Prof: Someone asked me
at the end of class on Tuesday a
very good question,
and the question is:
what exactly is a broadside?
 
So I was here sort of happily
like: 'oh, yes,
they're posting broadsides,
don't buy tea,' and I never
really precisely defined what a
broadside was.
A broadside is actually a
single sheet of paper that
something is printed on one side
and it would have been posted in
public or handed out in public
in town squares or taverns,
and usually they were
advertising things or announcing
things that were of immediate,
pressing importance like
immediate news,
pressing news,
political events,
official proclamations,
great entertainment or whatever.
 
They were sort of immediate
news and they were not really
seen as great permanent
documents.
They were seen as something
that you posted up,
you handed out,
you read it for the day or
whatever and then it would be
discarded,
so that was these broadsides
that I was talking about.
'The detested tea has arrived
at our port' would have been
that kind of an announcement.
 
It would have been an immediate
like: 'the tea's here now,
do something,' kind of an
instant announcement.
So that's what a broadside is.
 
Okay.
 
So today we are going to make
our way to what on the syllabus
I have called the logic of
resistance,
and what I mean by that is the
mindset that contributed to some
of the broad conclusions that
the colonists were drawing as
events were unfolding in the
1770s as we've seen in the last
few lectures.
 
But to get to the logic of
resistance we first have to lay
out another event that
contributed to the building of
that logic.
 
And I mentioned it right at the
end of the last lecture--
and that event is a series of
acts that were passed by
Parliament in 1774,
and Americans ended up calling
them the Intolerable Acts,
which will be an easy way to
remember what they are,
the Intolerable Acts.
They also were called the
Coercive Acts but intolerable
would have been what
Americans--what the colonists
would have considered them.
 
And I mentioned them right at
the end of the last lecture.
As you remember,
they were a response to the
destruction of the tea in Boston
Harbor,
which sort of dumbfounded Lord
North who had assumed that his
Tea Act,
passed in 1773,
was going to be seen as maybe a
relief by the colonies;
that North had been trying to
save the East India Company from
going under;
he had reduced duties on East
India tea so that people would
be buying that tea,
passed the act,
thought this would be seen
potentially as a good thing--
only to find that the colonists
saw it as an attempt of the
British government to have a
monopoly over what the colonists
had assumed was free trade.
And that's where you get the
broadsides that I was just
talking about,
telling people not to buy or
sell East India tea and to act
now,
defend your liberties.
 
And then eventually you end up
with the destruction of tea in
Boston Harbor.
 
And as I mentioned in the last
lecture, "Boston Tea
Party" is actually later in
the nineteenth century.
They didn't call it this at the
time.
They probably called it
"the destruction of the
tea," but it was not a
party [laughs]
at the time.
 
That was later they decided it
was a tea party.
So now clearly,
having had that happen,
North felt that something
really needed to be done about
the colonies,
or obedience to British law and
order,
in his mind,
would collapse in the colonies.
 
As he put it,
and I think I quoted this right
at the end of the lecture,
that if they didn't risk
something, all is over.
 
A dramatic statement.
 
Thus you get the Intolerable
Acts, which are passed in the
spring of 1774,
and although there were some in
Parliament who protested against
them,
still they passed with a great
majority.
Those who did protest against
them argued that the American
colonists deserved the same
rights as any other British
subjects and,
as I describe the acts to you,
you will understand why these
friends to America were making
this argument.
 
You'll hear the details and see
that their argument certainly
made sense at that moment.
 
So there were four acts that
get lumped together as the
Intolerable Acts.
 
The first one:
the Boston Port Act,
which closed the port of Boston
to all shipping until the
colonists paid for the tea that
they had destroyed,
and I suppose also hopefully
showed some degree of remorse
for having destroyed all that
tea.
Now clearly that's a pretty
extreme measure,
right?--closing the port of
Boston, period.
And North assumed that it would
pretty much crush the opposition
in Boston and that other
colonies would scramble for
Boston's lost trade and ignore
what was happening in Boston.
And we'll see this again and
again--
that there is sort of a
fundamental misunderstanding
about when and what ends up
seeming like a joint threat to
the colonists so that they act
together versus what doesn't
inspire them to act together.
 
So here we see Lord North
assuming that if Boston loses
trade the other colonies will
just sort of gobble it up and
the Boston radicals will sort of
get silenced and that'll be the
end of this matter,
but he misjudges colonial
sentiment,
in this case really
underestimating the sense of
unity that arises from something
that ends up being seen as a
joint threat.
So the British government ends
up being rather stunned when the
other colonies not only don't
ignore Boston but instead they
actually support it in its time
of need.
So other colonies responded to
the Boston Port Act and some of
these other acts by sending
goods.
So Connecticut sent sheep,
Charleston sent rice,
Philadelphia sent flour.
 
So the other colonies basically
stepped up and did something in
Boston's time of need and a lot
of colonies made June 1,
which is the day that that act
was supposed to take effect,
a day of fasting and prayer.
 
Now clearly some of this was
because people felt sympathy for
what was happening in Boston;
they saw and felt for Boston
and its plight.
 
