“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world...In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.“ – The Declaration of Independence
As I have indicated at length in Chapters III and IV, the conviction on the part of the Revolutionary leaders that they were faced with a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the balance of the constitution and eliminate their freedom had deep and widespread roots — roots elaborately embedded in Anglo-American political culture. How far back in time one may trace these roots it is difficult to say, but I have attempted at least to illustrate in the pages above, and to show in considerable detail elsewhere, that the configuration of attitudes and ideas that would constitute the Revolutionary ideology was present a half-century before there was an actual Revolution, and that among the dominant elements in this pattern were the fear of corruption — of its anticonstitutional destructiveness — and of the menace of a ministerial conspiracy.
1 At the very first signs of conflict between the colonies and the administration in the early 1760’s the question of motivation was openly broached and the imputation of secret purposes discussed. Early in the controversy anti-administration leaders like Oxenbridge Thacher could only “suppose” for the sake of discussion “that no design is formed to enslave them,” while pro-administration partisans, like Martin Howard, Jr., were forced to refute the charge of design.
2 To be sure, the conviction that the colonies, and England itself, were faced with a deliberate, anti-libertarian design grew most quickly where the polarization of politics was most extreme and where radical leaders were least inhibited in expressing and reinforcing general apprehensions. But in some degree it was present everywhere; it was almost universally shared by sympathizers of the American cause. The views of John Dickinson are particularly interesting, not merely because, though the most cautious and reluctant of Revolutionary leaders, he so forcefully conveyed the idea of conspiracy, but because he understood so well the psychological and political effects of thinking in precisely these conspiratorial terms. Reviewing the crisis of Charles I’s reign, he pointed out that acts that might by themselves have been upon many considerations excused or extenuated derived a contagious malignancy and odium from other acts with which they were connected. They were not regarded according to the simple force of each but as parts of a system of oppression. Every one, therefore, however small in itself, became alarming as an additional evidence of tyrannical designs. It was in vain for prudent and moderate men to insist that there was no necessity to abolish royalty. Nothing less than the utter destruction of the monarchy could satisfy those who had suffered and thought they had reason to believe they always should suffer under it. The consequences of these mutual distrusts are well known.
3 The explosion of long-smoldering fears of ministerial conspiracy was by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. It was experienced in England too, in a variety of ways, by a wide range of the English political public. Under George III, George Rudé has pointed out, it was widely believed … that the influence of the Crown was being used to staff the administration with new Favourites and “King’s Friends,” who formed a secret Closet party, beyond the control of Parliament and guided behind the scenes by the sinister combination of the Earl of Bute (who had resigned office in 1763) and the Princess Dowager of Wales. Opponents of the new system talked darkly of a repetition of “the end of Charles II’s reign” — and such talk was not confined to the circles of the Duke of Newcastle and others, who might be inclined to identify the eclipse of their own public authority with that of the national interest. Such expressions, Rudé concludes, “were common currency and abound throughout this period both in the press, in Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), in personal correspondence, pamphlet literature and speeches in Parliament.”4 Burke’s Thoughts is particularly relevant to the American situation, for the apprehension that dominates that piece is in essence interchangeable with that of innumerable Revolutionary writers. Its argument that Parliament was on the brink of falling “under the control of an unscrupulous gang of would-be despots” who would destroy the constitution “was sufficiently widely believed,” Ian Christie has written, “to give momentum in due course to a radical movement in the metropolis.”5 The specific identification in Thoughts of the conspiratorial cabal at work was distinctively Burke’s, but those who most vehemently disagreed with him about the source and nature of the conspiracy were no less convinced that a conspiratorial cabal of some sort was in fact at work. Catharine Macaulay, speaking for the extreme radicals, found it in the “maneuvers of aristocratic faction and party” of which Burke and the Rockinghams were themselves the inheritors and which was based on “a system of corruption [that] began at the very period of the [Glorious] Revolution and … was the policy of every succeeding administration.” Horace Walpole too felt that Burke had not gone back far enough: “The canker had begun in the administration of the Pelhams,” in the effort of the clique around the Princess Dowager “to inspire arbitrary principles into her son [the future George III] and to instruct him how to establish a despotism that may end in tyranny in his descendants.”6 For Horace Walpole, therefore, the immediate villain was Bute, who had arrived on the scene, Walpole wrote, with the triple disability of being “unknown, ungracious, and a Scot”; his influence, it was believed, continued through the sixties unabated, and by the early 1770’s “Lord North had flung himself into the hands of Lord Bute’s junto.” In believing this, Walpole was scarcely alone. The conviction that Bute’s secret influence lay behind the troubles of the time was widespread in opposition circles in England as it was in America. Seven years after Bute left office, Chatham delivered a speech in the Lords against “the secret influence of an invisible power — of a favorite, whose pernicious counsels had occasioned all the present unhappiness and disturbances in the nation, and who, notwithstanding he was abroad, was at this moment as potent as ever.” Rockingham, who was convinced that Bute’s secret influence had destroyed his administration in 1765–66, wrote in 1767 that his party’s “fundamental principle” was to resist and restrain “the