The first excerpt is from pages 8-11 of the Fiftieth Anniversary edition:
"I can now see more clearly than before how this essentualization and personification of power and the metaphoric descriptions of its character came to suffuse their thinking. In a situation of political conflict with established authority they drew on the legacy of the “Commonwealthmen,” the “real Whigs,” who had struggled in the generation after the Revolution of 1688 to carry forward against the Hanoverian court dominated by Robert Walpole the reform principles of the seventeenth century. The great spokesmen and publicists of that earlier age, the political pamphleteers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, had been eloquent and prolific on the need or reform and the dangers of powerful autocracies. Their two most famous weekly publications were the Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, which, republished in book form, together constituted 191 essays on “Liberty, Civil and Religious.” These pamphleteers of the 1720s expressed in vivid, challenging, defiant prose the basic themes on the nature and uses of power that the later American Patriots would fervently embrace.
These earlier writings overflowed with examples of the havoc wrought by power—power unfettered, power released, power allowed to tear at the vitals of free institutions and at the liberties of ordinary folk. In a free state power is a trust acquired by consent and used only for the people’s good. When it is acquired by force or deceit by those who use it to enhance their own glory and influence, power, they wrote, is arbitrary, and the people suffer deeply. Unconstrained monopolists of power become monsters, tyrants, savages, and they make the world “a slaughter-house,” a “desart.” They transform “blessings and plenty into curses and misery, great cities into gloomy solitudes, and their rich citizens into beggars and vagabonds.” The “Daemons” of power become worse the longer they wield their illegal force, until their victims, refusing to “be slaves to their own servants,” find it necessary for their survival to oppose them. And then, they wrote, the great upheavals ensue, as cities and nations are torn apart in the struggle for the uses of power.
These words of the earlier age on the dark progress of power lay deep in the American polemics of the 1760s and 1770s. Active resistance, the American Revolutionaries feared, was required against those who had gained, by brutality or guile or demagoguery, some measure of power’s dark essence.
Some people, they knew, seemed never to have known freedom, having been ruled by powerful despots time out of mind: the Russians, the Turks, and the Ottomans, governed by vicious leaders backed by the power of personal janissary troops. But what interested the Americans more than such legendary despotisms were examples of once-free states whose descent into autocracies of power had happened within living memory and had been recorded in detail by participants or contemporary witnesses.
Poland was a case in point—a nation, they believed, sunk in human misery, its peasant people reduced to barbarism, its social condition “a scene of carnage.” They could trace equally the loss of liberty in France under Louis XIV, the advent of autocracy in Sweden, and the revolts that shook Spain and severed its relation to Portugal.
The most recent example of the loss of freedom was that of Denmark, a story that had been recorded in day by- day, at times hour-by-hour detail by Viscount Molesworth, England’s envoy to Copenhagen under William III. In four short days, they learned from Molesworth’s
An Account of Denmark, that country had “changed from an estate little different from aristocracy to as absolute a monarchy as any is at present.” Molesworth, an eyewitness, knew exactly what had happened. At a critical moment, seeking safety from the impositions of the nobles, the two lower orders, the commons and the clergy, fearful and angry, gave the king, their supposed protector, the absolute power of the state, only to discover that “the little finger of an absolute prince can be heavier than the loins of many nobles.”
But the greatest example they knew of the descent from freedom to autocracy was the most distant from them in time but so familiar to them as to be contemporaneous in their thinking. This was the fortunes of ancient Rome.
At the start of the book, I wrote at length of the Americans’ deep immersion in the writings of antiquity. “Knowledge of classical authors,” I wrote, “was universal among colonists with any degree of education,” and I referred to the vast array of classical authors they knew and referred to—not merely the obvious Latin writers like Cicero, Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, Ovid, and Virgil, and not merely, among the Greeks, Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, and Plutarch, but also lesser known writers like Strabo, Nepos, Petronius, Lucan, and Marcus Aurelius. There was much misunderstanding in their readings; but still, I wrote, they found in the classics their ideal selves, and to some extent their inner voices. And then I wrote:
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought. They contributed a vivid vocabulary but not the logic or grammar of thought, a universally respected
personification but not the source of political and social beliefs.
The objections to these words by many writers on the classics in America have not subsided in the years since their appearance. It seems that everyone who writes about the subject seems obliged to register, upon reading these words, a sense of violation, of desecration, of lèse-majesté.
But for those who knew Molesworth’s Account of Denmark, the dismal fortunes of Poland, and the collapse of good order in Spain and Sweden, the destruction of the ancient Roman republic, the advent of Caesarian power and the resulting dictatorial principate, was one among many illustrations.
The fullest and most famous history of the destruction of Roman freedom and the rise of imperial power that left Rome in ruins was the detailed two volume account by the Abbé René-Aubert Vertot, “one of the most popular writers of the first half of the eighteenth century” (Caroline Robbins). English translations of his Revolutions That Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic (1720) were in almost every library, private or institutional, in British North America. And so too were copies of Vertot’s parallel accounts of the loss of freedom in Spain and Sweden. They were all illustrations of a universal phenomenon. What was unique about the Roman example was the vividness and drama of the personalities involved and the fame and familiarity of some of the major texts of the story."
