Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

28

The Invention of America

‘The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society . . .’¹ This is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Earl J. Hamilton, in his famous essay ‘American treasure and the rise of capitalism’, traced the various changes in sixteenth-century Europe – the advent of nation-states, the ravages and opportunities of war, the rise of Protestantism – and concluded that none of these had the effect that the discovery of America did. Hamilton was convinced that America was the main cause of European capital formation. ‘The consequence of the discovery was to encourage the growth of European industries, which had to supply manufactures in exchange for the produce of America; [which provided] Europe with the silver it needed for its trade with the East – a trade which contributed powerfully to capital formation because of the vast profits which accrued to its promoters; and to provoke a price revolution in Europe, which again facilitated capital accumulation because wages lagged behind prices.’² In another famous work, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (1933), H. M. Robertson argued that the significance of the discoveries was ‘not confined to the strictly material sphere. For the consequent expansion of commerce meant a necessary expansion of ideas’. Above all, he said, there was ‘an increase of opportunity . . . [and that] from these new opportunities there emerged an entrepreneurial class with a spirit of capitalism and individualism, which acted as a solvent on traditional society.’³

Walter Prescott Webb, in The Great Frontier (1953), was more specific. For him, Europe was the metropolis whereas America was the great frontier. Despite the many problems encountered, and the new type of farming needed on the Great Plains, ‘The opening of this frontier transformed the prospects of Europe in that it decisively altered the ratio between the three factors of population, land and capital in such a way as to create boom conditions.’⁴ In particular, he said, in 1500 Europe’s 3,750,000 square miles of land supported a population of roughly 100 million, which meant a density of 26.7 persons to the square mile. After the discovery of the New World, these 100 million people suddenly had access to an additional 20 million square miles of land. This surplus, Webb said, launched Europe on four centuries of boom, ‘which came to an end with the closing of the frontier around the year 1900’. On this account, the four centuries between 1500 and 1900 were a unique period in history – a time-frame in which the ‘Great Frontier’ of America transformed Western civilisation.⁵ As John Elliott says, ‘The consensus of studies on the impact of America boil down to three recurrent themes – the stimulating effects of bullion, trade and opportunity.’¹⁶

The age of discovery, culminating in the sixteenth century, brought with it the establishment of the first global empires in history. This not only provided new sources of conflict between European states, ‘far beyond the pillars of Hercules’, Europe’s traditional boundaries, but it also had consequences for the relationship between secular authorities and the church. The Vatican had always claimed world-wide dominion, yet its scriptures showed no awareness of the New World and made no mention of it.⁷ On the face of things, the discovery of millions of people living without the benefits of Christianity offered the church an unparalleled opportunity to extend its influence. But in practice the consequences were more complex. For a start, the discoveries coincided with the Reformation and the Counter, or Catholic, Reformation. This latter preoccupied the religious authorities in Rome more than the opportunities in the New World though it may also be true that the debates in Europe suffered because so many of the more effective evangelists had decamped across the Atlantic (the Council of Trent barely discussed American affairs). But in any case the very presence of missionaries in the new territories was dependent on the permission of the secular powers. In particular, the Spanish Crown was ideally placed to direct the pace and form of evangelisation, the more so as it had negotiated a papal authority for its explorations, known legally as patronato.⁸ It has even been suggested that the absolutist powers of the Spanish kings in the Indies helped generate the growth of absolutist ideas back in Europe.⁹ In similar vein, Richard Hakluyt, in England, suggested that colonisation ‘siphoned off’ those individuals most prone to sedition.¹⁰ ‘Just as the authoritarian tendencies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century state may have encouraged the disaffected to emigrate, so, in turn, the emigration may have enhanced the prospects of authoritarianism at home . . . There was presumably less inducement to fight for opportunities and rights at home if these could be secured at less cost by emigration overseas.’¹¹

John Elliott confirms that the centre of gravity of the Holy Roman Empire shifted decisively in the 1540s and early 1550s away from Germany and the Netherlands to the Iberian peninsula.¹² ‘The change was symbolic of the eclipse of the old financial world of Antwerp and Augsburg, and its replacement by a new financial nexus linking Genoa to Seville and the silver mines of America. In the second half of the sixteenth century, but not before, it is legitimate to speak of an Atlantic economy.’¹³

