Our history is the exact opposite of the French Revolution and their wretched masses guillotining the aristocracy and clergy. It has become fashionable to equate the two revolutions, but they share absolutely nothing beyond the word “revolution.” The American Revolution was a movement based on ideas, painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what would become the freest, most prosperous nation in world history.
The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s Nazi Party, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter, and America’s periodic mob uprisings, from Shays’ Rebellion to today’s dirty waifs smashing Starbucks windows whenever bankers come to town. The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America.
And yet the New York Times has written, “In this millennium, documents like the Magna Carta of 1215, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, and the American Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791 advanced the universality of human rights.”1 This is on the order of saying, “In this millennium, things like mosquitoes, moths, and DDT advanced the universality of bugs.” Why not throw in the Soviet constitution or Mao’s Little Red Book?
One small difference is that the Americans and the English did win freedom and greater individual rights with their documents. France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen led to bestial savagery, followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship, followed by another monarchy, and then finally something resembling an actual republic eighty years later.
In another editorial, the Times claimed that France had “helped launch the worldwide democracy movement with its 1789 Revolution against monarchy and feudal privilege,” claiming the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen “inspired democrats throughout the late-18th-century world and reinforced the ideas of America’s own, earlier revolution.”2 The only movements inspired by the French Revolution were those of other dictators who discovered they could slaughter without mercy, provided they claimed to be acting in the name of the people.
Both revolutions are said to have come from the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, the French Revolution informed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the American Revolution influenced by the writings of John Locke. This is like saying Presidents Reagan and Obama both drew on the ideas of twentieth-century economists—Reagan on the writings of Milton Friedman and Obama on the writings of Paul Krugman.
Locke was concerned with private property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law—as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized—rather than have each man be his own judge. Rousseau saw the government as the vessel to implement the “general will” and thereby create men who were more moral. Through the limitless power of the state, the government would “force men to be free.”
The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on “respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the creature of a new society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general will.”3
Contrary to the purblind assertions of liberals, who dearly wish our founding fathers were more like the godless French peasants, skipping around with human heads on pikes, our founding fathers were God-fearing descendants of Puritans and other colonial Christians. As Stephen Waldman writes in his definitive book on the subject, Founding Faith, the American Revolution was “powerfully shaped by the Great Awakening,” an evangelical revival in the colonies in the early 1700s, led by the famous Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, among others. Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, was Edwards’s grandson. The churches were so integral to the philosophy behind the revolution that there are books of Christian sermons on the American Revolution. In fact, it was the very irreligiousness of the French Revolution that appalled the Americans and British alike, even before the bloodletting began.
Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, the date our written demand for independence from Britain based on “Nature’s God” was released to the world. The French celebrate Bastille Day, a day when thousands of armed Parisians stormed a nearly empty prison, savagely murdered a half-dozen guards, defaced their corpses, and stuck heads on pikes, all in order to seize arms and gunpowder for more such tumults. It would be as if this country had a national holiday to celebrate the L.A. riots.
Among the most famous quotes from the American Revolution is Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Among the most famous slogans of the French Revolution is that of the Jacobin Club, “Fraternity or death,” recast by Nicolas-Sébastien de Chamfort, a Jacobin who turned against the revolution, as “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.”
Our revolutionary symbol is the Liberty Bell, first rung to herald the opening of the new Continental Congress in the wake of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and rung again to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to a public reading of the just-adopted Declaration of Independence.
The symbol of the French Revolution is the “national razor”—the guillotine.
Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, all died of natural causes in old age, with the exception of Button Gwinnett of Georgia, who was shot in a duel with a fellow officer during the Revolutionary War, though unrelated to the revolution.
Exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, on July 4, 1826, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died in their homes at age eighty-three and ninety, respectively. Apart from Gwinnett, only one of our founding fathers died of unnatural causes—Alexander Hamilton. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr because as a Christian, Hamilton deemed it a greater sin to kill another man than to be killed and, before the duel, in writing, vowed not to shoot Burr. President after president of the new American republic died peacefully at home for seventy-five years, right up until Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the French Revolution all died violently a few years after the revolution began, guillotine by guillotine.
The most moblike incident associated with the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party. With no beheadings, disembowelings, or defilement of corpses—or any corpses at all—the Tea Party wouldn’t even merit a passing mention in a history of the French Revolution. It was debated for hours, was carefully planned to avoid damaging any property other than the tea, and was specifically defended for not being the act of a mob. The only event less violent than the original Boston Tea Party is a modern-day Tea Party rally.
Moreover, unlike the French before the storming of the Bastille or Americans today, the rebels had no other ability to influence British policies. In that sense, they were in the position of pro-lifers in modern America with no options for affecting the law except violence.
Forget the cheerful retelling of the Boston Tea Party in children’s books: That event had little to do with the success of the American Revolution. Coming three long years before the Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party instigated nothing, other than repressive measures by the British Parliament in closing the Boston port and putting the entire town under martial law.
