JOHN M. MURRIN
A Roof
without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity
(from Beyond Confederation:
Origins of the Constitution and American Identity, RIchard Beemen,
Stephen Botein, Edward C. Carter II, eds. , (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of South Carolina Press, 1987)
The United States
Constitution, as we have come to realize, provided an innovative answer
to the legal problem of sovereignty within a federal system. This
difficulty had destroyed the British Empire by 1776, and by 1787 it
seemed likely to reduce the Congress of the United States to impotence.
The Federalists solved this dilemma by applying on a continental scale
the new principles of revolutionary constitutionalism that the states
had explored and developed between 1776 and 1780, the year in which the
Massachusetts Constitution completed the model. To be fully legitimate,
a constitution had to be drafted by a special convention and ratified by
the people. By so institutionalizing the premise that the people alone
are sovereign, and not government at any level, Americans made it
possible for a sovereign citizenry to delegate some powers to the
states, others to the central government. We still live happily, more or
less, with the benefits of this discovery. 1
But the
Constitution was also a more tentative answer to a broader cultural
problem. It established what Francis Hopkinson called a "new
roof" over an American union of extremely diverse states. Opponents
of the Constitution often warned that "the several parts of the
roof were so framed as to mutually strengthen and support each
other," he contemptuously declared, "and therefore, there was
great reason to fear that the whole might stand independent of the
walls." With heavy logic, he refuted this possibility. 2
Hopkinson had the
right image but the wrong alignment. The Federalists, not their
opponents, were building a roof without walls.
I
The American
Revolution was not the logical culmination of a broadening and deepening
sense of separate national identity emerging among the settlers of North
America. The sprawling American continents had taken a remarkably
homogeneous people, the Indians, and divided them into hundreds of
distinct societies over thousands of years. America was quite capable of
doing the same to Europeans. The seventeenth century created, within
English America alone, not one new civilization on this side of the
Atlantic, but many distinct colonies that differed as dramatically from
one another as any of them from England. Even the Revolution would
establish, not one new nation, but two distinct polities: the United
States and Canada. A century later the Civil War nearly added a third.
The Latin America wars for independence produced twenty-two nations from
a few vice-royalties.
For the English,
the Atlantic functioned much as a prism in the seventeenth century,
separating the stream of immigrants into a broad spectrum of settlements
from the Caribbean to New England. Most colonies shared many important
traits with immediate neighbors (Massachusetts with Connecticut,
Maryland with Virginia, St. Kitts with Barbados), but differences became
cumulative as one advanced farther along the spectrum. At the extremes -
Barbados and Massachusetts, for instance - the colonies had almost
nothing in common.
Historical
demography suggests the larger pattern. Fox complex reasons that
included climate and settler motivation, the farther north one went, the
greater that life expectancy generally became, the higher the percentage
of women in the colony, and the sooner population growth by natural
increase set in. The extent of population mixture also followed the
spectrum. New Englanders really were English. The Middle Atlantic
colonies threw together most of the peoples of northwestern Europe. The
Chesapeake added a significant African population, which would expand
dramatically from the 1690s on. Africans eventually outnumbered
Europeans by two to one in South Carolina and by much greater ratios in
the islands. Climate and demography also affected local economies. Apart
from the fur trade, few settlers north of Maryland engaged in economic
activities strange to Europeans. As rapidly as possible, they even
converted to European crops (without abandoning maize), grown mostly
through family labor. But the staple colonies specialized in the growth
and export through unfree labor of non-European crops, especially
tobacco and sugar. The West Indies did not even try to raise enough food
to feed the settlers and their servants and slaves 3
Government and
religion also followed the spectrum. At the province level, New England
gloried in its corporate autonomy, which Rhode Island and Connecticut
would retain until the Revolution. Royal government, by contrast, really
defined itself in the Caribbean during the Restoration era. On the
mainland south of New England, most settlers lived under proprietary
governments that eventually became royal, but Virginia had been royal
since 1624, and Maryland and Pennsylvania regained their proprietary
forms after losing them for a time following the Glorious Revolution. In
local government, the New England town ‑a variation of the
traditional English village‑spread no farther south than East
Jersey. English counties, not villages, became the dominant form of
local organization from West Jersey through North Carolina, and parishes
prevailed in South Carolina and the islands. In general, the farther
north one traveled, the higher became the percentage of local resources
that settlers were willing to spend on religion. Formally, the Old World
established church, the Church of England, became the New World
establishment everywhere from Maryland south by 1710. In the Middle
Atlantic region, dissent and establishment fought to a standstill, with
toleration the big winner. In New England except for Rhode Island, Old
World dissent became New World establishment. 4
Some uniformities
different from England's did emerge to bridge these cultural chasms.
