pamphlets, correspondence, as well as pan-Atlantic interest groups, the flow of information between Europe and the colonies was continuous, and for Bailyn the most important of these were the writings of the English dissenters:
In every colony and in every legislature there were people who knew Locke and Beccaria, Montesquieu and Voltaire; but perhaps more important, there was in every village of every colony someone who knew such transmitters of English nonconformist thought as Watts, Neal, and Burgh; later Priestly and Price . . . In the bitterly contentious pamphlet literature of mid eighteenth-century American politics, the most frequently cited authority on matters of principle and theory was not Locke or Montesquieu but Cato’s Letters.31
Believing the American Revolution to be an ideological and constitutional struggle, Bailyn expected to find the influence of Enlightenment theology, common law, classical literature, as well as a certain amount of rhetoric and propaganda embedded in revolutionary writing. What he did not expect to find were those strands of thought that many historians had traditionally denounced as irrelevant, nonexistent or simply ‘obtuse secularism’.32 The first of these patterns of ideas was the pervasive influence of European Enlightenment theory and theology on the revolutionary generation. Not only were these influences relevant, he claimed, they revealed that ‘[c]itations, respectful borrowings from, or at least references to, the eighteenth-century European illuminati are everywhere in the pamphlets of Revolutionary America’. The ideas and writings of reformers such as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Beccaria, as well as conservative thinkers such as Montesquieu, were ‘quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed a broad awareness’.33 The second discovery was a pattern of ideas and attitudes that flowed directly from the British tradition of radical social and political thought transmitted to the colonists by libertarians, disaffected politicians and religious dissenters whose anti-authoritarianism was bred in the upheaval of the English Civil War. Nourished by the seventeenth-century political writings of John Milton and Algernon Sidney, early eighteenth-century libertarians such as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Benjamin Hoadly and Robert Molesworth, and the contemporary writings of Richard Price, Joseph Priestly and Thomas Paine, the revolutionary pamphleteers revealed an astonishing engagement with the language of radical and anti-establishment thought. This tradition, Bailyn noted, had never been applied to the origins of the American Revolution, and it was in the context of identifying and classifying these references and sources that he saw new meanings in the language of revolutionary literature. What Bailyn discovered was a lexicon of fear and suspicion, a ‘vivid vocabulary’ of ‘slavery’, ‘corruption’, ‘conspiracy’, expressed over and over in the profusion of arguments, replies, rebuttals and counter-rebuttals that made up the literature of the revolutionary period. This language was not merely the propaganda of completing interests groups, but represented a genuine fear of rising tyranny and corruption:
These inflammatory words were used so forcefully by pamphleteers of so great a variety of social statuses, political positions, and religious persuasions; they fitted so logically into the pattern of radical and opposition thought; and they reflected so clearly the realities of life in an age in which monarchical autocracy flourished, in which the stability and freedom of England’s ‘mixed’ constitution was a recent and remarkable achievement, and in which the fear of conspiracy against constituted authority was built into the very structure of politics, that I began to suspect that they meant something very real to both the writers and their readers; that there were real fears, real anxieties, a sense of real danger behind these phrases, and not merely the desire to influence by rhetoric and propaganda the inert minds of an otherwise passive populace.34
For the colonists, the real danger to America was the violation of those principles upon which freedom rested. By 1763, Britain’s ‘mixed constitution’, the balance of social and governmental forces was seen to be under threat by ‘Jacobite remnants’, ‘effeminising luxury’ and ‘festering corruption’. In addition, there appeared to be evidence that ‘nothing less than a deliberate conspiracy launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty’ was being perpetrated against America.
While conspiratorial fears were latent throughout colonial history, beginning with the Nonconformist’s suspicion of the Church of England’s ‘formal design to root out Presbyterianism’, the smouldering belief in a hidden plot directed against American liberties ignited with the institution of British policies in civil affairs: the passage of the Stamp Act, the Townsend Duties, the weakening of the judiciary and, especially, the implementation of standing armies, viewed by many as the keystone of arbitrary government, all confirmed for the colonists that the constitution was being undermined by what John Adams called the ‘serpentine wiles’ of the English administration. In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament ‘threw off the mask’ of legality and initiated a series of acts, intended to cripple the economic base of Massachusetts: the Administration of Justice Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Quebec Act and the Quartering Act. Once this interpretation of events took hold in the minds of the colonists, ‘it could not be easily dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible, for them, is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign’. It was this belief, according to Bailyn, that transformed the colonists’ struggle and that in the end propelled them into revolution.35
Although Bailyn’s work does not use the term republicanism directly, it emphasized the transatlantic influences on American institutions and employed the key terms by which republicanism would come to be identified. It was Bailyn’s student Gordon Wood who would advance the view of a developing republican ideology in revolutionary America. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, while less deterministic than Bailyn’s Pamphlets, registered a similar note of surprise at the patterns of thought and conceptual language of the American patriots:
my reading opened up an intellectual world I had scarcely known existed. Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process—a set of common assumptions about history, society, politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas.36
Following Bailyn’s description of revolutionary language meaning something ‘very real’ to both writers and readers, Wood also interprets the words of the generation not as hyperbole and propaganda but as genuine fears rooted in their culture and education. For Americans,
the Revolution meant nothing less than a reordering of eighteenth-century society and politics . . . a reordering that was summed up by the conception of republicanism . . . Republicanism meant more for Americans than simply the elimination of a king and the institution of an elective system. It added a moral dimension, a utopian depth, to the political separation from England—a depth that involved the very character of their society.
According to Wood, the one source of republican inspiration acknowledged by all Whigs, English and American alike, was classical antiquity where all the great republics had flourished. The profusion of classical allusions, references, iconography and language that ran through the colonists’ public and private writings revealed their investiture in creating an American neo-classical age. From their readings, Americans conceived of the ideal republic as one that avoided the downfall of the first and the sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and the idealistic goal of their revolution. This ideology came to represent a final or even desperate attempt ‘to realize the traditional Commonwealth ideal of a corporate society, in which the common good would be the only objective of government’.37 Its most exact English equivalent was commonwealth, or a state belonging to the whole people rather than the crown. The people were a homogenous body, linked organically to the state and while the state was viewed as one moral whole, any clashing interests or factions were regarded as perversions and signs of sickness in the body politic.38 Republicanism, in Wood’s view, was profoundly traditional, embodying the ideal of the good society from antiquity through to the eighteenth century. Individual liberty and the public good were reconcilable because in Whig ideology