But equally if not more
important, people in other
colonies assumed if it could
happen in Boston,
it could happen anywhere.
 
So in a lot of ways,
Boston's cause was their cause.
It wasn't something happening
far away.
It was something that there was
no reason why they couldn't see
it couldn't happen anywhere else
where the British government
happened to be angry at
something that happened.
So in essence Lord North's
actions did the precise opposite
of what they were meant to do,
because they really ultimately
brought the colonies closer
together in a shared sense of
crisis.
 
As George Washington put it in
his typical kind of meandering,
indirect way--Washington is not
always the best wordsmith.
Washington had very good people
writing for him.
He had good speech makers,
that Washington,
but he tends to write in kind
of a meandering style,
and this will be kind of a
typical Washingtonian statement
full of parenthesis and weird
clauses,
but his heart's in the right
place.
Okay.
 
So Washington says,
"The ministry,"
the British ministry,
"may rely on it,
the Americans will never be
tax'd without their own consent,
that the cause of Boston,
the despotick Measures in
respect to it I mean,
now is and ever will be
considerd as the cause of
America (not that we approve
their conduct in destroying the
Tea)," this is all one
sentence [laughs]--
and that "we shall not
suffer ourselves to be
sacrificed by piece meals though
god only knows what is to become
of us."
It's sort of a Washingtonian
sentence but still,
he's making his point really
clearly.
So the Boston Port Act,
number one of the Intolerable
Acts.
 
The other three--still pretty
largely focused on
Massachusetts--
included a Quartering Act,
and the Quartering Act
legalized the quartering of
British troops not only in empty
buildings or taverns but also in
private homes;
the Administration of Justice
Act, which was an attempt to
protect people who were trying
to suppress revolts in the
colonies.
So the Administration of
Justice Act said that if a fair
trial for a British soldier or
official couldn't be had in
Massachusetts,
the trial could be transferred
to another colony or to England.
 
And in Massachusetts,
the land of propaganda,
this became known as the Murder
Act.
[laughs]
Just in case you want to wonder
what people are thinking about
it.
And as someone at the time put
it,
"Every villain who
ravishes our wives or deflowers
our daughters,
can evade punishment by being
tried in Britain,
where no evidence can pursue
him."
 
Okay.
 
We're not really talking so
much about ravishing and
deflowering.
 
We're really talking about
[laughs]
taxes and such--
but still, you could understand
the logic why people feel that--
again--some fundamental
liberties are being violated
here.
And then finally the last of
these acts is the Massachusetts
Government Act,
and in a lot of ways that ended
up being the most controversial
act of all,
because it basically imposed a
new charter on the colony of
Massachusetts.
 
From now on,
the governor,
who was appointed by the King,
could appoint his own council
rather than having the council
be elected by the colonial
assembly;
the council could no longer
veto the governor's decisions;
all town meetings besides the
one annual meeting for electing
officers now needed to be
approved by the governor,
and if the governor wanted he
could simply forbid town
meetings;
and any additional meeting
besides the one in which
officers were chosen--that
meeting needed to post an agenda
in advance and stick to the
agenda;
and the governor also now could
appoint or remove sheriffs,
judges, attorney generals,
marshals.
So basically the governor is a
royal official and the governor
is now in Massachusetts being
given a lot of power.
So I'll repeat the four
Intolerable Acts:
the Boston Port Act,
the Quartering Act,
the Administration of Justice
Act,
and the Massachusetts
Government Act.
So having described those acts,
you can see why there would
have been some in Parliament who
were sympathetic to what was
going on in the colonies who
would have protested that these
acts were depriving colonists of
some pretty basic British
constitutional rights,
but these protestors were in
the minority.
 
Now on top of these acts the
King sent a new governor to
Massachusetts,
Massachusetts General Thomas
Gage, commander of the British
forces in North America.
Okay.
 
So a military commander was
sent to be the new
governor--again,
a pretty dramatic statement.
So now in addition to all of
those acts,
you have the looming threat
certainly to the colonies or the
colonists in Massachusetts of a
standing army as a source of
tyranny staring them in the
face.
So certainly people in
Massachusetts at this moment
would have been justified in
feeling as though they were
under military occupation.
 
Now we may look at these pretty
drastic measures and assume that
reconciliation is pretty
impossible at this point.
And I know a few of you came up
to me after class on Tuesday and
actually were already leaning in
that direction--
like, 'when are we getting the
independence,
because how in the world can
they get out of this?'
Right?
 
[laughs]
'It's looking pretty bad.
Look at these really extreme
measures.'
Certainly it looks as though
rebellion is on the horizon.
But independence is not the
natural choice.
That's a really,
really radical move that is not
at this moment on the horizon.
 
These are really--And I'm going
to talk more about this in this
lecture a little further on.
 
These are British subjects
trying to demand the rights of
British subjects.
 
That's the logic that's at play
here.
They're not thinking
independence.
They're thinking that they need
to find a way to get the British
imperial system to work in a way
that they see as being right.
They're not trying to break
away.
They're hoping that there's a
way to fix things,
and that they will get what
they feel they deserve as
British subjects.
 
