PART VIII Other Forces for Revolution 70 The Expansion of Libertarian Thought

The accumulating conflict with Great Britain had led to armed revolution at Lexington and Concord. In addition, other forces had joined since the middle of the century to add strength to the revolutionary movement. One vital force was the further development and extension of libertarian thought in America. It was the general concepts of liberty and revolution that found expression in the specific revolutionary arguments against Great Britain.

One of the most important sources of the dissemination of libertarian thought in prerevolutionary America, England, and elsewhere, was Thomas Hollis V of Lincoln’s Inn, England. Hollis’s career is a stirring testament to the influence that can be wielded by the activities of one lone but dedicated man. An ardent libertarian, Hollis in 1754 conceived his “plan” of disseminating books on liberty throughout the world. To this he then dedicated his life and his ample fortune. Hollis lovingly collected and disseminated old libertarian works and republished those out of print. In addition to distributing liberal classics like Locke, Neville, Sidney, Milton, Nedham, Harrington, and Trenchard and Gordon, Hollis discovered and publicized such important but forgotten sixteenth-century writers as François Hotman, George Buchanan, and John Poynet, who anticipated Sidney and Locke, and Marian exile Christopher Goodman, whose work influenced the later doctrines of disobedience to the state. Libertarian medals, coins, prints, pictures, and manuscripts were also collected and sent abroad.

In the late 1750s and early 1760s Thomas Hollis distributed his libertarian gifts far and wide: to Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Poland, Italy, and France. But with the inception of the Stamp Act and other colonial struggles, Hollis turned the bulk of his attention after 1764 to the American colonies. Hundreds of libertarian works regarded as subversive by the British government were sent to the library at Harvard College, with libertarian mottoes and characters stamped upon them. Hollis also carried on an extensive correspondence with two great liberal Congregational divines of Massachusetts: Jonathan Mayhew and Andrew Eliot. And not only did Hollis ardently sow the seeds of English radicalism in America, he also led in distributing the American views to the people of England. Hollis, indeed, was the source of most of the pro-American writings printed in England and elsewhere in Europe during the 1760s, including the essays of Mayhew and Eliot.

There was nothing namby-pamby about Hollis’s libertarianism. It was profoundly radical and stressed Hollis’s passionate devotion to “king-killing,” resistance to tyrants, and the revolutionary principles of seventeenth-century England. There was perhaps more truth than exaggeration in Tory Samuel Johnson’s blaming the activities of the indefatigable Hollis for the outbreak of the American Revolution.*

Thomas Hollis was deep into the Wilkite movement, and a particularly active member of Hollis’s circle was the great radical writer and historian, Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, sister of one of the Wilkite leaders, Alderman John Saw-bridge. When Edmund Burke published his famous Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), which defined the principles of the Whig party, Mrs. Macaulay promptly attacked it from the republican and democratic left. This debate clarified the split between the regular or “moderate Whigs” and the libertarian, radical Whigs.

In America, the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew had been the leader of libertarian thought since his great sermon of 1750, which first gave public expression in colonial America to the sacred right and duty of resistance to tyranny. As a result of his extensive correspondence with Hollis from 1759 to 1766, the latter distributed Mayhew’s works throughout England. Mayhew, in turn, spread the message of the liberal and radical works sent him by Hollis—works such as Harrington, Sidney, Milton, and Hoadly. When the Stamp Act crisis arrived, Mayhew was perhaps the first to urge a network of committees of correspondence throughout the colonies and helped lead the opposition to the Stamp Act. In a sermon hailing repeal of the Stamp Act, Mayhew was among the first to envision America as a haven of liberty for the oppressed of other lands: “And if any miserable people on the continent or isles of Europe... should... be driven, in their extremity, to seek a safe retreat from slavery,... O let them find one in America... where our oppressed fathers once found it....”

John Locke continued to be the major fountainhead of libertarian theory in America, and his works and influence spread even more widely after midcentury. By the 1760s and early 1770s, for example, the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale contained the numerous works of Locke. Locke’s more revolutionary side, however, began to be stressed late in the colonial agitation, especially after the American printing of his Civil Government in 1773. Many writers have stressed the influence upon Americans of the American printing of William Blackstone’s Commentaries in 1771, but this work was used largely for its tactical strength as a source for quoting the eminent English Tory jurist against Great Britain. Actually, as Clinton Rossiter admits, “The Americans read the eclectic Commentaries in a shrewdly selective manner, citing this oracle repeatedly and effectively in support of all manner of Whiggish doctrines. Two of the most popular borrowings... were Blackstone’s memorable salutes to natural law and natural history.”*

The Lockean emphasis on natural rights was further strengthened by the influence of the distinguished philosopher of the German Enlightenment, Christian Wolff, in the Institutiones (1750). Wolff emphasized more consistently than Locke that man’s natural rights are inalienable and cannot therefore be alienated to the state by any social contract. Wolff’s rigorously systematic work was highly influential and not only in Germany. In France, the important journals featured Wolff’s writings, and Voltaire was an enthusiastic student of Wolff’s work. The Institutiones was translated into French in 1772, and Thomas Jefferson is known to have had a copy in his library—a copy in which passages on the asserted right of revolutionary war are specifically marked. Wolff’s views were also carried to America by the Swiss writer on the law of nature, Emerich de Vattel, whose book, published in French in 1758, influenced Jefferson, Otis, and the Adamses.

As the Revolution drew near, Algernon Sidney’s influence continued to be strong. His martyrdom at the hands of Great Britain now had a personal meaning for the American radical leaders. Thomas Hollis had spread Sidney’s writings, including his famous revolutionary motto, throughout the colonies, the maxim soon to be enshrined as the official motto of the revolutionary state of Massachusetts. The English translation of the Latin motto by John Quincy Adams runs as follows:

This hand to tyrants ever sworn the foe,

For freedom only deals the deadly blow,

Then sheathes in calm repose the vengeful blade,

For gentle place in freedom’s hallowed shade.

And as the anxious American rebels prepared for the outbreak of conflict, the Boston radical, Josiah Quincy, stirringly wrote: “America hath in store her Brutii and Cassii, her Hampdens and Sidneys, patriots and heroes, who will form a band of brothers; men who have memories and feelings, courage and swords.”

