Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

by Wilfred M. McClay

History is the study of change through time, and theoretically, it could be about almost anything that happens. But it must be selective if it is to be intelligible. Indeed, in practice, what we call “history” leaves out many of the most important aspects of life.

Hence this book strives to be, as the ancient sage put it, a river shallow enough for the lamb to go wading but deep enough for the elephant to swim.

A nation that professes high ideals makes itself vulnerable to searing criticism when it falls short of them – sometimes far short indeed, as America often has.

All human beings are flawed, as are all human enterprises. To believe otherwise is to be naive, and much of what passes for cynicism in our time is little more than naïveté in deep disguise.

One of the worst sins of the present – not just ours but any present – is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.

The writer Lewis Mumford expressed this surprising process in a single brilliant sentence: “The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe.”

He also brought along a Jewish scholar who was conversant in Arabic so that he would be able to communicate with any Muslims he encountered at his Oriental destinations. What may have been lacking in hard evidence for Columbus’s theories he more than made up for by the fervency of his faith. He fully expected that he would end up in the Far East.

Hence the cruel irony, as we shall see, that the settlement of America by newcomers would also produce a profound unsettlement for those who were not newcomers.

There was therefore a strong tension between the inherited Catholic-style orthodoxy with which the newly independent Church of England had begun its institutional life and the reforming zeal Calvinist-influenced clergy and laity now brought to church life. This particular form of compounded unsettlement – division between the Church of England and Rome, plus division between and among the factions within the Church of England – would not only shape English and British history for years to come but lie at the heart of the distinctive shape that American religion would assume a century or more later.

But the defeat of the Armada opened the way for England to take the lead in settling North America, and the result would be a continent and nation whose institutions, laws, and government were determined by their English antecedents.

But in the end, English colonization was a largely private undertaking. Or rather, it was a haphazard collection of uncoordinated private undertakings, taken on by a diverse group of entrepreneurs, visionaries, and zealots, each seeking the fresh opportunities of the New World for his own purposes, and each being given an extraordinary degree of freedom in pursuing those ends without being steered by a larger national vision.

Each of these undertakings, then, had its own profile, its own aspirations, its own distinctive way of understanding America as a land of hope. Hence the contrasts among them could be very striking, and very instructive. Perhaps the sharpest contrast of all came at the very beginning, between the colonies of Virginia and New England.

Whereas the earliest settlers of Virginia had been motivated primarily by material considerations, the New Englanders were driven almost entirely by religious zeal. Most of them were Puritans, men and women who believed the Church of England had not gone far enough to purge itself of its Catholic corruptions, and despaired of such a cleansing renewal ever taking place in their lifetimes.

Just as in the Congregational churches, ordinary believers came together to create self-governing churches, so with the Mayflower Compact, a group of ordinary people came together to create their own government. It was an astonishing moment in history, though, because it amounted to a real-world dramatization of the increasingly influential idea that civil society was based upon a “social contract” among its members. Here was a case where a group had actually covenanted with one another, and with God.

Covenant

We might be tempted to read this as an expression of religious pride, as perhaps it was. But it was equally an expression of religious humility, of a people choosing to subordinate their selfish desires to the accomplishment of their mission: to make a godly place in the New World, for the sake of the renewal of the Old.

Most such attempts failed in important respects to fulfill their original intentions. They started out with one vision, but time and chance happened to them all.

Colonies

It is because of stories like these that the historian Daniel Boorstin declared mordantly that “the colonies were a disproving ground for utopias.” There is ample ground for his saying so; it is the ironic side of being a land of hope. Being a land of hope may also mean, at times, being a land of disappointment. The history of the United States contains both. It is hard to have one without the other.

Land Of hope and disappointment

By the 1720s, a “wise and salutary neglect” (to use the words of Edmund Burke) became the all but explicit spirit of British colonial policy.

Of course, citizenship and the ability to participate in the political process in these colonies were severely restricted when measured by our present-day standards, since women, Native Americans, and African Americans were not permitted a role in colonial political life. But it is important to keep that fact in correct perspective. Such equality as we insist upon today did not then exist anyplace in the world. That said, no other region on earth had such a high proportion of its adult male population enjoying a free status rooted in the private ownership of land. A greater proportion of the American population could participate in elections and have a role in selecting their representatives than anyplace else on the planet. These colonists were acquiring the habit of self-rule, and they were not likely ever to want to give it up easily or willingly.