It is not so surprising then that the envy of Spain and Spanish conquests was aroused in France and England. The silver supplied from Peru first drew the attention of these rival powers, and these supplies were most vulnerable at the isthmus of land at Panama. A Protestant policy of taking Spain ‘by way of the Indies’ was another idea, and confirms that politics was acquiring a global dimension, marking the fact that sea power was becoming recognised as more and more important. Politically speaking, the New World also played its part in the development of European nationalism. Spain naturally felt that, as the centre of civilisation shifted to the Iberian peninsula, she was now ‘the chosen race’. But in the middle of the sixteenth century her image abroad suffered grievously from the publication of two works which gave birth to what became known as the ‘Black Legend’. These books were Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, first published in Spain in 1552, which was a frank attempt to reclaim for the Indians a humanity that had been widely denied them, and Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World, published in Venice in 1565.¹⁴ Both books were quickly translated into French, Dutch, German and English, and the Huguenots, Dutch and English no less quickly confessed themselves appalled by the Spaniards’ behaviour. Montaigne, after reading of the Black Legend, voiced what others also felt: ‘So many goodly citties ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; so infinite millions of harmlesse people of all sexes, states and ages, massacred, ravaged and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest and the best part of the world topsiturvied, ruined and defaced for the traffick of Pearles and Pepper . . .’¹⁵ The destruction of twenty million Indians was henceforth produced as evidence of the Spaniards’ ‘innate’ cruelty. This, says John Elliott, was the first example, at least in European history, of a metropolitan power’s colonial record being used against it.¹⁶

The fact remains that for more than a century after the discovery of America there was no real intellectual progress in assimilating the New World into European thought patterns. For a start, how was she to be explained? There was, for example, and as was referred to above, no mention of America in the scriptures.¹⁷ Did that mean, perhaps, that she was a special creation, emerging late from the Deluge, or had she perhaps suffered her own quite different deluge, later than the one that had afflicted Europe and from which she was now recovering? Why was the New World’s climate so different from Europe’s? The Great Lakes, for example, were on the same latitude as Europe but their waters froze for half the year. Why was so much of the New World covered in marshes and swamps, why were its forests so dense, its soil too moist for agriculture? Why were its animals so different? Why were the people so primitive, and so thin on the ground? Why, in particular, were the people copper-coloured and not white or black? Most important of all, perhaps, where did these savages come from?¹⁸ Were they descended perhaps from the lost tribes of Israel? Rabbi Manasseh Israel of Amsterdam believed that they were, finding ‘conclusive evidence’ in the similarity of Peruvian temples to Jewish synagogues. For some, the widespread practice of circumcision reinforced this explanation. Were they the lost Chinese perhaps, who had drifted across the Pacific? Were they the descendants of Noah, that greatest of navigators? Henry Commager says that the most widely held theory, and the one that fitted best with common sense, was that they were Tartars, who had voyaged from Kamchatka in Russia to Alaska and had sailed down the western coast of the new continent, before spreading out.¹⁹

The question as to whether America was part of Asia, or a landmass in its own right, was settled in the early 1730s. Vitus Bering had originally been commissioned by the Russian czar in 1727 to determine whether Siberia stretched all the way to America. He had reported back that there was sea between the two continents but the lack of detail in his account, and its similarity to stories circulating among the local inhabitants on the Russian side of the water, threw doubts on the veracity of his claims, sparking a debate that has lasted to this day.²⁰ People in the Kamchatka area of Siberia knew that land wasn’t very far over the horizon from the many reports of driftwood washed up on Karginsk island, where the wood came from a species of fir that didn’t grow in Kamchatka. In 1728 Bering handed over his commission to another commander and it was two of his men, Ivan Fedorov and Mikhail Grozdev, who finally discovered Alaska in 1732.

While that issue was settled, and settled unequivocally, other arguments about America, her purpose and meaning, went on and on. Early ideas that the New World was an El Dorado, full of precious metals, magical rivers and seven enchanted cities, never materialised.²¹ For some, America was a mistake, whose main characteristic was backwardness. ‘Marvel not at the thin population of America,’ wrote Francis Bacon, ‘nor at the rudeness and ignorance of the people. For you must accept your inhabitants of America as a young people; younger a thousand years, at the least, than the rest of the world.’²² The comte de Buffon, no less, argued that America had emerged from the Deluge later than the other continents, which explained the swampiness of the soil, the rank vegetation, and the density of the forests.²³ Nothing could flourish there, he said, and the animals were ‘stunted’, mentally as well as physically, ‘For Nature has treated America less as a mother than as a step-mother, withholding from [the native American] the sentiment of love or the desire to multiply. The savage is feeble and small in his organs of generation . . . He is much less strong in body than the European. He is also much less sensitive and yet more fearful and more cowardly.’ Peter Kalm, a Swedish professor, thought that there were too many worms to allow plants to grow, making oaks in America feeble, ‘and the houses built from them’. Even Immanuel Kant thought that native Americans were incapable of civilisation.²⁴

Others expressed the view that America was so bad that she was nowhere near ready to be brought into the mainstream of history, not yet ready to be Christianised or civilised and that syphilis was a divine punishment for the ‘premature’ discovery and the great cruelty meted out by the Spanish during the conquest.²⁵ The buffalo was an unsuccessful and pointless cross between a rhinoceros, a cow and a goat.²⁶ ‘Through the whole extent of America, from Cape Horn to Hudson’s Bay,’ wrote the abbé Corneille de Pauw in the Encyclopédie, ‘there has never appeared a philosopher, an artist, a man of learning.’²⁷

