Founding Visions

The Ideas, Individuals, and Intersections that Created America

Lance Banning, Todd Estes

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813152868
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia americana temprana

Lance Banning was one of the most distinguished historians of his generation. His first book, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology, was a groundbreaking study of the ideas and principles that influenced political conflict in the early American Republic. His revisionist masterpiece, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic, received the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Banning was assembling this collection of his best and most representative writings on the Founding era when his untimely death stalled the project just short of its completion. Now, thanks to the efforts of editor Todd Estes, this illuminating resource is finally available. Founding Visions showcases the work of a historian who shaped the intellectual debates of his time. Featuring a foreword by Gordon S. Wood, the volume presents Banning's most seminal and insightful essays to a new generation of students, scholars, and general readers.

PART 1

The Enduring Issues of the American Revolution, 1776–1815

At its core, expressed in the broadest terms, most of Lance Banning’s scholarship in one way or another addresses the challenges that the American Revolution created but did not resolve. From his work on the Jeffersonians and their creation of a party ideology based on adaptations of Revolutionary principles, to his studies of James Madison’s efforts to create and implement a Constitution capable of fulfilling the promise of the Revolution by dealing with some of its perceived excesses, to his other more focused examinations of related historical problems, Banning’s work revolves around this theme. At the heart of many of those issues is the problem of power—how to distribute it, how to divide it, how to restrain it, but also how to enable its use for pursuing good ends.

“The Problem of Power” appeared in a 1987 collection of essays on the American Revolution edited by Jack P. Greene. The entire essay is a model of succinct writing. The first paragraph may be as elegant and eloquent as any Banning ever penned. While his prose was graceful and unlabored, it also was never fussy or impenetrable, even when dealing with complex material. All those traits are displayed here. Note how easily yet effectively he summarizes complex bodies of political thought (Locke, Sidney) and historiographical treatments (Bailyn, Weston, Colbourn). The ability to simplify complex ideas without dumbing them down or losing sophistication was one of his hallmarks as a writer. Likewise, note how well he frames the discussion of the problem of power for American Revolutionaries not in abstract theoretical terms but in a grounded historical consideration, revealing not only what early Americans thought but what they did, and focusing always on the intersections between theory and practice.

Power proved among the most difficult matters faced by early national Americans, Banning demonstrates, because it was embedded in so many issues. If the American Revolution was fueled by a rejection of the abuses of power that the colonists blamed on Great Britain, how could Americans establish new governments of their own that placed power in safe hands so as to prevent such abuses in the future? As Banning shows, the Revolutionaries overcorrected for the problem, forgetting that power was not always abused, that it was in fact essential to good government, and that it was often necessary for reaching productive ends. The Constitution, written and ratified in 1787–1788, was the Revolutionary generation’s great contribution to political theory. It divided power in various ways, simultaneously creating safeguards while also enabling active, energetic government. But the Constitution did not resolve the problem of power. Implementing the new system proved complex and difficult, spawning numerous controversies on Constitutional interpretation and ultimately giving rise to political parties (a development wholly unanticipated by the Founders) and the contentious battles spawned in the 1790s and beyond. In each period Banning traces the particular historical problems concerning the use of power, locates their evolution and development across time, shows how some matters produced shared agreement while other sparked endless disputes, and suggests that many of the thorniest issues the founding generation grappled with have persisted through all of U.S. history right down to the present.

This essay demonstrates Banning’s skill as a historian in maintaining analytical and narrative command of the material and also exemplifies his ability to synthesize without losing particularity. It also shows, in short, his ability to take large issues and vast bodies of historical knowledge and render them not only comprehendible but also revelatory of larger patterns and themes both in history and in the historical literature. For all those reasons, “The Problem of Power” serves as an accessible yet sophisticated general introduction to this collection of Banning’s work, as it displays so many of his trademark qualities as a writer and historian.

The Problem of Power

Parties, Aristocracy, and Democracy in Revolutionary Thought

Power is a hand that can caress as well as crush, provide as well as punish. It cannot say yes to some without denying others. It may lack capacity to nourish if it cannot also grip. Properly directed, nonetheless, the might of a community, concentrated in its government, can increase the happiness and nurture the prosperity of the society it shields. If it were otherwise—if the fist could not be opened, if everyone possessed the same ideas and interests, or if the revolutionary generation had not expected government to promote the general welfare as well as to protect the citizenry from lawlessness within and dangers from without—power might have proved a less persistent problem than it did.

