A Review of For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) by Alexander Haskell
Intellectual history is the most difficult history to write. Too often it is written in a pedestrian manner resembling a genealogy from the Book of Genesis where this thinker begat that thinker and so on. Meanwhile, the followers of Leo Strauss and his students have been known to wrench historical actors and their ideas from their human and historical context, lest they commit the mortal sins of historicism or relativism. In the worst hands, one is left with disembodied ideas traipsing about waiting for their grand interpreter to decipher their true meaning, which is accessible only to a gnostic elite. Lest anyone believe I am casting aspersion upon all students of political theory, Francis Graham Wilson, the eminent scholar of public opinion and the mentor of the prominent political theorist Willmoore Kendall, laid down the prime directive for any student of intellectual history. As reported by Kendall, Wilson insisted that his students strive to “understand historical thinkers as they understood themselves.”
Professor Haskell has been faithful and true to Wilson’s dictum while avoiding the two temptations to which many intellectual historians fall prey. The first of these temptations is the presentist heresy, the projection of modern ideological perspectives masquerading as a moral posture, to pass judgement on the people and societies of the past. Thus, Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black (1968) pressed home the indictment that from the very beginning of European contact with Africans the European was guilty of a type of racism that would prove fertile ground for Freudian projections and racial sexualization of, well, nearly everything. The work now seems quaint in a perverse sort of way and ever so 1960s. A bit more nuanced was Edmund Morgan’s, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975). Morgan went in search of the origins of American conceptions of freedom in a slave society. One senses his frustration when the Virginians of the seventeenth century did not always cooperate. Virginians, like other Englishmen in the seventeenth century, were biased against anything or anyone not English. Racial bias did not operate then as it did during Jim Crow, and there was plenty of ambivalence and exceptions to the rules, including a fair amount of racial intermarriage in some Virginia counties. More recently, the most egregious example of the presentist heresyis the 1619 Project, an all-slavery all-the-time marketing program for reparations.
These types of projects also fall prey to the second temptation, oversimplification and the tragic dualistic thinking that is an unfortunate inheritance of the secular Puritan thought patterns that bedevil much of America’s political and intellectual discourse. Conversations about the causes of the War Between the States, the World Wars, and other calamitous events are of this type. Grays and other hues are lost in a desolate landscape of black and white. The teaching of the medieval schoolmen has been forgotten: God is simple, man is complex. Intellectual history is nothing if not complex and Professor Haskell respects that complexity.
Indeed, Haskell’s book is a model of how intellectual history should be done. First and foremost, the work is grounded firmly in the primary source literature of the period. Beyond this, Haskell is intensely interested in how the ideas of the courtiers, pamphleteers and theorists were transmitted through the intelligentsia and the elites who were involved in the projects of colonization in America. Adding to the rich texture of complexity, Haskell weaves into his narrative the geopolitical considerations that influenced how the elites of the day used ideas to pursue and justify their agendas and endeavors. In Haskell’s depiction of early modern England and Virginia, the intellectuals are not detached from the events and issues of their day, they are firmly grounded in the context of place and time. The book focuses on men and ideas, but most importantly associations. Thomas Hobbes was involved in the Virginia Company, men such as Thomas Hobbes and William Berkeley belonged to the same circle of intellectuals as Hobbes, and the social connections among many of the other elites, writers, and courtiers, all arguing for their particular vision of commonwealth and empire are as close. Haskell reminds us that the world of early modern England is small, intimate, and intellectually vigorous.
Haskell’s argument is complex as befits his subject. The view that colonies would develop into full-fledged commonwealths as an act of God’s providence was favored by many intellectuals in late Renaissance England. Colonization overseas was then a “mechanism” to assert the command of God to exercise dominion over the earth and to fulfill the great commission to evangelize the world for Christ. Planting was a vocation, a duty of Englishmen to go beyond the borders of England and thus win God’s blessing. Unfortunately, the advocates for overseas colonization and commonwealth building received, at best, only occasional and lukewarm support from both the Tudors and Stuarts. This “irresolution” on the part of the monarchs of England deeply troubled the colonizers who warned that God’s judgement would be visited upon the country for its neglect of the divine mandate.
