If one hundred randomly selected Americans were asked to quote the Declaration of Independence’s opening words, how many would begin with the document’s second paragraph? Surely very few would answer correctly. That is reasonable enough. As the late, great Gordon Wood observed of the Jacksonian era’s unruly social and political democracy in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, “what happened in America in the decades following [July 4, 1776] was only an extension of all that the revolutionary leaders had advocated.” Indeed, in the centuries following. The insistence upon universal suffrage by white men invoking the refrain “that they were free and equal with the right to pursue their happiness … made possible the eventual strivings of others.” The unfolding application of what Martin Luther King Jr. famously coined America’s “promissory note” will be the dominant theme in commentary on the Declaration’s 250th anniversary.
Inevitably, though, knowledge of a story’s conclusion shapes our telling of its start. Our semiquincentennial fireworks this July implicitly celebrate Saratoga and Yorktown as much as Jefferson’s pen on the Glorious Fourth. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse is a red-letter date in our history, not the anniversary of South Carolina’s secession ordinances. Most memorialists of America’s founding have written knowing that the fragile confederation of infant republics survived to full manhood in mighty strength. Writing in 1789, South Carolina state assemblyman and Continental Congress president pro tempore David Ramsay lacked that assurance. This makes his History of the American Revolution (beautifully reproduced with a modern introduction by Liberty Fund in 1990) especially worth revisiting in our present moment.
When the parameters and durability of American nationhood remained uncertain, an innate collective right to “assume a separate and equal station” “among the powers of the Earth” still seemed the Declaration’s most salient and momentous claim. In a two-volume work approaching seven hundred pages, Ramsay offered surprisingly little interpretive commentary on the famous document. He observed that Richard Henry Lee first motioned in Congress for the states to declare independence “from necessity … to obtain foreign assistance” rather than “continue in the awkward and hazardous situation of subjects” conducting a war against their acknowledged sovereign.
The embodiment of that aid reached Philadelphia in October 1778 in the person of Conrad Alexandre Gèrard, France’s minister plenipotentiary. With the poetical grandeur characteristic of the gentleman-scholar in eras before the bland conventions of professional academia, Ramsay eulogized this portentous moment in world-historical terms. On ground which “less than a century [before] had been the residence of savages … representatives of a new, free, and civilized nation” received an officer “from one of the oldest and most powerful kingdoms in Europe.” Tremulous Americans “felt the weight and importance to which they were risen among nations.”
Yet, in another sense, little had changed. As domestic constitutional events, Ramsay claimed that the colonies’ “change of sovereignty was hardly perceptible.” His account of this bloodless revolution anticipated Tocqueville’s Democracy in America by more than forty years. “Rejection of British sovereignty” necessitated the adoption of “some other principle of government.” The whole tenor of colonial life, their “republican habits and sentiments, naturally led [Americans] to substitute the majesty of the people in lieu of discarded royalty.” Ramsay’s first volume painstakingly traced the ironic consequences of George III and Prime Minister Frederick North’s rejection of Congress’s various petitions and preference for a military response. Even after declaring independence, he claimed, a peace offer satisfactorily redressing American grievances would have produced “a powerful party for rescinding the act of separation.” Instead, British folly forced Americans without premeditation or desire to play a novel scene on the stage of human history. Where the organic law of other free states both modern and classical, had been “thrown together by accident,” in America “alone, reason and liberty concurred in the formation of constitutions” through popular elections.
The remarkable yet seamless events of 1776 reified the political philosophers’ hitherto theoretical state of nature. Implicitly, Ramsay views the Declaration of Independence and America’s republican constitutions as the inevitable and spontaneous product of colonial history, Enlightenment thought, and immediate circumstance. His account feels more like an apologia than some American Virgil’s panegyric on an elect empire’s auspicious birth.
Educated at Princeton under the tutelage of his first father-in-law John Witherspoon, Ramsay’s History exudes Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy in ways modern readers may find rewardingly fresh. Where most present-day historians’ sense of justice draws their attention to the plight of a now-familiar cast of marginalized groups, the nation-making potential and moral probity of sound fiscal policy most interested Ramsay. This is not because he lacked the sensibilities of our own racially enlightened era. Though a member of Charleston’s elite class, Ramsay admonished his countrymen to both “let the hapless African sleep undisturbed on his native shore” by abolishing the slave trade, “and give over wishing for the extermination of the ancient [Native American] proprietors of this land. Universal justice is universal interest.” But in 1789, unfunded continental bills of credit posed the most pressing moral questions to the United States, and the most existential threat to their fragile union.
Amid self-congratulatory commentary on various new-found liberties in our personal lives, we would do well to heed the warnings of our Revolution’s first historian.
