While Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775
Declaration did not go so far as to make explicit the evident dedication of the
united colonies to preserve the traditions of British constitutionalism, it did
ultimately offer a remarkably powerful rebuke against the contemporary British
government which could not have but made perfectly clear the nature and depth
of the conviction nurtured by the delegates to the Continental Congress and the
colonies they represented. Namely, after having described the repeated and
respectful petitions for relief that had been submitted by the united colonies
to the Crown over the course of the Anglo-American crisis near the end of the
fifth paragraph therein, Jefferson and Dickinson asserted that,
We have
pursued every temperate, every respectful measure; we have even proceeded to
break off our commercial intercourse with our fellow-subjects, as the last
peaceable admonition, that our attachment to no Nation upon earth should
supplant our attachment to liberty.
Consider, for a moment, the
implication of that last clause. In spite of pursuing the stated objective of
achieving reconciliation between the Thirteen Colonies and the Crown,
Parliament, and people of Britain, here a document issued by representatives of
these selfsame colonies declared without ambiguity or equivocation that the
American people valued their freedom more than they valued their relationship
with their nominal motherland. While doubtless offered sincerely, it would seem
rather difficult now to imagine the circumstances within which either the membership
of the Continental Congress believed this sentiment to be conducive to
conciliation or the reigning ministry in London would have received it in the
spirit it was given.
Taken at face value, the sentiment
at the core of this affirmation would seem to be something on the order of “If
forced to choose, it is better to be free than to be British.” From the
perspective of a government in the process of confronting an armed insurrection
in one of its colonial possessions, whose members had borne witness to over a
decade of tumult originating from that same quarter of the empire, and whose
duties arguably demanded a degree of suspicion and mistrust whenever that
empire was in any way threatened by the prospect of dissolution, it would seem
exceedingly unlikely that this kind of declaration would be met as anything
other than an expression of extreme ingratitude. Britain had protected the
colonies from invasion and conquest by rival European powers, provided a shield
for their commerce in the form of the indomitable Royal Navy, and offered a
seemingly unquenchable market for the various commodities they had it in their
power to extract, produce, or cultivate. And in exchange, it more than likely
appeared to Lord North and his ministers, the united colonies had the temerity
to assert that liberty was more important than any attachment they might have
felt to any nation on Earth.
What was the meaning of “liberty”
to these colonists anyway? Were they not some of the freest people in the
world? Didn’t the British Constitution guarantee to them a set of rights and
freedoms that the greater share of the globe could only envy? And what of the
loyalty, fealty, and gratitude they owed to the nation that had nurtured them
since their infancy? The men who had died upon the field of battle in defence
of the colonies during the Seven Years War – at Fort Oswego, and Fort Carillon,
and Quebec City, among others – did their blood, their suffering, and their
lives count for so little? These and similar questions doubtless lashed at the
minds of the members of Lord North’s government as the Anglo-American crisis
shifted from popular protest to armed rebellion over the course of the middle
1770s. As it happened, the answers that the collective leadership of the united
colonies were most likely to offer were almost certainly among the least
satisfying it was possible to conceive. It wasn’t simply that the colonists
would rather be free than British, Jefferson and Dickinson argued in their 1775
Declaration. Rather, it was that they believed that an attachment to freedom
which made no allowance for loyalty or sentiment was absolutely fundamental to
what it meant to be British.
In deference to this assertion, the
history of England to that period had arguably shown as much. In spite of their
supposed fealty to the Crown, members of the landed aristocracy had taken up
arms against their sovereign during, among many other notable revolts, the
First (1215-1217) and Second (1264-1267) Baron’s Wars, the Despenser War
(1321-1322), the Rising of the North (1569-1570), and the Monmouth Rebellion
(1685). The English Civil War (1642-1651) combined a similar attempt by influential
magnates to reign in executive authority with strains of popular discontent
over religious and social inequality, while the aforementioned Glorious
Revolution (1688) witnessed the overthrow of a reigning monarch, the
solidification of Catholic exclusion from public affairs, and the death knell
of political absolutism in Britain. Laying aside the various colonial
precedents for a similarly vigilant sense of citizenship – Bacon’s Rebellion
(1676), the Boston Revolt (1689), the War of the Regulation (1765-1771), etc. –
the history of Britain alone would seem to have provided the inhabitants of the
Thirteen Colonies with ample reason to understand their status as British subjects
as an identity that actively embraced radical resistance to infringements upon
one’s rights and freedoms. Granted, the leaders of the cited aristocratic
rebellions were generally fighting to preserve the privileges of their social
class or to dispel the power of adversarial royal favorites – hardly the kinds
of objectives one identifies with popular sovereignty or constitutionalism. But
the principle embodied by their resort to arms – that freedom from an excessive
authority was more important than fealty to that authority – nonetheless
locates their actions within the same hallowed tradition as the Roundheads of
the Civil War or the Williamites during the Glorious Revolution. To be British,
these examples affirmed and reiterated, was to be jealous of one’s rights,
jealous of authority, and willing to resist the latter in defence of the
former.