Except in the smaller sugar islands, all of the colonies enjoyed a more
widespread distribution and ownership of land. No colony successfully
reproduced a hereditary aristocracy. Indeed, younger sons enjoyed
liberties in North America hard to match in any European society.
Similarly, England's complex legal system was everywhere
simplified and except in Quaker communities, the settlers also
adopted a ferocious style of waging war. For Europe's more limited
struggles among trained armies, they substituted people's wars of total
subjection and even annihilation. Their methods were deliberately
terroristic. They, not the Indians, began the systematic slaughter of
women and children, often as targets of choice. Finally, the English
language became more uniform in America than in England simply because
no colony was able to replicate the mother country's rich variety of
local dialects. 5
Nevertheless, the
overall differences stand out more starkly than the similarities. The
spectrum of seventeenth‑century settlement produced, not one, but
many Americas, and the passage of time threatened to drive them farther
apart, not closer together. Most of what they retained in common -
language, Protestantism, acquisitiveness, basic political institutions
‑ derived from their shared English heritage, however
institutionally skewed, and not from their novel encounters with the
continent of North America.
II
Between the
Glorious Revolution of 1688‑1689 and the Peace of Paris of 1763,
the colonies grew more alike in several respects. As newer generations
adjusted to climate, life expectancy improved south of Pennsylvania,
population became self-sustaining, and family patterns grew more
conventional. Warfare retained its original brutality in conflicts with
Indians, but it too Europeanized as the primary enemy became the
settlers and soldiers of other European empires. The widespread
imposition of royal government through the 1720s gave public life
structural similarities it had lacked in the seventeenth century.
As these
examples suggest, British North America in fundamental ways became more
European, more English, in the eighteenth century. The growth of cities,
the spread of printing and newspapers, the rise of the professions, and
the emulation of British political culture all encouraged this trend.
But the colonies did not all change in the same way. New England
anglicized at the core. On the fringes of the social order, it retained
much of its original uniqueness, such as the Puritan Sabbath and annual
election sermons. The southern colonies anglicized on the fringes while
remaining unique at the core, which now more than ever was characterized
by plantations and slave labor. A planter's economic base had no English
counterpart, but his daily behavior closely imitated gentry standards.
In the Middle Atlantic region, where emulation of England always had
ethnic and class overtones, the pattern was less clear. 6
A few examples will
have to suffice in illustrating this process. New England increasingly
replicated basic European institutions. Southern provinces,
by contrast, imported much of what they needed and did not
acquire the same capacity to produce their own. Thus, for instance,
every college but one was north of Maryland in 1775. New England trained
virtually all of its own clergy, lawyers, and physicians. By contrast,
no native‑born South Carolinian (and only a few dozen Virginians
out of the several hundred men who took parishes in the colony) became
Anglican clergymen. All of South Carolina's bar and much of Virginia's
was trained in England. Similarly, New Englanders wrote their own
poetry, much of it bad, while Maryland imported poets, a few of them
quite good (such as Richard Lewis).7
Perhaps the change
was most conspicuous in public life. In the seventeenth century many
colony founders had tried quite consciously to depart from and improve
upon English norms. They attempted to build a city upon a hill in
Puritan Massachusetts, a viable autocracy in ducal New York, a holy
experiment of brotherly love in Quaker Pennsylvania, a rejuvenated
feudal order in Maryland, and an aristocratic utopia in Carolina. But
from about the second quarter of the eighteenth century, colonial
spokesmen expressed ever‑increasing admiration for the existing
British constitution as the human wonder of the age. Improvement upon it
seemed scarcely imaginable. North American settlers read British
political writers, absorbed their view of the world, and tried to
shape their provincial governments into smaller but convincing
replicas of the metropolitan example. 8
One conspicuous
consequence was imperial patriotism. The generation in power from 1739 to 1763 fought two
global wars and helped to win the greatest overseas victories that
Britain had ever seized. Despite frequent disputes in many colonies,
royal government achieved greater practical success in America than at
any other time in its history to 1776. Colonial expressions of loyalty
to Britain became far more frequent, emotional, intense, and eloquent
than in earlier years. To the extent that the settlers were
self-conscious nationalists, they saw themselves as part of an expanding
Britisb nation and empire.
