The Genius of America (4 page)

My Dear Countrymen,

    Some states have lost their liberty
by particular accidents
: But this calamity is generally owing to the
decay of virtue
. A
people
is traveling fast to destruction, when
individuals
consider
their
interests as distinct from those of the public. Such notions are fatal to their country, and to themselves. Yet how many are there, so
weak
and
sordid
as to
think
they perform
all the office of life
, if they earnestly endeavor to encrease their own
wealth, power
, and
credit,
without the least regard for the society, under the protection of which they live.

A Farmer

T
HE
B
REAK WITH
E
NGLAND

Over the next ten years, repeated efforts by Parliament in London to tax and regulate the internal relations of the colonies convinced many Americans that Dickinson was right about the decay of British political society and the threat of that decay to Americans. John Adams observed that official corruption in England was a “Cancer” that had become “too deeply rooted, and too far spread to be cured by anything short of cutting it out entire.” In fact, this notion of the corrupting influence of British politics was so strong that it helped scuttle an effort to find a middle ground to avert separation. In 1774, Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania proposed, in effect, a two-house legislative system. Parliament in London and a national legislature in America would act together on issues concerning the colonies. Parliament would continue to have authority over America, but the colonists could no longer be taxed without the consent of their own representatives as well. The compromise drew considerable support in the Continental Congress, the single house assembly of state representatives that governed America from independence through ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of the new government. But Patrick Henry rose in opposition. This solution would accomplish little, he said. “We shall liberate our Constituents from a corrupt House of Commons, but throw them into the Arms of an American Legislature that may be bribed by that Nation [Britain] which avows in the Face of the World, that Bribery is a Part of her System of Government.” By a vote of 6 states to 5, Galloway's compromise was killed. Imagine if that vote had gone the other way. The rise of America, and the evolution of democratic government, might have followed a very different path.

Yet having rejected compromise, separation from England was still a frightening and radical prospect. On the eve of war many Americans, including Dickinson, still favored reconciliation with England. To them, separation was “a leap in the dark.” It was not enough just to believe that virtue was in decay under British rule, as Dickinson had argued. To sever their ties to the most powerful nation on earth, to their motherland, Americans had to believe they could do better on their own. If they made this leap in the dark, they asked, “where would they land?”

The man who proclaimed the answer more powerfully than anyone else was a new arrival to America. He would become the best-known and most articulate revolutionary polemicist of the late 1700s, on both sides of the Atlantic. His name was Thomas Paine. “We have it in our power,” Paine instructed, “to begin the world over again.” Independence now from England could save America from its discord and conflict, Paine wrote in a tract he called
Common Sense
. To Paine, the very word
republic
meant the public good. “Youth is the seed time of good habits, as well in nations as in individuals, the present time is the true time for establishing it [an American republic]. The intimacy which is contracted in infancy, and the friendship which is formed in misfortune, are, of all others, the most lasting.” And the good habit Paine expected of liberated Americans was public virtue, the capacity of citizens of the new Republic to suppress their individual interests for the public good. This is, of course, exactly what Americans had proven unable to do under British rule.

But then again, Tom Paine had not been in America the past ten strife-filled years. He had arrived from England only in the fall of 1774, so sick with typhus that he had to be carried ashore. It is hard to say what would have happened to the penniless and friendless Paine if not for the letter he brought with him from England. It was from the most famous man in America, Benjamin Franklin, who was then serving in England as America's representative. Improbably, based on Paine's record of failure in England, Franklin vouched for Paine, whom he had met in London. That was enough for Robert Aitken, a bookseller, who hired Paine to write for his inaugural issue of the
Pennsylvania Magazine,
probably the most important hire of a freelance writer in the history of America.

In the age of revolution, Tom Paine was a remarkable, recognizably modern, presence. His almost complete lack of formal education somehow freed him from the more formal writing style of most of the other founders. He wrote, Paine once said, so those who could barely read could understand him.

Paine would serve in the Revolutionary Army, coauthor the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, serve as a member of the French National Assembly as a delegate from Calais, author the
Rights of Man
and the
Age of Reason
for which he was inaccurately condemned as an atheist (he was merely an opponent of all organized religion), be imprisoned in France for treason against the French Republic, be liberated through the efforts of James Monroe, and finally return to America, where he would die poor and unheralded.

In our story he plays a crucial part. In 1776, this new immigrant to America became America's most convincing voice for independence and for the claim that with independence would come the public virtue English rule did not permit.

If you accept Gordon Wood's notion that the decision to rebel was a utopian movement that rose above the reality of colonial disunion, then it was Tom Paine's vision that rallied the movement.

Once in Philadelphia, Paine entered the environment of political tumult he always sought. The First Continental Congress had just completed its eight-week session, and the questions of tyranny, freedom and independence dominated the many papers and cafés of America's largest city. Paine became the editor of the
Pennsylvania Magazine
, writing numerous articles advocating freedom and rebellion. In January 1776, he had published
Common Sense
, a pamphlet of “breathtaking boldness,” that offered “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning,” as George Washington put it, “upon the propriety of a separation.” So popular was this pamphlet that over 120,000 copies were in circulation by the end of 1776. Even today, that would be a big best seller.

By April 1776, he resigned as editor of the magazine and was writing again, attacking the critics of
Common Sense
and pushing again for independence and republican government. Under the Arcadian-sounding pseudonym “the Forrester” (a job he never held), he wrote four letters for the Pennsylvania press. In the third of these, published in the
Pennsylvania Packet
on April 22, 1776, he told Americans of the great opportunity that independence offered them. He understood that colonists feared this leap. So he posed the central question: “Can America be happy under a government of her own?” The answer is “short and simple,” he said. “As happy as she please; she hath a blank sheet to write upon.”