That the membership of the
Continental Congress and their supporters in the various colonies were both
aware of and embraced this distinctly British legacy of vigilance over loyalty
is borne out by certain references to key moments in British history which they
sought to utilize in their ongoing struggle. The use of the term “Whig,” for
example, or the invocation of a past “revolution” or of “Revolution Principles”
in the discourse of people or organizations that supported the petitions and
remonstrances of the united colonies against successive British governments
showed a distinct consciousness of and connection to Britain’s rich legacy of
radical politics. Whig, as a political designation, originated in the 1640s as
a slur against a faction of the Presbyterian Scottish Covenanters whose violent
opposition to an Episcopalian religious order – i.e. one that was governed by
bishops and organized into dioceses – made them a source of derision and
disdain among the Scottish supporters of Charles I. A shortening of the term
“whiggamor” – a type of cattle driver native to the West of Scotland – Whig
later came to refer in the late 1670s and early 1680s to the members of
Parliament who opposed the potential ascension of James II to the throne on the
grounds that his Catholic faith, tendency towards absolutism, and French
relations threatened the religious freedom and civil liberties of the people of
England. While, by the time of the Anglo-American crisis in the late 1760s and
early 1770s the Whigs had since become a fairly mutable political faction whose
history encompassed numerous periods in and out of government, the notion of
being a Whig – as opposed to being a Tory – continued to carry with it
connotations of radicalism, opposition to a strong executive, and a belief in
the supremacy of Parliament.
It was for this reason that many of
the early supporters of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act (1765), the
Townshend Duties (1767), and the Tea Act (1773), among other particularly
controversial pieces of contemporary British legislation, enthusiastically
embraced the name of Whig for themselves and their allies. Not only did
adopting such a moniker emphasize a degree of solidarity with the British Whigs
– like the aforementioned William Pitt – who had publically and vehemently
opposed such policies, but it simultaneously identified the campaign to
preserve the rights and liberties of British America with past iterations of
Whiggism whose adherents had sought to protect what they believed to be their
accustomed and inviolable rights – to their faith, their government, or their
property – against a powerful central authority. By way of specific example,
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) had earlier referred in his satirical Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced
to a Small One (1773) to, “Zealous Whigs, and Friends of Liberty” as a
group to which Britain ought to have shown particular enmity if it wished to
divest itself of no small portion of its global dominion. Thomas Paine
(1737-1809) similarly prized the title of Whig in his much-heralded pamphlet Common Sense (1776), implicitly
identifying it with virtue, integrity, and the cause of American independence.
For these men – and for no small number of their compatriots, it seemed – what could
have variously been understood as a somewhat opaque artifact of a very specific
moment in British history, a political slur, or the default designation for a
fairly malleable Parliamentary faction became instead a symbol of resistance, a
rallying cry, and a model of principle and ideal.
In spite of the significance that
it would later acquire over the course of the struggle for American
independence, the use of the word “revolution” within the pamphlets, treatises,
remonstrances, and petitions of the American opposition to British authority
during the height of the Anglo-American crisis in the 1760s and 1770s possessed
a similar provenance to that of “Whig.” Far from intending to refer to any
desired severing of ties between British America and Britain proper,
“revolution” was almost always meant to evoke the aforementioned events of
1688-1689. Encompassing the overthrow of James II, the ascension of William
& Mary, and the passage of the Bill of Rights, the – somewhat
bombastically-named – Glorious Revolution remained, as of the late 18th
century, the peak and pinnacle of English/British constitutionalism. To refer,
in the 1770s, to “the Revolution,” therefore, was to conjure the moment at
which the spectre of arbitrary monarchy – an object that English civilization
had grappled with for centuries – was well and truly banished. To support the
principles of the same thus represented a particular appeal to or
identification with the values and convictions – Parliamentary supremacy, free
elections, due process, etc. – for which the memory of 1688 continued to stand.
Consider, to that end, even a
modest sampling of the literature produced by the American opposition during
the height of the Anglo-American crisis. Franklin, in his aforementioned satire
aimed at the seeming determination of the contemporary British government to
wholly and irrevocably alienate the American people, made specific reference
to, “Revolution Principles,” as being possessed and nurtured by those to whom
Britain had a particular interest in viewing as its enemies. John Adams
(1735-1826), in the first of his 1775 Novanglus
essays – written in response to the treatises of Massachusetts Loyalist
Daniel Leonard (1740-1829) – declared that the conviction that,
All men by nature are equal; that
kings are but the ministers of the people; that their authority is delegated to
them by the people, for their good, and they have a right to resume it, and
place it in other hands, or keep it themselves, whenever it is made use of to
oppress them [,]
Likewise fell under this same sacred
rubric. Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) made use of this same terminology in his
A Full Vindication of the Measures of
Congress (1774) when expressing his understanding of the distance from the
essence of decency and propriety the contemporary British government had
strayed. Though the unconditional supporters of British authority in America
may well have scoffed at colonial protestations, Hamilton wrote, would these
same individuals shrug off similar complaints from, “The Mayor and Alderman of
the City of London,” who, by their opposition to such measures as Parliament
had lately enacted in America, “Signified [their] repugnancy to the principles
of the revolution [?]”
