The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution

by Trevor Colbourn

In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history influenced the thinking of the founding fathers. As Jack P. Greene has observed, “[The Whig] conception saw the past as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other.” Many founders found in this intellectual tradition what Josiah Quincy, Jr., called the “true old English liberty,” and it was this Whig tradition―this conception of liberty―that the champions of American independence and crafters of the new republic sought to perpetuate. Colbourn supports his thesis―that “Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it”―by documenting what books were read most widely by the founding generation. He also cites diaries, personal correspondence, newspapers, and legislative records. Trevor Colbourn is President Emeritus of the University of Central Florida.

Genres: History, American Revolution, Philosophy, American History

305 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[John David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beginning around the year 1760, American colonists were eager to lay claim to an intellectual mantle that would justify their own frustration with the increasing intrusions on colonial freedoms by the British throne. While it could be argued that the worst English offenses were still yet to come, the infringements upon personal liberties and freedoms the colonists had already experienced up to that point had already pushed them to start looking for ideological justifications to defend themselves against an encroaching George III.

It so happens that the books they read provided them with exactly what they were looking for. Eighteenth century colonial America was very much a reading culture, and one of the most popular kinds of books that colonists read was English history. A very particular kind of history was most common: radical Whig history. A representative sample of authors has names that are mostly forgotten today, with the possible exception of the famed jurist Sir Edward Coke. They include Robert Molesworth, William Atwood, and Catherine Macaulay.

In their work, each of these writers emphasizes the point that English history after the Norman Invasion (1066) was a slow series of intrusions that tried to usurp the freedoms and liberties of the Anglo and Saxons, the two tribes that ruled much of Britain in the immediate years before 1066. Whigs looked back at the Angles and Saxons and interpreted that contemporary English society should reclaim some of their principles and liberties, among them an annual representative parliament (the Witenagemot), a well-behaved militia, a trial by peers, and allodial land tenure. The contrasting school of English historiography, the Tory school, was much more friendly to the chain of monarchs beginning with William the Conqueror and denied any parliamentary claims.

After he details several popular examples of Whig history, Colbourn goes on to a series of sixteen case studies each of which examines the opinions of an influential colonist, especially in light of how these histories influenced their opinions of what American liberty should look like. Many of the libraries he looks at were of well-known colonists including Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, James Wilson. While many of these men were from either born into or attained membership in the aristocratic planter class, Colbourn insinuates that their sway under the influence of Whig history very much resembled that of the average history-consuming colonist.

Colbourn does explicitly go out of his way to say the reading habits of the Founding Fathers did not serve as motivation for their future political actions per se, and in doing do carefully reigns himself in from overstating the importance of his thesis. However, Colbourn does allude to the Founding Fathers using some of the ideas discovered in their reading to help them formulate insights about which political actions to take. Since we know that those who supported American Revolution, those against it, and those who were indifferent were roughly equal in number, it would be fascinating to read another study that took up the possible influence of Tory historiography in the colonies.

It is worth noting that Colbourn includes a postscript to the book in which he explicitly calls this retrospective Whig reading of history a “myth.” Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind, however, is that it was very much believed to be true at the time. Colbourn never spends too much time here trying to split hairs regarding which ideas about the “Saxon Myth” were true and which were not. Whatever the details, it is safe to say with some historical hindsight that whatever liberty looked like in pre-Norman England bears little resemblance to what the Founders intended for their nascent country.

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a time, one begins to feel as if the founders read themselves into a peculiar echo chamber. Not only were they influenced by a century's worth of partisan bickering over English history, they found themselves recapitulating and refashioning old arguments for new contexts. Despite the valuable work it does in recovering much of what the founders read (and they seem to have read many of the same things and derived very similar lessons from their reading), Colbourn's text is now dated in a number of respects. Some of Colbourn's views, for example, of Jefferson's politics, have been largely repudiated by more recent scholarship. If there is a methodological defect in the work, it has to do with the reliance on a relatively small set of authors, their correspondence (mostly with each other) and their library catalogs. This dependence on published monographs tends to overlook the vast one-way correspondence of newsprint polemic, from England to America. One can find Boston and Philadelphia papers, for instance, regurgitating editorials and claims that are a decade old or more. That these views were disseminated widely among a less illustrious and educated readership perhaps suggests that the masses were to some extent ready and fertile ground for the ideas of the founders, developed through more sustained and systematic engagement with English thinking. To that extent, Colbourn's work is unable to tap a quieter but still recoverable stream of ideological formation for the early colonists. Nevertheless, this book is to go to source for who read what among the generation of the signers.

[David Nichols · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1965 monograph has only one argument - that American Revolutionary leaders based much of their ideology on their misconceptions about the Anglo-Saxons and their "ancient constitution" - but it develops that argument pretty well. Helps to explain where Cleon Skousen got some of his bizarre ideas.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pleasant enough read on the early American tendency to believe whacky things about the past that would justify what they wanted to do politically.

Also, a rather amusing reminder of how different contemporary history is from that of Colbourn's generation. Despite the, ahem, interesting contradictions involved in all of the claims about how *all* Americans were free and had the rights of free-men and so on, you can guess what goes unmentioned.

[Reid Luzzader · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the major theses of this book is that the Founding Fathers believed that an ideal form of government existed in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. This Anglo-Saxon society was supposed to have consisted of an elected monarchy and parliament, had a constitution, elected judges, had trials by juries of peers, and was generally virtuous in all things.

The belief among 18th-century writers in this utopian time in history is correct. I’ve run into a number of references to it. It comes in turn from a description by the Roman historian Tacitus, and the admiration for Republican Rome by the Founding Fathers really can’t be overstated. I think it’s been relatively forgotten as part of the history of political thought for a couple of reasons. First, it later became part of racist arguments for Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

Secondly, it’s incorrect. To quote the author: “Saxon was certainly not the democratic one envisaged by Jefferson and the whigs. As a society, in fact, the Saxon was less agrarian than military, and the personal tie which bound peasant to lord involved the performance of a customary service nearly as rigid as that bought in by the Normans . . . the Saxon Councils were composed, not of all classes, but of the upper ranks of the aristocracy, along with ecclesiastics when the church became established.”

The last chapter is titled the “The Saxon Myth Dies Hard”. Indeed it does. Cleon Skousen, so admired in Utah and by Glenn Beck, believed it completely. (Even more strangely, he goes on to write that a similar democratic system existed in ancient Israel). (Pgs. 12-17).

Skousen, Cleon.. The 5000-Year Leap. National Center for Constitutional Studies. 1981, 2006 *
*It is the kind of stimulating book I should like to see being studied in all our high schools and universities - Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch.