Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, Part V: American Ego

            Though much of the content of Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration appears constructed in such a way as to make explicit the loyalty and affection that the people of British America continued to feel for Britain proper’s legal and cultural customs – while simultaneously assigning blame for their burgeoning campaign of armed resistance upon certain individual ministers, magistrates, or military officers – a few notable passages appear to present an altogether different motive. Rather than portray the united colonies as having been – and endeavoring to continue as – enthusiastic members of the British imperial community whose resort to military confrontation represented only a momentary response to a set of very specific grievances, they instead seem to represent a quality of separateness and exceptionalism as forming a key characteristic of the American colonial project. Despite the fact that these sections occur quite infrequently over the length of the text – at no point, rest assured, do they significantly overpower or threaten the success of its overarching message – their significance ought not to be discounted. Not only do they indicate that the sense of identity and community nurtured by certain members of the various colonial populations was not as Anglo-centric as their public pronouncements would otherwise show – that there was, in their minds, a difference between being American and being British – but they also make clear the degree to which the authors of the 1775 Declaration were either inclined or permitted to bring their own personal philosophies to bear upon the task of crafting the official language of colonial resistance.

            As to the relevant passages themselves, their content, and their meaning, the first occurs at the beginning of the second paragraph of Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration. Though it is a lengthy one, it shall be excerpted here in full for the benefit of later comparison. “Our forefathers,” it reads,

Inhabitants of the Island of Great Britain, left their native land, to seek on these shores a residence for civil and religious freedom. At the expense of their blood, at the hazard of their fortunes, without the least charge to the Country from which they removed, by unceasing labor, and an unconquerable spirit, they effected settlements in the distant and inhospitable wilds of America, then filled with numerous and warlike nations of barbarians. Societies or Governments, vested with perfect Legislatures, were formed under Charters from the Crown, and a harmonious intercourse was established between the Colonies and the Kingdom from which they derived their origin.

Granting the difficulty in attempting to sum up the founding of British America – a project which began in the 16^th century and was arguably not completed until the 18^th century – in so few words, this exceedingly condensed chronicle nevertheless appears to omit details in a manner that has more to do with national myth-making than the needs of narrative concision.

Interpreted plainly, phrases like “religious freedom,” “At the expense of their blood,” “unconquerable spirit,” and “the distant and inhospitable wilds of America” would seem to conjure an image of self-sufficiency, righteousness, and perseverance. As Jefferson and Dickinson would accordingly have it, the colonies of British America were founded by individual seekers of personal and confessional sovereignty who braved the most profound hardships and carved out stable, prosperous communities for themselves – wholly unaided by the government they had left behind – through sheer grit, determination, and force of will. Whatever Americans possessed, therefore – both their personal properties and the liberties that sustained them – were owed as more to the individual industry of their forebears than whatever protection or assistance successive British governments may or may not have provided. This conception of “Americanness” – i.e. membership in a distinctly American cultural community – was later affirmed in paragraphs twelve and fifteen.

In the former, while accounting for the decision of the Continental Congress and the colonies it represented to embrace the course of armed resistance begun by the Massachusetts militia at Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, Jefferson and Dickinson declared that, “Honor, justice, humanity forbid us tamely surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.” The latter made use of somewhat different language while seeking to express a very similar sentiment. “For the protection of our property,” it declared, “Acquired solely by the honest industry of our forefathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms.” In both instances, note the affirmation of the supposed inheritance of liberty by the people of the united colonies from their familial predecessors. In spite of any affirmations to the contrary, it would seem – i.e. assertions made in the Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada asserting the possession of traditional British liberties by the Quebecois simply by virtue of their being British subjects – the membership of the Continental Congress were at the very least sympathetic to the belief that the rights possessed by British Americans were the earned possessions of a sovereign people rather than the attributes of membership in an larger socio-political community.  

There is, of course, a great deal that these reflections upon the circumstances and significance of the colonial founding fail to acknowledge. Turning again to the particularly lengthy passage cited above, a number of arguably calculated omissions present themselves for further consideration. The statement, for instance, that the, “Inhabitants of the Island of Great Britain, left their native land, to seek on these shores a residence for civil and religious freedom [,]” makes no mention as to the specific mechanisms by which much of would become British America was colonized during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Taken at face value, the excerpted phrasing would seem to indicate that the migrations which ultimately gave rise to the various colonies were the product of individual initiative and grounded solely upon the desire of their founders for administrative and/or confessional autonomy. In point of fact, however, though the promise of religious freedom for members of dissenting churches in 17^th century Britain was indeed a common motivation among early colonists, the means by which charters, land grants, trans-Atlantic passage, and logistical support were secured was often far less noble. The Virginia Company of Plymouth and the Virginia Company of London, for example, were a pair of joint-stock ventures chartered by James I (1566-1625) in 1606 and funded by merchant-investors for the purpose of extending British sovereignty in North America, extracting valuable natural resources, and ultimately enhancing the wealth and prestige of both the holders of company shares and the Crown itself. In spite of initial failures – the Popham Colony on the Kennebec River and the first shaky years of the Jamestown Colony – both of these ventures ultimately succeeded in planting the seeds of full-scale colonization in New England – in the form of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Plymouth Colony – and the Chesapeake Bay – in the form of the Province of Virginia. 

While the sincerity of the colonists who took part in these ventures, the hardships they endured, or the initiative they demonstrated ought not to be discounted, it similarly cannot be denied that their presence in North America was in large part the result of official patronage and mercantile enterprise. The Calvinist founders of the Plymouth Colony, for instance, most certainly believed that their exodus to the New World represented an escape from the corruption and oppression that dogged them in 17^th century England, and their success in building a functioning society was undeniably a direct result of their shared sense of solidarity and determination. That being said, they and their neighbors in Massachusetts Bay did not pay for their own passage across the Atlantic Ocean, often sought material relief from company investors, and keenly understood the security and stability that royal favor promised to provide. The Virginia Colony was no different in this sense, though its founders were not religious refugees, while the proprietary colonies of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania functioned based on a very similar relationship of capital, patronage, and labor.

Maryland, for example, was the personal project of Cecil Calvert, 2^nd Baron Baltimore (1605-1675), a Catholic aristocrat who parlayed his father’s relationship with Charles I (1600-1649) into a land grant for the founding of a settlement in North America wherein other persecuted Catholics might find freedom from molestation. Admirable though this may sound, however, successful tobacco harvests are what kept the venture afloat and justified the continued attentions of the Lords Baltimore. The territory later comprising the Province of Carolina – and later still North Carolina and South Carolina – was also granted by a monarch as a return on a personal favor. Specifically, in exchange for their aid in seeing him restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II (1630-1685) awarded the eight Lords Proprietors deed and title to tens of thousands of miles of un-colonized wilderness between Virginia and Spanish Florida in 1663. Not only did this serve to justify the loyalty these eight men felt for their sovereign during the first years of his rule, but it served the vital purpose of shielding the productive interiors of Virginia and Maryland from encroachment by Spaniards venturing northward. As with the shareholders of the Virginia Company and the Lords Baltimore, the Carolina Proprietors encouraged rapid settlement by offering very generous terms to potential migrants – religious freedom, grants of land, low or delayed rents, etc.

