Bernard Bailyn Quotes

The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.

Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

Independence was enriching, but most often it meant loss, isolation, and cultural deprivation,

The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.

All sorts of efforts were made to populate the Floridas - with anyone: Huguenots, Bermudians, Irish, Germans, Swiss, Scottish Highlanders, even some of the prostitutes being rehabilitated in London's Magdalen House. Sir Alexander Grant, who dreamed up the idea of transporting the prostitutes to Florida, confessed, with not exactly stunning insight, "Tis true they are not virgins"; nevertheless, he said, they would surely make splendid wives and mothers for such as were likely to live in a place like Florida.5

What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.

If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.

But are we to accept a form of government which we do not entirely approve of, merely in hopes that it will be administered well? Does not every man know, that nothing is more liable to be abused than power. Power, without a check, in any hands, is tyranny;

Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.

What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.

many of these excellent young people could not, as a general rule, either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities.

it is a fact that eleven million Africans were forcibly carried abroad, more than nine million of them to the Americas.

The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; ...

Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

Even toward the middle of the century, there were occasions when the London mailbag for Edinburgh was found to contain only a single letter.

Rhode Island, a colony that the mainstream Puritans denounced as "a cesspool of vile heresies and irreligion,

In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.

The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.6

It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.

Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, sel denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.

What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.

we don't live in Plato's Commonwealth, and when we can't have perfection we ought to comply with the measure that is least remote from it.