So in 1774, it was in the hope
of maybe figuring out some way
to settle things,
some way to compromise,
some way to come to some sort
of a solution that the
Massachusetts legislature sent a
circular letter to the other
colonies suggesting that it
might be smart to have a joint
congress from all the colonies
to discuss their problems and to
figure out a course of action
that made sense.
So what came to be known as the
First Continental Congress,
right?--the congress of the
continent--met in Philadelphia
at the end of August in 1774.
 
Most of the delegates to that
Congress already had some
political experience in their
separate colonies.
None of them were absolute
uncompromising radicals who
wanted to rip everything apart.
 
It was not a sort of dire
radical body,
and I'll be talking a little
bit more about the First
Continental Congress in a
lecture to come but for now,
I'll just state--I guess--four
significant things about the
meeting of the Congress.
 
Okay.
 
First, and it's actually kind
of practical,
the meeting of the First
Continental Congress forced the
colonists to make their beliefs
clear to themselves--
as people from a variety of
different colonies--
and to Great Britain,
and to explain the motives
behind their actions as they
debated and drafted petitions
and resolves and declarations.
 
The delegates were clarifying
and defining their thoughts,
and they were doing it in a
room full of delegates from
other colonies that people
didn't necessarily know that
well.
 
So it was actually just in and
of itself by collecting all
these people together in a room
and forcing them to sort of
think things through,
talk things through and come up
with some kind of a resolution
they were actually hashing out
their problems on a broad level
in a way that they had not done
before.
 
Second, a Continental Congress
forced people from very separate
colonies--
in a way, really sort of
separate nation-states--
to meet one another and stay
with one another for an extended
period of time.
And for a lot of the people
that were there,
this was really their first
extended period spent with
people from faraway colonies.
 
So not only did this contribute
to a sense of colonial unity,
but it actually on a really
practical level,
it gave people a chance to see
how other colonies ran their
colonial governments.
 
And John Adams actually--He
writes a great diary at the
time,
and in his diary he writes
about how when he's in this
congress he spent a lot of time
grilling people from other
colonies,
asking questions about their
charters,
their laws, the logic behind
them.
He really wanted to understand
how other colonies worked.
And it's interesting because in
his letters--
I think also in his diary but
in his letters for sure--
Adams refers to himself and his
position in the Continental
Congress as "our
embassy,"
right?
 
And by "our embassy,"
what he means is,
he sees himself as a kind of
diplomat representing
Massachusetts in a sort of--
today you might
say--international body,
but he sees the Continental
Congress as a sort of grouping
of representatives of other
provinces or other countries or
nations,
and he's a delegate from our
embassy of Massachusetts.
So in a way we put a lot of
baggage into the word
"congress"
as though,
'oh, it's a bunch of Americans
joined in a congress,' but it's
not a Congress in our modern
sense of the word.
It really is in their mind a
sort of delegation of people
representing different
nation-states,
which is why it was so
interesting for them to collect
together and get to exchange
thoughts.
And then third,
to John Adams and some others,
the fact that now this Congress
existed seemed to be,
or at least to hold the
potential for being,
some kind of a training ground
for American statesmen.
And Adams put it at the time,
said that the Congress was
quote,
"to be a School of
Political Prophets I suppose--
a Nursery of American Statesmen.
May it thrive,
and prosper and flourish and
from this Fountain may there
issue Streams,
which shall gladden all the
Cities and Towns in North
America, forever."
 
John Adams always has a way of
saying the big,
broad quotable thing,
which is why I keep coming back
to him.
 
Hello.
 
I will provide you the
historian with the big,
broad, wonderful quote about
the Continental Congress.
Thank you, John Adams.
 
"I am for making...
 
the congress annual,
and for Sending an entire new
set of delegates every Year,
that all the principal Genius's
may go to the University in
Rotation--
that We may have Politicians in
Plenty...
Our Policy must be to improve
every opportunity and Means for
forming our People,
and preparing Leaders for them
in the grand March of
Politicks."
So he's drawing a lot of big
hopes for the future from the
meeting of this Congress,
but certainly he's
thinking--the fact that it
exists and that these people
will be meeting and talking in
this way on this level will be
in and of itself a sort of
educational colonial experience.
And then finally a fourth
significant aspect of the
meeting of this Congress was
that at least to some back in
England the Continental Congress
symbolized a move towards
rebellion.
 
And indeed more about this to
come,
but in February of 1775,
Lord North passed a resolution
in Parliament declaring that
Massachusetts was in a state of
rebellion.
 
And part of the reason why it's
Massachusetts that he's focusing
on is because really still in
Parliament,
they are assuming that
Massachusetts is the ringleader
of all the trouble;
the real reason for the
Congress is Massachusetts;
Massachusetts is the problem;
Massachusetts is moving towards
rebellion;
and to some people back in
England looking on,
this Continental Congress looks
treasonable.
So you can see how things are
evolving here.
You can see how mutual
misunderstandings are growing.
Colonists and the British
administration are grappling
with the real meaning of British
sovereignty in the colonies.
The British government isn't
really clear on some of the
logic of colonial thinking on
such matters.
Colonists see an ongoing
attempt to violate their
fundamental rights as British
subjects as they have come to
understand them,
which brings us to the perfect
segue into a discussion of the
logic of colonial resistance,
the logic driving the colonial
mindset during the passage of
the 1770s.
 