Beginning in the 1760s, the French Enlightenment began to have notable influence in America; especially was this true of the great liberal Voltaire. Voltaire issued several important works during the 1760s, and an English translation appeared of his Collected Works. Americans steeped in Lockean thought recognized the French, especially Voltaire, as heirs to that tradition. Jonathan Mayhew, having read Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary and Philosophical History shortly after they appeared, wrote to Thomas Hollis praising these works, although stating that he could not agree with the Frenchman’s antireligious views. Howard Mumford Jones has shown, contrary to many historians, that Voltaire’s influence on American thought was far greater than that of his conservative contemporary Baron de Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws (1748) stressed state building, and checks and balances in that state, rather than natural rights or individual liberty. Jones shows that while Voltaire was the most popular French author in America in the second half of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu was only the sixth most influential. Moreover, Montesquieu’s influence was exerted only in the later state-building period of America, during the last quarter of the century, rather than in the third quarter when the revolutionary American ideology was being forged. The annual number of newspaper advertisements during the last half of the century averaged, in New York, thirty for Voltaire and eight for Montesquieu, and in Philadelphia forty-five for Voltaire and seventeen for the latter. It is true that American revolutionary tracts cited Voltaire minimally, but this proves little, since any such references to the great French radical would have been as tactically unwise as the window-dressing references to respectables like Blackstone or Montesquieu were shrewd. Voltaire’s works, furthermore, permeated a wide segment of the American public; the general public absorbed his political and social thought by reading his literary works, while the influential elite read his political and social philosophies directly.

The second most popular French writer in America was that confused and inconsistent radical, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Again and again he was referred to in America as “the ingenious Rousseau” or the “celebrated Rousseau.” Like those of Voltaire, Rousseau’s ideas were absorbed on two levels, the masses reading the novels Emile (1762) and La Nouvelle Eloise (1761) and the more serious-minded studying the Social Contract (1762), all of which were translated into English shortly after publication. Indeed, an English translation of Rousseau’s collected works appeared in 1774. John Adams had read the Social Contract as early as 1765, and he eventually accumulated four copies in his library. James Otis, in his pamphlets of the early 1760s, approvingly cited the radical Rousseau as well as John Locke.*

In his writings, Voltaire praised Locke’s motto, “Liberty and Property,” upheld revolution in behalf of liberty, and attacked despotism and war. In the article on war in his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire acidly compared warring states to armed gangs and observed that “the marvelous part of this infernal enterprise is that each chief of the murderers causes his flags to be blessed and invokes God solemnly before going out to exterminate his neighbor.” Revolution for liberty against the state, on the other hand, was a different question. In rebuttal to the age-old conservative attack upon revolution for using violence, Voltaire, in the Philosophical Letters, trenchantly pointed out that all political history has rested upon violence. Violence was permanently foisted upon the people by the state, declared Voltaire, and the difference between England and the other countries of Europe was that violent revolution had succeeded in England (at least in Voltaire’s romanticized model) but had failed elsewhere:

To establish liberty in England had been costly, no doubt; the idol of despotic power has been drowned in seas of blood; but the English do not think they have purchased good laws too dearly. Other nations have had no less troublous times; but the blood they have shed for the cause of their liberty had only cemented their servitude.

In striking contrast to Voltaire, Montesquieu was opposed to revolution and was a defender of the concept of preventive war (which Voltaire bitterly scoffed at as “clearly unjust”). In his Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu joined in the important debate between two important French historians. In 1727, the Comte de Boulainvilliers had concluded from his historical researches that the existing French government was rooted in conquest and that the current political structure was therefore the frozen embodiment of that past conquest. The current ruling class was the heir of the tribal conquerors; the ruled masses were the descendants of the subjugated. To the reactionary Boulainvilliers, this insight was only a support for complete domination by the ruling class, built on the presumed right of conquest. But to the philosopher and historian Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1734), the origin in conquest of the ruling class made all the more necessary the restoration of freedom to the people by ending the power of the rulers. Montesquieu, evading the obligation to weigh existing institutions on the basis of natural moral law, presumed instead to be a political “scientist” who takes existing institutions as his given—and therefore, of course, implicitly took as his undefended axiom the wisdom of the essentially feudal status quo. Indeed Montesquieu, fundamentally a reactionary, wanted to return to stronger feudal checks against the Crown. As a political scientist defending the basis of the status quo, Montesquieu, accepting the facts of original and permanent conquest, undertook to defend the existing ruling-class structure against possible revolution from below. It is no coincidence that Montesquieu’s popularity in the New World was suited rather to the state-building than to the revolutionary age in America.

For all his confusions, contradictions, and romantic irrationalism that opened the doors to future forms of tyranny, Rousseau staunchly supported the people against the despotic ruling classes of his day. He therefore must be regarded overall as a vital part of the broad radical-liberal movement of the era. In his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (1750; English translation, 1752), Rousseau condemned the accretion of centuries of coercive government—with its hordes of officials and auxiliaries of power in the legal profession, as contrasted to the more natural or voluntary government of the past. A trenchant attack on the ruling class was contained in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754). Building on Locke’s insight that private property began in the mixture of people’s labor with land and natural resources, Rousseau described how the state arose in the imposition of violence on such properties and their owners. This violence resulted in a ruling class imposing slavery and domination over the body of the ruled. From the state flowed the institutionalization of violence in “perpetual conflicts” between the original property owners and the ruling class. As Rousseau slashingly put it,

Such was... the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labor, slavery, and wretchedness....

From the State also flowed perpetual wars: struggles between the ruling classes of each state, employing and exhausting the lives and labors of the ruled.... The most distinguished men hence learned to consider cutting each others’ throats a duty; at length men massacred their fellow-creatures by thousands without so much as knowing why, and committed more murders in a single day’s fighting... than were committed in the state of nature during whole ages over the whole earth.

In Emile, Rousseau properly criticized Montesquieu for evading discussion of the philosophical and moral validity of the existing state, turning instead to elaborate treatment of currently established systems. Yet, when Rousseau later turned to such a philosophic inquiry in his own Social Contract, he developed two contradictory positions, for individual liberty, and for a popular collectivism.* On the existing ruling class, however, Rousseau stood firm for a libertarian view. Criticizing Hobbes’ curious conclusion that the right of the rulers to govern stems from the fact that only the rulers can benefit from political power, Rousseau scornfully remarked, “On this showing, the human species is divided into so many kinds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them.” On existing states, Rousseau’s famous verdict was unambiguous: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Above all, Rousseau was concerned, in his proposed commonwealth in the Social Contract, that democratic forms be as pure and direct as possible so that the specter of oligarchy could never more rear its ugly head. The more direct and continuous the control of the body of the people over state officialdom, the less likely would be the state to surmount the checks of popular vigilance and reestablish the despotism of oligarchy. Thus, for Rousseau, the necessary checks on state power were to be found not, as in Montesquieu, in legalistic forms within the state, but in popular forces coming from outside the state apparatus.

