The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution - Research Paper Example

Although the American experiment in republican self-government reached its zenith in the establishment of the United States Constitution, that document had many philosophical and political antecedents. Among them, one of the most important was the Charter of Privileges written by William Penn when he was granted the proprietary governorship of the Pennsylvania colony by Charles II, in repayment of a debt owed to his father by the king. The move toward democracy which is found in this document and in its own antecedent frameworks -- including the important initial document known as the First Frame, which had been drawn up by Penn while he was still in England and preparing to move his group of colonists under the royal charter -- came to be a critical influence in the building of a political foundation eventually leading to the establishment of the new nation. In this brief paper, the development of the Charter of Privileges and its outlines for self-government will be reviewed in order to discuss in detail the influence that the document held for later events in the founding of the nation. A chronological approach will be taken to studying the Charter, with comments on the political and social contexts of the document and the times. First, it will be shown how the document known as First Frame led to the Charter of Privileges and following this, a discussion of the content of the Charter itself will be offered to show how it led to the concept of democratic self-government. Penn was a member of the religious group known as the Quakers. This group held to a series of strong religious and ideological beliefs that often brought them into conflict with the political and religious authorities in England. They were convinced that their forms of religious worship, which revolved around a pacifist, silent meditation on the nature of God and man, were correct, and they were unwilling to bend to the dictates of either the English government or the their more aggressively zealous religious rivals, the Puritans. Because of the societal and religious strife that occurred in England during the civil wars of the mid-1600s, they eventually came to be persecuted for their beliefs, often being harassed to the point of being locked up (Powell, n.d.). Penn’s father had made a sizeable loan to the king before his death, and in an attempt to find a way to move his people out of England, to somewhere that they could practice their religion freely and openly, Penn called in the loan. He was granted a charter to establish the Pennsylvania colony and given the proprietary rule of the colony to govern as he saw fit, provided that the laws he established fell under the general legal purview of the English constitutional monarchy (Powell, n.d.). In line with both his religious convictions and his own beliefs regarding the need for self-government Penn decided that he would establish a government that moved much further toward democracy than anything that was evident in England at the time. He drew up the First Frame as a governing document to accomplish his objectives. The First Frame begins with a description of why law is needed among men. It argues that God established men as his deputies to rule the word and gave them the skills and intelligence that they needed in order to rule justly. However, it points out that a lust for power and other “transgressions” had led men to be disobedient to God’s law and therefore a need was evident for judicial administration. Such administration required the need for rules that would govern men, as well as a governor to administer the rules (Penn, 1682). But the question then arose: How should one design the government? Should rule by monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy be preferred? Penn answered with the following: I choose to solve the controversy with this small distinction, and it belongs to all three: Any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion (Penn, 1682). With this simple construction, Penn suggested the critical difference between the colony he would establish and the government of England’s rule, as he and his people viewed it. The people who would be subject to the laws ought to have a hand in making them. That is the only way, according to the Penn in the First Frame, that men may remain free even as they are ruled by law. The First Frame, therefore, established the outlines of a government that had the following characteristics: 1. A council of 72 members would be established to propose legislation. 2. A General Assembly of up to 500 members would approve laws. 3. A Governor would be installed with both voting and veto powers. 4. Elections would be held with overlapping terms for members in order to ensure continuity of experience. 5. Standing courts would be instituted to ensure proper administration of laws (Penn, 1682). The First Frame, by operating according to these characteristics, was established with limited but explicit directions for how the government should rule. Powell claims that the ideals expressed in the First Frame anticipated those found in later documents such as the Declaration of Independence. Specifically, he points to the notion that men have rights which even the government cannot take away and states that this is a critical feature of the First Frame: Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature ... no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent (Powell, n.d.). Because it was established before the colonists even set off for the New World, the First Frame served as an early version of a constitution which established a government, rather than a justification of the government after it had already been in place. Penn believed that this was necessary in order to limit the government so that even when he was no longer the governor of the colony the government would remain trustworthy. He believed that this was important because, although he obviously trusted himself to run the government conscientiously in protecting the colonists’ rights -- by, for example, keeping taxes low -- he worried what would happen once he left office. Additionally, another concern addressed in the First Frame revolved around the fact that Penn wanted to make sure there was a provision to change the government if it became necessary to do so once the realities of governing in the New World became evident. To meet this concern, according to Powell, the First Frame provided for an amendment process, and was the first constitution to do so. The First Frame served its purpose and furthered the cause of democracy, but it eventually became clear that the government would have to be defined in even more clear terms. This was because the government was faced with concerns such as dealing with the Native American tribes and colonists who didn’t share the Quakers’ religious beliefs. When Penn wrote the First Frame, his primary concern had been to protect the religious freedom that he cherished so dearly. Once on the scene in the colony, however, the day-to-day administration needs of the colonies brought about new realities that required new ways of thinking about the government’s powers. Penn realized that he would have to develop a set of rights and understandings that would avoid the types of problems that existed in English rule. It was into this social and political context that the idea for the Charter of Privileges came to exist. The Charter of Privileges was established as the fourth rewriting of the rules for governing in Pennsylvania. The government had undergone a series of earlier revisions which dealt with important procedural issues. These were important because they were in keeping with the movement to democracy. Specifically, the rights of the governor had been weakened by limiting his voting powers, and the rights of the Assembly had been