power and influence of Lord Bute.” More ordinary opinion was reflected by the printer and publicist William Strahan, who in fact thought well of Bute but who agreed that his secret influence remained paramount long after his resignation from office. Strahan’s colleague in the press, John Almon, not only blamed the evils of the time on Bute but believed that the Rockinghams were secretly cooperating with him. Indeed, the image of Bute as a malevolent and well-nigh indestructible machinator was almost universal among the opposition. Propagated endlessly in pamphlets and newssheets of all sorts, caricatured in a torrent of lurid cartoons depicting “‘the thane’ as the lover of the Princess Dowager of Wales … and thus the bestower of posts and pensions to hordes of hungry barbarous Scots to the exclusion of the English,” the idea of Bute as the central plotter became one of the keystones in the structure of opposition ideology, and it contributed forcefully to the belief, in England as well as in America, that an active conspiracy against the constitution was underway.[7] Not everyone, of course, even within opposition circles, agreed that there was a deliberate design to overthrow the balance of the constitution; fewer still agreed with the republican radicals that the Coercive Acts were intended to “enslave America; and the same minister who means to enslave them would, if he had an opportunity, enslave England.” Yet Lord Dartmouth felt it necessary to refute that charge specifically, and while it is true, as Christie has explained, that “abundant evidence now available about the activities of court and government enables historians to dismiss this fear as a chimera,” it is nevertheless also true that there was a “contemporary belief in such a threat,” a belief that was associated with the American crisis and that proved to be “a powerful stimulus to demands for reform” in English domestic affairs. “The sophisticated members of political society rightly dismissed as rubbish the misconceived but genuine radical fear, that the triumph of British arms and authority in America would be followed by the extinction of British liberties at home,” but the fear remained, widespread enough, powerful enough, to force disbelievers to acknowledge it and to confront it. Thus the cool, well-informed, and hard-headed Dr. John Fothergill, the secret negotiator between Franklin and Dartmouth in the winter of 1774–75, felt it necessary to explain that he did “not quite” credit the ministry with “endeavoring to enslave [the colonists] by system. I believe they are very happy if they can find expedients for the present moment.” So too Strahan wrote rather desperately to his American correspondent that “I know the good disposition of the ministry towards you … I know there is no disposition, either in the King, the ministry, or the Parliament, to oppress America in any shape.”[8]
That this was the issue, for thoughtful and informed people, on which decisions of loyalty to the government turned is nowhere so clearly and sensitively revealed as in the record Peter Van Schaack left of his tormented meditations of January, 1776. A wellborn, scholarly, and articulate New Yorker of 29 who prepared himself for deciding the question of his personal loyalty by undertaking in seclusion a critical examination of the works of Locke, Vattel, Montesquieu, Grotius, Beccaria, and Pufendorf, he noted first his fear of the destructive consequences of conceding Parliament’s right to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. That danger, he wrote, was perfectly clear. “But my difficulty arises from this,” he said: that taking the whole of the acts complained of together, they do not, I think, manifest a system of slavery, but may fairly be imputed to human frailty and the difficulty of the subject. Most of them seem to have sprung out of particular occasions, and are unconnected with each other … In short, I think those acts may have been passed without a preconcerted plan of enslaving us, and it appears to me that the more favorable construction ought ever to be put on the conduct of our rulers. I cannot therefore think the government dissolved; and as long as the society lasts, the power that every individual gave the society when he entered into it, can never revert to the individual again but will always remain in the community.* [footnote:]* Locke.[9] All of this, however, forms but one side of the role of conspiratorial thinking in the advent of the Revolution. There is an obverse to this that is of great importance, though, since in the end it was not in itself determinative of events, it has of necessity been neglected in the chapter above. The opponents of the Revolution — the administration itself — were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspiratorial designs. Officials in the colonies, and their superiors in England, were persuaded as the crisis deepened that they were confronted by an active conspiracy of intriguing men whose professions masked their true intentions. As early as 1760 Governor Bernard of Massachusetts had concluded that a “faction” had organized a conspiracy against the customs administration, and by the end of the decade he and others in similar positions (including that “arch-conspirator” Thomas Hutchinson) had little doubt that at the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority and force a rupture between England and her colonies.[10] The charge was quickly echoed in England. The Massachusetts Convention of 1768 elicited from the House of Lords resolutions based on the belief that “wicked and designing men” in the colonies were “evidently manifesting a design … to set up a new and unconstitutional authority independent of the crown of England.”[11] Such dangerous charges, tantamount to treason but objectively indistinguishable from faction — which was itself, in eighteenth-century terms, merely the superlative form of party[12] — had been a source of concern in the colonies since the start of the controversy. Under Grenville, Arthur Lee wrote, “every expression of discontent … was imputed to a desire in those colonies to dissolve all connection with Britain; every tumult here was inflamed into rebellion.” The fear that colonial leaders nursed secret ambitions that they masked, with greater or lesser success, by continuing professions of loyalty grew as the crisis deepened. If in 1771 Hutchinson, an equal with his arch-enemies the Adamses in detecting secret purposes behind open professions, could report with relief that “the faction in this province against the government is dying,” he still felt it necessary to add “but it dies hard.”
