PART IX The Impact of the Revolution 76 Oppressing the Tories

A myth has been promulgated by neoconservative historians that the American Revolution was a uniquely mild revolution, so mild as to be scarcely a revolution at all. In an America that now frowns strongly on the concept of revolution, this sort of mythologizing should not come as a surprise. The revolutionaries’ treatment of its Tory minority, however, scarcely fits this myth. Civil war raged throughout the United States, and Tory terror bands abounded in North and South. An estimated 50,000 American Tories joined the British army during the course of the Revolution, and during the 1780–81 campaign 10,000 Loyalists were under arms. In this kind of ferocious civil conflict, in which the life of the Revolution itself was at stake, it is unreasonable to expect consistently libertarian methods of handling the Tories from even the most liberal supporters of the Revolution. The nineteenth century Canadian historian Egerton Ryerson was quite right in pointing out the inconsistency of the revolutionaries: “The Declaration of Independence had been made in the name of and for the professed purposes of liberty; but the very first acts under it were to deprive a large portion of the colonists not only of liberty of action, but liberty of thought and opinion....”*

Everywhere Tories were deprived of civil rights and freedom of speech and press; they were especially taxed, and were arrested for the duration of the war on mere suspicion and without benefit of habeas corpus. They were herded together and shipped into prison camps far from the British lines, in which they were sometimes forced to work for the Revolution; they were tarred and feathered, banished, and their lands and properties were confiscated by the State. Sometimes they were even executed. They were forced to take test oaths, they were disfranchised and barred from public office, and they were generally forbidden to practice as professional men. In many cases family punishment was imposed, and relatives of absent Tories were jailed for the behavior of their errant kinsmen and held as hostages. Local vigilante action kept watch on suspected Tories and imposed harsh penalties on them.

Banishment from the country—with little money allowed to be taken out—was a favorite punishment for Tories and suspected Tories. Thus, Massachusetts began its systematic policy of banishment in 1777, by providing for majorities at town meetings to name Tories and then to bring them to trial. Convicted Tories were to be deported at their own expense. The following year, Massachusetts imposed a test oath for which refusal to sign would bring banishment. Later that year, Massachusetts went further to bring into practice the hated and tyrannical act of attainder—a legislative declaration of guilt without benefit of trial. Two hundred and sixty suspected Tories were attainted, imprisoned, and banished.

How far even the liberals were inclined to go may be illustrated by Thomas Jefferson’s action in the case of Josiah Phillips. Phillips had organized a Tory terror gang in Princess Anne County, Virginia. As a member of the Virginia Assembly, Jefferson pushed through a bill of attainder and outlawry declaring Phillips guilty of murder, plunder, and high treason and proclaiming Phillips and all of his unnamed associates to be outlaws whom any man could kill with impunity. Thus, Jefferson was willing to use a hated and despotic outlawry procedure rarely used in the American colonies and dying out even then in comparatively statist England.*

The Continental Congress, in October 1775, urged the imprisonment of anyone who might, in the opinion of the provincial committees of safety, “endanger the safety of the colony or the liberties of America”; and two years later it recommended confiscation of the property of all Tories, who had supposedly forfeited their “right of protection.” But Congress could merely recommend; only the states and localities could take action against the Tories. One such state program of action against its Tories has been subjected to detailed study—that of New Jersey.**

As in the other states, enforcement was in the hands of the attorney general, in this case, William Patterson. The chief centers of legal prosecution were the thirteen county courts in New Jersey, composed of local justices of the peace sitting together. But the traditional legal machinery proved too cumbersome a weapon, and in early 1777, New Jersey set up a council of safety, chosen by the legislature and including the attorney general, armed with the power to jail any man even suspected of Toryism.

The council of safety traveled all over the state, whipping up the zeal of local officials, and often taking the administration of anti-Tory law into its own hands: hearing witnesses, ordering the seizure of suspects, and the imprisonment of alleged Tories. In one day in July 1777, the New Jersey Council of Safety arrested no fewer than 48 suspected Tories! Juridical safeguards were disregarded, and Patterson could, for example, indict as well as prosecute. In practice, in fact, Attorney General Patterson did most of the council’s work.

Anyone making “seditious” remarks, however slight, or failing to turn out for militia duty, was apt to be suspected and denounced as a Tory and also to be forced to take a test oath swearing loyalty to the Revolution. The peak of Tory prosecution in New Jersey took place during 1777 and 1778, when almost all the cases were prosecuted. By October 1778, New Jersey was presumably cleansed of Tories, and the Council of Safety was dissolved.

As we have remarked, the Revolution did not spare its Tories the ultimate penalty, execution. Two were hanged in Philadelphia in 1778, and several were executed in North Carolina. Many active Tories were executed by state militia and guerrilla bands, and many armed Tory prisoners were executed in reprisal for British killings of rebels.

The eminent historian Robert R. Palmer has offered a critically important comparison of the degree of radicalism in the American and French revolutions: the number of émigrés who felt compelled to flee the country during the revolution. The French Revolution created 129,000 exiles out of a total population of about 25 million: an émigré ratio of 5 per 1,000. The American Tory émigrés amounted to what Palmer very conservatively sets at 60,000 in a population of about 2.5 million: 24 émigrés per 1,000. But at least half a million of the American population were slaves, who could hardly be considered to be in the same category as other inhabitants of of colonies. A more likely estimate for Tory emigration in the Revolution is 100,000. At this corrected rate, 50 Americans out of every 1,000 were émigrés during the Revolution, a rate fully tenfold the exile rate in the supposedly more radical French Revolution. Furthermore, as Palmer reminds us:

An important nucleus of conservatism was permanently lost to the United States. The French émigrés returned to France. The émigrés from the American Revolution did not return; they peopled the Canadian wilderness [e.g., New Brunswick]; only individuals, without political influence, drifted back to the United States. Anyone who knows the significance for France of the return of the émigrés will ponder the importance, for the United States, of this fact which is so easily overlooked, because negative and invisible except in a comparative view. Americans have really forgotten the loyalists.... The sense in which there was no conflict in the American Revolution is the sense in which the loyalists are forgotten. The “American consensus” rests in some degree on the elimination from the national consciousness, as well as from the country, of a once important and relatively numerous element of dissent.*

As the Revolution wore on and finances became tight, confiscation of Tory land became an increasingly tempting method of financing the war —certainly a method of reparation more just than inflation. Confiscation began as a method employed by scattered private individuals, operating on what might be called “the homestead principle.” Individuals, nearby rebel soldiers, and local committees expropriated the treasures, livestock, timber, furniture, and clothing of Tory families. Private appropriation of the property of Tories was not prosecuted as theft by the authorities.

At this point, the states stepped in, deciding to stake out booty from Tories for their own privileged use. Tom Paine, in Common Sense, had advanced the idea of seizing Tory property to finance the Revolution, and the Congressional resolution of late 1777 spurred the states to follow this advice. Generally, the states first sequestered Tory-owned lands to themselves, and then later sold the lands at auction, the state pocketing the proceeds. In this way, Tory lands were redistributed throughout the country.

Every state carried out the confiscation of Tory property, although the specific procedures often varied from state to state. Generally, the states seized Tory property by attainder, with no provision for jury trial. In some cases, the regular executive officers conducted operations; in others, special commissions were appointed. Auction sales were often made on credit, to ease the burden on purchasers, and sometimes payment could be made in state treasurers’ certificates issued to public creditors in the state. No Tories were permitted to buy the estates, and this effectively prohibited collusive purchases by Tory friends of the expropriated.

