Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism

PREFACE

This book rests on the premise that American opinions about Edmund Burke provide unique insights into the history of political thinking in the United States. Most of the opinion gathered here is related to formal political thought but is not limited to it; instead it extends to encompass the wider intellectual environment within which political attitudes are shaped and expressed. In the case of Burke and America, this includes not only direct engagement with Burke’s writings, but also American reactions to Burke’s reputation, his status, the events of his life, or his stands on particular issues; it also includes American responses to the views of other Americans on such matters. Commentary that on its most immediate level is about Burke always reveals a deeper background of competing ideas, worldviews, prejudices, and frames of reference, which inform and control the more self-consciously articulated elements of American political discourse.

While the book’s arrangement is chronological—beginning in Burke’s day and ending in our own—its historiographical motivation lies two-thirds of the way through, with the post–World War II revival of interest in Burke and his inauguration as the father of conservatism. During the last couple of decades, interest in the history of American conservatism has exploded, sparked by the nation’s rightward political drift. In turn, the roots of the conservative Republican resurgence have been traced back to Barry Goldwater, Joseph McCarthy, and Sunbelt populism; crucially, they have also been traced to intellectuals who articulated conservative doctrines since the war. As this study will show, the Burkean revival was part and parcel of that larger resurgence, though its challenge to established liberalism was also a variation on the long-standing ideological contest over American ideals that had been endemic since the birth of the Republic. Hence, this book opens a new window into the history of American conservatism and into conservatism’s dynamic relationship with the nation’s dominant liberalism.

In contrast to Louis Hartz’s famous claim that the American liberal tradition reigned supreme because it incorporated key conservative elements (respect for property, the Constitution, religion, the rule of law, economic competition) and therefore faced no serious threats from alternative creeds, the evidence discussed herein indicates a more contentious interplay of divergent beliefs. Actually, the liberal tradition has survived and retained primacy only by continual struggle against repeated and varied conservative assaults. Neither the political context for—nor the internal consistency of—liberalism or conservatism has held constant throughout American history, but the prevalent traits of both persuasions are discernible in retrospect. Even before the terms themselves came into general use, their generic profiles were evident. In ideal (almost impressionistic) forms: Conservatism houses a general preference for order, stability, hierarchy, religious orthodoxy, institutional authority, social conformity, property rights, discipline, and established cultural standards. Liberalism houses a general preference for innovation, progress, fairness, reform, democracy, equality, equity, humanitarianism, flexibility, tolerance, personal fulfillment, and experimentation. Each of these constituent values is itself open to interpretation, and not every value applies (or applies with equal weight) to all conservatives or to all liberals; moreover, conservative-liberal distinctions are usually drawn by de-emphasizing opposing values, rather than by rejecting them outright. Still, these two alternative value systems—whether functioning as clear ideologies or as diffuse sensibilities—have driven the core disputes of American political thinking for over two centuries. Hence the words conservative and liberal will appear periodically throughout this book, even at the risk of occasional linguistic anachronism.

A parallel development in recent scholarship has been the recognition that the political beliefs of Americans are often shaped by some particular understanding of the meaning of historical texts (the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are most obvious, but there are many others). Once again, this understanding tends to break along ideological fault lines. Left and Right interpretations champion different values; the moral of important texts varies with the predilections of the reader. The figures in this book have grafted the words of Edmund Burke to the standard stock of American scripture. No less than the writings of his perennial counter-authority Thomas Paine, Burke’s writings have served as a basis for refining and for explicating the promise of American life. But unlike Paine, who retained an excessive confidence in rationality, Burke understood that politics and government were products (perhaps consequences) of much deeper cultural currents. It was no coincidence that Burke was one of the first writers in English to use the word civilization, or that he placed so much emphasis on the imaginative decent drapery of life, and pleasing illusions of a people. On that score, Burke bore a passing resemblance to Tocqueville, who recognized (less romantically) that democracy was not just a system of government, but also a way of describing a wider national culture. The ideal of democracy captured the spirit behind the collective American personality. Yet democracy—both the system and the spirit—has proven to be contentious. Not only has it had to reinvent itself on a practical level every few generations; it has had to redefine and re-justify itself in the national consciousness as well. That process of symbolic adjustment—carried on by advocates on both sides of the ideological divide, employing doses of Burkean wisdom as circumstances required—provides the historical plotline of this book.