While it again bears noting the degree of suffering and hardship endured by the founding settlers of these various colonies, and the degree to which success depended upon their industry and endurance, the circumstances cited above under which certain colonies came into being would seem to indicate that the narrative of individual sacrifice put forward by Jefferson and Dickinson in their 1775 Declaration represents but one aspect of what was in fact a very complex process. However hard the first colonists worked – however much blood and fortune they sacrificed in creating homes and governments “In the distant and inhospitable wilds of America” – their presence in the New World was often indisputably the result of private enterprise or noble patronage. The much-mythologized Pilgrims of Plymouth did not – could not – physically transport themselves to the site of their famous landing in Massachusetts, nor were the inhabitants of Jamestown capable of surviving that settlement’s first tumultuous years without the aide expeditions dispatched by the Virginia Company in 1607, 1608, and 1609. Just so, the settlers of Maryland or Carolina would not have been given the opportunity to take possession of and work their individual grants were it not for favors owed by the reigning British monarch to certain members of the landed gentry, the high market value of the crops they raised, or the strategic significance that their settlements enjoyed within the institutional conception of Britain’s expanding presence in North America. In short, while often seeking the autonomy that Jefferson and Dickinson cited, these hardy homesteaders were in fact moving and acting within a framework of capital, patronage, and labor that made little allowance – if any – for truly autonomous behavior. Indeed, while likely little intending it, their endeavors on behalf of confessional isolation, self-sufficiently, or personal wealth arguably helped to found the increasingly centralized British Empire with which their descendants would be forced to contend.

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, Part IV: Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner, contd.

The other specific figure against which Jefferson and Dickinson directed their ire – in the twelfth paragraph of their 1775 Declaration – was the sitting Governor of the Province of Quebec, one Guy Carleton (1724-1808). While, like Gage, Carleton was for all intents and purposes a fairly typical British official in the contemporary mold – i.e. career military, blessed with certain influential allies, and practically-minded – his assignment as chief administrator of British Quebec was arguably bound to make him an object of suspicion in the eyes of British America’s more quarrelsome residents. Having been ceded by France to Great Britain in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1754-1763), Quebec was something of an oddity within the contemporary British Empire. Possessing a population of over ninety percent French-speaking Roman Catholics and subject to minimal English Protestant immigration, its inaugural British governors – James Murray (1721-1794) and Carleton himself – were quick to point out the necessity of accommodation rather than assimilation – i.e. recognition of existing conditions rather than a concerted attempt to change them. This need became increasingly acute into the late 1760s and early 1770s amid the social and political unrest then unfolding in neighboring British America. Fearing that the popular discontent of the Americans would spread to the restive Quebecois, Murray and Carleton both strongly advised Parliament to allay whatever anxieties their constituents may have been feeling under English Protestant rule by firmly securing their accustomed faith, legal traditions, and territory.

The result, in 1774, was the Quebec Act, by which the borders of the province were expanded threefold over their previous extent, Roman Catholics were permitted to hold civil office without renouncing their faith, the primacy of French law was affirmed in civil cases, and the seigneurial system of land distribution and management was restored. For reasons practical, moral, and philosophical, these measures met with resentment and indignation among the population of British America. Frontiersmen from colonies like Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York had already laid claim to lands that fell within the boundaries allotted by the Act to Quebec, the vast extent of which appeared to them to have been designed specifically to hem in the continued expansion of Britain’s American subjects. That this territory was also to be governed directly by the Crown and peopled by Roman Catholics was further cause for alarm, seeming as it did to secure an immense reserve of land in the interior of the continent for a religion and a style of government – i.e. one lacking in legislative oversight – fundamentally antithetical to the culture, laws, and traditions of Britain’s various American dependencies. As one of the authors of the Act, and the administrator of the resulting colonial polity, Carleton naturally became a focus for these and other fears, anxieties, and reservations as to the purpose and significance of Quebec within the dynamics of Britain’s North American empire.

Bearing all of this in mind – as well as Jefferson and Dickinson’s noted attribution of acts otherwise unfavorable to American interests to certain elements within the British Parliament rather than to Parliament itself – the nature of the claims made of Carleton within the text of the 1775 Declaration were very likely grounded in existing feelings of personal antipathy. Consider, to that end, the relevant passage of the twelfth paragraph therein. “We have received certain intelligence,” it began, “That General Carleton, the Governor of Canada, is instigating the people of that Province, and the Indians, to fall upon us; and we have but too much reason to apprehend, that schemes have been formed to excite domestick enemies against us.” Note the identification of Carleton as the sole named author of this particular conspiracy against the efforts of the united colonies. Like Gage, his actions evidently warranted specific recognition. Perhaps this was a consequence of the nature of his rule in Quebec and the enormity of the threat he theoretically posed to the efforts of the Continental Congress to secure a redress of grievances on favorable terms. Unlike the governors of the various colonies that comprised British America –each of which possessed an elected legislature – Carleton’s authority in British Canada was largely unchecked and absolute. That this ran counter to the norms and traditions held dear by the peoples of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, etc., and that it was furthermore the result of Carleton’s own attempts to reform the government of Quebec was doubtless cause enough for concern. That he should then have used this authority to rally the French-speaking, Roman Catholic inhabitants of the province as well as the native peoples thereof in an attempt to quash the campaign of armed resistance then solidifying in British America surely represented an almost existential affront to the efforts of the united colonies and the ideals to which they laid claim.

Granted, Guy Carleton was not in truth the autocrat or intriguer Jefferson and Dickinson described. While he did, upon receiving word of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Crown Point in May, 1775 by a combined force of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont militias, attempt to raise a force from among the Quebecois to see to the defense of Britain’s newest colonial acquisition, his efforts to this effect were neither particularly successful nor wholly without cause. Not only were the French-speaking inhabitants of Quebec unenthusiastic about the notion of undergoing militia duty in service of the British Crown, but they had already been subject to concerted efforts by the First and Second Continental Congresses to seek their cooperation in the ongoing Anglo-American crisis. First on October 26^th, 1774 and then again on May 29^th, 1775, the delegates assembled in Philadelphia approved the distribution of letters drafted by certain of their colleagues – among them Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson, New York’s John Jay, and Massachusetts radical Samuel Adams – and addressed to the inhabitants of the Province of Quebec. Both of these documents characterized Carleton’s administration as tantamount to tyranny, attempted to alert the Quebecois to the rights they were entitled to as British subjects – representative government, trial by jury, freedom of the press, etc. – and implored them to form a provincial congress of their own and send a delegation to Philadelphia. Though this propaganda campaign ultimately failed to sway the general population of Quebec to a violent rejection of British authority – thanks in part to the privileges extended by the Quebec Act and the efforts of Carleton to suppress the distribution of the offending letters – it nevertheless represented a undisguised attempt on the part of American radicals to foment insurrection in a neighboring British province. Carleton’s subsequent efforts to see to the defence of Quebec – including his admitted but notably cautious authorization of Iroquois forces under British Superintendent Guy Johnson (1740-1788) – therefore very much took the form of a reaction to attempted invasions by the Continental Congress upon his authority as governor.

As with Gage, of course, such mitigating circumstances as described above had little bearing on the manner in which Jefferson, Dickinson, and their colleagues in Congress understood Carleton’s actions or intentions. Their own efforts to incite an insurrection among his subjects notwithstanding, Governor Carleton doubtless appeared to them as the embodiment of all those violations of English rights and English liberties against which Americans had been railing since 1765. Through patronage and persistence he had secured for himself a position in Britain’s North American empire that was nearly without peer in the degree of authority it enjoyed. The passage of the Quebec Act in 1774 – another product of his efforts – effectively sealed this outcome by ensuring the continued loyalty of a people wholly lacking in elected representation and possessed of legal and cultural norms which had little use for the constitutional guarantees whose observation – or abrogation, as the case may be – so often made attempting to govern British America an exercise in frustration. In essence, therefore, Guy Carleton was like a king who ruled without a Commons, without a Bill of Rights, and without a Magna Carta. Or so he doubtless appeared to the authors of the 1775 Declaration, determined as they were to explain and to justify the need they felt to take up arms in defence of their accustomed liberties. Within that specific intellectual and philosophical context, though Thomas Gage certainly represented the greater practical threat to the ability of the colonists to enjoy the rights to which they believed they were entitled, Guy Carleton symbolized the more fundamental danger.