It is instructive to note the moral justification that a largely liberal society gave for the blatantly uncompensated confiscation of the property of the American Tories. The Virginia House of Delegates declared, at the end of 1782, that the confiscation laws “were strongly dictated by that principle of common justice which demands that if virtuous citizens, in defense of their natural rights, risk their life, liberty and property on their success, vicious citizens, who side with tyranny and oppression, or cloak themselves under the mask of neutrality, should at least hazard their property and not enjoy the labors and dangers of those whose destruction they wished.”*

The result of this redistribution was a significantly more democratic and less concentrated ownership of land in the country, for many large Tory estates were broken up by the confiscation process. Indeed, state policy was to divide up the large estates and sell them in small tracts, to prevent “dangerous monopolies of land.” In North Carolina, there was considerable redistribution of land and at low prices that small farmers could afford; thus, the vast holdings of the noted Tory, Henry McCulloh, were confiscated by the state and sold to eighty separate families. Such large estates as those of Tories John Wentworth in New Hampshire, Sir William Pepperrell in Maine, and Sir James Wright in Georgia were confiscated and redistributed. And various proprietary lands—in Maryland, the Penn family’s in Pennsylvania, Lord Fairfax’s tract in the Northern Neck of Virginia, and Lord Granville’s in North Carolina—were swept away. Their quitrents abolished, they were confiscated by the state and resold to separate private owners. In this way, the Revolution swept away these important remnants of feudalism.**

Lord Granville’s estate, it should be remembered, constituted one-third of North Carolina, while Fairfax’s Northern Neck domain totalled over five million acres. Interestingly enough, Lord Fairfax had settled down in permanent residence in Virginia in the 1740s, and he was never a Tory. Virginia therefore graciously waited until his death to confiscate his estate —a sign that elimination of this feudal land monopoly was a concern of Virginians separate from the urge to punish Tories. Furthermore, land monopoly was significantly attacked by the confiscation, division, and sale of ungranted royal estates and timberlands in New Hampshire, New York, and the southern states.

Whenever the State has privileges to dispense, they will tend to be granted to the State officials themselves or their favorites, or to be sold to the highest bidder. Hence, inevitably, corruption and special privilege entered into the lucrative disposal of the confiscated lands. Haskett shows this process of privilege as it developed in New Jersey. Confiscations and dispositions were made by appointed county commissioners. These commissioners were therefore suppliers of special privileges. Accordingly, they generally failed to advertise the land sales, doctored the auditing of assets, and rigged the bidding so as to sell the land parcels to favored buyers at bargain prices. Moreover, the county commissioners often kept the sale money, invested it for their personal accounts, and only paid the money into the government later, in highly depreciated currency. Indeed, one shrewd commissioner of Somerset County, Federick Frelinghuysen, ended up as owner of two of the seven confiscated estates he helped to sell. By 1781, New Jersey had only received $28,000 from its sales of land.

Neither Attorney General Patterson nor the assembly ever acted to stop this wholesale corruption. Not surprisingly, since Patterson was an old friend of Frelinghuysen; indeed, both Patterson and his brother-in-law became owners of confiscated Somerset estates. In fact, Frelinghuysen, Patterson, and Patterson’s family wound up as owners of over half the confiscated Tory estates in Somerset County.

Yet despite the widespread corruption, land distribution in New Jersey was still significantly broadened and made more democratic as a result of the Revolution. Over 500 Tory estates in the state were confiscated, parcelled out, and sold in New Jersey.

*Cited in North Callahan, Royal Raiders (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1963), p. 8.

*See Leonard W. Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 33ff. Levy’s work is indispensable for revision of the common over-inflation of the extent of Jefferson’s libertarianism.

**Richard C. Haskett, “Prosecuting the Revolution,” American Historical Review (April 1954), pp. 578–87.

*Robert R. Palmer,The Age of the Democratic Revolution, I: The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 189–90.

*See C. H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959, original edition, 1902), pp. 280–81.

**On the other hand, Penn’s private manors in Pennsylvania and their quitrents, totalling over 500,000 acres, were reconfirmed by the Pennsylvania legislature rather than confiscated!

77

Tory Lands in New York

These conflicting tendencies are highly important in assessing the results of large-scale land confiscation in New York from which the state received $3 million in proceeds. New York’s land system was uniquely shot through with feudalistic land monopoly; huge manorial estates, derived from the land grants of the early eighteenth century, were still largely intact, and contained an oppressed and restive tenant “peasantry.” Confiscation of large Tory quasi-feudal estates was therefore particularly significant in the much-needed democratizing of land ownership in New York. A particularly vital question for justice in land was the extent to which land ownership reverted to the tenants in this process, or instead went to land speculators privileged by the State.

New York feudalism was greatly weakened by the very fact of the breakup of the large Tory estates. This was the inevitable result of the confiscation and breakup of the huge estates of the Johnsons, Philipsburgh Manor of Philipse in Westchester, the Roger Morris and Beverly Robinson estates in Dutchess County (now Putnam), and the DeLancey estate in New York City; these last four accounted for nearly 90 percent of the tenantry of all Tory land holdings in New York Thus, James DeLancey’s estate in southern New York was broken up and sold to 275 different persons, and Roger Morris’ to 250 persons.

New York’s land confiscation policy came in two stages. The first policy was sequestration. In the spring of 1777, commissioners of sequestration were appointed for each county, and were authorized to seize all personal property of Tories in the county and to sell it immediately at public auction. Tory lands, on the other hand, were to be sequestered by the state and held in trust, the state meanwhile taking over the role of landlord, exacting rents from the tenantry. Some leases were granted by private application rather than by public auction, and rebel refugees from southern New York were to be favored in granting leases, so favoritism was rife; numerous tenants were evicted to make room for favored émigrés from southern New York. The tenantry soon found to their dismay that government feudal landlords were just as oppressive as private landlords —just as tyrannical, just as cruel to squatters, and just as prone to compel eviction for nonpayment of rent.

Ferment by the disgruntled tenantry quickly took the form of pressing for outright confiscation and sale of the Tory estates. The greatest pressure occurred in south Dutchess County; on the one hand, this area was the frontier nearest British control, and filled with rebel refugees from West-chester. On the other hand, the landlords in the area were mainly Tory, and hence their tenants had a strong economic incentive to become ardent Whigs and press for outright confiscation and breakup of the estates. In October 1778, 448 citizens of Dutchess County petitioned the assembly for a confiscation bill. It is not surprising that the right wing was bitterly hostile to confiscation, and Livingston, Gouverneur Morris, and the Jays denounced the plan as a great “compound of folly, avarice and injustice”; the moderate centrist Governor Clinton strongly opposed the confiscation laws. The leader in the assembly for confiscation was the old antilandlord champion of the tenant struggles of the 1760s, the independent freeholder, Dirck Brinckerhoff of Dutchess County. The veteran John Morin Scott was also a leading advocate of confiscation.

The great confiscation laws of 1779–80, in fact, were driven through solely by mass pressure from below, pressure against both Clinton and the ultraright. Thus, a confiscation bill passed in February 1779, but was vetoed by the council of revision as unjust and an attainder. The veto precipitated a great crisis in New York politics. Radical victories swept the spring elections in 1779, elections which took place, in Orange and Ulster Counties, with proradical militia batteries ominously maneuvering near the polling booths. In the fall session of the 1779 Assembly, two-thirds of the delegates were new—and radical. It was this session that drove through the radical legislation of New York during the Revolution.

