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  • The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government by Steve Pincus
  • Nasser Behnegar (bio)
The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government
steve pincus
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016
207 pp.

It is a pleasure to find a compact historical monograph in a fluid, clear, and engaging style by a writer who shows mastery of the art of narration. But it is a boon when such a work also sheds new light on well-studied events, making us rethink the relevance of the past to contemporary political debates. Steve Pincus's study of the Declaration of Independence is such a work.

The well-crafted title of the work that plays on the two meanings of heart ("the inner core of a thing" and "the organ of love or sympathy") expresses its thesis. Today reverence for the American founders is more common among conservatives than left-leaning liberals who tend to look askance at the founders with, at best, ambivalent eyes; Pincus's work, insofar as it intends to influence contemporary affairs, tries to give the liberals a reason for appropriating the founders as their own. According to him, "the Declaration of Independence is—and should remain—'American Scripture'" (2), not so much because of its articulation of abstract principles for which it is so famous but because it addresses "quintessential issues of the modern era" that deal with immigration, race, and especially economics. Of course, the declaration would not deserve this status simply for addressing these issues. Pincus suggests that it addresses them in the right way or in the right spirit, and he interprets his American Bible less through an exegesis of the text than through the recovery of its historical background, and ultimately of a partisan political position, of which the declaration was one expression. [End Page 230]

Pincus takes issue with the opinion that "American Patriots founded their new nation … in defense of small government and of local American culture against foreign imposition" (92). He questions the second part of this opinion by arguing that the American Revolution was a consequence of British partisan politics. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Whigs had ceased to be a unified party, splintering into two factions over questions of taxation and imperial politics. One side, the side that came to dominate the government first under Robert Walpole and later under George Grenville, "believed that John Locke … had shown that labor created property, and therefore any productive workforce, whether free or unfree, would generate economic prosperity" (30). The other side, who called themselves the Patriots, also followed Locke but argued that "economic prosperity was created not through production alone, but by means of dynamic interaction of human production and human consumption" (32). The establishment Whigs "privileged the British Sugar Islands," preferred a pacific policy toward the Spanish Empire to protect trade with these islands, and sought tax relief for landowners at home. The Patriots wished to promote the manufacturing sector and saw the potential of a prosperous North America as a market for British goods. They sought to promote this prosperity by encouraging immigration to the colonies and by forcing the Spanish to open their markets to American colonies. After the Seven Years' War, the tension between the followers of Grenville and the Patriots intensified as the former sought to reduce the debt incurred by the war by taxing the colonies while the latter argued for measures that would stimulate the economy of the colonies. The American Revolution, Pincus argues, was the result of despair over the failure of Patriot politics in England and the hope that it could be implemented in North America.

Throughout, Pincus persuasively shows the links between American founders and English Patriots, including some curious anecdotes. We learn, for instance, that George Washington's elder brother renamed their family estate, "the Little Huntington Creek Plantation," Mount Vernon in honor of the Patriot admiral and vocal critic of Walpole Edmund Vernon, and he did so in honor of not a victory but a defeat, the disastrous but honorable attempt to conquer the city of Cartagena in the War of Jenkins' Ear (Jenkins was a captain...

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