We read this now and smile. For the fact is, as the American historian Henry Steele Commager has put it, in many ways America actually realised the Enlightenment that Europe could only imagine. For ‘America too had its philosophes, though for few of them was philosophy, or even science, a full-time activity. For the most part they were busily engaged in farming, medicine, law or the ministry. More important, they lacked the Courts, Cathedrals, the Academies, the Universities and the libraries that provided so large a part of the patronage and nurture of philosophy in the Old World. They had a confidence in reason and science (where useful) and many had studied in Europe. When they returned they brought Europe with them but selectively, for they saw more to disapprove than approve: this was most consequential.’²⁸

It was indeed. The first Americans were not at all slow in creating their own Enlightenment, one that was carefully – and sensibly – tailored to the new conditions. There was, for instance, no religious establishment, no Puritanism or, come to that, no Catholic Counter-Reformation zeal. Early American thinking was secular and practical. In Philadelphia the American Philosophical Society (modelled on the Royal Society of London) was created with the deist Benjamin Franklin as its president from 1769 until his death in 1790.²⁹ Philadelphia, William Penn’s ‘holy experiment’, quickly became America’s ‘capital of the mind’, adding a Library Company, a college that became a university, a hospital, a botanical garden, and a brace of museums (John Adams called it the ‘pineal gland’ of British America).³⁰ Early Philadelphia was, in its way, every bit as distinguished as, say, Edinburgh. The Reverend David Muhlenberg was a botanist who identified and classified well over a thousand species of plants, Thomas Godfrey, a mathematician and astronomer, devised a new quadrant, while his son Thomas wrote and staged the Prince of Parthia, the first drama in the New World. Philadelphia was home to the first college of medicine in the colonies, the creation of three Edinburgh-trained men – John Morgan, Edward Shippen and Benjamin Rush. Philadelphia was also the natural focus for the artists of the time, for Benjamin West, Matthew Pratt, who painted the Quaker gentry, and Henry Bembridge. It was in Philadelphia that Charles Williams Peale founded the first Academy of Fine Arts and it was to Philadelphia that distinguished émigrés from the Old World gravitated and settled, men such as Tom Paine and Dr Joseph Priestley.

Above all there was the ‘presiding genius’ of Benjamin Franklin.³¹ A great coiner of proverbs (‘Lost time is never found again’) ‘his particular genius was for being there . . . He was there at the Albany Congress of 1754 where he drafted a plan that anticipated the ultimate American confederation; there at the House of Commons to defend the American distinction between external regulation and internal taxation; there in Carpenter’s Hall to help Jefferson draft a Declaration of Independence; and there too on the committee that drew up Articles of Confederation for the new nation. He was there at the Court of Louis XVI to win French support and there at the peace negotiations that acknowledged American independence. He was there, finally at the Federal Convention that drew up a constitution for the new nation.’³² And that was only the half of it. In England for fourteen years and France for eight, Franklin may be counted a major factor of the American, British and French Enlightenments, with many diverse talents – printer, journalist, scientist, politician, diplomat, educator and author of ‘the best of autobiographies’.³³

Benjamin Rush, Franklin’s successor in Philadelphia, was scarcely less talented, with almost as many interests. A graduate of Edinburgh and London Universities, and a disciple of John Locke, he was far more than a doctor, like Franklin a politician and a social reformer.³⁴ Back home in America, he was appointed professor of chemistry at the new College of Philadelphia but still found time to study diseases among Indians and campaign against slavery.³⁵ He created the first dispensary and performed vaccinations against smallpox. It is said that he provided Tom Paine with the title Common Sense for his pamphlet.³⁶ After signing the Declaration of Independence he immediately enlisted in the army.

Joel Barlow, from Connecticut, was a graduate of Yale and, though a parson, conceived an early idea of evolution. But he found a wider fame as a ‘cultural naturalist’, ‘the first poet of the republic’. He strained for twenty years to create an American epic on the scale of Homer or Virgil, producing in the end six thousand lines, The Vision of Columbus (1887), that surveyed ‘the melancholy history of the Old World and contrasted the glorious prospects of the New . . . Byron himself, whether in admiration or derision, called him the American Homer.’³⁷ A successful speculator when he wasn’t writing poetry, Barlow lived in Paris for a while where his salon became immensely fashionable – Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft were regulars. When Paine was jailed, Barlow ensured that the manuscript of the Age of Reason was successfully published. Like Barlow, Manasseh Cutler was a parson and like Benjamin Rush much more than a doctor – in his case, a lawyer, a diplomat and a geographer. Another passionate advocate of vaccination, he was also the first to begin systematically exploring Indian mounds.³⁸ ‘It was from his parish that the first band of intrepid emigrants set out for the Ohio country with their ministers and their bibles and their muskets – new Pilgrims en route to a new world.’³⁹

Joseph Priestley (who had been part of the American ‘interest’ in British politics) emigrated across the Atlantic at the age of sixty-one.⁴⁰ He was offered chairs at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia but opted instead for the Pennsylvania frontier, and a farm overlooking the Susquehanna river. Disillusioned with the Old World, Priestley at one stage intended to found a Utopia in America, with his friends Shelley, Southey and Coleridge. Although that never materialised, he did manage to finish his massive General History of the Christian Church, where he compared the teachings of Jesus and Socrates (the book was dedicated to Jefferson).⁴¹

