Finding the Founding (Part VIII): You Think Our Divisions Are Recent?

           In the 1940s, and more urgently in the 1960s (thanks to Castro), Costa Rica embarked on a series of agrarian reform measures, similar in spirit to those of the Gracchi, but without the grizzly murders of top political officials (see Finding the Founding VII). While these reforms did not create a paradise – 20% of Costa Ricans live in poverty while the USA stands at 16% – the country is the most stable (the only stable?) country in Central America. Costa Rica became better because the lives of more of its population had access to the means for wealth, ok, maybe not wealth the way we normally use the word, but at least the means to not living a life controlled by the 1%. The 1% still owns a sizeable portion of the land, but not all of it. There is a direct correlation between stability, democratic access and the realization of rights in countries, nations and republics where people have access to a material life where they can sustain themselves and not live cap in hand to the ruling class.  The Gracchi knew it, Costa Rica knows it and supposedly the founding ideology, according to the most influential historians of the American Revolution, like Gordon Wood, and Bernard Bailyn, was based on moving money (wealth) to support a middle class through taxation on wealth.

The Jesus Tree in Costa Rica: A place so miraculous 

that a tree grows out of the Pacific Ocean!

            Power in too few hands, means impoverishment in too many hands. Hah, the Founders knew that too much support to the “Job Creator” class creates a society of owners and peasants – or at least the historians of the ideology of the Revolution would have us believe that they, the Founders, believed that. But in looking for the Founding it is quite apparent that this was not the universal ideology of the Revolution.

            Colonial settlement patterns, which we hinted at in previous posts, suggests that a uniformity in ideology among the colonies would be highly unlikely. In fact at the dawn of independence, unity between the colonies, as we understand it, was not desired whatsoever. Instead their were cultural, economic and political divisions that made real union of the colonies into one country impossible.

            When it came to classical republican ideas and the support for a thriving and growing middle class as a means to secure freedom, only a few colonies could have really accepted such an ideology. The northern colonies had a middle class, or in the terms of the time, a “middling sort” who owned their own land (not much but enough) and could provide for themselves (not much but enough). Puritan Culture in New England had begun in the 1630s with a disdain for too much wealth accumulation by an individual because it meant they were serving “mammon” instead of “God.” The Quakers of New Jersey and Pennsylvania established those colonies in the 1680s with a similar view that the accumulation of too much wealth established a “cumber” (encumbrance) to “doing good in the world.” By the mid-1700s the religious overtones to these economic and cultural ideals was gone, but the idea that the community is served by a more even apportionment of wealth lived on. And so many were of the classical republican sort. But down South?

Hah. 

Down in the southern colonies there was no diversity of class or apportionment of wealth. There were two types of people and it wasn’t free and slave. There were those who had and those who had not. Those who “had” had everything and a monopoly on economic capital, political institutions, social and intellectual access and cultural standards. They were an oligarchy of the Planter class who sought one

Love this guy!

thing. More of what they had, and to simplify, they had power. Unlimited Power (oh, I already did the Palpatine thing). Could these people really buy into redistributive political policies to help stabilize a middle class and maximize freedom for more and more and more people? Yes, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. But did he really live those ideas? Jefferson was like most in the Planter Class, they could have an idea and use it for their gain, but really see it through? No.

            When it came to Classical Republicanism as a formal ideology it was in their minds as a philosophical whimsy, but as to practice? Plantation owners had a way of keeping the mind and body separate, or perhaps in more contemporary terms their ability to accept cognitive dissonance was off the charts. The Randolphs, Lees, Washingtons, Madisons and most of all Jeffersons would not, could not accept a society of wealth moving to the center in order to realize a better society. They believed in their status and that it entitled, no, that it demanded their absolute control over all they surveyed, not just slave but also free. They believed in Power and they knew that power of necessity stomped out Liberty … and they became informed about this power/liberty dialectic straight from the source, Cato. Not the ugly old man Roman Cato, but a duo of English Opposition writers, Trenchard and Gordon, the authors of Cato’s Letters.

Jefferson, Madison, Lee, Oh My!

            Taking on a Greek or Roman pseudonym was all the rage in 17^thand 18th British political writing (that means among the colonists as well). Why do you think the author of this blog is Cirrus Stratus? Even studying the ideological patterns of the Revolution makes you want to put on a classical hat, and those who donned Cato’s were probably the most famous to do so (I guess Publius, author of the Federalist Papers would beg to differ!). The author’s of Cato’s Letterswere part of a trend in early 18^thcentury British political thought often called by scholars The Commonwealth Men. Numerous writers, of which Cato’s authors Trenchard and Gordon were the most famous and important, espoused a republicanism that emphasized a Machiavellian rehashing of civic virtue, personal liberty and a government that was regulated, controlled and run by the people for the good of the people. According to many historians of the Revolution these writings were highly influential among the power groups of the colonies, especially the northern merchant class and the southern planter class. But given the historical context of these two regions, it is highly doubtful that the interpretation of “by the people, for the good of the people” would have been consistent among the two groups. Yeah, they spoke a similar political language, but the meaning of their words was drastically different.