The next is from pages 64-65:
"With Hoadly, among his contemporaries, though below him in importance to the Americans, was the outstanding opponent in Parliament of Walpole’s administration, the leader of a coterie of early eighteenth century freethinking Whigs, Robert Viscount Molesworth. Friend of Trenchard and Gordon, encomiast of Cato’s Letters (they were frequently attributed to him),
he was known particularly in the colonies for his Account of Denmark (1694), which detailed the process by which free states succumb to absolutism.21"
From pages 84-87:
"What made it so, what turned power into a malignant force, was not its own nature so much as the nature of man — his susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement.5
On this there was absolute agreement. Everyone, of course, knew that if “weak or ignorant men are entrusted with power” there will be “universal confusion,” for “such exaltation will … make them giddy and vain and deprive them of the little understanding they had before.” But it was not simply a question of what the weak and ignorant will do. The problem was more systematic than that; it concerned “mankind in general.” And the point they hammered home time and again, and agreed on — freethinking Anglican literati no less than neo-Calvinist theologians — was the incapacity of the species, of mankind in general, to withstand the temptations of power. Such is “the depravity of mankind,” Samuel Adams, speaking for the Boston Town Meeting, declared, “that ambition and lust of power above the law are … predominant passions in the breasts of most men.” These are instincts that have “in all nations combined the worst passions of the human heart and the worst projects of the human mind in league against the liberties of mankind.” Power always and everywhere had had a pernicious, corrupting effect upon men. It “converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office.” It acts upon men like drink: it “is known to be intoxicating in its nature” — “too intoxicating and liable to abuse.” And nothing within man is sufficiently strong to guard against these effects of power — certainly not “the united considerations of reason and religion,” for they have never “been sufficiently powerful to restrain these lusts of men.”6
From these central premises on the nature of power and man’s weakness in face of its temptations, there followed a series of important conclusions. Since power “in proportion to its extent is ever prone to wantonness,” Josiah Quincy wrote, and since in the last analysis “the supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands and are disciplined to the use of them,” the absolute danger to liberty lay in the absolute supremacy of “a veteran army” — in making “the civil subordinate to the military,” as Jefferson put it in 1774, “instead of subjecting the military to the civil powers.” Their fear was not simply of armies but of standing armies, a phrase that had distinctive connotations, derived, like so much of their political thought, from the seventeenth century and articulated for them by earlier English writers — in this case most memorably by Trenchard in his famous An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government … (1697). With him the colonists universally agreed that “unhappy nations have lost that precious jewel liberty … [because] their necessities or indiscretion have permitted a standing army to be kept amongst them.” There was, they knew, no “worse state of thraldom than a military power in any government, unchecked and uncontrolled by the civil power”; and they had a vivid sense of what such armies were: gangs of restless mercenaries, responsible only to the whims of the rulers who paid them, capable of destroying all right, law, and liberty that stood in their way.7
This fear of standing armies followed directly from the colonists’ understanding of power and of human nature: on purely logical grounds it was a reasonable fear. But it went beyond mere logic. Only too evidently was it justified, as the colonists saw it, by history and by the facts of the contemporary world. Conclusive examples of what happened when standing armies were permitted to dominate communities were constantly before their minds’ eyes. There was, first and foremost, the example of the Turks, whose rulers — cruel, sensuous “bashaws in their little divans” — were legendary, ideal types of despots who reigned unchecked by right or law or in any sense the consent of the people; their power rested on the swords of their vicious janissaries, the worst of standing armies. So too had the French kings snuffed out the liberties of their subjects “by force” and reduced to nothing the “puny privilege of the French parliaments.” The ranks of “despotic kingdoms” included also Poland, Spain, and Russia; India and Egypt were occasionally mentioned too.8
More interesting than these venerable despotisms, bywords for the rule of force unrestrained by countervailing influences, were a number of despotic states that had within living memory been free and whose enslavement, being recent, had been directly observed, Venice was one: it had once, not so long ago, been a republic, but now it was governed “by one of the worst of despotisms.” Sweden was another; the colonists themselves could remember when the Swedish people had enjoyed liberty to the full; but now, in the 1760’s, they were known to “rejoice at being subject to the caprice and arbitrary power of a tyrant, and kiss their chains.”
But the most vivid of these sad cases, because the most closely studied, was that of Denmark. The destruction of parliamentary liberties in Denmark had in fact taken place a century before, but that event, carefully examined in a treatise famous in opposition circles and in America, was experienced as contemporary by the colonists.