Finally, a brief word about the book’s cast of characters: the sole criterion for their selection was that they each had something to say regarding Burke, which also illuminated the landscape of political thinking in the America of their time. Despite the (mostly) elite status of its participants, this story is not exactly trickle down history. The bulk of the writing examined here aimed at understanding transitions in American society that boiled up from below: the decline of deference and demand for greater democracy; the rise of exceptionalism and lure of the frontier; the quest for social and economic justice, for the expansion of individual and group rights, and for increased flexibility in social and cultural norms. These writings were at heart about responses, adaptations, and accommodations to change. American commentary on Burke was usually political, but it engaged politics on a symbolic rather than tactical level. It dealt with the general condition of society. It displayed suppositions about human nature, reason, group dynamics, leadership, progress, tradition, and other fundamentals. Specific issues were less important than underlying principles. Indeed, this book may be viewed as a selective history of the United States, with alternative national visions as its theme and the reaction to Burke’s writings as its evidence.

Legend has it that when the novelist James Joyce was asked "How long did it take you to write Ulysses? he responded, Ten years. But in a sense, all my life." Exactly the same response applies to Edmund Burke in America. While this book took six years to research and write, it could never have been accomplished had I not spent the previous twenty years reading and thinking about Western civilization, American ideals, modern political thought, the Enlightenment, ideology, national leadership, and related matters. If all parties responsible for this book (whether during the six years or the prior all my life) were to be acknowledged here, there would be little room for the text. Instead, I will simply note the tiny handful of persons who were most directly connected to this project (plus one). At the University of Rochester, Robert Westbrook inspired me to pursue a topic and an approach to scholarship that excited me, even though both the subject and the method were, at the time, far from the academic vogue. Stewart Weaver was a valuable guide to the British perspective (most of what I first wrote about Burke and his environment has since been dropped, but the insights I gained from the effort enriched my analysis of Burke’s American legacy). I also benefited enormously from the publication advice of Joan Shelly Rubin. At Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy expressed immediate interest in this project, and sustained his commitment to it during an unusually lengthy path to publication. Finally, a special word of thanks goes to Richard Adelstein of Wesleyan University, who had nothing directly to do with this book. But he had a great deal to do with my being in a position to write it.

Introduction

In Search of Icons

In a 2005 New Yorker interview, a neoconservative Pentagon official defended the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq by invoking the name of the eighteenth-century British politician Edmund Burke.¹ Burke’s relevance may not have been obvious to most readers. But those who understood the esoteric codes of ideological discourse got the message. Forget that Burke had no practical knowledge of the Middle East, and knew nothing about weapons of mass destruction, Islamic fundamentalism, military strategy, or democratic nation building. None of that mattered. Paying homage to Burke was more a profession of faith than an explanation of policy. To certain conservative intellectuals, the use of Burke’s philosophy to justify the toppling of Saddam Hussein made sense: not because the situation called for it, or the facts on the ground justified it, but because the ritualistic mention of Burke, the father of conservatism, had by 2005 established itself as a standard rhetorical ploy.

It is an irony of modern intellectual history that liberals have inherited a larger and more convincing list of fathers than conservatives have. Liberals, who (ideally) are future-oriented innovators, barely make use of their own family tree. Conservatives, who desperately need great old names to help them defend traditional orthodoxies, have found few effective matches for Locke, Jefferson, Mill, Dewey, and other tradition-shattering icons. Consequently, they have been forced to stretch Edmund Burke beyond measure. Since the Second World War, Burke has been employed to counter virtually all left-of-center thought. Yet the current conservative appropriation of Burke’s legacy in America is only the latest chapter in a long, symbolic enterprise.

