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REVOLUTIONARIES AND REFORMERS
.^ FEDERAL REPUBLIC
Revolutionaries and Reformers.
Federal Republic
State constitutions
The revolutionary era witnessed the first deliberate attempt to broaden the base of American government, a process that has contin-ued to the present day. The
state constitutions’
authors knew that
governments designed to be responsive to the people would not neces-sarily provide sufficient protection if tyrants were elected to office.They consequently included explicit limitations on government au-thority in the documents they composed, attempting to protect whatthey regarded as the inalienable rights of individual citizens. Seven ofthe constitutions contained formal
bills of rights,
and the others had
similar clauses. Most guaranteed citizens freedom of the press, theright to a fair trial, the right of consent to taxation, and protectionagainst general search warrants. An independent judiciary was chargedwith upholding such rights. Most states also guaranteed freedom ofreligion, but with restrictions. For example, seven states required thatall
officeholders
be
Christians,
and
some
continued
to
support
churches with tax money.
In general, the constitution makers put greater emphasis on pre- venting state governments from becoming tyrannical than on makingthem effective wielders of political authority. Their approach to shap-ing governments was understandable, given the American experiencewith Great Britain. But establishing such weak political units, es-pecially in wartime, practically ensured that the constitutions soonwould need revision. Soon some states began to rewrite constitutionsthey had drafted in 1776 and 1777.
Invariably, the revised versions increased the powers of the gover- nor and reduced the scope of the legislature’s authority. In the mid-1780s, some American political leaders started to develop a theory of
checks and balances
as the primary means of controlling government
power. Americans sought to balance the powers of the legislative, ex-ecutive, and judicial branches against one another. The
national con-
stitution
they drafted in 1787 also embodied that principle.
Articles of Confederation
Yet the constitutional theories that Americans applied at the state level did not at first influence their conception of national govern-ment. Since American officials initially focused on organizing the mili-tary struggle against Britain, the powers and structure of the Conti-nental Congress evolved by default early in the war. Not until late1777 did Congress send the
Articles of Confederation
to the states
for ratification, and those Articles simply wrote into law the unplannedarrangements of the Continental Congress. The chief organ of na-tional government was a unicameral (one-house) legislature in whicheach state had one vote. Its powers included conducting foreign rela-tions, mediating disputes between states, controlling maritime affairs,regulating Indian trade, and valuing state and national coinage. TheArticles did not give the national government the ability to raise reve-nue effectively or to enforce a uniform commercial policy. The UnitedStates of America was described as ‘a firm league of friendship’ inwhich each state ‘retains its
sovereignty,
freedom and independence,
and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confed-eration expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assem-bled.’
The Articles required unanimous consent of state legislatures for ratification or amendment, and a clause concerning western landsproved troublesome. The draft accepted by Congress allowed states toretain all land claims derived from their original charters. But stateswith definite western boundaries in their charters (such as Marylandand New Jersey) wanted other states to cede to the national govern-ment their landholdings west of the Appalachian Mountains. Other-wise, they feared, states with large claims could expand and overpowertheir smaller neighbors. Maryland refused to accept the Articles until1781, when Virginia finally promised to surrender its western holdings
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to national jurisdiction. Other states followed suit, establishing theprinciple that unorganized lands would be held by the nation as awhole. Federal Constitution
The capacity of a single state to delay ratification for three years portended the fate of American government under the Articles ofConfederation. The unicameral legislature, whether it was called theSecond Continental Congress (until 1781) or the Confederation Con-gress (thereafter), was too inefficient and unwieldy to govern effec-tively. The Articles’ authors had not given adequate thought to thedistribution of power within the national government or to the rela-tionship between the Confederation and the states. The Congress theycreated was simultaneously a legislative body and a collective executive(there was no judiciary), but it had no independent income and noauthority to compel the states to accept its rulings. Under the Articles,national government lurched from crisis to crisis.
Many political leaders were convinced that the nation’s problems extended far beyond trade policy, and defended the
need for a much
stronger federal government.
