2The Paradoxes of Edmund Burke’s Reception in America, 1757–17901
Historians have not ignored the topic of Edmund Burke’s (1729–97) American reception. Indeed, they have frequently – at times intensively – investigated Burke’s post-1790 American reception. They have looked most often to the American impact of Burke’s most famous book, his Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790). That story is an interesting one, with dimensions informing American thought and culture through to the end of the nineteenth century. Burke’s bitter attack on what he predicted would be the excesses of the French Revolution became well known to nineteenth-century Americans.2 What might be styled as Burke’s ‘conservative impact’ is evident from the 1790s, and intensified during the decades leading up to the American Civil War. Burke left an impression with figures such as John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), James Buchanan (1791–1868) and Rufus Choate (1799–1859), but also on a string of secondary philosophers, lawyers, politicians and intellectuals of various stripes such as Robert Y. Hayne (1791–1839) and Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803–76), among many others.3 As Seamus Deane has put it in a recent essay entitled ‘Burke in the United States’, Burke has ‘long retained a special position [in America] as the defender of a specifically Christian society against a desolating modernity’ (Deane 2012, 222). But what of Burke’s reception in pre-1790 America? Here, the historiography is far more sporadic, and even divided.4 The historical record is somewhat more evasive and at times even illusive; but there is an equally interesting story to tell.
What early Americans made of Burke was informed by what Burke made of early America. And, from an early date, long before talk of an ‘American crisis’ in the 1760s and 1770s, America had had a place in Burke’s mind – perhaps even in his heart. When he first began to think about America is not clear, but by the mid-1750s a young Burke was seriously considering that he might move there. In his twenties, having given up on the study of law at the Middle Temple in London and uncertain of what direction his life would take, America was tempting; it may have offered a safe distance from the wrath of a displeased Irish father. Writing in the summer of 1757 to his good friend Richard Shackleton (1726–92), Burke remarked that his life was ‘chequered with various designs’ including ‘shortly please God, to be in America’.5 While no concrete action came of these designs, Burke would give sustained attention to American affairs in his writings over the next twenty years. By 1777, Burke could write in the opening lines of his ‘A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America’: ‘I THINK I KNOW AMERICA – if I do not, my ignorance is incurable, for I have spared no pains to understand it.’6 From 1757 to 1777, as Burke had come to know America, America had also come to know Burke.
In 1757 Burke was one of two anonymous co-authors of An Account of the European Settlements in America. That book, written in the context of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), was primarily intended to bring American history to a British audience. It is a wide-ranging history in seven parts but centred on one theme: commerce. As the first line of the preface explained:
The affairs of America have lately engaged a great deal of the public attention. Before the present war, there were but a very few who made the history of that quarter of the world any part of their study; though the matter is certainly very curious itself, and extremely interesting to us, as a trading people (Burke 1839, 9:1).
It is now known that the Account was the product of collaboration between Burke and his close friend, his ‘cousin’, William Burke (1729–93). Scholars continue to debate which sections of the Account were written by which Burke, but it is widely agreed that Edmund was heavily involved throughout.7 What has not been so widely appreciated is that the Account circulated in colonial America from an early date, and with some discernable consequences.8
James Rivington (1724–1802), an English-born American bookseller and publisher, offered the Account for sale in New York in 1762. His book-selling partner, Samuel Brown, did the same in Philadelphia.9 More importantly, perhaps, The Library Company of Philadelphia – the brainchild of Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) – had the two-volume set on its shelves by 1765.10 How many colonists purchased the Account or borrowed it from the shelves of America’s most celebrated library? We do not know, but that it was available at all suggests it was of interest to some. We do know that at least one eighteenth-century Philadelphian not only read the Account but discussed it in print and quoted it.
Anthony Benezet (1713–84), a French-born American Quaker and an early abolitionist of considerable note, quoted it extensively in his A Caution and Warning to Great Britain, and Her Colonies, in a short representation of the calamitous state of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions (1766). First published in Philadelphia, Benezet’s Caution and Warning was itself quite popular, being reprinted several times in America and also in London.11 Benezet wrote, near the beginning of his pamphlet, that, by referring to ‘authors of note’, he would aim to demonstrate that slavery ‘is inconsistent with the plainest precepts of the gospel, the dictates of reason, and every common sentiment of humanity’ (1766, 4). The very first work by an ‘author of note’ to which Benezet turned was the Account: ‘In an Account of the European Settlements in America, published in London in 1757’, wrote Benezet, ‘the author’ writes the following on the topic of slavery:
The Negroes in our Colonies endure a Slavery more compleat and attended with far worse Circumstances, than what any people in their condition suffer in any other part of the world, or have suffered in any other period of time: proofs of this are not wanting. The prodigious waste which we experience in this unhappy part of our species, is a full and melancholy evidence of this truth. The island of Barbados, (the Negroes upon which do not amount to eighty thousand) notwithstanding all the means which they use to encrease them by propagation, and that the climate is in every respect (except that of being more wholesome) exactly resembling the climate from whence they come; not withstanding all this, Barbados lies under a necessity of an annual recruit of five thousand slaves, to keep up the stock at the number I have mentioned. This prodigious failure, which is at least in the same proportion in all our Islands, shews demonstratively that some uncommon and unsupportable hardship lies upon the Negroes, which wears them down in such a surprising manner; and this, I imagine, is principally the excessive labour which they undergo. (1766, 5)
Did Anthony Benezet know he was here quoting Edmund Burke? Probably not. The Account was not typically known to be Burke’s by his British contemporaries at that time and it is doubtful that colonial Americans knew anything more. However, Burke’s thought was to become much better known to eighteenth-century Americans through other writings which they knew to be his.
