THE SUN RISES IN THE WEST: AMERICA’S CALL TO REMAKE THE WORLD ORDER
(This is taken from my forthcoming book on America entitled The Sun Rises in the West. The spirit of America is a powerful one and one that saw commerce as essential to the service of wealth, which can make all things possible to so many. That having been said, the economic situation in the colonies and the relation with England was not good for the colonists. Restricted in trade, restricted in manufacturing, short of hard currency, and facing the threat of the systematic destruction of various industries, the American leadership in particular understood the threat to their well-being from a class of people far away who showed some determination in enforcing policies across the ocean. Added to all of that was the reality that in the colonies was a new people — the Americans. True to the maxim, don’t let a good crisis go to waste, there were some in the American leadership who saw opportunity in the dislocations and disorders caused by the mercantile tyranny imposed by the English plutocracy, which Charles and Mary Beard estimate to have numbered no more than 10,000. This plutocracy controlled the British Government of which George III was the head.)
“That nascent crisis, which at the end of the last war `opened a new channel of business and brought into operation a new concatenation of powers, both political and commercial,’ is now, at the beginning of this present war, come forward into birth, in perfect and established system. `The spirit of commerce hath become a leading and predominant power,’ it hath formed throughout North-America, and hath extended to Europe the basis of a new commercial system. `The rise and forming of that system was what precisely constituted the crisis of that time.’…”[1]
So wrote Thomas Pownall about the American Revolution, and the reordering of the world that was underway. Pownall (1722-1805) was well-connected with the English international business leaders especially as his brother John was an official in the Board of Trade that operated England’s vast commercial empire. Thomas was the royal governor of Massachusetts for three years, later serving as governor of South Carolina and Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey. He came to know, and keep good relations with, the American luminaries of the day to include Benjamin Franklin who he first met at the Albany Conference in 1754 as the colonists were gathering to come up with a common plan of defense against the Indians.
Pownall identified the dynamics that ultimately lead to a successful revolution by the Americans. He explained those dynamics in a piece called A memorial most humbly addressed to the sovereigns of Europe on the Present State of Affairs between the old and new world, a copy of which ended up in the library of John Adams who read it. Pownall previously wrote and published in 1766 The Administration of the Colonies which did what we would call a “deep dive” into the economic and political situation in the colonies. It too was revised over the years and a copy ended up in the library of John Adams and other American Founders. In these works Pownall showed his intimate understanding of the workings of the American economy and the centrality of commerce, while revealing the spirit of many members of the American leadership. Commerce is about currency, or money, something that the colonists did not have much of due to the English limitations on making specie. In his later years, Pownall corresponded with Francisco de Miranda about international trade and in doing so helped to provide a strong economic reason for rebellion against the Spanish crown.[2]
Another Thomas, Thomas Paine (1737-1809), was one of the most influential men of the late 18th Century as John Adams once remarked, and he held to an ideology for the organization of society that the other Founders agreed to though like Adams some of them questioned the role of democracy in the new government. Perhaps more than anyone else, he crystallized the ideology that underlay America – he put it into words such that men would fight for it. This ideology formed the basis of a political economy that found its protection and enshrinement in the United States Constitution. All of this was set out in Common Sense namely 1) religion was a private matter of worship and hence reduced to the realm of magic 2) America elevated the individual as the measure of all things and effectively destroyed at least all the European ethnicities 3) government was a necessary evil whose powers had to be limited and 4) America is dedicated to the accumulation of material wealth. He wrote in Common Sense, echoing the obser4vations and wisdom of Pownall that the war of independence was about commerce, and America was to be the new center:
“Besides, what have we to do with setting the world at defiance. Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port. Her trade will always be a protection, and her barrenness of gold and silver secure her from invaders.” [83]
Paine emphasized that the reordering of the world along the lines of commerce would also include a way to remake the world:
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birth-day of a new world is at hand, and a race of men perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom the event of a few months. The Reflection is awful – and in this point of view, How trifling, how ridiculous, do the little, paltry cavellings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.” [109]
After the American Revolution, Paine was deeply involved with entrepreneurs and even went so far as to work with them in establishing a bank:
“Paine was read by the artisans and the poor, but his natural friends were also the manufacturers, who were fast destroying traditional society. Paine, the entrepreneur, the salesman forever hawking his iron bridge, had great respect for the Wedgwoods, the Arkwrights, the Watts, and their counterparts in America who chartered the Bank of Pennsylvania. These enterprising individuals stood outside government; indeed, their achievements occurred in spite of government [from The Rights of Man]:
`It is from the enterprise and industry of the individuals and their numerous associations in which, tritely speaking, government is neither pillow nor bolster, that these improvements have proceeded. No man thought about the government, or who was in, or who was out, when he was planning or executing those things: and all he had to hope with respect to government, was that it would let him alone.’
