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The Question of Home Rule
Eliga H. Gould
| NEARLY a hundred years ago, Carl Lotus Becker famously suggested that the American Revolution was, at base, an attempt to answer two questions. The first, which Becker termed "the question of home rule," involved the colonies' external rights vis-à-vis the British government (and, after 1776, each other); the second was the internal question "of who should rule at home." To this day American historians generally regard the second as the more significant, touching as it did on the gradual inclusion of "the common freeholder and ... unfranchised mechanic" within the political nation as well as the refusal to make comparable concessions to women, blacks, or Native Americans.1 As Jack P. Greene reminds scholars, however, the question of home rule was and is no less important. Indeed, in causative terms, the allocation of collective rights within the far-flung polity of the United States was probably of greater moment than the debates over the individual rights belonging to any particular class or group. By conferring on the post-1776 states the same rights as their colonial predecessors, the American Founders practically ensured that the white settlers whose interests the British Empire had so effectively served would remain firmly in control of the federal Republic that took its place on the North American mainland. |
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Of the various implications of this argument, probably none is more subversive than Greene's postcolonial contention that the Revolution preserved and in many ways intensified exploitative patterns set during the colonial era. In a rubric that dates to Progressive historians of Becker's generation, scholars have tended to think of the Revolution as marking a clean break, with the social and intellectual upheaval that accompanied independence constituting a radical (and usually democratic) attempt, in the words of Bernard Bailyn, "to begin the world anew." In its most pronounced, textbook form, the result is a narrative in which the republican ideology that animated men and women in 1776 becomes the dominant force in subsequent chapters of American history, setting the terms by which its various actors gained (or failed to gain) the benefits of citizenship. As Greene rightly cautions, the Revolution's "transformative power" in any area of American life was "far weaker" than such conventions would suggest, and the continuities it perpetuated were far greater. Despite the egalitarian claims in the Declaration of Independence, the chief obstacle to changing the post-1776 status quo was the sanction that the revolutionary settlement gave to the social and political order as it existed on the eve of independence. When abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of the Constitution, denouncing it for the power it conferred on Southern slaveholders, they knew exactly what they were doing.2 |
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If Greene's argument offers little comfort to the heirs of Becker and the Progressive tradition, it is no more likely to please historians with a vested interest in seeing the American Republic as a unitary nation-state. The Constitution of 1787, argues Greene, was "less a national than a federal settlement," ensuring that home rule continued to refer primarily to the states, not the union or nation. Practically the only constant in Thomas Jefferson's political philosophy was his conviction, born of the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, that concentrating power in a strong central government (whether British or American) was the single greatest threat to the union's integrity. When this principle clashed with others—as it did during the Missouri crisis of 1819–21 with congressional efforts to prevent the territory's citizens from legalizing slavery—Jefferson accepted, almost as a matter of course, that ultimate authority ought to remain with the states and the white settlers whose interests they represented. Although Britain's post-1783 empire was also, in many respects, a "virtual nation," Parliament's imperial sovereignty remained sufficiently vigorous to force West Indian planters to accept the end of slavery during the 1830s. In the United States, on the other hand, federalism kept the balance of power securely in the hands of Southern slaveholders.3 |
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