After the Tea Party such cautious optimism faded, and officials confirmed once and for all their belief that malevolent factions were implacably at work seeking to satisfy hidden ambitions and to destroy the ties to England.[13] Such charges were commonly heard: among crown officials, at every level; but also in other circles — among Tories, such as those in inland Worcester, Massachusetts, who defied the majority, and the leadership, of the Town Meeting, and published a denunciation of “the artful, crafty, and insidious practices of some evil-minded and ill-disposed persons who … intend to reduce all things to a state of tumult, discord, and confusion.” The committees of correspondence, they declared, had been the illegal creations of “a junto to serve particular designs and purposes of their own … tending directly to sedition, civil war, and rebellion.”[14] Such denunciations of the work of seditious factions seeking private aims masked by professions of loyalty, which abound in the writings of officials and of die-hard Tories, reach the extreme of vilification in Chief Justice Peter Oliver’s scurrilous Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion and attain the ultimate in respectability in George III’s statement to Parliament of October 26, 1775 — a statement that may be taken as the precise obverse of Jefferson’s claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that there was a “design to reduce [the colonies] under absolute despotism.” The authors and promoters of this desperate conspiracy [George III informed Parliament] have in the conduct of it derived great advantage from the difference of our intentions and theirs. They meant only to amuse, by vague expressions of attachment to the parent state and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me, whilst they were preparing for a general revolt … The rebellious war now levied is … manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire. This charge, emanating from the highest source, could not be left unanswered, and there lies in the records of the Continental Congress an elaborate refutation of the King’s accusation — an essay, remarkably verbose and rhetorical, crowded with exclamations and gesticulations yet full of subtle perceptions, that fills no less than thirteen pages in the printed Journals of the Congress. Cast in the form of an “Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies,” it was written by a committee headed by John Dickinson and James Wilson, and though it was tabled by the Congress because it seemed unduly apologetic and defensive at the time (February 1776) and, in Madison’s phrase, was “evidently short of the subsisting maturity” of opinion then in favor of independence, it nevertheless remains a most revealing exposition of the intellectual, political, and psychological dilemmas created by an escalating mutuality of conspiratorial fears. The Crown’s representation of the actions of the Congress as those of “a seditious and unwarrantable combination,” Wilson and Dickinson wrote, is malicious and false.
We are, we presume, the first rebels and conspirators who commenced their conspiracy and rebellion with a system of conduct immediately and directly frustrating every aim which ambition or rapaciousness could propose. Those whose fortunes are desperate may upon slighted evidence be charged with desperate designs. But how improbable is it that the colonists who have been happy and have known their happiness in the quiet possession of their liberties; who see no situation more to be desired than that in which, till lately, they have been placed; and whose warmest wish is to be reinstalled in the enjoyment of that freedom which they claim and are entitled to as men and as British subjects — how improbable is it that such would, without any motives that could tempt even the most profligate minds to crimes, plunge themselves headlong into all the guilt and danger and distress with which those that endeavor to overturn the constitution of their country are always surrounded and frequently overwhelmed? … Whoever gives impartial attention to the facts we have already stated and to the observations we have already made must be fully convinced that all the steps which have been taken by us in this unfortunate struggle can be accounted for as rationally and as satisfactorily by supposing that the defense and re-establishment of their rights were the objects which the colonists and their representatives had in view as by supposing that an independent empire was their aim. Nay, we may safely go farther and affirm, without the most distant apprehension of being refuted, that many of those steps can be accounted for rationally and satisfactorily only upon the former supposition and cannot be accounted for, in that manner, upon the latter … Cannot our whole conduct be reconciled to principles and views of self-defense? Whence then the uncandid imputation of aiming at an independent empire? Is no regard to be had to the professions and protestations made by us, on so many different occasions, of attachment to Great Britain, of allegiance to His Majesty, and of submission to his government upon the terms on which the constitution points it out as a duty and on which alone a British sovereign has a right to demand it? … But the nature of this connection, and the principles on which it was originally formed and on which alone it can be maintained seem unhappily to have been misunderstood or disregarded by those who laid and conducted the late destructive plan of colony-administration. Their conclusion was resigned: “Let neither our enemies nor our friends make improper inferences from the solicitude which we have discovered to remove the imputation of aiming to establish an independent empire. Though an independent empire is not our wish, it may — let your oppressors attend — it may be the fate of our countrymen and ourselves.”