As the fall session opened in October, the New York legislature passed a tax law authorizing discriminatory assessments against suspected Tories. More important, on October 22 (the same month as the peak of Pennsylvania radical strength in the attack on “Fort Wilson”), it passed a law attainting for treason a long list of Tories, and confiscating their estates. Fifty-nine Tories were thus attainted for treason and expropriated. Once the lands were confiscated, the crucial question became: would these lands be divided and sold into private hands? If so, then land monopoly would be dealt a tremendous blow, the lands would be divided and parcelled out, and irretrievably democratized. But if not, if the lands were rather kept by the state, then the land monopoly system would be retained, the tenants kept in their place, and perhaps the lands would even be returned to the large Tory owners. As a result, the conservatives in the legislature, led by the wily lawyer and longtime representative of the feudal landlords, Egbert Benson of Dutchess County, devoted themselves to trying to block the division and sale of the Tory lands.

Staughton Lynd has pointed out that this very question—the division and sale of confiscated feudal lands—proved to be a turning point in both the English and French revolutions. In England, a major factor in the Cromwellian counter-revolution was strong opposition by Presbyterians and London merchants to the sequestration and sale of royalist and bishop-owned lands; and in France, a crucial feature of the “Reign of Terror” was to be the Jacobin decision to sell off confiscated feudal lands in small lots, at low bargain prices, in order to get the land into the hands of the peasantry. In both revolutions, it was this decision to take the crucial step to smash feudalism and turn the lands over to the peasantry that alienated the middle-class land speculators and helped wreck the revolution. Fortunately, the United States did not suffer from that great weight of feudal land; hence the task of the revolution against feudalism was far easier (except in the case of slave-holding plantations), and the resistance far smaller.*

The radicals kept up a drumfire of pressure on the New York Assembly for sale of the lands throughout the 1779–80 session. Every county sent petitions for immediate sale. Finally, after a great deal of resistance by the Senate, the final step was taken in democratizing and liberalizing the land system: sale of the confiscated lands. The bill became law on March 11, 1780. To make things easier for the tenantry, the patriotic tenants were excused from all arrears in rent, and the lands leased to the émigrés were sold on the same terms as the rest.

We come now to a critical problem in judging the social effects of the confiscation of Tory land: how were the sales conducted? In the French Revolution, monied speculators instead of small peasants acquired the feudal lands; in the English, most confiscated land found its way back to the original owners. What of the New York lands?

Recent researchers have shown that the bulk of land sales did go to tenants rather than speculators, and that a significant leveling and democratizing of the feudalistic land structure in New York did take place. Staughton Lynd has found that in Dutchess County, some cases occurred of Whig relatives returning land to the original Tory owners, with more cases of middle-class land speculators acquiring one or two tracts to lease to the existing tenants.

Some tenants, unable to buy their farms in competition with the speculators, did demand that the government lease the land to them at low prices. But Lynd concludes that “the fact remains that the ledgers of the commissioners... bear out the older view that most of the confiscated land went to small farmers, and so contributed to the destruction of aristocracy in New York.” This happy result was largely due to the sale law, which provided that confiscated land be sold in parcels of 500 acres or less—and the typical farm in Dutchess was 100–200 acres—and especially that existing tenants be given first option in acquiring their land. The tenants were allowed preemption for eight months to purchase the land at an appraised price. The appraisal was to be made by three men, one of them the tenant himself, another a commissioner, and the third selected jointly by the other two, so that the tenant had a large share in deciding how much he might have to pay.

During the 1780s, it is true, the law was altered by a more conservative assembly to the disadvantage of the tenants, including the weakening of tenant preemption rights. But time was sufficient for the tenants to reap the benefits of this liberal measure. Thus, in Dutchess County, 496 confiscated lots were sold, of which 471 belonged to four prominent Tories: Beverly Robinson, Roger Morris, Henry Clinton, and Charles Inglis, and 414 lots belonged to Robinson and Morris alone. These 414 lots in south Dutchess were sold to no fewer than 401 persons, and in very few cases did one person buy more than one lot. Almost all the lots were farms under the 500-acre limit, and the average price per lot was inexpensive, less than 100 pounds. A large proportion of these small, cheap, and widely shared lots, perhaps a majority, were bought by the actual pre-existing tenants.

For Westchester, democratizing took place where it was most needed: in the large, heavily tenanted estates. The land speculators made their main acquisitions in scattered urban or unoccupied land holdings.*

The majority of the purchasers were residents on their lands. The disposition of Westchester’s largest Tory estate, Philipsburgh Manor, has recently been studied by Beatrice Reubens.** This huge estate composed one-fifth of present-day Westchester County, or 50,000 acres, centering on Yonkers. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Philipsburgh, the domain of the Philipses, contained over 270 tenants on farms of about 200 acres each. The manor, moreover, contained no freeholds and the tenantry was theoretically on a highly insecure “at will” contract which also prevented them from voting in colonial elections and from holding major offices in later state elections.

Since Westchester was occupied by the British throughout the war, the confiscation law could not be applied to it until the war was over. The same was true of New York City and other occupied areas. Philipsburgh Manor was therefore disposed of under the 1784 confiscation law, which was not as liberal in granting preemption rights as the law of 1779. Yet the result of the disposition of Philipsburgh, first and foremost, was to replace one powerful landlord with more than 50,000 acres and 270 tenants by 287 independent farmers owning an average of 174 acres each. Moreover, more than two-thirds of the purchasers bought farms which they themselves had worked as tenants of the estate. Various heirs of tenants are not included in these figures, and many purchasers were really stand-ins who resold the land to tenants who had not been ready to preempt at the designated time. Furthermore, the commissioners were very lenient and helpful to the preempting tenants, extending their credit for payment beyond the letter of the law. The extent of liberalization of land tenure at Philipsburgh was therefore obviously enormous.

It is true that throughout the confiscated lands of New York, the tenants, not being granted their tracts outright, were often forced to buy the lands on mortgage and sometimes lost their lands to the mortgagor. But this was only a fly in the ointment of their newly found prosperity and status as owners of their land.

*Staughton Lynd, “The Revolution and the Common Man,” pp. 76ff.

*Lynd points out that in Bergen County, New Jersey, where Tory landholdings were small farms rather than large estates, the confiscation policy led to no decrease in concentration of land; nor did it have to, since the real need for social change was precisely in the tenanted estates. Lynd, “Revolution and the Common Man,” passim.; cf. Ruth M. Keesey, “Loyalism in Bergen County,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 1961).

**Beatrice E. Reubens, “Preemptive Rights in the Disposition of a Confiscated Estate: Philipsburgh Manor, New York,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1965), pp. 435–56.

78

Elimination of Feudalism and the Beginnings of the Abolition of Slavery

The American Revolution brought about an important smashing of feudal elements in land ownership and their transformation into a far more liberal land structure. Land monopoly was transformed by the opening of free and virgin land in the West, Virginia’s thwarting the designs of the speculative land companies, the liquidation of huge British proprietary estates and quitrents (in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina), and the confiscation and resale of Crown lands, and through the confiscation, subdivision, and resale—largely to tenants—of huge Tory estates, especially in southern New York. One other antifeudal measure came into prominence during the Revolution: the abolition of entail and primogeniture. The most prominent leader of the assault on these remnants of outright feudalism was Thomas Jefferson, who summarized his goals in this struggle with his customary eloquence:

In the earlier times of the colony... some provident individuals pursued large grants; and, desirous of founding great families, settled them on their descendants... so that they could not be alienated [entail]. The transmission of this property from generation to generation, in the same name, raised up a distinct set of families, who, being privileged by law in the perpetuation of their wealth, were thus transformed into a patrician order.... From this order, too, the king habitually selected his counsellors of state....

To annul this privilege, and instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit, to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of wealth and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society... was deemed essential to a well ordered republic.