Thomas Paine had three careers, one in England, one America and one in France. Though he was not an easy man, or easy to classify, his abilities and his passion (even his fanaticism) were everywhere recognised and he made distinguished friends wherever he went – Franklin in America, Priestley in England, Condorcet in France. A true radical, who loved nothing so much as making trouble, he was at the same time a brilliant writer, a genius at making complex issues simple. ‘He overflowed with aphorisms as Mozart overflowed with melodies.’⁴² Perhaps because he was not especially well-educated, he simplified the leading ideas of the Enlightenment in a form that produced a large response. He argued that the laws of nature which regulated ‘the great machine and structure of the universe’ implied natural rights. The logic of this led him to favour revolution and, to his satisfaction, he did indeed witness revolution in two of the three countries where he lived.

Unlike many philosophes, Paine was no academic, or aesthetician. He was interested above all in practical progress. He urgently wanted an improvement in the material conditions of the underprivileged and a more egalitarian distribution of resources.⁴³ Part Two of The Rights of Man has as its subtitle ‘Combining principle and practice’. Thus he was an early critic of slavery and derived much satisfaction by writing the preamble to the Pennsylvania Act which prohibited slavery in that commonwealth. In his other writings, particularly Common Sense (1776), which despite ‘not being profound’ sold 120,000 copies, he urged progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes which were to be used to finance schemes for social welfare.⁴⁴ He also wanted the young to be given bonuses so they would have a good start in married life. And he advocated free schooling for the children of the poor, and financial and material support for the unemployed. ‘Thomas Paine was a world figure but it was America that made him. It was in America that he found his mission in life. It was to America that he returned in the end, after both England and France rejected him. It was on America, too, that his hopes were centred. Everywhere in the Old World “antiquity and bad habits” supported tyranny . . . America was the only spot in the political world where the principles of universal reformation could begin.’⁴⁵

Each of these men was remarkable and America could count herself lucky to have them. In time, as we shall see, they put together the best ideas of the Enlightenment to create – in the form of the American constitution – a new way of living together which was to prove as convincingly as anything ever is convincing that freedom and equality and prosperity are intimately linked and mutually supporting. Their first task, however, which went hand-in-hand with the creation of the first universities, the early hospitals and the first forays into scholarship, was to change some of the bad and/or mistaken impressions that many condescending Europeans clung on to. In retrospect, the way that life in America had advanced in the early years had beaten all expectations.

Thomas Jefferson himself was the most powerful and passionate advocate of America.⁴⁶ For example, his answer to the charge that nature was sterile and emaciated in the New World was to point to Pennsylvania, ‘a veritable garden of Eden, with its streams swarming with fish, its meadows with hundreds of song birds’. How could the soil of the New World be so thin when ‘all Europe comes to us for corn and tobacco and rice – every American dines better than most of the nobles of Europe’. How could the American climate be so enervating when statistical tables showed a higher rainfall in London and Paris than in Boston and Philadelphia?⁴⁷

In 1780 a young French diplomat, the marquis de Barbé-Marbois, had the idea to canvas opinion from several governors of American states and sent them a series of questions about the organisation and resources of their respective commonwealths. Jefferson’s response was the most detailed, the most eloquent and by far the most famous – Notes on Virginia. There is something surreal about this book now but the issues it attacked were keenly felt at the time. Jefferson met Buffon and the European sceptics head on. He compared the work rates of Europeans and Americans, as defined by actuarial statistics – to the advantage of the Americans.⁴⁸ Buffon had claimed that the New World had nothing to compare with the ‘lordly elephant’ or the ‘mighty hippopotamus’, or the lion and the tiger. Nonsense, said Jefferson, and pointed to the Great Claw or Megalonyx. ‘What are we to think of a creature whose claws were eight inches long, when those of the lion are not 11/2 inches?’ Even by 1776, enough fossil bones of the mammoth had been found to show that it was indigenous to the New World and that it was a beast easily ‘five or six times’ larger than an elephant.⁴⁹ Jefferson and his fellow Americans found other fruitful comparisons when they looked at population levels. In the rural areas of Europe, they pointed out, births outnumbered deaths. Not by much, but enough to keep population numbers stable. In the cities, however, the situation was much bleaker – numbers were dropping. In London alone there were five deaths for every four births and the city had added barely two thousand to her population in the first half of the century, and then only by dint of immigration from the surrounding countryside. Throughout England and France one in six babies did not live beyond their first birthday and some places were worse – in Breslau, for example, 42 per cent of children died before they were five.⁵⁰ Across the Atlantic, on the other hand, ‘among Negroes as among whites’, and from the north to the south, the population was thriving. The English colonies had comprised a quarter of a million souls in the early years of the eighteenth century. By the time agitation for independence began, that had increased to more than a million and a half. Immigration was only half the picture. In the first American census, compiled in 1790 (a decade ahead of the first British effort), they counted almost four million inhabitants, but statistically the population was very different from that in Europe. ‘Whereas the average marriage in London, Paris Amsterdam or Berlin produced four children, in America the number was closer to six and a half. In England there was one birth for every twenty-six inhabitants, in America one birth for every twenty inhabitants.’⁵¹ The figures for death were even more revealing: the average length of life in Europe in those days was thirty-two years, but in America it was forty-five.

