The Royalist Revolution

America’s founding pantheon has long posed a challenge to a nationalist understanding of the nation's history. To build a sovereignty movement on a foundation critical of the state’s own progenitors is absurd. At the same time, harbingers of the liberal-democratic forces soon to be unleashed by the French Revolution are glaringly apparent in the thought of some of the leading men of the American founding. Being seriously interested in constructing a state powerful enough to defend the sovereignty of the American people as a collective, how can one seriously embrace the legacies of such figures as Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin, whose leveling and secularizing projects sought to paralyze the state and deconstruct traditional society?

The sincere American conservative will find much material for the future project of rebuilding a conservative understanding of our nation’s history and founding documents in The Royalist Revolution by Eric Nelson. Nelson’s work has the merit of adding to a right-wing interpretation of the founding instead of merely subtracting elements rightists might find unattractive. Whereas simply muting the egalitarian attitudinizing of Paine and Jefferson, as many scholars already have, The Royalist Revolution brings to the fore the distinctly conservative motivations of the founding and spotlights figures such as James Wilson and James Iredell, promoting them in the pantheon of American history.

Americans’ lack of understanding of the English history immediately preceding the Revolution represents a major blind spot in the understanding of many commentators. Nelson goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the situation in the British Empire of the revolutionary period already left much to be desired for conservatives. Following the two English civil wars, the British throne had been largely defanged, with the whip hand being held by Parliament. The Imperial Crisis, created by Parliament’s enactment of an onerous tax regime, prompted a search for ideology to bolster the positions of both sides of the conflict. The first destination for the colonists in their search was not to the arguments of the radical Whigs, but instead to a “Neo-Stuart” conception of monarchical authority that harkened back to a more absolutist period in English history.

By way of Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, Nelson quotes an elderly Rufus King who was apt to reflect on the early American revolutionary thinking as follows:

“You young men who have been born since the Revolution, look with horror upon the name of a King, and upon all propositions for a strong government. It was not so with us. We were born the subjects of a King, and were accustomed to subscribe ourselves ‘His Majesty’s most faithful subjects,’ and we began the quarrel which ended in the Revolution, not against the King, but against his Parliament.”
— Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution 2 (2014)

It is through statements and arguments such as this that The Royalist Revolution makes the case that a strong contingent of the American founders set out on the path of revolution to reinvigorate the prerogative power of their executive, initially in the personage of the king, but ultimately in the figure of the President. As Nelson concludes:

“The new American republic, in contrast, would evolve and perfect a recognizably Royalist constitution, investing its chief magistrate with the very same prerogative powers that Charles I had defended against the great Whig heroes of the seventeenth century. On one side of the Atlantic, there would be kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings.”
— Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution 232 (2014)

One can read Nelson’s work and litigate the fine points of just how powerful the new executive authorized by the Constitution was, but the work does make a compelling case that the main thrust of many of the revolutionaries was a desire to reconstitute order and authority—and this even more so for the framers of the Constitution—in addition to an urge to curb the rising tide of egalitarianism. Can this be surprising when one considers the character of the early American people? Although, in part thanks to later waves of immigration, it is common to portray migrants to America as the desperate refuse of Europe, the early American colonists were not simply looking for a better place to get their next meal. The early colonists hailed from some of the most ethnically pure locales of the British Isles, where they had by no means lived in economic penury, were in their own eyes seeking to preserve the purity of their religious doctrine, and in the eyes of many, “were fond of British manners even to excess.” — Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority 38 (1972); Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 15 (1991).

Of course, one cannot fully extirpate out of the American intellectual tradition the strong liberal-democratic streak that currently holds dominance. This tradition, introduced to our body politic chiefly by Jefferson and Paine, was, as Nelson helpfully identifies, entirely homegrown British ideology, but instead of an alien origin.

Nelson conveys an enlightening conversation that John Adams reported having held with Paine at the height of his propagandizing. Paine had used passages contained in Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel 8 to pontificate that the history of the Old Testament illustrates the essential sinfulness of establishing any monarchy. Upon being pressed on the weaker points of this argument by the future President, Paine admitted “he had taken his ideas in that part from John Milton” and continued to express “a contempt of the Old Testament and indeed of the Bible at large, which surprised me.” — Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution 114 (2014).

It is here that Nelson’s background as a Jewish scholar and researcher pays dividends. He brilliantly pulls back the layers to reveal the ultimate origin of the anti-monarchical ideology introduced to the New World by Paine by way of Milton. The roots of the Paine–Milton line did not stem from the traditional “neo-Roman” understanding of God’s relationship with monarchy, but instead from a “hebraizing” tradition developed out of the Devarim Rabbah of the Midrashim. The Rabbinic sources had been recently discovered in Milton’s day, and the poet made quick use of them in his defense of the regicide of the British monarchs during the English Civil Wars. — Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution 114–122.

Here, the discerning rightist will identify the origin of two throughlines of American thought. On one side, we see the hebraized liberal-democratic vision of decentralized governance and an executive stripped of prerogative offered by the Jefferson–Paine school. It is this school of thought that is upheld as the “authentic” American ideology by the media and academia, but there is another. The Royalist Revolution highlights that the traditional European strong-state, strong-prerogative vision promoted by Washington, Adams, Wilson, Iredell, and Rush is not a historical novelty, but instead was a strong contender for the title of “the American ideology” from the beginning. As Nelson shows, this European position was the first ideology tried on by the mass of the colonists during the Imperial Crisis. George III’s limp-wristed decision to allow Parliament to run roughshod over his prerogative knocked the European line of colonial thought off balance and gave an opening for Jefferson to inject his liberal-democratic thought into the body politic by way of the Declaration. Although the Declaration set off a wildfire of liberal-democratic agitation, especially apparent in the state legislatures, for much of the period—including the Revolution and Articles period—European ideology ultimately triumphed in the ratification of the Constitution.

So, what is to be made of the founding? Certainly, harbingers of the decline ushered in by the French Revolution were present in the Imperial Crisis, but the founding’s early historical date suggests that there must have been some traditional and high cultural aspects to the founding that are worth highlighting. A rightist approach to American historiography cannot merely suggest demoting Jefferson and Paine from their positions in the American pantheon. We must have something to contribute. It may be time for the right to insist on the elevation of the architect of the presidency over the third President, America’s inaugural Federalist judicial minds over a degenerate pamphleteer, Von Steuben over Lafayette, and Adams’ May 15 Resolution over Jefferson’s utopian Declaration. Some of these solutions escape the bounds of what is discussed in Nelson’s work, but that is the value of The Royalist Revolution. Let us take this work as a much-needed jump start to a conservative redecoration of the pantheon of American history.