The Boston Tea Party was considered an embarrassment by many of our founding fathers and was not celebrated at all for another half century. Benjamin Franklin insisted that the tea be paid for, and a collection was taken up and offered to the India Tea Company. George Washington disapproved of the Boston Tea Party, making a point of saying “not that we approve their conduct in destroying the Tea” even when complaining of Britain’s retaliatory actions in response to the Tea Party.4
America’s friends in the British Parliament, such as Edmund Burke, were appalled by the Tea Party, unable to keep defending the Americans after this destruction of private property. Only when the Americans promised to repay the tea company for the ruined tea were America’s British partisans able to take up the rebels’ cause again.
The reason most of our founding fathers opposed the Boston Tea Party was that it seemed to be the act of a rabble. Interestingly, even Samuel Adams, who is believed to be an instigator of the Tea Party, immediately defended the raid by arguing that it was not the action of a mob but a reasoned protest when all other avenues of redress had failed. Paul Revere, who participated in the Tea Party, made sure to replace a broken lock on one of the ships and severely punished a participant who stole some of the tea for his private use.5 Though they destroyed the tea, the rebels fervently believed in otherwise following the law, much like the overwhelmingly law-abiding abortion clinic protesters today.
John Adams, Samuel’s second cousin, privately approved of the Tea Party, exalting in a letter, “The die is cast! The people have passed the river and cut away the bridge!” But even he stressed how calm and orderly the town of Boston was immediately following the Tea Party.6
Just a few years earlier, in 1770, John Adams had famously defended the British soldiers who shot and killed Americans in what came to be called the Boston Massacre, and Paul Revere testified for the defense.7 Five Americans died in the incident, but Adams argued to the jury that the Redcoats were justified in firing because they had been attacked by a mob.
Although Adams blamed Britain’s policy of quartering soldiers for provoking the citizens of Boston, he blamed the mob for instigating the violent altercation.
In his closing argument, Adams portrayed the crowd as a howling “rabble” that shouted, “Kill them! Kill them!” and threw “every species of rubbish” at the soldiers: “We have entertained a great variety of phrases to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, [it was] most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars. And why should we scruple to call such a people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.”
The American jury acquitted the British officer involved, as well as six of his eight soldiers. After the verdict, there was no rioting or looting; all was calm. Respect for Adams increased, and he would later say that his defense of the British soldiers for firing on the mob was “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”8
This country’s founders were strongly against the mob—as are today’s Tea Party patriots. Noticeably, modern Tea Partiers haven’t engaged in one iota of property destruction, in contradistinction to nearly any gathering of liberals. Violence and property destruction are specialties of the Left. As the New Yorker reported, a twenty-six-year-old Tea Partier from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thought about printing out a copy of the entire 2,000-page 2010 health care bill and throwing it in Boston harbor, but changed his mind when he found out it would be against the law.9
That’s why—until recently—it has been liberals pushing the Boston Tea Party as a crucial event in the American Revolution, while conservatives have preferred to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the bicentennial of the Constitution. Liberals hate the idea of a revolution by gentlemen, which is why they celebrate hairy, foul-smelling revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Susan Sarandon. They want to elevate the rabble and place the spectacularly unique American Revolution in the tradition of France’s mob revolt.
Thus, for example, Russell Bourne, a regular guest on NPR and PBS, has written a sad little book titled Cradle of Violence: How the Boston Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution. More accurately, the waterfront mobs nearly derailed the revolution.
Fear of mobs was a primary rationale of the Loyalists. Even those wishing independence from Britain worried that without British protection, the hoodlums might run wild. As the left-wing historian Howard Zinn admits, the “well-to-do merchants” of the Sons of Liberty “worried about maintaining control over the crowds at home.”10
Consider the case of Lord Hugh Percy. He had been a fervent supporter of the Americans, taking their side repeatedly in the British Parliament, including voting against the hated Stamp Act. When he arrived in Boston as a brigadier general of the British army in 1774, Percy was a strong advocate of American independence. But he took one look at the Boston waterfront and changed his mind, so “shocked” was he “by the mobbings he witnessed.”11
This is why, today, we know Patrick Henry’s name. We know Paul Revere’s name. We know the names of John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and of all the other signatories to the Declaration of Independence. We know the names of the authors of The Federalist. We know the name of pamphleteer Thomas Paine. We don’t know the names of the lowborn workers at the Boston Harbor engaging in tumult and property destruction. (Other than by the general catchall term “Celtics fans.”)
The men behind the American Revolution—the militias, the Minutemen, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the framers of the Constitution—were the very opposite of a mob. Today we would call them “Republicans.” They were educated, aristocratic property holders, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and other respectable tradesmen with everything to lose should the revolution fail.