Having attained a position of significant authority in British Quebec via a personal connection – the Secretary of State for the Northern Department at the time of his appointment as Lieutenant Governor in 1766 was a former superior in the military, the aforementioned Duke of Richmond – Carleton then proceeded to aid in and directly benefit from the creation of a government therein that almost wholly disregarded every tenet of the British Constitution intended to guarantee the rights and liberties of all subjects of the Crown. Surely, Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration seemed to posit, this is not what the king or Parliament intended. Surely the English rights and English liberties within which every inhabitant of British America located their freedom and security would never allow themselves to be so blatantly corrupted. Unwilling yet to answer otherwise, the conclusion of the united colonies – as of July 6^th, 1775 – was evidently to reject any such possibility. Britain had not failed them, their chosen scribes asserted, nor any principle or institution thereof. Rather – as argued at length – America had become the victim of ministerial corruption and favoritism, military expediency, and personal ambition. Whether in the form of ministers like Bute, Grenville, or Townshend, officers like Gage, or magistrates like Carleton, the ranks of power in the contemporary British Empire evidently abounded in men who were all too willing to sacrifice the principles upon which their nation was grounded in service of their own petty desires. The united colonies would not stand for this kind of behavior – this rampant perversion of the legal and philosophical principles upon which the British Empire was based – to the point of taking up arms in defence of what they knew to be the proper and accustomed relationship between the Crown, Parliament, the government, and British America.

Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration made this case at length, though perhaps not always with the finest attention to detail. To that end, while the manner in which the two scribes differentiated between Great Britain and the British Empire as concepts and certain specific policies or agents of the same exhibits an intriguing quality of finesse not often associated with the frequently bombastic rhetoric of the American Revolution, details not favorable to their position were often elided or omitted. Doubtless this penchant for selective recollection embodies the propaganda purpose of the document itself, aimed as it surely was at both wavering Americans and potentially sympathetic Britons.

Thomas Gage, for instance, while portrayed by Jefferson and Dickinson as arbitrary, brutish, and tyrannical, was in fact a fairly typical example of the contemporary British military administrator. He did see to the seizure of a number of powder reserves in rural Massachusetts beginning in September, 1774, though this was arguably a defensive measure intended to stave off an outbreak of violence between Patriot and Loyalist factions of the colonial population in the midst of the heightened tensions that followed the Boston Tea Party (December 16^th, 1773) and the enforcement of the Intolerable Acts (1774). He also did choose to abrogate the agreement guaranteeing freedom of movement that was sealed in April, 1775 between his administration in Boston and the residents thereof, though only after his Loyalist allies – on whose material support his forces depended – demanded it of him. And it likewise cannot be denied that his June 12^th declaration did lay a number of fairly damning accusations at the feet of the Patriot opposition and affirm the criminal status of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, though this document also offered, “In his Majesty's name […] his most gracious pardon in all who shall forthwith lay down their arms, and return to the duties of peaceable subjects [.]” Though the wisdom of these decisions on Gage’s part may be fairly debated – as might the evident contradiction between certain of his actions and the principles which those actions were ostensibly intended to uphold – it would seem manifestly unreasonable to attribute malice to any one of them, or to perceive in them evidence of Gage having behaved otherwise than in parallel with the administrative norms of the contemporary British Empire.

Guy Carleton’s behavior in the months and years preceding the publication of Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration was similarly far less sinister than that document indicated. His successful efforts to lobby Parliament for a reform of the government of contemporary British Quebec – the effect of which, among other things, was to place Carleton himself in a position of greatly enhanced authority in that province – while no doubt sincerely understood by certain residents of British America as a threat to their continued expansion into the continental interior, also represented perhaps the only means by which that newly-conquered territory could be kept from eventually devolving into civil insurrection. Just so, while the duly-empowered Governor Carleton did call for the recruitment of local militias and authorize the use of Iroquois war parties following the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Crown Point in May, 1775, these measures were not nearly what Jefferson and Dickinson made them out to be. Putting aside the fact that his efforts to recruit his Quebecois constituents to military service largely failed, and that the native forces organized by Col. Guy Johnson were limited by the Governor to operate only within British Quebec, all of the efforts Carleton undertook in the name of armed opposition to the united colonies in the spring and summer of 1775 occurred against a backdrop of attempts by the First and Second Continental Congress to foment rebellion within the territory then under his administration. From the perspective of the Governor of Quebec, therefore – and doubtless that of his supporters in Parliament, the government of Lord North, and very likely the Crown – efforts undertaken to see to the military disposition of that realm were wholly justified by the circumstances at hand. As the magistrate charged by the Crown to oversee the government of British Canada, it was not only prudent of Carleton to respond to invasions of his remit with all due energy, it was surely his duty to do so. The aforementioned Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada most certainly constituted such an invasion, and the governor thereof reacted as any magistrate in the contemporary British Empire surely would have.

Acknowledging these facts, of course – these mitigating circumstances upon the otherwise reckless and reprehensible behavior of certain British officials in North America – would have warped the narrative Jefferson and Dickinson were arguably attempting to promote in their 1775 Declaration of a virtuous, aggrieved America at the mercy of rapacious and brutish imperial functionaries. Battle had been joined between the united colonies and British forces in Massachusetts, an invasion of Quebec had been authorized by the Continental Congress, and militias were being raised and dispatched across the colonies in response to the events of Lexington and Concord and the ongoing Siege of Boston. Reconciliation remained the ultimate goal of the American provisional governments and their representatives in Congress – as so much of the content of their 1775 Declaration attests – but the situation remained a delicate one. While support for organized resistance to the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties, and Tea Act had been common in both the colonies and in Britain proper – particularly among the merchants whose livelihood was affected by recurrent boycotts – a resort to military force by the aggrieved parties in America risked alienating those who were otherwise sympathetic but dreaded the thought of an Anglo-American civil war. The solution, as embodied by Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration, was to craft a message that affirmed the loyalty of Britain’s American subjects and justified their resort to arms by describing a campaign of oppression and hostility perpetrated by men who claimed to represent the interests of the Crown but whose cited behavior clearly demonstrated their corruption, their lack of integrity, and their ultimate responsibility for the deplorable state of affairs then unfolding in British America. Provided that this narrative managed to convince a sufficient percentage of British America’s Loyalist population and a critical mass of merchants and ministers in Britain proper of the justice of the position maintained by the united colonies, the likely – if not inevitable – outcome would surely have been a peaceful settlement of the present crisis on favorable terms to the aggrieved colonists.

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, Part III: Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner, contd.

            Strange though it may seem to have delved so deeply into an examination of 1760s British partisan politics during a discussion of a document written years later and thousands of miles away, the authors of the 1775 Declaration themselves affirmed the connections that they perceived between the machinations of statesmen in London and the events which moved them to take up arms in America. They cited the “Peers and Commoners” whose support they had theretofore enjoyed, the cities and towns that had spoken in their defence, and the one minister in particular whose successes and failures they tied to their own. They spoke of the glories of the Empire, affirmed their pride of place therein, and spoke with respect of its great institutions – its kings and parliaments, and its vaunted constitution. These were not words uttered on behalf of a people who held themselves apart from Britain, rejected membership in the associated socio-political community, and believed formal independence to be a forgone conclusion. Rather, they were the honest assessments of a people still very much invested – even in the midst of an increasingly bloody campaign of armed opposition – in the ebb and flow of British political and cultural life. Speaking for the Continental Congress – and thus for the governments of thirteen separate colonies – Jefferson and Dickinson testified to this emphatically. America remained, and wished to remain, a part of the Empire whose triumph they had aided in the late war with France. The colonists had friends in the Commons, the Lords, and the military, regarded the king with affection and respect, loved the constitution and treasured the rights and liberties it guaranteed. Indeed, their concerns – which had compelled them to resist the abrogation of their prerogatives to the point of armed resistance – had never been with the institutions of the British Empire, or with the British people themselves. Rather, as the 1775 Declaration attested, the source of their discontent lay in the greed, corruption, and duplicity of certain powerful individuals who had perhaps mistakenly been vested with undue authority over the affairs of the Empire.

