Ch 30 Liberalism and the Challenge to Absolute Monarchy

 AMONG THE MOST IMPORTANT long-term consequences of the Scientific Revolution

and the subsequent Enlightenment was the set of beliefs called liberalism.

 It took especially strong root in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where it was also fostered
by the events of 1688 and the writings of John Locke (see Chapter 23).

 Th e political revolutions in America and France were different in course and outcome,
but they were linked by a common origin in the belief in the inherent freedom and moral
equality of men.

 Th is belief was at the heart of liberal politics and economics and could not be
reconciled with the existing state of aff airs in either the American colonies or France in
the late eighteenth century.

 In this chapter, we will look at the linkage of liberal thought with the particular problems
of the American colonies; in the following chapter, at the troubles in France.

 In America, the more radical colonists’ discontent with their status grew to the point of
rebellion in the 1770s.

 Th e term rebellion is usually associated with starving workers or exploited peasants.

 On the contrary in this case, however, a prosperous middle class led the American
Revolution—people who had nothing against their government except that final
authority was located in London and not directly responsible to them.

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 The Liberal Creed

 Where did the liberal creed begin, and what were its essentials? Liberalism was born in
the form identifi ed by the modern world in the late eighteenth century.

 But its roots go back much further, to the Protestant Reformation and the seventeenth-
century political philosophers in England.

 Th e basic principles of liberalism are a commitment to (1) the liberty of the individual in
religion and person and (2) the equality of individuals in the eyes of God and the laws.

 Eighteenth-century liberals were children of the Enlightenment and thus especially

noticeable in France and England (much less so in central, southern, and eastern
Europe, where that movement had taken only superficial root).

 Th ey believed in the necessity of equality before the law and freedom of movement,
conscience, assembly, and the press.

 Th ey considered censorship both ineffective and repressive, and they despised the
inborn privileges accorded to the aristocracy.

 Th ey thought that a state religion was almost inevitably corrupt and that individuals
should have the power to choose in which fashion they would serve and obey their
God.

 Liberals originally did not believe in equality for all in political or social matters, but only
in restricted legal and economic senses.

 Th ey subscribed to what we would now call “the level playing field” theory—that is, that
all people should have the opportunity to prove themselves in the competition for
wealth and the prestige that comes with it.

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 Those who were weaker or less talented should be allowed to fail, as this was nature’s
way of allowing the best to show what they had to off er and keeping them on top.

 Th e liberals of the eighteenth century reflected the general optimism of the

Enlightenment about human nature.

 Like most of the philosophes, the liberals believed that the good would inevitably
triumph and that humans would recognize evil in whatever disguises it might assume
for the short term.

 Th ey believed that rational progress was possible and, in the long run, certain.

 Th ey believed that education was the best cure for most of society’s problems.

 Th e enthusiasm for education carried over to a fascination with new technology that
could demonstrate the innate mastery of men over nature.

 In matters of government, they sympathized with John Locke and Baron Montesquieu.

 These men thought that the powers of government must be both spread among various
organs and restricted by a checks-and-balances system in which the legislative,
judicial, and executive powers were held by separate hands.

 Liberals believed that representative government operating through a property-based

franchise was the most workable and most just system.

 Th ey rejected aristocracy (even though there were many liberal nobles) as being
outmoded, a government by the few for the few.

 But they mistrusted total democracy, which they thought would lead to rule by the
“mob”—those who were uneducated, bereft of any property, and easily misled.

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 They were willing to have a monarchy, so long as the monarch’s powers were checked
by a constitution of laws, by a free parliament, and by free and secure judges.

 In the liberal view, the legislature should be the most powerful branch of government.

 It should be elected by and from the “solid citizens”—that is, from among the liberal
sympathizers: educated and well-off landowners, professionals, merchants, and the
lower ranks of the nobles.

 They all believed that in structure, if not in practice, the government of eighteenth-
century England should be the model for the world.

 They admired its segregation of parliamentary and royal powers, with Parliament
holding the whip hand in matters of domestic policies.

 They thought England after the Glorious Revolution had achieved a happy blend of
individual freedoms within proper limits, allowing the responsible and forward-looking
elements to retain political and social dominance.

The American Revolutionary War

 In this context, it was natural that the British American colonies were strongholds of
liberal thought and sympathy.

 Men like George Washington, Th omas Jeff erson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin,
and many others were ardent supporters of the liberal view.