In
the aforementioned A Summary View of the
Rights of British North America (1774), Jefferson himself likewise made
note of the significance of the Glorious Revolution within the history of
British constitutional government. Noting the tendency of English monarchs
during the Middle Ages to dissolve a sitting of Parliament at their own
discretion, Jefferson declared approvingly that, “Since the establishment,
however, of the British constitution, at the glorious revolution, on its free
and antient principles, neither his majesty, nor his ancestors, have exercised
such a power of dissolution in the island of Great Britain [.]” To the Sage of
Monticello, it seemed, the events of the Glorious Revolution represented a
sea-change in the history and practice of government in Britain. Whereas before
it, the Crown had enjoyed tremendous authority over the institutions of the
realm, after it, the power of the monarchy was substantially restrained – to
the benefit, it followed, of those whom said institutions were intended to
represent. Just so, James Wilson (1742-1798) offered, in his Considerations on the Nature and Extent of
the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774) that, contrary
to the history of Parliament up to that point, “It was not till some years
after the revolution, that the people could rely on the faithfulness of their
representatives, or punish their perfidy.” As with Jefferson, Wilson appeared
to mark the Glorious Revolution as a turning point in the saga of parliamentary
government in Britain. Having thus permitted the people it had long claimed to
serve to begin to depend in earnest on the integrity of the institution, “the
revolution” thus signified the necessary upending of existing power structures
in the name of the liberties and rights to which all British people could lay
claim.
Such
a clear and evident regard for the often turbulent relationship described in
British history between authority and sovereignty made itself known in certain
of the institutions of the American Revolution as well. The notion of
alternative governments to those recognized by the Crown – i.e. those which
governed the individual colonies or even Congress itself – for example, was
well-attested in the saga of British constitutionalism during moments of peak
tension between the mechanisms of royal authority and established popular
prerogatives. Just as the Anglo-American crisis gave rise in the 1770s to the
various provincial congresses once uncooperative colonial legislatures were
dissolved by governors loyal to the Crown – and just as the Continental
Congress itself effectively stood in for a hostile Parliament as the de-facto
legislative body for British America – so too had the conflict between
Parliament and Charlies I in the 1630s and 1640s resulted in the existence of
two administrations claiming the right to govern the realm.
Granted, the parallels between
these two assertions of radical sovereignty are far from exact. On one hand, the
provincial congresses bear a close resemblance to the so-called “Long
Parliament” that defied the authority of Charles I by attempting to govern
without his consent in the 1640s in that both were comprised of members that
had been elected via mechanisms established for that purpose – i.e. they had
initially been chosen by a means which both sides agreed was legitimate. On the
other hand, the congresses were formed specifically because their authority had
been vacated by the aforesaid royal governor, whereas Charles was prohibited
from dissolving the Long Parliament by the terms of the Dissolution Act (1641)
and so sought to split the body by calling them to session at Oxford
(resulting, again, in two Parliaments for one kingdom). The relationship
between the sitting Parliament in 1774 and the Continental Congress, meanwhile,
was dissimilar to that between the Long Parliament and the Oxford Parliament in
large part because the two were formed by different means, from different
population, and in different parts of the world. No member of Congress had been
elected to Parliament, made themselves an object of the king’s displeasure, and
witnessed the bisecting of that institution along partisan lines. The
Continental Congress was truly an alternative body – it bore no formal
relationship to Parliament, save for the fact that it claimed some portion of
the authority normally reserved to that institution. In the sense that it did
claim certain prerogatives in defiance of royal authority, however, Congress
very much operated in the same realm as the Long Parliament had some one
hundred and thirty years earlier. Just as the latter had asserted, beginning
with the Militia Ordinance (1642), that the laws it ratified were binding
whether or not they received the assent of the Crown, the former issued a number
of declarations and petitions over the course of 1774-1775, as well as making
supply requisitions, levying troops, and issuing military commissions, all
without either requiring or requesting the validation of the reigning monarch.
Indeed, it is this lack of expectation or
even desire for royal dispensation that fundamentally unites the provincial
congresses and the Continental Congress with the example earlier established by
the Long Parliament. In the 1640s and the 1770s alike, bodies of men banded together
under the banner of a sovereign institution of government and claimed that
their right to make law for their constituents outweighed any loyalty or
obligation they may have felt towards their nominal ruler. Faced with a king
whose actions in the preceding decades had made it abundantly clear that he had
little patience for a legislature that did anything more than levy the taxes he
desired, the members of the Long Parliament effectively concluded that their
collective authority as the elected representatives of England superseded the
prerogatives of a monarch who seemed to possess no sense of respect for the
rights to which his people were entitled by custom and precedent. Likewise,
having received nothing but hostility and antagonism from Parliament and the
Crown in response to their earnest petitions for a redress of grievances, a
portion of the inhabitants of British America determined that the only way to
ensure their rights and liberties received the respect they deserved would be
to form governments that truly represented the interests and concerns of the
people being governed. Not only was this in keeping with the principles at the
heart of the British Constitution – i.e. that people were entitled to be a part
of the process when their money, their liberty, or their lives were being
apportioned – but it was validated and justified by the history of the British
nation.
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