[15] By then, in February of 1776, the lines of political division had long since hardened; troops were engaged in hostilities. Yet the accusations of malign purpose continued, culminating on the American side in the enumeration of conspiratorial efforts that forms the substance of the Declaration of Independence, and on the English side in a group of publications refuting those charges. The most interesting, if not the ablest, of these replies is by the ubiquitous Thomas Hutchinson, an exile in England since 1774, and, though consulted by the ministry and honored by Oxford University, still desperately eager to convince the world that his original suspicions had been correct. His Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia was his penultimate effort (his History would be the last) to prove that “if no taxes or duties had been laid upon the colonies, other pretenses would have been found for exception to the authority of Parliament.” For the colonies, he explained, had been “easy and quiet” before the famous controversies started; “but there were men in each of the principal colonies who had independence in view before any of those taxes were laid or proposed … Their design of independence began soon after the reduction of Canada.” Failing to attain their goals by arguments from the natural rights of mankind, they found “some grievances, real or imaginary, were therefore necessary.” These they produced simply by seeing to it “that every fresh incident which could be made to serve the purpose … should be improved accordingly.” Professions of loyalty and concessions were “only intended to amuse the authority in England.” No indulgence short of independence could ever have satisfied them, “for this was the object from the beginning.” The chiefs of the rebellion in each colony found grounds “to irritate and enflame the minds of the people and dispose them to revolt”; and so it was that “many thousands of people who were before good and loyal subjects have been deluded and by degrees induced to rebel.” The design, Hutchinson concluded, after answering one by one every charge in the Declaration, “has too well succeeded.”[16]
The accusations of conspiratorial designs did not cease with the pamphlet series touched off by the Declaration, nor even with the American successes in battle. They merely shifted their forms, and began a process of adaptation that has allowed them to survive into our own time. Just as radical pamphleteers in England, patriot historians in America, and such Whig leaders as the younger Pitt continued after the war to blame the Revolution on the deliberate malevolence of the administrations of the 1760’s and 1770’s, so loyalists like Galloway and Thomas Jones continued to “expose” the Americans’ conspiracy; continued to argue that no error had been committed by the government of George III in not conceding more to America since the colonists had been secretly determined from the start to cast off their dependence upon England; continued too to link the rebels with opposition factions in England; and began, in the nadir of military defeat, darkly to suggest that the strangely defeated commander in chief, Sir William Howe, was himself not above suspicion of secret collaboration with the faction that had carried out so successfully the long-planned design of independence.[17] These wartime and postwar accusations were both an end and a beginning — an end of the main phase of the ideological Revolution and the beginning of its transmutation into historiography. Charges of conspiratorial design settled easily into a structure of historical interpretation, on the one hand by Hutchinson, in the manuscript third volume of his History of … Massachusetts-Bay (published 1828); by Peter Oliver, in his frenzied Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion (1781, published 1961); by Thomas Jones, in his History of New York during the Revolutionary War (1780–1790, published 1879); by Jonathan Boucher, in the book-length Introduction of his View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution Revolution (1797); — and on the other hand by Mercy Otis Warren, in her three-volume History of the … American Revolution (1805); by David Ramsay, in his History of the American Revolution (1789); and by patriot historians of individual states: Belknap, Burk, Trumbull, Ramsay. These are the histories of participants, or near-participants: heroic histories, highly personified and highly moral, in which the conspiratorial arguments propounded during the Revolution are the essential stuff of explanation. These views, caricatured and mythologized in such immortal potboilers as Weems’ Washington, survived almost unaltered through the next generation — survived, indeed, through the next two generations — to enter in a new guise into the assumptions of twentieth-century scholarship. The “progressive” designs as what by then had come to be known as propaganda. They implied when they did not state explicitly that these extravagant, seemingly paranoiac fears were deliberately devised for the purpose of controlling the minds of a presumably passive populace in order to accomplish predetermined ends — Independence and in many cases personal advancement — that were not openly professed. No Tory or administration apologist during the Revolution itself ever assumed more casually than did such distinguished modern scholars as Philip Davidson and John C. Miller that the fears expressed by the Revolutionary leadership were factitious instruments deliberately devised to manipulate an otherwise inert public opinion. Conversely, nowhere in the patriot literature of the Revolution proper is there a more elaborate effort to prove that there was in actuality a ministerial conspiracy — a plot of King’s friends aimed at victimizing the colonists — that made by Oliver Dickerson in his Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (1951).[18] But the eighteenth century was an age of ideology; the beliefs and fears expressed on one side of the Revolutionary controversy were as sincere as those expressed on the other. The result, anticipated by Burke as early as 1769, was an “escalation” of distrust toward a disastrous deadlock: “The Americans,” Burke said, “have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them: we have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion against us … we know not how to advance; they know not how to retreat … Some party must give way.”[19]
But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. — John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 1818
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution -- Harvard University Press.
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In the last few decades a cabal has grown up in the United States of left-wing ideologues who argue that ‘Conspiracy Theories’ are fostered by extreme right-wing movements in the United States. Philosopher Sir Karl Popper popularized the expression 'conspiracy theory’ in the 1950s.
Popper criticized what he termed the "conspiracy theory of society," the view that powerful people or groups, godlike in their efficacy, are responsible for purposely bringing about all the ills of society. This view cannot be right, Popper argued, because "nothing ever comes off exactly as intended." According to philosopher David Coady, "Popper has often been cited by critics of conspiracy theories, and his views on the topic continue to constitute an orthodoxy in some circles." However, philosopher Charles Pigden has pointed out that Popper's argument only applies to a very extreme kind of conspiracy theory, not to conspiracy theories generally.
