The American founding period lasted from 1775 to 1791, although one might (and many have) extended it a decade or so in either direction, or both directions, without any serious protest. The question of black slavery was a major public issue in those years, but not a predominant issue. In the minds of the colonists, several issues were more urgent.

There was the Revolutionary War itself, a long and difficult struggle with a formidable occupying power. The war was a civil war, pitting English against English, and many of the English Americans remained loyal to ‘King and Country.’ The revolutionaries fought most immediately for themselves, not for their slaves. The British attempted to exploit slavery for military advantage, signing black troops to fight against the colonists (Countryman 162). Unlike the 1861-65 civil war, slave emancipation during the Revolutionary War would have been a clear-cut advantage for the cause of natural-rights republicanism.

The colonial English resisted the ever-increasing tendency toward landlordism and tenancy, the lack of free trade, taxation without representation—all features of an imperial system in which merchants and traders were crushed in other places, such as Ireland and India (Countryman 12, 49, 52). The passions, fears, and ambitions of the colonists were concentrated on those evils and on resistance to them. Insofar as they thought about the slaves at all during the war, they thought of them as a potential menace to their own freedom—rather as they thought of Amerindians, many of whom also allied with the British.

Just as arduous as the war, in its own way, was the intellectual and political task of founding the world’s first commercial republic based upon the philosophy of natural rights and the principle of popular sovereignty—two not-necessarily-compatible materials. This entailed working out these doctrines in practice, under circumstances largely unknown to the European writers who had formulated the theory. The extensive literature on the old form of republicanism—the mixed regime—was of dubious value to the Founders, who did not live in a society with a titled aristocracy or (after 1781) a monarch (Wood, Creation, 217-222). Understandably, the Founders made mistakes. The Articles of Confederation (for example) failed, but retained many partisans. Working out the complex issues of union vs. states’ rights, real vs. virtual representation, ‘corruption’ vs. ‘citizen virtue’ consumed considerable energy.

That is, the dual effort of first vindicating rights on the battlefield and then attempting to secure them in the political struggles following independence was aimed at ending ‘slavery’ or the threat of it for the colonists. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that chattel slavery seemed a less urgent concern.

Having said this, however, it is then important to unsay it, at least to some degree. Slavery surely was a major issue during the founding period, if under the surface more often than not.

Judith Shklar has marshalled substantial evidence showing that the colonists often contrasted their freedom with slavery. It is impossible not to see that this motif had resonance; even if it was a rhetorical trope, it was rhetoric used too often not to have been judged to have a strong effect on Americans. The freedom-slavery dichotomy of course had preoccupied the colonists on many occasions, and for a long time. Kathleen M. Brown details the decades-long struggle in Virginia simply to define the relations of blacks, free and slave, to the whites. The paternalism of “genteel, restrained authority of [planters’] household” (361) may have been materially stable but it was “anxious,” psychologically precarious (see also Greene 95). In the lower South, where over two-thirds of the population consisted of slaves, the precariousness must have been more than psychological (Greene 143). In particular, South Carolina planters actually managed to dominate and block the economic advance of merchants, artisans, and small farmers, deliberately and firmly establishing themselves as the dominant political and economic actors in the state (Countryman 164-165).

By 1750, under the influence of Locke, paternalism itself was under attack (Wood, Radicalism, 147). But without patriarchy or at least paternalism, how else is slavery to be justified? That is, the very ideology that worked to free white colonial men from white imperial men undermined the household authority of white men. By the beginning of the founding period, the precariousness of slaveholding had been upgraded to the status of a principled anxiety. Jefferson’s fulminations in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence against the alleged English imposition of slaves upon Americas—an attempt to externalize the evil for the sake of a worthy political object—would not have been conceivable without the prior moral, natural-rights critique of paternalism and slavery. The reaction of Jefferson’s fellow Continental Congress representatives to this line of argument suggests that the Founders deliberately subordinated the slavery issue to the immediate problem: unity in opposition to the British Empire. To defeat British rule in America, the revolutionaries needed South Carolina and Georgia to be with them, not against them.

The year 1787 saw two careful attempts simultaneously to recognize the dilemma posed by slavery and to limit slavery’s reach. Edward Countryman remarks that the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance were framed at more or less the same time, plausibly contending that this was likely to have been no accident (191). The Convention delegates set a time limit on the slave trade, compromised on Congressional representation with the three-fifths rule, and established the fugitive slave provision. In William H. Riker’s judgment, the northern and middle Atlantic states could have imposed an antislavery provision, but did not want South Carolina and Georgia to reject the Constitution—the same scenario as that in 1776. My own view is that the stakes were larger. Virginia barely ratified the Constitution, even with the clauses countenancing slavery. Without such provisions, ratification was highly unlikely. In other key states—particularly Massachusetts and New York—the issue of slavery was no impediment to ratification but the issue of state self-government was. It is one thing to end the slave trade—a legitimate power of any national government. It is another thing to ratify a constitutional law that would permit the federal government to reach into each state and confiscate property, causing (in those states where slaves were numerous) a potentially serious threat to the white minority. An antislavery provision would have been object lesson number one for every Anti-Federalist in the country, whether pro-slavery or anti-slavery.

Without Virginia and South Carolina (at a minimum) the United States would have been prey to the divide-and-conquer strategies of Britain, France, even Spain. The natural rights of the white population would have been threatened while the natural rights of the black population would in no way have been secured. The choice of the Founders boiled down to this: Shall we secure our own natural rights, abolish slavery in the states amenable to abolition, and (not incidentally, as Riker shows) obtain the Congressional power to pass navigation acts by a simple majority, thus insuring northern-middle Atlantic dominance in that area? Or shall we split the Union, thereby putting our own rights at hazard, and let ourselves in for intra-American trade wars? It could not have been a difficult decision to make. It was a decision that confirms the sense that black slavery was indeed a major public issue for the Founders, but not the overriding issue. ‘Slavery’ in the sense of the potential loss of natural and civil rights by the dominant whites was of course the issue for the Founders, and they acted in accordance with that not-inconsiderable concern.

While I take the moral passion of William M. Wiecek and many others seriously, I regard his argument as overdrawn. “The framers’ generation considered slavery to be entwined with human progress”? The farther south one went, the more likely that they did, but the major Founders from Virginia north did not. Quite the opposite: Jefferson and many of the others too-optimistically regarded ‘progress’ as likely to leave slavery in the dust. Slavery was “wholly compatible with the American constitutional order”? The Constitution was “permeated” with slavery? Not wholly: the Constitution recognized slavery and delimited it; the Northwest Ordinance barred it from the western territories. Slavery was “an integral part of the legal order of nearly every colony by the time of the American Revolution”? Then why did so many states abolish it within their borders by a decade or so after the Convention? Slavery was designed for “race control” not labor control? Then why were slaves imported? Did Americans bring Africans here in order better to control them? What for? Race control is possible without slavery, as the post-Reconstruction South would demonstrate, and as English and other European imperialists were demonstrating throughout the founding period. Race control once blacks were in North America could have been achieved by driving them away, as was done with Amerindians (who were rather more formidable militarily than blacks could have been at that time). It makes more sense to say that slavery was primarily for labor control; the Amerindians perished under slavery, and whites would stand for it. Hence the use of blacks, and hence the ‘need’ of race control for the purpose of labor control. The key Founders recognized that such labor control was wrong, inconsistent with natural-rights principles except in the temporary, attenuated sense that no one realistically assumes that all human beings in all times and places are prepared to assume the civil rights and responsibilities they will need to defend their natural rights effectively.