In Jefferson himself America had a one-man riposte to Europe. Here, inside this one skin, was a soul who imported Palladio to Virginia, building at Monticello what Gary Wills calls the most beautiful building in America. Jefferson embraced the new economics of Adam Smith, experimented with grains and plants (agriculture, he said, was ‘a science of the very first order’) and, on top of his concern to forge a new country without the vices of the Old World, still found time to learn Greek and Latin.⁵² Jefferson led the way, intellectually at least, in his attempts to tame the wilderness. He carried out breeding experiments with cabbages and Jerusalem artichokes, with all kinds of nuts, with figs and rice, with mulberry trees and cork trees, and olive trees. ‘He sat up all night watching Lombards make cheese so he could introduce the process to America . . . and tried, in vain, to domesticate the nightingale.’⁵³ He made astronomical observations and was one of the first to see the advantages that might derive from digging a canal through Panama.⁵⁴

This sturdy, practical optimism of the early Americans succeeded far more often than it failed, to create a national mood and character and approach to life that exists to this day. There was only one area where the Americans were unsure of themselves: this was in their relations with the Indians. Buffon and some of the other French philosophes had (from 3,500 miles away) called the Indians degenerate. Try fighting him, Jefferson responded. ‘You will sing a different tune.’⁵⁵ He referred to the rhetoric and eloquence of Logan, chief of the Mingoes: this underlined that Indian minds, no less than their bodies, were as well adapted to their circumstances as were Europeans.⁵⁶ But, if Logan and his fellow Indians were blessed with all the qualities Jefferson said, if the Indian leader had all the qualities of Demosthenes and Cicero, as Jefferson also said, what right had white Americans to slaughter them in such numbers and appropriate their land?⁵⁷ American views veered inconsistently, from the early Spanish argument, that the Indian was not wholly human, incapable of responding to the faith, to the view of the philosophes, that he was primitive, to that of the romantics, that he was noble. In time, they settled to a more realistic view, as epitomised in the works of Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). But by then the damage had been done.

But it was in politics that the forceful genius of the early Americans was at its finest. Here too the comparisons with the Old World served to clarify what Americans were escaping from. For the most part, European political practices reflected a set of old ideas, now discredited.

England was as bad as anywhere, its political statistics shaming. Its population at the time was roughly nine million but of those barely 200,000 had the vote.⁵⁸ This minority, 2.2 per cent of the population, filled all the offices of government, army, navy, church, law courts and the colonial administration. Except in Scotland, only they were entitled to enter the universities, where all were expected to take ordination. It was little better elsewhere. This was the age of absolutism in many countries, where monarchies ruled without any requirement to consult parliaments or estates. In France, ruled by a king, commissions in the army were available only to those who could show four generations of noble forebears. In many areas of Europe, government offices were hereditary and in England seventy seats in parliament were returned from constituencies with no electors. ‘In Hungary the nobles had exclusive right to office, filled all the places in the Church, the Army and the Universities, and were exempt most taxes.’⁵⁹ In Germany the margrave of Ansbach shot one of his hunting party because the man had dared to contradict him and the Count of Nassau-Diegen likewise executed a peasant just to show he could get away with it.⁶⁰ In Venice, which had a population of some 150,000, only 1,200 nobles were entitled to attend the Great Council.⁶¹ In the Low Countries (which had loaned the new republic substantial sums), where there were a free press, free universities and a higher level of literacy, the gulf between rich and poor was not so glaring.⁶² ‘Even so, Amsterdam was still ruled by thirty-six men who inherited their offices and held them for life.’⁶³

Put like this (and I have depended heavily on Henry Steel Commager’s account of the early days of America), it is not hard to see why Franklin, Jefferson and their colleagues should wish to be different. At the same time, however, America offered some striking natural advantages. It was a land without a monarchy, there was no established church and the hierarchy that entailed. There was no empire, no established legal system, none of the pomp of tradition. Politics was the natural beneficiary of this.

The pristine nature of America ensured, for example, that democracy was established on the western shores of the Atlantic and – equally important – that it was similar from community to community. Town meetings and local courts emerged in much the same way across all fledgling states, and they moved toward male suffrage at much the same pace in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont and Georgia. ‘It was out of this world that Benjamin Franklin and Charles Thomson emerged in Pennsylvania, Samuel Adams and Joseph Hawley in Massachusetts, Alexander McDougall and Aaron Burr in New York, Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton in Virginia.’ In the Old World, as has often been observed, these men would have been excluded from politics. Moreover, the Franklins and the Pendletons were not separated from their constituents in a capital city or a distant court.⁶⁴

There were shortcomings. The early state constitutions all stipulated a religious qualification for voters. Pennsylvania, so liberal in other ways, and so oil-rich, had to begin with no religious restrictions, but then required all office-holders to be Protestants and to swear their belief in the divine inspiration of both the Old and the New Testaments.⁶⁵ On occasions, offices seemed to run in families (Connecticut, New York and the South) but they were a long way from the hereditary practices of Europe.

