The Origins of American Politics by Bernard Bailyn

The Origins of American Politics Reviews

• 
  Richard Subber

  This is readable academic history that explains some of the foundational reasons for the decisions of many American colonial leaders to declare independence from England in the late 18th century.
  
  Bailyn makes it clear that the Americans felt deep conviction that they were Englishmen entitled to the rights of Englishmen and eager to embrace what they and most English political thinkers viewed as the ideal tri-partite form of government: king/executive branch/, House of Lords/aristocratic branch, and House of Commons/democratic branch. There was remarkable, cogent, and, at the time, convincing evidence that the inherent checks and balances of these three elements would sustain good government.
  
  However, the English king, his ministers, and the powerful elite class in England exercised compelling “influence” that organized and coerced the three branches to do the bidding of the king and his aristocratic supporters. The government tended to be stable, and most observers thought it was working satisfactorily.
  
  The Origins of American Politics makes it plain that no such system of “influence” existed in the colonials, where the right to vote was much more widespread and where no propertied elite class had grown to prominence and domination. The colonists wanted the power that they thought the Lords and the Commons were routinely exercising.
  
  The king and his ministers and Parliament wanted to control the governance and commerce of the colonies. The Englishmen in the colonies were intent on establishing and sustaining, for their own benefit, the kind of “perfect” government structure that they thought they saw in London.
  
  When the colonists became convinced that the home government was corruptly trying to overpower their colonial governments and their rights, things started to get political.
  
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  www.richardsubber.com
• 
  Nathan Albright

  As someone familiar with the author's work [1], I must say I enjoyed this book and had a good idea of what to expect from it given that familiarity.  One of Bailyn's major strengths as a historian is to move beyond the cliches of what is popularly known about the political history of the colonial period and to integrate what was going on with the American colonies with the larger Atlantic world.  One thing as well that I appreciate about Bailyn is his restraint when it comes to contemporary politics.  A lesser writer would have hit the reader over the head with the negativity of how contemporary political problems are related to patterns that began in the colonial period, but Bailyn writes in detail about the colonial history and shows mastery of the relevant historiography (as per usual) and lets the reader draw the conclusions about the implications and consequences of America's paranoid political culture.  This book is an example of how a writer manages to layer one's discussion and how to remain relevant by focusing on the historical aspects and allowing the reader to bring their own context to that material.
  
  The materials of this relatively short book (a bit more than 150 quarto pages) were originally the November 1965 Charles K. Colver Lectures at Brown University.  Although these are somewhat old essays, they retain a great deal of interest because they provided Bailyn with the opportunity to develop insights into the way that British country politics provided a fertile ground for colonials to understand their own political situation in conspiratorial and paranoid fashion, a tendency that has continued to contemporary political rhetoric.   The author begins by looking at the sources of American political culture (1) in a transplanted version of country politics that included radical Whig and radical Tory opposition literature to the later Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs.  After this the author examines the structure of colonial politics (2) and examines the explosive combination of the prerogative of governors and the colonial establishment with the weaknesses and rigidity of their position in the face of intransigent and highly democratic colonial legislatures, a storm that never ceased to be problematic in most of the British colonies and which led quickly to a desire for independence in the face of tightening efforts at integration by England in the post-1763 period.  The author then closes the essays with a look at the legacy of the colonial political order (3) with a struggle in legitimizing partisanship and a tendency to view opposition in conspiratorial and paranoid ways.
  
  To put it bluntly, this is a great book.  If you are familiar with the general tenor and approach of Bailyn's works, this book is broadly similar to his collections of essays where the author demonstrates his intimate awareness with sources as well as an approach that takes writers during the period on both sides of the Atlantic seriously.  Rather than assuming that writers were merely being overheated, he takes their fears seriously and examines how these fears sprang from a worldview where opposition was viewed in the most negative light.  And although these essays are more than half a century old, they remain relevant because they discuss long-term patterns that have remained consistent within American culture, namely the tendency on the part of people to accept partisanship and decry the corrupting influences of political patronage (crony capitalism and its cousins) while not often connecting the oppositional nature of American political culture to the problems of legitmizing dissent and keeping a political culture going without a continual sense of crisis in the absence of patronage and sheer bribery.  Bailyn's book helps us to understand the roots of our own contemporary political crises in quarrels over the proper place of government and our simple lack of trust in those who would claim authority over us.
  
  [1] See, for example:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
• 
  Lobstergirl

  
  This was a small book but extremely dense. It's a series of three lectures Bailyn gave in 1965. As is sometimes my wont I raced through it and, as with some foodstuffs, 53.6744% of it did not absorb.
• 
  Boone Ayala

  I find Bailyn’s story extremely engaging but ultimately flawed. His basic question is why the arguments of opposition writers during Walpole’s administration - Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon - found such explosive purchase in the American colonies when they were peripheral within English politics. (In this way this book forms an excellent complement with Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which talks about the deployment of these ideas. Indeed, the two works must be read together.)
  
  Following Plumb and Namier, Bailyn sees 18th century Britain as remarkably stable politically as a result of a strong executive, with power over patronage, a small electorate, rotten boroughs, and a philosophy of virtual representation. All of these meant that it was possible for Walpole and his successors to exert strong control over British politics, and so keep the whole remarkably peaceful.
  