The Founders established a commercial republic in order to secure natural rights for the dominant white population. But precisely because those rights were understood as natural, and therefore inherent in all human beings, inevitable questions and criticisms arose, somewhat sotto voce during the founding period, but with increasing insistence as the country survived and prospered. The principles of commerce, as conceived by the Founders, following Adam Smith, wedded the labor theory of value (contra patriarchy) with the right of each person to the fruits of his/her labor. Modern republicanism maintained that natural rights are best secured by self-government, which, among other things, means real, not virtual representation in ruling institutions. Both the commercial and the republican principles of the new regime empowered elites that needed ever-widening constituencies in order to compete for positions of authority. the scope of civil/political rights thus widened, first encompassing factory workers in the early decades of the nineteenth century, then the slaves, and finally women. In each case, the principle of ‘No taxation without representation’—that virtual representation is inadequate security for natural rights–became increasingly evident to a critical mass of Americans, ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite.’ That the problem with respect to blacks was more severe than the problem with respect to workers and women may be seen in the need for a second civil war to begin to settle it. The very intractability of the problem, and the Founders’ understanding of that intractability, explains why they did not undertake to solve it in their day, nationwide. They had indispensable preliminary work to do. In the meantime, the Founders did abolish slavery where it could be abolished, and they kept it out of the northwest territories. Retrospectively, one can always wish for more. But, as the Founders’ contemporary and political enemy Dr. Samuel Johnson remarked on another topic, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” The Founders did secure natural rights for ‘themselves and their posterity,’ instituting the regime most likely to eradicate slavery in places where it had gained a firm foothold.

 

Works Cited

Appleby, Joyce: Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Brown, Kathleen M.: Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 

Countryman, Edward: The American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Greene, Jack P.: Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: Unversity of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Riker, Jack P.: The Art of Political Manipulation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Shklar, Judith N.: Redeeming American Political Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Wiecek, William M.: “‘The Blessings of Liberty’: Slavery in the American Constitutional Order.” In Goldwin, Robert A. and Kaufman, Art, eds.: Slavery and Its Consequences: The Constitution, Equality, and Race. Washington: The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1988.

Wood, Gordon S.: The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1783. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992 [1964].

Wood, Gordon S.: The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

 

In his majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes attempts to justify a hierarchy of constitutional principles. Specifically, in construing Article VI’s “authority” clause and its “supreme law of the land” clause, he rates explicitly-stated constitutional prohibitions over implicit prohibitions, and he claims that treaty law overrides the unspecified ‘reserve powers’ of the states, mentioned in the Tenth Amendment.

Holmes’s argument regarding the wording of Article VI has been disputed on the grounds that Article VI’s reference to laws made in pursuance of the Constitution and treaties made under the authority of the United States both refer to the obligation to pay debts contracted during the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation, as well as to future debts contracted under the Constitution. But while these debts are specifically mentioned in the Article’s previous clause, there is no need to assume that the language of the clause under scrutiny refers back to obligations undertaken under the Articles of Confederation alone; clearly, the language refers to future treaties, as well. Moreover, the language of the Tenth Amendment does not overturn the treaty power. Holmes could have confined his decision to those points, which would have forced the plaintiffs to narrow the dispute to whether hunting (as opposed to shipping) migratory wildfowl really falls under the interstate commerce clause. (After all, the birds aren’t being shipped across state lines; they are moving on their own.)  He chose not to, but instead took the opportunity to advance a new way of interpreting the Constitution as a whole.

Holmes begins by appearing to have recourse to the ancient Roman principle, ‘the public safety is the supreme law’ or, as his contemporary, John Dewey, might have put it, necessity is as necessity does. But this maxim won’t ‘do’ for Holmes, at least in its naked meaning. It would not restrict a government to its own “authority” any more than it would restrict it to a constitution. “Authority” suggests a distinction between legitimacy and tyranny. Naked necessity could imply an appeal to despotism.

Holmes has almost ventured beyond ‘broad construction’ of the Constitution, into extra-constitutional ground. But he does not want to step too far away from constitutional law. To do so would put at hazard his own authority as a judge. Moreover, he also does not want to step into the extraconstitutional terrain preferred by the Framers, the terrain of natural right, which he regards as a land of myth, a realm harmonized by the mystic chords of memory that Lincoln invoked futilely on the eve of the Civil War.

Holmes makes a different move. He defines the Constitution as “a constituent act” (emphasis added) whereby the Framers “called into life” (note the God-language) a document that is more than a document, more than the sum of its language. The meaning of this document develops, grows, in ways that “could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters.” The Framers hadn’t simply composed a document; they had “had created an organism.”

