David Lefer - The Founding Conservatives: How a Group of Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution

INTRODUCTION

I n the fall of 1779 a small but fatal riot on the streets of Philadelphia changed the course of the Revolution and forever altered the nature of American politics. It began when hungry militiamen, enraged over the ever-rising cost of bread, seized four rich merchants. With fixed bayonets and a lone drummer beating The Rogues March, the mob paraded its captives around the city and then toward the house of the prosperous lawyer James Wilson. Wilson, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, was a staunch free-market advocate and opposed the sorts of price controls demanded by radicals. The mob, he knew, was not coming in peace.

Informed that an attack was imminent, Americas leading conservatives rushed to Wilsons house that afternoon to defend him. To the growing din of shouts and drum taps, they hastily barricaded the building and readied their powder. No one knows who fired the first shot, but within ten minutes the mob had rolled a cannon into firing position and was smashing through Wilsons doors with hammers and iron bars. Blood stained the street, and by the time the mob retreated, five men were dead and fourteen wounded. That Americas conservative leadership even survived the Fort Wilson Riot, as it was soon called, would have a lasting impact on American politics.

The street fight had a seismic impact on public perception as well. Within a year, fear of the mob would lead to the decline of radical power and the ascendance of conservatism as the dominant political force in America for the next twenty years. Those two decades were among the most formative in American history, and during this time conservatives found themselves in a position to shape the new republic, from rewriting the state constitutions and running the government under the Articles of Confederation to drafting the Constitution and getting it ratified in the states. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed in a speech entitled The Conservative American Revolution, Had James Wilson and his friends not defended themselves, this brawl on October 4, 1779, would have been to the American Revolution what the capture of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was to the French Revolution. In other words, had Americas first conservatives not held out that day, the nations history might have turned out radically different.

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O utside scholarly circles, most people have no idea that the American Revolution was wracked by bitter and often violent struggles between left and right. For much of the twentieth century, in fact, this notion was largely dismissed within the academic community as well. Morisons views, for example, were squarely in the minority when he described the significance of the Fort Wilson Riot in 1975.

Having taught American history for many years at both the high school and college level and having written about the subject in a previous book, I was astonished to discover this relatively unknown side of the American Revolution. I learned about it one day when one of my brightest students asked me who John Dickinson was. As far as I knew, Dickinson had played only a small role in the Revolution, but I was pleased to recall what most history textbooks say about him. He wrote the Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, I replied.

I know that, she said. Thats what it says in all the textbooks. But who was he?

I had to admit I didnt know any more about him but promised to get back to her with more information. A quick search revealed that only one Dickinson biography had been written in the twentieth century, a book with the oxymoronic title John Dickinson: Conservative Revolutionary. Could one be revolutionary and conservative at the same time? I wondered. I checked the book out of the library.

I was amazed to learn that in the buildup to independence, Dickinson was the most trusted man in America and the second most famous American in the world, after Benjamin Franklin. His contemporaries credited him with single-handedly rallying the colonies in the fight against British oppression. It was only because of Dickinson, said one American in 1774, that there was a present disposition to dispose the tyranny of Parliament.

Dickinsons accomplishments intrigued me so much that I began reading about his political allies, discovering in the process similar titles such as Carter Braxton: A Conservative in Revolt;Revolutionary Conservative: James Duane of New York; and Philip Schuyler: The Origins of a Conservative Patriot. These men were equally impressive. James Wilson, who studied law under Dickinson, was one of Americas finest legal minds and drafted much of the Constitution. Robert Morris, who helped defend Wilsons home during the Fort Wilson Riot, served as Americas first chief executive, established the United States Navy, and personally bankrolled the Continental Army as well as much of the American economy. John Jay crafted much of New Yorks constitution, served as president of Congress, and secured American economic interests while brokering the peace treaty with Britain. Philip Schuyler, an upstate New York patrician, orchestrated the military victory that changed the course of the war. Silas Deane of Connecticut secured the French aid that kept the American army alive. John Rutledge of South Carolina almost single-handedly saved the Deep South. James Duane, Gouverneur Morris, Robert Livingston, Edward Rutledge, Carter Braxton, and many others also played pivotal roles in the Revolution. Yet as consequential as these men were in their lifetimes, they have been largely forgotten today.

Then I delved into the history of conservatism, and several things struck me right away. First, Dickinson and his allies were indeed revolutionary conservatives. Hailing largely from the colonial upper classes, they were initially reluctant to embrace independence. Yet they were not Loyalists. They were among the most zealous defenders of American rights, and many fought with distinction against both British Redcoats and their own social peers who had stayed loyal to the Crown. They were committed Patriots who nonetheless wanted to preserve as much of the old social order as possible. Many of their core tenets, in fact, would be surprisingly familiar to modern conservatives: their faith in history and experience; their mistrust of theory and dogmatism; their support for venerable social institutions; their reverence for the military; their insistence on protecting property over equality; their belief in yoking the interests of the rich and powerful to the government; and their devotion to free-market capitalism.