Some scholars have argued that Burke’s name was suggested by the Secretary of the Board of Trade, John Pownall (1720–95), as a possible Agent for the Assembly of New York as early as 1761.12 (Burke eventually held that post, but not until 1771). If that was the case – it is less than certain because Pownall wrote of a ‘Thomas’ Burke – then the reply he received from Council President Cadwallader Colden (1688–1776) suggests Burke was not then well known in New York. Colden wrote of the Burke in question: ‘There is a difficulty, he is not so much as known by name to any person in this place or in what state he stands. But I hope the character you have given him and his being your friend will be sufficient to remove all difficulties.’13 Regardless of whether or not Colden was here commenting on Edmund Burke, on the whole, the available evidence suggests that Burke’s name was not widely known in New York or any other American colony in the early 1760s.
Still, some Americans were reading Burke and quoting him, and not only from An Account of the European Settlements in America. Burke’s thought also circulated through his work as the primary editor and a prodigious contributor to The Annual Register. Published in London by the brothers Robert (1704–64) and James Dodsley (1724–97), the first number of The Annual Register appeared in 1758, two years before the accession of George III. American affairs figure prominently in The Annual Register from 1758 and increasingly so as the American crisis developed. From its inception, The Annual Register was popular in America, as it was elsewhere in the British Atlantic world.14 But, here again, the impact of an anonymous author is difficult to trace with precision. There are many direct references to The Annual Register in eighteenth-century American publications, but it is also the type of material that was frequently read without particular notice.15 Indeed, it was sometimes even used without particular notice. American historians plagiarized shamelessly from Burke’s ‘Historical Accounts’ when they came to give ‘their’ accounts of the American Revolution in the early years of the Republic, as we shall see. But first, did colonial Americans know Burke as the author of two other volumes that he had published in the 1750s: A Vindication of Natural Society (London, 1756) or A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757)?
The first American reference found to either of these works is from 1762. That is the year in which Noel Garrat (1707–76), a New York bookseller, offered for sale in his annual catalogue, ‘Bourke [sic], on the Sublime and Beautiful’ (1762, 9).16 We also know that, about this same time, John Adams (1735–1826), who would soon be one of America’s most famous revolutionaries, was reading Burke on the sublime and beautiful. He tells us that others in New England were too.17 Adams recorded in his diary in early 1763 that many Americans read Burke’s book but that they did not agree with all that they read: ‘the Chapter upon Sympathy, they all disapprove. The Author says we have a real Pleasure in the Distresses and Misfortunes of others. Mem. To write a Letter to Sewal or Quincy, or Lowell on the subject of that Chapter’ (Butterfield 1962, 1:234). While some enlightened Americans, such as John Adams, were intrigued by Burke’s moral and philosophical thought, it was Burke’s political writings and career that were at the heart of his reception in eighteenth-century America. It is to this context that we should now turn.
Burke’s political career had begun in the 1750s but hit full stride in 1765 with his appointment as private secretary to Charles Watson-Wentworth, second Marquess of Rockingham (1730–82). As the Burke scholar Frederick A. Dreyer put it, ‘Henceforth, Burke devoted himself entirely to politics’.18 Elected a Member of Parliament for Wendover in December 1765, Burke was one of the so-called Rockingham Whigs and the record established as their spokesman suggests that is the guise in which Americans of the 1760s came to know him best of all. With his reputation rising in Britain, Burke’s name was frequently mentioned in parliamentary lists and similar registers printed in colonial American almanacs and newspapers. A representative example would be when John Fleeming’s [or Fleming] Boston almanac included ‘Burke Edmund Wendover’ in its ‘Alphabetical LIST of the House of COMMONS’ (1771, 35).
Burke’s first significant political pamphlet, probably published in 1762, was on Irish problems. That would have appealed to some in America. The second was published soon after his election to Parliament. A Short Account of a Late Short Administration (1766) offered a defence of Rockingham’s administration of 1765–66. Burke wrote that under Rockingham’s administration, the ‘passions and animosities of the colonies, by judicious and lenient measures, were allayed and composed, and the foundation laid for a lasting agreement amongst them’ (Burke 1839, 1:208). Surprisingly, perhaps, Burke’s Short Account does not appear to have been immediately or often discussed in print in America in the 1760s. However, there is evidence that it would be discussed in some circles as American resistance to imperial policy became a revolutionary movement in the 1770s.