The Holmesian Constitution is no longer simply a contract, to be construed by careful analysis of its language, whether ‘strict’ or ‘broad.’ Jeffersonian ‘strict construction’ versus Chief Justice John Marshall’s ‘broad construction’ both get brushed aside, as both are bound up in the verbal/contractarian framework. Rather, the new, historicized, ‘living,’ ‘organic’ Constitution must be interpreted historically, by which Holmes does not mean in line with the original intent of the Framers but “in the light of our whole [national] experience and not merely in [the light of] what was said one hundred years ago.” (“In the beginning was the Word? No! In the beginning was the Act!” The new Constitution is Faustian.)

With respect to exegesis, this means that a treaty can only be constitutionally limited if it flatly contradicts some specific “prohibitory words” of the document, some exact ‘Thou shalt not’ of its ‘creators’ or ‘begetters.’ But the vaguer language of the Tenth Amendment is not specifically prohibitory; the meaning of those words is changeable in ‘history,’ meaning in the course of the Constitution’s ‘organic development’ or ‘growth.’ “We must consider what this country [and with it, in the new, organic sense, the Constitution] has become in deciding what [the Tenth Amendment] has reserved [to the states].

Here is Holmes’s exegetical opening. The case now becomes an anticipation of what would be done with the commerce clause in the 1930s. The nation has evolved; corporations transcend state boundaries and so (in the issue before the Court here) do migratory birds. In both instances, social development including technology and commercial industrialism have posed problems in ways the states are no longer competent to solve. The treaty power, suitably ‘misread,’ can be used to solve this problem, reversing the original intent of the framers of the Tenth Amendment. Wedded to a commitment to American nationalism, the hierarchy of explicit over implicit reserved state powers follows from this new, historicist approach to Constitutional interpretation.

What validates this hierarchy? The Framers themselves, as well as Jefferson and even Marshall would reply: Nothing at all. To them, Holmes would be freebooting. ‘This is not constitutional construction at all,’ they would say, ‘except in the sense that Holmes is reconstructing our Constitution. This is not an exercise in contract law, the verbal analysis of a document with a stable meaning delivered by the language of the document itself.’

Thus Holmes abandons natural right, natural law, and contractarianism for natural history or evolutionary organicism. As it plays out in constitutional exegesis, this approach enables him to supersede the Framers intentions in a limited way: Where the Framers explicitly prohibit, he must still respect their intention. But where they are vague, or leave things unstated, he can silently contravene their intention.

What justifies this, in Holmes’s mind? “[W]hat was said a hundred years ago” most emphatically justifies nothing, he contends. But what was said at that time? Exactly one hundred years before 1920, the Missouri Compromised saved the old Constitution, the Constitution as understood by the Framers and by Jefferson and Marshall. But this salvation was only temporary. As Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes learned in his life’s formative experience, the old way of understanding the Constitution could not save the union the Constitution was intended to solemnize and reinforce. Holmes believes that organicism will better meld ‘nation’ and ‘Constitution’ to ensure an ever-strengthening Union, one that will never again disintegrate into the carnage of modern, techno-industrial war.

The old Constitutional order at best permitted only a temporary Missouri Compromise. Holmes’s new Constitutional order (enunciated, appropriately enough, in a case called MISSOURI v. Holland) brings forth what he hopes will be a permanent Missouri Synthesis, whereby a states-rights challenge to the national government is dialectically and ‘organically’ subsumed, not patched over. The past—the Constitution of “one hundred years ago”—is not authoritative. The true authority of the United States government is now and in the future, as America has grown and will grow.

It may seem faintly comic to load such weighty matters into a dispute over migratory birds. But Holmes might not have thought so. As any resident of Washington, D. C. would have known, in 1914 the last passenger pigeon died in its cage at the Washington Zoo. A major food source for earlier Americans, the seemingly numberless flocks of passenger pigeons had provided food for the burgeoning American populace as it extended its rule from one end of the continent to the other. The pigeon was a victim of precisely the same commercial-industrial economy that called for a rethinking of the commerce clause. This was also the political economy that had helped the United States to win the Civil War against the States-Righters of the Confederacy. How could a thoughtful man of Holmes’s generation not see these linkages: Union and the need for increased power over often-recalcitrant states; but, at the same time, the vast increase and then displacement of rural folk (simultaneous with the very destruction of one of their principal foods) in an industrializing economy, and the consequent need for the national management, the federally supervised conservation, of natural resources that know no conventional, ‘contractual’ state boundaries. Migratory Americans had extinguished a huge population of migratory birds; without nationwide governance from a centralized state, Americans themselves might eventually become extinct.