            Most of these people were not identified by name, though their influence was noted by the manner in which Jefferson and Dickinson described their machinations. Of the train of abuses heaped upon the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s, enumerated in the third paragraph of the Declaration, the document declared that, “Parliament was influenced to adopt the pernicious project [.]” Mark the difference between this phrasing – an attribution of wrongdoing to an element separate from Parliament – and a claim that Parliament itself was responsible for the abuses in question. It was not the British legislature – a venerable institution whose form and function nearly every American colony sought to imitate – that was responsible for the repeated ills suffered by British America, but rather an influence therein. Just so, it was not Great Britain – a nation and a people worthy of affection and respect – that the united colonies blamed for their misfortunes, but this or that government thereof. To that end, as Jefferson and Dickinson affirmed, the Crown’s subjects in America had every reason to acclaim the Newcastle-Pitt Ministry, and to perceive its triumphs as parallel to their own. By the same token, residents of British America were well-justified in recognizing the Bute, Grenville, and North Ministries as having acted in a fashion inimical to their own particular priorities and desires. Again, the issue was largely one of personality. Some agents, ministers, and even leaders of the British government behaved in a way that comported with the understanding nurtured by the majority of Americans of the British Constitution, the Empire, and their relationship to the same. Others, of course, did not.

            Of these others, Jefferson and Dickinson offered two specific examples. The first, beginning in the seventh paragraph of the 1775 Declaration and continuing through the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, was General Thomas Gage. Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America since 1763 and Governor of Massachusetts since 1774, Gage was a common source of disdain and frustration among the American opposition to contemporary British tax and trade policies and a frequent target for accusations of cruelty, ruthlessness, and tyranny. Since the pronouncement of the Restraining Acts in April, 1775 – which blocked all trade between British America on one hand and Great Britain, the West Indies, and Ireland on the other – and the associated bolstering of the troops and vessels under Gage’s command (paragraph seven), Jefferson and Dickinson attested to a litany of abuses perpetrated at his behest. First, in that same month in 1775, the General proceeded to make an, “Unprovoked assault on the inhabitants of the [Province of Massachusetts Bay], at the Town of Lexington” wherein his men, “Murdered eight of the inhabitants, and wounded many others [,]” and, “From thence proceeded in a warlike array to the Town of Concord, where they set upon another party of the inhabitants of the same Province, killing several and wounding more” (paragraph nine). Though an assemblage of Massachusetts militias ultimately met this assault upon the lives and liberties of the inhabitants of that colony by driving the remaining British forces back into Boston – where they were thereafter contained under siege conditions – Gage’s campaign of abuses evidently continued apace.

            Having effectively become the inhabitants of an occupied city, Jefferson and Dickinson further explained in paragraph nine, the residents of Boston who found themselves trapped in that city upon its encirclement by American militia forces – and after June 14^th, 1775 by the Continental Army – became the next logical target of their nominal Governor’s ruthless intentions. Hoping to depart in peace, the 1775 Declaration explained, and doubtless regarding the integrity of an officer in the British Army as a sufficient guarantee, these individuals naturally, “Entered into a treaty with him, [in which] it was stipulated that the said inhabitants, having deposited their arms with their own Magistrates, should have liberty to depart, taking with them their other effects.” The relevant articles were thereafter delivered to the occupying authorities, so that, “They might be preserved for their owners,” and the prospective evacuees made ready to depart. At this point, Jefferson and Dickinson declared, “In open violation of honor, in defiance of the obligation of treaties, which even savage nations esteemed sacred,” Gage ordered a body of men under his command to seize the arms in question, “Detained the greatest part of the inhabitants in the Town, and compelled the few who were permitted to retire, to leave their most valuable effects behind.” This act of knowing duplicity was then followed on June 12^th by the issue of a proclamation under Gage’s name – “Further emulating his Ministerial masters” – which allegedly declared the colonists having taken up arms to be, “Rebels and traitors; to supersede the course of the common law, and instead thereof to publish and order the use and exercise of the law martial” (paragraph eleven). Combined, these actions – “This perfidy,” Jefferson and Dickinson labelled it in paragraph ten – were said to have the effect of separating families from their most vulnerable members, resulted in the destruction of an untold amount of real and movable property, and reduced those accustomed to living, “In plenty, and even elegance,” to a state of, “Deplorable distress.”

            In fairness to General Gage – a career military officer who by all indications attended to his duties with commendable zeal and initiative – the accusations cited above as having been heaped upon his character and conduct by the authors of the 1775 Declaration did not necessarily represent an accurate accounting of his behavior during the first weeks and months of what would become the opening campaign of the American Revolutionary War. Laying aside the casualties inflicted upon the assembled militiamen by British forces during the Battles of Lexington and Concord – an outcome which both sides would doubtless have preferred to avoid but which circumstances had quite possibly made inevitable – Gage’s actions during the Siege of Boston were not nearly as despotic as Jefferson and Dickinson would have had their readers believe. As to the agreement arrived at between the General and the inhabitants of occupied Boston – sealed on April 22^nd, 1775 – its terms permitted the safe and unmolested passage of women and children, “With all their effects,” and extended the same privilege to all male residents upon the condition, “That they will not take up arms against the king’s troops.” Furthermore, in the event that armed conflict occurred within the limits of the city, Gage promised that, “The lives and properties of the inhabitants should be protected and secured, if the inhabitants behaved peaceably.” Firearms were among the relatively small list items not permitted to be removed from the city, and all residents desiring to depart were required to secure and present a pass issued under the authority of Gage himself.

            As often happens during even the most well-intentioned efforts by military authorities to secure a major population centre, however, these fairly reasonable conditions very soon fell victim to logistical complications and short-term strategic thinking. Earnest though Gage may have been in his promise to prevent the properties of departing residents from being seized, pillaged, or otherwise disturbed, it simply was not in his power to enforce any such guarantee. Not only were the soldiers tasked with searching the belongings of prospective evacuees for contraband materials quite often willing to confiscate whatever item(s) happen to catch their fancy, but the presence of thieves and looters among those who opted to remain in the city made it virtually impossible for any property or item to be left unattended by its owners wholly absent the possibility of its being damaged or stolen. This unfortunate reality ultimately resulted in a large number of residents electing to remain in the city to keep watch over their possessions while sending their families to seek relative safety in the surrounding countryside. Meanwhile, as the inhabitants sympathetic to the Patriot cause departed from Boston in the thousands and those residents of nearby communities whose professed loyalty to the Crown and Parliament sought protection in the wings of its British occupiers, it soon enough became evident to Gage and his Loyalist allies that their strategic position was becoming increasingly precarious. In the event that the city became host solely to British troops and their Crown-aligned supports, there would seemingly have been little to prevent the encircling Continental Army from, say, setting it ablaze. Pressed by his local patrons – upon whom the maintenance of his forces in large part depended – to take steps aimed at preventing this outcome, Gage ultimately determined to abrogate the April 22^nd agreement, severely limit the number of inhabitants permitted to leave the city thereafter, and wholly foreclose on any attempts to remove personal property.

