We need our revolutions to be pretty. Well, not exactly
pretty, like rosy, but pretty, like neat. They need to be comprehensible and
easy to interpret; otherwise how usable will they be for those who come after.
They need to be undertaken by the ‘good’ people, or -- if we are trying to
resist change – by the ‘bad’ people. They shouldn’t be undertaken by a diverse
group of people for conflicting purposes grounded simply in material
self-interest. So, this brings us to a second rule: revolutions should be undertaken
by idealists, whether or not we like them. That way we can find our own
‘better’ selves reflected through or in the revolution. If it is our fight, we
will need to see the changes (often violent as they are) as being worth it
because they are backed up by our high ideals. If it is someone else’s fight,
we will want our side to be justified by a cause or two of our own, even if it
is just the assumption that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds.
Either way, we help define ourselves neatly in the process.
But revolutions are never this way. While they may have half
lives of idealism that can get the nations that emerge from them through a
decade or two, or maybe even a century or two, they are always open to
interpretation and questioning. Simply put, the new orthodoxy that gets
established in the place of the old orthodoxy is still going to be inadequate
as an explanation for the messiness of history.
These two “truths” – that revolutions need to be pretty and
idealistic – seem perfectly clear when we are looking at other people’s
revolutions. Take the Russian – there were a bunch of Bolsheviks, a majority in
nobody’s minds but their own – who imposed communist doctrine on an empire.
Ditto China. But the idealism Petered out and the St. Paul of corruption turned
Leninist idealism into Stalinist pogroms. Ditto the Cultural Revolution. The
French: from Girondins, through Robespyre
and guillotine, to bones apart – say no more. It is only when we come to the
American Revolution that everything – history – comes unglued. Here a
revolution that never made much sense to anyone who was involved in it – and
certainly not much to the British who had other concerns to deal with –
developed idealism half-lives that push well beyond strontium on the road to
plutonium for some of the seediest of self-interested characters – 230 years
and counting.
How does a society, your society, pull off this feat of
repeatedly injecting idealism back into its revolution and continuing to find
this comprehensible and historical? There are many answers.
The first, of course, is that you need your revolution to
have been considered a relatively insignificant affair – and indeed, the stakes
were considered to be very low with regard to the American revolution. The fact
that nobody cares about your revolution, because it simply isn’t seen to matter
very much, really helps you to stake a claim for idealism and plant your seed
firmly in this idealistic soil. Compare any other revolution and the responses
they stirred. Haiti – slaves revolting, wow, stomp on that. Russia –
proletariat acting out, let’s all invade. China – Mao or less insane, how about
a war in Korea? America – well we don’t need its food anymore, because we’ve
got Canada; we don’t want to do what it takes to win this thing, because we may
lose our prosperous slave colonies in the Caribbean. Besides, who the hell
wants New Jersey?
The second is that you should, in spite of yourself and your
best efforts to do otherwise, become a great nation. In this way, the seed
firmly planted will grow into a strong plant, and the fact that the seed is
being given miracle grow that allows it to shoot up in spite of, not because
of, the idealistic soil will go largely unnoticed. A Louisiana Purchase is
really all you need. This will take you from being a small nation hemmed in by
empires that will be able to pick you off at a time of their choosing, to being
an empire in your own right. You will have won the yellow bits on the Risk
board – well the best spaces, anyway – and you can begin an expansion of your
own. Your best efforts to do otherwise would be to say to Napoleon, as
Jefferson did, hey, we don’t mind if you invade Haiti. We worry more about the
success of a slave rebellion on our own plantations in Virginia than we do
about the fact that you’ll bring your army to New Orleans, and establish the
whole Louisiana territory as your breadbasket for your sugar colonies.
The third answer is that every time you go back to develop
the teleology that you call history you must simplify the story so that the
messy parts get left out. Essentially, this means you must forget New Jersey –
home of the Sopranos and their ancestors.
So what of New Jersey? If you are to understand the
revolution, or at least comprehend all the dimensions of its
incomprehensibility as a pretty revolution, you must learn about New Jersey.
Who were the 18th-century Sopranos. They were basically the
Proprietors and their agents who wanted to ensure that they established a
Scottish style landowning system at the expense of the yeomanry, who had
settled on the land. While the landowners were clearing the land in the
Highlands of Scotland, the would be owners of New Jersey, the Proprietors, were
getting their agents to begin the process of clearing all the lowlifes (read
regular people) from their lands throughout the colonies.
Arch villain in this is a man named James Alexander.
The rise of the professional bar further alienated common
farmers from the judiciary. In 17th-century America, educated lawyers
were rare. Many lawyers had no formal legal training, and some were only
semiliterate. In the 18th century this changed as London-trained
attorneys (James Alexander being a prominent example) arrived in the colonies
and established informal law schools in their offices. Soon, a trained legal
cadre emerged and reignited a deep, latent hostility to the bar, variants of
which were evident throughout Anglo-American society. The hostility of
provincial yeomen toward lawyers was strong because they were understood as
dispute-encouraging parasites. “There is,” wrote a young law clerk in 1745,
“perhaps no Set of Men that bear so ill a Character in the Estimation of the
Vulgar, as the gentlemen of the Long Robe.” The fact that James Alexander
trained many of New Jersey’s lawyers in his office only reinforced popular
hostility to the bar.
The Revolution in New Jersey was essentially a story of
these lawyers endeavoring not to lose control of the position they had
established under William Franklin, in the face of growing dissent against the
Crown throughout the colonies. This meant that they needed to know which way
the political winds were blowing and act accordingly. The result was that their
loyalties were not firmly established, and they were quick to respond to
whether or not General Howe or General Washington was on the ascendancy.
All of this is embodied in the person of Richard Stockton.
He was a product of the East Jersey and New York law firms, a judge who was
very much aligned with Lord Dartmouth and Franklin. He was the kind of person
who would turn up at a convention of radicals and instead of immediately
signing an idealistic declaration of independence, would ask for a
recapitulation of the pros and cons; he was the kind of person who would later
sign an oath of loyalty to the King, and then once Washington had reestablished
control, change sides once again.
Revolutions are never neat, of course, but it is neat, as a
historian, to see how the least idealistic of all the revolutions has gained
ascendancy as the most determined by ideas. That is partly the result of so
much history, all those messy bits, being suppressed so comprehensively.