*Hollis’s crucial role has in recent years been rescued from ill-deserved oblivion by Caroline Robbins. See her “The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1950): 406–53; and The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 262–68.

*Clinton Rossiter, The Political Thought of the American Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, & World, 1963), pp. 73–74.

*On the influence of French ideas and writings in America, see Howard Mumford Jones, America and Trench Culture, 1750—1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927); idem., “The Importance of French Books in Philadelphia, 1750–1800,” Modern Philology (1934), 157—77; idem., “The Importance of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,” Studies in Philology (1931), pp. 235–57; and Mary M. Barr, Voltaire in America, 1744–1800 (Baltimore, 1941). On the influence of Wolff, see Julius Goebel, “Christian Wolff and the Declaration of Independence,” Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblatter (1918–19).

*The collectivist, or at least the antiindividualist, strain in Rousseau may be partly attributed to the conservatizing influence of Montesquieu. See Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 208ff.; and C. E. Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy Before and After Rousseau (New York: Russell & Russell, 1960), 1:296.

71

The Vermont Revolution: The Green Mountain Boys

While the American colonies were moving inexorably toward a final break with Great Britain, and the winds of revolutionary doctrine blew in from overseas, a local but intense revolutionary conflict was developing in the North. As in the case of so many internal conflicts in the American colonies, the struggles centered around the disposition of land.

Western New Hampshire (now Vermont), though still sparsely populated, was being settled throughout the 1760s, under land grants parceled out by New Hampshire’s governor, Benning Wentworth, and these lands quickly devolved by purchase upon the actual settlers. To attract settlers, the prices charged for the land were not very onerous. But New York, goaded by its land speculators, aggressively continued to assert its own arbitrary claims to all the land of the region. In 1771, this western region (which also included part of current New York east of the Hudson) contained some seven thousand settlers.

In 1764, however, the Board of Trade dealt a rude blow to the settlers of western New Hampshire. It decreed that New York’s land claims to the area were valid. New York’s governor, Cadwallader Colden, hastened to proclaim his rights and, true to the New York tradition of venal land oligarchy, to sell those rights to the land to a handful of land speculators from New York. By the end of 1765, Colden had sold to a few speculators rights to 36,000 acres of the best land in the area, centered around Arlington and Manchester in what is now southwestern Vermont. Leading these speculators were James Duane and John T. Kempe. New Hampshire tried desperately to halt or nullify these grants, but the Crown’s pressure left enough loopholes for New York to continue granting western New Hampshire land on a large scale. By the late 1760s, Colden had sold over 535,000 acres in grants, and had sold well over 2.1 million acres of military land grants to veterans, virtually all of which were transferred to large land speculators. By 1776 the total had reached 2.1 million acres of regular, and 2.4 million acres of military, land granted by New York. The great New York oligarchs were featured on this new gravy train of land monopoly; among the grantees were James Duane, Philip Skene, William Livingston, Robert R. Livingston, Pierre DePeyster, Augustus Van Cortlandt, William Smith, and John Morin Scott.

Claims mean little unless enforced, and trouble began as soon as New York tried to oust the New Hampshire settlers in behalf of its newly asserted “owners.” In 1769, New York’s aged Cadwallader Colden, back as governor after a three-year gap, brought proceedings against James Breakenridge of Bennington, to try to eject him from his farm. When they arrived at the farm, the New York authorities were driven off by armed friends of Breakenridge. The next step was for New York to order the arrest of Breakenridge and his rioting friends, who were led by the Reverend Jedediah Dewey and Samuel Robinson. New York was not able to make any arrests, however, and Colden, with mounting horror, complained that these settlers of the Green Mountain area proclaimed their allegiance to New Hampshire—as if they would hasten to salute a New York power that was trying its best to seize their lands and turn them over to a few privileged favorites!

The following year, New York proceeded again in earnest, launching ejectment suits against Breakenridge, Isaiah Carpenter, and other Green Mountain settlers. At this point, one of the great figures of American revolutionary history emerged, to be chosen to lead the defense of the beleaguered settlers: the redoubtable Ethan Allen. The trial of Breakenridge, Carpenter, et al. took place in the New York courts. The impartiality of the court may be gauged by the fact that its chief justice was Robert R. Livingston, himself a leading New York grantee of New Hampshire land, and the prosecutors were Attorney General Kempe and James Duane, the leaders of the speculative ring in the granted land. Not surprisingly, the New York court ruled for New York, in June 1770.

At first, Duane and Kempe tried to bribe Ethan Allen into submission, but the latter scornfully rejected their offer. Allen and the settlers resolved to hold their positions, by force if necessary. Banding together, the settlers formed a committee of safety to oppose the court’s decision, as well as an armed band to resist New York’s aggression against their properties. The band was called the Green Mountain Boys and Ethan Allen was chosen its leader. Soon each town west of the mountains had selected its own committee of safety. Delegates from the local committees convened regularly at Bennington.

Moving from attempted bribery to physical violence, the New York government, now headed by its ever more grasping governor Lord Dunmore, sent sheriffs several times to arrest Breakenridge, but each time they were violently repelled by armed farmers of the neighborhood. New York responded by escalating its coercion, ordering the arrest of the rioters, including the leaders, Silas Robinson and Simon Hathaway. The farmers refused to be intimidated, and violent armed defense continued.

The Vermont region is bisected by the Green Mountains. Although the heart of the settler resistance was located west of the mountains, the eastern region erupted also. There, while the Breakenridge turmoil continued in the west, a band of armed settlers, headed by Joseph and Benjamin Wait and by Nathan and Samuel Stone, rebelled against New York authority, denied its jurisdiction, captured the sheriff who had tried to arrest them, and forced the New York courts to adjourn. But the revolutionary movement there did not command the mass support that it did west of the Green Mountains. For the eastern side was more remote and New York’s yoke was felt more lightly there. The town of Guilford even went so far as ardently to advocate allegiance to New York. Rioters were therefore routed by four hundred pro-New York inhabitants, and the settler revolution was stilled in eastern Vermont by the end of 1770.