            All that being said, the rather strained circumstances under which General Gage was forced to operate in occupied Boston – and the decisions he had to make as a result – bore little significance upon the perspective manifested by Jefferson and Dickinson in their 1775 Declaration. However much he might have sincerely believed that his efforts to preserve peace and stability in the British America were both in the best interests of its inhabitants and ultimately served to protect the rights and liberties that they held dear, the membership of the Continental Congress clearly disagreed. Whereas he perceived the movement of British troops into urban centers like Boston and New York City after 1768 or the seizure of local gunpowder stores after 1774 as necessary to maintaining social stability and avoiding bloodshed, the Patriot opposition saw them as one man’s wholly unconstitutional attempt to place a people guilty of no crime or transgression under military occupation. Likewise, whereas Gage doubtless viewed his actions during the Siege of Boston as striking a necessary balance between liberality and necessity – between his own sense of fairness and the practical needs of his subordinates and local supporters – his opponents had little reason to construe his behavior as anything other than ruthless or corrupt. This essential dichotomy of perception seems not only to define the relationship between Gage and his American opponents, but it is in many ways the essential condition of the Anglo-American crisis of the 1760s and 1770s.

As an agent of the British state in America and a lifelong officer of the Crown, Thomas Gage very likely nurtured a personal respect for and dedication to the social and political values embedded in the British Constitution which was in every way the equal of that professed by his American adversaries. It is accordingly almost certain that he would have agreed with them upon many fundamental points of law, or politics, or philosophy – the sovereignty of Parliament, for example, or the importance of the writ of habeas corpus. Where he and his opponents differed, therefore, was mainly upon questions of execution. The Patriot resistance to Gage’s administration in Massachusetts was of the evident opinion that the English liberties to which they all held dear were wholly inviolable, and that protecting them at all costs was perhaps less important than observing them at all costs. Gage himself seemed to conversely understand that it was permissible – even necessary – to abrogate certain liberties in the short run if it meant securing them in the long run. It should be fairly obvious how and why these differing assessments ultimately brought Gage and his American constituents to blows. For, indeed, it was Gage at which Jefferson and Dickinson’s ire was aimed in 1775. Rather than direct their anger at his superiors in the British military, the Parliament that had assigned him to the North American garrison, or to the larger apparatus of the British Empire whose continued expansion arguably required and rewarded the service of men like Gage, the agents chosen by the Continental Congress to articulate its position upon military resistance chose to blame the individual – his attempts to seize gunpowder, his abrogation of the April 22^nd agreement, his declaration of July 12^th, etc. – for the crimes they believed he had committed against them. Again, the rebellious colonists’ evident desire and ability to draw a line between Great Britain in the abstract and certain British governments, magistrates, or ministers seems clear enough. 

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, Part II: Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner

            Perhaps the single most compelling aspect of the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms – in light in the context from which it emerged – is just how carefully its authors endeavored to walk the line between loyalty to and rebellion against Britain, its government, and the institutions thereof. As mentioned in the previous entry in this series, the majority in Congress at the time of its publication still very much believed that reconciliation between the colonies and the mother country was both possible and desirable. A written proposal seeking exactly that result – the aforementioned Olive Branch Petition – had been issued only a day prior (July 5^th, 1775) to the Declaration itself (July 6^th, 1775), and it therefore stood to reason that Congress had no interest in antagonizing Britain or otherwise casting doubt upon the intentions of its American subjects. Nevertheless, shots had been fired. American militiamen had killed British soldiers, and vice versa, and some form of explanation was surely felt to be necessary by those authorities who supported the American cause. Enter John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration, by which the Continental Congress hoped to explain why a resort to arms had been called for in such a way as to avoid casting aspersions upon the trans-Atlantic relationship that Congress itself was simultaneously attempting to salvage.

The challenge presented by such an effort was surely a stiff one. Jefferson and Dickinson were somehow supposed to justify the killing of British soldiers by their fellow subjects in America, laying siege to the capital of a British Crown colony, and generally waging war upon the British administration of North America while at the same time expressing the depth and sincerity of the affection and loyalty that the people of British America continued to feel towards Britain and its monarch. The evident paradox of such an approach required a deft touch, and something other than orthodox thinking about the nature of the Anglo-American relationship. In consequence, the Declaration seems to engage in a high degree of compartmentalization. As taken up by Jefferson and Dickinson, the grievances nurtured by their fellow colonists were not directed against the Crown, Parliament, or even a particular government thereof. Rather, their concern was with certain individuals within or adjacent to these institutions – corrupt ministers, royal favorites, or ruthless officers – whose influence over the mechanisms of administration had allowed them to twist the economic, political, and military priorities of the British Empire to suit their petty ambitions. It was a rather delicate case to make, relying as it did upon the separation of virtuous from venal intention within the actions of Parliament and its agents and the demarcation of a category within the British ministerial elite whose selfish aims rendered resistance to their dictates not only legitimate but moral. Jefferson and Dickinson attempted it all the same, however, and in so doing revealed a great deal about the way they – and likely no small number of their countrymen – understood contemporary British political culture and its relationship to British policy in America. 

          

            Chief among the evidence offered by Jefferson and Dickinson – whom I refrain from referring to as Jeff & Dick by only a tremendous act of will – for the affection they and their countrymen had every reason to feel for Great Britain were the mutually beneficial relationships which they argued had existed and continued to exist between the people of America and certain individuals within or elements of British society and government. Both the produce of America and its capacity to supply British manufacturers with a market for their goods, for example, had long been of substantial benefit to the British economy, and in particular to the merchants and industrialists of certain jurisdictions thereof. Thus, in laying out the various voices within contemporary British society from which the united colonies had garnered support during their petitions for redress in the early 1770s, the Declaration made specific mention in its eighth paragraph of, “The interference of the City of London, of Bristol, and many other respectable Towns, in our favor.” And while Jefferson and Dickinson rightly portray this later attempt at intercession as having been “fruitless,” the campaign undertaken in 1766 by a coalition of chiefly London merchants to see the Stamp Act (1765) repealed had met with marked success. By thus referring to the advocates that the colonists possessed among a particular segment of the British economy – whether they were effective or not – the Declaration thus recalled the nature of the ties that bound Britain and the colonies together. Over a century of trade had enriched individuals, trading firms, and entire municipalities on both sides of the Atlantic, creating alliances of mutual interest that the colonists had benefited from directly and had no reason to seek to disrupt.

The eighth paragraph of the Declaration also made mention of another group within contemporary British society from whom the beleaguered colonies had enjoyed support and concern during the years of crisis in the 1760s and 1770s. Described by Jefferson and Dickinson as, “An illustrious band of the most distinguished Peers and Commoners, who nobly and strenuously asserted the justice of our cause,” this group was almost certainly intended to include the likes of Edmund Burke (1730-1797), the Duke of Richmond (1735-1806), and, most notably, William Pitt the Elder (1708-1778). Each of these men, and others like them, had spoken or acted in support of the colonies at some point during the fifteen year period that preceded the beginnings of armed conflict in 1775, and in so doing had powerfully endeared themselves to their fellow subjects in America.

Burke, for instance, had helped organize the aforementioned coalition of London merchants whose lobbying efforts succeeded in securing the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, and in 1774 delivered an eloquent rejoinder to the attempts of successive governments to lay taxes directly upon the colonies of British America during a debate over the repeal of the Tea Act (1773). “Leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself,” he implored his fellow MPs,

Leave the Americans as they anciently stood […] If intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government by urging subtle deductions […] from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question […] No body of men will be argued into slavery.