While it is true, as recent historians have emphasized, that entails and primogeniture were not extensively employed in Virginia or the South, their abolition remains important as a principle. Furthermore, the arch-conservatives, led by Edmund Pendleton and Landon Carter, felt intensely enough about abolition that they fought it almost to a standstill. Carter, indeed, had the effrontery to call entail—a severe interference with an owner’s right to control and dispose of his property—a basic component of the “right to do as we please with our own property.”

Entail was abolished in Virginia in 1776, and in South Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania during the Revolution. North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, and New. York followed in the years after the war. Primogeniture was slower to fall, but was abolished in Georgia in 1777 and in Virginia, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and the Carolinas during the 1780s. By the mid-1780s, all but two states had abolished entail, and all had eliminated primogeniture by the early 1790s.*

One critical element of coercion—and of land monopoly—remaining in American life after the Revolution was Negro slavery. The relatively cheap and coerced labor provided by slavery made large plantations for such products as tobacco and rice profitable which would not have been viable on the free market. This was true because the simplicity and easy supervision of field work on a single crop made slavery particularly adaptable to plantation labor. Furthermore, the concentration of slaves on plantations had already brought about fundamental sectional divisions in America, divisions that were, of course, exacerbated once the colonies became independent and united. While in the North, Negroes, some of whom were free, constituted less than 5 percent of the population, in the South (Maryland and below) they formed 40 percent of the population, virtually all of them slaves.

During the Revolution the northern states began to move against slavery within their borders. The first steps were taken against the slave trade —against the importation of slaves into the state—since existing slavery was considered by too many people as a “property right” (even though in human beings) that could not be violated. In 1776, the Delaware Constitution prohibited the importation into the state of slaves for sale, and Massachusetts outlawed the slave trade. John Adams, however, effectively killed a Massachusetts bill for emancipation in 1777, and it took the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 for slavery to be abolished there—or so the constitution was eloquently construed in the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1781 in the notable case of Commonwealth v. Jennison. Chief Justice William Cushing decreed that the constitution’s declaration that all men are born free and equal, and are entitled to liberty, clearly made slavery unconstitutional. In his construction, Cushing was undoubtedly influenced by the brief of the lawyer Levi Lincoln, later attorney general of the United States under Jefferson. To the opposing argument that slavery was sanctified by the “custom and usage of the country,” Lincoln pungently replied that “custom and usage against reason and right” were void.

Vermont directly prohibited slavery in its constitution of 1777. A bill drafted by radical leaders Thomas Paine, George Bryan, and Charles Willson Peale gradually abolishing slavery passed the Pennsylvania legislature in 1780, but it freed only children of existing slaves upon reaching the age of 28. The New Hampshire constitution of 1784 prohibited slavery, and Connecticut and Rhode Island decreed its gradual abolition in 1784. The Rhode Island action came after years of prodding by the prominent Quaker merchant, Moses Brown.

New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the southern states remained with slavery unchecked by the end of the Revolution. New York City delegates, headed by John Jay, had urged a gradual emancipation law in 1777, but lost by a close vote. In 1785, a gradual emancipation bill freeing all future Negro children was passed in the legislature. It was vetoed by the Council of Revision of New York, however, because it denied the freed Negroes the ballot and thus would create a group of half-citizens. The staunchest and most principled libertarian in the New York legislature was New York Assemblyman Aaron Burr, who not only argued persistently for the Negro’s right to vote, to be a witness and juror, and to intermarry freely, but who also fought unsuccessfully for immediate and unconditional abolition of all slavery in New York. New York did liberate all the slaves of its Tories, and New Jersey liberated the slaves who had become state property by its confiscation of Tory properties.

But while slavery was being largely liquidated in the North, it was being cemented in the South, despite the staunch opposition of such men as Jefferson. Indeed, the states actively encouraged slavery: North Carolina passed a law in 1777 restricting the voluntary manumission of slaves, while South Carolina and Georgia paid out slaves as part of the salaries of soldiers and state officials. During the war, however, every state except Georgia and South Carolina either severely restricted the slave trade or prohibited it. This was not a particularly idealistic action by the upper South, however, since the value of domestic slaves would inevitably rise after prohibiting their further importation. And then Virginia and Maryland, where slave labor was becoming less profitable, could breed slaves to replace foreign imports as a source of new slaves to the lower South.

Fearful of slave defections to the British in the light of their wholesale flight to Lord Dunmore’s forces early in the war, the southern states placed especially severe controls upon the slaves during the war. Slaves were herded to points far from British-occupied zones. Special patrols were set up to prevent escape, and executions of slaves attempting to flee were stepped up. And yet, despite the harsh treatment and the resale into slavery in the West Indies suffered by the Negroes in British hands, many tens of thousands of slaves escaped to the British lines. Thus 4,000 escaped Negroes sailed away when the British evacuated Savannah, and around 6,000 sailed with the British from Charleston; in 1782, nearly 3,000 sailed with the British from New York City. Probably as many as 100,000 slaves —or nearly one-fifth of the slave population—succeeded in escaping during the Revolutionary War.

Many slaves also became known as “maroons”—fugitives fighting in inaccessible areas and waging guerrilla war against slaveholders. Maroon activity abounded in Georgia and the Carolinas, and a slave named Bill was hanged in 1781 in Prince William County, Virginia, for leading other ex-slaves in attacks upon plantations. One group of 300 determined ex-slaves decided not to evacuate Savannah with the British; instead they stayed in the swamps at Bear Creek as self-styled “King of England’s soldiers,” engaging in guerrilla raids on Georgia plantations. It took four years and the combined militia of Georgia and South Carolina to finally rout this band.

Plots of slave revolts were diminished during the war by the opportunities to escape offered by the revolutionary conflict. Still, several plots were uncovered, the most important being a planned revolt of the slaves of Pitt, Craven, and Beaufort counties in coastal North Carolina. The plot was betrayed by two slaves on the eve of the uprising in July 1775, and scores of slaves were arrested throughout the counties. They were punished by numerous lashes and ear croppings. Slaves rebelled on Tybee Island, Georgia, in early 1776, and Negro restiveness was noted, starting at about the same time, in Albany, New York, in Elizabethtown in Somerset County, New Jersey, and in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Restiveness among the nearly 4,000 slaves in Albany County continued for several years, including organized escapes and a plot to destroy the slaveowners and burn Albany to the ground. Virginia was beset by several slave revolts or threatened revolts during the war: in Botetourt, Halifax, and Accomack counties and Williamsburg, where in December 1781 the slaves set fire to governmental and other buildings in the town.

One other escape route for several thousand Negro slaves was enlistment in the Revolutionary armed forces; for in many cases where the states permitted, masters offered freedom to Negroes who enlisted. These enlistments could not begin until mid-1776, for until then, Negroes were barred from the army. In Congress this prohibition was led by the Rutledges of Georgia, but the ban also prevailed in the separate state militias, including Massachusetts, the rest of New England, and all the middle states. Tightened war conditions, however, as well as Dunmore’s call for Negroes to escape, reversed American policy and permitted slave enlistments. In early 1776, Congress reversed its previous decision to bar Negroes from the armed forces and the towns and states followed later on. The enthusiastic expectations of the enlisted Negroes were reflected in the surnames many of them now gave themselves including “Freeman,” “Liberty,” “Freedom,” and “Free.” South Carolina and Georgia, however, despite the ardent pressure of Henry and John Laurens and of William Henry Drayton, refused throughout the war to allow their Negroes to enlist, and made it clear that they preferred defeat in the war to allowing that sort of subversive license. The stubbornness of these two deep-south states prevented what might have been a severe blow to the entire structure of slavery in the South.