But in the west, the revolutionary struggle intensified. From defending the property of Breakenridge and the other settlers, the rebels went on the offensive to oust by force all New York authority in the area. When New York appointed a pliant ally as judge, the judge’s home was burned down and he was driven off. Robert Cochran led an armed band and forced out of the territory two leading New York officials. Surveyors from New York were threatened and beaten and their surveying tools confiscated. Settler defense continued as well: when the New York sheriff put a tenant of his in place of Isaiah Carpenter on the latter’s farm, Carpenter’s neighbors forced the intruder to leave.

The New York government next tried the soft sell, wooing the angry settlers by promising to confirm their grants from New Hampshire and reduce official fees. But the settlers could no longer trust their enemy. And so New York, now led by Governor William Tryon, fresh from his triumph in crushing the North Carolina Regulation, soon returned to the policy of coercion. In July 1771, Sheriff Henry Ten Eyck gathered a huge posse, numbering in the hundreds, at Bennington, in the southwest corner of Vermont, to bar Breakenridge from his farm. Now, at last, these insolent rebels were to be taught the lesson of obedience.

Setting out confidently on their easy mission, the New York posse was ambushed, surrounded, and forced back by a heroic band of ardent revolutionaries, members of the Green Mountain Boys, led by Captains Robert Cochran and Seth Warner, a cousin of Ethan Allen. This stirring victory of a private band of irregulars over organized New York power raised the hearts and spirits of the settlers of western New Hampshire.

The Green Mountain Boys now launched a systematic campaign to drive off the settlers who had been brought in by New York to enjoy the property created by the New Hampshire settlers. Charles Hutcheson, a transplanted New Yorker on Cochran’s property, saw his cabin burned and was ordered off by Ethan Allen: “Go your way now and complain to that damned scoundrel, your governor. God damn your Governor, Laws, King, Council, and Assembly.”

Governor Tryon of New York, in consequence, offered a reward for the capture of Allen, Cochran, and another leader, Remember Baker, to which Allen and the Green Mountain Boys retorted sardonically by offering counterrewards for the capture of their arch-enemies Duane and Kempe. In high spirits, Allen wrote mockingly to Philip Skene that “by virtue of a late law in the province they are not allowed to hang any man before they have ketched him.” Boldly, Allen rode into Albany unharmed and was welcomed by a sympathetic populace.

Allen did not even let himself be fazed by the desertion of the Green Mountain cause by the New Hampshire authorities. By the end of 1771, Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire had abandoned support of the rebels, hoping indeed to acquire some of the New York-claimed land for himself. The best the settlers could now hope for from New Hampshire was neutrality, which they gained when Wentworth refused to issue a proclamation against the Green Mountain Boys.

The Green Mountain Boys now stood alone. How could these very loosely organized and individualistic irregulars hope to stand up to the overwhelming might of the New York government backed by British regular troops? The answer lies in the authentic genius of the undaunted Ethan Allen. Allen perceived the potential of a new form of warfare on the scene of world history. Allen had watched with interest and sympathy the Prendergast tenant rebellion of 1766 and the rapid debacle of the rebel cause. From this carnage Allen and Allen alone learned the proper military and revolutionary lessons.

Allen saw that the grave mistake of Prendergast and the tenants was to rush out, an unorganized and untrained mass, to do formal battle with the well-trained and far more heavily armed British troops. The ensuing slaughter was inevitable. But why must all battle be waged in formal ranks on open fields? Just because all European military lore said so? Allen did not see why these hidebound rules should not be transcended. In particular, he saw that a revolutionary war, a people’s war, was best waged in a far different and a far more revolutionary manner.

In brief, what were the advantages and disadvantages of the Green Mountain Boys in their armed struggle with the organized power of New York? Their disadvantages were all too evident: the superior arms, and the formally trained, specialized troops of the enemy. But the military advantages of such a zealous people’s revolutionary movement had too often been overlooked. Two advantages were that the rebels dwelt among an admittedly friendly and sympathetic population, and operated on a thoroughly friendly terrain. As settlers themselves, the rebel forces were of that population and could blend quickly and easily with it. This itself greatly offset the specialization of the enemy; these part-time rebels, so camouflaged, just could not easily be spotted, isolated, or captured. Therefore, able to move among the people and on familiar terrain as fish in water, the rebel band had the great advantage of mobility and speed. It also had the advantage of surprise, for the support of the surrounding populace gave it an enormous intelligence advantage over the enemy. The rebels came to know where the enemy was, but the enemy knew virtually nothing about the rebels. The rebels, therefore, could and must hit and run, hit and run, strike and fade away, harassing and weakening and demoralizing the enemy while keeping it always off balance. These advantages, and others, the farsighted Allen had come to see. In short, he perceived that the proper path to victory for a people’s revolution against a well-armed state force is guerrilla warfare, not a foolhardy rush to open confrontation and instant defeat.

To organize guerrilla warfare, the rebels needed knowledgeable and brilliant leadership and high morale, both in the fighting force and in the supporting population. The Vermont settlers possessed these requisites: in the high-quality leadership of Allen and his lieutenants and in the zeal of the settlers fighting for their homes and land against aggressors. By 1772, a successful and continuing guerrilla war was being waged in the Green Mountains.

The astuteness and farsightedness of Ethan Allen’s grasp of the principles and tactics of guerrilla war may be seen by his highly restrained use of coercion. Since it is crucial to the success of a revolution to keep the active support of the masses, coercion must be held to the necessary minimum, both for daily mass support and so as not to provoke enemy reprisals against the people. Therefore, only as necessary, and then but minimally, were threats and terror employed by the Green Mountain Boys in achieving their aims of driving out the New York officials and interlopers, and of rescuing settlers and their own members from the New York enemy. So remarkable was their minimizing of coercion that in all their battles and skirmishes the Green Mountain Boys never killed a single man.

Allen sensed that revolutionary practice cannot successfully proceed without revolutionary theory and he proceeded to supply the latter as well. Lusty, militant, candid, and roughhewn Allen may have been, but he was far from an unlettered oaf. Though lacking a college education, Allen studied at the feet of the notable Boston radical Dr. Thomas Young. From Young, Allen imbibed deism, Newton, and French rationalism.