Early America at its best is shown by the Convention that drafted the federal constitution. This ‘assembly of demigods’ (the phrase is Jefferson’s) provided, for the first time in history, that all offices – all – would be open to each and every man. Even for the president himself – the New World equivalent of a monarch in Europe – there were only two requirements: he must be native born and thirty-five years old (the average life-span in Europe at the time, remember, was thirty-two). There were no religious requirements, another move unprecedented in modern history. ‘In America Plato was vindicated: for the first time in history philosophers were kings.’⁶⁶

The sheer speed with which these events unfolded was as important as their content and direction. The nations of Europe had taken generations – centuries – to evolve their different identities but in America, a new nation with a fully-fledged self-consciousness and a distinctive identity was fashioned in a single brilliant generation. In Thomas Paine’s words, ‘Our citizenship in the United States is our national character . . . Our great title is Americans.’

‘Not only was American nationalism achieved with a swiftness unprecedented in history, but what was achieved was a new kind of nationalism. It was not imposed by a conqueror or a monarch. It was not dependent on an established Church at whose altars all worshipped alike, or upon the power of a ruling class. It did not draw its strength from a traditional enemy. It came from the people; it was an act of will.’⁶⁷ Nor should we overlook the fact that, for many Americans, their nation was a repudiation – conscious or unconscious – of the worst features of the Old World. More than a few had been forced to flee and so their new nation was all the sweeter and all the more speedily and satisfactorily formed. People were free in ways almost unthinkable in the Old World, free to marry whoever they wanted, free to worship whichever God they wanted, free to work at whatever occupation they wanted, free to attend whichever college they wanted and, above all, free to say and think whatever they wanted. In this sense, the invention of America was a moral act.⁶⁸

This was all made easier by two factors. One was the presence of the Indian, the ‘cudgelled people’ in W. H. Auden’s phrase, which enabled the newcomers to unite against a common enemy, and to provide Americans with their own imaginative focus.⁶⁹ The second factor was that, for the first time, the religious dissenters and sectarians made up a majority. There were established churches in America – Congregational and Anglican for example – but the majority of people who had themselves been victims of religious bigotry had no wish to perpetuate the sin.⁷⁰

Finally, we must not overlook the revolution itself and the processes leading up to it, as a set of events instrumental in creating a sense of common destiny and of nationalism. Men from very different states fought side-by-side, with no mercenaries. Alongside their military successes, over a considerable Old World force, it provided them with a series of legends and heroes – Washington and Valley Forge, Nathan Hale and John Paul Jones – and it gave them the symbols of the new nation, the flag and the bald eagle.⁷¹ (Hugh Brogan says the flag is one of only two sacred things in the United States – the other is the White House.⁷²)

Something approaching a colonial government had been broached as early as 1754, in the Albany Plan of Union. In the 1760s the Stamp Act Congress brought together delegates from nine colonies, among whom were several who were to feature in the Revolution. Which meant that by the time of the First Continental Congress many of America’s leaders knew one another. This proved critical in helping form the union just six months before Yorktown. ‘Had there not been an effective union before this, there might never have been a Yorktown . . . To an extent unimaginable in the Old World, American nationalism was a creation of the people themselves: it was self-conscious and self-generating. Here it was the frontiersmen and the farmers, the fishermen and the woodsmen, the shopkeepers and apprentices, the small-town lawyers (there were no barristers), the village clergy (there were no bishops), the country schoolteachers (there were no dons) who provided the warp and woof for the fabric of nationalism.’⁷³ In 1782, M. G. Jean de Crèvecoeur, a naturalised Frenchman, decided that America had fashioned ‘a new race of men’, and came up with the image of a ‘melting pot’.⁷⁴

Lacking a monarch, a court, an established Church, and centuries of ‘tradition’, the Founding Fathers of the new republic, in their wisdom, turned to law. As Henry Steel Commager has observed, for forty years every president of the new nation, every vice-president and Secretary of State, with the exception of Washington himself, was a lawyer.⁷⁵

