Sixty-One: Pretty Revolutions

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 18^th-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 17^th-century America, educated lawyers were rare. Many lawyers had no formal legal training, and some were only semiliterate. In the 18^th 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.