John Foster "Chip" Berlet is an American investigative journalist, research analyst, and activist specializing in the study of extreme right-wing movements in the United States. He also studies the spread of conspiracy theories.
A short list of present day anti-conspicists includes: Clare Birchall, Peter Knight, Quassim Cassam, Annabel Bligh, Karen Douglas, Aleksandra Cichocka, Annika Rabo, Jovan Byford, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule.
“The idea behind conspiracy theories can be summarized as follows: Nothing is what it seems, and there is a master plan behind all major events in world history (Butter 2018; Barkun 2013). Conspiracy thinking underlies entertaining conspiracy theories, or at least, it is a disposition to holding conspiracy theories to be true.”--Philipp Hübl
What everyone of these so-called scholars seem utterly ignorant of is the fact that the founding fathers of the United States were themselves conspiracy theorists, as defined by these people. This is proven by Bernard Bailyn in the opening pages of this essay.
“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” — John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 1818
IT WAS an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere. In the light of such a conception conception everything about the colonies and their controversy with the mother country took on a new appearance. Provincialism was gone: Americans stood side by side with the heroes of historic battles for freedom and with the few remaining champions of liberty in the present. What were once felt to be defects — isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weakness in the authority of the state — could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal, and hope wherever they might be — in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes. The mere existence of the colonists suddenly became philosophy teaching by example. Their manners, their morals, their way of life, their physical, social, and political condition were seen to vindicate eternal truths and to demonstrate, as ideas and words never could, the virtues of the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers.
But the colonists’ ideas and words counted too, and not merely because they repeated as ideology the familiar utopian phrases of the Enlightenment and of English libertarianism. What they were saying by 1776 was familiar in a general way to reformers and illuminati everywhere in the Western world; yet it was different. Words and concepts had been reshaped in the colonists’ minds in the course of a decade of pounding controversy — strangely reshaped, turned in unfamiliar directions, toward conclusions they could not themselves clearly perceive. They found a new world of political thought as they struggled to work out the implications of their beliefs in the years before Independence. It was a world not easily possessed; often they withdrew in some confusion to more familiar ground. But they touched its boundaries, and, at certain points, probed its interior. Others, later — writing and revising the first state constitutions, drafting and ratifying the federal constitution, and debating in detail, exhaustively, the merits of these efforts — would resume the search for resolutions of the problems the colonists had broached before 1776. This critical probing of traditional concepts — part of the colonists’ effort to express reality as they knew it and to shape it to ideal ends — became the basis for all further discussions of enlightened reform, in Europe as well as in America. The radicalism the Americans conveyed to the world in 1776 was a transformed as well as a transforming force.
REPRESENTATION AND CONSENT
The question of representation was the first serious intellectual problem to come between England and the colonies, and while it was not the most important issue involved in the Anglo-American controversy (the whole matter of taxation and representation was “a mere incident,” Professor McIlwain has observed, in a much more basic constitutional struggle1), it received the earliest and most exhaustive examination and underwent a most revealing transformation. This shift in conception took place rapidly; it began and for all practical purposes concluded in the two years of the Stamp Act controversy. But the intellectual position worked out by the Americans in that brief span of time had deep historical roots; it crystallized, in effect, three generations of political experience. The ideas the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that had long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics. What had taken place in the earlier years of colonial history was the partial re-creation, as a matter of fact and not of theory, of a kind of representation that had flourished in medieval England but that had faded and been superseded by another during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In its original, medieval, form elective representation to Parliament had been a device by which “local men, locally minded, whose business began and ended with the interests of the constituency,” were enabled, as attorneys for their electors, to seek redress from the royal court of Parliament, in return for which they were expected to commit their constituents to grants of financial aid. Attendance at Parliament of representatives of the commons was for the most part an obligation unwillingly performed, and local communities bound their representatives to local interests in every way possible: by requiring local residency or the ownership of local property as a qualification for election, by closely controlling the payment of wages for official services performed, by instructing representatives minutely as to their powers and the limits of permissible concessions, and by making them strictly accountable for all actions taken in the name of the constituents. As a result, representatives of the commons in the medieval Parliaments did not speak for that estate in general or for any other body or group larger than the specific one that had elected them.2
Changing circumstances, however, had drastically altered this form and practice of representation. By the time the institutions of government were taking firm shape in the American colonies, Parliament in England had been transformed. The restrictions that had been placed upon representatives of the commons to make them attorneys of their constituencies fell away; members came to sit “not merely as parochial representatives, but as delegates of all the commons of the land.” Symbolically incorporating the state, Parliament in effect had become the nation for purposes of government, and its members virtually if not actually, symbolically if not by sealed orders, spoke for all as well as for the group that had chosen them. They stood for the interest of the realm; for Parliament, in the words by which Edmund Burke immortalized this whole concept of representation, was not “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole, where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.” “Instructions, therefore,” Speaker Onslow said, “from particular constituents to their own Members are or can