The Minutemen were called that because they could be ready for battle in a minute, having been preparing for years to launch a disciplined military response. They were not a rabid mob, full of festering hatreds, ready to dash out and impale their fellow citizens. (And virtually none of these brave men under arms, I might add, were dating one another.) They were a citizen army with ranks, subordination, coordination, drills, and supplies.
The spark that ignited the first battles of the Revolution was the news that British troops—who were under constant surveillance by Paul Revere and others—were on the move, planning to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock that night in Lexington.
Luckily, the Minutemen had planned ahead and were not lunatics running around in a burst of manic energy guillotining people, like the French. Because the Minutemen had been watching and waiting, they knew exactly what the British were up to. Indeed, Paul Revere knew more about the Redcoats’ plans that night than the British soldiers themselves did.
Although most Whig leaders had fled Boston to avoid arrest, a few remained, including Doctor Joseph Warren. Through his confidential source—probably the American wife of British general Thomas Gage—Warren confirmed the British plans to arrest the two revolutionary leaders. By prearrangement, Warren contacted Paul Revere.12
Warren had already sent two other messengers to warn Adams and Hancock. One was William Dawes; the other is unknown to history. All three men took different routes to Lexington in order to increase the odds that at least one of them would make it. (Why? Yes, that is correct: because they had planned ahead.)
Fearing that none of them would make it past the British across the Charles River out of Boston, Revere had arranged with the sexton of a Boston church to signal the countryside with lanterns in the steeple window. The British were going by sea, so the sexton sneaked past the British regulars in Boston, climbed the 154 steps of the Anglican Christ Church—whose minister was a Loyalist—and held two lanterns outside the steeple window. The Charlestown Whigs, waiting and watching, saw the brief flicker of two lights in the distance and knew the British were leaving by boat. They sprang to action, preparing to receive Revere and provide him with a horse.13
It is precisely this advance preparation that is celebrated in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem: “One if by land, and two if by sea.”14 By contrast, the French Revolutionary ditty “It Shall Be” includes the line “Take the aristocrats to the lantern and hang them.”
Every detail of Paul Revere’s ride had been meticulously arranged with scores of other American patriots. Even the horse Revere rode, Brown Beauty, had been carefully chosen by the Whigs as the best horse for the job. And indeed, Brown Beauty was so sure-footed, she allowed Revere to escape his first British ambush that night.
Revere alerted Whig leaders in towns all along his ride, setting off a chain of communication to the Minutemen throughout the countryside. The town leaders—doctors, lawyers, and ministers—spread the alarm with bells, drums, cannon, and musket fire. “The astonishing speed of this communication,” historian David Hackett Fischer writes, “did not occur by accident. It was the result of careful preparation.”15
At around midnight, Revere arrived at the house where Adams and Hancock were staying and was promptly rebuffed by the Lexington militiaman standing guard, who told Revere to stop making so much noise or he’d wake up everyone. “Noise?” Revere replied. “You’ll have noise enough before long! The Regulars are coming!”16
With Adams and Hancock awake, and Dawes arriving half an hour later, the men went to a tavern to talk things over with the Lexington militia. (The third man, whoever he was, never arrived.) Wondering why the British were mobilizing so many troops for a simple arrest, they soon realized the British were planning to seize the Americans’ artillery in Concord that night, too.
Once again, Revere and Dawes mounted their horses and took off for Concord, planning to wake up the surrounding towns. They immediately ran into a young, wealthy doctor from Concord, Samuel Prescott. A “high son of liberty,” Prescott offered to ride with them, since he knew the terrain and he knew the people.17
Halfway to Concord, they ran into some Redcoats. Outnumbered, they insanely tried to bolt past the Regulars. The British didn’t shoot, but didn’t let Revere’s group pass either, shouting, “God damn you! Stop! If you go an inch further, you are a dead man!”18
They were taken prisoner and brought to join other American prisoners captured that night. While being led off the path, Prescott and Revere spurred their horses, taking off in different directions. Revere’s route took him straight into a group of Redcoats, but by distracting their captors, he allowed Prescott to escape—across a wall and into the backwoods he knew so well. As Revere had done before him, Prescott would set off a chain of warnings to the militias in the towns all around Concord.
As the Redcoats surrounded Revere, Dawes escaped, pretending to be one of the Regulars in pursuit of a fleeing rebel—“Halloo, my boys I’ve got two of ’em!”19 He got away, but his horse soon threw him and his journey was over.
Both the Redcoats and their famous prisoner were remarkably polite to each other, with Revere later recalling that the British officer in command was “much of a gentleman.” Surprised to have captured the well-known rebel leader Paul Revere, the British began interrogating him and were stunned by his candor.