But it was the British who had won the war, not the Americans, and it was the British who had to pay for it – a mammoth expense, which included putting the nation under the burden of some £58 million of additional debt. As a result, it seemed inevitable that there would have to be a tightening of imperial control over the colonies. As Adam Smith observed, it was no longer possible for the colonies to be considered “provinces of the British empire” which “contribute neither revenue nor military force toward the support of the empire.” In other words, the days of the colonies enjoying a free ride, not being required to pay taxes as British citizens, were over.

In the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century, the spirit of Protestantism and the spirit of science were not seen to be in fundamental conflict with one another. Belief in some version of the biblical God and belief in an ordered and knowable universe were not seen as at all incompatible. There was a high degree of tolerance of religious differences, a by-product of the remarkable religious diversity of the colonies. Beliefs easily intersected; Edwards himself had a keen interest in Newton’s new science and saw the orderliness of nature as evidence of God’s masterly design, while Franklin, who tended toward Deism in his own beliefs, was captivated by George Whitefield’s preaching, and by its salutary effects upon his listeners, when the latter came to Philadelphia.

Several more things had to happen for the movement to independence to become unstoppable. First, the British government refused to consider any form of compromise. King George III summarily rejected a conciliatory appeal known as the Olive Branch Petition, written by Dickinson, refusing even to look at it, and choosing instead to label the colonists “open and avowed enemies.” Then the King began to recruit mercenary Hessian soldiers from Germany to fight the Americans, a gesture that the colonists regarded as both insulting and callous, a way of signaling that they were no longer fellow Englishmen.

Oddly, Paine himself was a Briton who had only been in America a year, a rootless and luckless soul in his late thirties who had failed at nearly everything else he had attempted. But he proved to have a talent for political agitation and stirring rhetoric.

Paine had connected the dots as no one before him had done and had brought sharp definition to an unsettled situation. He made the path forward unmistakably clear.

The Revolution was prosecuted by imperfect individuals who had a mixture of motives, including the purely economic motives of businessmen who did not want to pay taxes and the political conflicts among the competing social classes in the colonies themselves. Yet self-rule was at the heart of it all. Self-rule had been the basis for the flourishing of these colonies; self-rule was the basis for their revolution; self-rule continued to be a central element in the American experiment in all the years to come.

We often assume that everyone in the colonies was solidly on board for independence, but that was very far from being the case. It is hard to know for sure, but perhaps as many as one-third of Americans remained loyal to the Crown and opposed the Revolution; another third seemed to be indifferent as to the outcome. Even the remaining third who supported independence had divergent motives for doing so.

When he showed up at the Second Continental Convention in Philadelphia, he was wearing his military uniform, signaling for all to see that he was ready to fight for the colonial cause. The Congress acted accordingly, making him commander in chief of the Continental Army in June 1775. He accepted the position, on condition that he receive no pay for it.

Like a great many other Americans of his day, Washington was deeply influenced by Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato, a Tragedy, a popular and powerful drama about the meaning of honor. The play depicts the virtuous life of its subject, the ancient Roman senator Cato the Younger, who sacrifices his life in opposing the incipient tyranny of Julius Caesar. It was an example Washington took to heart. He saw the play performed a great many times and frequently quoted or paraphrased it in his correspondence and had it performed in front of his soldiers. Cato’s lofty example was the example he wished to emulate; much of the American public shared his admiration and would respond well to the prospect of his leadership.

But the Patriots’ morale would be lifted immensely by the timely intervention of another pamphlet from the pen of Thomas Paine, the first in a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis, tailor-made for the discontents of that moment. It began with his famous inspirational words: “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Yes, he conceded, the immediate future looked grim; but that was even more reason to hunker down and push ahead, because “the harder the conflict,” he insisted, “the more glorious the triumph.” Once again, Paine’s words worked their magic. Washington ordered that they be read aloud to the army encampments, and they had the desired effect in rousing once more the fighting spirit of his men. For a second time in one year, Paine had made an inestimable gift to the colonial cause.