  In America, these powers did not exist. While colonial governors did possess sweeping powers to veto laws, erect courts, and otherwise exert prerogative powers, they were unable to control politics in the colonies. The broad suffrage, the control of patronage networks by Whitehall or the assemblies (but not the Governor), and the tumultuous socioeconomic environment of the colonies meant that in America politics was more dynamic. The Governor’s strength in prerogative powers, the assembly’s independence, and the absence of a hereditary aristocracy (preventing the tripartite mixed constitution of England from functioning in the colonies) meant that conflict in the colonies was often between a “Robinacal” (Walpolean) Governor attempting but failing to undermine the independence of the assembly and an assembly that consistently asserted its privileges at the expense of prerogative - and so seemed to be a threat.
  
  Thus it was the political context of the colonies which made them more receptive to the ideas of opposition writers. It was because politics in America was not Namierite that it was so unstable.
  
  Bailyn’s lectures are engaging and well-written, and the ideas are thought-provoking. But he falls short in a few ways. First, he doesn’t explain why these same processes would not have taken place in the British West Indies. Second, I disagree pretty fundamentally with a Namierite vision of English politics in this period, favoring a split between Patriots, Establishment Whigs, and Tories (Wilson’s Sense of the People; Justin du Rivage’s Revolution Against Empire; Pincus’s Heart of the Declaration; Brewer’s Politics and Ideology at the Accession of George III). I wonder about how to fit Ireland, or Wilkes, into this story. Third, I think Bailyn’s view of the political horizon of the assemblies is contradictory. Many times he mentions that they were steeped in the 18th century literature on British politics, but at other times he mentions that all of their concerns were parochial. Did they not have ideas about how the empire should function in general?
• 
  Lauren Albert

  I found Bailyn's argument very interesting and it makes sense--he claims that Governors and other British leaders in the colonies had more power and less influence than their peers back "home". The first offended their constituents and the second made it difficult for them to deal with the consequences of the offense! They lacked the ability to manipulate with the handing out of positions and money.
  
  The Origins of American Politics
  Bernard Bailyn
  Vintage, 1970
  
  “But it was in these three areas primarily—the vetoing of colonial legislation; proroguing and dissolving legislative bodies; and dismissing judges and creating courts—that the legal power of the executive was felt to be the most archaic and threatening, a source of danger to liberty and to the free constitution.” 69
  
  “The royal governors arrived in the colonies not merely with a commission that outlined their duties but with a book of instructions that filled in the details so minutely and with such finality that in some of the most controversial and sensitive public issues the executive was in effect politically immobilized.” 71
  
  “And later, after the Revolution, it would be commonly said in England and in loyalist circles that ‘the King and government of Great Britain held no patronage in the country, which/could create attachment and influence sufficient to counteract that restless, arrogating spirit which in popular assemblies, when left to itself, will never brook an authority that checks and interferes with its own.’” 72-3
  “The patronage forfeited by the governors to the home authorities was small, however, next to the losses that fell to the local political powers in the colonies.” 75;
  
  “Thus the colonial governors were stripped of much of the power of patronage by which in England the administration could discipline dissent within the political community and maintain its dominance within Parliament. But it was not the existence of patronage alone that in England gave the administration its unique political advantage. The highly irregular, inequitable, and hence easily manipulated electoral system contributed greatly; and this too was absent in America.” 80
  
  “Instruction was but one form by which representation in the colonies was kept ‘actual,’ a form of attorneyship, as distinct from the virtual representation celebrated in Burke’s description of Parliament…/As well as being instructed by their constituents, delegates were required, often, to be actual residents of the communities they represented at the time of their incumbency.” 84-5
  
  “But if ownership of land was a restrictive qualification in England, it was permissive in the colonies where freehold tenure was almost universal among the white population.” 86
  
  “Gubernatorial appointments, as part of the patronage system of English politics, were susceptible to all of the vagaries, discontinuities, and irrationalities of that system. The determination of gubernatorial tenure had less to do with the shape of American political problems than with the exigencies of politics in England…” 88
  
  “Thus the configuration of circumstances: a deeply bred, firmly rooted assumption, reinforced by the appearance of institutions, that the colonial constitutions corresponded in their essentials to the prototypically mixed/government of England; an assumption, an expectation, violated in fact, first, by what were believed to be excessive powers, associated with Stuart autocracy, in the hands of the first order of the polity, and second, by the less clearly recognized but politically more important absence in the colonies of the cluster of devices by which in England the executive maintained discipline, control, and stability in polititcs.” 95-6
  
  “Leadership was uncertain largely because the economy was uncertain. The interests that sought expression in politics varied and shifted.” 99
  
  “The openness of the economy led to repeated innovations and displacements/that sought expression in politics. There were no ‘classes’ in colonial politics, in the sense of economic or occupational groups whose political interests were entirely stable, clear, and consistent through substantial periods of time. More important, there was not sufficient stability in the economic groupings more loosely defined
  to re-create in America the kind of stable interest politics that found in England so effective an
  expression in ‘virtual’ representation.” 99-100
  
• 
  Miranda

  Thank God it's over! This book was almost insultingly dry. However it has an interesting premise. It's a collection of three essays. His essays focus on the political thoughts and circumstances that dominated the pre-Revolutionary era in not only the American colonies but also in England. He historically analyzes the effects that these thoughts had on the emergence of patriotism in the colonies and the drive for independence that would follow and lead to the American Revolution.
• 
  Frederick

  Quite an eye-opening book on the conspiracy theories and fractiousness rampant in colonial politics. It is clear that a desire to be independent from Britain existed under the surface decades before it exploded and Americans have always been paranoid and suspicious of the motives of anyone of their kith and kin with opposing opinions. This is well worth the read and easy to understand.
• 
  Craig Bolton

  The Origins of American Politics by Bernard Bailyn (1970)