The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government by Steve Pincus (review)

At 152 pages of actual text, this volume proves that small can be beautiful. It advances a provocative but fascinating and well documented (in fortysix pages of endnotes) case that the American Revolution, far from being undertaken in defense of small government and local rights, was an effort to establish a version of the activist, pro-development state that had existed in Britain from the fall of Sir Robert Walpole in 1741 to the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. Not everyone will agree with this argument, but its fresh perspective is certain to stimulate lively scholarly debate and it casts important historical light on discussions about the role of government and the imperative of austerity in the name of public debt reduction in our own times.

For Steve Pincus, the roots of the American Revolution lie in the emergence of the Patriot Whigs in Britain and North America in the 1730s in opposition to the Walpole administration's policy of raising revenue for national debt reduction through taxing trade and consumption. Convinced that "the creative interplay between consumption and production" (26) held the key to economic development, the Patriots (as they soon became known) wanted an imperial government that would expand international trade, reduce tariffs in areas under its control, and encourage immigration to its colonies. Their hero was Admiral Edward Vernon (1684–1757), in whose honour Patriot enthusiast Lawrence Washington (half-brother to George) renamed the family estate as Mount Vernon (from the original Little Huntington Creek Plantation) in 1741. By and large Patriot principles held sway on both sides of the British Atlantic in the mid-eighteenth century, but the perceived need to reduce a national debt bloated by foreign war induced a succession of George III's ministries to substitute austerity in place of pro-growth measures after 1763. The resultant efforts to extract wealth and revenue from the North American colonies provoked the imperial crisis that eventually produced the Declaration of Independence, whose authors were "simply crystallizing deeply held Patriot beliefs" (114). Whereas the opening clauses of this document detailing "self-evident truths" have become enshrined in America's consciousness, Pincus directs his attention to the long list of indictments that follow regarding George III's "repeated injuries and usurpations." Though unfamiliar to the modern mind, these grievances were a fundamental expression of Patriot discontent about the betrayal of their ideal that government should "promote prosperity to the largest number of people" (92).

As with any challenge to prevailing orthodoxy, particularly one so briefly enunciated, specialists in the field will find some of Pincus's assertions unconvincing. There is a significant volume of scholarship, exemplified by Alan Taylor's American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (2016), which sees the Revolution as a conservative phenomenon driven by elite concerns to maintain local control and westward expansion. Pincus also makes a valiant effort to portray the Patriots as solidly anti-slavery, not on moral grounds but out of concern that slave societies, characterized as they were by extreme concentrations of wealth, "could never develop into broad-based consumer societies" (123). However, this is hardly convincing with regard to prevailing opinion in the southern colonies. Pincus's focus on Georgia, a frontier colony formally established in 1732 as a model of Patriot economic principles and prison-reform philanthropy, raises questions as to how representative it was of Virginia and the Carolinas. Furthermore, the claim that Patriot desire for a more active national state drove the formation of the new republic is difficult to square with the earliest attempt at constitution-writing. For Pincus, the Articles of Confederation "granted new and significant powers to the central government" (144) in the interests of enhancing its capacity to fund the war effort, but this does little to rebut arguments advanced by the likes of David Hendrickson in Peace Pact: The Lost World of...