 They had pored over Locke and Montesquieu and digested their ideas.

 Th ey had much less fear of popular democracy than they did of the home country,
because the masses of desperate poor who might threaten the continued leadership of
the middle- and upper-class liberals in Europe were not present in America.

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 In fact, the three-million-or-so free colonists were probably the materially best-off large
group of individuals in the world.

 Th e American Revolutionary War began with a routine dispute between the British
government and its subjects over taxation.

 Fighting the war of the Austrian Succession (Queen Anne’s War) and the Seven Years’
War (French and Indian War), which lasted from 1754 to 1763 in North America, had
cost the British government a considerable sum, while the American colonists had
contributed little to meet those expenses.

 Th e necessity of maintaining a much-larger standing army to garrison Canada and the

new American frontiers meant that London would be faced with a budgetary drain for
the foreseeable future.

 Therefore, Parliament imposed a series of new taxes on the colonists, most notably the
Stamp Act of 1765, which created such a furor that it was quickly repealed.

 Th e Navigation Acts, demanding the use of British ships in commerce between the
colonies and other areas, which had been loosely enforced until now, were tightened
and applied more rigidly.

 These British demands fell on colonists who in the Hanoverian Dynasty era had
become thoroughly accustomed to running their own households.

 The American colonies had the highest per-capita income in the Western world in 1775,
and they paid among the lowest taxes.

 They were the great success story of European settlement colonies, and they had
achieved this condition without much guidance or interference from the London
government.

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 The colonists were used to a high degree of democratic government in local and
provincial affairs.

 Many now felt that the ministers of King George III were unduly pushing them about,
and they resolved to let their feelings be known.

 The focal point of discontent was in the Massachusetts Bay colony, where maritime
commerce was most developed.

 The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was a dramatic rejection of the right of the Crown to
change the terms of colonial trade in favor of British merchants.

 When the London government replied to the defi ant and illegal acts of the Bostonians
by sending troops and closing the crucially important Boston harbor, the clash came
much closer.

 One act led to another as the stakes were raised on both sides.

 Finally, in April 1775, the “shots heard ’round the world” were fi red by the Minutemen in
Lexington, and the War for Independence—the first full-blown revolt by a European
colony against its home country—was on.

 What did the rebellious colonists want? At the outset, the moderate faction in the
Continental Congress—which the rebels summoned to provide political leadership—
was in control.

 Th ey demanded “no taxation without representation” and other, relatively mild slogans
upholding the alleged rights of Englishmen after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

 But by 1776, after blood had fl owed, a more uncompromising group, led by Patrick
Henry and Jeff erson, assumed the leadership role.

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 Th is group wanted nothing less than independence from Britain, and in the Declaration
of Independence, Jeff erson wrote their program and battle cry (see the Law and
Government box for excerpts from this work as well as a comparable French
declaration).
 The great popularity of the radical pamphlet Common Sense by the newly arrived
Thomas Paine showed how inflamed some tempers had become.

 Not all colonists agreed.

 Besides the very hesitant moderates, many people in all of the colonies remained true
to the Crown, and these Loyalists were later either maltreated by their fellow Americans
or chose to emigrate at war’s end.

 Th e conflict was as much a civil war as a rebellion.

 Even families were split.

 Washington’s troops froze during the savage winter at Valley Forge, while in nearby
Philadelphia most of the populace enjoyed their comforts under British occupation and
protection.

 The military outcome was eventually dictated by three factors favoring the rebels: (1)
the logistic eff ort needed to transport and supply a large army overseas; (2) the aid
provided to the rebels by the French fl eet and French money; and (3) the only-
halfhearted support given to the Crown’s eff orts by the sharply split Parliament in
London.

 Under the Alliance of 1778, the French supplied the Americans with much material aid,
contributed some manpower, and, above all, prevented the British navy from controlling
the coasts.

 By 1779, after the critical defeat at Saratoga, it was clear that the second-rate British
commanders had no plans worth mentioning and could not put aside their mutual
jealousies to join forces against Washington.

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 Even if they had, the many Londoners who sympathized with the Americans, both in
and out of Parliament, would negate any full-fl edged war eff ort.

 The defeat of General Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 spelled the end of armed
hostilities, and the Peace of Paris officially ended the war in 1783.