be only of information, advice, and recommendation … but not absolutely binding upon votes and actings and conscience in Parliament.” The restrictions once placed upon representatives to make them attorneys of their constituencies fell away.3 But the colonists, reproducing English institutions in miniature, had been led by force of circumstance to move in the opposite direction. Starting with seventeenth-century assumptions, out of necessity they drifted backward, as it were, toward the medieval forms of attorneyship in representation. Their surroundings had recreated to a significant extent the conditions that had shaped the earlier experiences of the English people. The colonial towns and counties, like their medieval counterparts, were largely autonomous, and they stood to lose more than they were likely to gain from a loose acquiescence in the action of central government. More often than not they felt themselves to be the benefactors rather than the beneficiaries of central government, provincial or imperial; and when they sought favors from higher authorities they sought local and particular — in effect private — favors. Having little reason to identify their interests with those of the central government, they sought to keep the voices of local interests clear and distinct; and where it seemed necessary, they moved — though with little sense of innovating or taking actions of broad significance, and nowhere comprehensively or systematically — to bind representatives to local interests. The Massachusetts town meetings began the practice of voting instructions to their deputies to the General Court in the first years of settlement, and they continued to do so whenever it seemed useful throughout the subsequent century and a half. Elsewhere, with variations, it was the same; and elsewhere, as in Massachusetts, it became customary to require representatives to be residents of, as well as property owners in, the localities that elected them, and to check upon their actions as delegates. With the result that disgruntled contemporaries felt justified in condemning Assemblies composed “of plain, illiterate husbandmen, whose views seldom extended farther than to the regulation of highways, the destruction of wolves, wildcats, and foxes, and the advancement of the other little interests of the particular counties which they were chosen to represent.”4
All of this, together with the associated experience common to all of the colonies of selecting and controlling agents to speak for them in England,5 formed the background for the discussion of the first great issue of the Anglo-American controversy. For the principal English argument put forward in defense of Parliament’s right to pass laws taxing the colonies was that the colonists, like the “nine tenths of the people of Britain” who do not choose representatives to Parliament, were in fact represented there. The power of actually voting for representatives, it was claimed, was an accidental and not a necessary attribute of representation, “for the right of election is annexed to certain species of property, to peculiar franchises, and to inhabitancy in certain places.” In what really counted there was no difference between those who happened to live in England and those in America: “none are actually, all are virtually represented in Parliament,” for, the argument concluded, every Member of Parliament sits in the House not as representative of his own constituents but as one of that august assembly by which all the commons of Great Britain are represented. Their rights and their interests, however his own borough may be affected by general dispositions, ought to be the great objects of his attention and the only rules for his conduct, and to sacrifice these to a partial advantage in favor of the place where he was chosen would be a departure from his duty.6 In England the practice of “virtual” representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection. It was its opposite, the idea of representation as attorneyship, that was seen as “a new sort of political doctrine strenuously enforced by modern malcontents.” But in the colonies the situation was reversed. There, where political experience had led to a different expectation of the process of every Member of Parliament sits in the House not as representative of his own constituents but as one of that august assembly by which all the commons of Great Britain are represented. Their rights and their interests, however his own borough may be affected by general dispositions, ought to be the great objects of his attention and the only rules for his conduct, and to sacrifice these to a partial advantage in favor of the place where he was chosen would be a departure from his duty.6 In England the practice of “virtual” representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection. It was its opposite, the idea of representation as attorneyship, that was seen as “a new sort of political doctrine strenuously enforced by modern malcontents.” But in the colonies the situation was reversed. There, where political experience had led to a different expectation of the process of representation and where the workings of virtual representation in the case at hand were seen to be damaging, the English argument was met at once with flat and universal rejection, ultimately with derision. It consists, Daniel Dulany wrote in a comprehensive refutation of the idea, “of facts not true and of conclusions inadmissible.” What counts, he said in terms with which almost every writer in America agreed, was the extent to which representation worked to protect the interests of the people against the encroachments of government. From this point of view the analogy between the nonelectors in England and those in America was utterly specious, for the interests of Englishmen who did not vote for members of Parliament were intimately bound up with those who did and with those chosen to sit as representatives. The interests of all three, “the nonelectors, the electors, and the representatives, are individually the same, to say nothing of the connection among the neighbors, friends, and relations. The security of the nonelectors against oppression is that their oppression will fall also upon the electors and the representatives. The one can’t be injured and the other indemnified.” But no such “intimate and inseparable relation” existed between the electors of Great Britain and the inhabitants of the colonies. The two groups were by no means involved in the same consequences of taxation: “not a single actual elector in England might be immediately affected by a taxation in America imposed by a statute which would have a general operation and effect upon the properties of the inhabitants of the colonies.”7