After most of the states had already
appointed delegates, the Confederation Congress belatedly endorsedthe proposed convention, ‘for the sole and express purpose of revisingthe Articles of Confederation.’ In mid-May 1787, fifty-five men, repre-senting all the states but Rhode Island, assembled in Philadelphia tobegin their deliberations.
The vast majority of delegates to the
Constitutional Convention
were men of property and substance. They all favored reform; other-wise, they would not have come to Philadelphia. Most wanted to in-vigorate the national government and to give it new authority overtaxation and foreign commerce. Many had been members of statelegislatures, and some had helped to draft state constitutions. All wereinfluenced in their Philadelphia deliberations by their understandingof the success or failure of those constitutions’ provisions. Their ranksincluded
merchants,
planters,
physicians,
generals,
governors,
and
especially lawyers–twenty-three had studied the law. Most had been
born in America, and many came from families that had arrived in theseventeenth century. Most were Congregationalists, Presbyterians, orAnglicans. In an era when only a tiny proportion of the population hadany advanced education, more than half of the delegates had attendedcollege. A few had been educated in Britain, but most had graduatedfrom American institutions: Princeton, with ten, counted the mostalumni participants. The youngest delegate was twenty-six, the old-est–Benjamin
Franklin–eighty-one.
Like
George
Washington,
whom they elected their presiding officer, most were in their vigorousmiddle years. A dozen men did the bulk of the convention’s work. Ofthese,
James Madison
of Virginia was by far the most important; he
deserves the title ‘Father of the Constitution.’
James Madison was thirty-six years old in 1787; a Princeton gradu- ate raised in western Virginia, he served on the local Committee ofSafety and was elected successively to the provincial convention, thestate’s lower and upper houses, and the Continental Congress (1780-1783). Although Madison returned to Virginia to serve in the statelegislature in 1784, he remained in touch with national politics, partlythrough his continuing correspondence with his close friend ThomasJefferson. Madison stood out among the delegates for his systematicpreparation for the Philadelphia meeting. Through Jefferson in Parishe bought more than two hundred books on history and government,carefully analyzing their accounts of past confederacies and republics.A month before the Constitutional Convention began, he summed upthe results of his research in a lengthy paper entitled ‘Vices of the Po-litical System of the United States.’ After listing the flaws he perceivedin the current structure of the government (among them ‘encroach-ments by the states on the federal authority’ and lack of unity ‘in mat-ters where common interest requires it’), Madison revealed the conclu-sion that would guide his actions over the next few months. What thegovernment most needed, he declared, was ‘such a modification of thesovereignty as will render it sufficiently neutral between the differentinterests and factions, to control one part of the society from invadingthe rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controlled it-self, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the whole Society.’
Thus Madison set forth the principle of
checks and balances.
The
government, he believed, had to be constructed in such a way that it
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of the first five states to ratify did so unanimously, but serious dis-agreements
then
surfaced.
Massachusetts,
in
which
Antifederalist
forces had been bolstered by a backlash against the state government’sheavy-handed treatment of the Shays rebels, ratified by a majority ofonly 19 votes out of 355 cast. In June 1788, when New Hampshireratified, the requirement of nine states was satisfied. But New Yorkand Virginia had not yet voted, and everyone realized the new Consti-tution could not succeed unless those key states accepted it.
Despite a valiant effort by the Antifederalist Patrick Henry, pro- Constitution forces won by 10 votes in the Virginia convention. InNew York, James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton cam-paigned for ratification by publishing
The Federalist,
a political tract
that explained the theory behind the Constitution and masterfullyanswered its critics. Their reasoned arguments, coupled with Federal-ists’ promise to add a bill of rights to the Constitution, helped win thebattle. On
July 26, 1788,
New York ratified the Constitution by the
slim margin of 3 votes. Although the last states–North Carolina andRhode Island–did not join the Union until November 1789 and May1790, respectively, the new government was a reality.
Madison took the lead with respect to constitutional amendments. At the convention and thereafter, he had consistently opposed addi-tional limitations on the national government. He believed it unnec-essary to guarantee people’s rights explicitly when the government wasone of limited powers. But Madison recognized that Congress shouldrespond to public opinion as expressed in state ratifying conventions.Accordingly, he placed nineteen proposed
amendments
before the
House. The
states
soon
ratified ten,
which officially became part of
the Constitution on December 15,
Their adoption defused An-
tifederalist opposition and rallied support for the new government.