And what I'm going to do
now--I'm going to introduce this
subject by doing something
that's a little bit illogical
but I just can't resist it
basically,
so you are going to be subject
to it.
There actually is a logic to
it, but to talk about the logic
of resistance in the Revolution,
I'm going to use a story that
actually dates to a period
significantly after the
Revolution,
which kind of doesn't make
sense but it does because the
story actually really wraps up a
lot of stuff in it.
 
And this story relates to a
conversation that took place in
1791, so it's after the
Revolution.
The United States has only been
in existence for a few years
when this story takes place.
 
And Secretary of State Thomas
Jefferson,
who is almost newly arrived as
Secretary of State,
not there for that long,
decides he's going to have a
little dinner party to discuss a
political question that's come
up,
and he invites Vice President
John Adams and he invites
Secretary of the Treasury
Alexander Hamilton.
 
The reason why we know this
story is because Jefferson told
it a lot, right?
 
Because as we'll see,
Jefferson draws great,
deep significance to this
little dinner conversation and
he repeated it over and over
again in letters and in
journals.
 
It's like the story that
reveals the meaning of
everything--but you'll see why.
 
It won't sound too dramatic now
that I've set it up that way,
but to Jefferson it was
earth-shaking.
So a little dinner party,
Adams, Jefferson,
Hamilton--and Jefferson,
who tells the story,
says that after they're done
with their meal,
quote, "our questions
agreed and dismissed,
conversation began on other
matters....
The room, being hung around
with a collection of the
portraits of remarkable men--
among them were those of Bacon,
Newton,
and Locke--Hamilton asked me
who they were."
 
So this is Jefferson's home and
in his home are these portraits,
Bacon, Newton,
and Locke, and Hamilton,
sitting there as a dinner
guest, looks up,
sees the portrait and says,
'Who are they?' Okay.
Jefferson says,
"I told him they were my
trinity of the three greatest
men the world had ever
produced"--
this is Professor Jefferson in
full gear--
"naming them."
Lord Francis Bacon,
the philosopher of science,
Sir Isaac Newton,
the scientist who defined the
laws of gravity,
John Locke, the philosopher
of--I suppose you could say,
the philosopher of liberty,
and as Jefferson recalled
hearing this,
quote, Hamilton "paused
for some time.
'The greatest man,' said he,
'that ever lived was Julius
Caesar.'"
Okay.
Now for reasons that will
become clear in this lecture,
this shocked Jefferson,
shocked Jefferson,
so that he told the story again
and again and again,
remembered it for decades.
 
In the 1820s,
he's still like,
'I remember that story,
the dinner with Hamilton 30
years ago [laughs]
in which he said,
'The greatest man who ever
lived was Julius Caesar.'
He repeated it.
 
To him it was a sign of the
amazing dangerous implications
of Hamilton's policies,
but I want to pull this story
apart.
 
I want to look at this a little
bit as a way not really of
getting at Jefferson and
Hamilton,
but to get at something of the
intellectual mindset of
Americans during this period and
some of this has to do with
Enlightenment thinking,
and some of this has to do with
constitutional thinking,
but you'll see why both men
said what they said.
 
Now to start with,
I'm not saying that every
single colonist is sitting
around at this point discussing
Bacon, Newton and Locke.
 
Okay. That's not what I mean.
 
This is very much a
Jeffersonian parlor with these
portraits up on the wall,
but those three men--Bacon,
Newton,
Locke--and others,
did contribute to an
intellectual atmosphere that the
American colonists tapped into
that shaped their thoughts about
rights,
about resistance,
and then eventually about
revolution.
So let's start by looking at
Jefferson's trinity of great
men.
 
Who were they?
 
Okay.
 
Sir Francis Bacon,
man of science who believed
that truth discovered by reason
through observation could
promote human happiness as well
as truth communicated through
God's direct revelation.
 
So basically Bacon's work
suggested that it was in
humankind's power to discover
truth by reason and that by
doing that,
humankind could better itself.
Okay. So that's Bacon.
 
Isaac Newton,
a second man of science who
studied gravity and the laws of
motion,
and Newton's work demonstrated
that it was possible through
reason and study to discover the
laws of nature and of nature's
God.
 
So Newton's work suggested that
the world is governed by laws
that you could discover and
understand;
that there's a cause and
effect, and that through reason
and study you can figure out the
cause and effect of nature's
laws.
 
So then on to the third man,
John Locke,
whose Second Treatise on
Government from 1683
suggested that you could apply
nature's laws to the political
world as well,
and determine and understand
natural and political rights.
 