In 1774, John Adams would write to his wife, Abigail (1744–1818), describing a dinner party he had attended: ‘Mr. Collector Francis Waldo, Esqr. in Company with Mr. Winthrop, the two Quincys and the two Sullivans. All very social and chearfull – full of Politicks. S. Quincy’s Tongue ran as fast as any Bodies.’ What had Samuel Quincy’s (1734–89) fast tongue said? Adams tells us: ‘He was clear in it, that the House of Commons had no Right to take Money out of our Pocketts, any more than any foreign State – repeated large Paragraphs from a Publication of Mr. Burke’s in 1766, and large Paragraphs from Junius Americanus &c’ (Butterfield 1963, 1:131).19 As Burke became widely known as a British politician who opposed American taxation, the way was opened for him to become a celebrated friend of what was becoming an American Revolutionary cause. Frustratingly, American Revolutionaries did not often leave clear indications of how they were reading Burke. What evidence exists suggests they found a much different Burke than the conservative (or Romantic) one known by Americans in the nineteenth century. While modern commentators question whether Burke knew the American colonial situation well, Burke’s American contemporaries had no doubt that he did.
Early American newspapers of the 1760s and 1770s are replete with references to Burke. There, Burke is often mentioned in columns reporting the news from ‘London’. So, for instance, The Boston Post-Boy reported, mistakenly, that Burke was one of those to be ‘included in the intended new Ministry’.20 As was frequently the case with eighteenth-century newspapers, once printed a story was often reprinted, even in identical words; in this case by the end of the year in newspapers from New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts.21 Burke’s contributions to the debates in the House of Commons were also reprinted in colonial newspapers, such as in a Boston Chronicle article of 1769,22 and praised, such as when the Chronicle reported that ‘Mr. Burke, member for Wendover … spoke for near an hour, in a pure eloquent and rhetorical manner, truly Ciceronian, which he is well known to be master of’.23 By 18 March 1769, the New York Gazette could report the meeting of ‘a company of gentlemen’ who drank toasts to celebrate the third anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Tax. Edmund Burke, ‘an asserter of American rights’, was one of those to whom they drank.24 In short, the Burke defined in American print culture of the 1760s was one who increasingly was being cast as a celebrated friend of the American colonial cause.
In 1769 Burke published Observations on a Late Publication Entitled ‘The Present State of the Nation’, an attack on William Knox’s (1732–1810) pamphlet of the previous year.25 Here, Burke elaborated on his defence of the Rockingham administration’s 1766 repeal of the Stamp Tax of 1765. The Stamp Tax, wrote Burke, was designed to ‘let loose that dangerous spirit of disquisition, not in the coolness of philosophical inquiry, but inflamed with all the passions of a haughty resentful people, who thought themselves deeply injured, and that they were contending for everything that was valuable in the world’ (Burke 1839, 1:307).26 Burke argued in words that get to the heart of his thoughts on the American Revolution. In essence, he ‘maintained that real consequences and practical circumstances ought to be at the forefront of Britain’s policy toward her American colonies’ (Spencer 2006). Burke wrote:
Whoever goes about to reason on any part of the policy of this country with regard to America, upon the mere abstract principles of government, or even upon those of our own ancient constitution, will be often misled. Those who resort for arguments to the most respectable authorities, ancient or modern, or rest upon the clearest maxims, drawn from the experience of other states and empires, will be liable to the greatest errors imaginable. The object is wholly new in the world. It is singular: it is grown up to this magnitude and importance within the memory of man; nothing in history is parallel to it. All the reasonings about it, that are likely to be at all solid, must be drawn from its actual circumstances. (1839, 1:314–15)
For Burke, the American crisis was unique because the American colonists were unique in their history and present circumstances; and, therefore, unique solutions ought to be sought. Part of the power of Burke’s message here is, as Daniel Hitchens puts it, that he ‘changes the subject from “America” as an “object” to its “people” with their particular nature’ (2013). Little wonder that colonial American newspapers reprinted Burke’s speeches and regarded him as a ‘celebrated’ orator who saw that
the Americans are contending only for an inalienable right; the right of taxing themselves, which is inseparable from every country that boasts the least degree of freedom. When they crossed the Atlantic, they did not give up the rights of Englishmen … On the contrary, they shifted their abode in order to breathe a freer air, and to give full scope to that independent, that unconquerable spirit, with which they are still animated.27
It is almost as though from 1757 to 1770 Burke had come to know America so well that he could attempt to write as if he saw things through colonial American eyes. While not the sort of conclusion that can easily be proved, it is tempting to speculate that part of the explanation of his achievements lies in Burke’s early designs to go to America. Burke was able to appreciate deeply the imperial crisis and attempt to formulate his reconciling position from the perspective of an American, in part, because as a young man he had in his mind transported himself across the Atlantic when he considered migrating there to seek his own freer air.
In 1771 the parameters of Burke’s American reception were to change again when he accepted an offer to serve as Agent for the General Assembly of the Province of New York. News of Burke’s appointment soon made its way into print in America. The New York General Assembly recorded its resolution:
That Edmund Burke, Esq; of London, be, and hereby is appointed agent for this colony to the Court of Great-Britain, in the Room of Robert Charles, Esq; deceased, and that for his services as such, there be allowed to him the said Edmund Burke, Esq; at the rate of five hundred pounds per annum.28
The Assembly’s appreciation of Burke’s work on their behalf also comes through at various times. A typical expression of this is found in a record for 15 March 1775, when the Assembly resolved:
That it is the opinion of this committee, that there be allowed unto Edmund Burke, Esq. agent of this colony in Great Britain, as a reward for his care, trouble and diligence in attending upon his Majesty and his ministers of state, in that station, from and to the time aforesaid, after the rate of £500 per annum … and also the further sum of £140 for the contingent charges of the said agent.