Revere openly told them about British plans that night—of which they were unaware. Hoping to keep them away from Hancock and Adams, he warned the British soldiers that they would be killed if they went anywhere near Lexington Green, where up to five hundred militiamen were mobilizing. The other prisoners listening to Revere were astonished at how boldly he spoke to his captors. When one captain put a gun to Revere’s head and demanded that he tell the truth, an indignant Revere said he didn’t need to be threatened. “I call myself a man of truth,” he said, “and you have stopped me on the highway, and made me a prisoner I knew not by what right. I will tell the truth for I am not afraid.”20
The rattled Redcoats began to ride their prisoners toward Lexington, but when they heard gunfire on the outskirts of town, seeming to confirm Revere’s warnings of an armed militia, they released their prisoners and hurried back to Boston.21 They weren’t going to start a war without clearer orders.
Hancock and Adams were safe, the rebels’ military supplies hidden, and the British about to be amazed.22
The face-off in Lexington would not have given Americans much hope that day. British troops blew past the disorganized and outnumbered militia without much difficulty.
But Concord was a different story. By the time the British reached Concord, militias from dozens of towns had received the call and were ready for battle. The Americans punched back so hard that the British retreated all the way back to Boston. The British fought bravely, but the Americans overwhelmed them.
Shell-shocked and bleeding, Redcoats began surrendering on the trek back to Boston. An old American woman picking weeds accepted the surrender of six British soldiers that day, telling them, “If you ever live to get back, you tell King George that an old woman took six of his grenadiers prisoner.”23 (That woman, of course, was TV’s Betty White.) About a hundred British were killed in the Battle of Concord, many of them officers, and another hundred were wounded. Only fifty Americans were killed and thirty-nine wounded.
Having seen the Minutemen fight, even Lord Percy, who had been disgusted by the Boston mobs, had a new view of the rebels. He said they had attacked “with perseverance and resolution,” adding “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken.”24
If the American rebels had not planned every detail in advance—practicing, training, mapping strategies, gathering information, preparing a vast network of patriots to spread the warning, and employing endless contingency plans—the British might have crushed the incipient rebel forces on April 19, 1775. Instead, victory belonged to the Americans in the first battle of the Revolutionary War. Paul Revere’s ride is the seminal event of our Revolutionary War. It bears no resemblance to screeching washerwomen beheading guards at the Bastille.
The American Revolution was unique not only for the strategy and planning involved, but also for the explosion of literature explaining the reasons for the Revolution. Perhaps foremost among the pamphlets defending the war was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, in which Paine methodically addressed each of the arguments against rebellion, point by point, for all to see and critique.
In addition to Paine’s Common Sense, there are virtual encyclopedias of erudite, Christian sermons given on behalf of the American Revolution. Christian ministers were a crucial part of the war effort, inspiring the local militias. Before the battle of Concord, the town’s minister, William Emerson, urged on the outnumbered rebels as the Redcoats approached, saying, “Let us stand our ground. If we die, let us die here!” He slapped one terrified young soldier on the back and said, “Stand your ground, Harry! Your cause is just and God will bless you!” Harry fought bravely for the rest of the day.25
This was a revolution waged by thinkers and debaters constantly prattling about the reasons for the war. Although they were “rebels,” the Americans were very chatty about their revolution. By contrast, mob uprisings like the French Revolution are sparked by tumult, pandemonium, and violence, not thoughtful sermons and pamphlets.
There wasn’t much literature explaining the French Revolution—apart from Paine’s hapless attempts (which would nearly lead to his beheading). The revolutionaries were too busy rushing out to desecrate Notre Dame, murder a priest, or do some other new wild thing to have the time to read or think. Bernardine Dohrn and the rest of the SDS would have fit right in with the filthy Jacobins, without even having to change clothes.
In contrast to the French, who celebrate the spontaneous emotion of their revolution—the storming of the Bastille, the storming of Versailles, the storming of the Tuileries—Americans celebrate the Minutemen’s preparedness, Paul Revere’s methodically planned ride, and the vast literature arguing America’s case, especially the specific demand for separation from the British in the Declaration of Independence.
The reason our revolution was the opposite of a directionless, violent mob running wild in the streets is that the dominant American culture was Anglo-Saxon and Christian. Even while fighting “the British,” as we now call them, Americans considered themselves British with the rights of Englishmen, who bore the tradition of the Magna Carta. In fact, one rebel explained that he was fighting the Redcoats to protect his house by saying, “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”26
They just wanted to be free of meddling from the Crown. Having been born and raised in the distant and expansive American colonies, Americans objected to the high-handed way King George was dealing with them. They didn’t hate the king—to the contrary, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton dispassionately acknowledged that the English political system was better than most others in the world.
Our revolutionary document, the Declaration of Independence, is a religious document through and through, with the colonies demanding rights entitled to them by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” As founding father James Wilson put it, the “will of God” was the supreme law of nations.27
Consequently, the Declaration cites “certain unalienable rights” given to men “by their Creator.” For the “rectitude” of their intentions, the drafters appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world.” The Declaration reads like a legal brief, with causes of action and prior attempts at resolution enumerated, and a specific demand for relief: We’d like to go our own way please, Supreme Judge of the World. One can read the Declaration of Independence centuries later and understand the whole point.
