Jonathan Den Hartog Archives - Constituting America

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Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

Imagine yourself on Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s the evening of December 16, 1773—dark and undoubtedly cold. Three ships rest gently at the wharf, each with a cargo of a contested good—East India Company tea. From the darkness emerges a company of men, just over one hundred, with faces darkened and dressed like Native Americans. They proceed to board the ships, carry more than three hundred casks of tea onto the deck, break them open, and toss the tea into Boston Harbor. You’ve just witnessed the Boston Tea Party—although it didn’t get that name until the nineteenth century. The Tea Party matters both as a statement of the lack of popular consent to taxation and as an action that would thrust the question of consent to the foreground for all American colonists.

What had brought these Bostonians out? Their presence at the harbor was the result of local resistance to decisions that had been made far away in London. In 1767, in another attempt to raise revenue, Parliament had laid duties on many goods imported to the American colonies—goods such as paint, glass, paper, and tea. Americans resisted, writing against the acts and petitioning for repeal. Many Americans opted for practical resistance to the measures, refusing to purchase the taxed goods. They also formed groups that came to be known as the Sons of Liberty, dedicated to defending the rights of the colonists. Eventually, the protests worked, and Parliament repealed the duties—except for the tax on tea.

A tripwire was set for a new political crisis, with tea at the center. The Parliament-approved Tea Act of 1773 allowed the East India Company to sell its tea at a lower price, but for the colonists, buying the cheaper tea would be a practical endorsement of the right of Parliament to tax it. Americans across the colonies united in their opposition to the tea, but approaches differed. In Pennsylvania and New York, the ships bearing the tea were simply turned away. In South Carolina, the tea was unloaded but immediately locked up until the colony could decide what to do. But the real center of controversy was Boston. There, Governor Thomas Hutchinson was committed to enforcing Parliamentary rule. Once the ships docked, Hutchinson refused to let them leave until they unloaded their cargoes of tea—which the Sons of Liberty opposed.
The cargo of tea became the key point of political controversy—a symbol of the competing ideals between Parliamentary sovereignty and the right of Americans to be taxed only with their consent (directly or by actual representatives). Boston’s resistance leaders and Governor Hutchinson were at loggerheads. Meanwhile, plans were being made by the Sons of Liberty to deal with the tea.

On the evening of December 16, a public meeting was held to denounce the tea—and the governor—again. Thousands showed up. Significant public leaders like Samuel Adams gave speeches. Meanwhile, rank-and-file members of the Sons of Liberty proceeded in an orderly fashion to destroy the tea. Among those on board the ships, we know, was a common shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes—an ordinary individual who refused to accept unconstitutional taxation.

The activity of the Sons of Liberty at the ships was organized and intentional. It aimed to destroy the tea alone—not to engage in a more general destruction of property. The best example of this impulse was when one of the ship’s holds was padlocked, and to get into it the participants had to break the lock. Before the night was done, they paid the ship’s captain to replace the lock.

The consequences of the Boston Tea Party were severe. Parliament decided to teach Boston a lesson, which they did with a series of acts known as the Coercive Acts, but which the colonists dubbed the “Intolerable Acts.” The acts shut down Boston Harbor, removed local government from the colony, and installed military rule. Boston’s plight would be the prime point of discussion at the Continental Congress that gathered in Philadelphia in 1774. The opposition between the colony and the representatives of British power made Massachusetts a veritable powder keg. In fact, it was a British expedition to seize militia powder and shot that led to conflict at Lexington and Concord—and launched the American Revolution.

The citizens of Boston, then, had been engaged in a great debate over a key constitutional principle around consent. Defending their rights as Englishmen not to be taxed without their consent, they refused to accept Parliament’s repeated attempts to levy taxes on them. Their principled resistance led to practical actions—organizing to express popular sentiment, explaining reasons for resistance, and then symbolically destroying the tea. These New Englanders demonstrated the significance of consent—or lack thereof—in the conflict that produced the American Revolution.

Dr. Jonathan Den Hartog is the Carolyn and Don Drennen Chair of American History, Civics, and the Constitution at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, where he is also the Chair of the History Department. He received his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Notre Dame. Den Hartog’s historical interests are in the religious and political history of the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods of the United States. He has written the book Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation and has co-edited the book Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833.