Loyalty to colony meant loyalty to Britain. The two were expected to
reinforce one another. 9
Occasionally a new
vision of a glorious future for the American continent would appear in
this rhetoric, but almost without exception these writers confined their
exuberance to an Anglo‑American context. North America would
thrive with Britain, Nathaniel
Ames's almanacs excitedly told New Englanders. Because population grew
faster in America than in Europe, mused Benjamin Franklin, the colonies
would one day surpass the mother country, and perhaps crown and
Parliament would cross the ocean to these shores. 10
In
other words, political loyalties to an entity called America scarcely
yet existed and could not match the intensity with which settlers
revered either their smaller provinces or the larger empire. Despite the
frequent worries voiced in the British press or expressed by British
placemen in America, native‑born North Americans showed no
interest in political union, much less independence. Every colony
involved rejected the Albany Plan of Union of 1754 regardless of the
manifest military peril from New France.
This
reality was far from obvious to the British. They, not the settlers,
imagined the possibility of an independent America. Imposing new
patterns of uniformity on colonies that they had to govern routinely,
few London officials grasped the extent or significance of local
differences three thousand miles away. The British worried about the
whole because they did not understand the parts, and they reified their
concerns into a totality they called America. Debate over the Canada
cession focused these anxieties more sharply than ever before and also
revealed that British writers almost took it for granted that one day
the American colonies would demand and get their independence. Wise
policy required that Britain avert this result for as long as possible.
In a word, America
was Britain's idea. Maybe it was even Britain's dream, but if so, it
soon became her nightmare. Every countermeasure taken to avert the
horror seemed only to bring it closer. Nothing is more ironic in the
entire span of early American history than the way in which Britain
finally persuaded her North American settlers to embrace a national
destiny that virtually none of them desired before the crisis of 1764-1776.
11
There was, in
short, nothing inevitable about the creation and triumph of the United
States. Rather, the American nation was a by‑product that at first
nobody wanted. The British believed that they were doing everything
they could to avoid such a thing. The settlers until almost the last
moment denied that they had anything of the kind in mind. Only British
oppression, they insisted, could drive them from the empire. 12
At one level the
Revolution was thus the culminating moment in the process of
anglicization. The colonists resisted British policy, they explained
with increasing irritation and anger, because London would not let them
live as Englishmen. They
demanded only the common rights of Englishmen, such as no taxation
without representation and trial by jury, and not unique privileges for
Americans. (At the same time, they did believe that the availability of
land in North America gave them unique benefits unavailable to fellow
subjects at home.) Britain demanded that North Americans assume their
fair share of common imperial obligations and embarked on a reform
program after 1763 that was designed to centralize and rationalize the
empire. Beginning with the Stamp Act crisis of 1764-1766, London thus
polarized the needs of the whole and the rights of the parts. She was
never able to put them together again.
Precisely because
public life in America was so thoroughly British, the colonists resisted
Britain with all the available weapons of eighteenth‑century
politics‑ideology, law, petitions, assembly resolves, grassroots
political organizations, disciplined crowd violence. Until 1774, when
the Continental Congress finally provided an American institutional
focus for general resistance, patriot leaders looked to the radical
opposition movement in London as the logical center of their own. Not surprisingly, until the
Congress met, more of its members had visited London than Philadelphia.
The Revolution, in short, was a crisis of political integration
and centralization that Britain could not master. Britain could not
control politically the forces that were drawing the
parts of the empire closer together. That failure left patriots
on this side of the ocean alone with America. They had shown that they
would fight and even confederate to protect the rights of the parts.
They had yet to discover whether they could create enough sense of
common identity to provide for the needs of the whole. The challenge was
exhilarating - and terrifying. 13
III.
