Bernard Bailyn Quotes

#1. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.

Bernard Bailyn

#2. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

Bernard Bailyn

#3. Rhode Island, a colony that the mainstream Puritans denounced as "a cesspool of vile heresies and irreligion,

Bernard Bailyn

#4. slave rebellions occurred on approximately 10 percent of all slave ships,

Bernard Bailyn

#5. Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.

Bernard Bailyn

#6. But are we to accept a form of government which we do not entirely approve of, merely in hopes that it will be administered well? Does not every man know, that nothing is more liable to be abused than power. Power, without a check, in any hands, is tyranny;

Bernard Bailyn

#7. we don't live in Plato's Commonwealth, and when we can't have perfection we ought to comply with the measure that is least remote from it.

Bernard Bailyn

#8. That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; ...

Bernard Bailyn

#9. Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, sel denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.

Bernard Bailyn

#10. at the height of the British slave trade, in the 1790s, one large slave vessel left England for Africa every other day.

Bernard Bailyn

#11. The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

Bernard Bailyn

#12. What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.

Bernard Bailyn

#13. What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.

Bernard Bailyn

#14. The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought

Bernard Bailyn

#15. The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

Bernard Bailyn

#16. The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.

Bernard Bailyn

#17. It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.

Bernard Bailyn

#18. In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

Bernard Bailyn

#19. At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

Bernard Bailyn

#20. Independence was enriching, but most often it meant loss, isolation, and cultural deprivation,

Bernard Bailyn

#21. Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

Bernard Bailyn

#22. Even toward the middle of the century, there were occasions when the London mailbag for Edinburgh was found to contain only a single letter.

Bernard Bailyn

#23. That is to say, their thoughts came higglety-pigglety out of the big, buzzing, booming confusion of their minds, too many pouring out chaotically in the same instant.

Bernard Bailyn

#24. In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.

Bernard Bailyn

#25. The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.

Bernard Bailyn

#26. it is a fact that eleven million Africans were forcibly carried abroad, more than nine million of them to the Americas.

Bernard Bailyn

#27. Instantly available without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play.

Bernard Bailyn

#28. The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution , there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do.

Bernard Bailyn

#29. Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

Bernard Bailyn

#30. They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.6

Bernard Bailyn

#31. Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.

Bernard Bailyn

#32. many of these excellent young people could not, as a general rule, either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities.

Bernard Bailyn

#33. Every major feature of the modern United States - from racial equality to Social Security, from the Pentagon to the suburb - represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism.

Bernard Bailyn

#34. The number of slave voyages included in the database has now risen to thirty-five thousand, accounting for the forced migration of more than twelve million Africans between 1514 and 1866, a million more than were estimated at the time of the conference in 1998.

Bernard Bailyn

#35. In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.

Bernard Bailyn

#36. The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred; ...

Bernard Bailyn

#37. The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

Bernard Bailyn