The Language of
Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the
Anglo-American World by J.C.D. Clark. (Cambridge University Press, 1993) 404 p.
Reviewed by William B.
Allen*
Large
sympathy must inform a reading of The
Language of Liberty, for its heterodox reading of the substance of the American Revolution strains against its very
helpful survey of the rhetoric of the
Revolution. That the American revolutionaries were, in the main, a religious
and not a secular people is obvious and beyond cavil, despite the impression
conveyed by secular historians of later eras. Clark conveys this suitably and accurately,
justifying throughout the book his conclusion that “democracy—in the sense of
debates over the franchise, the distribution of seats, or the representative
machinery in general—was not central to the conflict which rent the
English-speaking world in the early-modern period, and was not at the heart of
the self-image of any of the societies which made up that world. Its key term
had been not ‘democracy’ but ‘liberty,’ and liberty was a term which had its
ramifications chiefly in the vast intellectual territories then occupied by law
and religion.” This largely accurate (leaving aside the inappropriate
separation of law and politics), general view of the Anglo-American
socio-political development veers off course, however, when Clark seeks to
localize it in the United States. His argument presupposes Americans who could
not think around more than one important question at a time. Thus, he jettisons
their legitimate interests in constitutional reform in order to arrive at the
view that the Revolution was centered in “utopian millennial expectations.”
About
this conclusion two things must be said. First, abundant evidence exists that
the Americans were independently energized
around the broad constitutional questions and the broad religious questions,
however much the two came to be assimilated to a single set of contingent
references once the need for social construction—as opposed to preservation—became
unavoidable. Second, “utopian millennial expectations” were rooted in the “New
Israel” wholly independent of the eventual political solution which addressed social contradictions that were evident—but not resolved
or even systematically addressed—as early as the Massachusetts “Body of
Liberties” (1648).
Nothing
illustrates the first consideration so tangibly as the broadside found in Ezra
Stiles’s papers, and which announced the formation of the “American Society for
Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, in the British Colonies.” This advertisement, declaiming against the “prevalence and increase of
vice among us,” was published between 1772 and 1775, on the very eve of the
Revolution. The names of leading members, those designated to receive
subscriptions, include such revolutionary activists as William Smith, Elias
Boudinot, and John Lathrop, as well as the evangelist, Jonathan Edwards and the
lawyer, Tapping Reeves. No evidence exists that the society ever functioned,
and I presume that its good work was swamped by the rising tide of Revolution.
Thus, the constitutional question did not co-opt the religious question.
Rather, the constitutional event displaced attention from the religious
project, suggesting that “liberty” was far from a code word for religious
awakening.
This
argument may be sustained, I believe, even when Stiles resurfaces in his
election sermon of 1783, “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor,” and
charts a millennial, providentially inspired course for the new polity. The
millennial end, however, is nothing other than the triumph of religion on
grounds of constitutional liberty much like those addressed to Charles II by
Massachusetts in 1662. That is, the earlier view of the need for moral regeneration (under the old constitution) has been
reformulated as an expectation of
moral regeneration under a new constitution (“we have realized the capital
ideas of Harrington’s Oceana”).
Stiles discussed the equal franchise and an equable distribution of
property as conditions of this unique opportunity: “Religion may here receive
its last, most liberal, and impartial examination. Religious liberty is peculiarly
friendly to fair and generous disquisition. Here Deism will have its full
chance; nor need libertines more to complain of being overcome by any weapons
but the gentle, the powerful ones of argument and truth. Revelation will be
found to stand the test...” Thus, far from being ignorant of the war between
secular constitutional principles and evangelical faith, it would be fairer to
say that Stiles reveled in that war as an opportunity for faith (Sidney Mead to
the contrary notwithstanding).
Much
less need be written concerning the older—indeed original—roots of “utopian
millennial expectations.” Pastor John Robinson in 1620 addressed the Pilgrims
departing Delft Haven with an injunction to keep peace with God and man and a
promise of God’s ordinances to sustain human innovations. Similarly, the
General Court of Massachusetts answered Robert Child that “we account all our
countrymen brethren by nation, and such as in charity we may judge to be
beleevers are accounted also brethren in Christ,” doing which under “the rules
of God’s word, the civill prudence of all nations, and our owne observation of
the fruite of other mens’ follies” the General Court anticipated a “peace,
unity, prosperity, &c.” Of course, this was also the case in which the
General Court heralded the superiority of Massachusetts’s constitution to the
English constitution after a detailed, side-by-side comparison of the two.
Finally, none can read Mather’s Christi
Magnalia Americana (his imitation of Plutarch), and its rich praise of
religious devotion and secular
knowledge (as in the life of William Bradford) without discerning the powerful
belief among Americans that God’s grace would conduct their affairs, as a
people, in this world as well as in the next.