No doubt Burke’s term as colonial agent influenced his reception with the colonial elite in New York. So too would the circulation of his political writings and speeches, words read by many more beyond the elite.
Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770) is an important work informing Burke’s reception in early America. As Bernard Bailyn has perceptively remarked, Burke’s Thoughts was ‘particularly relevant to the American situation, for the apprehension that dominates that piece is in essence interchangeable with that of innumerable Revolutionary writers’ (1967, 146). The key place of that set of ideas to Bailyn’s influential understanding of the American Revolution ought not to be understated. As Burke had put it in 1769: ‘The Americans have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them: we have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion against us […] we know not how to advance; they know not how to retreat […] Some party must give way.’29
As we have seen, Burke’s celebrity as an orator was evident in America as early as the 1760s. That reputation continued to grow in the 1770s. So, for instance, in New York, James Rivington included Burke’s name in ‘A List of principal Orators who have distinguished themselves at the Head of the Minority in the lower House of Parliament’ in his 1774 almanac, which was designed for ‘gentleman’ as well as ‘ladies’.30 In the years leading up to the outbreak of their Revolution, Americans eagerly sought out British editions of Burke’s speeches and they also printed their own editions. In 1775, the third edition of Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq; on American Taxation, April 19, 1774 was reprinted by Rivington in New York, and by Benjamin Towne (?–1793) in Philadelphia.31 That same year, Rivington reprinted The Speech of Edmund Burke, Esquire, on moving his Resolutions for Reconciliation with the Colonies, March 22d, 1775 (New York, 1775). The degree to which Burke was at the core of Rivington’s publishing enterprise can be seen by the prominent place of Rivington’s reprintings of Burke’s works in the New Yorker’s advertisements.32
Burke’s ‘Conciliation’ speech was also reprinted in American newspapers. Sometimes it was even serialized as when the Pennsylvania Evening Post published its multi-issue reprinting: The speeches in the last session of the present Parliament, delivered by several of the principal advocates in the House of Commons, in favour of the rights of America … With the speech of Mr. Edmund Burke, in favour of the Protestant dissenters, in the second Parliament of George the 3d. If Burke was virtually unknown to Americans in 1757, by the time of the outbreak of the American War of Independence, he was the celebrated Edmund Burke, Esq.33 By the end of 1775, Burke’s speech was being advertised as ‘The CELEBRATED SPEECH of EDMUND BURKE, Esq. On moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775’. It was touted in words of praise such as this: ‘The above is one of the most masterly speeches ever pronounced in a British House of Commons’ (Hutchins 1776, 3). Part of what is interesting here is to see Burke’s efforts at conciliation in the context of what was fast becoming a polarized factional divide. As Martin Fitzpatrick puts it in his essay on ‘England and the American Enlightenment’ in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, in his Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, Burke essentially ‘argued that the colonial claims against the Westminster government were based upon English ideas and principles of liberty, and that the case for conciliation rested upon the shared social and political culture of England and America, upon ties “from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection”’.34 It is also interesting to note here that while modern commentators have often been concerned to reconcile (or not) a seeming paradox between Burke’s support of the Declaratory Act and his support of the American cause, eighteenth-century Americans seem not to have been troubled by this. For them, there was no paradox in need of resolution.35
Eighteenth-century Americans not infrequently saw Burke in the same colours as Charles James Fox (1749–1806) and Isaac Barré (1726–1802), as one of the handful of British parliamentarians who openly voiced their support for the Americans. In America’s Appeal to The Impartial World (Hartford, 1775), Connecticut clergyman Moses Mather (1719–1806), could cast Burke as an ‘illustrious patriot’:
I shall now proceed in the last place to consider this question in another light, viz. the equity of the demand made upon the colonies, and of the manner in which it is made. The ill policy of such measures, having in a most inimitable manner, been considered and exposed by those illustrious patriots, the earl of Chatham, Burke, Barre, the bishop of Asaph, &c. (whose names and memories no distance of place or time, will be able to obliterate from the greatful minds of the Americans) with such dignity of sentiment, energy and perspicuity of reason, such rectitude of intention, uncorruptness and candor of disposition, and with such force of elocution, as must have rendered them irresistible, only by the omnipotence of parliament. (Mather 1775, 476)
Americans not only had access to the text of Burke’s speeches, which they read for themselves, but they also read what others wrote about Burke. In Political Disquisitions: An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses (London, 1774–75), James Burgh wrote that Burke was one of those who had defended Sir George Saville’s right to say that ‘This house hath betrayed the rights of the people’. Burgh remarked that
Mr. Edmund Burke … with great spirit, defended Sir George Savile, and called upon the ministry to punish Sir George, if the accusation was false; and said, ‘That if a false and unjust charge had been made, the gentleman who made it ought to be sent to the Tower’: but added, ‘that the ministers were conscious of the truth of the assertion, and therefore in a tame and cowardly manner crouched under it’. He said, the people abhorred the present ministry, and asked the speaker if the chair did not tremble under him. (Burgh 1774–75, 1:479)
Burgh’s Political Disquisitions was reprinted by Robert Bell in three volumes in Philadelphia in 1775.