Burke also keenly noted in a subsequent address, in a manner that surely pleased those in the colonies who stressed much the same sentiments in their resolves and petitions, that, “The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen [...] They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles.” He additionally developed a series of strenuously-reasoned arguments against British military involvement in the Anglo-American crisis and a set of proposals – including an admission of wrongdoing, a formal apology, and the election of a general assembly for America – by which he believed the conflict between Britain and the colonies might be settled indefinitely. While Burke found himself largely ignored by a government – led by aforementioned Lord North – entirely fixated upon seeking a military solution to the American problem, he spoke with a quality of passion that surely gratified his colonial devotees and affirmed their faith in his efforts and intentions.

The Duke of Richmond proved himself a similarly steadfast ally of the American colonies within the halls of Britain’s ministerial elite. A former Secretary of State for the Southern Department – an office which, until 1768, oversaw British interests in North America – Richmond spoke frequently and tirelessly against what he perceived to be his government’s heavy-handed approach to American affairs. To that end, he notably introduced a series of conciliatory resolutions in August, 1770 intended to normalize relations between Britain and the increasingly quarrelsome American colonies, and during the December, 1775 debate over the Prohibitory Act – authorizing a naval blockade of American ports – declared that the course of action thus far undertaken by Britain’s subjects in America constituted, “Neither treason nor rebellion, but is perfectly justifiable in every possible political and moral sense [.]” Combined with his advocacy for parliamentary reform – universal manhood suffrage, equal apportionment of ridings, etc. – and his support for the creation of a civil government in British Canada, Richmond enthusiastically lived up to his popular moniker, “the Radical Duke.” And though, as with Burke, his pleas fell on the deaf ears of the North Ministry and wholly failed to alter or mitigate British conduct in America, the very fact of his support – as a member of the House of Lords, a former government minister, and a Field Marshall in the British Army – speaks to the quality of aid that Americans enjoyed among even the highest echelons of British society.

            Curiously enough, the British political personality most often viewed with sympathy and affection in late 18^th century America – and which Jefferson and Dickinson praised in the second paragraph of their 1775 Declaration – was also perhaps one of the greatest advocates in British history for empire, colonialism, and the global preeminence of the British nation. While this might appear something of a contradiction – particularly if one understands the repeated American rejection of Parliamentary authority in the 1760s and 1770s as an inherent rejection of the very concept of empire – Jefferson and Dickinson’s account of the man’s career tribulations portray it as anything but. Referred to with admiration and esteem as “The Great Commoner” prior to his elevation to the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham in 1766, William Pitt the Elder was – as Secretary of State for the Southern Department in the cabinet of the Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768) – the principle strategist behind Britain’s victory over France in the Seven Years War (1754-1763). In that capacity, Jefferson and Dickinson asserted, Pitt not only led the British Empire to, “The summit of glorious prosperity,” but publicly declared while doing so that, “These Colonies enabled [Britain] to triumph over her enemies.” By citing these ideas together – Pitt’s role in burnishing the strength and prestige of the Empire and his praise of America’s role therein – the 1775 Declaration both affirmed the pride which the united colonies continued to invest in the glories of the British nation and asserted – through the medium of one of the most respected statesmen in contemporary Britain – their place in making those glories manifest.   

            The people of British America identified so closely with Pitt, it seemed – pegged their own fortunes to his efforts on behalf of the Empire – that Jefferson and Dickinson went so far as to pinpoint his resignation in 1761 amidst the rise of men like the Earl of Bute (1713-1792) and George Grenville (1712-1770) as the seed of the Anglo-American crisis. “Towards the conclusion of [the Seven Years War]” they asserted, “It pleased our Sovereign to make a change in his Councils. From that fatal moment, the affairs of the British Empire began to fall into confusion, [and] are at length distracted by the convulsions that now shake it to its deepest foundations.” In point of fact, the “change in his Councils” occurred as a result of Bute’s influence over the newly-crowned George III, the former’s perception of Pitt as an impediment to his advancement, and the debate occasioned by the revelation in 1761 that Spain was preparing to enter the war in aid of France. The former tutor of then-Prince George, Bute favored an end to hostilities on the European continent and sought to manipulate the situation within the cabinet to simultaneously favor this position and isolate Pitt. To that end, he first convinced Pitt’s collaborator Newcastle of the folly of widening the scope of the war at a time when Britain’s financial resources were stretched increasingly thin. Then, when Pitt’s arguably inevitable call for a pre-emptive attack on Spain’s colonial possessions arrived, Bute simply prevailed upon his colleagues in the Newcastle Ministry to turn upon their former collaborator. When Pitt’s proposal was accordingly rejected by a majority in cabinet, he felt it necessary to tender his resignation. Newcastle was himself removed from office in 1762, with Bute appointed Prime Minister in his place. Alongside the aforementioned George Grenville – Secretary of State for the Northern Department, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Bute’s successor as PM – he then proceeded to bring the war to its conclusion, negotiate the accompanying Treaty of Paris (1763), and undertake the military and financial planning that made policies like the Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend Duties (1767) appear both necessary and proper to the maintenance of Britain’s global empire.

            Begging the reader’s indulgence for the length and complexity of the explanation offered above, said passage in fact represents a severely abridged account of the relationship between the fall of William Pitt in 1761 and the beginnings of the Anglo-American crisis in 1765. There were many more participants in the game of ministerial musical chairs that took place over those years, each a member of any number of factions and splinter groups within a political culture that remained as malleable as ever. Not only that, but certain events which occurred between 1761 and 1775 would seem to at least call into question the soaring talents and liberal sympathies attributed by Jefferson and Dickinson to their beloved Pitt. Consider, for example, his return to prominence as Prime Minister between 1766 and 1768 at what would appear to have been a critical moment in the events leading to the formation of the Continental Congress and the beginning of armed hostilities between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies. In evident contradiction to his avowed sympathies for and understanding of the Crown’s subjects in America, Pitt allowed his Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend (1725-1767) to introduce a series of duties on goods like tea, glass, lead, and paper upon their sale in the colonies for the express purpose of raising revenue. The resulting “Townshend Duties” became yet another flashpoint for protest and political and civil resistance in British America, both in terms of their obvious significance and the manner by which they were enforced. Granting that Pitt was reportedly afflicted with both physical and psychological maladies during the majority of his term in office, took to frequently sequestering himself as a result, and so was likely often unaware of the measures his own cabinet was pursuing, the fact remains that both his ability and his inclination to act in a manner favorable to the people of British America was at times a great deal more limited than his advocates in that part of the world often believed.

In the context of Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration, however, this rather sobering truth hardly seems to matter. For whatever reason, by whatever means, the scribes chosen by the Continental Congress to express the position of the united colonies vis-à-vis armed hostilities between themselves and Great Britain perceived nothing but the best of intentions in the career of William Pitt, and little else but the worst kinds of corruption and avarice in the deeds of his contemporaries. Whereas, to their reckoning, Pitt had strengthened the British Empire by his conduct of the war with France, heralded the role of British America therein, and spoke out against the “unconstitutional” taxation of the colonists via Parliamentary fiat, his successors, “Finding the brave foes of Britain, though frequently defeated, yet still contending, took up the unfortunate idea of granting them a hasty peace, and then of subduing her faithful friends.” What the latter claim amounted to was the rather conspiratorial accusation that the likes of Bute and Grenville had determined continued war with France too expensive for the rewards it would generate, sought an expedient settlement of the same, and then set their sights upon British America as a far more compelling source of wealth and patronage. Thus, Jefferson and Dickinson asserted, “These Colonies were judged to be in such a state as to present victories without bloodshed, and all the easy emoluments of statutable plunder.” These scheme was carried out, they further declared, despite the colonists’, “Dutiful, zealous, and useful services during the war, though so recently and amply acknowledged in the most honorable manner by His Majesty, by the late king, and by Parliament [.]” From this signal betrayal allegedly flowed the many injuries visited upon the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s – unjustified taxation, judicial abuses, legislative interference, and economic warfare – ultimately leading to the state of armed resistance commenced in 1775.