In an “appendix” chapter inserted midway through volume two, Ramsay traces the legislative history and manifold dire consequences of Congress’s diminishingly valuable currency. He highlights especially the states’ refusal in 1781 and again in 1783 to approve a five percent impost enabling Congress to fund the confederation’s debt, reapportioned by state population. Instead, though Congress intended otherwise and erred chiefly “from ignorance,” laws requiring acceptance of unfunded paper “in the discharge of debts in contracted silver and gold” caused “much injustice.” Retirees “found their substance melting away to a mere pittance.” Widows dependent on “the bequests of a deceased husband experienced a frustration of all his well-meant tenderness.” “The blooming virgin” endowed with “a liberal patrimony [lost] everything but her personal charms and virtues.” The debt-ridden pauper “became rich, and the rich became poor.”
Radical leftists may deem such de facto redistributionism just, but inflation threatened complete economic collapse and, more horrifyingly for Ramsay, “estranged citizens from the habits and love of justice.” Though “time and industry” might “repair the losses of property,” the restoration of republican virtue corroded by endemic violation of contracts awaited “a new generation … unpracticed in the iniquities of their fathers.”
From the vantage point of 1789, Ramsay saw in the Declaration of Independence little more than a provisional statement of nation-making intent. Anything but self-executing, it would hold no lasting meaning if the American Revolution failed. The Treaty of Paris guaranteed nothing. “No government will or can endure which does not protect the rights of its subjects,” he warned. “Unless such efficient regulations are adopted as will secure property as well as liberty, one revolution will follow another.” How much of world history in the last century does that prophecy encompass?
Since the ratification debates, there have always been Americans who see in the Constitution an antidemocratic usurpation of the revolution’s true spirit. Patrick Henry warned Virginians at their ratifying convention of “a revolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain, [endangering] our rights and privileges” by “relinquishing the sovereignty of the states.” Progressive historians since Charles Beard have echoed these concerns in ever-more radical tones. Woody Holton, in Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, for example, accused the Framers of carving “the accusation of plebian incompetence into the cornerstone of the edifice they constructed at Philadelphia.”
Writing at the threshold of the new constitutional era, though, the revolution’s first published historian viewed the matter otherwise. The human past furnished “many melancholy proofs that popular governments seldom answer in practice to the theories of their admirers.” Yet, if properly effectuated “by just laws” faithfully executed, the revolution could last. A stable currency and banking system resting on reliable national bonds would “make a fund for agriculture, commerce and manufactures” sufficient to raise the United States to “an exalted rank among the nations of earth.”
Ramsay’s work typified the federalists’ prudential, Enlightened nationalism unsullied by the vague mysticism of later nineteenth-century Romantics such as Giuseppe Mazzini. He noted that the new constitution took effect when eleven ratifying states elected a Congress and inaugurated a chief executive. A footnote adds that North Carolina had done so just as The History went to press. There is no sense, as Abraham Lincoln later claimed, that the union predated and originated the independent states. Rhode Island, it seems, could ratify or not. But only fools would have refused. Ramsay foresaw that if Americans “continue under one government” with an equitable fiscal system undergirding all commerce and contracts, “there is no point of national greatness to which you may not aspire.” Possessed of “advantages equal to the oldest kingdoms of Europe, what they have been slowly growing to in the course of nearly two thousand years, [the United States] may hope to equal within one century.” Quite so, and more besides.
To those conscious of the founding generation’s imminent division into the First Party system, Ramsay’s statements may suggest strict Hamiltonian orthodoxy. But his vision was pre-partisan. After failing to secure a congressional seat in 1788 (thanks in part to his abolitionist sentiment), Ramsay never returned to active political life. George Washington’s brand of anti-sectional unionism pervaded Ramsay’s historical writings. As readily as he urged fiscal probity, he unselfconsciously invoked aspects of the revolution’s republican ideology destined to become proprietary identifiers of Jefferson’s faction. Thus, he admonished his countrymen also to “practice industry, frugality, temperance, moderation,” and “venerate the plough.” Only “children … inured to toil” and “yeoman who have no other dependence than on Almighty God” could preserve America’s “career of liberty” once her towns and cities inevitably became “engulphed in luxury and effeminacy.”
Modern minds may see two classes of concern here: one technocratic and economic, the other cultural and religious. But in Ramsay’s federalist-republicanism, they are of a piece. Likewise, there is no radical American Revolution whose soaring democratic wings the Constitution later clipped. The successive extension of the Declaration’s recognition of innate human equality—all the revolution’s latent democratic implications so celebrated by later historians—required the effectuating agency of a constitutional order that preserves the pursuit of property.
As this once-young republic celebrates its 250th birthday, it hurtles willfully toward a sovereign debt crisis of global proportions. Amid self-congratulatory commentary on various newfound liberties in our personal lives, we would do well to heed the warnings of our Revolution’s first historian. No commonwealth that despoils the industrious and thrifty by the inflationary effect of unfunded debt can long survive. The most liberal-democratic aspirations without fiscal prudence amount only to so much blood in the streets.