Most of the Negro soldiers served in the Continental Army rather than in the short-term state militia, and the bulk of them was furnished by the New England states, despite their relatively small Negro population. Negroes served in fully integrated units, but few were selected for the higher status service of cavalry or artillery. Most were infantry privates, often in menial service (servants, orderlies, waiters, cooks, teamsters, drummers) rather than in arms-bearing functions. Even so, Negroes, happy to be slaves no longer, generally enjoyed higher morale than the other soldiers who were eager to return to the freedom and higher living standards they had been used to in civilian life. In contrast to the army, the American navy—Continental, state and privateer—welcomed Negro sailors from the very beginning of the conflict, partly because Negro sailors were already familiar to colonial America: they were often used as pilots and even the South Carolina and Georgia navies used Negro sailors.

By no means all of the Negro soldiers and sailors of the Revolution received their freedom as a result; many were enlisted involuntarily by their masters. But the vast majority—several thousand Negroes—were set free by the enlistment process.

*On the abolition of entail and primogeniture, and on other radical libertarian consequences of the Revolution within America, see Robert A. Nisbet, The Social Impact of the Revolution (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974).

79

Disestablishment and Religious Freedom

Another important social impact of the Revolution was a great impetus toward religious freedom and the separation of church and state. In the first place, the southern colonies, on which Britain had imposed an Anglican establishment against the will and beliefs of the majority, moved quickly during the Revolution to disestablish the Anglican Church, which eventually became a harmless Protestant Episcopal Church. This disestablishment was almost an inevitable natural consequence of the Revolution against British imperialism. (In contrast, the propatriot Congregational establishment in New England could not be dislodged.) Thus, New York, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia eliminated their Anglican burden upon the state. Significant opposition to this important liberal change came only in Virginia, where almost half the citizens were Anglican; Jefferson and Madison did not succeed in driving through disestablishment until six years after the bill had been written and introduced by Jefferson in 1779. Even then it met strong opposition from, among others, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and the young lawyer, John Marshall, who urged the general establishment of all religion in the state. This Statute of Religious Freedom, which Jefferson rightly regarded as one of his noblest accomplishments, decreed absolute religious liberty:

No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or funds, or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by agreement to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

All men were to enjoy such freedom, which the law affirmed as one “of the natural rights of mankind.”

Jefferson’s philosophical preamble to the Statute of Religious Freedom was eloquently libertarian: he strongly condemned past rulers, “civil as well as ecclesiastical,” who had presumptuously “assumed dominion over the faith of others.” The human mind is by nature free and must operate uncoerced; truth, he affirmed, must be left to itself to prevail in the free and unfettered argument against error: “Errors ceasing to be dangerous where it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

Some of Jefferson’s ringing declarations on the supremacy of human reason were eliminated in a final pique led by such conservatives as Benjamin Harrison and John Page; while Madison and the young libertarian theorist, John Taylor of Caroline, fought to preserve the eloquent affirmations intact. The weakening was not very serious, however, and Jefferson, with due pride, printed and circulated the statute far and wide, and it made a deep impression in Europe.

Jefferson’s statute was quickly translated into French and Italian, and inserted into the notable French Encyclopédie. As he eloquently wrote to Madison from France in late 1786: “It is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles; and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions.”

Another significant development during the Revolution was the easing of the previously hysterical anti-Catholicism that had permeated the colonies, North and South. France, not long before a hated Roman Catholic enemy, was now a beloved and much appreciated ally and it was inevitable that France’s religion would no longer be treated as a creature of the Antichrist. No fewer than eight states moved, during the Revolution, to allow Roman Catholics to hold public office.

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Was the American Revolution Radical?

Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world; in the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. This neoconservative view of the American Revolution, echoing the reactionary writer in the pay of the Austrian and English governments of the early nineteenth century, Friedrich von Gentz, tries to isolate the American Revolution from all the revolutions in the western world that preceded it and followed it. The American Revolution, this view holds, was unique; it alone of all modern revolutions was not really revolutionary; instead, it was moderate, conservative, dedicated only to preserving existing institutions from British aggrandizement. Furthermore, like all else in America, it was marvelously harmonious and consensual. Unlike the wicked French and other revolutions in Europe, the American Revolution, then, did not upset or change anything. It was therefore not really a revolution at all; certainly, it was not radical.

Now this view, in the first place, displays an extreme naiveté on the nature of revolution. No revolution has ever sprung forth, fully blown and fully armed like Athena, from the brow of existing society; no revolution has ever emerged from a vacuum. No revolution has ever been born out of ideas alone, but only from a long chain of abuses and a long history of preparation, ideological and institutional. And no revolution, even the most radical, from the English Revolution of the seventeenth century to the many Third World revolutions of the twentieth, has ever come into being except in reaction to increased oppression by the existing State apparatus. All revolution is in that sense a reaction against worsening oppression; and in that sense, all revolutions may be called “conservative”; but that would make hash out of the meaning of ideological concepts. If the French and Russian revolutions may be called “conservative” then so might the American, This same process was at work in Bacon’s Rebellion of the late seventeenth century and the American Revolution of the late eighteenth. As the Declaration of Independence (a good source for understanding the Revolution) rightly emphasized:

Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations... evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government....

It takes such a long train of abuses to persuade the mass of people to throw off their habitual customs and loyalties and to make revolution; hence the absurdity of singling out the American Revolution as “conservative” in that sense. Indeed, this very breakthrough against existing habits, the very act of revolution, is therefore ipso facto an extraordinarily radical act. All mass revolutions, indeed all revolutions as distinguished from mere coup d’états, by bringing the masses into violent action are therefore per se highly radical events. All revolutions are therefore radical.

But the deep-seated radicalism of the American Revolution goes far beyond this. It was inextricably linked both to the radical revolutions that went before and to the ones, particularly the French, that succeeded it. From the researches of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, we have come to see the indispensable linkage of radical ideology in a straight line from the English republican revolutionaries of the seventeenth century through the commonwealthmen of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the French and to the American revolutionaries. And this ideology of natural rights and individual liberty was to its very marrow revolutionary. As Lord Acton stressed of radical liberalism, in setting up “what ought to be” as a rigorous guidepost for judging “what is,” it virtually raised thereby a standard of revolution.

The Americans had always been intractable, rebellious, impatient of oppression, as witness the numerous rebellions of the late seventeenth century; they also had their own individualist and libertarian heritage, their Ann Hutchinsons and Rhode Island quasi anarchists, some directly linked with the left wing of the English Revolution. Now, strengthened and guided by the developed libertarian natural rights ideology of the eighteenth century, and reacting to aggrandizement of the British imperial state in the economic, constitutional, and religious spheres, the Americans, in escalated and radicalized confrontations with Great Britain, had made and won their Revolution. By doing so, this revolution, based on the growing libertarian idea pervading enlightened opinion in Europe, itself gave immeasurable impetus to the liberal revolutionary movement throughout the Old World, for here was a living example of a liberal revolution that had taken its daring chance, against all odds and against the mightiest state in the world, and had actually succeeded. Here, indeed, was a beacon light to all the oppressed peoples of the world!

The American Revolution was radical in many other ways as well. It was the first successful war of national liberation against western imperialism. A people’s war, waged by the majority of Americans having the courage and the zeal to rise up against constituted “legitimate” government, actually threw off their “sovereign.” A revolutionary war led by “fanatics” and zealots rejected the siren calls of compromise and easy adjustment to the existing system. As a people’s war, it was victorious to the extent that guerrilla strategy and tactics were employed against the far more heavily armed and better trained British army—a strategy and tactics of protracted conflict resting precisely on mass support. The tactics of harassment, mobility, surprise, and the wearing down and cutting off of supplies finally resulted in the encirclement of the enemy. Considering that the theory of guerrilla revolution had not yet been developed, it was remarkable that the Americans had the courage and initiative to employ it. As it was, all their victories were based on guerrilla-type concepts of revolutionary war, while all the American defeats came from stubborn insistence by such men as Washington on a conventional European type of open military confrontation.