Molesworth’s An Account of Denmark (1694) established the general point, implicit in all similar histories but explicit in this one, that the preservation of liberty rested on the ability of the people to maintain effective checks on the wielders of power, and hence in the last analysis rested on the vigilance and moral stamina of the people. Certain forms of government made particularly heavy demands on the virtue of the people. Everyone knew that democracy — direct rule by all the people — required such spartan, self-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race. Other forms, aristocracies, for example, made less extreme demands; but even in them virtue and sleepless vigilance on the part of at least the ruling class were necessary if privilege was to be kept responsible and the inroads of tyranny perpetually blocked off. It had been the lack of this vigilance that had brought liberty in Denmark to its knees, for there a corrupt nobility, more interested in using its privileges for selfindulgence than for service to the state, had dropped its guard and allowed in a standing army which quickly destroyed the constitution and the liberties protected by it. the perpetuation of the race. Other forms, aristocracies, for example, made less extreme demands; but even in them virtue and sleepless vigilance on the part of at least the ruling class were necessary if privilege was to be kept responsible and the inroads of tyranny perpetually blocked off.
It had been the lack of this vigilance that had brought liberty in Denmark to its knees, for there a corrupt nobility, more interested in using its privileges for selfindulgence than for service to the state, had dropped its guard and allowed in a standing army which quickly destroyed the constitution and the liberties protected by it.
The converse of all of this was equally true and more directly relevant. The few peoples that had managed to retain their liberties in the face of all efforts of would-be tyrants propelled by the lust for power had been doughty folk whose vigilance had never relaxed and whose virtue had remained uncontaminated. The Swiss, a rustic people locked in mountain sanctuaries, were ancient members of this heroic group; they had won their liberty long ago and had maintained it stubbornly ever after. The Dutch were more recent members, having overthrown the despotic rule of Spain only a century earlier; they too were industrious people of stubborn, Calvinist virtue, and they were led by an alert aristocracy. More recent in their emergence from darkness were the Corsicans, whose revolt against Genoese overlords backed by French power had begun only in 1729; they were still, at the time of the Stamp Act, struggling under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli to maintain their independence and liberty.9
Above all, however, there were the English themselves. The colonists’ attitude to the whole world of politics and government was fundamentally shaped by the root assumption that they, as Britishers, shared in a unique inheritance of liberty. The English people, they believed, though often threatened by despots who had risen in their midst, had managed to maintain, to a greater degree and for a longer period of time than any other people, a tradition of the successful control of power and of those evil tendencies of human nature that would prevent its proper uses."
Pages 94-95:
"Conceiving of liberty, then, as the exercise, within the boundaries of the law, of natural rights whose essences were minimally stated in English law and custom, the colonists saw in the balance of powers of the British constitution “a system of consummate wisdom” that provided an effective “check upon the power to oppress.”24 Yet they were far from optimistic about the future of liberty. They looked ahead with anxiety rather than with confidence, for they knew, from the whole of their received tradition, of the desperate plight of liberty everywhere: “new tyrannies have sprung up, likeso many new plagues, within the memory of man, and … [have] engrossed almost the whole earth,” rendering “the world a slaughterhouse.” Rulers of the East were “almost universally absolute tyrants … The states of Africa are scenes of tyranny, barbarity, confusion, and every form of violence. And even in Europe, where human nature and society are arrived at the highest improvements, where can we find a well constituted government or a well governed people?” France “has an arbitrary authority”; Prussia, “an absolute government”; Sweden and Denmark “have sold or betrayed their liberties”; Rome “groans under a medley of civil and ecclesiastical bondage”; Germany “is a hundred-headed hydra”; and Poland a ruin of “extravagant licentiousness and anarchy … the nobility and gentry arbitrary despotic tyrants, and the populace a race of slaves.” Only in Britain — and her colonies — had liberty emerged from its trials intact; only in Britain had the battle repeatedly been won. Yet even in Britain the margin of victory had been narrow, especially in the last, bitter struggle with would-be despots of the house of Stuart. And the dangers were known to persist.25
The historical phasing of the defense of liberty in England was a matter of great importance to the colonists not merely because it illustrated the characteristic dangers liberty faced but also because it made clear their own special role in history. “Liberty,” James Otis wrote in a sentence that reveals much of the structure of the colonists’ historical thought, “was better understood and more fully enjoyed by our ancestors before the coming in of the first Norman tyrants than ever after, till it was found necessary for the salvation of the kingdom to combat the arbitrary and wicked proceedings of the Stuarts.” The period before the Norman conquest was the greatest age of English history."
Page 128:
"But the troops arrived, four regiments in all: in bold, stark actuality a standing army —
just such a standing army as had snuffed out freedom in Denmark, classically, and elsewhere throughout the world. True, British regulars had been introduced into the colonies on a permanent basis at the end of the Seven Years’ War; that in itself had been disquieting. But it had then been argued that troops were needed to police the newly acquired territories, and that they were not in any case to be regularly garrisoned in peaceful, populous towns.20 No such defense could be made of the troops sent to Boston in 1768. No simple, ingenuous explanation would suffice.
The true motive was only too apparent for those with eyes to see. One of the classic stages in the process of destroying free constitutions of government had been reached.
To those most sensitive to the ideological currents of the day, the danger could scarcely have been greater. “To have a standing army!” Andrew Eliot wrote from Boston to Thomas Hollis in September, 1768, “Good God! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty!"