American commentary on Burke has always revealed more about the intermittent traumas of American life than it has about the historical Edmund Burke. Readers of Burke tend to find what they are seeking: wisdom, inspiration, verification of personal beliefs, and a wealth of quotable prose. Still, Burke in America has been an anomaly. Even during the revolutionary era, Burke had apparently switched sides between 1776 and 1789. In his first incarnation, he was a friend of liberty aligned with colonial America’s nascent liberal tradition. In his second incarnation, Burke’s royalist sympathies and his rejection of French revolutionary idealism placed him in stark opposition to that same tradition. Little wonder that after 1800 most Americans treaded lightly when citing Burke for political gain. For the next century and a half (until the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s) there was no dominant American school of thought on Burke. Yet patterns emerged in the way Burke continued to be discussed. In retrospect, the polemical need for Burke in America reveals deep, ever-present fissures in the national culture.

Inventing American Tradition

Long after independence, the United States remained tied to British civilization. But individual Americans, as well as politicians and historians, found it convenient to deny this. In part this was a necessary consequence of breaking free from the mother country. Yet over time, America’s cultivation of its own uniqueness became a handy emotive force (akin to patriotism) that could be employed by anyone in support of various agendas. The easy acceptance of new truths suggesting that Americans were God’s chosen people, that their society stood as a city on a hill, that they were expected to fulfill their manifest destiny, that they lived in a classless society endowed with a frontier spirit, and that, in some vague yet materially verifiable way (as with the great expositions of the late nineteenth century, or the space race of the mid-twentieth) their nation was leading all others into the future, tended to focus attention on the new and different. While this might seem to have been a rejection of tradition, it was something more complicated: the creation of new traditions, which, because of their redemptive nature, required the ritual rejection of old traditions. The Old World was therefore viewed as corrupt, exhausted, ossified, oppressive, and backward. Obvious connections with it had to be severed, ignored, or downplayed. America has always been exceptionalist in this sense, and American historians have generally written from within this context. Given such an environment, it is understandable that Burke—an exponent of British traditionalism—has been mostly absent in the telling of American history.

By contrast, we accept the influence in America of (Burke’s friend) Adam Smith in the economic sphere, and of (Burke’s adversary) Thomas Paine in the political sphere, and of John Locke in both the economic and political. But that is partly because such figures have been distilled down to one or two basic principles, which, since they have been widely accepted, appear to be almost self-evident. The invisible hand of the market, and the right of free citizens to construct their own government, are examples of this. In the case of Burke, however, it is not so easy to reduce his thoughts to a single idea. And, since his work has been neither understood nor accepted as widely, his influence has not been as clear-cut. It is also worth noting that while Locke, Smith, and Paine were viewed as apostles of progress, Burke after 1790 was often viewed as representing the anchor of tradition (on this point he was reducible to a single idea). This put him at odds with America’s exceptionalist self-image. The ideas of Paine were adopted by Americans to help them forge into new territory, but the ideas of Burke were used as counterweights by those who felt uncomfortable with either the speed or direction of change. To this very day, Burke’s champions are acting in this mold.

Burke’s American legacy belongs to the same genus as that of Henry David Thoreau. This is not to suggest that their philosophies were similar—quite the contrary. Yet despite their incompatible ideas, both men represented the losing side in their respective battles with progress. Both embody a road not taken, yet neither has been forgotten. Their separate legacies retain followings, and their partisans have experienced occasional, partial victories. Both men’s worldviews conflicted with the dominant forces of their times—forces now recognizable as the beginnings of modernization. Both men possessed a transcendental aspect that was central to their beliefs. In addition, the writings of both men appeal to the literary as well as the intellectual sense, and so have retained their attraction on more than one level. Like Burke, Thoreau cannot easily be reduced to a single idea, and he was never a participant in the American parade of progress as exemplified by Gilded Age industrial development or twentieth-century modernization. Instead, his philosophy inspired alternatives, such as back to nature movements, civil disobedience, and social nonconformity. In a similar way Burke has been used to justify opposition to excessive democracy and to an overreliance on reason, as well as to the power of the plutocracy, creeping socialism, utopian radicalism, and moral relativism. Again, these contrarian movements and ideas sometimes resulted in limited success, but they rarely constituted the dominant social or intellectual currents of the nation.