Also, as in any people’s war, the American Revolution did inevitably rend society in two. The Revolution was not a peaceful emanation of an American “consensus”; on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a civil war resulting in permanent expulsion of 100,000 Tories from the United States. Tories were hunted, persecuted, their property confiscated, and themselves sometimes killed; what could be more radical than that? Thus, the French Revolution was, as in so many other things, foreshadowed by the American. The inner contradiction of the goal of liberty and the struggle against the Tories during the Revolution showed that revolutions will be tempted to betray their own principles in the heat of battle. The American Revolution also prefigured the misguided use of paper money inflation, and of severe price and wage controls which proved equally unworkable in America and in France. And, as constituted government was either ignored or overthrown, Americans found recourse in new quasi-anarchistic forms of government: spontaneous local committees. Indeed, the new state and eventual federal governments often emerged out of federations and alliances of local and county committees. Here again, “committees of inspection,” “committees of public safety,” etc., prefigured the French and other revolutionary paths. What this meant, as was most clearly illustrated in Pennsylvania, was the revolutionary innovation of parallel institutions, of dual power, that challenged and eventually simply replaced old and established governmental forms. Nothing in all of this picture of the American Revolution could have been more radical, more truly revolutionary.

But, it may be claimed, this was after all only an external revolution; even if the American Revolution was radical, it was only a radicalism directed against Great Britain. There was no radical upheaval at home, no “internal revolution.” Again, this view betrays a highly naive concept of revolution and of wars of national liberation. While the focus of the upheaval was, of course, Great Britain, the inevitable indirect consequence was radical change within the United States. In the first and most obvious place, the success of the revolution meant inevitably the overturn and displacement of the Tory elites, particularly of those internal oligarchs and members of governors’ councils who had been created and propped up by the British government. The freeing of trade and manufacture from British imperial shackles again meant a displacement of Tory favorites from positions of economic privilege. The confiscation of Tory estates, especially in feudalism-ridden New York state, had a sharply democratizing and liberalizing effect on the structure of land tenure in the United States. This process was also greatly advanced by the inevitable dispossession of the vast British proprietary landed estates in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. The freakish acquisition of the territory west of the Appalachians by the peace treaty also opened vast quantities of virgin land to further liberalize the land structure, provided that the speculative land companies, as it increasingly appeared, would be kept at bay. Revolution also brought an inevitable upsurge of religious liberty with the freeing of many of the states, especially in the South, from the British-imposed Anglican establishment.

With these radical internal processes inevitably launched by the fact of revolution against Great Britain, it is also not surprising that this internal revolutionary course would go further. To the attack on feudalism was added a drive against the remnants of entail and primogeniture; from the ideology of individual liberty—and from British participation in the slave trade—came a general attack on that trade, and, in the North, a successful governmental drive against slavery itself.

Another inevitable corollary of the Revolution, and one easily overlooked, was that the very fact of revolution—aside from Connecticut and Rhode Island where no British government had existed before—necessarily dispossessed existing internal rule. Hence the sudden smashing of that rule inevitably threw government back into a fragmented, local, quasianarchistic form. When we consider also that the Revolution was consciously and radically directed against taxes and against central government power, the inevitable thrust of the Revolution for a radical transformation toward liberty becomes crystal clear. It is then not surprising that the thirteen revolted colonies were separate and decentralized, and that for several years even the separate state governments could not dare to impose taxes upon the populace. Furthermore, since royal control in the colonies had meant executive, judicial, and upper house control by royal appointees, the libertarian thrust of the Revolution was inevitably against these instruments of oligarchy and in favor of democratic forms responsive to, and easily checked by, the people. It is not a coincidence that the states where this type of internal revolution against oligarchy proceeded the furthest were the ones where the oligarchy was most reluctant to break with Great Britain. Hence, in Pennsylvania, the radical drive for independence meant that the reluctant oligarchy had to be pushed aside, and the process of that pushing led to the most liberal and most democratic constitution of all the states. (A highly liberal and democratic constitution also resulted from Vermont’s necessity for rebelling internally against New York and New Hampshire’s imperialism over Vermont’s land.) On the other hand, Rhode Island and Connecticut, where no internal British rule existed, experienced no such internal cataclysm. Internal revolution was therefore a derivative of the external, but it happened nevertheless. Because of these inevitable internal libertarian effects, the drive for restoration of central government through taxation and mercantilism had to be a conscious and determined project on the part of conservatives—a drive against the natural consequences of the Revolution.

Since the Revolution was a people’s war, the extent of mass participation in the militia and committees led necessarily to a democratizing of suffrage in the new governments. Furthermore, the principle of “no taxation without representation” could readily be applied internally as could British restrictions upon the principle of one man, one vote. While recent researches have shown that colonial suffrage requirements were far more liberal than had been realized, it is still true that suffrage was significantly widened by the Revolution in half the states. This widening was helped everywhere by the depreciation of the monetary unit (and hence of existing property requirements) entailed by the inflation that helped finance the war. Chilton Williamson, the most thorough and judicious of recent historians of American suffrage, has concluded that

the Revolution probably operated to increase the size of that majority of adult males which had, generally speaking, been able to meet the old property and freehold tests before 1776.... The increase in the number of voters was probably not so significant as the fact that the Revolution had made explicit the basic idea that voting had little or nothing to do with real property and that this idea should be reflected accurately in the law.... The changes in suffrage made during the Revolution were the most important in the entire history of American suffrage reform. In retrospect it is clear that they committed the country to a democratic suffrage.*

While many of the state constitutions, under the influence of conservative theorists, turned out to be conservative reactions against initial revolutionary conditions, the very act of making them was radical and revolutionary, for they meant that what the radical and Enlightenment thinkers had said was really true: men did not have to submit blindly to habit, to custom, to irrational “prescription.” After violently throwing off their prescribed government, they could sit down and consciously make over their polity by the use of reason. Here was radicalism indeed. Furthermore, in the Bills of Rights, the framers added a significant and consciously libertarian attempt to prevent government from invading the natural rights of the individual, rights which they had learned about from the great English libertarian tradition of the past century.

For all these reasons, for its mass violence, and for its libertarian goals, the American Revolution was ineluctably radical. Not the least demonstration of its radicalism was the impact of this revolution in inspiring and generating the admittedly radical revolutions in Europe, an international impact that has been most thoroughly studied by Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot. Palmer has eloquently summed up the meaning that the American Revolution had for Europe:

The American Revolution coincided with the climax of the Age of Enlightenment. It was itself, in some degree, the product of this age. There were many in Europe, as there were in America, who saw in the American Revolution a lesson and an encouragement for mankind. It proved that the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment might be put into practice. It showed, or was assumed to show, that ideas of the rights of man and the social contract, of liberty and equality, of responsible citizenship and popular sovereignty, of religious freedom, freedom of thought and speech, separation of powers and deliberately contrived written constitutions, need not remain in the realm of speculation, among the writers of books; but could be made the actual fabric of public life among real people, in this world, now.**

*Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage, pp. 111–12, 115–16.

**Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution I, pp. 239–40.

81

The Impact in Europe

Through a burgeoning press, book and periodical, reading clubs and the reports of foreign soldiers who had served in the American War, Europe was swept with fervor for the revolutionary cause. Indeed, a widely read political press and the formation of a “public opinion” really began in this era under the impact of the American Revolution. France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands were particularly taken by the Revolution and its inspiring example for the rest of the world. Under its impact a political press developed in Germany and the Netherlands; in Ireland and the Netherlands, two countries with close personal and kinship ties to the American people, the revolutionary example of the Sons of Liberty and committees of correspondence inspired popular political clubs.

