged to his irregular levies. They were the American people in arms, and by their crushing victory they made clear the real nature of Britain’s intractable problem: with handfuls of mercenary troops to crush a society, a nation. Counter-revolutions need stronger foundations. Saratoga was most inadequately counterbalanced by the fall of Philadelphia to Howe, although Washington and his men were thereby compelled to endure their darkest hours at Valley Forge, a bleak encampment near the city where they had somehow to survive another bitter, foodless, shirtless winter, without blankets, in huts which gaped to wind and snow from every quarter. No matter: Saratoga convinced France that this was a war in which Great Britain really could be beaten, and the following year she entered it, followed shortly by her ally, Spain.’
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