One of the ablest and most dedicated community organizers in the American Revolution, Samuel Adams helped launch the Committees of Correspondence that formed the basis for the Constitutional Congress. A person of virtue who committed his life to the benefit of others, he wrote in a 1748 essay, "It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty—to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves." Library of Congress LC-USZ62-45248
closing down the port, local citizens refused to serve on juries for the duration of British rule. Philadelphia, in solidarity with Boston, called a Continental Congress at Carpenters' Hall in 1774 and delegates drew up a list of grievances. Other local committees also went to work listing their demands, and, from them, Dr. Joseph Warren wrote up the Suffolk Resolves, the precursor to the Declaration of Independence. Along with the Fairfax Resolves of Virginia, the Suffolk Resolves called for popular control over military and civilian issues. The king refused to accept these demands, and, within a year, on July 3, 1776, the Continental Congress met again and issued the Declaration of Independence, thus launching the American Revolution.
This well-known sequence of events highlights how direct democratic practices often undergird representative democracy. The American colonists sought rights that lower-middle-class and working-class people in England, Scotland, and Ireland lacked until the end of the nineteenth century. As late as 1819, following the Napoleonic wars, English crowds peacefully gathered in Peter's Field outside Manchester to demand some of the rights of self-government that propertied white American men had achieved through the American Revolution. It took the 1832 Reform Act and the Chartist Movement of 1838 to 1848 and finally the 1867 and 1884 Reform acts for British working-class men (but not yet women) to gain universal suffrage even if they lacked property, a pattern largely repeated in the United States. The much applauded ability of the American colonists to form democratic institutions and to create a sense of a public good set a precedent that even they themselves opposed spreading. They did not, for example, include indigenous people (who, like the Iroquois, had their own government long houses), free women, indentured servants, or slaves in the public good that they promoted in the Constitution that was passed in 1789.
A common trait of democratic movements worldwide is participants' demand for inclusion in decision-making. Even those who lack access to public forums because of their sex, race, or ethnicity, who lack leisure to organize and mobilize frequently, lack meeting places and even the paper on which to print news, proclamations, or posters, periodically join grass-roots movements and attempt through them to form stable democratic organizations. This was especially evident during the French Revolution and democratic uprisings in late eighteenth-century Brazil.
In 1789, the high price of bread and the failure of the French Crown to secure sufficient revenues to meet the economic and social needs of the country forced the king to call together the Estates General, the governing body made up of wealthy urban merchants, aristocrats, and Church leaders. Despite the multiple social groups assembled, only the merchants and professionals, who made up the Third Estate, could be asked to provide revenues, as Juan de Padilla and members of the other sixteenth-century Castilian towns had been required to do. The representatives of the three French estates, aristocracy, clergy, and the merchants and property owners of the Third Estate, met separately in the late spring of 1789, and, when the groups seemed incapable of resolving the financial crisis, the Third Estate declared itself a Constituent Assembly. Outside the official meetings, groups of ordinary Parisian women, unable to afford food, mobilized as they had previously done, to demand bread at what they considered a just price. Some working-class women joined male relatives in burning down the hated Bastille prison in the heart of the popular district of Paris, thus releasing political prisoners and debtors as well as ordinary criminals. Their attack on July 14, 1789, launched the French Revolution, which, like the American Revolution, created more aspirations for popular democracy than it was able to satisfy.
Even before the revolution took place, slavery and women's absence from government bodies was cause for consternation of some groups, and Olympe de Gouges, a poor playwright, activist, and incipient feminist, spoke out against the marginalization of women and slaves. De Gouges, who was not interested in waiting for change, was determined to do away with privileges associated with gender, race, and class. She focused on creating a democratic society in which descendants of African slaves and all women could be full citizens. Even before the French Revolution began in 1789, those supporting slavery in the French Caribbean castigated her play "Zamore and Mirzrah or Black Slavery" (Zamore et Mizrah, ou l'esclavage des negres), written in 1783 and published in 1786, and her essay "Reflections on Black People" (Reflexions sur les hommes negres), which many thought was far too outrageous to circulate.3
Faced with a government that meant "men" when it used that noun, many women and abolitionists recognized that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen passed by the National Assembly in 1789 excluded women and slaves. Both Olympe de Gouges and the English governess and political critic Mary Wollstonecraft, who was then living in Paris, responded in forceful ways, insisting on women's rights to participate equally in the public sphere. De Gouges retaliated against the exclusion of women by writing "The Declaration of the Rights of Women" in 1791. In Article II, she wrote that "political rights should include the natural rights of all men and women. These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression."4 When the slave uprising led by Toussaint l'Ouverture ensued in 1791 in Haiti, France's most lucrative colony, abolitionists like de Gouges were unfairly blamed for the violence, as American abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison would be at the time of Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831. But in each case, slave holders not abolitionists or slaves should be held accountable.
In free societies, attempts to balance collective and individual rights became a central preoccupation of democratic movements from the eighteenth century on. Between 1789 and 1793, women of all classes assembled in public places in Paris to argue about how the government should proceed. The aristocratic Dutch immigrant Etta Palm d'Aelders organized the Patriotic and Beneficent Society of Female Friends of Truth in 1791 and hoped to generate programs to train young women to be seamstresses and skilled workers. She and other middle-class activists formed patriotic societies and promoted divorce legislation through coordinated action with other women's clubs.5
The clubs helped generate proposals in each of the districts of Paris. As early as 1791 "The Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes Defenders of the Constitution," a mixed-sex group that reserved two leadership positions for women, formed in Paris. They joined some of Paris' poorest men and women in the galleries of the male Cordeliers and Jacobin political clubs and helped form a "Central Committee of Parisian Fraternal Societies" in May 1791. When King Louis XVI, unwilling to cooperate with the National Assembly in governing the country, fled Paris, the Central Committee called for the establishment of a republic and organized a mass public petition-signing demonstration at the Champ-de-Mars in Paris on July 17, 1791. The Marquise de Lafayette, who had given such strong support to the American patriots against Britain, willingly followed the National Assembly's orders and sent in troops to repress the petitioners, ultimately killing fifty people. Those believed to have participated in the demonstration were hunted down, and their clubs were closed for two weeks following the massacre. When Austria attacked France on April 20, 1792 in hope of restoring the absolutist monarchy, Louis XVI, the brother-in-law of the Austrian emperor, made only feeble attempts to defend the country, thus leaving local citizens to defend themselves.6