In the lands of America’s wartime allies France and Holland, revolutionary sentiment could grow in a particularly favorable climate. Future French revolutionary leaders from Lafayette to Brissot de Warville were deeply inspired by the American example. France (as well as Ireland and Holland) learned about constitutional conventions, committees of public safety, test oaths, confiscation of émigré property, paper money and price controls from the Americans. Ambassador Franklin was lionized in Paris, and an international intellectual debate was waged over the virtues of the various American constitutions by such leading liberals as John Adams and Jefferson in the United States, Turgot, Condorcet, Dupont de Nemours, Mirabeau, Abbé Mably, and Abbé Morellet in France, and Richard Price in England. In Holland, John Adams intrigued with the radical republicans to join the war against the wishes of the pro-British Orange regime. Adams had close contact with the Dutch revolutionaries headed by J. D. van der Capellen tot der Pol, the Reverend van der Kemp, and the bankers of Amsterdam. The Belgian revolution of 1789 was greatly influenced by the American constitutions and state papers, and the Declaration of Independence by Flanders against Austrian rule in 1789 reproduced the language of the American Declaration. Moreover, the Act of Union of the United Belgian States in 1790 almost exactly reproduced the language as well as the spirit of the Articles of Confederation; the central legislative body of the union was even called “Congress.”

The American Revolution, and the question of participating in the fight against England, led to the formation of a Dutch revolutionary Patriot party around Capellen. Capellen, in a notable pamphlet of 1781, An Address to the Netherlands People, denounced the pro-British Orange oligarchy and bureaucracy, pointed to the example of an American government elected by the people, and, most importantly, called for the arming of the people, after the examples of America and Ireland. He also urged the formation of spontaneous grassroots citizens’ groups like the American committees and the English associations, to put pressure upon the government. To follow the American example, he wrote, was to be ready, “every man with his musket.” Accordingly, the burghers of Utrecht and other towns began to arm, drill, organize free corps, and form national meetings and assemblies. The mass army and the pressure of the burghers polarized and split the Patriot movement, for the aristocratic and traditionally anti-Orange Dutch “regents,” in control of the councils and provincial estates, began to be frightened at the democratic demands of the middle-class burghers. The burghers’ free corps was led by the fiery Ondaatje, a student at the University of Utrecht, who became a focal point for both sides in the Patriot split. The Dutch masses rallied to Ondaatje and the Patriots, while some of the regents left to join the Orange party.

Free corps began forming in 1784, and the first National Assembly of Free Corps met at Utrecht at the end of that year. By 1786, the National Assembly of Free Corps and the liberal wing of the regents issued a joint declaration calling for a truly republican, democratic, and liberal regime. What is more, the Utrecht burghers deposed the old aristocratic town council, and chose a new council by general election; the following year civil war broke out with the troops of the Prince of Orange. The Dutch Revolution seemed to be sweeping all before it. But, as was later to occur in France, the forces of foreign armed counter-revolution intervened to crush the popular movement. While financially aided by France, the Patriots were overwhelmed by large-scale British bribery and intrigue, but especially by the intervention of 20,000 Prussian troops, who invaded the Dutch provinces, occupied Utrecht and Amsterdam, and crushed the Dutch Patriot revolution. The intriguer British Ambassador Sir James Harris was close to tears of joy as he and the Prussians restored the rule of the House of Orange. Edmund Burke, in a prefigurement of his reactionary role in the French Revolution, also hailed the crushing of the rebellion. Harris’ financial largesse controlled the restored regime, and the House of Orange instituted a veritable reign of terror, driving many thousands of Patriots into exile. Most of the refugees fled to France and the Austrian Netherlands, though van der Kemp emigrated to the United States. Britain and Prussia made so bold as to guarantee formally the rule of the Orange regime.*

The Belgian provinces, led by the province of Brabant and by the lawyer Jean François Vonck, successfully revolted against Austrian rule and declared their independence in 1789. After independence, the Vonckists determined to complete their revolution and democratize and liberalize the restrictive feudal and guild systems of Belgium. In provincial revolutionary committees and in elections of local officials, insurrectionary committees of middle-class citizens began to sweep Belgium. The Belgian aristocracy countered by forming an estates general and adopting an act of union modelled, in its decentralization, on the Articles of Confederation, and insisting that the American model was only a national, external revolution for independence. The liberals led by the moderate Vonck, however, countered by citing the importance of the American state constitutions and the consequent liberalizing of each state. Thus, both sides in the Belgian struggle relied on their varying interpretations of the true nature of the American Revolution. Finally, after various scuffles, the reactionary Estates party won out in the spring of 1790, and hundreds of liberal leaders were forced to flee to France. A rightist reign of terror, launched by the Catholic clergy and its reactionary theoretician Abbé Feller, broke out against the liberals, and one monk declared in a sermon that anyone meeting a Vonckist should kill him on sight. Masses of peasants, led by their priests, poured out into the towns to kill liberals. Hence, the return of Austrian rule in late 1790 was understandably greeted by the harassed Belgian liberals as “almost a deliverance” from the rule of the Belgian aristocracy; they then returned to Belgium bitterly anticlerical and looking wistfully to revolutionary and anticlerical France for their future model.

The first of the eighteenth century European revolutions had occurred in the city of Geneva. The burghers, with Rousseau as their philosopher, tried to break through the tightly knit rule of the local aristocracy in 1767–68, and gained a few concessions. In 1781, the burghers again tried to democratize rule in Geneva. The Geneva aristocrats appealed to the powers that had presumed to impose and guarantee a tight aristocratic rule in Geneva in the Act of 1738: the cantons of Bern and Zurich and the kingdom of France. Genevese aristocrat Micheli du Crest urged external intervention “in the cause of all legitimate governments and of all sovereigns,” to crush the “atrocious and unprovoked horrors of sedition.” France, Bern, and Zurich promptly sent in troops and laid siege to Geneva and finally stormed it. The foreign powers, consulting with the town aristocracy, not only reinforced the pre-1781 aristocratic rule, but they even revoked the minor concessions of 1768. The banker Étienne Clavière, a burgher leader, fled from Geneva to Paris and there formed with Brissot de Warville a Gallo-American society to perpetuate the ideals of the American Revolution. Clavière was later minister of finance in the revolutionary Girondin government of France.

Another particularly direct outgrowth of the American war was the upsurge of a revolutionary movement in Ireland. In response to John Paul Jones’ raid on Belfast in the spring of 1778, upper and middle-class Irishmen, almost all Protestants (the submerged bulk of Roman Catholic peasantry had no voice in Irish political life), formed armed companies throughout Ireland. Designed originally for defense against invasion, these armed companies, the Irish Volunteers, remained in being to emulate the Americans and press for greater liberty in Ireland. Legal because of their ostensible purpose of common defense, the Volunteers exchanged ideas and met in regional assemblies. Newspapers, pamphlets, grand juries and county meetings agitated for liberal reforms against England, especially for the relaxing of British imperial trade restrictions in order to ease the severe economic crises caused by the embargo of Irish exports (especially linens) to the United States. Politically, the Volunteers wanted home rule for the Irish Parliament and democratic reform of that aristocratic body itself. The pressure of the armed Volunteers forced substantial concessions from the British, permitting some exports of Irish goods to the colonies. Further pressure by a Volunteer movement grown to 80,000 armed men forced the British in 1782 to grant the Irish Parliament, led by the reformer Henry Grattan, home rule and equal status with the British Parliament under the Crown. Such infamous measures as Poynings’ Law were repealed. Exuberantly, the Irish admitted that it was America’s victory, joined to their own armed pressure, that had forced England to grant home rule. “It was on the plains of America,” wrote one Irishman, “that Ireland obtained her freedom.”