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Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 546 – 553 (stop at chapter 6 heading) of this edition of Democracy in America.

De Tocqueville in this chapter continues his investigation of social customs and mores in America, but he uses his description to support his larger point about the contrast between aristocratic society and democratic society. His analysis here reinforces his on-going contention that democracy in America means much more than simply having large numbers of citizens voting. When it comes to employment and working for others, De Tocqueville asserts, “Democracy does not prevent these two classes [masters and servants] from existing; but it changes their spirit and modifies their relations.”

In describing the aristocratic view, De Tocqueville describes a society in which servants accept and endorse hierarchy of both authority and social standing. Because servants are permanently in a lower class, they cannot change their standing. They accept the commands of their master and often come to identify their interests with their master’s interests. They also accept a hierarchy amongst themselves. De Tocqueville observes, “Whoever occupies the last step in a hierarchy of valets is base indeed.” This reality has been captured for Americans by depictions of service in the period drama Downton Abbey. While all those in service acknowledge the superiority of the Grantham family, there exists “downstairs” among the servants a rigid hierarchy that extends from the Butler Mr. Carson all the way down to the newest footman. The youngest footman can dream of nothing more than over many years ascending within this household hierarchy.

De Tocqueville then contrasts this aristocratic, European view with the American reality. Put simply, “Equality of conditions makes new beings of servant and master and establishes new relations between them.” Rather than forming a separate or permanent class, servants saw themselves as undertaking a temporary role, in the confidence that they would shortly rise in their conditions. “At each instance,” De Tocqueville observes, “the servant can become a master and aspire to become one; the servant, therefore, is not another man than the master.” What binds the two together is the existence of a written contract, freely entered into by both sides.

De Tocqueville then has to modify his description. He acknowledges that he is talking about the labor conditions among whites in the North and the West. The existence of slavery in the South made for totally different conditions there. For De Tocqueville, however, “particularly in New England, one encounters a fairly large number of whites who consent to submit temporarily to the will of those like themselves in return for a wage. I heard it said that these servants ordinarily fulfill the duties of their state exactly and intelligently, and that without believing themselves naturally inferior to whoever commands them, they submit without trouble to obey him.” (551)

De Tocqueville’s description of New England employment echoes other testimonies. In an early American play, The Contrast by Royall Tyler, we see a New England youth named Jonathan. He is serving as a footman for a Revolutionary War veteran named Manly. When described by a European-trained valet as “a servant,” Jonathan objects strenuously. He insists, “I am Colonel Manly’s waiter.” The word choice is significant, as it justifies his status and the dignity of his employment. Jonathan then protests that he is “a true blue son of liberty,” and he could not be a servant because “no man shall master me.” He emphasizes his equal status and insists that his family’s farm was just as good as that of his employer.

De Tocqueville would immediately grasp the import of this exchange. The status of servanthood—such as a “waiter”—is temporary. It would last only as long as the contract lasted and would not extend one step beyond the contract. It also did nothing to change the intrinsic equality of both employer and employee as humans and as citizens. Each carried within himself the same political and social weight, just as their votes would be equal at the next election.

A generation after De Tocqueville, the rising Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln pointed to a very similar conviction in the West. Addressing the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Lincoln praised the American approach of freely accepting to work for wages as a first step in a long career. He rejected the “mud-sill theory” that expected a permanent class of workers mired in drudgery. In contrast, Lincoln praised the free labor ideal which encouraged young men to sell their labor but maintained multiple routes by which they could rise in society.

For contemporary readers, then, De Tocqueville’s chapter on servants and masters can reaffirm a long-standing American attitude to employment. Many work for others—often quite closely. That labor, however, should be such that it doesn’t prevent them from rising economically—and perhaps eventually hiring others. Further, no matter the job, each individual bears inherent dignity as a citizen and so deserves society’s respect.

Dr. Jonathan Den Hartog is Professor of History and the Chair of the History Department at Samford University. He is the author of Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation and the co-editor of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States.

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Click here for the essay schedule with today’s essay and previously published essays hyperlinked.