The following year, 1776, Bell also reprinted in Philadelphia the first edition of John Cartwright’s (1740–1824) American Independence, The Interest and Glory of Great Britain. Burke did not figure large in that volume, but he did matter. Bell attached to the end of Cartwright’s text an extract from the Monthly Review’s review of the second London edition, writing, with his typical American nationalist flare:
If any GENTLEMAN, possessed of the English second Edition of this Pamphlet, will be so obliging, as to favour the Printer ROBERT BELL with it, for a few days only, he will thereby render an essential service to the cause of LIBERTY and LITERATURE in AMERICA. (Cartwright 1776, 121)
The reviewer for the Monthly Review explained that the second edition had added to it ‘a copious Appendix, containing two additional Letters to the Legislature’ and ‘a Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq; controverting his Principles of American Government’ (Cartwright 1776, 121).
Other references to Burke are to be found in America in the 1770s. There are occasional references to his Sublime and Beautiful, twice in Robert Bell’s catalogue for 1773: once to ‘Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful,’ octavo in gilt (1773, 15), and once as ‘Bourke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful – To which is added, a Vindication of Natural Society by the same Author’ (1773, 12). Harvard’s catalogue of 1773 referred, mistakenly, to ‘Burke (William) on the sublime and Beautiful’ ([Winthrop] 1773, 8). Catalogues of the 1780s carried on that trend.36
References to Burke can be found in miscellaneous papers and various works published during the years of the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). In 1780, Samuel Cooper (1725–1783) referred to Burke in his A Sermon Preached before his Excellency John Hancock … the Senate, and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Seeing France’s Louis XVI as a potentially useful ally of the Americans, Cooper remarked that ‘The celebrated Mr. Burke, in his speech before the British house of Commons on February last’ gave praise to Louis. He went on:
[W]hen speaking of some reforms in the finances and the court of France, he says, ‘The minister who does these things is a great man, but the prince who desires they should be done, is a far greater: We must do justice to our enemies; these are the acts of a patriot king.’ The friendship of such a monarch must be valuable indeed!37
The outbreak of war between Britain and America did not put an end to Burke’s correspondence with Benjamin Franklin. In one notable exchange, Burke aimed to solicit Franklin’s assistance for British General John Burgoyne (1722–92), Burke’s friend. Burke wrote to Franklin in America:
If I were not fully persuaded of your Liberal and manly way of thinking, I should not presume, in the hostile situation in which I stand, to make an application to you. But in this piece of experimental Philosophy, I run no risque of Offending you. I apply, not to the Ambassador of America, but to Doctor Franklin the Philosopher; my friend, and the lover of his Species. (Corr. 4: 364–65 [15 August 1781])
Burke’s skills as a public orator continued to be praised in the colonial presses during these years too, but not always without qualification. So, for instance, in an American edition of the Letters of Thomas Lord Lyttelton, published in Philadelphia in 1782, Burke is noted for giving ‘a happy dignity to parts of his speeches, a want of which is, in general, their only defect, by the application of scriptural expressions’ (Lyttelton 1782, 39).
In the 1780s, some Americans are known to have sought out Burke’s company when they visited Britain. John Adams did so in 1783, but was not impressed with his reception. Adams recorded in his Diary:
Curiosity prompted me to trot about London as fast as good horses in a decent carriage could carry me. I was introduced by Mr. Harley, on a merely ceremonious visit, to the Duke of Portland, Mr. Burke, and Mr. Fox; but finding nothing but ceremony there, I did not ask favours or receive any thing but cold formalities from ministers of state or ambassadors. (Butterfield 1962, 3:150)38
So did Samuel Chase (1741–1811), who stayed with Burke for several days.39 Burke himself sought out Americans who were in Britain, such as the prominent South Carolinian planter and merchant, Henry Laurens (1724–92). In Laurens’s case, the American praised Burke for showing him such care while he was incarcerated in the Tower of London, details we know from a letter that Laurens wrote to John Hancock (1737–93).40
In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Burke’s various writings continued to circulate in America. The degree to which Burke was an established presence in early America, even before the publication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, can be seen by looking to the 1789 catalogue of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Its Burke holdings are impressive. Along with ‘An account of the European settlements in America. Second edition. 2 vols. London, 1758’, which we have seen was in its collection from at least 1765, one now finds two copies of ‘Edmund Burke’s Speech on American Taxation. Third edition. London, 1775’, and also the ‘Third edition. New York, 1775’ (as well as ‘An answer to Burke’s speech on American taxation. London. 1775’), ‘Edmund Burke’s speech on moving for a conciliation with the colonies. Second edition. London, 1775’, ‘Edmund Burke’s speech on presenting to the house of commons a plan for the better securing of the independence of parliament, &c. Fourth edition. London. 1780’ (in two separate collections), ‘A representation to his majesty, moved in the house of commons by Edmund Burke, and seconded by William Windham. London, 1784’, and a complete set of ‘Dodsley’s annual register; or a view of history, politics, and literature; from the year 1758, to the year 1783. 31 vols. London’.41
Any endeavour to understand Burke’s reception in eighteenth-century America must take into account that Americans of the 1780s were themselves uncertain about the nature of the Revolution they had achieved. That searching nature is sometimes captured in their correspondence, such as the famous exchange of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) that centred on answering the question, as Adams styled it, ‘What was the American Revolution?’ The same searching tone is also evident in the histories that Americans wrote in the 1780s in their efforts to understand, and define, the causes, nature, and consequences of their Revolution. Of notably high quality here is The History of the American Revolution, by David Ramsay (1749–1815). Ramsay’s History is worthy of attention in a chapter on Burke’s reception in early America.42
