Essays by “The Free Republican,” 1784–1786. Benjamin Lincoln, Jr.
proprietary property the measure of wisdom was not what most constitution makers in 1776 had expected. In his experience, said Jefferson in 1776, “Integrity” was not “the characteristic of wealth.”42 But he and other leaders were baffled by the apparent inability of the people to perceive the wise and truly talented. Lincoln himself lamented the fact that the people were not capable of choosing the proper men to fill the offices of government. If the people were learned and virtuous enough, he told his father in 1780,
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“a republican government might then be as convenient in practice as it is in theory.”43 But since this was not what the populace was really like, gentry like Lincoln thus were reluctantly compelled to endorse property as the best possible source of distinction for their state senates. In no state was this emphasis on property as the basis for the senate more conspicuous than in Massachusetts.
During the debate over the proposed constitution of 1778 in Massachusetts, Theophilus Parsons in the Essex Result, the publication of the Essex County convention, spent a great deal of time discussing the difficulty of erecting an upper house. The proposed constitution of 1778 was defective, he wrote, because it provided for the selection of the senate by all the freemen: “a trust is reposed in the people which they are unequal to.” If Massachusetts wanted a proper senate containing “the greatest wisdom, firmness, consistency, and perseverance,” it had to look beyond the common people. “These qualities,” said Parsons, who later became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, “will most probably be found amongst men of education and fortune,” especially fortune. On behalf of the Essex Convention Parsons admitted that all men of property were not at present men of learning and wisdom, but surely, he said, it was among the wealthy that the largest number of men of education and character could be found. Hence the senate, declared the Essex convention, should represent the property of the state.44
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Since the weakness of the senate was one of the reasons the proposed constitution of 1778 was turned down, the convention that drew up the new Massachusetts constitution in 1780 was determined to remedy this defect. Not only did the senators have special property qualifications, but representation in the senate was based on the proportion of taxes paid by each senatorial district, in other words, on the value of the land in each district. And if this were not clear enough, the convention that drew up the new constitution of 1780 explicitly spelled out the difference between the two houses. “The House of Representatives is intended as the Representatives of the Persons, and the Senate of the property of the Commonwealth.”45
Of course, making the senate the overt representative of property severely distorted the traditional meaning of mixed government.46 Property was no longer simply a crude measure of the best and wisest men in the society. It had become a special interest in its own right, something requiring particular protection by one of the houses of the legislature. In 1776 the Revolutionaries had drawn no sharp distinction between persons and their property, for such a division would
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have undermined their commitment to the single public interest, the res publica, of republicanism.
By the 1780s many Americans had abandoned that earlier republican dream of equality and were busy trying to find a way of dealing with a society that had come apart and increasingly unequal. These intense discussions and debates in Massachusetts in the late 1770s and early 1780s over the framing of a constitution appropriate to the newly appreciated inequality of American society created the climate that produced the constitutional thinking of both Lincoln and Adams.
The new Massachusetts constitution did more than recognize and represent the widening social inequalities of the society, it exacerbated them. In extralegal conventions and fiery publications the disgruntled farmers in the western counties of the state voiced their objection to the very “existence” of the senate. They had a point. Since representation in the senate was based on the proportion of taxes paid by each senatorial district, representation in the senate of the wealthier eastern counties would be substantially greater than the senatorial representation of the poorer western counties of the state. In the minds of the westerners the upper house was loaded in favor of rich easterners.47
Although the constitution seemed to benefit Lincoln’s kind of gentry, he was no more happy with it than the angry
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westerners. He thought the senate was deficient because it did not protect property enough. Even with senatorial representation based on the property of each district, the less well-off, he pointed out in essay No. VI, would still outnumber and could outvote the wealthy. He was equally unhappy with the fact that the governor’s veto was qualified and could be overridden by two-thirds of the legislature. Like Adams, Lincoln wanted the executive to have an absolute veto over all legislation.48
Despite all his constitutional objections, in the end Lincoln fell back upon the major requirement for republican government that had been advocated by all the Revolutionaries in 1776. In order to support a republic, he wrote in essay Number X, “a general diffusion of knowledge and virtue are indispensable.” And this was true whatever the
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electoral process might be. “Without virtue no government long retained its freedom.” And since virtue was not natural but had to be taught, “the first attention of a free government is to be paid to the education of youth.” Whenever the people became “so deeply plunged in ignorance, or hardened in vice, as either not to know, or knowing not to choose those that are best qualified to perform the duties they are elected to discharge, … whenever either of these melancholy events shall take place,” warned Lincoln, “liberty, with all her attendant blessings, must take her flight to some happier clime, and leave the government to anarchy and ruin!”49
A college like Harvard was a fine thing, but not sufficient for educating “the greater part of the community, men of small property, whose subsistence requires their and their children’s utmost industry.”50 These poor and middling people needed instruction in public schools that were easily
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and cheaply available. All the villages, towns, parishes, and precincts ought to have schools and seminaries of instruction for all the ordinary people in the society.
It was on this matter of supporting widespread public education that the aristocratic Lincoln finally joined hands posthumously with his middling opponent William Manning—a linkage between the few and the many that has resonated through the whole of American history. In his “Key of Liberty” of 1799 Manning rightly understood that “learning and knowledge among the Many is the only support of liberty,” but he was wrong in assuming that the genteel few like Lincoln were opposed to public schooling and were bent on keeping the many in ignorance and superstition. Despite all their social and intellectual differences, both Lincoln and Manning ultimately agreed on what was really essential for the sustaining of republican government.51
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Essays by “The Free Republican,” 1784–1786
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