Once a lack of natural identity of interests between representatives and the populace was conceded, the idea of virtual representation lost any force it might have had; for by such a notion, James Otis wrote, you could “as well prove that the British House of Commons in fact represent all the people of the globe as those in America.” The idea, in such situations, was “futile” and “absurd” “absurd” — the work of a “political visionary.” It was a notion, Arthur Lee wrote, with supporting quotations from Bolingbroke, Locke, Sidney, Camden, Pulteney, Petyt, Sir Joseph Jekyll, and assorted Parliamentary speakers, that “would, in the days of superstition, have been called witchcraft,” for what it means is that while “our privileges are all virtual, our sufferings are real … We might have flattered ourselves that a virtual obedience would have exactly corresponded with a virtual representation, but it is the ineffable wisdom of Mr. Grenville to reconcile what, to our feeble comprehensions, appeared to be contradictions, and therefore a real obedience is required to this virtual power.” Who, precisely, is the American freeman’s virtual representative in England? Does he know us? Or we him? No. Have we any restriction over his conduct? No. Is he bound in duty and interest to preserve our liberty and property? No. Is he acquainted with our circumstances, situation, situation, wants, &c.? No. What then are we to expect from him? Nothing but taxes without end.8
But it was not merely the American situation that called into question the idea of virtual representation. Logically one could lead the argument further and say that the whole conception, wherever or however it might be applied, was defective. If it was wrong in America it was wrong in England too, and should be rooted out no less thoroughly in the one place than in the other. “To what purpose,” James Otis asked in a celebrated passage, “is it to ring everlasting changes to the colonists on the cases of Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield, who return no members? If those now so considerable places are not represented, they ought to be.” For, as John Joachim Zubly, the Swiss-born pastor of Savannah, Georgia, wrote in an almost verbatim denial of what Burke five years later would describe as the proper function of representatives, every representative in Parliament is not a representative for the whole nation, but only for the particular place for which he hath been chosen. If any are chosen for a plurality of places, they can make their election only for one of them … no member can represent any but those by whom he hath been elected; if not elected, he cannot represent them, and of course not consent to anything in their behalf … representation arises entirely from the free election of the people. So widely believed, indeed, — such a simple matter of fact — was it that “‘virtual representation’” anywhere, under any conditions, was “too ridiculous to be regarded,” that the American Tories gladly used it as a basis of protest against the assumed representativeness of the makeshift Provincial and Continental Congresses. For it was not much of an exaggeration of Otis’ earlier arguments to claim in New York in 1775 that by the patriots’ reasoning “every man, woman, boy, girl, child, infant, cow, horse, hog, dog, and cat who now live, or ever did live, or ever shall live in this province are fully, freely, and sufficiently represented in this present glorious and august Provincial Congress.”9
But the colonists’ discussion of representation did not stop with the refutation of the claims made for virtual representation. The debate broadened into a general consideration of the nature and function of representation — in situations where interests of electors and elected, franchised and disfranchised, coincided as well as where they did not. The virtues of binding representatives by instructions were now explicitly explored. Some approached the question cautiously, arguing that, though the idea “that the constituent can bind his representative by instructions” may in recent years have become “an unfashionable doctrine,” nevertheless, “in most cases” the “persuasive influence” if not the “obligatory force” of instructions should be insisted upon: “a representative who should act against the explicit recommendation of his constituents would most deservedly forfeit their regard and all pretension to their future confidence.” But the dominant voices were direct and decisive. The right to instruct representatives, Arthur Lee declared in the fourth of his “Monitor” papers, has been denied only “since the system of corruption which is now arrived to so dangerous a heighth began first to predominate in our constitution. Then it was that arbitrary ministers and their prostituted dependents began to maintain this doctrine dangerous to our liberty, that the representatives were independent of the people. This was necessary to serve their own tyrannical and selfish purposes.” Elected representatives, he stated, “are trustees for their constituents to transact for them the business of government … and for this service they, like all other agents, were paid by their constituents, till they found it more advantageous to sell their voices in Parliament, and then … wished to become independent of the people.” Defended, he wrote, by all the great authorities from Demosthenes to Coke, its denial condemned by Sir William Wyndham as “the most monstrous, the most slavish doctrine that was ever heard,” the right of freemen not merely to choose representatives but to bind them with instructions “must have begun with the constitution,” and was “an ancient and unalienable right in the people.” The fact that “Mr. Blackstone, in his commentary on the law of England, has asserted the contrary” carried no weight with him. It was enough to point out that Blackstone “founds his opinion on that fiction of a person’s being, after he is elected, the representative of the whole kingdom, and not of a particular part. The sophistry of this argument is sufficiently manifest, and has been fully exploded. The British constitution is not to be new modelled by every court lawyer. [footnote:] Mr. Blackstone is solicitor to the Queen.” Constituents, it was agreed, had nothing less than “an inherent right to give instructions to their representatives.” For representatives, James Wilson concluded, were properly to be considered the “creatures” of their constituents, and they were to be held strictly “accountable for the use of that power which is delegated unto them.”10 But what did that mean? There were far-reaching implications, some of which, first drawn out during this decade of debate, would remain persistent problems until finally resolved in the realization of American democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was seen, even in the 1760’s and 1770’s, that if a representative were kept to strict accountability, he would in effect be acting “in every respect as the persons who appointed him … would do were they present themselves.” With the result, it was concluded, that a representative assembly “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” If the population shifted in composition, so too should the character of the assembly, for “equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it.” There might well be, in fact, “some permanent ratio by which the representatives should … increase or decrease with the number of inhabitants.”11
The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection. — Benjamin Rush, 1787
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (p. 230). Harvard University Press.