Admitting that “Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” our Declaration sets forth “a long train of abuses and usurpations” by the Crown. The purpose of the document was to explain America’s case to the world, because “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Manifestly, the French couldn’t care less that the rest of the world was appalled by them.
Stating that facts “submitted to a candid world” would prove that the king was attempting to create “an absolute Tyranny over these States,” the Declaration concisely listed abuse after abuse, including the Crown’s quartering soldiers, protecting the king’s soldiers from charges of murder, and depriving Americans “in many cases” of trial by jury. These were rights well familiar to the British, inasmuch as they came from English common law and were enjoyed by British citizens.
Significantly, among the Declaration’s enumerated grievances was that the king had encouraged mobs. As the document puts it, the king had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” including uprisings by “merciless Indian Savages” whose idea of warfare was “an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
The Americans’ complaints were clear, as was their objective: separation from the British Crown in order to establish their own government. This was not a rash decision. As the authors explained, they had tried other approaches: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms,” but those requests were “answered only by repeated injury.”
Fifty-two of the fifty-six signers of the American Declaration were orthodox Christians who believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or as they would be known today, “an extremist Fundamentalist hate group.”28
The Declaration was written on behalf of the thirteen colonies unanimously and signed by each member of the Continental Congress, name by name, beginning with the famously supersized signature of John Hancock. These weren’t anonymous brutes chopping off the breasts of princesses in pursuit of “fraternity” or some other amorphous concept.
Our revolutionary document was inspired by God—as put by John Adams, a signatory and second president of the United States. He said, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”29
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was inspired by a paranoid hypochondriac who denied divine revelation and original sin: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The very logic and clarity of the Declaration of Independence were qualities specifically rejected by Rousseau. “One of the errors of our age,” Rousseau said, “is to use reason in bare form, as if men were only mind.” Yes, much better to fire up a crowd with emotional appeals. Thus, Rousseau recommended using “signs that speak to the imagination,” complaining that words make too weak an impression. “[O]ne speaks to the heart far better,” he said, “through the eyes than through the ears.”30
This is the essence of how one riles up a mob—by using images, not words. (Republicans drove the car into a ditch.) Rousseau perfectly describes the governing strategy of all mob leaders, from Robespierre to Fidel Castro to today’s Democratic Party.
The mob’s revolutionary document, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is precisely what one would expect from people who prefer images to logic. The document enumerates lots of abstract principles without ever coming to what used to be known as “a point.” It doesn’t assert any God-given rights, but merely announces that the Declaration is being issued “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.”
Not surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson is said to have had a hand in it, but this time, without the sobering influence of John Adams and the rest of the Continental Congress’s drafting committee. (The committee deleted nearly 500 of Jefferson’s words, made dozens of other changes, and added numerous references to God.)31
The coming bloodshed in France should have been obvious from the title, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In other words, the document addressed your natural rights as an individual … and your duties to the government.
From the very first sentence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man swerves off the rails from the ideas of the Declaration of Independence by stating that “the sole causes of public miseries and the corruption of governments” are “ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man.”
You could ask every signatory to the Declaration of Independence—indeed, you could probably poll every colonial American—and not one would have said the problem with King George was that the rights of man had slipped his mind. Rather, our founding fathers believed—as Madison wrote in Federalist 10—that men are more likely to oppress another than to “co-operate for their common good.” In particular, he said the power to tax created the greatest temptation to “trample on the rules of justice,” because increasing someone else’s taxes “is a shilling saved to their own pockets.”32
According to the French, King George was disregarding the rights of man. But according to Madison, he was merely following “the nature of man.”
That’s why, in our Declaration, the founding fathers cited the only authority even higher than a king. The French reeled off a series of airy “rights” that could as easily have been any other random collection of rights. A sensible reader of the French Declaration might ask, Says who?
The only demand in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which is really more of a suggestion, is that “members of the social body” compare executive and legislative acts to the principles stated in the Declaration. Or not. Whatever.
The National Assembly that drafted the French Declaration never says what it wants changed exactly, except by implication. There are, for example, assertions that all citizens should be treated equally, suggesting that they were not already being treated equally, and the demand that no one “be accused, arrested, nor detained but in the cases determined by the law,” suggesting that some men had been accused, arrested, or detained outside of the law. But who, when, or how—or what the Assembly had done about it—is left to conjecture.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen announces a slew of abstract “rights” of the sort we have come to associate with all bloodthirsty dictatorships. For example, the Declaration proclaims:
“Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others.”
“Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society.”
“No one may be questioned about his opinions, including his religious views, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.”
“[A] common contribution is indispensable; it must be equally distributed between all the citizens, by reason of their ability to pay.”
This mishmash of English natural rights doctrine and Rousseauian argle-bargle was ignored ten minutes later, when the Assembly voted to confiscate church lands, decreed that the pope’s authority was null and void throughout France, and demanded that all priests take an oath to the state-controlled civil constitution of the clergy.