Power puzzled revolutionary leaders longer and more deeply than older histories suggested because the revolutionaries did not consistently conceive of government as no more than a necessary evil, which should be limited to the protection of the individual in his pursuit of private goods. Nor did they always think of their society in terms of the relationships between an aggregate of solitary social atoms.¹ Living in an age of commerce, the revolutionary generation wanted benefits, not just protection, from their governments. Heirs to neo-classical and civic-humanist political ideas, as well as to the English libertarian tradition, they were accustomed to regarding man both as an individual involved in a relationship with other individuals and as a member of persistent social groups. In consequence, although the Revolution started with a fear of unresponsive central power, it produced a general government whose reach and grasp were more impressive than the claims that generated the American rebellion, and it involved the revolutionaries in a lifelong argument not only over ways in which great power might be rendered safe, but also over ways in which it could be shared and exercised so as to take advantage of its positive potential. Recent histories have focused scholarly attention on dimensions of the revolutionaries’ thinking that were long neglected. A better understanding of the sources of their thought has thrown new light on how it changed and made it possible to see the federal Constitution as an incident in an extended effort to resolve a set of problems that the Founders redefined, but neither solved nor ceased debating.²

From this new perspective, it is helpful to approach the Revolution as a moment in our past when circumstances forced the nation’s leaders to consider fundamentals. The moment was a long one. Historians today seem more and more inclined to think of this consideration of the fundamentals as a process that began as early as 1763 and may have reached a partial resolution only after the conclusion of the War of 1812.³ The circumstances were the sort that pressed the revolutionaries to probe continuously deeper into all the basic concepts: virtue and self-interest; the many and the few; parties and the public good; liberty and power. The institution of our present federal government came roughly halfway through the course of this collective effort. The writing and approval of the Constitution ultimately altered nearly all the terms of the continuing debate, but it did not do so at once, nor did it solve all of the problems that the argument involved.

In 1763, most articulate American colonials identified themselves as English and shared with other Englishmen a reasonably coherent way of thinking about political society and power. Government, they thought, originated in the consent of the society it served and exercised a legitimate authority only when it faithfully protected the indefeasible rights of those it sheltered. But as power naturally inclined to turn against the liberties it was intended to defend and individuals were equal only in their right to hold their lives and property secure, the most effective way to guarantee that all would be protected and that government would stay within its proper bounds was to divide the sovereign authority (or legislative power) among three different branches, each representing different segments of society and all combining to provide the three essential characteristics that just, enduring governments require.⁴ On both sides of the ocean, the history of seventeenth-century England was remembered as the story of the nation’s struggle to confine the government within due limits and to forge effective links between the exercise of power and society’s consent.⁵ On both sides, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Englishmen complacently and boastfully agreed that their complicated government of king-in-parliament had solved this problem in a manner that was properly the envy of the enlightened world.⁶ With power shared among the Crown, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, every major segment of society possessed sufficient power to protect its vital interests, and the state reflected all the finest qualities of every simpler form of government without the risks and limitations which simpler governments entailed: the unity and vigor of a monarch; the wisdom commonly associated with a leisured, well-born few; and the responsiveness to common good that flows from the participation of the body of the people.⁷

Coherent as it seemed, eighteenth-century thinking was in fact a very complicated blend of elements that did not blend as smoothly as contemporaries thought. When British thinkers asked about the origins and limits of governmental power, their reasoning began with individuals. In the manner of John Locke, they emphasized a natural equality of rights, the limitations of legitimate authority, and the logical necessity that any aggregate of equals must be guided by the largest number.⁸ When they thought about good government, by contrast, eighteenth-century Englishmen and their colonial cousins concerned themselves primarily with the relationships between two fundamentally unequal social groups: the many, and the few who are distinguishable from the majority by their greater leisure, better birth, and superior possessions.⁹ This second line of reasoning, which may be traced back through the Renaissance to ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, was more preoccupied with the achievement of a stable mixture of the virtues of two social groups than with the rights of individuals. Where Locke assumed a sharp distinction between society and government, the neo-classical tradition was inclined to merge the two, conceiving of society as embodied in the different parts of government and worrying less frequently about the limits of governmental power than about the maintenance of its internal equilibrium.

Logically, these different modes of thought involved some rather contradictory assumptions and suggested inconsistent attitudes toward power. Historically, they had converged so neatly during the seventeenth-century struggle to confine the Stuart kings that eighteenth-century Englishmen were seldom conscious of the tensions.¹⁰ Men had sometimes to be thought of in their individual capacities and sometimes as constituents of persistent and potentially conflicting groups. Regarded either way, their liberties seemed safest when power was divided among the few, the many, and the one. The governmental equilibrium that guaranteed security for every segment of society seemed simultaneously to shield the individual from grasping power. This seemed more certainly the case because the course of English history suggested that dangers to the governmental balance and the liberties of subjects both ordinarily issued from the usurpations of the one (or the executive) and because habitual association of liberty with property encouraged an assumption that the whole political society was present in the Lords and Commons, which confined the Crown and linked the exercise of power with consent.¹¹

For colonials, however, the crisis in imperial relations which ground its way inexorably toward independence in the decade after 1765, severely shook this integrated way of thinking. The Revolution pitted its constituent ideas against each other, wrenched them into different shapes, and forced the altered elements into a new configuration. Half a century later, power was a different sort of problem. If this was less apparent to contemporaries than it seems to us, that was in part because Americans still feared the possibility of its abuse and still expressed this fear in eighteenth-century language, condemning “aristocracy” and “influence” and the like, employing terms that were increasingly ill-suited to contemporary practices and needs. But the persistence of such terms was also a reflection of the fact that older structures of ideas had not abruptly crumbled. While the Revolution and the Constitution rapidly produced a new consensus about the character and limits of legitimate authority, the problem of good government was not so readily resolved; newer worries over parties and the public good could not be easily disjoined from more traditional concerns about relationships between the many and the few. Aristocracy, democracy, and parties troubled revolutionary leaders in succession. Successive grapplings with these problems significantly reshaped the country’s thought and institutions, but the hardest questions raised by the determination of the Founders to secure a government at once responsible and wise were not so much resolved as thoroughly rephrased.