The most important of them involved the colorful British General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, commanding the northern forces, who was to move his men down from Canada and across Lake Champlain toward Albany. He successfully traversed the lake and occupied the abandoned Fort Ticonderoga on the lake’s southern end. But when he tried to go further, the effort, slowed by an immense baggage train that included thirty carts carrying Burgoyne’s lavish wardrobe and his supplies of champagne, became bogged down in the dense woods north of Saratoga. The American forces swelled in numbers and enthusiasm as volunteers and militia flocked to the area, and eventually Burgoyne found himself hopelessly surrounded and forced to surrender on October 17. Some fifty-seven hundred British troops were taken prisoner. It was an enormous triumph for the Americans.

Watch out for baggage

Then, seeking to secure the Carolinas further and cut them off from external sources of aid, British General Charles Cornwallis took his force of seventy-two hundred men northward, heading toward Virginia and ending up in Yorktown, a small port city strategically located near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. They would be safe and secure from siege there, he believed, since the Americans lacked a serious navy to challenge him by water and sufficient troops in the area to threaten him by land. Both those assumptions proved to be dead wrong, and the assistance of the French Navy was the main reason why.

The Roman Republic had become strong through the martial and civic virtues of its hardy citizenry; the Roman Empire had fallen into dissolution from the decadence and corruption of its spoiled and self-interested inhabitants.

The Northwest Ordinance provided a clearly defined process by which the western lands would, in several stages, eventually be “formed into distinct republican States.” The historian Daniel Boorstin called it “the add-a-state plan.” It ensured that the western lands would not be held as permanent colonial dependencies but would gradually enter the Union on terms exactly equal to those the already existing states enjoyed. The result would be a steadily growing country, not an empire, and a union that grew more and more imbued with a spirit of national unity.

Unlike the physically imposing Washington, James Madison did not look the heroic part he was given by history to play. His nickname was “Little Jemmy,” because he was such a tiny, frail man, a mere five feet tall, with a squeaky voice and a reticent, bookish manner. But no one doubted his high intelligence, his encyclopedic knowledge of political history, and his eloquence and persuasiveness in debate. His intelligence was of the rarest sort, combining the shrewdness of an effective practical politician with the reflectiveness of a philosopher. His knowledge of the past gave him a particularly keen appreciation of the possibilities inherent in the moment in which America found itself, and he intended to make the most of those possibilities. Getting the Constitution right would be a high-stakes affair. America, he asserted, would “decide for ever the fate of republican government.”

Madison Learn from history

After electing George Washington to preside over the convention, and voting to close the proceedings and meet in secret, the delegates faced two fundamental decisions: How much power needed to be given to an expanded national government? And how could they ensure that this empowered national government would itself be fully accountable, and would not become too powerful?

After all, many nations have their great leaders and laborers, their war heroes, their monuments, and their days of independence. But there is only one nation on earth that can point with pride to a written Constitution that is more than 230 years old, a continuously authoritative expression of fundamental law that stands at the very center of our national life.

Most successful political document in human history

In fact, indentured servitude was so common that some historians have estimated more than half of the white immigrants to the American colonies up to the time of the Revolution had come to the New World under indentures, and even the first black Africans to appear in North America, dropped off at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 by a Dutch ship, may well have been indentured servants rather than slaves.

What made the American situation especially intolerable was not the wrongs these earliest Americans perpetrated but the high and noble ideals they professed, which served to contradict and condemn those very practices. They were living an inconsistency, and they could not be at ease about it. Washington freed his own slaves upon his death. Jefferson did not, but he agonized over his complicity with slavery and later in life foresaw slavery as an offense against God and a possible source of national dissolution. What these two examples tell us is that the seeds of a more capacious ideal of liberty were already planted and had begun to take root but still were far from being ready to blossom.

Washington And Jefferson slavery

It is also true that a considerable number of the Framers sincerely believed that slavery was already on the wane, that it had been on the wane since the Revolution, and that it would eventually disappear of its own accord. They therefore were willing to accept the compromises in the Constitution for the sake of a brighter future of whose coming they were very confident. Roger Sherman observed “that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it.” Similarly, his fellow Connecticut delegate Oliver Ellsworth predicted that “Slavery, in time, will not be a speck in our Country.”