Allen used his ardently held Lockean natural-rights theory to justify the settler revolution. In his Brief Narrative (1774), written at the behest of a convention of westside towns, Allen rested the settlers’ rights to their land on the Lockean natural right of possession and cultivation, which “is of itself abundantly sufficient to maintain the right in the possessor,” and to gain him a “title, sealed and confirmed with the sweat and toil of the farmer....” In short, as Darline Shapiro puts it, “Allen’s argument, then, is that he who occupies and works the land has a natural right to it, a right sufficient to confer legality.”*

In true Lockean fashion, Allen proceeded to demonstrate the limits of government: “Laws and society, compacts, were made to protect and secure the subjects in their peaceable possessions and properties, and not to subvert them. No person or community of persons can be supposed to be under any particular compact of law, except it presupposeth that the law will protect such person or community of persons in his or their properties.” Therefore, no government or king may force a man to give up his rightful property: “The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent.” When a government transcends its proper limits and invades private property, then power reverts to the people, who resume their original liberty. In this way, reasoned Allen, the settlers of western New Hampshire had returned to a state of nature. By the default of the governments of New York, New Hampshire, and Great Britain, the Green Mountain Boys had become the means by which the settlers assumed the task of defending their property.

Governor Tryon, the stern extirpator of the Regulators, had never encountered such opponents as the Green Mountain Boys. In the spring of 1772, he asked for negotiations, although he refused to talk with the top leaders. The rebels sent as negotiators Captain Stephen Fay, the veteran tavernkeeper of Bennington, where the rebels often gathered, and his son Dr. Jonas Fay. In the rebel messages to Tryon, it was trenchantly pointed out who the real rioters and wielders of violence were: “Though they [the sheriff and posse] style us rioters, for opposing them, and seek to catch and punish us as such, yet, in reality, themselves are the rioters, the tumultuous, disorderly... faction, or, in fine, the land-jobbers....”

A lull now appeared in the New York conflict. In the west, the governor obeyed royal orders to leave the New Hampshire settlers alone. In the east, the revolutionary spirit died down; Guilford formally proclaimed itself part of New York, and two pro-Yorkers were elected to the New York Assembly. Tryon and the Fays readily concluded a truce on the basis of letting the settlers alone.

But the Vermont lull was destined to be short-lived. Continued pressure by Yorkers on western New Hampshire lands led to determined armed resistance by the rebels. Full-scale conflict resumed more intensely than ever, and a futile arrest order was sent out for Remember Baker and Ira Allen. Governor Tryon vainly asked for British troops to crush the Green Mountain Boys, but the British wanted no repetition of their role in suppressing the New York tenant rebellion of 1766. During 1773, guerrilla terrorism by the Boys intensified. The major irritant was the Scottish colonel John Reid, a New York land claimant who had been ejected from his claimed land by the settlers a year before. In early 1773, Reid led a party of Scottish immigrants back to settle on the invaded land; he built a wall, and even began to construct a village on the land. But in mid-August, Ethan Allen, Baker, and Seth Warner, leading a hundred Green Mountain Boys, swept down to demolish this nascent settlement and to drive the intruders off the land. When asked by a settler for his legal warrant for this raid, Baker lifted his hand to declaim, “Here is my warrant,” and Allen then raised his rifle high and dramatically shouted, “This is my law!”

As the guerrilla war continued to rage, Ethan Allen and his band, in the autumn of 1773, kidnapped one of New York’s top officials in the area, Judge Benjamin Spencer. Allen, Cochran, Warner, and Baker then conducted a public trial of Spencer, finding him guilty of allegiance to New York at the expense of the settlers. Allen and Baker informed Spencer that “they valued not the government [of New York] nor even the kingdom... they had force and power sufficient to protect themselves against either.” As punishment, Spencer’s roof was pulled off; after this salutary warning, Spencer pledged himself to be a loyal citizen of New Hampshire thenceforth. Thus was a leading royal official in the western area mildly but firmly removed from the fray. The request of the unhappy Tryon for British troops was again scornfully turned down; General Frederick Haldimand in Boston, a Prussian-trained officer totally unfamiliar with Allen’s new-style guerrilla warfare, indignantly wondered how Tryon could possibly claim to need His Majesty’s troops to vanquish a few miserable bandits.

Finally, Governor Tryon moved to a stance of maximum toughness, violating the canons of Anglo-Saxon law in the process. In early March 1774, he put through the New York legislature the “Bloody Law,” which proclaimed that Allen, Warner, Baker, Cochran, Breakenridge, and three other Green Mountain Boys were to be regarded as convicted felons and were to suffer death without trial unless they surrendered themselves within seventy days. Rewards for the capture of these leaders were also greatly increased.

In the face of this awesome sentence of outlawry, Ethan Allen never faltered. Instead, he leaped to counterattack in a magnificently revolutionary manner. In a slashing remonstrance, Allen blasted the New York officials of “insatiable, avaricious, overbearing, inhuman, barbarous blood-guiltiness of disposition and intention.” Allen dared the New Yorkers to come and get the Green Mountain Boys: “Come on, we are ready for a game of scalping with them, for our martial spirits glow with bitter indignation and consummate fury to blast their infernal projections.” Allen concluded with sweeping counter-death threats, promising death to anyone who dared to arrest a single Green Mountain Boy. And a west-side convention of settlers in mid-April branded any person in the area holding a commission from New York an “enemy to their country.”

New York was stunned to find maximum threats answered in kind. No one surrendered, and the Green Mountain Boys redoubled beatings and insults to New York officials and transplants, and they proceeded to seize, try, and sentence the New Yorkers. Acting Governor Colden (replacing Tryon, who had been called to England to explain this curious phenomenon in the New Hampshire grant area) soon was forced to call again for British troops, which were again sternly denied.

Meanwhile, the east-siders, those east of the Green Mountains, were being galvanized by the passage of the Coercive Acts and the British crackdown on Massachusetts. The east side met at a (Cumberland) county convention in Westminster late in October to consider its course. The east-siders replied rather ambivalently, if unsurprisingly, hailing American liberty and devotion to the king. Going beyond this stance, Leonard Spaulding of Dummerston cursed King George for establishing the Roman Catholic church in Canada, so vehemently that he was arrested for high treason. Soon armed men gathered and marched to Westminster, freeing Spaulding without meeting any resistance. The town clerk of Dummerston hailed this liberating act by the “brave sons of freedom,” and concluded his account of the affair by denouncing the “cut-throatly, Jacobitish, High Church, Toretical minions of George the Third, the Pope of Canada and tyrant of Britain.” No conservative hanging back or ambiguity here!