Crisis came upon the empire in the aftermath of Britain’s brilliant victory in the last and largest of four eighteenth-century wars with France. Struggling with a swollen national debt, obliged to govern conquered Canada, and conscious of a gathering concern with the irrationality and looseness of imperial relations, the ministry began to tighten its control and initiated parliamentary legislation intended to require the older colonies to pay a portion of the costs of their administration and defense. The colonies rebelled, proclaiming that it was the right of English peoples to be taxed only by their own elected representatives and that it was the custom of the British empire to confide internal regulation of the colonies’ affairs to their provincial governments, in all of which the people’s representative assemblies had come to hold the largest share of power. So serious and uniform was the colonial resistance that the Stamp Act had to be repealed. Yet Parliament insisted on its sovereign right to legislate in every case for all the British peoples, and the need for a colonial revenue remained. Different taxes followed. More colonial resistance ensued. In 1774, the spiral of resistance and reaction culminated in the punitive Coercive Acts, the meeting of a Continental Congress, and the ministry’s decision to resort to force.

Independence, in a sense, resulted from the empire’s inability to reach agreement on the character and limits of legitimate authority. Not directly represented in the British Parliament (and aware from the beginning that even the admission of a few colonial representatives would not make Parliament responsive to colonial desires), Americans repeatedly attempted in the decade after 1765 to pressure and persuade the English to accept new definitions of the limits of its power. Early in the crisis, it was not unreasonable for them to think they could succeed. From their perspective, Parliament’s attempt to levy taxes obviously threatened not only the accepted right of Englishmen to hold their property secure, but all of the traditional (or “constitutional”) arrangements linking power with consent. The House of Commons, they conceded, guarded liberty “at home.” Parliament was rightfully the ultimate authority within the empire. But Parliament’s encroachment on the local legislatures’ customary right to hold the purse strings challenged the assemblies’ very place within the governmental structure, disputing their control of just the power that the Commons had itself employed to win a vital and continuous role within the central government. Colonials expected Englishmen to recognize that they were asking only for security against the claims of arbitrary, irresponsive power, which was no more than Englishmen demanded for themselves. The arguments they wielded were grounded firmly in the English libertarian tradition. The limits they insisted on were moderate at first: Parliament should leave taxation in the hands of the colonials’ own representatives, which would continue to protect their other rights; the central government should check its growing inclination to intrude on the provincial governments’ conventional or “constitutional” autonomy in local matters.¹²

These arguments, of course, did not persuade the English. Parliament would not agree that its authority was constitutionally limited by the traditional prerogatives of the colonial assemblies. The ministry decided to respond to extra-legal pressure with coercion, and coercion drove the Continental Congress to deny that the colonials were obligated to submit to any legislation to which they had not assented. From this point, the path ran straight to arms and independence. And when Americans had reached its end, they found themselves committed to a revolution. Although a decade’s argument had not convinced the English, it had radically transformed their own ideas.

It did so in two ways. First, the lengthy effort to define the “constitutional” extent of parliamentary control resulted in a powerful new emphasis upon an active and continuous relationship between legitimate authority and popular approval, as well as on a newly literal insistence on inherent, equal rights, which governments could challenge only at their peril.¹³ In their attempt to bind a distant, unresponsive central government, colonials recurred repeatedly to Locke and other theorists who traced the purposes and limits of political authority to pre-governmental compacts. Thousands of colonials became accustomed to assuming that, as individuals were the parties to these compacts, every individual (or, as the eighteenth century conceived it, each responsible, white male) is equally entitled to protection and personally entitled to an active voice in political decisions. Although some English writers tried to argue that colonials were “virtually” represented in the House of Commons, along with other Englishmen who lacked the right to vote, the confrontation with an uncontrollable imperial authority hammered home the lesson that power-wielders will respond primarily to those to whom they owe their places and with whom they share a fundamental unity of interests. In the colonies, where unprecedented numbers had the right to vote, the governmental officers and branches most immediately dependent on the people were valiant in the defense of liberty, while the appointive branches often lagged behind. Meanwhile, the distant House of Commons, which rested on a more restricted franchise, seemed ever more apparently a feeble guardian of liberty, or even part of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1. The Enduring Issues of the American Revolution, 1776–1815
• Part 2. Republicanism, Liberalism, and the Great Transition
• Part 3. The Constitution
• Part 4. James Madison
• Part 5. The First Party Conflict
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Bibliography of Published Works by Lance Banning
• Copyrights and Permissions
• Index