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, Part I: Context

Having ranged somewhat far afield with the previous series – in which the history of performed Shakespeare, 18^th century English theatre, Orientalism, and Caesar Augustus were all discussed to a greater or lesser extent – it would seem fitting to next explore a rather more…compact…subject. This is not to say that the aforementioned digression in any way constitutes a mistake for which a penance must be made. I, for one, found the experience quite stimulating, and hope to revisit something similar in the weeks and months to come. That being said, such lengthy and complex departures can sometimes verge on overwhelming. A periodic return to form would therefore seem an appropriate salve. We are perhaps not all of us conversant in, say, 18^th century Anglo-American popular culture – myself very much included – but I should hope that those who lay their eyes upon these words are by this time familiar with the personalities and ideologies that shaped the American Founding. In that spirit, let us turn to a document issued by the 2^nd Continental Congress in July of 1775 entitled Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms for the purpose of once more reflecting on the importance of process – see: our previous discussion – when recalling the history of a given event, movement, or trend.

As stated above, the Declaration was a product of the second iteration of the Continental Congress, a body first convened September 5^th, 1774, adjourned October 26^th of that year, and reconvened May 10^th, 1775. The document was itself issued approximately two months into this second term, July 6^th, a little less than a year prior to the declared formation of the United States of America. Its authors – though who contributed what remains somewhat hazy – were one John Dickinson (1732-1808), moderate critic of British policy in America and author of the various editions of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania published between 1767 and 1768, and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a somewhat more radical Virginian lawyer and polemicist who had seen his seminal denunciation of the contemporary actions of Parliament – A Summary View of the Rights of British America – first printed and distributed in 1774. Both of these men were serving as delegates to Congress from their respective states at the time their joint work was penned and issued, and were in fact assigned the task by a committee of their peers convened for the purpose of drafting a public justification for the decision of the united colonies to resist Britain’s armed attempts to bring them to heel.

While these details doubtless seem plain enough, the significance of the Declaration to the narrative of the American Founding is hardly that. Indeed, a person possessed of a general knowledge of the American Revolution might fairly ask what makes this document different than the more famous Declaration of Independence. One could even be forgiven for conflating the two, in light of the ostensible commonality of their subject matter and authorship. To that end, let it be stated here unequivocally that the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms represents something other than the formal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from the British Empire. Strange as that may seem in light of the purpose for which said document was written, it was issued at a moment in time when reconciliation was still the preferred objective of the united colonies of British America. The Founders of what was soon to become the United States did not seek that outcome from the beginning, after all, but rather arrived at it via a process of internal and external negotiation. The Declaration thus denotes an intermediate step between the petitions, resolves, and remonstrances of the various colonial legislatures or inter-colonial assemblies that sought relief from British policies like the Stamp Act (1765), Townshend Duties (1767), and the Tea Act (1773) and the complete dissolution of the accustomed relationship between the thirteen aggrieved colonies and the British Crown. By studying it, therefore, one may gain a deeper appreciation for the slow, often meditative process by which resistance transformed into rebellion, and the way that the Founders conceived of their actions along the way.

To perhaps put a finer point on this notion of process – that the Declaration represents a very specific moment within the narrative of the Revolution between remonstrance and revolt – consider certain details of the timing and manner of its publication. The final draft – completed by Dickinson after a first draft by Jefferson – was issued July 6^th, 1775. Not only, as mentioned above, was this just short of a year before Congress declared the United States of America wholly independent of the British Empire, but it was also approximately two months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19^th 1775), as many days into the Siege of Boston April, 1775 – March, 1776), and a scant three weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17^th, 1775). The Thirteen Colonies were thus already engaged in an armed conflict with British forces under the command of General Thomas Gage (1718-1787), Commander-in-Chief of North America and Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay when Congress commissioned this formal justification for their continued resistance. Almost two hundred colonists had been killed, along with about half as many British soldiers, and an untold amount of property damage had been inflicted upon the residents of Boston and the surrounding countryside. In spite of these losses – the blood shed and property destroyed – the Declaration manifestly proceeds from the position that no actions had yet been committed which could not be forgiven.

Putting aside – for the present, at least – the rationale provided in the text for this rather generous stance, evidence of it can be located in something as simple as the manner by which it refers to its issuers. The precis which introduces the Declaration, for example, calls the entities represented by the Continental Congress, “The United Colonies of North-America.” This nomenclature is subsequently observed throughout the document in question – always “These Colonies,” “The United Colonies” – to the total exclusion of the terms “state” or “states.” The symbolism of this choice is not to be overlooked. In spite of having literally taken up arms in defiance of British parliamentary and ministerial authority, the various delegates to the inter-colonial assembly tasked with coordinating a united response to British intransigence remained steadfast in their conviction – publicly, if not privately – that they and their constituencies remained subjects of the Crown. To that end, it also bears noting that Great Britain’s reigning monarch – George III (1738-1820) – was referred to very respectfully in the text of the Declaration as either, “Our Sovereign” or “His Majesty.” Far from attempting to distance themselves from an attachment to Britain, therefore, the delegates to the Continental Congress – and their chosen scribes, Dickinson and Jefferson – seemed intent on affirming their continued membership in the larger British Empire amidst an increasingly volatile socio-political crisis.

Though the exact nature of that crisis, circa July, 1775, has been discussed at length in previous entries in this series, a few points ought nonetheless to be reiterated here. As mentioned above, British legislation like the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties, and the Tea Act were met with widespread discontent upon their attempted enforcement in the colonies of British America in the 1760s and 1770s. Though the taxes levied by these acts of Parliament were in fact often quite low, they nonetheless became flashpoints for social and political unrest because of the manner in which they were authorized. Whereas the reigning governments in London – led by the likes of George Grenville (1712-1770) and Lord North (1732-1792) – asserted the supremacy of Parliament in all matters pertaining to the British Empire, large segments of the colonial populations countered that any attempt to tax subjects of the Crown in America by a body in which they were not represented constituted a violation of certain guarantees enshrined in the British Constitution. The relationship between these duelling perspectives constitutes the first point which ought to be kept in mind, namely that the seeds of the American Revolution were born out of differing interpretations of the same core principles. Supporters of the “Patriot” or “Whig” cause thus did not reject the basis of British authority out of hand, but rather held that the position nurtured by those who supported the Stamp Act, Townshend Duties, etc., was fundamentally misguided or misinformed.    

While inter-colonial efforts to encourage a British retraction were initially successful – the Stamp Act Congress, for example, adopted a boycott of British goods which eventually convinced the government of the Marquess of Rockingham (1730-1782) to repeal the offending legislation – the passage of the Declaratory Act (1766) also made it clear that subsequent British efforts to make law for the colonies would not be so easily defeated. The resulting tension – caused by a kind of mutual intractability – resulted in any number of violent confrontations between supports and detractors of British policy in North America. Tax collectors were hounded, assaulted, and made to flee their homes and possessions. Demonstrations were held in major urban centers, campaigns of property damage and intimidation became increasingly common, and British fears of open rebellion slowly began to mount. Colonial governments meanwhile took to publishing resolves and petitions decrying perceived abuses and requesting relief while colonial governors requested and received British military protection – seen as particularly necessary in hotbeds of dissent like Whig-dominated Boston. Fatal encounters like the Boston Massacre of March, 1770 – in which five bystanders were killed when British sentries fired into a riotous crowd – were the arguably inevitable results of this steady escalation.