The west-siders, always leading in the Revolution, were not to be caught napping. After the removal of Benjamin Spencer, the Baptist minister, Judge Benjamin Hough, was the only major New York official remaining in the area. Finally, at the end of January 1775, Hough was seized by the Green Mountain Boys and taken to Sunderland to be tried by the leaders of the rebels. Hough was charged with allegiance to New York and acting as a New York magistrate. Admitting the charges, Hough was sentenced by the judges to 200 lashes with a rope scourge and exiled from the New Hampshire grant area. Before sending Hough out on foot, Allen and Warner capped their triumph by issuing the judge a “passport” for safe conduct to New York.

Thus, Ethan Allen had led the Green Mountain Boys in five years of outstandingly successful guerrilla war against mighty New York to a smashing conclusion. In sum, New York officials and planted settlers had been ejected from the area, and New Hampshire settlers had been defended—with no one killed on either side during the entire period. Indeed, only one Green Mountain Boy was wounded, and a few New Yorkers were whipped, pushed around, and had their homes burned—the full catalogue of casualties of this remarkable conflict under a remarkable and brilliant leader.

Matters were also coming to a head on the east side of the Green Mountains. A convention of Cumberland County had endorsed the actions of the First Continental Congress. Nonimportation, however, was rejected by the New York Assembly, thus widening further the rift with the east side. A third county convention in early February petitioned Governor Colden against the tyranny of the county court, which was appointed from above rather than chosen by the people of the county. Moreover, the court was too expensive and burdensome: it inconveniently dragged local farmers in to sit on juries, and was too prompt in enforcing collection of debts. Despite warnings of approaching tension, the Cumberland County court opened on March 13. A group of about a hundred men met at Rockingham, north of the county seat at Westminster, and, armed only with clubs, marched down to the county courthouse and engaged in a sit-in. That evening, marching up from the south came Sheriff Billy Paterson at the head of fifty men, many of them equipped with firearms. That night the sheriff’s posse shot its way into the courthouse and killed two of the sit-ins, in what soon was dubbed the “Westminster Massacre.” The first one to die was young William French, who was fittingly saluted as the martyr of the fray.

The Westminster Massacre aroused and galvanized the people of the east-side New Hampshire grants. The following day, militia companies of the people formed and kept tramping into Westminster. The Paterson posse hastened to flee. The county court, reading the handwriting on the wall, hastily adjourned. The radical elements in the assembled mob proposed to burn the courthouse and shoot the sheriff, the judges, and all their retinue, but they were held back by the more restrained militia commanders. Instead, the militiamen released the sit-in prisoners and arrested the sheriff, judges, county clerk, and members of the posse that could be rounded up. As militiamen continued to pour into Westminster to fend off any New Yorker or British counterattack, a climactic moment came when there arrived from across the mountains a detachment of Green Mountain Boys, led by Captain Robert Cochran. Their arrival was a living symbol of the emerging unity between the two halves of the New Hampshire grant territory.

As usually happens in such cases, the postponement of revolutionary vengeance led to a cooling off of temper and resolution. The Yorkite prisoners were either released on bond or sent for trial to Massachusetts, where they were all soon released; not one of the Yorkers implicated in the massacre even came to trial. However, the generally hated Justice Noah Sabin, on returning to his farm, was treated by his fellow citizens with an intense wrath that stopped just short of invading another man’s sacred right of private property. Sabin was assured that should he take one step beyond the borders of his own farm, he would be shot that instant.

Unity between the east side and the west side was further forged on April 11, when a convention of the town committees of safety of the two regions assembled at Westminster and proclaimed that all citizens should “wholly renounce and resist” the oppressive jurisdiction of the government of New York. Two east-siders and Ethan Allen were selected to draw up a remonstrance on their joint behalf.

As the news arrived of the shattering events at Lexington and Concord, the sturdy and successful Vermont revolution naturally blended into the Revolution against Great Britain. For one thing, the enemy New York government, particularly its executive, was a royal government, as was that of New Hampshire. For another, the call of liberty against the oppression of the state was very familiar to the men of the Green Mountains; they had fought for the libertarian cause for years. What more natural than to extend the fighting against the larger despotism of imperial Britain?

*Darline Shapiro, “Ethan Allen, Philosopher-Theologian to a Generation of American Revolutionaries,” William and Mary Quarterly (April 1964): 243.

72

The Revolutionary Movement: Ideology and Motivation

With the beginning of the American Revolutionary War at the outbreak of Lexington and Concord, two truths about the Revolution already stand out clearly. One is that the Revolution was genuinely and enthusiastically supported by the great majority of the American population. It was a true people’s war against British rule. In addition to all the evidence given above, the American rebels could certainly not have concluded the first successful war of national liberation in history, a war against the world’s greatest naval and military power, unless they had commanded the support of the American people. As David Ramsay, the first great historian of the American Revolution, put it in 1789, “The war was the people’s war... the exertions of the army would have been insufficient to effect the revolution, unless the great body of the people had been prepared for it, and also kept in a constant disposition to oppose Great Britain.”*

A second truth that emerges is the egregious fallacy of the view endemic among historians of all ideological persuasions that there is a large and necessary dichotomy between political or moral principle and economic self-interest. Historians friendly to the Revolution have insisted that the Americans fought for political freedom, for independence, for constitutional rights, or for democracy; critical historians maintain that the fight was merely for economic reasons, for defense of property and trade against British interference. But why must the two be sundered? Why may not a defense of American liberty and property be conjoined to a defense of political and economic rights? The merchants rebelling against the stamp tax, or sugar, or tea taxes, or the restrictions of the navigation laws, were battling for their rights of property and trade free from interference. In doing so, they were battling for their own property and for the rights of liberty at the same time. The American masses, similarly, were battling for all property rights, for their own as well as those of the merchants, and acting also in their capacity as consumers fighting against British taxes and restrictions. In short, there need be no dichotomy between liberty and property, between defense of the rights of property in one’s person and in one’s material possessions. Defense of rights is logically unitary in all spheres of action. And what is more, the American revolutionaries certainly acted on these very assumptions, as revealed by their essential adherence to libertarian thought, to political and economic rights, and always to “Liberty and Property.” The men of the eighteenth century saw no dichotomy between personal and economic freedom, between rights to liberty and to property. These artificial distinctions were left for later ages to construct.