Perhaps we can now
appreciate the dilemma of American national identity. To the extent that
North Americans were more alike by 1760 than they had been in 1690 or
1660, Britain had been the major focus of unity and the engine of
change. To repudiate Britain meant jeopardizing what the settlers had in
common while stressing what made them different from one another. Older
patriots quickly sensed the danger. If goaded into the attempt, the
colonies would indeed be able to win their independence, John Dickinson
assured William Pitt in 1765. "But what, sir, must be the
Consequences of that Success? A Multitude of Commonwealths, Crimes, and
Calamities, of mutual jealousies, Hatreds, Wars and Devastations; till
at last the exhausted Provinces hall sink into Slavery under the yoke of
some fortunate Conqueror." Younger patriots were more
confident about America. They welcomed the chance to become fabled
heroes in their ironic quest to prove that the British had been right
about America all along and that their own doubts and hesitations were
unworthy of their lofty cause. At his Yale commencement of 1770, John
Trumbull predicted the eventual supremacy of America in the arts and
sciences, called the colonies a nation, and exulted in the deluge of
blood that would accompany this transition to greatness.
See
where her Heroes mark their glorious way,
Arm'd for the fight and blazing on the day
Blood stains their steps; and o'er the conquering plain,
'Mid fighting thousands and 'mid thousands slain,
Their eager swords promiscuous carnage blend,
And ghastly deaths their raging course attend.
Her mighty pow'r the subject world shall see;
For laurel'd Conquest waits her high decree.
The colonists would
inherit from Britain, not just their own continent, but the world.
America's fleets would "Bid ev'ry realm, that hears the trump of
fame, / Quake at the distant terror of her name." Trumbull hardly
needed to announce the moral, but he did anyway. Although the process
would take some centuries to complete, America's triumphs would hide
"in brightness of superior day / The fainting gleam of Britain's
setting ray.” 15
This bloodcurdling
rhetoric probably concealed real anxieties. Any task that
sanguinary‑that worthy of heroes‑was quite daunting. Not
only would an American national identity have to be forged in a brutal
war with the world's mightiest maritime power, but the settlers would
have to do so without the usual requisites of nationhood Sir Lewis
Namier has contrasted two basic types of European nationalism from the
eighteenth century to the present. Both reduce to a question of human
loyalties. To what social collectivity do people choose or wish to be
loyal? One pattern was traditional and, at root, institutional. England
was a nation because it possessed reasonably well defined boundaries and
a continuity of monarchical rule for about nine hundred years. The crown
had created Parliament, which became both a reinforcing and a competing
focus for loyalties as the two, together with their public, defined
England's distinct political culture in the seventeenth century.
Switzerland provided Namier with another example. This mountainous
republic forged a common institutional identity among its several
cantons despite their division into three languages and two major
religions.
The other model,
just beginning to find important spokesmen in late
eighteenth‑century Germany, was linguistic nationalism. Among a
people who shared no common institutional links, language seemed an
obvious focus for loyalty. Even though the boundaries between competing
languages were by no means clear‑cut, this type of nationalism
would come to dominate Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Whereas institutional nationalism had the potential
to absorb waves of reform without internal upheaval, linguistic
nationalism recognized no obvious geographical boundaries and had to
replace existing political institutions with new ones to achieve full
expression. Although it began with warm sentiments of benign
humanitarianism, it was far more likely to become militaristic and
destructive, and by the twentieth century it could be deflected into
overt racism whenever it seemed necessary to distinguish true Germans,
for example, from outsiders who had merely mastered the language over
several generations. 16
The most
fascinating and troubling feature about the American case is that
neither model could work here. The American continent could boast no
common historic institutions other than crown and Parliament. It had
acquired no shared history outside its British context. Likewise, the
American settlers possessed only one language in common: English. In
both cases, the logic of national identity pointed back to Britain, to
counterrevolution, to a repudiation of the bizarre events of 1776. From
this perspective, the loyalists were the true nationalists. Many older
patriots implicitly agreed, at least to the extent that they too equated
nationhood with the institutionalization of centralized power. To them
centralization meant a severe challenge to liberty, a threat to the
Revolution itself. Yet all patriots understood that, unless they could
unite and fight together effectively, they would lose the war. Their
early answer to this dilemma was virtue. Americans had it; the British
had lost it. Virtue, or patriotism, would inspire the settlers to
sacrifice their private interests, even their lives, for the general
welfare. 17
As the struggle
progressed into a seemingly endless war and the North Americans (often
for the first time) came into intimate contact with each other, this
conviction wore thin. The shock of recognition was uncomfortable and
disturbing, for it was just as likely to expose differences as
similarities. It revealed, in effect, the underlying spectrum of
settlement. Too often the Americans discovered that they really did not
like each other very much, but that they needed common trust to survive.