As a tribute to its success, just three days after the completion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the mob stormed the Bastille.
Practically overnight, the greatest nation in continental Europe became a human abattoir. That is why the French Revolution remains an inspiration to liberals everywhere. France’s revolution-by-mob would be imitated in Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere, always with the same bloody consequences. With less success—so far—mob action is the governing strategy of our own Democratic Party.
This is why the British philosopher Edmund Burke—who had been a staunch supporter of the American Revolution—denounced the French Revolution even before the guillotining began. Presciently, Burke wrote in 1789 that the “old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true this may be no more than a sudden explosion.… But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them.”33
Similarly, Americans didn’t recognize the French Revolution as bearing any relationship to their own revolution against a king.
Consider the fate of the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. The wealthy and titled Lafayette came to America to fight for independence, serving with distinction under General George Washington. Lafayette was so important to the American cause that dozens of U.S. cities, towns, parks, and streets across the nation are named after him. When he was buried in Paris, dirt carried from Bunker Hill was sprinkled on his coffin, and an American flag has flown at his grave ever since.
Lafayette began as a supporter of the French Revolution, foolishly imagining that it would proceed along the lines of the American Revolution. In the summer of 1789, he joined the National Assembly, the populist outgrowth from the class-based Estates General. It was Lafayette, the National Assembly’s vice president, who presented the soon-to-be-ignored Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Assembly.
But for the next three years, Lafayette commanded the French National Guard in a losing battle against the lunatic Jacobin mobs. In the summer of 1792, he was declared a “traitor,” subject to immediate execution, whereupon he fled France just ahead of the guillotine.
Apart from Lafayette, the only prominent supporter of the American Revolution to sign on with the mob revolt of the French was Thomas Paine, who was not born in America and perhaps never fully understood its philosophical underpinnings. (Even the French revolutionaries grasped this, refusing the request of an American delegation to release Paine from prison on the grounds that Paine was not an American but an Englishman.)34 Paine hit his peak with the American Revolution, but got bored after the war was won, crossed the ocean to France, and leapt into the middle of a much less noble endeavor. He was a historical one-hit wonder, desperately trying to find that follow-up single that would put him back on top.
Paine justified the insanity of the French Revolution with the argument that all royalty was bad and therefore any alternative was better. When the French revolutionaries threw him in prison, Paine found out there were some political systems worse than a monarchy.
In so little esteem did Americans hold mob action, particularly the atheistic French mob, that when Thomas Paine returned from participating in the French Revolution, he was universally reviled, his name written on the bottom of people’s shoes to indicate their disdain. Paine’s only American defender was, of course, Thomas Jefferson, mob sympathizer and father of the Democratic Party.
The French Revolution was spontaneous, impulsive, passionate, emotional, romantic, utopian, resentful, angry, dreamy—anything but rule-bound and reasoned. No one knew, from one year to the next, where the Revolution was heading. That’s why, at the end of it all, they enthusiastically threw themselves into the arms of the dictator Napoleon.
By contrast, Americans concluded their revolution with a Constitution, meaning we have agreed rules, baselines, and standards, as well as continuity, stability, and legal reasoning.
Indeed, it was a mob uprising after the Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion, that propelled Americans to abandon the Articles of Confederation and create a strong national government capable of suppressing mobs. Shays’ Rebellion was instigated by Daniel Shays and other poor farmers and debtors in Massachusetts, who couldn’t pay the taxes being levied to pay for the war. They were a motley rabble, attacking debtors’ courts and armories.
Not only aristocrats but “lowly farmers” as well were terrified by Shays’ Rebellion and driven to support a national government that would have the power to protect their rights against the mob. In his introduction to the Federalist Papers, Isaac Kramnick cites an “obscure farmer,” Jonathan Smith, arguing in favor of the Constitution purely as a response to Shays’ Rebellion:
People I say took up arms, and then, if you went to speak to them, you had the musket of death presented to your breast. They would rob you of your property; Threaten to burn your houses; oblige you to be on your guard day and night … poor persons were set in the front, to be killed by their own friends. How dreadful. How distressing was this. Our distress was so great that we should have been glad to snatch at anything that looked like a government. Had any person that was able to protect us, come up and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if it had been a monarch, and that monarch might have proved a tyrant. So that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny, and better have one tyrant than so many at once. But the new Constitution is our cure.35
The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to make the case for a national Constitution, are brimming with warnings against mobs. In Federalist 9, Alexander Hamilton cites with contempt the “tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage” that periodically swept through Greece and Italy. Even in peaceful times, he said, one feels regret over the certainty that “the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed” with angry mobs.36
Hamilton assured Americans that their new Constitution would incorporate “wholly new discoveries” in the science of government able “to suppress faction and to guard the internal tranquility of States.” He denounced the flimsy Articles of Confederacy precisely because they created “tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord.”37 By creating “an assemblage of societies,” the Constitution would calm the unruly crowds. Under the Constitution, should “a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states,” Hamilton said, “the others are able to quell it.”38
Clearly, the framers recognized how bad mobs were and created a government designed to squelch them. James Madison dedicated Federalist 10 to explaining how the Constitution would cure the “dangerous vice” of factions, or what we might call “special interests.” Democracies were threatened, he said, by groups of people “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion,” opposed “to the rights of other citizens” or the “interests of the community.” Madison complained of the propensity of democracies to become “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” unable to safeguard either property rights or personal security.
