The Origins of American Politics

by Bernard Bailyn

The Charles K. Colver Lectures, Brown University 1965.

"An astonishing range of reading in contemporary tracts and modern authorities is manifest, and many aspects of British and colonial affairs are illuminated. As a political analysis this very important contribution will be hard to refute...."
—Frederick B. Tolles, Political Science Quarterly

"He produces historical analysis which is as revealing to the political scientist or sociologist as to the historian, of the significance of social and cultural forces on political changes in eighteenth-century America."
—John D. Lees, Cambridge University Press

"...these well-argued essays represent the first sustained and systematic attempt to provide a comprehensive and integrated analysis of all elements of American political life during the late colonial period...the author has once again put all students concerned with colonial America heavily in his intellectual debt."
—Jack P. Greene, The New York Historical Society Quarterly

"...Mr. Bailyn brings to his effort a splendid gift for pertinent curiosity. What he has found, and what patterns he has made of his findings, light our way through his longitudes and latitudes of scholarly precision."
—Charles Poore, The New York Times

Genres: History, Politics, American History, Nonfiction, American Revolution, American, Political Science

161 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Bernard Bailyn is an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He has been a professor at Harvard since 1953. Bailyn has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice (in 1968 and 1987). In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone familiar with the author's work [1], I must say I enjoyed this book and had a good idea of what to expect from it given that familiarity.  One of Bailyn's major strengths as a historian is to move beyond the cliches of what is popularly known about the political history of the colonial period and to integrate what was going on with the American colonies with the larger Atlantic world.  One thing as well that I appreciate about Bailyn is his restraint when it comes to contemporary politics.  A lesser writer would have hit the reader over the head with the negativity of how contemporary political problems are related to patterns that began in the colonial period, but Bailyn writes in detail about the colonial history and shows mastery of the relevant historiography (as per usual) and lets the reader draw the conclusions about the implications and consequences of America's paranoid political culture.  This book is an example of how a writer manages to layer one's discussion and how to remain relevant by focusing on the historical aspects and allowing the reader to bring their own context to that material.

The materials of this relatively short book (a bit more than 150 quarto pages) were originally the November 1965 Charles K. Colver Lectures at Brown University.  Although these are somewhat old essays, they retain a great deal of interest because they provided Bailyn with the opportunity to develop insights into the way that British country politics provided a fertile ground for colonials to understand their own political situation in conspiratorial and paranoid fashion, a tendency that has continued to contemporary political rhetoric.   The author begins by looking at the sources of American political culture (1) in a transplanted version of country politics that included radical Whig and radical Tory opposition literature to the later Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs.  After this the author examines the structure of colonial politics (2) and examines the explosive combination of the prerogative of governors and the colonial establishment with the weaknesses and rigidity of their position in the face of intransigent and highly democratic colonial legislatures, a storm that never ceased to be problematic in most of the British colonies and which led quickly to a desire for independence in the face of tightening efforts at integration by England in the post-1763 period.  The author then closes the essays with a look at the legacy of the colonial political order (3) with a struggle in legitimizing partisanship and a tendency to view opposition in conspiratorial and paranoid ways.

To put it bluntly, this is a great book.  If you are familiar with the general tenor and approach of Bailyn's works, this book is broadly similar to his collections of essays where the author demonstrates his intimate awareness with sources as well as an approach that takes writers during the period on both sides of the Atlantic seriously.  Rather than assuming that writers were merely being overheated, he takes their fears seriously and examines how these fears sprang from a worldview where opposition was viewed in the most negative light.  And although these essays are more than half a century old, they remain relevant because they discuss long-term patterns that have remained consistent within American culture, namely the tendency on the part of people to accept partisanship and decry the corrupting influences of political patronage (crony capitalism and its cousins) while not often connecting the oppositional nature of American political culture to the problems of legitmizing dissent and keeping a political culture going without a continual sense of crisis in the absence of patronage and sheer bribery.  Bailyn's book helps us to understand the roots of our own contemporary political crises in quarrels over the proper place of government and our simple lack of trust in those who would claim authority over us.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

[Richard Subber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is readable academic history that explains some of the foundational reasons for the decisions of many American colonial leaders to declare independence from England in the late 18th century.

Bailyn makes it clear that the Americans felt deep conviction that they were Englishmen entitled to the rights of Englishmen and eager to embrace what they and most English political thinkers viewed as the ideal tri-partite form of government: king/executive branch/, House of Lords/aristocratic branch, and House of Commons/democratic branch. There was remarkable, cogent, and, at the time, convincing evidence that the inherent checks and balances of these three elements would sustain good government.

