The View From 1776

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding

The View from Windsor Castle
By Robert Curry

George III was not far wrong…when he called the [American] Revolution “a Presbyterian Rebellion.”

Paul Johnson, A History of the American People

George did more than blame the Scots for inciting rebellion among his American subjects.  He took aim at a specific Scottish institution as the real source of the trouble, an institution that had vexed so many monarchs before him—the Kirk [ed. - Scottish and Scandinavian for church, by way of 8th century and later Viking raids]. 

John Knox, the Martin Luther of the Scottish Reformation, founded the Presbyterian Church in 1560-1561.  Long before the Founders began to make their argument for popular sovereignty, he preached popular sovereignty as a matter of doctrine.  Political authority, Knox and the Presbyterians believed, ultimately belonged to the people.  According to Knox, the people had the right to choose those who would manage their political affairs, and it was the people’s right to remove them at will.  Knox famously treated the sequence of monarchs with whom he had to deal during his lifetime with undisguised impatience and contempt, and the Kirk was often at odds with the monarchy. 

According to King George, we need to look to the Scottish Reformation to locate the original source of the American Revolution.  How so?  We have seen that the Founders relied, to a very great extent, on the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment for the theory of the Founding, for the philosophical arguments and ideas they used.

Of course, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment attempted to provide a philosophical foundation for natural rights and moral judgment, developing the twin philosophies of common sense and the moral sense.  But we may ask why they took the direction they did.  After all, their contemporaries in France took a very different direction.  The French exalted reason instead of common sense.  Instead of popular sovereignty, Voltaire and Diderot placed their political hope in enlightened, reforming monarchs.

Hitchhiking on King George’s insight, we are in a position to understand that Knox’s enormous influence had already set the direction for the Scots when they entered the great philosophical project of the 18th century and began to work out their own version of the Enlightenment.  Subsequently, the Founders learned from the Scots and applied those ideas to the great task of creating a representative system of government for America. 

Even the Kirk itself offered a model of such a government.  It had from the beginning a representative system of government.  As Arthur Herman describes it:

Even the minister was chosen by the congregation’s consistory of elected elders…The elders also sent representatives to their local synod, who in turn sent representatives to the Kirk’s General Assembly.  This meant that the members of the Kirk’s governing body really were representatives of the people.

Both the doctrine of popular sovereignty and a functioning governing body that embodied the doctrine of popular sovereignty were unique to Scotland during that time. 

Two centuries later the Founders fought a revolution to establish the right of popular sovereignty in America.  Then, when it came time to design a system of government by and for the people, James Madison proposed a design that bears a remarkable, though generally unnoticed, resemblance to the Presbyterian system.  Called “the Virginia Plan,” it was the original proposal written by Madison and presented by Edmund Randolph.  This initial proposal opened the discussion and became the basis of the debate.  David O. Stewart describes the Virginia Plan like this:

“The people would elect the “first Branch” of the legislature…That “first branch” (the future House of Representatives) would choose the “second branch” (the future Senate).  Together, those two houses would select the president and appoint all the judges.”

Although the Virginia plan is the subject of much discussion, its striking resemblance to the Kirk’s system of representative government is consistently overlooked.  Yet it is a fact worthy of note that Madison initiated the Constitutional debate with a plan that could have been taken directly from Scottish, even Presbyterian, history.

Though it is remarkable, it is not inexplicable.  We know that Madison was steeped in the Scottish tradition.  His education was so strongly Scottish in its character that he even spoke French with a Scottish accent, and Princeton, his alma mater, had been founded by the Presbyterians to provide for the education of their American clergy.  Because of Madison’s involvement with what Garry Wills calls the “Princeton/Presbyterian network,” we know that Madison was very familiar with the workings of the Presbyterian ministry.  Wills writes:

“In his close circle of friends at the school were several who entered, or considered entering, the Presbyterian ministry, and he admired and kept in touch with them for years…Madison even went to Philadelphia in 1774, when the Presbyterians’ annual synod was taking place, to see the friends assembling there.”

Americans were committed to having a government by and for the people.  Madison’s problem, and the Founder’s problem, was finding a design for representative government that was likely to succeed and endure.  It would have been very much in character for Madison to propose something like the Presbyterian system. After all, that system was at hand, had been tested by experience and had stood the test of time.

Madison and the other Founders relied on the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century to justify the theory of popular sovereignty and for the intellectual tools they needed to design the system of government that would replace monarchy.  In our desire to understand America’s Founding, we do well to take note of the fact that we find both the doctrine of popular sovereignty and an example of the system of representative government in Reformation Scotland—more than two centuries before the American Revolution.