Paine's faith in the people of his new land was boundless. Past was not prologue. Given a blank slate, Americans would rise to the responsibilities of a free people once the burdens of Britain were gone. “We are young, and we have been distressed; but our concord hath withstood our troubles, and fixes a memorable era for the posterity to glory in.”

Americans rallied around Paine's vision of a virtuous America. A poem in the
New Jersey Gazette
in May of 1778 captured the sentiment.

Here Governments their last perfection take.
    Erected only for the People's sake:
    Founded no more on Conquest or in blood
    But on the basis of the Public Good.

The idea of independence drew Americans together against a common enemy and provided a powerful force for suppressing the colonists' quarrelsomeness. The revolutionary colonists were Americans with a common American interest. A mood of optimism infused even the men who would be far more skeptical ten years later. “Would any Man two Years ago have believed it possible, to accomplish such an Alteration in the Prejudices, Passions, Sentiments and Principles of these thirteen little States as to make every one of them completely republican, and to make them own it,” wrote John Adams in 1776.

Despite all the history of conflict among them, the revolutionary colonists saw independence from England as freeing them to live the virtues they idealized. Independence would lead to the spread of public virtue, which then rooted would seed itself and reseed itself in following generations. “If there is a form of government . . . whose principle and foundation is virtue,” Adams wrote, “will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?” Even a young James Madison chimed in: “A spirit of Liberty and Patriotism animates all degrees and denomination of men.” America would be a place populated, predicted Thomas Jefferson, by “sensible, hardworking, independent folk secure in their possession of land, free of the corruptions of urban poverty and cynicism, free of dependence on a self-indulgent aristocracy of birth, responsible to the common good as well as to personal betterment, educated in the essentials of free government and committed to the principles of freedom—peaceful, self-reliant, self-respecting, and unintimidated people.”

The colonists filled their public documents and writings with an almost religious proclamation of their belief in their own special pubic virtue and the central role of that virtue to their hope for liberty. Pennsylvania's Constitution of 1776 declared, “A firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality are absolutely necessary to preserve the liberty, and keep a government free.”

As the colonists saw it, English freedom, like the freedoms of the classic republics, had been destroyed by the absence of public virtue and with it the hope for American freedom under English rule. Only through independence could American public virtue flourish and consequently American liberty exist. “As the possibility of a break with England approached,” one historian summed up, “the American mind seemed almost relieved, as though the Revolution would finally do ‘away with the flimsy excuses suggested by avarice and mistaken self-interest' and ‘bring the unanimity, the firmness, and wisdom' that had so long seemed lacking in American society.”

This faith in public virtue had a practical and direct effect on the national and state governments the colonists established as they declared independence. Simple government was best, and all that was needed. For if government was, as Paine wrote, only a “necessary evil” for “restraining our vices,” then a simple government would suffice for a people with few vices and strong virtue. Simple government would be one that expressed and acted upon the will of the majority. In fact, anything more complicated could undermine the realization of the public good. “The more simple any thing is,” wrote Paine, “the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired.”

Remarkably, some of this same sentiment was expressed in 1777 by a twenty-two-year-old officer in the Continental Army by the name of Alexander Hamilton. New Yorkers were debating the structure of their new state government. Hamilton wrote that adding a second house, a senate, to the New York legislature was unnecessary. Having two houses would “occasion delay and dilatoriness,” Hamilton wrote, and, of “much greater evil,” would, “from the very name, and from the mere circumstance of it being a separate member of the Legislature, . . . be liable to degenerate into a body purely aristocratical.” For Hamilton, the “danger of an abuse of power from a simple Legislature, would not be very great,” if such body was based on an “equality and fullness of popular representation.” In the course of the dramatic intellectual revolution that occurred between 1776 and 1787, perhaps no one would more radically alter his view than Hamilton.

This reliance on public virtue to ensure the public good influenced the drafting of many state constitutions immediately after the Declaration, most clearly through the transfer of powers from royal executives to legislatures, leaving executives with very little authority.

The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 went the farthest in placing its faith on the virtue of the people. That constitution contained every imaginable means of anchoring the exercise of power in the will of the majority of the state's voters. The legislature had only one house, members served one year at a time, and their maximum term was limited. The executive was a committee with no veto power.

Most significantly, faith in public virtue was central to America's first “Constitution,” the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, drafted by John Dickinson in 1776.

The Articles granted the Congress exclusive power over the war effort, foreign affairs and monetary policy, but not the power to tax or to regulate commerce among the states. In other words, the Congress could borrow money for the war, but it had no means to pay it back. It had to rely on the states, which, as the Pennsylvania Constitution illustrated, were tied to the will of the majority of their electorates. Congress had no power to coerce the states to repay its war debt, muster troops or to conform to any of its requirements.

This omission of coercive powers in the Articles of Confederation was intentional. Madison noted that the Articles of Confederation were drafted with “confidence that the justice, the good faith, the honor, [and] the sound policy” of state legislatures would compel their compliance. Coercive power was therefore unnecessary. A decision of Congress would reflect the public good. The public virtue of the citizenry and their state legislators would then ensure that the states would cooperate. “The Articles contained no provision empowering Congress to use coercive authority against the states because, quite simply, it was difficult to believe they would willfully defy its decisions.”