However, the English king, his ministers, and the powerful elite class in England exercised compelling “influence” that organized and coerced the three branches to do the bidding of the king and his aristocratic supporters. The government tended to be stable, and most observers thought it was working satisfactorily.

The Origins of American Politics makes it plain that no such system of “influence” existed in the colonials, where the right to vote was much more widespread and where no propertied elite class had grown to prominence and domination. The colonists wanted the power that they thought the Lords and the Commons were routinely exercising.

The king and his ministers and Parliament wanted to control the governance and commerce of the colonies. The Englishmen in the colonies were intent on establishing and sustaining, for their own benefit, the kind of “perfect” government structure that they thought they saw in London.

When the colonists became convinced that the home government was corruptly trying to overpower their colonial governments and their rights, things started to get political.

Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a small book but extremely dense. It's a series of three lectures Bailyn gave in 1965. As is sometimes my wont I raced through it and, as with some foodstuffs, 53.6744% of it did not absorb.

[Riq Hoelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a generally bland section that to me is introductory in nature, but continues to over 100 pages. Then it dives into the subject for real only to reference obscure events that have in no way been mentioned in the long introduction. How many have heard of the "Morris-Hunter settlement", for example? ("Hunter-Morris" rolls much more trippingly off the tongue.) Then there is a long wrap up section. The meat is the middle is pretty thin.

I guess the main point is that in modern times we see the Revolution as having started as a consequence of events in the 1760s and coming to fruition in the 1770s, but this book contends that the problems were ongoing throughout the 18th century. The Glorious Revolution in the UK had created a balanced constitution there, but those ideas had not fully arrived in America where there were provincial governors with all the authority in name, but little in practice. The pressures caused by this situation caused constant strife and conflicts and it is against this background that the Revolution finally erupted.

Learned an interesting word from this book: Subdolous means somewhat sly, crafty, cunning, or artful. Synonyms of subdolous include clever and sly. The word comes from the Latin words sub and dolus, which mean "deceit". By the way, contract this with "sedulous", which means involving or accomplished with careful perseverance, or diligent in application or pursuit.

[Dolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author finds the basis of the American Revolution predates events in the 1760's and 1770's.
The tripartite system of Crown, Lords, and Commons was paralleled by governors, councils, and assemblies in the colonies. But while the Prime Minister ruled with a tame Parliament controlled through patronage and a limited franchise, conditions in the colonies led to conflict, as the governors lacked patronage funds, were limited by London, and faced an ever increasing franchise as colonists became landowners. Colonial government was both regressive and progressive in parts, and there was a crackdown as the populace gained more control. The author shows the importance of cultural and economic forces on political change in 18th century America.