Mutual suspicion and fascination jostled for preeminence in the hearts
of patriots. The language of virtue may have intensified the sense of
hostility, for it became all too easy to explain any annoying cultural
differences as someone else's lack of virtue and commitment. The terms
of opprobrium that Americans hurled at each other may even have
contained more venom than did the anti‑British polemics of the
period, many of which reflected the anguish of an ancient and real
affection now inexplicably betrayed.
The most
conspicuous fault line divided New Englanders from everyone else,
although other antagonisms surfaced as well. Yankees could not conceal
their sense of moral superiority, which often seemed rankly hypocritical
to observers from other regions. "We Pennsylvanians act as if we
believe that God made of one blood all families of the earth,"
complained William Maclay; "but the Eastern people seem to think
that he made none but New England folks.” 18 One New York merchant,
Gerard G. Beekman, thought that nearly everyone in Connecticut "has
proved to be d...d ungreatfull cheating fellows." Thirteen years
later he was still denouncing "the best of them out of that damd
Cuntry" for defaulting on their debts." 19 Lewis Morris, Jr.,
could not even keep a similar sense of disgust out of his last will and
testament in 1762. He ordered that his son Gouverneur Morris (the later
patriot) receive
the
best Education that is to be had in Europe or America but my
Express Will and Directions are that he be never sent for that
purpose
to the Colony of Connecticut least he should imbibe in his youth
that
low Craft and cunning so Incident to the People of that Country,
which is so interwoven in their constitutions that all their art cannot
disguise it from the World tho' many of them under the sanctified
Garb of Religion have Endeavored to Impose themselves on the World
for honest Men? 20
When John Adams
passed through New York City in 1774, he heard Yankees castigated as
"Goths and Vandalls," infamous for their "Levelling
Spirit." He retaliated in the privacy of his diary by speculating
on the shocking lack of gentility and good breeding among the New York
elite.To Abigail Adams, Virginia riflemen seemed every bit as loathsome
and barbaric as British propaganda claimed. 21
Sometimes regional
hatreds became severe enough to reduce the northern department of the
Continental army to near impotence. Yankees showed such complete
distrust of New York's General Philip Schuyler that he virtually lost
the ability to command. Soldiers from other parts of America, reported
Captain Alexander Graydon of Pennsylvania, retaliated in kind. They
regarded the eastern men as "contemptible in the extreme," in
part because their officers were too egalitarian. In 1776 a
court-martial acquitted a Maryland officer accused of showing
disrespect to a New England general. "In so contemptible a light
were the New England men regarded," explained Graydon, who sat on
the court, "that it was scarcely held possible to conceive a case,
which could be construed into a reprehensible disrespect of them. 22
IV
American national
identity was, in short, an unexpected, impromptu, artificial, and
therefore extremely fragile creation of the Revolution. Its social roots
were much weaker than those that brought forth the Confederate States of
America in 1861, and yet the Confederacy was successfully crushed by
military force. 23
At first Congress
tried to govern through consensus and unanimity. That effort always
created strain, and it finally broke down in 1777-1778. Thereafter no
one could be certain whether the American union could long outlast the
war. In June 1783 a mutiny in the Pennsylvania line drove Congress from
Philadelphia. The angry delegates gathered in the small crossroads
village of Princeton, New Jersey, where they spent an anxious four
months in uncomfortable surroundings. They found that they had to
contemplate the fate of the Union. Could the United States survive with
Congress on the move and its executive departments somewhere else?
Charles Thomson, secretary to Congress since 1774, doubted that the
Union could endure without British military pressure to hold the several
parts together. This worry obsessed him for months. 24 By 1786 New
England delegates were talking openly of disunion and partial
confederacies, and this idea finally appeared in the newspapers in early
1787. 25
Instead, a
convention of distinguished delegates met in Philadelphia that summer.
It drafted a Constitution radically different from the Articles of
Confederation. By mid‑1788 enough states ratified the plan to
launch the new government in April 1789. This victory followed a titanic
struggle in which the Constitution had almost been defeated by popularly
chosen conventions in nearly every large state. Among the small states,
New Hampshire and Rhode Island also seemed generally hostile.