During the tumult of the English Civil War and the commonwealth period, the authoritarian ideas of Thomas Hobbes gained far more purchase with both the Stuarts and Oliver Cromwell than those of the commonwealthmen (my term not Haskell’s). Hobbes’s view of the centralized, unitary sovereign state had no room for autonomous commonwealths overseas. The author of Leviathan argued that colonies were provinces that existed for the good and at the pleasure of the sovereign, and for both Cromwell and the Stuarts that good and pleasure was revenue. Here lay the source of many of Virginia’s internal tensions and difficulties with the Crown. Virginia was viewed as “an integral commonwealth with its own sacred and inalienable public,” but was at the same time viewed as a source of revenue and a depository for England’s undesirables. Officially, the Hobbesian view won out, but the older idea of Virginia as commonwealth did not disappear. The figure of Richard Bland, who is the primary subject of Haskell’s epilogue, illustrates the tensions between an eighteenth century Virginian devoted to the commonwealth, resentful at metropolitan interference, yet attached to the ideas of imperial sovereignty. And though Haskell does not make the connection, he unearths the origins of the conflict between the colonies and Britain in the 1760s regarding the delineation and proper bounds of imperial authority, as represented and exercised by both Parliament and the Crown, and the prerogatives, rights, and autonomy of the thirteen colonies. This is possible because in Haskell’s conception one set of ideas does not wholly replace the other. The worldviews of the eighteenth-century Virginians and Englishmen borrowed heavily from all the wells of inspiration in the past and in their present, not to mention the adjustments made for local conditions: Virginians, like other colonials displayed a talent for pragmatic adjustment of concepts to realities on the ground.
Haskell not only does not shrink from complexities in his account, but he is also unapologetic for focusing upon the political, military, financial, and intellectual elites of the nascent British empire. The colony as commonwealth was grounded firmly in the elite’s Christian humanism of the Northern Renaissance, but this did not obscure the fact that colonization resulted in “commonwealths that rested, inevitably and precariously, on norms of human bondage and territorial possession….” This is true in part, be it Ireland or North America. Colonization carried with it any number of legal and moral ambiguities, encouraging elites to adopt an ethical approach based upon casuistry to be utilized in the defense of colonization. Worldly and godly tendencies in the formation and administration of the colonies might be reconciled under such an approach, though casuistry might also be used to set aside moral scruples in favor of a reason of state or commercial advantage. Not mentioned by Haskell, but an appropriate example nonetheless, were those Virginians of mixed race whose mothers were African slaves and fathers free born Englishmen who asserted their right to manumission under the common law. The most famous appeal to this legal precedent was that of Elizabeth Key, who successfully sued her master, one Colonel Higginson, for her freedom in the Northumberland County court. Key argued in part that her father, Thomas Key, was a freeborn Englishmen, thus she was held in bondage by Higginson in violation of the common law. This loophole for those seeking escape from bondage was closed by an act of the General Assembly, which determined that in Virginia, the offspring of unions between freeborn Englishmen and slaves would remain slaves. This overturning of the precedent established under English common law was a striking departure from commonwealth principles respecting English legal precedents. Yet, whatever the shortcomings of their approach, the supporters of the commonwealth thesis of colonization argued forcefully from a Christian perspective for the rightness of their position.