[Dr G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed with The Origins of American Politics , but that may have been largely my fault. I had, in common with many other world citizens found myself wondering how it could be that the US Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, fought for the freedom of slaves, both during the Civil War and in its aftermath, apparently the shibboleth of American liberalism, and yet the Democrats are now regarded as the liberals. Bernard Bailyn is not remotely interested in this question in The Origins of American Politics and, in fact, he does not really spend much time on party politics at all. Neither party is referenced in the index.
To be fair, neither Bailyn’s title nor his preface implies that party politics would feature.
Caveat Emptor !
(Fortunately, a little more searching found me What it took to Win: The History of the Democratic Party by Michael Kazin. And this started to answer my question.)
What Bailyn was doing in what were originally three essays delivered as lectures in 1965, was examining the way American political thought developed. That meant that a fair amount of his explanation related to British politics of the eighteenth century. While I am certainly no expert, I thought his three essays were soundly and eloquently argued. Again though, I needed more and, again, I was able to find it ( Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution by Richard Beeman.)
The very important material which Beeman was able to add to Bailyn’s account was the level of states-rights stubbornness in smaller (often slavery) states, and the level of compromise which was offered by the federalists. While there was a nascent movement against slavery in these years, it did not have enough momentum to turn the tide (bearing in mind that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Grant -just to name some presidents – were all from slave-owning families) and those at the constitutional convention (just under 50% of whom owned slaves as they debated the finer points of the constitution) whose ethics about slave-owning were troubling them were not sufficiently troubled at that stage to confront such nonsense as slaves not being enfranchised but counting as 3/5 of a non-slave for the purpose of determining each state’s representation! Further, while there was vehement anti-royalism at the convention, there was a widespread elitist view that few people (and certainly no women) could be trusted to vote.
However, to return to Bailyn’s slender book, he makes the point that England was proud of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw the deposition/abdication of King James II after three years of his reign – which followed the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II. Subsequent events saw William of Orange become king and his wife, Mary, the daughter of James II, become queen. (The swapping of monarchs was something of a fashion in seventeenth century Britain.) One of the fascinating facts that comes out of his book is the chaos which operated in American colonial government in the decades prior to the War of Independence.
The Stuarts had insisted that monarchs had a God-given right to wage war and impose taxes. In fact, a large part of the ultimate dissatisfaction of the British Parliament with the Stuarts arose from their various dabblings in Roman Catholicism, bearing in mind that Henry VIII’s Reformation and separation from the Roman Catholic Church had occurred a mere hundred and fifty years earlier, more than enough time for inter-Christian suspicion to foment into bellicose hatred.
Following the agreement that William and Mary (Protestant, and therefore good and trustworthy) would be the monarchy and that James II was suspiciously sympathetic to Catholics, and therefore bad and untrustworthy, and father to a new heir so an additional danger to Protestant posterity, Parliament, including a number of the notables who had brought about James’s departure and William’s coincidental arrival, sat down to formalize the new arrangements.
This included a Bill of Rights which established that Parliament had authority over the monarchy. In the style of the times, “Parliament” was represented as “the people”.
King William agreed to govern by parliamentary statutes, not veto; and agreed that he could not create courts; that he would convene parliament in, at least, three year periods, that he would call elections in seven-year periods; would not maintain a standing army in peacetime; and would not wage war for territorial gain without parliamentary agreement. The Church of England was to be the established church, although dissent was to be tolerated (while also being penalised).
There was, according to Bailyn, a general feeling of satisfaction that there was now a harmonious balance between the Crown, the Church, the Lords and the Commons, although the “Commons” were originally knights and burgesses, and franchise for the House of Commons was limited to a small number of property freeholders, and membership was often reliant on patronage managed by the government.
A failed Jacobite attempt at rebellion increased a sense of danger in 1745 but, generally, English governments were secure; Bailyn notes that opposition to the government was usually “weak to the point of debility. Composed of a heterogeneous cluster of malcontents drawn from every segment of the political spectrum.” And the concept of an opposition party was roundly distrusted, being seen as bordering on treason. Opposition ideas were usually randomly disseminated by newspapers and pamphlets, the writers often being the most notable literati and thinkers of the era. Their perspective was commonly Lockean, “primarily for individual rights against the power of the state” and argued in the coffee houses. Another branch warned against the personal avarice of those in power, and their use of corruption to maintain themselves. Incorporated were warnings of venality and warnings of foreign ineptitude and malice. “Of this was the political culture of early 18th century England composed: a conviction of national superiority manifested particularly in the achievement of a degree of civil and political freedom unique in the world; the belief that this freedom resulted from the careful balancing of the socio-constitutional elements in a mixed government; and the experience of politics itself as the exercise of an elaborate system of ‘influence’ by which the Crown and its administration controlled the whole of the polity – a control, informal and un-legal that was condemned as corrupt by vituperative and indefatigable critics of the government, themselves viewed as quasi-conspirators against constituted power.”
Notably, at this stage, the American environment absorbed much the same arguments and outlooks of the English pamphleteers. “The colonists universally agreed that man was by nature lustful, that he was utterly untrustworthy in power, unable to control his passion for domination. The antinomy of power and liberty was accepted as the central fact of politics, and with it the belief that power was aggressive, liberty passive, and that the duty of freeman was to protect the latter and constrain the former. Threats to free government, it was believed, lurked everywhere, but nowhere more dangerously than in the designs of ministers in office to aggrandise power by the corrupt use of influence, and by this means ultimately to destroy the balance of the constitution.”
Bailyn notes the widespread pro-British feeling at this time, exemplified, often with some pride, by the identification of colonial bicameral legislative bodies with the Houses of Westminster, and the fact that franchise in the colonies was almost identical to that in Britain. However, one significant difference to be found in the colonies was the presence there of “strife, first of all, between branches of government – between the executives on the one hand and the legislatures on the other – strife so rampant as to be more noteworthy by its absence than its presence and so intense as to lead on occasions to a total paralysis of government. But it was not only a matter of conflict between branches of government. There was, besides this, a milling factionalism that transcended institutional boundaries and at times reduced the politics of certain colonies to an almost uncharted double chaos of competing groups. Some were personal groups, small clusters of relatives and friends that rose suddenly at particular junctures and faded again as quickly, merging into other equally unstable configurations. Others were economic, regional, and more generally social interest groups…. All were vocal; most were difficult to control; and while in certain colonies at certain times political life attained the hoped-for balance and tranquillity” more regularly it did not.
Bailyn attributes these frequent conflicts, first to the lingering presence of England’s Privy Council as the final arbiter on legislation; secondly, to governors’ power, frequently employed, to prorogue assemblies and, thirdly, to the power of colonial executives over their judiciaries, and over a number of other areas in ways which had been eliminated in England. In turn, Bailyn contends that much of this results from over-precise instructions and paternalism issued by England to the governors of both Crown and Proprietary colonies, and to retention by faraway England of the power of many appointments. So there was a paradoxical excess of local executive power mixed with an ultimate reduction of that power brought about by British interference. Anyone holding a position of authority needed to maintain support from both locals and English power-brokers, and sometimes of powerful people in other colonies as well. Ironically, one gets the impression that many of the problems the American colonies were encountering had been either solved or papered over across the decades and centuries when they occurred in England, often enough by such dubious means as patronage and horse-trading. Or were a continuing problem there as well. It seems likely the colonies would similarly have solved their problems if they had been left to do so.
It is worth recalling too, that the American colonists, or their antecedents, had made a deliberate decision to move to their new home, often because of dissatisfaction, from a vast array of esoteric beliefs with the British religious environment, or with the more general power structure, from which they felt excluded. They expected whatever was the source of their dissatisfaction to be rectified as a result of their move. And of course, not all the immigrants were from England. People disaffected with their lot in other lands were also a part of the mélange. Bailyn notes that there was an ongoing debate in numerous quarters as to whether opposition was per se essential to proper democracy or a curse afflicting free government. That, in turn, led to debates on free speech and its negative impacts.
So the message which persists through this book is that English politics was chaotic and inefficient during the eighteenth century and that American colonial politics was much the same, indeed worse because the Americans imagined something better was possible. The surprising aspect of this is that, until quite late, there was a broad sympathy with England but that the situation was incendiary and could easily have led in just about any direction depending on the particular fuse employed.