From Orrin Grant Libby’s pioneering study published at the beginning of the twentieth century, historians have known that one of the ways in which Burke’s thought circulated in eighteenth-century America was when passages Burke contributed to The Annual Register were copied verbatim by men like Ramsay in his History of the Revolution in South-Carolina (1785) and The History of the American Revolution (1789).43 Ramsay was not alone in that regard; others too copied what was well-expressed, thought to be true and most useful.44 The plagiarism tells us something about Burke’s America reception. But Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution has other things to offer. Most noteworthy is Ramsay’s nuanced understanding of Burke’s own nuanced understanding of the American crisis.45 While modern scholars may conclude that Burke had ‘little understanding of the rapidly escalating issues in the American quarrel’ (Ritcheson 1976, 15), that is far from how Ramsay saw it. Rather, in his History of the American Revolution, Ramsay remarked that there had been a number of ‘plans for conciliation’ between America and Britain. Looking at these, by far ‘the most remarkable’ was the one that Burke put forward in his speech of 22 March 1775. Ramsay praised Burke’s Speech on Conciliation as so many in America had before him: ‘for strength of argument, extent of information, and sublimity of language’, it ‘would bear a comparison with the most finished performance that ancient or modern times have produced’. But it was the details of Burke’s argument that most caught Ramsay’s attention. That argument he summarized for his readers:
In his introduction to this admirable speech, he examined and explained the natural and accidental circumstances of the colonies, with respect to situation, resources, number, population, commerce, fisheries and agriculture, and from these considerations shewed their importance. He then enquired into their unconquerable spirit of freedom; and he traced it to its original sources; from these circumstances he inferred the line of policy which should be pursued with regard to America – he shewed that all proper plans of government must be adapted to the feelings, established habits, and received opinions of the people. On these principles he reprobated all plans of governing the colonies by force; and proposed as the ground work of his plan, that the colonists should be admitted to an interest in the constitution. (Cohen 1990, 1:156)
Ramsay endorsed Burke’s understanding of the historical context of the Americans. He argued that Burke ‘contended that a communication to the members of an interest in the constitution, was the great ruling principle of British government’. Burke’s solution for the American crisis:
go back to the old policy for governing the colonies. He was for a parliamentary acknowledgment of the legal competency of the colony [sic] assemblies for the support of their government in peace, and for public aids in time of war – and of the futility of parliamentary taxation as a method of supply. He stated that much had been given in the old way of colonial grant, that from the year 1748 to 1763, the journals of the house of commons repeatedly acknowledged that the colonies not only gave, but gave to satiety; and that from the time in which parliamentary imposition had superceded the free gifts of the provinces, there was much discontent, but little revenue. He therefore moved six resolutions affirmatory of these facts, and grounded on them resolutions for repealing the acts complained of by the Americans, trusting to the liberality of their future voluntary contributions. (Cohen 1990, 1:156)
Sadly, explained Ramsay, Burke’s ‘plan of conciliation, which promised immediate peace to the whole empire, and a lasting obedience of the colonies, though recommended by the charms of the most persuasive eloquence, and supported by the most convincing arguments, was by a great majority rejected’ (Cohen 1990, 1:156–57). In other words, Burke had understood the American crisis, but most in Britain had not.46
Burke’s contribution to the American crisis and the earliest phase of his reception in early America, summarized here so nicely by Ramsay, would soon be supplanted. Burke’s American legacy was to become inextricably tangled with the controversial reception that met his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In 1791, Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in consequence of some late discussions in Parliament, relative to the ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ was reprinted in America. That same year, Hugh Gaine in New York reprinted A Letter from Mr. Burke, to a member of the National Assembly, in answer to some objections to his Book on French Affairs. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was reprinted in 198 pages by Hugh Gaine in 1791 and in even larger editions of 254 pages in Philadelphia in 1791 and 1792. About this time, Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington (1732–99) on 8 May 1791: ‘Sir, – The last week does not furnish one single public event worthy communicating to you: so that I have only to say “All is well.” Paine’s answer to Burke’s pamphlet begins to produce some squibs in our public papers. In Fenno’s paper they are Burkites, in the others, Painites’ (Peterson 1984, 977). Not long after, Charles Pigott (d.1794) in his The Female Jockey Club (London, 1794, but reprinted in New York that same year) could refer to Burke as ‘the Corinthian pillar of Aristocracy’ (Pigott 1794, 172).
Burke figures significantly in the History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) by Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814). For Warren, like Ramsay, Burke ‘always appeared to have a thorough detestation of corrupt men and measures. He advocated the cause of liberty, not only with the ability of an orator, but with an enthusiasm for the establishment of freedom in all countries’ (Cohen 1989, 2: 519). Burke ‘was the friend of Franklin and Laurens; corresponded with the first on American affairs, and made great exertions to mitigate the sufferings of the last, while in rigorous imprisonment’. Indeed:
The celebrity of Mr. Burke for his general conduct, and his spirited speeches in favor of the rights of man, during the revolutionary war, were justly appreciated throughout America. He was admired for his oratorical talents, and beloved for the part he took in the cause of suffering individuals, either American prisoners of the oppressed in his own country. His feelings of humanity extended to the Ganges; and by his lively descriptions of the miseries of the wretched inhabitants of India, he has expanded the human heart, and drawn a tear from every compassionate eye. (Cohen 1989, 2:520)
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France disrupted that set of appraisals. ‘Certainly, to such a man, the tribute of a tear is equally due, when he shall be beheld in the decline of life, deviating from his own principles, and drawing his energetic pen to censure and suppress the struggles for liberty in a sister kingdom’ (Cohen 1989, 2:520).