And I'm going to offer here a
really woefully brief summary of
Locke's thoughts that'll just be
enough to give us a sense of
what it is that Jefferson's
getting at here.
Basically, Locke believed that
people were born free,
unhampered by government and
with certain natural rights--
life, liberty,
and property--and that to
protect these rights people
decided to voluntarily leave
this state of nature to form a
civil government,
contracting some of their
natural rights to this
government when they did so.
 
So civil society was created to
protect humankind's three
natural rights--life,
liberty, property.
So you could refer to this as
social contract theory,
a logical enough summing up of
it.
If you think about it,
if a civil government is a kind
of voluntary contract,
this suggests that people have
a right to pull out of that
contract if their rights are
being violated,
and obviously that will have an
important logic down the road.
 
Now if you take all of that
together--
Bacon, Newton,
Locke, and the logic of their
thoughts--
you can see the empowering
aspect of Jefferson's trinity.
 
Right?
 
All of those men in one way or
another are preaching ideas that
are empowering humankind.
 
They're suggesting that there
are laws of the universe that
could be determined by people
and applied to nature,
to government,
to science, to society in the
hope of bettering things.
 
They suggested that civil
government is a contract created
by and maintained by people,
not some kind of a divine
creation.
 
And if you step back and
consider the implications of
these really broad ideas,
you can see that they share an
underlying conviction that
humankind could solve God's
riddles by dissolving--
dissolving?
dissolving his laws,
chaos--discovering and applying
his natural laws.
 
And in a sense this is the idea
that's the spirit of the
Enlightenment--
that the world is governed by
natural laws that can be
detected,
they can be studied,
they can be applied,
and in a sense the practice of
deism stems from this idea.
There were some Founder types
who were basically deists at
heart,
believing that God was a sort
of divine clockmaker who made a
world of logic and natural laws
and then stepped back and
allowed it to operate without
intervening,
and this kind of God was
omniscient and all powerful but
it was natural forces that
governed daily existence.
 
And things that were governed
by understandable and
predictable natural laws could
be detected, analyzed,
critiqued and applied by man.
 
So in this sense you really can
see how some of the spirit of
the Enlightenment would have
been a kind of empowering
philosophy.
 
So Jefferson's trinity of
portraits reveals a lot about
this kind of general
Enlightenment spirit and some of
its intellectual implications,
but what about the other half
of the story?
 
What about Hamilton's comment
about Julius Caesar and
Jefferson's I'm-going-to-be-
shocked-for-three-decades
response?
 
Well, this aspect of the story
reveals another related aspect
of the Enlightenment mentality.
 
It shows how immediate and
relevant the ancient world--
and actually history
generally--was to Enlightenment
thinkers,
and I suppose,
just in the eighteenth century
generally.
An idea that's--again--related
to this idea that humankind can
detect patterns and then apply
them for all time.
Because basically,
if you think about it,
if you believe in ongoing
natural patterns,
you're also going to believe
that the study of history,
all of history,
is one way to determine laws
and patterns of human nature
that apply across all time.
So basically to people at this
period,
all of history was like a big
grab bag of lessons about
humankind and civil society:
ancient Greece,
ancient Rome,
modern nations,
modern peoples and more.
 
If you study them,
if you look at rules and
patterns,
you could find things to apply
to modern times that ideally
would allow you to better things
for the present by learning from
the past.
And in a way the ultimate
example of this--I think I've
mentioned it once before in
here;
I'm not sure--is James Madison
preparing for the Constitutional
Convention and he's very
much--he's right in line with
this kind of thinking.
 
He basically says,
'I'm going to study republics
across all time,' right?
 
All of human time--I will study
republican government--
and thinking,
if he could figure out the
rules,
if he could figure out what
works and what doesn't work and
see the patterns and get the
rules,
he can then apply that
knowledge to the creation of a
new republic that hopefully then
would benefit from that kind of
knowledge.
I love the fact that Madison
sets out to do that,
writes it all down on paper.
 
So you can see how in this
sense--If you're thinking along
these lines,
you can see how ancient history
could be really immediate to
this sort of whole founding
generation,
because it had real lessons for
the present.
 
And actually one of the most
influential books in educating
young gentlemen at the time was
Plutarch's Lives.
Has anyone here read
Plutarch?
There must be some--Oh,
there's a couple of Plutarch
readers in here.
 
That's admirable.
 
Plutarch's Lives is
basically a collection of brief
biographies of great statesmen
and leaders,
ancient Greece,
ancient Rome,
and it was aimed at teaching
rules of leadership,
teaching young men how to model
themselves into great leaders,
or certainly that's how it was
used in the eighteenth century.
Any young man would have read
Plutarch's Lives and
would have learned--
the greatest thing I can do is
to be a great statesman and
found a nation,
and here are great examples for
me to follow.
So given this kind of a logic,
there's a good reason why
Hamilton's comment about Caesar
might have been shocking to
Jefferson.
 
It's not just a little
interesting intellectual sort of
"ha"
on the part of Hamilton:
'oh,
I think the greatest man that
ever lived was Julius Caesar,
pass the cherries.'
It's not--He didn't see this as
a sort of random idle throwaway
intellectual comment.
 