[Boone Ayala · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find Bailyn’s story extremely engaging but ultimately flawed. His basic question is why the arguments of opposition writers during Walpole’s administration - Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon - found such explosive purchase in the American colonies when they were peripheral within English politics. (In this way this book forms an excellent complement with Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which talks about the deployment of these ideas. Indeed, the two works must be read together.)

Following Plumb and Namier, Bailyn sees 18th century Britain as remarkably stable politically as a result of a strong executive, with power over patronage, a small electorate, rotten boroughs, and a philosophy of virtual representation. All of these meant that it was possible for Walpole and his successors to exert strong control over British politics, and so keep the whole remarkably peaceful.

In America, these powers did not exist. While colonial governors did possess sweeping powers to veto laws, erect courts, and otherwise exert prerogative powers, they were unable to control politics in the colonies. The broad suffrage, the control of patronage networks by Whitehall or the assemblies (but not the Governor), and the tumultuous socioeconomic environment of the colonies meant that in America politics was more dynamic. The Governor’s strength in prerogative powers, the assembly’s independence, and the absence of a hereditary aristocracy (preventing the tripartite mixed constitution of England from functioning in the colonies) meant that conflict in the colonies was often between a “Robinacal” (Walpolean) Governor attempting but failing to undermine the independence of the assembly and an assembly that consistently asserted its privileges at the expense of prerogative - and so seemed to be a threat.

Thus it was the political context of the colonies which made them more receptive to the ideas of opposition writers. It was because politics in America was not Namierite that it was so unstable.

Bailyn’s lectures are engaging and well-written, and the ideas are thought-provoking. But he falls short in a few ways. First, he doesn’t explain why these same processes would not have taken place in the British West Indies. Second, I disagree pretty fundamentally with a Namierite vision of English politics in this period, favoring a split between Patriots, Establishment Whigs, and Tories (Wilson’s Sense of the People; Justin du Rivage’s Revolution Against Empire; Pincus’s Heart of the Declaration; Brewer’s Politics and Ideology at the Accession of George III). I wonder about how to fit Ireland, or Wilkes, into this story. Third, I think Bailyn’s view of the political horizon of the assemblies is contradictory. Many times he mentions that they were steeped in the 18th century literature on British politics, but at other times he mentions that all of their concerns were parochial. Did they not have ideas about how the empire should function in general?