Ratification marked
a victory for American nationalism, as folklore has always told us, but
it also perpetuated political conflict, which continued without pause
into the new era. Most patriots equated union with harmony and were
quite upset by the turmoil of the 1790s. The only union they could
maintain was accompanied by intense political strife, a pattern of
contention that did, however, observe certain boundaries. It had limits.
26
The actions of the
Washington administration in its first few years seemed to vindicate the
gloomiest predictions of the Antifederalists, but these proud patriots
did not respond by denouncing the Constitution. Instead, they began the
process of deifying it. They converted it into an absolute standard and
denounced their opponents for every deviation from its sublime mandates.
In effect they returned to their anchorage in British political culture
to find a harbor in which their ship might float. They converted the
Constitution into a modern and revolutionary counterpart for Britain's
ancient constitution. To keep the central government going at all, they
embraced the venerable antagonism between court and country, corruption
and virtue, ministerial ambition and legislative integrity. The
Federalists claimed only to be implementing the government created by
the Constitution. Their Jeffersonian opponents insisted that they, in
turn, were merely calling the government to proper constitutional
account. But they both accepted the Constitution as their standard, a
process that kept the system going and converted its architects into
something like popular demigods within a generation. 27
The lesson taught
by the first American party system was curious in the extreme. Americans
would accept a central government only if it seldom acted like one. The
British Empire had crumbled while trying to subordinate the rights of
the parts to the needs of the whole. The Continental Congress had
brought American union to the edge of disintegration by protecting the
rights of the parts at the expense of common needs. The Constitution
seemed to provide an exit from this dilemma, a way of instilling energy
in government while showing genuine respect for revolutionary
principles. But it did not work quite that way. Vigorous policies by the
central government always threatened to expose the underlying
differences that could still tear America apart. The spectrum of
settlement had been muted, warped, and overlaid with new hues, but it
was still there. Thus, although everyone soon agreed that the new
government was a structural improvement on the Articles, it exercised
very few substantive powers in practice that people had not been happy
to allocate to the old Congress. In a word, the Constitution became a
substitute for any deeper kind of national identity. American
nationalism is distinct because, for nearly its first century, it was
narrowly and peculiarly constitutional. People knew that without the
Constitution there would be no America. 28
In the architecture
of nationhood, the United States had achieved something quite
remarkable. Francis Hopkinson to the contrary, Americans had erected
their constitutional roof before they put up the national walls.
Hovering there over a divided people, it aroused wonder and awe, even
ecstasy. Early historians rewrote the past to make the Constitution the
culminating event of their story. 29 Some of the Republic's most
brilliant legal minds wrote interminable multivolume commentaries on its
manifold virtues and unmatched wisdom. Orators plundered the language in
search of fitting praise. Someone may even have put the document to
music. 30 This spirit of
amazement, this frenzy of self‑congratulation, owed its intensity
to the terrible fear that the roof could come crashing down at almost
any time. Indeed, the national walls have taken much longer to build.
The very different
Americas of the seventeenth century had survived into the nineteenth
after repudiating the Britain from whom they had acquired their most
conspicuous common features in the eighteenth. While the Republic's self
announced progenitors, New England and Virginia, fought out their
differences into the Civil War, the middle states quietly eloped with
the nation, giving her their most distinctive features: acceptance of
pluralism, frank pursuit of self‑interest, and legitimation of
competing factions.
The Constitution
alone could not do the job, but the job could not be done at all without
it. The Constitution was to the nation a more successful version of what
the Halfway Covenant had once been to the Puritans, a way of buying
time. Under the shade of this lofty frame of government, the shared
sacrifices of the Revolutionary war could become interstate and
intergenerational memories that bound people together in new ways. 31
Ordinary citizens could create interregional economic links that simply
were not there as late as 1790, until a national economy could finally
supplant the old imperial one. Like the Halfway Covenant, the
Constitution was an ingenious contrivance that enabled a precarious
experiment to continue for another generation or two with the hope that
the salvation unobtainable in the present might bless the land in better
times. 32
ENDNOTES
1.
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of
the American Republic, 1776‑1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969).
2.
In Paul M. Zall, ed., Comical Spirit of Seventy‑Six: The Humor of Francis Hopkinson (San
Marino, Calif, 1976), 186‑194, esp. 190.
3.