Burke’s reputation, like Thoreau’s, has ebbed and flowed with succeeding generations. Furthermore, Burke’s image underwent alterations over time. Different ages spawned different uses for his legacy. Because Burke’s work was known for its eloquence, and Burke was considered to be one of the great English rhetoricians, he was quoted (in or out of context) in support of stands on widely varied issues. This was done in the same vein in which advocates quoted the Bible or Shakespeare, and it had the effect of summoning the weight of ageless wisdom. It also revealed the speaker or writer to be erudite, and to be acting in harmony with the established Anglo-American tradition. Generally, Burke’s admirers in America saw themselves as moral-cultural guardians who were formulating a philosophy of responsible leadership by a natural aristocracy. In turn, this philosophy was expected to save America from self-destructive behavior, as well as from those characters who endorsed or encouraged such behavior.

This was certainly a noble mission, which was undertaken with (I believe) seriousness and sincerity. But however good their intentions, American Burkeans quickly learned that they were unlikely to prevail. The exceptionalist environment proved too resistant to the innate traditionalism of the Burkean message. In reaction to this, the Burkean perspective became transformed into a perennial counterpoint that was played against the major themes of egalitarianism and competitive material progress. If Burkeanism had been a political party, it would have represented the loyal opposition—strong enough to influence the agenda, not strong enough to set it. The main thread that united Burkeans was a devotion to America as a civilization that was both derived from, and still in communication with, traditional Western (or European) civilization, of which the British branch was by far the most germane. This helps explain why such American Burkeans as Edward Everett, E. L. Godkin, and Russell Kirk were Anglophiles as well. Hence the founding of the United States represented an incremental development rather than a revolutionary departure. For Burkeans, severing ties with the established, accepted, or (what might even be called) authorized past would inevitably result in an unraveling of the social fabric in the present. Burkeans in America were not defending British royalty or nobility; they were defending the accumulated experience and wisdom of centuries—now transplanted to American soil.

Cultural Politics

Burke today is a controversial figure. Because he has been canonized by conservative intellectuals, he has not attracted as much attention from other scholars (literary interest in Burke’s aesthetic theory is an exception that lies beyond our concerns here). Typically, the left-of-center constituency views Burke as an antimodern who picked the wrong side in the French Revolution. As a result, he is considered to be either irrelevant or harmful to the contemporary intellectual and political landscape, and thus not worthy of further examination. But such denial does not alter the record of history. It only ignores it.

Many scholars have classified Burke as an early romantic, thanks to his emotional rejection of cold reason. Within limits that characterization is apt. But for our purposes, it is more central that Burke was astute in his recognition—contrary to Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, and other early moderns—that reason was usually more servant than master. Portions of Burke’s antirevolutionary tracts described a British society in which intellect was but a self-conscious superstructure, built atop a sturdier mass of beneficial prejudice. When he wrote of all the Super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, and of a bland assimilation, [that] incorporate[s] into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society,² he was placing long-accepted, unexplored beliefs, practices, and feelings at the base of the cultural (and psychological) pyramid. Politics or political theories were meaningless—or dangerous—without them. Elsewhere, he suggested that behavior sprang in part from unknown—perhaps unknowable—sources. Admittedly, Burke most famously applied his cultural perspective in a narrowly traditionalist direction; but the possibilities for alternative angles abounded, and he displayed more flexibility when discussing the cultural milieu of colonial America and India. In today’s postmodern environment, the subjectivity and subservience of reason are taken for granted, and cultural history has demonstrated that the influences behind social belief systems are broader and more complex than classic intellectual or political history had previously assumed. Among other things, this new awareness supports the need for a more contextual reading of both Burke and the Americans who engaged his writings.