Because democracies were generally unable to control mobs—or factions, as Madison called them—they have been “as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Pure democracy, even in the hands of “enlightened statesmen,” was no good because, as Madison said in Federalist 55, even if every Athenian had been a Socrates, “the Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”39
According to Madison, there were only two methods “of curing the mischiefs of faction”: Eliminate the causes or eliminate the effects. The principal advantage of a “well constructed union,” he said, would be to control the effects of violent mobs by diffusing them and supplying “opposite and rival interests” to counteract one another.40
The French chose the other path: They resolved to remove the cause of faction by always exercising the “general will.” There would be no disagreement because everyone would always agree. But as Madison said, to eliminate the cause of faction, one either had to extinguish liberty or require all citizens to have “the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” That, he said, was a cure “worse than the disease.”41
Two years after Madison wrote those words, the French would embark on their program of eliminating factions by killing people. To fashion a republic of “virtue,” they simply exterminated anyone who did not agree with “the general will.” The only way to ensure unanimity of opinion was to kill those who disagreed. Then—just as Rousseau foresaw—obeying the general will was completely free, because people were simply obeying themselves. All it took was a few years of murder and terror to make man free!
The whole history of liberal thought, back to Marx and ultimately back to Rousseau, is that political authority rests on force—until the revolution gives us true and perfect freedom at the sharp edge of a guillotine. Our founders realized there is no “general will,” and therefore were never required to slaughter citizens in order to create it.
If our revolution had been won by a mob, why would The Federalist keep saying how scary mobs are? Why would they jabber on and on about how the new Constitution would prevent mobs from arising? Wouldn’t they celebrate mobs? Why didn’t Americans cheer Shays’ Rebellion, rather than using it as an argument to create an all-new form of government? Both during the Revolution and for the next two centuries, mobs in America were dealt with swiftly and without remorse.
We have had plenty of violence in America. But until fairly recently, mobs didn’t drive events. One of the goriest episodes was the Civil War Draft Riots in New York City in 1863—perpetrated, of course, by Democrats. There was enough burning, pillaging, murdering, and corpse desecrating there to earn professional courtesy from a French mob.
In an explosion of animalistic violence, Irish Democrats, enraged by the Emancipation Proclamation, which they believed would force them to compete for jobs with blacks coming up from the South, ran through the city, lynching blacks and burning black establishments to the ground. As described in the book by Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863:
On the waterfront, they hanged William Jones and then burned his body. White dock workers also beat and nearly drowned Charles Jackson, and they beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. Rioters also made a sport of mutilating the black men’s bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams—jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones—while a crowd of men, women, and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging “vengeance on every nigger in New York.” A white laborer, George Glass, rousted black coachman Abraham Franklin from his apartment and dragged him through the streets. A crowd gathered and hanged Franklin from a lamppost as they cheered for Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. After the mob pulled Franklin’s body from the lamppost, a sixteen-year-old Irish man, Patrick Butler, dragged the body through the streets by its genitals. Black men who tried to defend themselves fared no better. The crowds were pitiless. After James Costello shot at and fled from a white attacker, six white men beat, stomped, kicked, and stoned him before hanging him from a lamppost.42
So America has always had people capable of behaving horribly. We call them “Democrats.” But the one-week riot had no effect on events.
President Lincoln sent the army from Gettysburg and restored order. The war continued. Even the draft continued. Even Irish service in the army continued.
One year after the Draft Riots, blacks and Republicans in New York City celebrated their alliance with an all-black regiment raised for the war. As the regiment marched through the streets, joined by members of the Union League Club and a hundred policemen, it was remarked upon how much more orderly and sharp the black regiment was, compared to some of the ragtag white regiments.
And then the South was finally crushed, slavery abolished, and America marched on. The Draft Riots didn’t even prevent Lincoln from carrying New York State in the next year’s elections.
The first exception to Americans’ abhorrence of mob action came in the sixties. The civil rights movement gave mobs a halo. Disgust with the Jim Crow laws overcame Americans’ natural aversion to disorder. At the outset, the civil rights movement consisted of peaceful citizens battling mobs that were oppressing blacks—mobs that were, as always, led by Democrats. Orval Faubus, Bull Connor, George Wallace, and the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—Democrats all.