For strong examples of this extensive demographic literature, see the
essays in Stanley N. Katz and John M. Murrin, eds., Colonial
America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 3d ed. (New
York, 1983), 122‑162, 177‑203, 290‑313; and in Thad W
Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds. The
Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo‑American
Society (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 96‑182. See also Richard S.
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise
of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624‑1713 (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1972), esp. 300-334.
4.
John M. Murrin, "Political Development," in Jack P. Greene and
J. R Pole, eds., Colonial British
America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore,
1984), 408‑456. John M. Murrin, Mary R Murrin, and Gregory E. Dowd
are engaged in a study, still in progress, that will enumerate colonial
clergymen, colony by colony and year by year. The data show that the
ratio of clergy to people generally rose from south to north, which also
provides a rough index of each society's financial support for organized
religion.
5.
Daniel J. Boorstin provides a good starting point on language in The
Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958), chaps.
41‑43. For an excellent introduction to early legal history, see
David H. Flaherty, ed., Essays in
the History of Early American Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969). On war,
see John Shy, A People Numerous
and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American
Independence (New York, 1976), 225‑254; Edmund S. Morgan, American
Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New
York, 1975), 73‑74; Francis Jennings, The
Invasion of Amenca: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1975), esp. chaps. 9, 13; and Allen W Trelease, Indian
Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1960), 60‑85.
6.
The process of anglicization in the Middle Colonies is too complex to
pursue here, but an adequate account would have to examine and compare
the different ways that particular ethnic groups were assimilated into
the larger culture. For example, see Randall H. Balmer, "Dutch
Religion in an English World: Political Upheaval and Ethnic Conflict in
the Middle Colonies" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1985).
Balmer argues that New York City Dutch settlers cultivated close ties
with the classis of Amsterdam and retained a rather sentimental
attachment for the Dutch language while intermarrying with Anglicans and
assimilating to upper‑class English standards. The Jersey Dutch
rejected both the authority of Amsterdam and elite English norms. They
adjusted to an English world by going evangelical and aligning with the
Presbyterians. Ned C. Landsman's Scots who settled in central New Jersey
were commercially active and largely succeeded in capturing and defining
the Presbyterian church. In the process they forged a new Scottish-American
identity, which, like that of the Jersey Dutch, was linked to
revivalism. But Ulster Scots who settled in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna
Valley were less commercial and were antirevival. See Landsman, Scotland
and Its First American Colony, 1683‑1765 (Princeton, N.J.,
1985); and Elizabeth I. Nybakken, "New Light on the Old Side: Irish
Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism," journal
of American History, LXVIII (1981-1982), 813-832.
7.
John M. Murrin, "The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of
Eighteenth Century Massachusetts," in Katz and Murrin, eds., Colonial America, 540-572, illustrates this process.
8.
For a survey, see Murrin, "Political Development," in Greene
and Pole, eds., Colonial Britisb
America, 408-456.
9.
Max Savelle, "Nationalism and Other Loyalties in the American
Revolution," American
Historical Review, LXVII (1961‑1962), 901-923; Paul A. Varg,
"The Advent of Nationalism, 1758‑1776," American
Quarterly, XVI (1964), 169-181; Judith A. Wilson, "My Country Is
My Colony: A Study in Anglo‑American Patriotism, 1739-1760,"
Historian, XXX (1967‑1968),
333-349; Nathan O. Hatch, "The Origins of Civil
Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France,
and the Revolution," William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXI (1974), 407-430.
10.
Sam Briggs, ed., The Essays,
Humor, and Poems of Nathaniel Ames, Father and Son. . (Cleveland, Ohio,
1891), esp. 284‑286, 308‑311, 313, 324‑325; Benjamin
Franklin, Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind (1755), in Leonard
W. Labaree et al., eds., The
Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn., 1959‑), IV, 227-234.
11.
See J. M. Bumsted, " `Things in the Womb of Time': Ideas of
American Independence, 1633 to 1763," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXI (1974),
533‑564. Close examination of Bumsted's sources will show that
this was a debate among Europeans, including British placemen and
travelers in America. Only an occasional native‑born colonist
participated, often with some bewilderment about why this dialogue was
taking place at all.
12.
For a classic statement, see Benjamin Franklin, The Interest of Great Britain Considered, with Regard to Her Colonies,
and the Acquisition of Canada and Guadeloupe (1760), in Labaree et.
al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, IX, esp. 90‑91. For a shrewd
analysis of the role that Independence did play for a major patriot in
his strategy of resistance,
see Pauline Maier, "Coming to Terms with Samuel Adams," AHR, LXXXI (1976), 12‑37.