If the existence of a national culture had not yet been fully discovered in Burke’s time, neither had the concept of political ideology. In retrospect, Burke seems to have been instrumental in anticipating the former and creating the latter.³ Curiously, America’s twenty-first-century political climate has managed a virtual merging of the two—though the polarizations and subdivisions of politics now mirror the fragmentation of culture. As the bumper stickers Question Authority and God Said It. I Believe It. That Ends It indicate, personal outlooks on life that are at heart cultural can have predictable political consequences. This mixture of sensibility and ideology is not entirely new (less intense versions of it can be found as far back as the Jacksonian era; and it was, for example, a vital component of late nineteenth-century Populism). But the widespread recognition and systematic partisan exploitation of it as a ubiquitous, extra-rational force is recent. So too is the scholarly attention now paid to factors that relate to political behavior but are outside the usual orbit of political thought or theory.⁴ For this story of Burke in America, alternative conceptions of national ideals form the necessary bridge between culture and ideology. That is why most of the commentary on Burke’s political philosophy (even from prominent politicians) took place outside the political arena itself. By the time matters got to the Senate floor or the campaign trail, general sentiments had been translated into specific issues, and social-cultural inclinations had yielded to politics proper.

Past battles over the nature of freedom, liberty, equality, progress, justice, opportunity, and related ideals revealed alternative hopes for America as a civilization. Like Burke, all of the figures examined in this book approached political thought as a reflection of more-comprehensive belief systems. (Or at least it is nearly impossible to read them today without drawing that conclusion.) Thus they viewed laws, court decisions, and government policies as codifications of the unwritten rules, standards, and aspirations of society. In certain cases they spoke in political terms, yet their associated intellectual leanings may be sensibly discerned; in other cases their discussion was social or cultural, but the political ramifications are evident; some figures spoke of both cultural and political matters. Since these ideological battles and cultural wars are still with us, the generational debates over Burke’s writings remain essential to our understanding of the perpetual tension between competing sets of American ideals.

CHAPTER 1

Burke in Brief

A Philosophical Primer

Edmund Burke (1729–97) is usually described as a British political philosopher. But he was, in the first instance, an active politician who spent most of his adult life as a member of Parliament. Whatever philosophy Burke expounded was extracted by others from his pamphlets, letters, and orations, which were produced in the heat of political battle. This, in part, explains why he has been susceptible to differing interpretations. Burke was a prolific speaker and writer who today is remembered chiefly as a critic of the French Revolution and as the father of conservatism. In historical context, however, he had little in common with many conservatives of his own day, and almost nothing in common with conservatism as it is practiced today. It would be less anachronistic and more accurate to call Burke a progressive-traditionalist instead, since certain kinds of conservatism are antitraditionalist, ahistorical, and certainly not progressive. Burke’s traditionalism employed an idealized conception of the past as a guide for managing change in the present. The goal was not to prevent change; it was to assure the right kind of change.

In fact, Burke called for a good deal of change during his lifetime. And far from being a conservative by the standards of his day, he was more the genuine reformer. In British terms, he was a Whig, not a Tory. On such issues as American liberty, the condition of Ireland, religious toleration, the abolition of slavery, and the governance of India, Burke opposed the archconservative power structure and—at considerable political risk—called for more humane policies (in present-day usage, he would have been liberal or progressive on such issues). Granted, this is not the whole story; on other matters— radical revolution in particular—Burke took the conservative side. But even his conservatism was—and still is—subject to qualification.

Burke’s Image

Few important historical figures have been more ill-served by concise summation than Edmund Burke. The richness of his Whig vision has been diluted by an oversimplification of his political views and by a fixation on the most reactionary elements of his thought. While the present conservative stereotype of Burke was constructed by a right-wing constituency during the early Cold War, it could not have taken hold without the acquiescence of the broader intellectual community. Postwar conservatives may have needed a patron saint to guide them out of the wilderness, but liberals and radicals also benefited by finding a convenient straw man to embody the alleged backwardness of conservative positions. Even ideologically neutral writers found, and still find, that it is expedient to classify Burke as a narrow defender of outdated beliefs. Textbooks, for instance, give brief mention to Burke for the sake of obstruction—that is, to demonstrate to late-modern students why the historical path to secular democracy, pluralism, and egalitarian values was not traveled as effortlessly as might be assumed in retrospect.