The First Amendment specifically prohibited Congress from pass- ing any law restricting the right to freedom of religion, speech, press,peaceable assembly, or petition. The next two amendments arose di-rectly from the former colonists’ fear of standing armies as a threat tofreedom. The Second Amendment guaranteed the right ‘to keep andbear arms’ because of the need for a ‘well-regulated Militia.’ Thus theconstitutional right to bear arms was based on the expectation thatmost able-bodied men would serve the nation as citizen-soldiers, and
there would be little need for a standing army. The Third Amendmentlimited the conditions under which troops could be quartered in pri-vate
homes.
The
next
five
pertained
to
judicial
procedures.
The
Fourth Amendment prohibited ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’;the Fifth and Sixth established the rights of accused persons; the Sev-enth specified the conditions for jury trials in civil (as opposed tocriminal) cases; and the Eighth forbade ‘cruel and unusual punish-ments.’ The Ninth and Tenth Amendments reserved to the people andthe states other unspecified rights and powers. In short, the amend-ments’ authors made clear that, in listing some rights, they did notmean to preclude the exercise of others. Summary
During the 1770s and 1780s the nation took shape as a political un- ion. It began to develop an economy independent of the British Em-pire and attempted to chart its own course in the world in order toprotect the national interest, defend the country’s borders, and pro-mote beneficial trade. Some Americans prescribed rules for the cul-tural and intellectual life they thought appropriate for a republic, out-lining artistic and educational goals for a properly virtuous people. Anintegral part of the formation of the Union was the systematic formu-lation of
American racist thought.
Emphasizing race (rather than
status as slave or free) as a determinant of African Americans’ standingin the nation, and defining women as nonpolitical, allowed men whonow termed themselves ‘white’ to define republicanism to exclude allpeople but themselves and to ensure that they would dominate thecountry for the foreseeable future.
The experience of fighting a war and of struggling for survival as an independent nation altered the political context of American life inthe 1780s. At the outset of the war, most Americans believed that ‘thatgovernment which governs best governs least,’ but by the late 1780smany had changed their minds. They were the drafters and supportersof the Constitution, who concluded from the republic’s vicissitudesunder the Articles of Confederation that a more powerful central gov-ernment was needed. During ratification debates they contended that
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REVOLUTIONARIES AND REFORMERS
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their proposals were just as ‘republican’ in conception (if not more so)as the Articles.
Both sides concurred in a general adherence to republican princi- ples, but they emphasized different views of republicanism. Federalistsadvanced a position based on the principles of classical republicanism,stressing the community over the individual. Antifederalists, fearingthat elected leaders would not subordinate personal gain to the goodof the whole, wanted a weak central government, formal protection ofindividual rights, and a loosely regulated economy. The Federalistswon their point when the Constitution was adopted, however nar-rowly. The process of consolidating the states into a national wholewas thereby formalized. The 1790s, the first decade of government un-der the Constitution, would witness hesitant steps toward the creationof a true nation, the United States of America.
As the nineteenth century began, inhabitants of the United States faced changed lives in the new republic. Indian peoples east of theMississippi River found that they had to give up some parts of theirtraditional culture to preserve others. Some African Americans strug-gled unsuccessfully to free themselves from the inhuman bonds ofslavery, then subsequently confronted more constraints than ever be-cause of increasingly restrictive laws.
European Americans too adjusted to changed circumstances. The first eleven years of government under the Constitution establishedmany enduring precedents for congressional, presidential, and judicialaction–among them establishment of the cabinet, interpretations ofkey clauses of the Constitution, and stirrings of judicial review of stateand federal legislation. Building on successful negotiations with Spain(Pinckney’s Treaty), Britain (the Jay Treaty), and France (the Conven-tion of 1800), the United States developed its
diplomatic independ-
ence,
striving to avoid entanglement with European countries and
their continental wars. Yet especially after 1793 internal political con-sensus proved elusive. The 1790s spawned vigorous debates over for-eign and domestic policy and saw the beginnings of a system of organ-ized political factionalism, if not yet formal parties. The Whiskey Re-bellion, instigated by westerners outraged at tax policies formulated byeastern elites, showed that regional conflicts continued even under thenew government. And the waging of an undeclared war against France
proved extremely contentious, splitting one faction and energizinganother.