Accordingly,
it is fair to say that Clark has exaggerated the transformation of American
evangelism into political utopianism through the American Revolution. Unlike
the French Revolution (however philosophically consanguine) the American
Revolution never hazarded the Gnostic
presumption. Human nature was relied upon rather than jettisoned in the United
States.
This
reckoning raises the interesting question, therefore, of exactly what bearing
should inform the reading of Clark’s book. In a word, I believe its true
bearing is to reconstruct the seriousness of the language of faith and what I
call voiced differences, not as some Golden Age myth but as a continuing if
infrequently resorted to resonance in Anglo-American social reflection. To
understand this one must rather review the demonstrations than the conclusions
of this book
Perhaps
one can account for Clark’s misreading of the nature of the American identification
with England by the opening observation of the work, which relies on David
Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British
Folkways in America. There Clark recounted the ritual, religious, and
political celebrations the colonists shared with their cousins, including “the
birthday of the reigning monarch.” Clark omitted the significance, however, of
New England’s celebration of “Fore-fathers Day” each December 22. These
forbears were not ritually shared with Englishmen, and the rite emphasized the
pre-existing sense of difference between Americans and Englishmen. Still more
importantly, that combined religious and political holiday was replaced, most
prominently, by “Independence Day,” the celebration of the “Declaration of
Independence.” Thus, the colonists-turned-citizens of the United States
symbolically provide witness of both the true nature and extent of their prior
identification with their cousins and of their self-conscious political separation.
Clark’s
belief that the two shared one history led him to ignore the most
fundamental reason for the divergence of American and English common law (a
point which William Nelson’s Americanization
of the Common Law misses for different reasons). Though Blackstone spoke
but briefly on the subject, the area in which he spoke directly addresses a
central constitutional dilemma. English law did not “unify” the colonies for
the sufficient reason that English law itself created the exception to the
reach of English law in proportion as a colony was considered “conquered” or “discovered”
(1 Blackstone, p. 46). The difference often served, in the colonies, to place
the monarch in the room the common law would have occupied. The same problem,
in a far more intensified degree, informed the trial of Warren Hastings twenty years
after the American Revolution. The legal separation of Americans and Englishmen
was an accomplished requirement of English legal practice long before the
political separation of the American Revolution. It constituted the heart of
Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View of the
Rights of British America, in which Jefferson rejected Blackstone’s
conquest theory for a discovery theory. Ironically, had the American
constitutional theory been prevalent in Britain, Clark’s analysis would now be
correct. Unfortunately, it did not prevail. Moreover, it serves to demonstrate
precisely why Lord Bryce’s observation that “natural rights” was a “mass” of
political dynamite in France (as Clark cites it) cannot be applied to the Constitution
the same Lord Bryce celebrated as the “greatest work ever struck off by the
mind of man.”
In
a word: the political history of the United States unavoidably shapes the rhetorical
context in which the “language of liberty” must be weighed, not the reverse.
Clark’s survey, therefore, is the survey of a single set of meanings and
symbols in the employ of two different people. Only the illusion of a single
English-speaking political universe (which Churchill knew himself to be using
when he spoke thus) permits the view that an inadvertent rupture resulted from
little more than rhetorical excess.
Now,
this political account does not militate heavily against Clark’s claim: “In
this study the American Revolution is analysed theologically as a rebellion by
groups within Protestant Dissent against an Anglican hegemony... A rebellion of
natural law against common law and a rebellion of Dissent against hegemonies
Anglicanism were the same rebellion, since their target was the unified
sovereign created by England’s unique constitutional and ecclesiastical” blend.
For the truth is that evangelical religion plays a large role, such as he
recounts, in advancing modern principles on both sides of the Atlantic. That
very observation minimizes, for the Americans, the role of the monarch, since
the ecclesiastical authority of the monarch was rejected in the colonies from
the outset. Nothing highlights this so well as the appeal of the General Court
of Massachusetts to Charles II that “we might enjoy divine worship without
humane mixtures.” For the same reason it minimizes the claim that this was a
revolt of natural law against common law, inasmuch as the monarch sought to
maintain an authority in America based on a right of conquest. That leaves us
with only the serious claim that we may analyze the public opinion of the
Revolution in terms of the concerns of Protestant Dissent, and that those are
similar for America and England.