End of slavery inevitable

In other words, the price of pursuing abolition of slavery at that time would almost certainly have been the dissolution of the American nation, which would probably have rendered the resulting nation-fragments highly unstable and unable to defend their interests. Would that have been worth the price? This is a far different question for us to ask today than it was for them to answer at the time.

Compromises necessary in the moment

And it is also indicative that the final document did open the way to an ending of the transatlantic slave trade after the year 1808, a move inspired by a resounding speech from George Mason of Virginia, himself a slaveholder but also a Christian who labeled the trade an “infernal traffic.” Mason feared the corrupting spread of slavery through the entire nation, which would bring “the judgment of Heaven” down severely upon any country in which bondage was widespread and blandly accepted. His own state of Virginia had been one of the first jurisdictions in the world to stop the importation of slaves for sale, doing so in 1778 under the leadership of its governor, Thomas Jefferson. These things speak volumes about the Framers’ conflicted consciences.

George mason and Jefferson

In fact, slaves in the antebellum South would have the highest rate of natural increase of any slave society in history. Ironically, that more favorable environment meant that the institution would prove difficult to eliminate, contrary to the confident hopes of men like Sherman and Ellsworth.

Hence it would be profoundly wrong to contend, as some do, that the United States was “founded on” slavery. No, it was founded on other principles entirely, on principles of liberty and self-rule that had been discovered and defined and refined and enshrined through the tempering effects of several turbulent centuries of European and British and American history. Those foundational principles would win out in the end, though not without much struggle and striving, and eventual bloodshed. The United States enjoyed a miraculous birth, but it was not the product of an unstained conception and an untroubled delivery. Few things are.

Bye bye 1619 project

Many of the papers in The Federalist showed considerable originality and went on to become minor classics in the history of political thought – an improbable fate for mere newspaper columns. In Federalist 10, for example, James Madison put forward an incisive discussion of the problem of factions in political life – whence they come, how they can be controlled – and showed how a large and diverse republic like the United States could solve the factionalism that besets small republics by “extending the sphere,” that is, by enlarging the republic to encompass so many different varieties of faction that no one of them would be able to predominate. In Federalist 51, he put forward a compelling account of how the Constitution’s complex federal system could afford a “double security” for the rights of the people, pitting the states against the national government and dividing the national government against itself.

Beneath it all was a darkly realistic view of human potentialities, reflecting the chastened Calvinist view of human nature that permeated eighteenth-century America and informed the thinking of the Framers themselves, making them suspicious of concentrated power. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison warned, because although a society needed the energy of its ambitious men, the most ambitious men were likely also to be the worst if they became corrupt, and the causes of faction were everywhere “sown into the nature of man.”

They were engaged in one of the great experiments in the annals of politics, attempting to use the example of previous republics to avert those republics’ fate. They used the new science of politics in trying to remedy the fatal flaws of republics past. They used history to defy history.

Few today would ever want to contemplate the Constitution stripped of its Bill of Rights. It is one of the glories of the American constitutional system and, despite its added-on status, has become part of the very heart of the Constitution. It is one of the ironies of history that some of the fiercest opponents of the Constitution turned out to be among its chief benefactors.

If its theme could be summed up in a single term, that term would be national unity. All around him, Washington saw evidence of growing divisions, which presaged troubles to come. Washington began by making it clear how much he deplored “the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” the acrimony that was pushing the nation into the institutionalizing of partisan politics. He expressed his concern about the related rise of sectional conflict, in which northerners and southerners and easterners and westerners all seemed to be placing their local interests above those of the country as a whole, thereby forgetting all the ways in which their differences were mutually beneficial and necessary for the thriving of the whole.

Jefferson himself grandly referred, in an 1819 letter written long after his retirement from public life, to “the revolution of 1800,” and many historians have followed him in employing that expression. But Jefferson was referring in those words not to his implementation of transforming revolutionary policies but merely to the peaceable transfer of power itself: the nation’s success in producing change “not effected indeed by the sword … but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.”

In addition, Jefferson distrusted the tendency of judges to seek expanded influence, by using the questions before them to establish new precedents and extend their powers – or, in his colorful phrase, “to throw an anchor ahead, and grapple further hold for future advances of power” – all of it in ways designed to circumvent the will of the people as expressed in their democratic institutions.