Yet had Burke actually been as crudely cemented to rigid ideas and practices as his current image implies, it is doubtful that his writings would have found a receptive audience for generations after his passing. Usually, brief treatments of Burke deal exclusively with the concluding chapter of his career. But if Burke had died at the age of sixty, his thought would not have been subject to such misinterpretation. Moreover, his legacy would likely have been incorporated into the tradition of progressive reform rather than conservative reaction. Be that as it may, had Burke died at sixty (which would have been in 1789, the year the French Revolution began), he would have died a much smaller man. No matter how prolific a writer, or how distinguished his political career, Burke was merely an interesting figure of secondary importance until he published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Only then did he become one of the major voices of political philosophy. His remaining years were most notable for his elaborations on that great work.¹

To better understand Burke’s American image, it is helpful to look briefly at those elements of his career that formed the basis for later interpretations. For the sake of convenience (and following a tiny nutshell biography), this summary will be divided into three topics: America and reform, reason and revolution, and Burke’s Whig vision.

Nutshell Biography

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1729, the son of a Protestant (lawyer) father and a Catholic mother. After graduating from Trinity College, he relocated to London, ostensibly to study law, but intent on a career as a man of letters. Although he achieved recognition with A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), he chose to enter politics. In 1765 Burke became secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham (leader of the Whigs, and briefly prime minister) and was elected to Parliament from the pocket borough of Wendover. He remained in the House of Commons for over twenty-eight years, later representing Bristol (1774–80) and the pocket borough of Malton (1781–94); in 1782–83 he twice held the subcabinet post of paymaster of the forces. Burke was a genius at political rhetoric, and his early tracts and published speeches mostly served a reform agenda, especially regarding the American crisis, the Wilkes Affair, and Whig attempts at curbing the power of King George III. After Rockingham’s death in 1782, Burke’s influence dwindled among Whigs; from 1783 on, his major reform crusade was an attack on Britain’s exploitation of India. Following the fall of the Bastille in 1789, Burke began to break with the Whigs and oppose the revolution in France, ultimately calling for British military intervention to thwart France’s European expansion. He retired from Parliament in 1794 and died at his Beaconsfield estate near London in 1797.

Burke’s accomplishments may appear to have been modest. He failed to achieve high office or significant power and was rarely on the winning side of political debates. Nevertheless, he was an articulate proponent of political principles that were to have profound and long-lasting consequences. His writings and speeches were (and are) what made Burke important and exceptional. For instance, his Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770) outlined the Whig opposition to the court government and defended the rise of political parties. His two major speeches on America—Speech on American Taxation (1774) and Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)—brilliantly addressed the issues of political liberty and colonial governance; his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777) expanded on those themes, and also defined the proper relationship between elected representatives and their constituents. In his later antirevolutionary works, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and many others, Burke defended traditional practices against radicalism and rationalism, and laid a foundation for ideological conservatism. Thus it was Burke’s writings, rather than his political effectiveness, that made him immortal and relevant to future generations.

America and Reform

Contrary to popular belief, Burke did not exactly support the American Revolution, but he sympathized with it. He believed that colonial grievances were justified, and that a combination of arrogance, corruption, and stupidity on the part of the king’s government had prevented British Americans from enjoying their customary liberties. Burke strongly preferred granting America some version of autonomy short of independence. As he put it in his Speech on Conciliation with America: My hold of the Colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These ties, which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.²

Burke seems to have found America alluring, and he even considered emigrating. In his late twenties, he wrote that he wished shortly please God, to be in America, and at thirty-two he asked a friend: When you look at the Atlantic do you not think of America?³ Around this time An Account of the European Settlements in America appeared, bearing no author’s name but actually a collaboration of Edmund and his cousin Will Burke.⁴ Portentously, the book observed that Englishmen in America exhibited an unusually strong natural temper for liberty.⁵ Later, Burke stated that the colonists must be governed according to the opinion of a free land.⁶ Elsewhere he concluded that British Americans chafed against authority because they were both militant Protestants and assertive Whigs, inclined to snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.⁷ Accordingly, during the brief ministry of the Rockingham Whigs, Britain repealed the hated Stamp Act, which had been the chief cause of American discontent. On one hand, Burke saw in America living proof of British liberty unencumbered by the damaging rule of wicked and designing men. On the other hand, since America lacked so many of the stabilizing institutions of England, particularly a hereditary aristocracy, Burke doubted the colonies’ ability to function outside the protection of the British Empire and its unwritten constitution. Nevertheless, at this early stage of the game Burke leaned in favor of liberty and kept his reservations about its consequences in check.

