However cozy your childhood home may appear through the lens of time and distance, you really can’t go home again.
There’s quite a bit of hoopla both in the UK and here in the States, at least in some circles, about the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. I’m open to argument but it seems to me that the document’s importance to us Yanks is very much exaggerated. To understand why you’ve got to look at a timeline.
A gang of armed barons and, presumably, their men-at-arms forced John Lackland to sign Magna Carta on the 15th of June, 1215. That’s according to the Julian calendar so, presumably, it would actually have been a few days later according to our calendar but what’s a few days among friends?
The first permanent English settlement in the New World was in 1607. Said another way, American history diverged from English history a little less than 400 years after the signing of Magna Carta and has remained that way. Oh, Americans were aware of Magna Carta and it had some vague foundational influence. However, at least by my reading, Magna Carta was mostly about powerful aristocrats asserting their independence and rights against a king who tried to establish a modern state ahead of its time. Nowadays in the 21stcentury we’ve been separated from Magna Carta for longer than our English forebears (those of us who, unlike me, have English forebears) were governed by it.
Meanwhile, after 1607 the Americans were largely left without adult supervision, trying to create a society largely without those powerful aristocrats, most of whom remained on their estates in Old Blighty. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence he thought about Magna Carta but, legal scholar that he was, the Declaration owed more to Jean Jacques Burlamaqui and Francis Hutcheson than it did to Magna Carta. Or John Locke for that matter.
What I’m saying is that our Englishness is much exaggerated. How then did the U. S. become so Anglophile?
I would suggest that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Throughout the 19th century there was more immigration from Ireland or Germany (or what was to become Germany) than there was from England. Wealthy Americans of English descent sent their kids to be educated at Oxford or Cambridge occasionally. Americans attended the Sorbonne, the University of Vienna, and Edinburgh, too.
I think the big push for American Englishness began right around 1914, pushing us towards England and away from Germany, and reached its zenith in the late 1930s in the effort to encourage American entrance into the war on England’s side.
I’d be interested in dissenting views but I think it would healthier for us if we recognized just how different we are from our English and European cousins. We are not English. We are not Europeans. We are Americans.
Shortly before entering what came to be known as WWI, a high ranking US Navy Admiral told a delegation headed to Britain for talks that they should let His Majesty’s Government know that the USN would be just as happy to go to war against the limeys as the krauts.
After that war, it looks to me that the British Government made a great deal of propaganda in the US to convince the US to effectively scuttle our planned Navy – which would have been better than the British Navy. It was completely self-serving on their part.
The Brits didn’t seem to come around to liking America or Americans, as best I can tell, until it became a matter of choosing Nazis or Americans.
I guess I disagree. The Magna Carta emerged in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution as a key document evidencing the Whig view of history and politics. It was that Englishmen, or at least free ones, enjoyed certain inherent rights, whose precise nature is identified through reason and examination of the ancient traditions. The Magna Carta evidenced the idea that law was superior to kings.
The most persistent Whig expressions were from Blackstone and Coke, whose legal treatises were some of the most popular writings among the Founders. They revealed the Common Law of England to be a series of rational developments emerging from numerous conflicts. Coke in particular viewed Magna Carta as standing for the proposition that taxes are only authorized by representation (by “common counsel”). The Bostonians certainly referenced Magna Carta (or at least Coke’s interpretation of it) in justifying rebellion.
I wouldn’t deny that there’s a strain of English thought among the Founders and that it was particularly strong in New England. However, I think that whether English thought and tradition or the Scottish and French Enlightenments were more influential in molding the thinking of the Founders is worth considering.
Keep in mind that I grew up in a state in which the Code Civil was part of the fabric of state law.
The American revolutionaries described their struggle as one to preserve the rights and privileges of Englishmen. Most of the books they read and referenced were in English, and I would include Hume from Scotland. There is far less evidence of any significant or at least equivalent French influence, other than Montesquieu, whose chief importance was in describing how English liberties were secured by tripart separation of powers.
Jefferson was an anglophobe, but he wrote extensively about the unique virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race. His racial pride is tempered by the belief that English natural rights began to be eroded by the Norman invasion. The one time he visited England he viewed the Magna Carta at the British Museum. Like many of the rebels, his vision was more restorative to ancient rights and liberties than idealistic.
You’re making a good argument, PD. You may persuade me yet.
However, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Franklin, and John Adams all spoke and read French fluently.
I’ve argued the French influence point somewhat recently with a Frenchie, and by all of my accounts I won. 😉 One point of information are the various attempts to identify the works that the Founders referenced or owned: List of top 37 works cited. I’m not sure that it should be surprsing that English-speaking people generally write to each other in English, favoring English references.
An ideological revolution requires drawing on shared ideas and values. Soldiers need to be encouraged to enlist. Statesmen need to form common consensus. Propaganda must be written, and it is far more effective to complain that your opponent is violating its own principles (enshrined in the Magna Carta) then just any principles.
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine called for a Constitutional Convention to create a Continental Charter, “answering to what is called the Magna Carta of England.” Once the Charter was written, the Convention would disband and the government would be created pursuant to the Charter. Whether or not this is precisely what Magna Carta was about, it was broadly understood at that time to be about Constitutionalism.
I don’t think there’s any doubt there’s a straight line connection linking the Declaration of Independence to the English Bill of Rights of 1689. I think the connection between the English Bill of Rights and Magna Carta is more notional.
It’s occurred to me that I may not be making my point clearly. I’m not arguing that the intellectual underpinnings of American political thought are French. I’m making more an American exceptionalism argument. I think we’re sui generis.
Imagine a phylogeny tree. Put Magna Carta as the trunk. We and the modern day English are on different branches of that tree and the English are closer to the trunk than we are.
In addition, American political thought has antecedents that are absent from English political thought.
One way to consider French influence on the Founding is to consider the Founders’ influence on the French Revolution. There were a few prominent Americans in Paris during its Revolution, and they felt they had experiences to contribute to forming the new Republic. For the most part (exception noted below), the Americans urged the French to create a Constitutional monarchy like England. They by and large felt that the American experience was exceptional as a new nation in a new land, and thought that French liberties needed the continuity provided by a monarch. The Americans were largely ignored in their efforts to “teach” the French; and one has to wonder what influence the French could have had on American political thought that virtually nothing could be conveyed back in turn.
Paine, however, had no use for monarchs, but gave an impassioned plea against regicide — he felt the King should be tried and if necessary banished to the United States. The King needed to be shamed and brought below the law. I will add, like King John.