“Paine’s entrepreneurial friends were engaged in the same egalitarian crusade as he was. Like him, they sought a redistribution of wealth and power that would be based on equality of opportunity and that would enable individuals and real ability to replace those of `no ability.’…”[3]
Paine explained that Liberalism, and in particular the American ideology that he put forth in Common Sense, was designed to insure the creation of a society in which the fittest would survive, those with ability and resources would rule the rest, wealth would be the highest prize like material success. The bogeyman was the aristocracy and “the hereditary system” as he wrote in Common Sense and On First Principles of Government. He wrote, in keeping with Richard Cantillon of about sixty years earlier:
“That property will ever be unequal is certain. Industry, superiority of talents, dexterity of management, extreme frugality, fortunate opportunities, or the opposite, or the means of those things will ever produce that effect, without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of avarice and oppression; and besides this there are some men who though they do not despise wealth, will not stoop to the drudgery of the means of acquiring it….while in others there is an avidity to obtain it by every means not punishable….All that is required with respect to property is to obtain it honestly and not employ it criminally….
“I have always believed that the best security for property, be it much or little, is to remove from e very part of the community, as far as can possibly be done, every cause of complaint, and every motive to violence; and this can only be done by an equality of rights. When rights are secure, property is secure in consequence. But when property is made a pretence for unequal or exclusive rights, it weakens the right to hold the property, and provokes indignation and tumult; for it is unnatural to believe that property can be secure under the guarantee of a society injured in its rights the influence of that property.” [462-463]
And, as he set forth in Dissertation on First Principles of Government as well as Anti-Monarchical Essay, “Establish the Rights of Man; enthrone equality…let there be no privileges, no distinctions of birth, no monopolies; make safe the liberty of industry and trade, the equal distribution of family inheritances.” [23] Hence the Rights of Man which makes everyone equal, even children.
It is not surprising that he went on to Paris (the English charged him with treason and did not let him return) to incite a revolution in France using similar rhetoric that he used in Philadelphia. He did all of this after helping found the Bank of Pennsylvania while defending it as essential for commercial growth which meant the betterment and happiness of all. Paine also advocated for a stronger central government as the 1780s wore on. By April, 1787 he was en route to Europe and ultimately France where he witnessed the early stages of the French Revolution, and reportedly was quite pleased with the same. He penned The Rights of Man which appeared in 1791 and called for the replacement of the aristocratic institutions of England and France more in keeping with republican government. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and patriotic English recoiled at Paine’s suggestions, and by November 1792 he was a persona non grata who was convicted the following month of seditious libel and banned from England.[4]
It is not surprising either that he was able to recognize that the American Revolution lead to the French Revolution. He wrote in Dissertation on First Principles of Government in 1795:
“Every art and science, however imperfectly known at first, has been studied, improved and brought to what we call perfection by the progressive labours of succeeding generations; but the science of government has stood still. No improvement has been made in the principle and scarcely any in the practice till the American Revolution began. In all the countries of Europe (except in France) the same forms and systems that were erected in the remote ages of ignorance still continue, and their antiquity is put in the place of principle; it is forbidden to investigate their origin, or by what right they exists…..” [452]
[1] Thomas Pownall, A Memorial Most Humbly Addressed to the Sovereigns of Europe on the Present State of Affairs Between the Old and New World (J.Debbett, London, 1780), 1-2; quoting from Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, 3rd Edition, (J. Walter, Charing Cross, London, 1766).
[2] John A. Schultz, Thomas Pownall, British Defener of American Liberty: A Study of Anglo-Ameriecan Relations in the Eighteenth Century,” (A.H.Clark & Co., Glendale, California, 1951), 267-288.
[3] See, The Thomas Paine Reader, (Penguin, London 1987), 22-23.
[4] See, The Thomas Paine Reader, (Penguin, London, 1987), 9-29.