Lawyers had written the Declaration of Independence and it was mainly lawyers who drafted the constitutions of the states and of the new United States. One effect of this was to shape early American literature. In Revolutionary America there were no poets, dramatists or even novelists who could begin to compare with the political writings of Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Tom Paine or James Wilson. The new nation was politically minded and legally minded. ‘They did away with ecclesiastical law, administrative law and even chancery law, and limited the reach of common law – it all reeked of the Old World of privilege and corruption.’ It was this attitude that gave rise to the idea of judicial supremacy, and judicial review. It was this attitude that gave rise to the separation of powers. It gave rise to the law school and to the abolition of the distinction between barrister and solicitor.⁷⁶ There would be no America as we know it without the Puritan Revolution, the ideas of John Locke and Montesquieu and a knowledge of republican Rome, but Tom Paine (the ‘lethargic visionary’ in John Ferling’s words) was surely right when he observed that ‘the case and circumstance of America present themselves as in the beginning of a world . . . We are brought at once to the point of seeing government begin, as if we had lived at the beginning of time.’⁷⁷

‘Tradition’ has a fine ring to it, especially in the Old World. But another way of looking at it is as a principle by which the dead govern the living and this was not the American way. Early Americans wanted their new world to be open and malleable and so they wanted tradition in its place. That is why the Founding Fathers allowed for revision and amendment of the constitution.⁷⁸ In practice, this facility has been used conservatively.

Arguably the most brilliant, and at the same time the most fragile, part of the American politico-legal system was federalism. The creation of a genuine union out of thirteen states, each asserting its own independence and sovereignty, took some doing. Was the new United States a confederation or a nation? The issue would be tested more than once, most famously in the Civil War. James Madison, fourth president and as thorough as ever, prepared himself with a comprehensive study of other confederations, including the Italian, Hanseatic and Helvetic leagues, the confederation of the United Netherlands and the history of the Holy Roman Empire. All of them, he concluded, had suffered the same fatal defect: they were too weak to protect themselves against foreign aggression or internal dissension. For Madison and his colleagues, the central problem was always how they could create a federal government strong enough to defend itself against a foreign enemy and contain domestic dissension. At the same time the government must not be too strong to threaten the liberty of its citizens or the prosperity that derived from local government.⁷⁹

In the division of authority between the federal government and the states they managed just fine. Where they were less successful was in the measures they devised by which the central government could insist recalcitrant states abide by the terms of the division. The solution the Founding Fathers worked out, which was threatened by the Civil War but worked well enough at other times, was to vest all authority in the people of the United States. They, in their sovereign capacity, apportioned appropriate powers between the states and the nation. Conflicts between the two were to be resolved, not by force but by law.⁸⁰ And here a ‘nice’ distinction was to be made: ‘Force was not to be used against state or nation but only against individuals who violated the law.’⁸¹ This balance of power between the states and the nation was arguably the most brilliant element in the constitution, placing checks on government (at a time when absolutism was paramount in Europe). This was the concept of federal domination.⁸² But a second brilliant achievement, that ran the balance of powers close, was the Bill of Rights. There were precedents, of course, particularly in England: Magna Carta, as long ago as 1215, the Petition of Rights of 1628, the immortal Bill of Rights of 1689.⁸³ Massachusetts had introduced a ‘Body of Liberties’ in 1641, also inspired by Magna Carta, but the American Bill of Rights, attached to the Constitution, was of an altogether different order.⁸⁴ In England rights were never ‘inalienable’ and it was by no means unknown for either the Crown or Parliament to rescind them. And so here are the essential differences between Magna Carta and the American Bill of Rights. Magna Carta guaranteed due process of law, the proscription of cruel and unusual punishments, excessive fines or bail; later, a standing army was also proscribed without the consent of Parliament; interference in free elections was likewise outlawed, and Parliament’s control of the public purse was established. The American Constitution and its Bill of Rights guaranteed: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and of assembly, and many other freedoms. Five states forbade self-incrimination; six specifically asserted the supremacy of the civil over the military. North Carolina and Maryland prohibited the creation of monopolies, which were pronounced ‘odious and contrary to the spirit of free government’. Delaware abolished the slave trade, others soon followed and Vermont, newly opened up, abolished slavery altogether.⁸⁵ Jefferson had insisted on the phrase ‘pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration, and the sentiment embodied in these few words influenced American freedoms profoundly.⁸⁶

Watching these events from afar, the Reverend Dr Richard Price in London wrote that ‘The last step in human progress is to be made in America.’ He was almost right. But in fact it was to be France that benefited most immediately from the American genius. The Declaration of the Rights of Man of August 1789 was largely the work of Lafayette, Mirabeau and Jean Joseph Mounier, ‘but it derived philosophically from the American Bill of Rights’. (While he had been in Paris, Jefferson was constantly consulted in secrecy by Lafayette: the ‘pursuit of happiness’ became, in Lafayette’s French, la recherche du bien-être.)⁸⁷ In many ways the French Déclaration went a good deal further even than the American version. It abolished slavery, removed primogeniture and entail, eliminated honorary distinctions and the privileges of the clergy, and emancipated the Jews. It guaranteed the care of the poor and aged and education at public expense.⁸⁸

