The ideological origins of the American Revolution by Bailyn Bernard

Author:Bailyn, Bernard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political science, Science politique
Publisher: Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Published: 1967-03-15T05:00:00+00:00

ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

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 Mcllwain has observed, in a much more basic constitutional struggle 1 ), 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fact and not of theory, of a kind of representation that had flourished in medieval England but that had faded and been superseded by another during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.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

1 Charles H. Mcllwain, "The Historical Background of Federal Government," Federalism as a Democratic Process (New Brunswick, N.J., 1942), p. 35.

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