From our conclusions that the American revolutionaries commanded the loyalty of a large majority of the colonists, and that they saw no dichotomy between liberty and economic rights—and therefore between ideology and economic interest—we may proceed to some broader speculations on the role of ideology as compared with that of economic interest in the various actions of political history. In particular, we contend that the primary motivations will tend to differ among two classes of political actions: actions of the state in expanding its power over the populace, and actions of the populace in moving or rebelling against state power. We contend that the actions of the former will tend to be primarily motivated by economic interest, while the latter will tend to be motivated primarily by more abstract ideological or moral concerns.

Let us see why this should be so. The essence of the state throughout history is a minority of the population, constituting a power elite or a “ruling class,” governing and living off the majority, or the “ruled.” Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the social system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently by itself but must always be led by an oligarchy, every state will subsist by plundering the majority in behalf of a ruling minority. A further reason for the inevitability of minority rule is the pervasive fact of the division of labor: the majority of the public must spend most of its time going about the business of making a living. Hence the actual rule of the state must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society.

Throughout history, then, the state has consisted of a minority plundering and tyrannizing over a majority. This brings us to the great question, the great mystery, of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. From Etienne de La Boetie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises, political philosophers have shown that no state—no minority—can continue long in power unless supported, even if passively, by the majority. Why then does the majority continue to accept or support the state when it is clearly acquiescing in its own subjection? Why does the majority continue to obey the minority?

Here we arrive at the age-old role of the intellectuals, the opinion-molding groups in society. The ruling class—be it warlords, nobles, bureaucrats, feudal landlords, monopoly merchants, or a coalition of several of these groups—must employ intellectuals to convince the majority of the public that its rule is beneficent, inevitable, necessary, and even divine. The leading role of the intellectual throughout history is that of the court intellectual, who, in return for a share of, a junior partnership in, the power and pelf offered by the rest of the ruling class, spins the apologias for state rule with which to convince a misguided public. This is the age-old alliance of church and state, of throne and altar, with the church in modern times being largely replaced by secular intellectuals and “scientific” technocrats.

When state rulers act, then, to use and aggrandize state power, their primary motivation is economic: to increase their plunder at the expense of the subject and the taxpayer. The ideology that they profess and that is formulated and spread through society by the court intellectuals is an elaborate rationalization for their economic interests. The ideology is the camouflage for their looting, the fictitious clothes spun by the intellectuals to hide the naked plundering of the emperor. The economic motive behind the ideological garb of the state is the heart of the issue.

But what of the actions of the rebels against state power—those infrequent but vital situations in history when the subjects rise up to diminish, whittle away, or abolish state power? What, in short, of such great events as the American Revolution or the classical liberal movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Of course, an economic motive exists here, too, in this case one of defending the private property of the subjects from the depredations of the state. But our contention here is that, even when conjoined as in the American Revolution, the major motive of the opposition, or of the revolutionaries, will be ideological rather than economic.

The basic reason for this assertion is that the ruling class, being small and largely specialized, is motivated to think about its economic interests twenty-four hours a day. Manufacturers seeking a tariff, merchants seeking to cripple their competition, bankers looking for taxes to repay their government bonds, rulers seeking a strong state from which to acquire revenue, bureaucrats wishing to expand their empire—all of these are professionals in statism. They are constantly at work trying to preserve and expand their privileges. Hence the primacy of the economic motive in their actions. But the majority has allowed itself to be misled largely because its immediate interests are generally diffuse and hard to observe, and because the majority comprises not professional “antistatists” but people going about their business of daily living. What can the average person know of the arcane processes of subsidy or taxation or bond issue? Generally, he is too wrapped up in his daily life, too habituated to his lot after centuries of state-guided propaganda, to give any thought to his unfortunate fate. Hence, an opposition or revolutionary movement, or indeed any mass movement from below, cannot be primarily guided by ordinary economic motives. For such a mass movement to form, the masses must be fired up, must be aroused to a rare and uncommon pitch of fervor against the existing system. But for that to happen, the masses must be fired up by ideology. Only ideology, guided either by a new religious conversion or by a passion for justice, can arouse the interest of the masses (in the current jargon, “raise their consciousness”) and lead them out of the morass of daily habit into an uncommon and militant activity in opposition to the state. This is not to say that an economic motive—for example, a defense of their property—does not play an important role. But to form a mass movement in opposition means that the people must shake off their habits, their daily mundane concerns of several lifetimes, and become politically aroused and determined as never before in their lives. Only a commonly held and passionately believed-in ideology can perform that role. Hence our conclusion that a mass movement like the American Revolution must be centrally motivated by a commonly shared ideology.

How then do the masses of subjects acquire this guiding and determining ideology? By the very nature of the masses, it is impossible for them to arrive at such an opposition or revolutionary ideology on their own. Habituated as they are to their narrow and daily rounds, uninterested in ideology as they normally are, it is impossible for the masses to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to hammer out an ideological movement in opposition to the existing state. Here we arrive at the vital role of the intellectuals. Only intellectuals, full-time (or largely full-time) professionals in ideas, have the time, the ability, and the inclination to formulate an opposition ideology and then to spread the word to the people. In contrast to the statist court intellectual, whose role is a junior partner in rationalizing the economic interests of the ruling class, the radical or opposition intellectual’s role is the centrally guiding one of formulating the opposition or revolutionary ideology and then of spreading the ideology to the masses, thereby welding them into a revolutionary movement.

An important corollary: in weighing the motivations of the intellectuals themselves or even of the masses, it is generally true that setting oneself up in opposition to an existing state is a lonely, thorny, and often dangerous road. It is usually directly in the economic interests of the radical intellectuals to allow themselves to “sell out,” to be coopted by the ruling state apparatus. The intellectuals who do choose the radical opposition path, who pledge—in the famous words of the American revolutionaries—“their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor,” can scarcely be dominated by economic motives; on the contrary, only a fiercely held ideology, centering on a passion for justice, can keep the intellectuals to the rigorous path of truth. Hence, again, the likelihood of a dominant role for ideology in an opposition movement.

Thus, statists tend to be governed by economic motivation, with ideology serving as a smokescreen for such motives, while libertarians or antistatists are ruled principally and centrally by ideology, with economic defense playing a subordinate role. By this dichotomy we may at last resolve the age-old historiographical dispute over whether ideology or economic interests play the dominant role in historical motivation.