Northwest Ordinance
The Northwest Ordinance, officially titled “An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North West of the River Ohio,” was adopted by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787. Also known as the Ordinance of 1787, the Northwest Ordinance established a government for the Northwest Territory, outlined the process for admitting a new state to the Union, and guaranteed that newly created states would be equal to the original thirteen states. Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, the Northwest Ordinance also protected civil liberties and outlawed slavery in the new territories.
Whatever veneration might be entertained for the body of men who formed our Constitution, the sense of that body could never be regarded as the oracular guide in expounding the Constitution. As the instrument came from them it was nothing more than a draft of a plan, nothing but a dead letter, until life and validity were breathed into it by the voice of the people, speaking through the several State Conventions. If we were to look, therefore, for the meaning of the instrument beyond the face of the instrument, we must look for it, not in the General Convention, which proposed, but in the State Conventions, which accepted and ratified the Constitution. — James Madison, 1796
THE AMERICAN Constitution is the final and climactic expression of the ideology of the American Revolution. As such, in the two centuries of its existence, it has become the subject of more elaborate and detailed scrutiny and commentary than has been given to any document except the Bible. No one has mastered all the useful writings on the Constitution; no one ever will. There is too much; there is movement in too many directions at once; too many disparate issues are alive and flourishing quite independently of each other. Yet there will never be enough. The subject matters too much — matters in the sense of shaping the way we live, what we may do, and how the government may act. We must get the two-hundred-year-old story straight, in some way, in order to make sense of our own world. The Constitution, in all its aspects and ramifications, is profoundly relevant. But it is more than that. The writing and ratifying of the Constitution, and the original debate over its meaning, are, quite simply, fascinating. The issues are subtle, the details are often puzzling and intriguing, the movement of events complex. And the actors are remarkable. On one side, Madison, Wilson, Ellsworth, Hamilton, Jay, Iredell, the Morrises, Sherman; on the other, the junta of immensely articulate Pennsylvania antifederalists and their counterparts north and south — Melancton Smith, Luther Martin, James Winthrop, George Mason, Patrick Henry, Elbridge Gerry — the list of truly interesting actors in this drama seems endless. Part of the fascination comes from seeing these minds at work, formulating and reformulating, shifting, dodging, lunging. There can be no ordinary historical characterization of the complicated interplay between the maturing of Revolutionary ideas and ideals and the involvements of everyday life, which is the essence of the history of the Constitution period. Perhaps the most subtle and penetrating depiction depiction of the inner character of the drafting of, and the original debate on, the Constitution is not a historical discourse but a poem, a short poem, by Richard Wilbur. It is called “Mind.”
Mind in its purest play is like some bat That beats about in caverns all alone, Contriving by a kind of senseless wit Not to conclude against a wall of stone. It has no need to falter or explore; Darkly it knows what obstacles are there, And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar In perfect courses through the blackest air. And has this simile a like perfection? The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save That in the very happiest intellection A graceful error may correct the cave.
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https://youtu.be/Btlrty43ZL8?t=8 – The Rise of America's Secret Government: Allen Dulles and the CIA (2015)
Talbot's book The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government is a biography examining the career of Allen Dulles. Listen to the book for free: https://amzn.to/3hkruiv
According to Talbot, Dulles orchestrated the assassination of Kennedy at the behest of corporate leaders who perceived the President to be a threat to national security, lobbied Lyndon B. Johnson to have himself appointed to the Warren Commission, then arranged to have Lee Harvey Oswald take sole responsibility for the act. The book charges that the conspirators in JFK's death also murdered Bobby Kennedy as they perceived him to be "a wild card, an uncontrollable threat" that would reveal the plot. The book has stirred debate about the history of the CIA. In a review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Glenn C. Altschuler stated, "Talbot’s indictment is long, varied and sensational." Altschuler wrote: "Animated by conspiracy theories, the speculations and accusations in his book often run far ahead of the evidence, even for those of us inclined to believe the worst about Allen Dulles." But the book was praised elsewhere, including Kirkus Reviews, whose starred review, called it "a frightening biography of power, manipulation and outright treason. [...] all engaged American citizens should read this book and have their eyes opened."
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https://youtu.be/T8iVbF9y2dw?t=11
Skull and Bones, the CIA, Ivy League and Initiation Rituals: The Power of the Secret Society (2002)
https://youtu.be/TnrnAmz7mLQ?t=12 – "He belonged to the same secret society as his dad": George W. Bush & the Bush Family Dynasty (1999)
See: Antony Sutton - America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of SKULL & BONES
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, She was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930 and died on February 8, 2022. She attended Dana Hall preparatory school and Katharine Gibbs College in New York City, where she studied business. Iserbyt's father and grandfather were Yale University graduates and members of the Skull and Bones secret society.
She sent Antony Sutton a box full of her father and grandfathers memorabilia, which had details of the secret society that had never been known to the public. Sutton was busy writing a book when he received the materials and didn't open it until months later. Upon discovering the contents Sutton knew that this material was going to be the basis of his next book.