But as soon as blacks started to vote in large enough numbers to matter, the whole Democratic Party switched sides. Unable to win elections by appealing to the racist mob, the anti–civil rights wing of the Democratic Party disappeared virtually overnight. In the blink of an eye, the Democrats went from being the Party of Bull Connor to being the Party of Al Sharpton. The Democrats simply traded one mob constituency for a new one. You might say they traded their white robes for a track suit and a giant medallion.
This is the history of the Democratic Party: Find out what the mob believes, then leap in front of the mob in order to lead it.
One man who didn’t like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way—by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court. Marshall was the anti-Rousseau, using words, not pictures, to get justice.
Martin Luther King Jr. was the heir to Rousseau. He used images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause, deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor.
Connor was a machine-politics, pro-union Democrat who had been elected to the Democratic National Committee from Alabama. He was also a vile racist, endorsed by Alabama’s Democratic, segregationist governor, George Wallace. After witnessing Connor’s brutal tactics to enforce segregation, the good citizens of Birmingham stepped in to remove him from his position as Commissioner of Public Safety. Birmingham’s middle class, business leaders, and Jewish community weren’t interested in having beery KKK nightriders in their town. First, they voted to eliminate Connor’s office; then—to be extra clear—they decisively voted against Connor when he ran for mayor.
It was over—responsible citizens and civil rights advocates had won. But Martin Luther King planned one last protest before Connor’s term expired. City merchants, including the black millionaire A. G. Gaston, opposed King’s protest on the grounds that Connor had already been beaten at the ballot box. On the day of Connor’s electoral defeat, Burke Marshall, a champion of civil rights in Kennedy’s Justice Department, called King and asked him to call off the Birmingham protests.43
But King decided to deliberately provoke Connor, who was insane. This was a way to extend the movement, just as, years later, King would branch out from racial justice into “social justice.”
With television crews crawling all over Birmingham, King arranged for hundreds of black children to march on the city. As expected, this led to a total conflagration when Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on little children, some as young as six years old. The explosive images from this confrontation were instantly broadcast around the world.
King had stoked this incredible fire to ignite his dying movement—dying because civil rights had won in the courts, at the ballot box, and in the hearts and minds of Americans. But King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Wyatt Walker were “overjoyed” at the mayhem they had caused. Walker gloated, “There never was any more skillful manipulation of the news media than there was in Birmingham.”44 Connor was delighted, too—the protests helped him rally his dwindling racist following.
The only people who weren’t happy were the decent citizens of Birmingham, pro-integrationists in the Kennedy administration, and civil rights lawyers. As businessman Gaston put it, King was “messing things up just when we were getting a new start.”45
Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling him an “opportunist” and “first-rate rabble-rouser.”46 Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was “a boy on a man’s errand.”47
But it was too late. Americans had capitulated to the idea of the “good mob,” and that opened the door to near-constant riots and protests for every group of citizens upset about a hangnail. The civil rights movement had made mobs respectable, to the great misfortune of the nation. In no time, liberals began engaging in what I believe Gandhi called “active resistance” every time they didn’t get their way through legitimate legal processes.
Democrats have made out like bandits—this is their moment! They are skilled manipulators of the mob. It was Democrats who kowtowed to Southern racists, blocking the schoolhouse door and campaigning on “segregation forever!” It was Democrats who responded to the Black Power movement by demanding racial quotas and Kwanzaa celebrations in the public schools. (The Democratic Party has consistently favored racial discrimination, it just switched which race should be discriminated against.) It is Democrats who have adopted every crackpot “share the wealth” program from Huey Long to Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama. It was Democrats who instantly transformed themselves into the antiwar party in response to protests during the Vietnam War. It was Democrats who embraced the wacko Marxist cult leader Jim Jones, who got nine hundred of his followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking cyanide-laced grape Flavor Aid at the cult’s “Jonestown” settlement in Guyana. It was the Democratic Party that welcomed former leaders of the SDS and the Weather Underground into their party. It was Democrats who turned themselves into the abortion-on-demand party to grab the feminist vote—with the Reverend Jesse Jackson going to sleep one night against abortion and waking up the next morning in favor of abortion and a viable Democratic Party candidate. It was Democrats who co-opted the labor union movement and then invented the absurdity of government “unions” providing them with a new guaranteed voting bloc.
By now, mob action has become so integral to the Left that it permeates every aspect of their political behavior. Don’t like Bush? Burn him in effigy. Upset the Kyoto treaty wasn’t signed by the United States? Throw rocks at cops. Don’t like the international monetary system? Smash a Starbucks window. A stripper claims she’s been raped by rich frat boys? Bang pots and pans outside the athletes’ home.
Republicans are baffled by mobs, opposed to disorder, but paralyzed with indecision about what to do. Meanwhile, Democrats are hurling bricks from the barricades. If Democrats knew who he was, they would admire Robespierrre. Liberals’ history is not this country’s history—theirs is the history of the mob.