Quite apart from the question of the legitimacy of Holmes’s constitutional jurisprudence, however, the problem will be this: If you replace the deductive logic of the old constitutionalism with the dialectical logic of ‘growth,’ will not this Hegelian means result in the Hegelian end, a worldwide bureaucratic state? Where does that leave the self-government of “We the People”?

 

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American saw political transformations that were to have (as Hegel might have put it) ‘world-historical’ significance. Americans framed the first government that was republican—based on representation—in all three branches. As The Federalist observes, previous republics had been ‘mixed’ regimes, exemplified in antiquity by Rome and in modernity by Britain and the Netherlands: regimes in which various social orders—monarch, aristocrats, commoners—each controlled one branch of government. The American Founders established the first unmixed republic; moreover, the new regime was designed to falsify the Montesquieuian truism that republics could only exist on small territories, and could survive only in loose confederations. In the United States, however, a moderate centralization of governmental authority occurred, as the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution of 1787. This vindication of popular sovereignty led to the increasing democratization of the regime throughout the early nineteenth century, culminating in the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

European regimes experienced considerably longer transformations to republicanism. What was it about the political, economic, social, and ideational preconditions of the American founding that lent themselves to the success of the Founders’ political experiment? The question matters now as much as it did then, as peoples around the world struggle for and against the founding of democratic and commercial republican regimes in their own countries.

 

Military and Political conditions

The English colonists in America exercised considerable self-government before the Seven Years’ War. British interests thereafter required a better-integrated empire in order to raise taxes needed to pay the war debt and to enhance military preparedness, but Americans, relieved of the bothersome French, needed British protection must less, and needed the empire not at all. They were sitting on territory big enough for their own empire, even if it were to be an ’empire of liberty.’ Foreseeably, the empire of liberty would need only local militias as land forces for Indian ‘removal.’ For national defense, it would need not so much an army as a navy; this circumstance favored republicanism, inasmuch as navies seldom threaten civilian rule.

The Revolutionary War helped to establish popular sovereignty because the American gentry needed soldiers who would fight the British. As political sociologist Michael Mann remarks, “the first mass mobilization war of modern times” contributed to the first popular-sovereignty republic, as the petite bourgeoisie and small farmers organized into militias (Mann 152). “Self-government and the militia went together” (Hintze 196). In Europe warfare had led to aristocracy, but in America there was no aristocracy, and the gentry could not win without the ‘commons’ (Hintze 168). Thus the American Whigs in a sense reversed the Whiggish account of political development, which held that war breeds despotism. A militia isn’t a standing army; it empowers a vigilant, arms-bearing citizenry, not social and political elites. (Future American state-builders, from the old Federalists to Theodore Roosevelt to the New Dealers who established the ‘national security state,’ advocated a standing army, professional and/or conscript.) A democratic military structure enhanced the chances for a Jeffersonian, and then a Jacksonian America. Washington’s policy of disentanglement from European affairs minimized the need for a larger-scale land force, thus combining political liberty with geopolitical Realpolitik.

Civilian politics in the colonies featured local self-government; the New England townships are best-remembered, but in one form or another, colonial governments mostly made their own laws. American colonies saw more political participation as measured in terms of suffrage than England had; much of colonial government was republican, forming the civilian basis of popular sovereignty once the king’s men were pushed out (Huntington 94). Huntington claims that American colonial institutions were Tudor leftovers that the English immigrants had brought with them and never ‘updated’: balance of powers, decentralization, subordination of governments to fundamental law—all guards against statism (96) and, particularly, against modern English-style parliamentary sovereignty (105). He contends that the Tudor conception of the constitutional monarch, as distinct from the modern-European absolute monarch, was transferred to the office of the presidency (107). On the other hand, as Huntington also sees, the Americans did not exalt the state over the churches or empower a real, hereditary monarch; they were decidedly selective, republican ‘Tudors.’