[Nepatriots9 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easily digestible explanation of colonial politics, drawn from three lectures by Bailyn in 1965.

[Colin Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise discussion of the effects of the English constitution on the formation of government in the colonies.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Bailyn's argument very interesting and it makes sense--he claims that Governors and other British leaders in the colonies had more power and less influence than their peers back "home". The first offended their constituents and the second made it difficult for them to deal with the consequences of the offense! They lacked the ability to manipulate with the handing out of positions and money.

The Origins of American Politics
Bernard Bailyn
Vintage, 1970

“But it was in these three areas primarily—the vetoing of colonial legislation; proroguing and dissolving legislative bodies; and dismissing judges and creating courts—that the legal power of the executive was felt to be the most archaic and threatening, a source of danger to liberty and to the free constitution.” 69

“The royal governors arrived in the colonies not merely with a commission that outlined their duties but with a book of instructions that filled in the details so minutely and with such finality that in some of the most controversial and sensitive public issues the executive was in effect politically immobilized.” 71

“And later, after the Revolution, it would be commonly said in England and in loyalist circles that ‘the King and government of Great Britain held no patronage in the country, which/could create attachment and influence sufficient to counteract that restless, arrogating spirit which in popular assemblies, when left to itself, will never brook an authority that checks and interferes with its own.’” 72-3
“The patronage forfeited by the governors to the home authorities was small, however, next to the losses that fell to the local political powers in the colonies.” 75;

“Thus the colonial governors were stripped of much of the power of patronage by which in England the administration could discipline dissent within the political community and maintain its dominance within Parliament. But it was not the existence of patronage alone that in England gave the administration its unique political advantage. The highly irregular, inequitable, and hence easily manipulated electoral system contributed greatly; and this too was absent in America.” 80

“Instruction was but one form by which representation in the colonies was kept ‘actual,’ a form of attorneyship, as distinct from the virtual representation celebrated in Burke’s description of Parliament…/As well as being instructed by their constituents, delegates were required, often, to be actual residents of the communities they represented at the time of their incumbency.” 84-5

“But if ownership of land was a restrictive qualification in England, it was permissive in the colonies where freehold tenure was almost universal among the white population.” 86

“Gubernatorial appointments, as part of the patronage system of English politics, were susceptible to all of the vagaries, discontinuities, and irrationalities of that system. The determination of gubernatorial tenure had less to do with the shape of American political problems than with the exigencies of politics in England…” 88

“Thus the configuration of circumstances: a deeply bred, firmly rooted assumption, reinforced by the appearance of institutions, that the colonial constitutions corresponded in their essentials to the prototypically mixed/government of England; an assumption, an expectation, violated in fact, first, by what were believed to be excessive powers, associated with Stuart autocracy, in the hands of the first order of the polity, and second, by the less clearly recognized but politically more important absence in the colonies of the cluster of devices by which in England the executive maintained discipline, control, and stability in polititcs.” 95-6

“Leadership was uncertain largely because the economy was uncertain. The interests that sought expression in politics varied and shifted.” 99

“The openness of the economy led to repeated innovations and displacements/that sought expression in politics. There were no ‘classes’ in colonial politics, in the sense of economic or occupational groups whose political interests were entirely stable, clear, and consistent through substantial periods of time. More important, there was not sufficient stability in the economic groupings more loosely defined
to re-create in America the kind of stable interest politics that found in England so effective an
expression in ‘virtual’ representation.” 99-100

[Miranda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank God it's over! This book was almost insultingly dry. However it has an interesting premise. It's a collection of three essays. His essays focus on the political thoughts and circumstances that dominated the pre-Revolutionary era in not only the American colonies but also in England. He historically analyzes the effects that these thoughts had on the emergence of patriotism in the colonies and the drive for independence that would follow and lead to the American Revolution.

[Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an eye-opening book on the conspiracy theories and fractiousness rampant in colonial politics. It is clear that a desire to be independent from Britain existed under the surface decades before it exploded and Americans have always been paranoid and suspicious of the motives of anyone of their kith and kin with opposing opinions. This is well worth the read and easy to understand.

[Craig Bolton]

The Origins of American Politics by Bernard Bailyn (1970)