It was a declaration about
present day policies to
Jefferson,
and it wasn't a declaration
that made Jefferson happy
because think about the
historical lesson that Jefferson
logically pulled from Hamilton's
comment about Julius Caesar.
 
Who was Julius Caesar?
 
In short, he was the man who
destroyed the Roman republic.
Okay.
 
He's the guy who marched his
army against the republic,
who seized power,
who made himself emperor.
So there we are in 1791 and
Alexander Hamilton in the middle
of this experiment to create a
new republic--no one knows if
it's going to work;
it might collapse at any
second--and Alexander Hamilton
says,
'The greatest man who ever
lived is Julius Caesar,' the man
who destroyed the Roman
republic.
Okay.
 
This is why Jefferson was like
[laughs]: 'oh,
my God.
 
What does this mean?'
 
What does this mean?
 
This is the truth to Hamilton.
 
Right?
 
This is a bad moment as far as
relations between Jefferson and
Hamilton are concerned,
the Jefferson dinner party.
Hamilton never lived it down.
 
So to Jefferson this is--to him
this was like he--the scales
were lifted from his eyes.
 
Right?
 
Hamilton wants to be a kind of
Caesar.
He's dangerously ambitious.
 
He wants to destroy the
republic.
Maybe he wants to make it back
into a monarchy and then put
himself into some kind of a
position of power.
He could just see the pathway
laid, all with that one little
comment that Hamilton tossed out
at a dinner.
You had to be careful how you
talked [laughs]
in an age where history meant
that much.
Now let's stop for a moment
also to think:
why did Hamilton say that?
 
Why did he say that?
 
It's unlikely that what he
meant to say was,
'Hi.
 
I'm going to be the next Julius
Caesar.
[laughs]
I'm out to destroy the
republic.
 
Nice to meet you.'
 
Okay.
 
He probably wasn't intending to
signal some big threat to the
American republic.
 
I think that there are probably
two explanations for it.
No one actually ever absolutely
knows why he said this and that
says more about Hamilton than
anything else.
He's a wonderfully
self-destructive individual,
Alexander Hamilton,
but in this case I think there
are two possible reasons why he
said this.
One is he actually just liked
to say things to upset Thomas
Jefferson.
 
[laughter]
He really did and this was a
good one,
[laughs]
better than he thought,
but he liked to push
Jefferson's buttons,
get Jefferson all sort of
sputtering and mad,
and it worked.
Aaron Burr did the same thing
to Alexander Hamilton.
He would say sort of shocking,
outrageous things and then
watch Hamilton sputter,
and then Hamilton would repeat
them for years and years and
years.
'Do you know what he said at
the dinner party?'
Dinner parties were tricky
places to maneuver in the early
republic.
 
So part of it might have been
just Hamilton being deliberately
irritating,
or equally possible,
it's possible that Hamilton was
referring to Caesar as a
statesman,
a leader, a founder of a nation.
Hamilton would have admired
military ability,
so he would have actually
seriously admired that in Caesar
too,
but he really could have been
more thinking of Caesar as great
statesman,
great leader,
depicted in Plutarch as
a model.
 
And certainly in the mind of an
educated gentleman like
Hamilton,
being the founder of a nation,
being someone who's shaping a
nation,
would have been seen as an
admirable thing,
so he could have been thinking
along those lines.
It's interesting when you look
through all of Hamilton's
writings--
he doesn't really speak in
praise of Caesar anywhere else,
which might lead you to theory
number one.
 
[laughter]
'Okay, T.J.,
see how you deal with this one.
 
[laughs]
I'm all for Julius Caesar.
[laughs]
What are you going to do?'
No.
 
It's hard to know,
but at any rate it's unclear
what Hamilton's logic is,
but you can certainly
understand Jefferson's shocked
response,
and either way,
both the comment and the
response reveal the power of the
classical heritage on this early
American world.
 
Both men are applying the past
to the present in some way.
And one of the lessons that
Caesar certainly suggested to
Thomas Jefferson as suggested by
his response is a powerful
lesson that a lot of people were
focused on in the early years of
the American republic and in
this colonial period as well,
and that is the fragility of
liberties--
and in the republic also
obviously how fragile republics
are.
 
So the ancient world held
really valuable lessons but so
did the semi-recent past as
well, particularly for the
American colonists.
 
There was another period of
time that seemed to hold special
lessons for them,
the period of the Glorious
Revolution in Britain,
which would have been a period
when opposition to the King's
Court and ministers was on the
rise in Britain along with a
growing tradition of praise for
English liberties and the
glories of representation in
Parliament.
 
So political rhetoric from the
era of the Glorious Revolution
would have focused on attacking
corruption and corrupt
influence,
as when a monarch would try to
bribe legislators or ministers
with high office or pensions
granted from the Crown,
thereby subverting the balanced
British constitution,
which is supposed to be
balanced between Crown,
Lords and Commons.
That would have had some real
bearing on this revolutionary
period as well But whether
talking about history ancient or
history relatively modern,
history did teach some
overriding lessons that British
subjects would have taken as
their own throughout this period
and that at this moment in time
would seem really relevant in
the American colonies.
So--there is going to be an
amazingly brief summary of some
of these lessons,
but you'll see really clear
lessons that history would
appear to be teaching generally
and that the colonists would be
listening to really attentively.
So history taught basically
that arbitrary power is the
ultimate threat to good
government.
Okay.
 