13. See, generally, Pauline Maier, From
Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of
American Opposition to Britain, 1765‑1776 (New York, 1972); David Ammerman, In the
Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville,
Va., 1974); H. James
Henderson, Party Politics in the
Continental Congress (New York, 1974).
14.
Dickinson to Pitt, Dec. 21, 1765, in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution:
Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764-1766
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 119.
15.
John Trumbull, An Essay on the Use
and Advantages of the Fine Arts . . . (New Haven, Conn., 1770), 3-6,
11-12, 14.
16.
Sir Lewis Namier, "Nationality and Liberty," in Namier, Vanished
Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812-1918 (New York,
1963 ), 31‑ 53.
\17. For recent efforts to
understand the patriots in generational terms, see Pauline Maier, The
Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New
York, 1980), esp. chap. 6; and Peter C. Hoffer, Revolution
and Regeneration: Life Cycle and the Historical Vision of the Generation
of 1776 (Athens, Ga., 1983), which studies younger revolutionaries.
18.
Edgar S. Maclay, ed., journal of
William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania 1789-1791
(NewYork, 1890),210.
19.
Quoted in Philip L. White, The
Beekmans ofNew York in Politics and Commerce, 1647-1877
(New York, 1956), 223‑224.
20.
Quoted in Max M. Mintz, Gouverneur
Morris and the American Revolution (Norman, Okla., 1970), 15.
21.
L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and
Autobiograpby of john Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), II, 107,
109; Abigail to John Adams, Mar. 31, 1776, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family
Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass., 1963‑), I, 369. Abigail
asked whether the common people of Virginia were "not like the uncivilized
Natives Brittain represents us to be?" The rest of the letter shows
that she believed they were.
22.
See, generally, Don R Gerlach, Pbilip Schuykr
and the American Revolution in New York, 1733‑1777 (Lincoln,
Nebr., 1964). For the quotations, see Alexander Graydon, Memoirs
of His Own Time, with Reminiscences of the Men and Events of the
Revolution, ed. John Stockton Littell (Philadelphia, 1846), 158,
179; see also 147‑149.
23.
For a fuller discussion, see John M. Murrin, "War, Revolution, and
NationMaking: The American Revolution versus the Civil War," in
Murrin, ed., Violence and
Voluntarism: War and Society in America from the Aztecs to the Civil War
(forthcoming, Philadelphia, 1987).
24.
Eugene R Sheridan and John M. Murrin, eds., Congress
at Princeton, Being the Letters of Charles Thomson to Hannah Thomson,
June to October 1783 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 19, 29-30,
66‑67, 73, 83, 86, 91-92.
25.
Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress ( Washington, D.C.,
1921‑1936), VIII,
247‑248, 282, 415‑416, 533, for
some of the major correspondence on this subject. The first public
call for separate confederacies appeared in Boston's Independent
Chronicle, Feb. 15, 1787. Cf. William Winslow Crosskey and William
Jeffrey, Jr., Politics and the
Constitution in the History of the United States, Vol. III, The
Political Background of the Federal Convention (Chicago, 1980), 395.
26.
See, generally, Richard Hofstadter, The
Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United
States, 1780‑1840 (Berkeley, Calif, 1969).
27. Lance Banning,
"Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution, 1789 to
1793," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXI (1974), 167‑188.
28.
For fuller discussions, see John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion,
or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in
England (16881721) and America (1776‑1816)," in J.G.A. Pocock,
ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641,
1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 368‑453; and Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1978).
29.
Peter C. Hoffer, "The Constitutional Crisis and the Rise of a
Nationalistic View of History in America, 1786‑1788," New York History, LII (1971), 305-323.
30.
See Edward S. Corwin, Court over Constitution: A Study of Judicial Review as an Instrument of Popular Government (Princeton,
N.J., 1938), 229-230 n. This incident was probably an example of
Confederate humor, not a real event.
31.
Charles Royster, "Founding a Nation in Blood: Military Conflict and
American Nationality," in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds.,
Arms and Independence The Military
Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1984),
25-49.
32. Kenneth M.
Stampp, The Imperiled Union:
Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York, 1980), 3-36,
shows how tentative the idea of a perpetual union really was.