strengthened by granting it power to propose legislation in the Second Frame and Third Frame, respectively. While Penn was not entirely convinced that the shift in the balance of power for the colonial government was a good one, he agreed to it because it seemed to be dictated by the very principles he hoped to achieve by limiting the government and increasing individual rights. The Charter was, effectively, the Fourth Frame of government and came to replace the other three frames, thereby becoming a new constitution for the colony. It came about in 1701, some twenty years after the settling of the colony. The Charter, like the First Frame which preceded it, begins by recognizing the absolute need to respect religious freedoms. It is to this end that Penn desired to amend the governing structure. However, the effect of the design for government in the document would do much more than this. For example, the Council which had been established initially to propose legislation was demoted to the role of an advisory panel. Additionally, the Assembly gained greatly in power, and was expanded to include representatives from each county in the colony. These two moves meant that the government was brought even closer to the people as the locus of power. Penn agreed to these changes in part because he had no choice, due to the rising demands of the colonists for more autonomous authority. However, as Powell argues, the experience of ruling the Pennsylvania colony had taught Penn that, despite some fairly serious conflicts that had arisen between the Quaker majority and the other colonists over such concerns as patronage and commerce, the right to self-govern was one which the citizens in the new world had become accustomed to and proven capable of. In other colonies, such as the Massachusetts colony, religious persecution had crept back in through the actions of the Puritan governing officials. In Pennsylvania, however, the religious ideals espoused by the Quakers had meshed well with the notions of limited government and greater individual autonomy. And so Penn agreed in the Charter to extend those rights. In many ways the Charter was a test of Penn’s commitments to his own ideals, and he threw himself as governor into a faithful adherence to the notion that religious experience could both inform and control the law if men were but given a chance to practice religion freely. Following a kind of “holy experiment” the Charter established a number of procedural elements that would lead, once the religious instinct was taken out of government, to a greater extension of rights and autonomy. Any citizen who practiced a respect for and adherence to a tolerant faith could run for and sit for office, thereby promoting the eventual extension of the voting franchise to all citizens under the US Constitution and its amendments. The assembly would make and pass laws, and the governor and judiciary would administer them. This notion began steps toward divided government which would be taken up in the Constitution. Criminals would be given the right to counsel and all men would be granted freedom of conscience, religion and property rights, thereby leading to a notion of a Bill of Rights. All men would keep unto themselves any rights not ascribed to the government, thereby promoting limited government. The establishment of rights as inviolable and the implementation of controls on government would lead to the notion that government derived its power from the people, not the other way around. All of these concepts were stated explicitly in the Charter, as a way of founding the governing principles so that they could not change with the whim of public authorities. There were other procedural elements within the Charter of Privileges that would prove immensely important in the later formulation of the Constitution. Besides the ability of the Assembly to pass its own laws, it also had the ability to decide for itself who could run for office and how elections would be structured. By placing such concerns in the hands of the people, Penn again took a risk that good government could be maintained when placed closer to the people. Whereas the First Frame had stated clearly that God had granted the right to govern with certain deputies and that these deputies then had a responsibility to rule the people well, in the Charter the right to decide many of the elements that went into forming the government were placed in the hands of those would eventually be ruled by those laws. This was another key move to democracy. Penn might have, had he not been so trusting in the religious instincts and goodwill of his citizens, kept more power to himself as governor in an attempt to make sure his cherished ideals of religious tolerance were protected. However, by trusting the people to make good decisions he gave over a power that, once it was gone could not be regained easily, except by a use of force that Penn himself surely would have been reluctant to use. As with the extension of religious liberties in the first place, the extension of political rights to promote and protect those religious liberties came to rest in the hands of the people. The center of power shifted in the colony (Bailyn, 1992). The effects of the Charter of Privileges were long lasting and widespread. It is no coincidence that when the founding fathers met to formulate the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they came to Pennsylvania. While the other colonies, notably Virginia, had also moved significantly toward democracy, it was in Pennsylvania under Penn’s religious tolerance regime that the greatest development of individual autonomy and democratic freedoms came to reside. The Charter was an important document because it promoted a kind of tolerance, but it was in the way the machinery of government was established to protect that tolerance that the real genius of Penn’s governing style and substance met their lasting importance. By attempting to rule in a benevolent fashion that was in the interests of his citizens, Penn came to realize that the people themselves should be ever-increasingly involved in forming the content of that very rule (Bailyn, 1992). As such, the Charter of Privileges came to have a major influence on the thinking of those who came later. By promoting freedom of conscience, rights to property, rights to fair trial, and the like, Penn’s Charter established the beginning of what would become the founding principles of the new government that was developed following the American Revolution. And by establishing a people-centered approach to obtaining and protecting those rights, he built a government that would inspire the limited and structurally divided government that would eventually be the goal when the colonies came together to form a perfect union. The Charter of Privileges is not a document that many people look to and understand today. With its emphasis on religion, it speaks to a concern that is simply not relevant to the governing structure we hold dear today. However, it is because the Pennsylvania governor wanted to protect that religious liberty and keep his people from suffering the abuse they had suffered in England that the procedural and principled approach to government were developed in the document. As such it forms an important part of the American political heritage. References Bailyn, Bernard. 1992. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridg MA: Belknap Press of Harvard. Penn, William. 1682. Frame Of Government of Pennsylvania. 3 May, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/bcp/frampenn.htm Penn, William, 1701. Pennsylvania of Privileges. 3 May, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/bcp/penncharpriv.htm Powell, Jim. William Penn, America’s First Great Champion for Liberty and Peace. Quaker.org. 3 May, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.quaker.org/wmpenn.html. Read More