Sometimes an Art by Bernard Bailyn

Author:Bernard Bailyn [Bailyn, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-87448-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

Later, in 1787, the Founders returned to the problem in setting up a federalist structure for the national government, a sharing of power between the national and state governments, which we inherit. But while the federalism they invented assigned significant powers to the states, in the end the national government had, as it has, ultimate sovereignty—a fundamental fact of American constitutionalism mandated not by the Founders in 1787, who for political reasons had not dared to write absolute national supremacy into the Constitution, but by successive federal judges who saw the inescapable logic of state formation. Two hundred years later, Max Weber, analyzing theoretically the logical structures of political authority, explained that “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.… The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.” Hutchinson had written that “it is essential to the being of government that a power should always exist which no other power within such government can have right to withstand or controul.”7 Yet for his insistence on the logic of sovereign power Hutchinson was vilified, charged with denying his fellow colonists the rights that were theirs.

But that was a minor charge next to the firestorm of condemnation that fell on him when his views on liberties, written in private letters of 1767–69, were revealed to the public in 1773. That blistering and defining episode, from which Hutchinson’s reputation never recovered, was provoked by Franklin, who obtained the letters in London from an unknown source and then sent them to Boston with instructions to restrict their circulation to a designated few. He knew that they would eventually be published and hoped that they would divert the blame for Britain’s repressive actions from the ministry to a few “very mischievous men” in Boston, led by Hutchinson, who, Franklin and the Boston leaders would claim, had misrepresented the colonies as a community in continuous turmoil, defiant of all law and order and determined to throw off allegiance to Britain. But if that was Franklin’s plan, it succeeded only in part—not in creating a window for conciliation between America and Britain but in destroying Hutchinson’s career and in the process elevating Franklin himself to the status of a patriot hero in America. For what the letters revealed was that in 1768–69 Hutchinson had written privately to a correspondent in England that it was impossible for “a colony 3,000 miles distant from the parent state [to] enjoy all the liberty of the parent state”—that it was simply a matter of fact that there would have to be “an abridgement of what are called English liberties” in America if the tie to Britain were to be retained; and if that tie were lost, the defenseless colonies would be vulnerable to all the predatory powers at work in the world of warring nations and all English liberties would then be lost.8

Once those words were published, the entire colonial world, it seemed, exploded in wrath.

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