Subsequent efforts by both sides to reassert their positions seemed only to heighten tensions further – on the American side: more property destruction, the formation of the 1^st Continental Congress, another boycott, and another petition; for the British: the passage of a series of laws intended to punish those colonists perceived to have conspired against British authority in North America. More protests followed, more petitions, and more discussion among the delegates to what was now the 2^nd Continental Congress as to what their position going forward ought to be. The length and breadth of this chain of events constitutes the second point which one ought bear in mind going forward, that the social and political upheaval which precipitated the armed phase of the American Revolution took place over the course of at least a decade and witnessed numerous attempts at reconciliation and rapprochement. Armed resistance was never the first response of any of those who rejected British attempts to assert the authority of Parliament over the colonies, and quite a number of efforts were made by the aggrieved colonists – bringing social, political and economic pressure to bear – to secure a peaceful resolution of the ongoing crisis.

 These efforts ultimately failed, of course. The passage of the Massachusetts Government Act (1774) – one of the so-called “Intolerable Acts” viewed by many in the colonies as designed to compel submission to Parliamentary authority through blunt intimidation – converted the ruling council of the province from an elected to an appointed body and placed far greater power at the disposal of the executive branch than the existing charter – in place since 1691 – would have allowed. Governor Thomas Gage subsequently dissolved the elected colonial assembly, seeking to consolidate all decision-making authority under a core of magistrates and officers appointed solely by the Crown. The Whig members of the assembly responded on October 7^th, 1774 by reorganizing themselves as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and asserting their continued control over taxation, appropriations, and the militia. The six months that followed witnessed these competing governments – one located in Boston, the other migrating from town to town in order to avoid the arrest of certain of its members – attempt to seize weapons and ammunition in a series of raids and expeditions intended to either deny military advantage to their rival or seek it for themselves. Towns allied to the Provincial Congress accordingly began to reorganize and drill their militia companies so they could respond at a moment’s notice in defence of their gunpowder stores. When Governor Gage readied the forces under his command in Boston for an expedition to the town of Concord planned for April, 19^th, 1775, the appropriate militia forces were notified – thanks to the remarkably effective intelligence network serving the Provincial Congress – alarms were sounded, and the appropriate defences were prepared.  

The subsequent engagement – more a series of skirmishes than a battle – saw approximately four thousand Massachusetts militia square off against fifteen hundred British regulars, allowed Patriot leaders Samuel Adams (1722-1802) and John Hancock (1737-1793) to evade capture, and culminated in a fighting retreat by the British and the beginning of what was to become the ten month-long Siege of Boston. The assembled Massachusetts militias that surrounded the provincial capital and seat of its now isolated and beleaguered royal government – supplemented since April by the arrival of forces from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut – were thereafter adopted by the 2^nd Continental Congress on June 14^th, 1775 as the Continental Army, to be joined by additional riflemen drawn from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Virginia delegate George Washington (1732-1799) – a farmer, surveyor, and veteran of the Seven Years War – was unanimously chosen as the Commander-in-Chief of this force. By the time he arrived in Cambridge to take up his new office on July 2^nd, 1775, however, the first major engagement of the campaign had already taken place. Made aware of British plans to fortify certain of the hills overlooking Charlestown as a means of securing their control of Boston Harbor, a force of twelve hundred colonial troops under Massachusetts Col. William Prescott (1726-1795) set out on the night of June 16^th to occupy and fortify Bunker Hill and the adjacent Breed’s Hill. The British attacked the following morning with three thousand men under Col. Robert Pigot (1720-1796). While inflicting significant casualties upon the colonial defenders – one hundred fifteen dead in all, including noted Patriot leader and Major General Joseph Warren (1741-1775) – and forcing the rest to flee back to Cambridge, the British victory at what has since become known as the Battle of Bunker Hill was hardly cause for celebration. Over two hundred British soldiers had been killed in a single day of fighting, nineteen officers among them, and British hopes of a swift victory over poorly-trained and poorly-disciplined colonials were severely shaken.

What occurred next was largely a matter of rhetoric and timing. Seeking to use the loss to their advantage – and chiefly the sympathy that might have been elicited by the image of British regulars slaughtering backwoods citizen-soldiers – the Massachusetts Committee of Safety authorized a report on the battle to be sent to Britain and presented to the government of Lord North, Parliament, and the Crown. Meanwhile, the Continental Congress – at this time still dominated by those who favored reconciliation – commissioned Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson and a committee of four others to draft a so-called “Olive Branch Petition” addressed to George III which rejected any ambition of American independence and suggested a number of possible remedies to the ongoing crisis. Not to be caught unawares in case this effort was rejected, Congress had also granted permission on June 27^th to New York landowner and Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) to plan and lead and expedition into British Quebec for the purpose of capturing its capital city and thereby prevent a possible British invasion. This pro-active manoeuvre was joined by the commissioning of second document – the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms – intended to explain the decision of the united colonies to resort to a campaign of armed resistance. The Olive Branch Petition was approved by the Congress on July 5^th and despatched to Britain on July 8^th. The Declaration was issued in the interim on July 6^th.

Thus, we come to the third point whose significance bears remarking upon at the outset of our discussion – i.e. that colonial military decision-making at the outset of the American Revolutionary War, while often thorough and effective, was at no point directed either at a wholly offensive war or the separation of America from the British Empire by force of arms. The first attempt by either Britain or the Patriots of Massachusetts to seize a store of gunpowder came at the behest of the former when, on September 1^st, 1774, Governor Gage sent a force of two hundred sixty regulars to empty the Powder House at Somerville. The expedition moved in secret, made a detour to take possession of two artillery pieces in Cambridge, and deposited the lot on heavily-fortified Castle Island in Boston Harbor. The reaction of colonists across New England when word reached them that British troops were marching covertly through the countryside was understandably anxious. Local militias were readied accordingly so as to prevent similar incidents from taking place without resistance to British efforts, and a number of centralized powder stores in Rhode Island and Connecticut were removed and dispersed. When Governor Gage next dismissed the colonial assembly in October, colonists once more reacted accordingly by forming an alternative government in the form of the aforementioned Massachusetts Provincial Congress. This body then assumed responsibility for coordinating further militia preparations, thus helping to ensure a more vigorous response to the British attempt mentioned above to seize gunpowder stored in Lexington in April, 1775.

Observe, at every step, a British action and a colonial reaction. Governor Gage sought to pre-empt colonial unrest by taking control of the local supply of gunpowder. The resulting expedition to Somerville, however, had something of the opposite effect. Rather than cut off the Patriot ability to offer substantial resistance to British authority, the so-called “Powder Alarm” of September 1^st, 1774 in fact increased the likelihood of organized opposition. Similarly, when Gage endeavored to more effectively enforce the terms of the Intolerable Acts in Massachusetts by dissolving the quarrelsome provincial assembly, the Patriot members thereof responded by forming a government wholly free of his influence or control. Even the Battle of Bunker Hill and the planned Invasion of Quebec – both ostensible examples of offensive decision-making by colonial authorities – arguably represent defensive reactions to British behavior. Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill were only fortified and defended by the Continental Army in response to intelligence that British forces planned to do the same, while Gen. Schuyler’s expedition into Canada followed upon the efforts of Quebec governor Guy Carleton (1724-1808) to fortify Fort St. Johns on the Richelieu River – less than thirty miles from the border with New York – and rally the local Iroquois to the British cause. By the time the Olive Branch Petition and the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity were adopted by the Continental Congress in July, 1775, the united colonies were most certainly in the midst of preparing for further military operations against British forces in North America. They were, in essence, at war. But it was not a war they seemed at all eager to win. Rather – as they had since Governor Gage made the first move in September 1774 – they seemed intent only on seeing to the defence of what they had come to think of as their accustomed role within the Anglo-American relationship.