            And the meaning had to be different based upon the biggest difference between these two groups – the extent of slavery as the driving cultural force in one of those regions.

              Both the south and the north had slavery. It was sanctioned by British law throughout the empire and especially in the colonies, but as a cultural entity it was different, if for no other reason than that in the northern colonies slaves were an insignificant percentage of the population. Outside of northern cities and ports there were less than 1% of the population held as slave, and in those cities the highest % was about 10 of the overall population. In the south almost half the population was held in chains in the 1770s. It was a constant of life in the south that some are free and some are slave and every aspect of culture was permeated by this self-evident truth.

            So what that means is that every political concept, civic virtue, liberty, equality, taxation, representation, and government “by the people, for the good of the people” was framed within a context of meaning directly related to whether slaves were in your midst.

               Cato, from Cato’s Letters, espoused the idea of power as an inhibitor, or more like the enemy, of liberty – and interestingly enough this Cato was not based upon the Grachi’s Cato, but his great grandson, Cato the Younger, who was an enemy of Julius Caesar. He was so against the swallowing of the Republican Roman state by Caesar that when it was apparent that Caesar had taken control of the state for himself, Cato committed suicide. Had he waited a couple of years he could have helped on the Ides of March, but I guess murder isn’t as strong a statement for how much you love your country as ripping your own guts out, which is what the Younger did. The meaning of this death, much like the 18^thcentury ideas associated with it, would not have been lost on colonial ruling classes that ultimately did not control their own government. Power from London was inhibiting “by the people, for the good of the people.” Power was endangering Liberty (even though to be British in the British Empire meant that you were among the freest (maybe the only free) persons on the planet). But the meaning of liberty was different when it came to northern merchants and southern planters, and so for that matter was the means by which power had to be checked in order to maintain liberty.

               By the 1770s historians estimate that most males in New England and the Middle colonies had some political access. Most families owned land and provided for themselves, and that had “republican” consequences as to how they conceived their changing relationship with Parliament in England. After a century of “salutary neglect” where Parliament rarely legislated for the colonies there was now a financial need to make the colonies pay for themselves, hence the need for all those taxes. The colonies had been an expense for the crown and for taxpayers in England – an expense that was worth it when Britain was involved in a century of warfare against rival France for global dominance. 

             When Britain moved ahead in that war (which really didn’t end until WWI and WWII brought the collapse of both empires and paved the way for the American Empire to achieve predominance throughout the world) Parliament decided to shift the burden of running the colonies, of protecting the colonies (but not governing the colonies) to the colonial taxpayers. Colonists in New England and the Middle colonies rebelled, because they were used to passing their own tax laws and these taxes (Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, you know the ones) were passed in London. The old English maxim that law and taxes could only be made by the consent of the governed meant that voters in the northern colonies had to have their representatives make the law. And most people voted, so most people believed that consent was tied to their representatives.

                 In the colonial south, however, hardly anyone voted. Hardly anyone owned land, and hardly anyone realized the independence of providing for yourself that went along with republicanism and the democratic sentiments of the northern colonies. Almost half the population was in real chains, and of the free population half of that population had no political, economic or social rights – meaning “free” women were in figurative chains. Most of the free male population in the south were dependent upon the only group that was truly free, the Planter Class. 

(But was the situation any different for women in the North? In ways that might not be meaningful to the 21^stcentury observer there were very important differences between the rights of women in North and South, and those differences were as significant as defining the Liberal and Conservative views to women’s rights in the 21^stcentury …. But that AmericaHypothesis is going to have to wait for another posting.)

Mary Wollstonecraft: The most important philosopher

of the last 250 years from the "Oh, her daughter wrote

Frankenstein?" Category. She defined the abuses of the 

"Politics of Pretty."

            The idea of representation in the south was not democratic. It couldn’t be. Nothing could be democratic or republican in a southern culture where raw power held by the few of a landed elite held other human beings as slaves. Well, they didn’t really think of them as fully human, is often the response I have heard to make apologies for the hypocrisy of Jefferson’s “created equal.” Right, they didn’t and they didn’t really think of free people outside of the Planter Class as really human either, at least not the created equal kind. And the Planter Class had no basis, along with anyone in southern culture for understanding equality of any kind, nor did they have the ability to comprehend government “by the people for the good of the people.” What they had was a cultural underpinning, not of Liberty, but of Power, where power entailed having rights and power was, for the most part, part of the birthright of the Planter Class. So when they objected to Parliament’s taxing laws, it was not for Cato’s reasons as the northern merchant understood by civic virtue, but by virtue of their birthright to wield power over all that they surveyed. And Washington was a surveyor for a time. So where is the Founding? We’ll find it in an X, the tenth and final installment, and it will be a bittersweet ending for all you GOT fans.