GREG WEINER on the Beard thesis centennial.

Beard counterposes the economic interests of the delegates to abstract theoretical motive. What he overlooks is the decisive role the protection of property played in republican theory as a bulwark against political abuse. Property provided a source of power independent of the sovereign, enabling the multiple ties of dependence whose necessity Bertrand de Jouvenel emphasizes.

Thus Governor Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island in 1764: “For it must be confessed by all men that they who are taxed at pleasure by others cannot possibly have any property, can have nothing to be called their own. They who have no property can have no freedom, but are indeed reduced to the most abject slavery. . . .” Samuel West, preaching an Election Day sermon in 1776, noted the connection between property and personal independence: “But if [the British] have the right to take our property from us without our consent, we must be wholly at their mercy for our food and raiment, and we know by sad experience that their tender mercies are cruel.” Timothy Ford, writing under the pseudonym Americanus, similarly observed in 1794 that in the absence of protection for property, there would be no laws “but such as would authorize the lounging crew to prey upon the industrious.”