The
dimension of Clark’s analysis that benefits from his patient, if somewhat disorderly
excavation appears in chapter one, “The Conflict of Laws.” He argues that “The
sovereignty of the people, under God, was an idea which led away from the
ancient constitution or from English liberties as a set of positive privileges
and immunities, and towards a unified society whose fundamental laws ...
mirrored and expressed the eternal principles of natural law.” The
centuries-long religious war, then, became the pre-condition for the separation
of “liberty” out of the merely contextual, blood bound concept of nationality
and into the status of a truth of nature and nature’s God. By this account one
conceives of an American Revolution growing “naturally” from the soil of piety—perhaps
even on account of the historical accident of internal British political
disorder—and assimilating to such philosophical or Enlightenment concepts as
strengthen the intrinsic tendency of the movement. This view contrasts sharply
with the notion of a pious people upon whom steals unperceived a godless faith
to create a new secular state.
Clark
succeeds in drawing this picture rather more because he succeeds in revealing
how extensive was the disorder and the extent of religious contest in England,
which in turn enables the reader to imagine how far evangelical principles
might advance in the absence of the Revolution. The answer is, “quite far
indeed.” In fact, one may plausibly derive the democratic revolution in
Britain, slow and incoherent as it has been, from the religious struggles
chronicled here. Thus, when a people similarly engaged found themselves imbued
with the ideas but liberated from the systems of political control (well before
the military victory!), it brings no surprise that they concretize liberty,
popular sovereignty, equality, and all such fundamental principles as came to
find permanent residence in the Constitution of 1787.
The
great mystery of The Language of Liberty is
that Clark fails to realize that this is the story he has presented. He
believes, for example, that the Constitution of 1787 “in a fundamental sense
reversed the verdict of 1776.” One
suspects that he is rather uncritically reading Wood’s Creation of the
American Republic (which even Wood no longer reads uncritically). Clark
seems to conceive that generative political discourse should be judged by the
speed with which it generates clichés (hence the erroneous discussion of the
first relevant uses of “socialism,” “capitalism,” “individualism,” “Americans,”
etc.), when one should rather look to the speed with which generative political
discourse changes or introduces ideas. Nothing can be clearer than, by the end
of the eighteenth century, notions of “liberty” and “self-government” had
prevailed powerfully over public opinion in the United States. The fact that
such movement was advanced by evangelical dissent in company with enlightenment
rationalism reveals well the sources and powers of political change. Indeed, to
judge by the measure of religious establishment, the cardinal index for Clark,
the change was wholly worked in the United States before even the political
clichés associated with it came into general usage; for 1832 witnessed the end
of establishment in the American states (though Clark is silent about this
fact, it greatly amplifies his argument). The book is far less about the “language”
of liberty than it is about liberty’s overthrow of establishment once liberty
itself was emancipated from mere custom, or what Washington called in 1783 the “gloomy
age of ignorance and superstition.”
Britain
existed within the context of a species of political irony: its constitution
was rooted in an Anglicanism to which relatively few adhered and which
displayed little capacity for independent existence. “Even within England, the
position of the Church was hegemonic not consensual...”(p. 203) As dissenting
faiths challenged Anglicanism, having already (in company with Anglicanism)
dislodged Catholicism, they served not only to undermine meaningful
establishment. They also exposed ill-defined and ill-defended constitutional
foundations. Thus Clark turns our attention away from the
reification, “Revolution,” and towards the social condition, “the contingent
features,” that invited fundamental change. This very framework makes it unnecessary
to lean on such intellectual placebos as “paranoia” (p. 222) in order to
explain these large events. Where there is room to dispute Clark’s fairly
idiosyncratic reading of the ‘contingent features,’ it ought not to be denied
that his recovery of the seriousness of voiced differences—the arguments people
actually had—goes a long way to re-invest the period of “movement toward
revolution” with historical significance.
In
order that the judgment of Clark’s reading of historical contingencies as idiosyncratic
should not be seen as an ad hominem, a
postscript example should suffice. That is his rather quirky view that the term
“America” had only a geographical meaning until the King conceded it a national
meaning in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. William Gordon’s history urged a different
construction before mid-century. Nathaniel Ames’s 1758 Almanac connected
“utopian millennial expectations” with the term. George Washington’s first
official address to the troops of the Revolutionary Army, not to mention his
dramatic correspondence with General Gage (among many other and still more
emphatic examples) sets forth a clearly national—if incomplete—meaning. Not
only did various usages among Americans explicitly urge such meanings, but even
speeches in Parliament sometimes made use of the separately cognizable
political existence (and what else can he mean by a “national sense”?) of America.
Clark’s ill-advised vendetta threatens, then, to undermine otherwise able
scholarship. As Ames opened his paean to the growing America of the next two
centuries in the 1758 Almanac, “America
is a subject which daily becomes more and more interesting.”
Dr.
Wiliam B. Allen is dean
of the James Madison School at Michigan State University and a member of the
Acton Institute’s Board of Advisors.