We can now see why the Charles Beard–Carl Becker “economic-determinist” model of human motivation, a dominant school of American history in the 1920s and 1930s, so fruitful and penetrating when applied to statist actions of the American government, fails signally when applied to the great antistatist events of the American Revolution. The Beard-Becker approach sought to apply an economic-determinist framework to the American Revolution, and specifically a framework of inherent conflict between various major economic classes. The vital flaws in the Beard-Becker model were twofold. First, they did not understand the necessarily primary role of ideas in guiding any revolutionary or opposition movement. Second, they did not understand that there are no inherent economic conflicts in the free market; without government intrusion, there is no reason for merchants, farmers, landlords, et al. to be at loggerheads. Conflict is created only between those classes that rule the state and those that are exploited by the state. Not understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms of the allegedly conflicting class interests of, in particular, merchants and farmers. Since the merchants clearly led the way in revolutionary agitation, the Beard-Becker approach was bound to conclude that the merchants, in agitating for revolution, were aggressively pushing their class interests at the expense of the deluded farmers.

But now the economic determinists were confronted by a basic problem: If indeed the Revolution was against the class interests of the mass of the farmers, why did the latter support the revolutionary movement? To this key question, the determinists had two answers. One was the common, mistaken view—criticized above—that the Revolution was supported only by a minority of the population. Their second answer was that the farmers were deluded into such support by the “propaganda” beamed at them by the upper classes. In effect, these historians transferred the analysis of the role of ideology as a rationalization of class interests from its proper use in explaining state action, to a fallacious use in trying to understand antistate mass movements. In this approach, they relied on the jejune theory of “propaganda,” pervasive in the 1920s and 1930s under the influence of Harold Lasswell: namely, that no one sincerely holds any ideas or ideology, and therefore, that no ideological statements whatever can be taken at face value, but must be regarded only as insincere rhetoric for the purposes of “propaganda.” Again, the Beard-Becker school was trapped by its failure to give any primary role to ideas in history.

After World War II, as part of the general “American celebration” among the American intellectuals of that era, the newly dominant “consensus school” of American history demonstrated that the Revolution was indeed supported by the majority of the population. Unfortunately, however, under the aegis of such major consensus theoreticians as the “neo-conservatives” Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter, the consensus school moved to the truly absurd conclusion that the American Revolution, in contrast to all other revolutions in history, was not really a revolution at all, but a purely measured and conservative reflex against the restrictive measures of the Crown. Under the spell of the American celebration and of the hostility to all modern revolutions generated by the post—World War II era, the consensus historians were constrained to deny any and all conflicts in American history, whether economic or ideological, and to absolve the American republic from the original sin of having been born via revolution. Thus, the consensus historians were fully as hostile to ideology as a prime moving force in history as their enemies, the economic determinists. The difference is that where the determinists saw class conflict, the consensus school maintained that the genius of Americans has always been to remain unfettered by abstract ideology of any kind, and that instead they have met every issue as ad-hoc problem-solving pragmatists.

Thus, the consensus school, in its eagerness to deny the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, failed to see that all revolutions against state power are necessarily radical and hence “revolutionary” acts, and, further, that they must be genuine mass movements guided by an informed and radical ideology.

Fortunately, however, the most recent and now dominant school of historiography on the American Revolution—that of Professor Bernard Bailyn—brings radical ideology (and radical libertarian ideology at that) into the forefront of the causes of the Revolution. Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Bailyn has managed, in scarcely a decade, to emerge as the leading interpreter of the Revolution. Bailyn’s great contribution was to discover for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology among the revolutionaries. He stressed not only that the Revolution was a genuine revolutionary and multiclass mass movement among the colonists, but also that it was guided and impelled, above all, by the ideology of radical libertarianism—or, as Bailyn happily calls it, the “transforming libertarian radicalism of the Revolution.”

In one sense, Bailyn harked back to a generation of historians at the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called Constitutionalists, who had also stressed the dominant role of ideas in the revolutionary movement. But Bailyn correctly saw that the mistake of the Constitutionalists was in ascribing the central and guiding role, first, to sober and measured legalistic arguments about the British Constitution and, second, to John Locke’s philosophy of natural rights and the right of revolution. Bailyn saw that the problem of this interpretation was to miss the major motive power of the revolutionaries. Constitutional legalisms, as later critics pointed out, were dry-as-dust arguments that hardly stimulated the requisite revolutionary passions, and furthermore they neglected the important problem of the economic depredations by Great Britain; and Locke’s philosophy, though ultimately highly important, was too abstract to generate the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonists. Something, Bailyn rightly felt, was missing: the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary passions.

Bailyn found the missing ingredient in the radical libertarian Lockean English writers of the eighteenth century—especially John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon of Cato’s Letters. These writers applied and transformed Lockean natural-rights theory into a radical and passionate, and explicitly political, libertarian and anti-British framework. Trenchard and Gordon, and the other influential libertarian writers, clearly and passionately set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and warned also that power—government—stood ever ready to conspire to violate the liberties of the individual. To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of liberty by power, the people must be ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies of the rulers to expand their power and aggress against their subjects. It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly imbibed, and that accounted for their “conspiracy view” of the English government, a view which historians like Bernhard Knollenberg have shown was basically correct, since, after 1760, such conspiracies were all too real. Thus, what some historians have derided as the “paranoia” of the colonists turned out to be not paranoia at all but an insightful apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonists’ libertarian understanding of the very nature and essence of state power itself.

Thus, in the deepest sense, the American Revolution was a conscious majority revolution in behalf of libertarianism and against power, a libertarian ideology that stressed the conjoined rights of “Liberty and Property.” The American Revolution was not only the first great modern revolution. It was a libertarian revolution as well.**

*Professor Alden has shown that the myth of present-day historians that only one-third of the American public backed the Revolution, with an equal number opposed, stems from a misreading of a letter by John Adams (John R. Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783 [New York: Harper & Row, 1954], p. 87). Historians of such disparate views as Robert E. Brown and Herbert Aptheker now support the view that the Revolution was a majority movement. Thus, see Brown, Middle-Class Democracy, passim, and Aptheker, The American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), pp. 52ff.

*For a further elaboration of this thesis, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Economic Determinism, Ideology, and the American Revolution,” The Libertarian forum (November 1974): 4–7; see also Rothbard, “The American Revolution Reconsidered,” Books for Libertarians (July 1974): pp. 6–8. For a summary of Bailyn’s views, see Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 3–31.