For example, when the radical MP John Wilkes was charged with treason for publishing a criticism of royal prerogative, Burke aligned his party with English radicals in the name of liberty. Wilkes also supported the American colonial cause, and the Wilkes Affair was a major catalyst in shifting American opinion toward independence.⁸ This episode introduced a whole cluster of reform issues—parliamentary privilege, habeas corpus, freedom of the press, the constitutionality of general warrants, the reporting of parliamentary speeches, and the rights of citizens to choose their legislative representatives—all centered on the actions of Wilkes between 1763 and 1774. On each of these matters, Burke championed (what would now be called) civil liberties and government transparency and accountability.⁹ Far from the aristocratic flavor of his more famous conservative sentiments, Burke’s ideas during this early crisis sounded solidly bottom-up by the standards of his day: "The House of Commons can never be a control on other parts of Government unless they are controuled [sic] themselves by their constituents.¹⁰ And: The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a Statesman."¹¹ In his Conciliation speech, he declared: I do not know a method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. I cannot insult and ridicule the feelings of Millions of my fellow-creatures. And elsewhere he posed the question: If any ask me what a free government is? I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.¹² True, Burke never became a democrat as the term is used today. In the 1770s, only radicals drifted toward that persuasion. But Burke’s own drift certainly pointed away from government by a cabal of King’s friends and away from authoritarian notions of imperial control.

Obviously, Burke failed to prevent American independence, though he quickly accommodated himself to it, even hinting, in a private note, at a favorable outcome: A great revolution has happened…. It has made as great a change…as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world.¹³ The related Wilkes Affair, which had forged a marriage of convenience between Whigs and radicals (and of Burke and radicals), ushered in a number of liberty-enhancing reforms in Britain concerning arrest warrants, the reporting of parliamentary speeches, and freedom of the press. Finally—and perhaps difficult for Americans to comprehend—once the United States achieved independence, it seemed to fade from Burke’s consciousness; since America no longer belonged to the British Empire, his concerns turned elsewhere.

It may surprise many to learn that Burke espoused a gentle rather than tough line on what today’s politicians call law and order. This included that ultimate litmus test of tough-on-crime rhetoric: the death penalty. Here Burke noted that experience showed that capital punishments are not more certain to prevent crimes than inferior penalties. It was a mistake, he said, to suppose the Gallows the only force.¹⁴ Later, when the issue was the punishment of rioters, he argued that the number of prisoners awaiting execution (sixty-two) was excessive, and that the carnage of mass executions rather resembles a Massacre than a sober justice.¹⁵ The next month, Burke defended two sailors condemned to hang for mutiny, and he was among those instrumental in obtaining pardons for both men.¹⁶ While not strictly opposed to capital punishment, Burke sought to limit its use. On punishments short of the death penalty Burke likewise favored humane reform, as when he offered to support legislation to outlaw the pillory.¹⁷ He also proposed the revision of the entire criminal code, and called especially for improvements to, or even the complete abolishment of, the system of transportation to penal colonies. In fact, on criminal law in general, the father of conservatism sometimes sounded remarkably softhearted, even calling criminals the diseased and infirm part of our country…. They are under cure; and that is a state which calls for tenderness, and diligence, and great consideration.¹⁸ Burke’s reform impulse extended to civil matters. For instance, he supported a bill to prevent the permanent imprisonment of insolvent debtors—and he went even further, by proposing a white-washing provision allowing for the total discharge of debt. He criticized the existing