Results of the American Revolution in European Opinion

 What exactly was the American Revolution? We are accustomed to thinking of a
revolution as necessarily involving an abrupt change in the economic and social
structures, but this was not the case in the new United States.

 Th e existing political, economic, and social circumstances of the citizenry, whether

white or black, were scarcely changed by independence.

 Th e War for Independence had been won, but this was not at all the same as a
revolution.

 Th e real American Revolution was slower to manifest itself and did so only by degrees
after 1783.

 Th e Paris treaty recognized the thirteen former colonies as a sovereign nation, equal
to any other.

 All of the territory west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi was open to the new
nation (see Map 30.1).

 For the first time, a major state (Switzerland preceded the United States but did not
qualify as a major state) would have a republican form of government—that is, one that
had no monarch and in which sovereignty rested ultimately in the people at large.

 A representative body that was responsible to the citizenry through the electoral
process would exercise lawmaking power.

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 Most of the (white male) citizens would be entitled to vote and to hold office.

 They would enjoy freedom of religion, be fully equal before the law, and have no
economic restrictions imposed on them by birth, residence, or circumstance.

 Th e establishment of that form of government and those freedoms was the American
Revolution—not the forcible severance of ties with London, however remarkable that
had been.

 A few years after independence, the ex-colonists acknowledged the severe

shortcomings of the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which had been their first try at
bonding the states together.

 They set about creating a workable, permanent system of government.

 Th e outcome of the eff ort, the U.S.

 Constitution of 1789, is now one of the oldest constitutions in the world.

 Men raised in the liberal traditions of the eighteenth century drafted this document.

 Th e framers of the Constitution under which Americans still live were conservatives in
their approach to social institutions but liberals in their approach to individual freedom.

 They wished to create a system that would allow free play to individual talent and
ambition and protect individual rights, while still asserting the primacy of the state.

 They believed in freedom of opportunity, while rejecting political and social equality.

 They believed in equality before the law and in conscience, but, like Locke, they
believed in the sacred rights of property and hence left slavery untouched.

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 More than the successful war, the Constitution strongly influenced educated European
opinion.

 Against many expectations, it demonstrated that a large number of men could create a
moderate system of self-government with elected representatives and without an
aristocracy or a monarch at its head.

 Many European liberals had informed themselves in detail about the United States.

 Some of them even came to fi ght in the rebellion (French Marquis de Lafayette, Poles
Kazimierz Pulaski and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and German Baron von Steuben, among
many others).

 They were an eff ective propaganda apparatus, and they were seconded by the equally
effective work of Americans such as Franklin, Jeff erson, and the Adamses, who
resided for a time in Europe as officials of the new country.

 On the continent, the American innovations received the most attention in France.

 Th e rebellion had many friends in enlightened society, including some in the royal
government who welcomed this weakening of the British winner of the Seven Years’
War.

 Many French officers had been in America and had contact with the leading American
figures.

 Th e drawing rooms of the Parisian elite were fi lled with talk about America.

 Some of it was negative: Th e crude Americans would soon see that government must
be either by the king and his responsible offi cials or by the mob; no third way was
possible, given human nature.

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 But much of the talk was enthusiastically favorable.

 More and more people of high social standing were convinced that the present French
monarchic system was in terrible need of reform, and they looked to some aspects of
the American experiment for models of what they wished to introduce at home.

 Like the Enlightenment, the liberal frame of reference in Western politics was to
contribute mightily in a few more years to a movement for reform that would go much
further than originally intended.

SUMMARY
 LIBERAL POLITICS WAS THE PRODUCT of beliefs dating to the Protestant
Reformation and the seventeenth-century English Revolution against absolutism.

 Its fundamental principles asserted the equality and liberty of individuals in both the
moral and the legal sense.

 Liberals believed that all were entitled to the opportunity to prove their merits in
economic competition, but they generally rejected social and political equality as
impractical for the foreseeable future.

 Th e British colonies in America were strongholds of liberalism, and those convictions

led directly to the rebellion against British rule in 1775.

 Th anks in part to French military and fi nancial aid and the lukewarm support of the
war eff ort by Parliament, the rebellion was successful: Th e American republic was
born—the first large-scale experiment in liberal politics.

 Although the War for Independence was won, the true American Revolution took longer
to develop.

 Its paramount expression came in the Constitution of 1789, which made a deep
impression on educated Europeans, particularly the French adherents of reform.

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