But home rule proved disappointing, and trade restrictions and royal control continued in force; the Volunteers insisted on continuing in force to demand reform of the Irish Parliament itself. But they were weakened by a grave inner contradiction: their desire to democratize ran squarely against their commitment to keeping the body of Roman Catholics submerged. If the Roman Catholics were to be given the vote, the entire social system established by the English conquests, notably land monopoly and the established Protestant Church, would be cast into peril.

Discontent with the results of home rule swelled the ranks of the Volunteers, who even began to admit Catholics into their ranks. In consequence, Grattan and the Irish Whigs, whose victory for home rule had rested on the Volunteers, now denounced these peoples’ troops as an anarchic menace. The Volunteers pressed on to hold their first “Grand National Convention”—the world’s first national convention—in late 1783. Their reform plan having been rejected by Parliament, the Volunteer ranks grew further in the following year; Roman Catholics were increasingly welcomed, and the Irish radicals began to talk openly of revolution. In particular, the American example was increasingly held up as a model, and the reformers began to call for a national “Congress,” in open imitation of revolutionary America. But the attorney general suppressed the radical press, and arrested the sympathetic sheriff of Dublin. The Volunteer movement soon faded away, largely because it never resolved its contradiction on Roman Catholic emancipation, and hence because it never had the courage to openly enlist the Roman Catholic masses on its side.

Edmund Burke, significantly enough, staunchly favored the conservative side, the side of prescriptive custom. At the same time he bitterly opposed English Parliamentary reform; there he went to the logical conclusion of conservatism that any sharp change in government was simply “anarchy.” “For to discredit the only form of government which we either possess or can project, what is this but to destroy all government? And this is anarchy.”

Thus, in four countries in western Europe, armed liberal mass movements arose during the 1780s, inspired by the success of the American Revolution. (In England a feebler association movement collapsed with the division of the reform forces between Pitt and Fox.) In three of these cases—Holland, Belgium, and Geneva—the movement proceeded to the point of revolution. But in each of them the revolution failed and was crushed by armed counter-revolution. By the end of the 1780s, the first liberal impetus had been crushed by a regnant counter-revolution that, in most of these cases, relied on armed foreign aid to help crush the revolutionary forces; generally it was Great Britain to whom the reactionaries looked for succor. This was true of the Dutch, of the Irish magnates, and of the Belgian right; and, of course, it had also been true of the American Tories before their expulsion. Everywhere, England began to emerge as the home, the nucleus of international armed counterrevolution.

In reaction to England’s role, the liberal and democratic forces in Europe—and, for that matter, in America—had begun to turn to France for aid and sustenance. France, England’s ancient foe, played this role, interestingly enough, long before the French Revolution, aiding the left in America, Holland, and Ireland, and providing a haven for refugees of all of the lost revolutions. This was done not because of idealism (as its own role in crushing Genevan liberalism made evident), but to help even the score with Great Britain.

And so outside of America the wave of liberal revolutions had failed abysmally. They failed basically because they were bourgeois rebellions that did not tap support among the peasant masses by mounting a total assault on the feudal land system. By failing to be truly revolutionary, the middle classes could not command mass support and left themselves vulnerable to armed force. As Palmer explains:

The democratic movement failed everywhere, before 1789, except in America.... Moderate though it was, or seems in retrospect, it failed to obtain any concessions at all... all the efforts of English and Irish parliamentary reformers and of Dutch, Belgian and Genevese democrats, had come to absolutely nothing. Indeed, matters were if anything worse, for the fear and vindictiveness of threatened oligarchies had been aroused.

The democratic movement had failed for various reasons, in some places because the forces of the old order had successfully called upon foreign aid, and in all cases because the democratic interests, though important and enlightened, were a numerical minority in the country as a whole. They had no mass following. The “mass,” outside London, Paris, or Amsterdam, really meant the rural population. Country people at lower income levels in the countries now being considered, were politically unaroused.... So far as the ruling aristocracies drew their incomes from land, or their influence from the good will of the tenantry, they had little to fear from disaffected lawyers or impudent pamphleteers; the one thing that would undermine them was wholesale defection on their own estates. This did not happen until it happened in France in the summer of 1789.

If these events prove anything, it is perhaps that no purely middle-class or “bourgeois” revolution could succeed. Lawyers, bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, students, and professors could not alone unseat the holders of political power.... Another reason for the democratic failure, applying at least to Holland, Belgium and Geneva, was that these countries had the misfortune to be small, and hence easy objects of intervention. The attempt of conservative Europe to intervene in France in 1792, was to have a very different outcome.*

Above all it was necessary to engage the masses, as the American revolutionaries had done. But in Europe, ridden as America had not been by internal feudalism, still dominated by monarchy and by theocracy, mass upheaval would have had to rend and disrupt the entire social fabric. The stage was set for France to pick up the baton of the American Revolution. The seemingly far greater radicalism of the French Revolution was merely a function of the far greater built-in resistance to libertarian principles. As Palmer justly concludes:

The American and the French Revolutions “proceeded from the same principles.” The difference is that these principles were much more deeply rooted in America, and that contrary or competing principles, monarchist or aristocratic or feudal or ecclesiastical, though not absent from America, were, in comparison to Europe, very weak. Assertion of the same principles therefore provoked less conflict in America than in France... it was the weakness of conservative forces in eighteenth century America, not their strength, that made the American Revolution as moderate as it was.... The difference lay in the fact that certain ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, found on both sides of the Atlantic—ideas of constitutionalism, individual liberty, or legal equality—were more fully incorporated and less disputed in America than in Europe.... For a century after the American Revolution, as is well known, partisans of the revolutionary or liberal movements in Europe looked upon the United States generally with approval, and European conservatives viewed it with hostility or downright contempt.**

The French, indeed the European liberals in general, had to face far more entrenched opposition than had the Americans, and Palmer brilliantly concludes that in France “the revolution was itself a reaction against an immovable conservatism already formed.” Just as in America British aggrandizement radicalized public opinion, so the tendency of European counter-revolution to harden after suppression of the revolts of the 1780s radicalized French revolutionary opinion.

It should be noted that the European theorists of the old order did not take the current neoconservative tack of praising the American Revolution and reviling the French. These reactionary ideologues knew their enemy, and that most emphatically included the American Revolution, which was attacked with the same phrases later used to denounce the French. Similarly denounced were the Dutch, Genevan and Belgian revolutions of the 1780s. The Abbé Feller, theorist of the Belgian right, Mallet du Pan in France, and Schlozer and other historical jurists (as opposed to natural rights jurists) in Germany all became noted opponents of the French Revolution and were equally hostile to the American. Edmund Burke formed his defense of reaction in the cauldron of the moderate and liberal Dutch, Irish, and English reform agitations long before he attacked the alleged horrors of the French Revolution. The American Revolution, the European right realized, was a vital milestone in the advance and development of the western revolutionary tradition.*

*Palmer rightly concludes that “the Dutch Republic first lost its independence not to the ’Jacobins’ in 1795, but to the already well-developed forces of the European counterrevolution in 1787.” Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution. I p. 340.

*Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution, I, pp. 368–69.

**Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution. I, p. 189.

*On the linkage of the American and French revolutions, see Louis Gottschalk, “The Place of the American Revolution in the Causal Pattern of the French Revolution,” in H. Ausubel, ed., The Making of Modern Europe (New York: Holt, 1951), I:494–510; and Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation (Paris, 1956), and Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (New York: Free Press, 1965).