Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

II. The Meaning of Representation

142 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution II. The Meaning of Representation The people of a free state have a right to expect from those whom they have honoured with the direction of their public concerns, a faithful and unremitting attention to these concerns. He who accepts a public trust, pledges himself, his sacred honour, and by his o≈cial oath appeals to his God, that with all good fidelity, and to the utmost of his capacity he will discharge this trust. —Samuel Cooper, A Sermon, 1780 The fact that prominent political texts of the era contained copious references to genuine, as opposed to virtual, representation of the American colonists (not to be confused with the term ‘‘representation’’ used elsewhere in this book to denote a symbolic portrayal) has sometimes led us to believe that the authors understood it in a way more modern than was the case. When Americans raised the issue of their lack of delegates in Westminster, Prime Minister George Grenville responded with genuine surprise, emphasizing that the authority on which the Stamp Act was founded was soundly based on virtual representation. He observed that fewer than 5 percent of the people in England had ever been directly represented (i.e., were electors), and that the colonies had thus far approved of this system.∞≥ He was right; for the colonists, the issue was mostly tactical, and after independence the political elite almost immediately assumed a role closely resembling that of virtual representatives of ‘‘the people.’’ It was not likely that the colonial authors of demands for direct representation actually wished to travel across the Atlantic for each session of the English Parliament. And yet, unlike Grenville, who looked back into history for the sources and validity of this idea, the American political class had placed it in a new context by stressing equality, and by defining ‘‘representatives’’ as deriving authority from a sovereign people. Does this mean that once Americans won independence these progressive concepts turned out to be merely instrumental, and were abandoned in favor of ‘‘returning’’ to traditional rule by elites? Was Revolutionary ideology betrayed when only a few years after the Constitution many of the framers openly expressed their conviction that a representative recruited from their the sway of symbolic power 143 class would—on account of superior virtue and education—better articulate the will of the people than the people themselves? Some historians have viewed this as an outright reversal, where the ‘‘concept of representation ceased to be a revolutionary engine with a single thrust’’ and was ‘‘returned’’ to its old, elitist meaning. The result was that ‘‘American representative government . . . would exclude the represented from governance.’’∞∂ When we look more closely at the contemporary understanding of political representation , however, it does not seem likely that such a ‘‘return’’ to elitist meaning could have occurred—because the ship had never left the harbor. Nor was it technically possible to ‘‘exclude’’ some of the represented; they had not been included before, and most were not going to be for a very long time. For the American political class, whether one was a Federalist or an AntiFederalist , the original importance of representation in assemblies derived not so much from elections and responsibility before constituents, but from the right of privilege. A belief that they possessed a great degree of autonomy as representatives cannot realistically be labeled reactionary just because it continued beyond the Revolution. For instance, it was thoroughly consistent with such assumptions to devise the new constitutional system entirely without the people. As Edward Carrington noted: ‘‘The debates and proceedings of the Convention are kept in profound secrecy. Opinions of the probable result of their deliberations can only be formed from the prevailing impressions of men of reflection and understanding.’’ ‘‘Everything was covered with the veil of secrecy,’’ marveled William Pierce. Those who tend to stress the modernity of the writers of the Constitution and claim that they reached to the ‘‘people themselves’’ in order to ‘‘assure the legacy of freedom’’ for all, sometimes gloss over the significance of the fact that constitutional proceedings took the form of essentially private meetings, not open to the public. These were usually limited to about forty gentlemen, and conducted much like the colonial assemblies, the members of which rarely sought public opinion, kept debates closed, did not publish them in newspapers, and did not, as a rule, feel themselves to be primarily in the role of democratically mandated agents of voters...