If you’ve ever doubted the potency and durability of ideas rendered in writing, then ponder the significance of the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, which established the rule of law and trumped King John’s arbitrary and capricious rule in England. Take a moment Monday, and ponder how this history-making event laid the foundation of modern democracy in the English-speaking world.
Daniel Hannan, a British member of the European Parliament for the Conservative Party, recently called attention to the 800th anniversary of the Great Charter in an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal. True to his Tory credentials, he recast the rebellion of English barons at Runnymede — where today stands a monument commemorating the charter erected by the American Bar Association in 1957! — as a victory for the forces of liberty over the despotic British monarch. But as much as anything the Magna Carta was an assertion of nobility’s prerogative to protect its own property, and not the rights of commoners, from King John’s confiscatory practices. Yet over the next several centuries, and especially in the New World of America, the Magna Carta inspired the founding fathers to rebel against arbitrary authority and to secure the liberty of our citizenry.
The Magna Carta represents a rebellion against a government of men, and a movement for a government of laws, a notion carried over to the American colonies early in the 17th century. Americans, as British subjects, came to accept as legitimate only that government which sought the consent of the governed. Citizens — initially limited to property holders — demanded a say in the taxes government imposed. Government resistance to this demand provoked rebellion that, in the late 18th century, resulted in revolution against our British overlords.
Free men, the argument went, are entitled to protect their property from onerous taxation, for freedom and property-holding were regarded as two sides of the same coin of the realm. The landless, slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants and women were not entitled to such freedom because, by law, they were not permitted to hold property. Life, liberty and the pursuit of property, Hannan reminds us, became cornerstones of the American Revolution that secured our nation’s independence from British tyranny.
The Magna Carta had codified the barons’ prerogatives, especially regarding the sovereign’s claim on their property, thus giving the barons negative freedoms, i.e., freedoms from the king’s claims. It was a similar series of negative freedoms that America’s founders incorporated first in state charters and then in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. In all cases, freedom from government exercise of its power over citizens.
To protect the citizenry from arbitrary central government, consent of the governed took operative form in representative government, whereby legislators elected by property holders raised taxes and made laws. In Britain, as late as 1832 less than 5 percent of the male population over the age of 20 was eligible to vote. In the United States, an estimated 6 percent of the white male population could vote in our first presidential election in 1789 and not until after the Civil War, with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, could all males vote. Yet Jim Crow laws in the South prevented 97 percent of all African-American males from registering to vote; and not until 1920 were women given the right to vote and Native Americans four years later.
Democracy is always a work in progress. In the 800 years since the Magna Carta and the 228 years since the U.S. Constitution, distrust of central power and loss of confidence in our often dysfunctional elected legislatures continue to animate our political and legal systems, generating citizens’ protests and legal challenges in the courts over such issues as equal rights, income inequality, campaign finance, voting laws and marriage equality.
On June 15, the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, as we recall the besting of King John at Runnymede by England’s barons, we American commoners should also ponder the future of our own democracy.
Roger Bowen is a political scientist who lives in Prospect Harbor.