And it was a Frenchman who delivered the first, and what is still in some ways the most thoughtful and least partisan, verdict on this ‘last step in human progress’. Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris on 11 Thermidor in year XIII of the French revolutionary calendar, or 29 July 1805. The son of a Normandy count, he became a magistrate, with an abiding interest in prison reform, and looked forward to a career in politics. However, because of his father’s allegiance to the deposed Bourbon monarchy, Alexis found it expedient to travel to America with his friend and colleague Gustave de Beaumont. The ostensible reason for their visit was to study prison regimes in the New World but they travelled widely and on their return both wrote books about America.⁸⁹

They remained in the United States for a year and took in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Canada and Philadelphia. They travelled the frontier, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and back up through the South to Washington. They sampled all the different Americas and Americans. In Boston they stayed at the Tremont Hotel, the first large luxury hotel in the United States, where each room had a private parlour and each guest was provided with a pair of slippers while his boots were polished.⁹⁰ ‘Here luxury and refinement prevail,’ wrote Tocqueville. ‘Almost all the women here speak French well, and all the men we have seen so far have been to Europe.’⁹¹ It made a change, he said, from the ‘stinking’ arrogance of the Americans in New York, where they had stayed in a boarding house on ‘fashionable’ Broadway, and encountered ‘a certain crudeness of manners’, when people would spit during a conversation.⁹²

To begin with, and until they reached the frontier, they were disappointed by the lack of trees in America, and by the Indians, whom they found small, with thin arms and legs, ‘brutalised by our wines and liquors’.⁹³ They visited Sing Sing, a prison on the banks of the Hudson, met John Quincy Adams, Sam Houston (the founder of Texas, who brought his stallion aboard ship on the Mississippi), and were entertained by the American Philosophical Society (where Beaumont was bored).⁹⁴ As their journey progressed, although their creature comforts didn’t improve (one of the steamers they took on the Ohio river struck a reef and sank), Tocqueville’s admiration for America grew and on his return to France he resolved to write a book about the most important feature which he felt distinguished America: democracy. His book appeared in two editions, the first in 1835, which concentrated on politics, and a second, in 1840, which added his thoughts and observations on what we would call the sociological effects of democracy. The latter was darker than the former, as Tocqueville addressed what he felt was the main problem with democracy – the danger that it would make men’s minds mediocre and in that way damage their ultimate freedom.

But in almost all other ways he was full of admiration for the democratic spirit and structure of America. Americans formed a society, he found, in which classes were much less distinct than in Europe and where even the ordinary sales clerk did not have the ‘bad form’ of the lower classes in France. ‘This is a commercial people,’ his colleague Beaumont wrote at one point. ‘The entire society seems to have melted into a middle class.’⁹⁵ Both men were impressed by the advanced position of women, the hard work, the general good morals, and the absence of military force. They were further impressed by the sturdy individualism of the small landowners, whom they saw as the most typical Americans.⁹⁶ ‘The Americans are no more virtuous than other people,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘but are infinitely more enlightened (I’m speaking of the great mass) than any other people I know . . .’⁹⁷ In the Democracy, Tocqueville made much of the stability of the American system (though he drew attention to the danger of rising expectations), which he contrasted with France and, to an extent, Britain (which he had also visited).⁹⁸ He put this down to ordinary Americans being more involved than their European counterparts in (a) political society, (b) civil society and (c) religious society, and to the fact that America operated in ways which were almost the direct opposite of those in Europe: ‘The local community was organised before the county, the county before the state, and the state before the union.’⁹⁹ Tocqueville greatly admired the role of the courts in America, where they took precedence over the politicians, and the fact that the press, though no less ‘violent’ than the French press, was left alone: no one even thought of censoring what was said.

He was not blind to the problems of America. He thought the issue of race was insoluble. In the ancient world, slavery had been about conquest but in America, he saw, it was about race and he thought there was no way out. He concluded that democracies tended to elect mediocre leaders, which would in time hinder progress, and he thought majorities too intolerant of minorities. He gave as examples the fact that laws against bankruptcy weren’t passed in America because too many thought themselves liable, and it was the same with liquor, though the link between alcohol consumption and crime was even then self-evident.¹⁰⁰

In the realm of pure ideas, he felt that democracies would make more progress in practical than in theoretical sciences, he was impressed by the architecture of Washington, particularly its grandeur in a city that was, after all, ‘no bigger than Pontoise’. He expected poetry to blossom in America because ‘there was much nature’. He found families more intimate and more independent-minded than in Europe, and was heartily in favour of the trend whereby marriage was based more on love and affection than on economic or dynastic considerations.¹⁰¹

Despite his caveats, Tocqueville’s admiration for America and its obsession with equality (part of the French revolutionary trinity) shone through his text and, when it was published, his book was well received. In France it won the Montyon Prize, worth 12,000 francs, and in Britain J. S. Mill described Tocqueville’s book as ‘the first great work of political philosophy devoted to modern democracy’.¹⁰² Since then, other books have tried to emulate Tocqueville’s but his has become a kind of classic. In a sense, of course, such books, though fascinating, are irrelevant. The most infallible verdict on America was the vast number of immigrants who left Europe, and then other countries across the world, to find freedom and prosperity in the United States. They are still voting with their feet.