 

Economic conditions

The political economies of the American colonies were local and mostly regional. There was no national political economy, a fact the Constitution’s commerce clause was intended to alter. Although broadly commercial/capitalist, they came in four varieties: state-patronage, slave-based agricultural, free commercial agricultural (Mann calls this “agrarian petty commodity capitalism”), and commercial-landed (Mann 142-143). These economies were 90% agricultural, but this was commercial agriculture, not feudal, ‘manor-and-peasant’ agriculture, as still seen in Europe.

Crucially, the colonists did not need the British imperial system for trading; indeed, that system only impeded them, preventing free markets for American goods in the Caribbean. Smuggling ensued. The colonial system also inhibited the development of local manufactures, much to the displeasure of northern and middle-Atlantic colonists; fortunately, slavery was not much used in the manufacturing industries, else its abolition in the North might have been delayed. For their part, the colonists’ slogan, ‘No taxation without representation,’ was not only a statement of moral-political principle but an economic threat: Let us participate in the governance of the Empire or we will cut off the lifeblood of Leviathan.

The war got rid of the American Tories and much of the state-patronage capitalism, which would appear, under republican auspices, in the move for ‘internal improvements’ in the nineteenth century. This left a rivalry between slave-based agriculture and free agriculture, which became entwined in the catastrophic, near-fatal military/political conflict, four generations later. But the 1787 Constitutional Convention avoided a serious split between the northern and southern states with the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave importation clause. Instead of a truly virulent regime division among states, north and south, the ratification debate resolves into intrastate debates between eastern and western interests. The Middle Atlantic states ratified quickly; they were already full-fledged commercial republics. A strong, well-coordinated national state would protect their coastlines and thereby protect their international trade. Southern and northern states were more reluctant, but in each case, a state-by-state examination of the ratification debates shows that the eastern, coastal areas supported the new constitution, with its promise of interstate commercial regulation, resistance to debtors’ demands, and coordinated national systems of military defense and (at least in some, Hamiltonian, minds) of modern finance.

The commercial economy begun by the colonies and reinforced by the Constitution played out politically in the formation of mass, competitive parties in the early nineteenth century. The Madisonian policy of giving ‘factions’ or interests their play within a legal framework gave considerable leeway to party organizing. The commercial economy, undermining the planter gentry, induced the gentry to appeal to the democratic/republican people in order to defend their own way of life, even as they had had to appeal to the people for military support during the war. This led to a synergism of republicanism and commerce, each side dissolving the elitism of the other. Thus ‘gentry’ politicians like Jefferson and Madison laid the groundwork for the organization of parties, an act followed by the recognizable, and much democratized, parties of the 1830s. Alternatively, America might have developed long the lines Jefferson professed to fear: a high-toned Federalist state with a quasi-monarchic president in alliance with a strong bureaucracy and  standing army, eliciting sharper, more politicized class struggles. America might then have come to look more like Europe.

 

Social structure

Tocquevillian moeurs or habits of the heart include a democratic/republican religion (Protestantism), a love of orderly home life carried into public affairs, a separation of church and state that makes religion more, not less, powerful because it is now fully consensual, and widespread literacy, encouraged by the Bible-based, democratized religion of Protestantism. All of these social features existed in the colonies; although of course the Puritans were not exemplars of church-state separation, they did have a democratized and above all individualized religiosity; further, the Middle Atlantic states contained many of the English and other European ‘dissenting’ sects, which did insist on church-state separation. The very diversity of sects in colonial America lent itself to the Madisonian solution, identical to his solution of factionalism: Increase the number of sects and you decrease religious intolerance. The political payoff was that the First Amendment had civil-social reinforcemtn; George Washington could do what no state had ever done—tell Jews, Catholics, and Quakers that they were not merely to be tolerated but must be allowed free exercise of religion as a matter of natural and civil right—and expect the American people to redeem his promise.

On the more sinister side, the colonial implantation of slavery had the social consequence (cited by Tocqueville) of allowing southern whites to scorn labor. Commercial republicanism stands on the labor theory of value; Tocqueville rightly concludes that slavery attacks the American Union indirectly, through its moeurs, by enabling the whites of one region to imagine themselves aristocrats, living off slaves and reading altogether too many novels by Sir Walter Scott. Modern or race-based slavery, supporting an honor-bound, warlike, high-spirited class of whites, yielded the series of Southerners’ miscalculations of Northern commercial-republican willingness and ability to fight, miscalculations that eventuated in the Civil War.