Warren lamented:
When we retrace the powers of the human mind, and view the gradations of the faculties, or the decline of genius, it is a humiliating reflection, that a more advanced period of life so often subtracts from the character of man, as it shone in full lustre in the meridian of his days. Perhaps in the instance before us, a deviation from the former principles might be more owing to a decline in correct political sentiment, than to any physical debility that was yet apparent … without further apology it is proper to observe, that before he finished his political drama, the world was astonished to behold Mr. Burke, fulminating his anathemas against a neighbouring nation, who were struggling with every nerve for the recovery of the freedom and the natural rights of man, of which they had long been robbed, and which had been trodden under foot, if not annihilated, by despotic kings, unprincipled nobles, and a corrupt clergy. (Cohen 1989, 2:520–21)47
The stage was set for Burke’s reception in nineteenth-century America and the seeming paradox that many historians still attempt to solve.
Notes
1The author is grateful to the book’s editors for their helpful comments on his chapter. He also wishes to thank Roger L. Emerson, Craig Hanyan, Adam Nadeau, John Sainsbury, Wayne Thorpe and F. L. van Holthoon for reading various drafts and offering many improvements.
2Jonathan Boucher’s references to Burke’s Reflections and his Letters on a Regicide Peace, added to the 1797 revised edition of Boucher (1797) – a book dedicated to George Washington – is representative of the wider reception in America of Burke as a conservative critic of the French Revolution.
3For a guide to some of the historiography published before 1994, see Cowie (1994); however, much has been published since then. For Burke’s post-1790 American reception, see, in particular, Anders and Fisch (1939); Howe (1979); Belz (2000); Tate (2005); Connolly (2009); and, more recently, Deane (2012); and Macaig (2013).
4Most often the approach has been to assess Burke’s understanding of the ‘American crisis’, rather than to illuminate Burke’s American reception. As Harry T. Dickinson explains, ‘Modern scholars … are divided over Burke’s response to the American crisis. Some maintain that Burke was well informed about American affairs … Other scholars have argued that Burke never really fully appreciated the American position’ (Dickinson 2012, 156). See e.g. Ritcheson (1976).
5Corr. 1:123, Edmund Burke to Richard Shackleton [10 August 1757]. In a note in the Correspondence, Copeland explains that William Dennis, a mutual friend of the two correspondents, had written to Shackleton on 5 August 1757 that Burke’s ‘purpose for America holds’ (1:124 n.2). The thought was evidently still on his mind in 1761. Burke asked an Irish friend: ‘When you look at the Atlantick ocean do you think of America? In our old fabulous History I think I have read that the Prophet Moses advised the antient Scots to go as far Westward as possible; is this good advice to their posterity?’ (1:141, Burke to Charles O’Hara [10 July 1761]). For speculation on some of the possible reasons behind Burke’s ‘designs’ for America, see Lock (1998, 126).
6Reprinted in Kramnick (1999).
7See Lock (1998, 126–41). J. C. D. Clark’s statement that ‘Little in [Burke’s] writings or speeches published before 1775 bore on America’ (2005, 79) needs to be ignored or qualified in the light of the Account, and also when Burke’s contributions to The Annual Register are taken into account, as they are below.
8There has been relatively little work on the early American dissemination of Burke’s writings. Lundberg and May (1976) include Burke in their statistical assessment, however, they do not consider the Account. That is only one of the shortcomings of their study when it comes to tracing Burke’s reception in early America. Burke also does not register in Lutz (1984).
9See Rivington and Brown (1762, 38).
10See Franklin and Hall (1765, 111).
11Those reprintings included ones in Philadelphia, in 1767 and 1784, and in London, in 1767 and 1785. The Caution and Warning was also issued in Benezet (1773), a volume that was also reprinted in the eighteenth century. My quotations below are drawn from the first Philadelphia edition of 1766.
12See, in particular, Stebbins (1903). For an alternate and more convincing view, see Hoffman (1956, 16–17).
13Quoted in Stebbins (1903, 89).
14Lundburg and May’s study does not consider this publication either. On the early popularity and dissemination of The Annual Register and Burke’s part therein, see the essays ‘A Career in Journalism’ and ‘A Body of Anonymous Writings’ in Copeland (1970); see also McLoughlin (1975); and Todd (1961).
15The Annual Register’s account of the War for American Independence had a particularly large audience in America. One indication of this is that it was serially reprinted, including in the South Carolina and American Gazette in 1778 and 1779. As well, in 1785, Thomas Jefferson remarked in a letter to David Ramsay that the account of the American Revolutionary War found in The Annual Register was the best that Great Britain would produce.