So the 1770s is a moment when
that's certainly going to be
something that people hear.
 
History taught that political
liberties were fragile.
History taught that
constitutional principles
defended customary contractarian
rights against government
assertions of arbitrary power.
 
So arbitrary power is the
ultimate threat to good
government;
political liberties are fragile;
and it's constitutional
principles that defend against
government asserting arbitrary
power.
So yes, Rome had been great,
but arbitrary power had sent it
spiraling into tyranny.
 
The Glorious Revolution had
been a moment where ancient
liberties had been restored by
restraining the power of the
monarch.
 
So clearly history taught
liberty is fragile,
and power is the natural
enemy--arbitrary power--
and power naturally grows,
by nature power grows,
and as it does it encroaches on
liberties in a free society.
So power has to be restrained;
British liberties must be
defended;
and British liberties,
as defined by generations of
constitutional precedents.
Now it's important to remember
that the British constitution is
not a written document like
American state and federal
constitutions.
 
It's a way of thinking about
authority largely based on
precedent,
based on existing institutions,
based on laws and customs,
and it was a means of limiting
power and defending rights.
 
So when British colonial policy
began to change in the
mid-eighteenth century and
precedents seemed to be
abandoned and new precedents
perhaps were being set,
when Parliament seemed to be
asserting what certainly to some
colonists felt like arbitrary
power,
colonists logically began to
worry about protecting their
fundamental British liberties
against seemingly increasingly
arbitrary parliamentary power.
 
They felt defensive.
 
They worried about the seeming
inevitability of a rise of
arbitrary power.
 
Now of course people in
Parliament did not see
themselves as exercising
arbitrary power.
They saw themselves as behaving
constitutionally,
asserting their constitutional
power to govern over the
colonies,
but as we've seen in this
course so far,
there were some fundamental
disagreements on both sides
about the precise meaning of
Parliament's constitutional
power to govern over the
colonies,
about the precise way in which
this imperial system was
supposed to work.
So acts like the Stamp Act,
which Parliament basically
intended as a way to raise
revenue,
or the Tea Act,
same idea, could logically seem
to the colonists like a way of
establishing a new precedent,
right?--a new precedent that
ultimately would be making some
kind of inroad against liberty
and property rights.
And particularly,
given that the Stamp Act was
not ultimately raising enormous
sums of money to the colonists,
that was a real sign that it
must be about a precedent.
Right?
 
It can't really be about
raising enormous sums of money.
It must be a trap,
a precedent-setting trap,
that if they can get us to
accept this precedent then the
government will be able to set
future taxes along similar lines
because the precedent will have
been set.
If your constitution--If you
understand your constitutional
rights as based on precedent,
when you see new precedents
potentially being set that's a
potentially scary thing,
so you can kind of get a sense
of why the colonists are
reacting as they do to a lot of
events in this period.
As John Dickinson wrote
in--I've mentioned before his
really well-known pamphlet from
1768 called Letters from a
Farmer in Pennsylvania.
Dickinson wrote,
"Nothing is wanted at
home"--
and by home he means
Britain--"but a precedent,
the force of which shall be
established by the tacit
submission of the colonies....
 
If the parliament succeeds in
this attempt,
other statutes will impose
other duties.
And thus the parliament will
levy upon us such sums of money
as they chuoose to take,
without any other limitation,
than their pleasure."
 
Right?
 
He says it's just about the
precedent;
it's all about precedent.
 
That's what we're looking at
here.
The fact that small amounts of
money are being raised in a
sense is the ultimate proof that
what really matters to
Parliament is the precedent that
they're setting.
The same holds true for the
Vice-Admiralty courts I've
mentioned before,
that were being used as venues
for trying certain crimes
committed in the colonies.
Vice-Admiralty courts were
composed of a single judge,
they had no jury,
and they were becoming
responsible for enforcing
parliamentary legislation and
new legislation.
 
Logically, many colonists would
have seen this--
again--really dangerous
precedent violating fundamental
British constitutional rights,
violating past precedents.
The presence of a standing army
in the colonies:
also,
same kind of threat,
same kind of fear,
something new is happening
here, and certainly history
ancient and modern taught about
the dangers of a standing army.
 