At the end of the 1790s, after more than a decade of struggle, the Jeffersonian view of the future of republicanism prevailed over Alexan-der Hamilton’s vision of a powerful centralized economy and a strongnational government. As a result, for decades to come the countrywould be characterized by a decentralized economy, minimal gov-ernment (especially at the national level), and maximum freedom ofaction and mobility for individual white men. Jeffersonian Democ-ratic-Republicans, like other white men before them, failed to extendto white women, Indian peoples, and African Americans the freedomand individuality they recognized as essential for themselves.
The 1800 election marked the peaceful transition in power from the Federalists to the opposition Democratic-Republicans. ThomasJefferson replaced John Adams as president and sought both to unifythe nation and to solidify Democratic-Republican control of the gov-ernment. Jeffersonians favored frugal government, and they cut thebudget, military forces, and diplomatic missions.
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall remained a Federalist bastion. Both parties fought over the judiciary, and Marshallwould ensure, until 1835, the dominance of Federalist principle: fed-eral supremacy over the states and the protection of commerce andcapital. In
Marbury v. Madison
(1803), the Supreme Court established
its great power of judicial review.
Jefferson considered the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory (1803) and the commissioning of Lewis and Clark’s expedition amonghis significant presidential accomplishments. In a single act the UnitedStates doubled its size. Increasingly Americans looked westward, andLewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery practiced ‘buckskin diplomacy’while exploring the land, flora, fauna, and people west of the Missis-sippi. Americans quickly moved to settle Louisiana.
With Jefferson and his successor James Madison, the Democratic- Republicans won every presidential election in this period. Thoughthe electorate was limited only to males and mostly to whites, both theFederalists and the Democratic-Republicans competed at the grass-roots level for popular support. Political conflict was bitter, and divi-sions were real. Sometimes they could prove fatal as in the Burr-
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trolling their own front door and cooking facilities), freehold and uni-versity franchises for the boroughs. Catholics were barred from votingfor county representatives until 1793 and cot tinned to be largely ex-cluded from the electorate until a Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Calls for reform
From the late eighteenth century onwards, demands for reform of the British electoral system became more insistent and widespread,particularly from the growing and increasingly self-confident urbanmiddle classes. The debates centred on those arguing for a simpleextension of the franchise and those who opposed any widening of thefranchise as an invitation to mob rule but who nevertheless acceptedthat limited reforms were needed to make government more respon-sive and efficient.
By the 1830s changing political circumstances finally pushed
con-
stitutional reform
to the front of the parliamentary agenda. Popular
pressure from the London Radical Association and the BirminghamPolitical Union was growing, while the death of the conservative KingGeorge IV in 1830, the fall in the same year of the duke of Welling-ton’s Tory government and its replacement by the reformist Whigadministration
of
Earl
Grey,
removed
final
obstacles
to
electoral
reform. The 1832 Reform Act demonstrated both the extent and thelimitations of the influence of the contemporary debates on the natureof the constitution. Ideas of responsible citizenship were accepted, butconcepts of natural, universal rights were rejected in favour of thestatus quo. The reform had to be extensive enough to satisfy at least aproportion of public opinion, but was to be based upon property andexisting franchises to appease the vested interests in parliament. Evenso, the Bill had a hazardous journey through parliament and was onlyenacted after a turbulent general election in 1831.
The redistribution of seats rather than the extension of the fran- chise was the major feature of the Reform Act. Fifty-six borough con-stituencies were abolished and a further 30 were reduced from twomembers to one. The seats were redistributed, roughly equally, be-tween new borough and county constituencies. New seats were also
created in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The 40-shilling freehold wasretained as the qualification in county constituencies and a uniformborough franchise of £10 was introduced for England and Wales.However, the situation
was complicated by the fact
that ‘ancient
rights’ customary voters remained in borough electorates and that theChandos clause introduced voting rights for some tenants and lease-holders in counties.