16Lundburg and May (1976) do include Burke’s Philosophical Essays in their study, finding it in seven of ninety-two colonial libraries and then, impressively, in twenty-four of the twenty-nine library catalogues they surveyed for the period of 1777–90. That latter figure is equal to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government for the same period.
17See Barker-Benfield (2010, 37). On some of the similarities, and differences, between Adams and Burke, see Ripley (1965).
18For a book-length study of this core idea, see Dreyer (1979).
19John Adams to Abigail Adams [7 July 1774]. Butterfield explains in a note: ‘Edmund Burke published in 1766 “A Short Account of a Late Short Administration,” a manifesto of the Rockingham Whigs. “Junius Americanus” was a pen name used by Arthur Lee in contributing political pieces to the London papers’ (1:134 n.4).
20‘LONDON, Sept. 19’, The Boston Post-Boy, 534 (9 November 1767): [2].
21See ‘London’, New-York Mercury, 837 (16 November 1767): [2]; New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy, 1298 (19 November 1767): [2]; ‘London, September 12’, Pennsylvania Gazette, 2030 (Philadelphia, PA): [2]; ‘London, September 9’, New-York Journal, 1299, Supplement: [1]; Connecticut Journal, 7 (4 December 1767): [1]; Boston Evening Post, 1683 (28 December 1767): [2].
22Boston Chronicle, 2.10: 78.
23‘Extract of a Letter from Hague, Aug. 29’, Boston Chronicle, 11.47 (Thursday 16 November–Monday 20 November 1769): 376. This piece was reprinted in the New-York Gazette, and Weekly Mercury, 944 (27 November 1769): [2]; ‘London, September 8’, New-York Journal, 1404 (30 November 1769): 2. In the late 1760s, when he travelled to Britain, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) recorded that he ‘attended the House of Commons, and there saw the celebrated speakers Col. Barre and Mr. Burke’ (Corner 1948, 65).
24See Hoffman (1956, 101). See also Boston Chronicle, 11.16 (Thursday 13 April–Monday 17 April 1769): 122.
25For Knox’s Present State of the Nation (1768), see Bellot (1999); see also Lock (1998, 259–64).
26Much of what Burke wrote served party ends. To his pragmatic American readers that did not appear to matter all that much, although perhaps to some it did.
27New York Gazette, 30 April 1770; see Hoffman (1956, 101).
28Journal of the votes and proceedings of the General Assembly of the colony of New-York (1771), 18. For miscellaneous reporting of Burke’s activities as a public officer, see for instance, New York (State) (1773), 3; Journal of the votes … (1773), 6; Gaine’s universal register (1774), 98; Gaine’s universal register (1775), 44, 109. The New York Journal reported on 9 May 1771: ‘Mr. Burke hath accepted the Agency of New York.’
29Quoted in Bailyn (1967, 158–59).
30Rivington’s … Almanack (1773), 31. That year, Benjamin Franklin, America’s most famous revolutionary, struck up a correspondence with Burke. Franklin, like Burke, was a colonial Agent. Franklin’s first extant letter to Burke, of 19 December 1774, was related to those shared interests (Corr. 3:80–81). Between 1774 and 1782 Franklin and Burke exchanged at least eight letters, as that number have survived.
31Rivington had advertised his edition of Burke’s taxation speech on the final page of Arthur Lee (1775, 32).
32See, in particular, Rivington’s advertisements at the end of [James Rivington] (1775, 8).
33J. C. D. Clark’s foolish assessment of Burke’s ‘silence on the American Revolution’ (2005, 86) might come as a surprise to Americans who, in the 1770s, had heard Burke loud and clear.
34Spencer (2015, 1: 391).
35See Ritcheson: ‘There is therefore something of a paradox: Burke, the “champion’ of colonial liberty”; and Burke, the staunch adherent of the Declaratory Act’ (1976, 5).
36For instance, in 1785, Thomas Seddon advertised for sale the ‘New annual register, by Edmund Burke’ as well as ‘complete sets’ in 21 volumes, The Pennsylvania Evening Herald and the American Monitor, 20 (1 October 1785): 77. ‘Burke on the sublime and beautiful’ was advertised in [Guild] (1787, 6).
37Reprinted in Sandoz (1990, 651).
38Other Americans were also critical of Burke in the 1780s, including Henry Cruger, Jr (1739–1827); see Van Schaack (1859) and Lester (1999).
39See Horsnell (1999).
40See Cohen (2004, 42–43, 76).
41Philadelphia (1789, 35, 178, 187, 192, 194, 208).
42See O’Brien (1994, esp. 9).
43See Libby (1901–02). See also the ‘Foreword’ in Cohen (1990, xxx–xxxi). The most detailed assessment is found in Brunhouse (1965), esp. Appendix III, ‘Cases of Plagiarism’), which tabulates some two dozen passages in Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution that originated in Burke’s Annual Register.
44See Libby (1889, 1:367–88).
45It is also interesting to note that Ramsay was familiar with Burke on the Sublime. See his reference to that work in his letter to Benjamin Rush of 8 April 1777 (Brunhouse 1965, 55).
46In the light of Ramsay’s assessment, we ought to be cautious in our acceptance of J. C. D. Clark’s suggestion that Burke had only ‘a shallow understanding of the colonies’ (Clark 2005, 81).
47This did not stop Warren in her History from drawing liberally on Burke’s Annual Register as she did, without acknowledgement.