And Samuel Adams summed up
prevailing ideas about standing
armies in a newspaper essay that
he wrote in 1768 and he wrote,
"It is a very improbable
supposition,
that any people can long remain
free,
with a strong military power in
the very heart of their country:
Unless that military power is
under the direction of the
people,
and even then it is
dangerous.-- History,
both ancient and modern,
affords many instances of the
overthrow of states and kingdoms
by the power of soldiers,
who were rais'd and maintain'd
at first under the plausible
pretense of defending those very
liberties which they afterwards
destroyed."
So in the colonies the fear of
a standing army was bad enough
at the end of the French and
Indian War when the crown sent
troops to protect the colonists
against the French,
the Spanish and the Native
American populations--
but a few years later when
troops began to arrive in Boston
in response to Stamp Act
demonstrations,
it certainly seemed to many
colonists as though it might be
the first step in what could be
the destruction of their
liberties,
their colonial charters,
their constitutional rights.
 
This seemed to be--again--a
scary precedent.
Now in a way it's really
tempting to look at this way of
thinking like,
these people are worried about
precedents--'What's happening?
 
What does it mean?
 
It must be a sign that they're
going to do worse'--and think of
these people as being really
paranoid and illogical like,
'oh, come on.
 
[laughs]
What if it's just a little
gesture to raise some money,
colonists?
Why do you seem so paranoid?'
 
And there--In the past there
actually have been some
historians who suggested that
the colonists were to some
degree being paranoid,
were seeing threats of tyranny
where there actually wasn't any
tyranny at all.
But as I've just described,
precedents are a fundamental
part of British constitutional
thought.
And Enlightenment theory backed
up that idea,
because Enlightenment science
promised the capacity to
understand and control nature
and society.
You're supposed to be looking
for patterns of behavior to
understand what things mean.
 
So the British government
seemed to be setting new
precedents and the colonists
were looking for the pattern,
trying to figure out the logic
of what was happening.
What was Parliament up to?
 
What were they thinking?
 
Why were they seemingly
violating fundamental
constitutional rights?
 
And you can see this logic
again in Dickinson's pamphlet,
in his Letters from a Farmer
in Pennsylvania,
which he argued was
premised on his desire,
quote, "to discover the
intentions of those who rule
over us."
 
Why are they doing what they're
doing?
There's a pattern.
 
What is the pattern?
 
What does it mean?
 
Colonists ultimately resisted
what they saw as the approach of
tyranny,
and their resistance stiffened
the British government's
resolve,
which in turn provoked more of
a reaction in the colonies.
And eventually down the road,
the colonists would come to see
their social contract with the
British government broken,
a conclusion which would seem
to then give them the right of
community resistance,
but as I've said before it's
important to recognize that the
colonists at this point see
their actions not as
revolutionary but just the
opposite.
 
They're fighting for their
British rights.
They're not trying to figure
out how to stage a revolution.
I think when we hear the phrase
"Continental
Congress,"
we're like: 'ooh,
one more Continental Congress
and we're there,
[laughs]
wow, almost at independence,'--
but that's obviously not the
way that they're thinking at the
time.
 
They see themselves as fighting
against arbitrary power in
defense of British liberties,
not as rabid revolutionaries,
and thus far in the course,
it's Parliament that seems to
be the main source of arbitrary
power to the colonists.
So as we're going to see in
future lectures,
a logical response to this
conclusion would be for the
colonists to next turn to the
King to solve their problems.
Okay.
 
If Parliament is exercising
arbitrary power we will now turn
to the King and appeal to him to
solve our problems.
You--We will see that logic go
into effect very soon in future
lectures.
 
So more has to happen before
the colonists begin to consider
the ultimate act of resistance.
 
Actual rebellion would seem to
them as the last resort,
the last resort of a people
unable to protect their lives,
liberties and properties by
normal constitutional methods,
and there were some Members of
Parliament that could foresee
this looming threat.
 
In early 1775,
Edmund Burke gave one of his
best known speeches in
Parliament.
It was a three-hour speech and
he argued in his speech that
Parliament should try to be
conciliatory towards the
colonies or risk pushing them to
extremes.
And he laid out in this speech
some of the points that actually
have come up just in the course
of this lecture.
He said Americans loved their
liberties.
Why?
 
Because they're descendants of
liberty-loving English citizens.
To those who argued that giving
concessions to the colonists
would encourage them to demand
even more concessions,
Burke said, he doubted whether,
quote,
"giving...
 
two millions of my fellow
citizens, some share of those
rights, which I have always been
taught to value,"
would bring down the empire.
 
And he had a dramatic
conclusion.
He said, "Let the colonies
always keep the idea of their
civil rights associated with
your government;--
they will cling and grapple to
you;
and no force under heaven will
be of power to tear them from
their allegiance But let it once
be understood that your
government may be one thing,
and their privilege another;
that these two things may exist
without any mutual relation;
the cement is gone;
the cohesion is loosened;
and everything hastens to decay
and dissolution."
So to the colonists then in a
sense--
you can hear,
to Burke as well--rebellion
would be a drastic action only
to be exercised by an
overwhelming majority of the
community against rulers who so
completely ignored the terms of
the original social contract as
to make further allegiance a
crime against God and reason.
And it's really only by
grasping this mindset and really
taking it seriously that we can
begin to understand events to
come that ultimately will lead
to what is seen at the time as
that last dire step towards
revolution.
I will stop there.
 
I will see you on Tuesday.
 
Happy paper-completing and have
a good weekend.
 
 