The Act resulted in an increase in the number of electors of about 45 per cent. Thus, in England and Wales, around 18 per cent of adultmales now possessed the vote. The effect was more dramatic in Scot-land. Over 18 times as many voters existed after 1832, although asmaller proportion of the population could vote than in England andWales. The average burgh electorate comprised over 1,000 voters.Two members were returned for Edinburgh and Glasgow; one eachfor Aberdeen, Paisley, Dundee Greenock and Perth and the remaining14 members from 14 districts of burghs (this complexity has made itimpossible to map the changes in Scotland to county level). In Ireland,the Reform Act had less impact than the Catholic Emancipation Act,which had increased the number of voters dramatically. In 1829 thecounty franchise had been increased to £10 because of the fear thatCatholic voters were swamping the electorate. The Reform Act addeda £10 leaseholder franchise in the counties, which increased the electo-rate slightly.
Calls for further reform began as soon as the statute was passed. The reform of local government provided one focus, but a more sus-tained challenge came from the mainly working-class Chartist move-ment, which demanded universal manhood suffrage and the secretballot. Parliament refused even to consider Chartist petitions in 1840and 1842, and militants who threatened an armed rising were de-ported. In 1848 the government, alarmed by the wave of revolutionssweeping Europe in that year, threatened the use of military forceagainst the Chartists if a planned demonstration in support of a thirdpetition went ahead. Chartism thereafter declined as a political force,but in the 1850s the front benches of the two major parties began tocontemplate the possibilities for further reform and serious considera-tion was given to the incorporation of working men into the electo-rate. William Gladstone’s Reform Bill of 1866 aimed to bring the
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franchise to urban male house-holders, in an attempt to unite theworking men and middle classes. His Bill failed because of oppositionfrom Conservatives and even some Liberals, who argued that men didnot possess a natural right to the franchise, and must prove their fit-ness to vote. The rejection of Gladstone’s Bill mobilised popular opi-nion in the same way as the Lords’ rebuff to reform in 1831 had led tomass agitation. This pressure ensured that Benjamin Disraeli’s minori-ty government was compelled to introduce some measure of reform.The Second Reform Act of 1867 therefore reflected political pragmat-ism rather than commitment to any philosophical or ideological prin-ciple extending the electorate. After much negotiation, four main fran-chises were established in the boroughs: a £10 occupational qualifica-tion; rate-paying male householders; a £10 lodger franchise; and the‘ancient rights’ voters. In counties, the electorate was increased to alesser extent by a £12-pound occupational franchise and a reduction inthe lease and copyholder qualification from £10 to £5. The ReformAct for Scotland closely resembled that of England and Wales. In Irel-and, the county franchise had already been doubled by an Act of 1850.The Irish Reform Act of 1868, reluctantly introduced by Disraeli,reduced the borough qualification from £8 to £4, enfranchising mostborough ratepayers though still excluding the very poorest (largelyCatholic men).
Further reform came in 1872 with the introduction of the secret ballot, which freed voters from employer and landlord influence. Thefirst complete remodelling of the system took place between 1883 and1885, and for the first time was taken on the basis of the whole UnitedKingdom. In 1883 some corrupt practices and electoral abuses weretackled. The Third Reform Act of 1884 assimilated the county andborough franchises so that all male householders now possessed thevote, whether they lived in borough or in county constituencies. Thefollowing year, a series of one-member constituencies was introducedand the principle of constituencies representing numbers of votersrather than particular interests was accepted. Therefore, for the firsttime, populous areas of England achieved a reasonably fair share of therepresentation. The effect of the legislation of 1884-5 was almost todouble the electorate, from around 3 million to over 5 million.