Triumph and tragedy were both viewed through the lens of Divine Providence and the communication of duties by God to his subjects on earth. Crucial to this Christian humanist conception and its underlying casuistry was the role of the “captain” in colonization. Compared to Old Testament figures such as Joshua and David, the captain was portrayed by the courtiers of the day as the defender of royal sovereignty, the bringer of order to disorder, and the master of virtues. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Peter Carew, John Smith, and countless others involved in the colonization efforts in Ireland and North America were hailed as the faithful and dutiful servants of the Crown, expanding royal sovereignty into new realms, yet who were often rewarded for their efforts with slights and stinginess by the very sovereigns they served. Captains might also be threats, for the commonwealth thesis held them to be sovereigns of a sort in their own right. John Smith’s actions in early Virginia are an example, more extreme examples may be found in Ireland, though not mentioned by Haskell, such as Sir John Perrot, dressed and equipped as an Irish warlord waiting to face James Fitzmaurice to duel for the supremacy in Munster, or more ominous still, Captain Thomas Lee, Queen Elizabeth’s “faithful bog soldier” who went full native and joined the Gaelic resistance. Haskell’s treatment of this subject is refreshing. Elites matter, they have influence and are able to set events in motion, and Haskell makes every attempt to understand them on their own terms and thereby to gain a better understanding of some of the motives and reasons behind colonization. He also gives full accounts of the positions of those who opposed overseas colonization and whose arguments were also within the same Christian humanist position.
The great hinge in Haskell’s story is the state, Crown, and Parliament. The Virginia Company, the colonists, and the commonwealthmen all desired greater support from the state for their project. Ultimately, the Stuarts and Cromwell chose to view the colonies as possessions of the Crown or the state, whose reason for existence was to enhance the state’s revenue. Even as Virginia held charters and instructions from the Crown that guaranteed the colonists their rights as Englishmen and the propagation of English law, customs, and institutions, and even as Virginia began to enact laws, conduct trade, and govern itself in local affairs, there were powerful men and currents in England that argued forcefully that the Virginia colony was not a civic association but remained an enterprise association for the benefit of the Crown. It was Thomas Hobbes’s innovative political theory that provided the intellectual scaffolding for this view. Hobbes rejected the natural idea and the Christian humanist conception that commonwealths were bound together by mutual and reciprocal obligations of rulers and subjects. Hobbes viewed the commonwealth as a surrendering of individual wills to the state. Hobbes’s view of the state was a compelling one for both Stuarts and Puritans and influenced deeply the colonial policy of the Cromwellian regime and the Restoration.
Much to Haskell’s credit, there are no stark lines of demarcation between the ascendancy of Hobbes’s view of the commonwealth and the older one rooted in the Christian humanism of the Renaissance. William Berkeley, governor of Virginia and an acquaintance of Hobbes, continued to champion the older view. When Virginia continued to champion the cause of the Stuarts after the English Civil War, as Haskell relates, Berkeley responded to Puritan charges of treason by asserting, that “Virginians were simple men rather than overreaching saints and thus would choose instead [in Berkeley’s words] to ‘follow the perspicuous and plaine paths of God and our Lawes.’” That statement breathed, not of Leviathan-like absolutism, but rather of the law’s more straightforward origins in the choices made historically by communities in their public declarations.” These tendencies, Renaissance and Hobbesian, would remain in dynamic tension throughout American history. Both would undergo considerable alteration over time, and in the pragmatic minds of Americans such as Richard Bland, they might take up residence together. Besides Richard Bland, here may lay the ambivalence of patriots such as James Otis, the able and articulate foe of the Writs of Assistance, who was also filled with scruples over the more excessive actions and positions of other patriots against what he viewed as the lawful authority of the Crown and its officers. Haskell sums up well the quandary for the champions of the British imperial regime well when he states that the issue is “whether those communities could be governed effectively without acknowledging that they, too, had laws, histories, and identities of their own.” I daresay that this was not just an issue for the British government but remains a crucial point of contention in the federal union today.
Unfortunately, reviews by necessity oversimplify and neglect significant aspects of important and complex histories such as Professor Haskell has given us. Read the book. It brings alive a vibrant and powerful world that we have lost and uncovers issues and conflicts important to the origins and development of Virginia, but also, for those who can see, our current time.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
“…the 1619 Project, an all-slavery all-the-time marketing program for reparations…”
They are hard at work at Ft. Monroe prepping the ground for the coming memorial. I reckon they’ll be done by June. It looks like the memorial is going to distract the view of the Bay waters going toward Norfolk and Newport News. I’m assuming the residents in these homes don’t like it and will not like it, but are keeping their mouths shut.
(There are several homes facing these waters, and the memorial and grounds being built are right in between the homes and the Bay waters.)