The major colonial social condition with political consequences was the lack of a titled nobility. Without this, an unmixed republic was possible; without a titled nobility, a thoroughly commercial republicanism was possible; without a titled nobility, a very strong central state is unnecessary and Hobbes’s argument that such a state, with a monarchic regime is the best rode to ‘modernization’ falls flat. A relatively egalitarian, consensual society needs no central government to dislodge an anti-modern aristocracy (Huntington 126). The political principles of self-government and equal civil rights for citizens were socially reinforced by fluid, diverse English America, in sharp contrast with both French Canada and Latin America (Hartz 74-75). Gianfranco Poggi observes that in Europe concrete standestaat claims were not easily translated into the more abstract terms of natural and legal right (Poggi 87); Americans did not have this impediment to popular sovereignty or to the understanding of government as security for natural rights via the rule of law.

 

Ideas

There is a limit to Huntington’s hypothesis. He rightly says that ideational modernism means the Machiavellian-Baconian project of conquering fortune and nature. But he does not say that ‘Tudor’ America limited that project. American obviously partook of what Harvey Mansfield calls the modern-liberal ‘taming’ of the Machiavellian project.

Hartz describes seventeenth-century Americans as individualistic; their Christianity did not include acquiescence to the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule, for example (73). He concedes that those Americans were not secularists (nor, he should add, did their asceticism comport with profit-maximizing) but claims, Weber-like, that their ‘Protestant ethic’ lent itself to subsequent secularization of Lockean-liberalization. As for the South (which Hartz does not much discuss), although it is true that the planters resisted Lockean principles with respect to their families and slaves, white men there very much wanted to apply them to themselves, leading to tensions visible as late as the post-Civil War self-defense of Jefferson Davis.

Although much ink as spilled over the alleged contradiction between a ‘liberal’ and ‘republican’ tradition in America, the writings of the principal Founders show no such thing. Colonists and Founders alike associated the principles later labeled as ‘liberal’ with republicanism. While there were anti-Federalists who disliked any thoroughgoing commercial ethos, their sentiments were fatally compromised by Lockean elements, as Herbert J. Storing has demonstrated.

 

Conclusion

Karl Polanyi identifies four institutions of the nineteenth-century European states: a balance of power among states; an international financial system based on gold; a self-regulating commercial market leading to industrialism as technology advanced; generally liberal if not yet stable republican regimes. Huntington defines modernization as ‘rationalization’ of authority (in the Weberian, rules-governed-bureaucratic sense of rationality), along with differentiation of social structures and expansion of political participation (93). Colonial America featured the preconditions of liberalism, of democratization/expanded political participation, and the market economy. It had the making of its own balance-of-power system—federalism—which would however prove unstable as it was (mis)conceived by later American politicians. It did not anticipate a modern financial system; that awaited Hamilton and Robert Morris. It did not conceive of bureaucratization at all, and in fact had revolted against the extension of British state bureaucracy to its shores. Such a political society interacted with Europe primarily by trading with it and by proving to Europeans the viability of commercial republicanism. The success of that regime here proved not so easily maintained in Europe, where war, political regimes, and socio-economic conditions all impeded it. Only after commercial/market economies were established there, thanks in large measure to state intervention (Zolberg 87) did commercial republican regimes become increasingly feasible.

 

Works Cited

Hartz, Louis: The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955.

Gilbert, Felix, ed.: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Huntington, Samuel P.: Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

Mann, Michael: The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The Riuse of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Poggi, Gianfranco: The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.

Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963 [1944].

Storing, Herbert J., ed.: The Complete Anti-Federalist. Five volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Zolberg, Aristide: “Strategic Interactions and the Formation of Modern States in France and England.” In Eli Kazancigal, ed.: the State in Global Perspective. Paris: Gower/UNESCO, 1986.  See also “International Engagement and American Democracy: A Comparative Perspective.” In Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds.: Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.