The electoral system in the late nineteenth century was still a re- strictive one, with only 60 per cent of adult males possessing the vote.The unenfranchised were domestic servants, sons living with parents,soldiers living in barracks, those receiving poor relief, those not on theregister, those in mobile occupations and those incapable of voting.Nevertheless, with the majority of men now enfranchised it becameharder to justify the exclusion of women. By 1900 many MPs recog-nised that a further extension of the franchise was desirable. Burke and the new conservatism
Edmund Burke
had been strongly opposed to coercing the Amer-
ican colonies, but he refused to agree that the French Revolution wasan extension of the American. To his mind France was busily subvert-ing everything on which social order depended, and Price’s implicationthat Britain should follow suit drove him to answer. His rebuttal wasmore than mere polemic, more even than is suggested by its title,
Ref-
lections on the Revolution in France.
He went beyond reflection on a
particular revolution to a consideration of the basic questions that itraised about the relationship of the citizen to the state. His treatise leftits mark on all later conservative thinking.
Burke was no slave to the status quo. He recognized the truth of the old adage that times change and we change with them, and he hadmade his name as a reformer, but he insisted that reform must not bethe means of eliminating the good with the bad. He was too muchpervaded by a sense of the past to be a revolutionary. The social or-ganism was for him not a thing of the moment, to be reconstitutedaccording to the dictates of abstract philosophy; it was the product of aslow and infinitely complex process of historical development, ‘a part-nership not only between those who are living, but between those whoare living, those who are dead, and those Who are to be born.’ Therevolutionary would dissolve the partnership and destroy the organismin the hope of creating something better in its place. The French, totake the immediate example, were denying their past for the sake of anuntried future, and their faith that reason alone could create utopiastruck Burke as madness.
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were no more than the descendants of robber chieftains; no one wasmore noble by birth than another. Parasitical courtiers, placemen,pensioners, and unnecessary soldiers and sailors riddled society; if theywere eliminated, £4 million a year in taxes might readily be saved. InPart II of his work, Paine outlined a ‘welfare state’ program of child-ren’s
allowances,
old-age
pensions,
and
tax-supported
elementary
schools for which such savings might be used. The pamphlet, bothprovocative
and
inexpensive,
had
an
enormous
circulation–some
200,000 copies in two years–among artisans and small tradesmen;during the next half-century it had a greater impact on British work-ing-class radicalism than any other work. The government’s imme-diate reply was to indict Paine for seditious libel. He fled to France,where he was first elected to the legislature and then condemned as anenemy of the Revolution whose virtues he had so ardently extolled.Having barely escaped the guillotine, he spent his final years in theUnited States.
The first individual to answer Burke, however, had been not Paine but one of the most remarkable women of the age. Mary Wollstone-craft had penned
A Vindication of the Rights of Man
late in 1790, and
followed it a year later with her pioneering manifesto
A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman.
In the latter work she contended against an inter-
pretation of ‘nature’ in which men figured as law-giving teachers andwomen as their well-behaved pupils. ‘It is a farce to call any beingvirtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own rea-son. This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men; I extend it to wom-en.’ In her judgment men and women shared the same canons of mo-rality and therefore merited the same type of education, the same eco-nomic opportunities, and the same political rights and responsibilities.In 1797, she married William Godwin, a fellow political radical andthe author of
Political Justice
(1793), a widely read book that challenged
the social conventions of the age and anticipated the ultimate disap-pearance of all governments in the interest of human liberation and‘the right of private judgment.’ Mary Wollstonecraft’s often tempes-tuous life ended in September 1797 in the aftermath of childbirth, buther and Godwin’s daughter Mary survived to become in due coursethe wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and an author in her ownright.
The fear of a popular rising in Britain, which underlay the gov- ernment’s prosecution of Paine and other political radicals, proved tobe unfounded. The common people were as much divided as weretheir governors. Agitators wandered the country, preaching that arepublic was at hand and that all property would be divided equally; insome areas mobs responded by rioting against the established order.But in other areas the riots were against reformers, among whom Jo-seph Priestley was the most prominent victim. His house in Birming-ham, with his manuscripts and scientific instruments, was sacked anddestroyed, and he too, like Paine, was eventually forced to find refugein the United States. The old days of embattled factions, of politicaltrials and forced exiles, seemed to be returning.
