A People's History
of the American Revolution
Page Smith
[Excerpts from Volume One, A New Age Now Begins,
published by McGraw-Hill in 1976]
PART I
A New World / 1
I have tried to convey a sense of the remarkable diversity
represented in [the founding of the principal colonies]. A number of
human varieties and social forms, some as old as England itself,
others as new as the new commercial and mercantile spirit of the age,
were planted in the virgin soil of the New World. There they would
grow luxuriantly, each in its particular way, in a vegetative mold
made up of new ideas and opportunities.
Perhaps it was this
vision of a new world and a new opportunity that ran as a common theme
through all the colonies. North or south, all reverberated to that
grand chord, a silken thread that tied them all together and that, in
time, would become a mighty rope. [p.27]
Who Came / 2
And then there were the Irish. They were a special case. They fled
famine and rent-wracking landlords.
[p.29]
Hugh Jones, in
The Present State of Virginia, published in 1724, put the
matter succinctly:
America had received, for the most part, "the
servants and inferior sort of people, who have either been sent over
to Virginia, or have transported themselves thither, have been, and
are, the poorest, idlest, and worst of mankind, the refuse of Great
Britain and Ireland, and the outcast of the people." [p. 33]
Whether wickedly abused or treasured and rewarded - and certainly
they experienced both cruelty and kindness - indentured servants made
up more than half the immigrants to the middle and southern colonies.
During the twenty-five-year period between 1750 and 1775, some 25,000
servants and convicts entered Maryland, and a comparable number
arrived in Virginia. P.[p. 36]
A total of thirty thousand convicted felons were shipped from England
in the fifty-year period prior to the Revolution, of whom the greater
number apparently went to Maryland and Virginia. [p. 38]
Hardy, enterprising Calvinists, they made their way in large numbers
westward, where land was plentiful and cheap. There, serving as "the
guardians of the frontier," they were constantly embroiled with
eastern land speculators or various Indian tribes over ownership of
land. [p.44]
Legacy of Liberty / 3
If he did not thereby lay the foundations for English America
[James] for a certainty provided the colonies with a company of
settlers who, by transplanting that Puritanism that so enraged the
kind to the New World, determined the character, temper, consciousness
- call it what you will - of that New World more conclusively than any
other body of people who came to the English colonies. [p. 49]
The historian George Trevelyan calls the lengthy session that
followed "the true turning-point in the political history of the
English-speaking races. It not only prevented the English monarchy
from hardening into an absolutism of the type then becoming general in
Europe, but it made a great experiment in direct rule of the country
and of the Empire by the House of Commons." [p. 53]
Charles was captured once more, tried before a high court of
sixty-seven members appointed by an abbreviated Parliament, sentenced
to death, and beheaded at Whitehall on January 30, 1649. for the next
eleven years England lived under the Commonwealth, a nominally
republican form of government that was actually largely under the
control of Cromwell, who in 1653 took effective power as lord
protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland under
a written constitution called the "Instrument of Government,"
which gave Cromwell essentially dictatorial powers. [p. 55]
The leader of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, challenged the
parliamentary leaders and roundheads with doctrines too radical for
them to consider. "What stock," he asked, "is provided
for the
poor, fatherless, widows, and impoverished people? And
what advancement of encouragement for the laboring and industrious,
as to take off their burthens, is there?" Another Digger wrote, "England
is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free
allowance to dig and labour the Commons."
Winstanley went
to far as to argue that the earth should be made a "common
Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect to persons."
[p. 55]
Inevitably, many of the Leveler pamphlets and the ideas they espoused
found their way to America, where they fell like seeds in a welcoming
soil. Milton's works, which relentlessly championed freedom in every
area of man's social and political life, became as familiar as the
Bible and John Bunyan to colonists of the Protestant persuasion -
Congregationists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists alike. It is
difficult to convey the intensity of attention with which the
colonists attempted to follow the bewildering course of events in the
mother country. [p. 56]
Moreover, with the Restoration a spirit developed in England quite
hostile to the colonies. In the mother country Anglicanism and
aristocracy once more suppressed Puritanism and incipient democracy.
Correspondingly, the colonies, so far as they manifested a leveling
and democratic temper, served to remind Englishmen of events they
would have preferred to forget. There was widespread disquiet among
dissenters in the colonies as well as in England over the severity of
the Cavalier Parliament's Clarendon Code, four statutes directed
against religious nonconformists. [p. 57]
All the democratic ferment that seemed to fade so rapidly in England
persisted in America and entered into the consciousness of many of
those colonists who would have been called dissenters had they
remained in England. [p. 59]
Moreover, the political instability of the mother country was a
powerful incentive to emigration in the days when being out of power
often meant losing one's head in the bargain. So the English colonies
grew greatly in numbers during that tumultuous century, and they
learned, perhaps better than the British themselves, whatever lessons
the events of that era were capable of teaching to attentive students
on the other side of the Atlantic. [p. 59]
New England and the Middle Colonies / 4
In that attentiveness to the worth and quality of things, and to the
relation between things and services
was to be found the secret
of the community that became an essential building block of the
nation. [p. 64]
Dr. Alexander Hamilton also noted the "democratick" nature
of the government, adding, "They have but little regard to the
laws of England, their mother country, tho they pretend to take that
constitution for a precedent." The customs officials and royal
officers in Rhode Island were "ciphers." "They dare not
exercise their office for fear of the fury and unruliness of the
people.
" On the other hand they profited from generous
bribes for looking the other way when illicit cargoes entered their
ports. [p. 71]
The community supported and sustained the family, verified and
reinforced its values, provided the essential context in which this
new breed, so strangely compounded of fanaticism (or perhaps, more
gently, zeal) and democracy, grew and flourished. The Puritan made the
town, and the town made the Puritan. The Puritan was, at one and the
same time, the most sturdily independent of characters and the most
profoundly oriented toward the community. There was no tyrant like the
community, and yet, paradoxically (that word so necessary to the
historian), the community, so demanding in its orthodoxy, produced
that classic figure of independent individualism, the New England
Yankee. Individual and community: community and individual - in that
mysterious balance, that alteration, lay the answer to the riddle of
the Puritan character. [pp. 74-75]
Rensselaerwyck had several thousand tenants, and the patron, like a
feudal baron, told Hamilton "he could muster 600 men fit to bear
arms." The patrons had their own courts, in which they dispensed
justice for minor infractions; they collected a series of feudal dues
and rents from tenants who were more like medieval serfs than free
men. The patroonships were an anomaly in eighteenth-century colonial
America, where the citizens of Massachusetts and Rhode Island enjoyed
more extensive political rights than any citizens in the world. The
patroonship was certainly an anachronism in the colony of New York,
with its enterprising merchant class that so well represented the
commercial spirit of the new age. The tenants of the patrons had risen
up in rebellion on several occasions, but without materially improving
their situation. [p. 76]
it could be said that if the Quakers took in their charge the
keeping of the consciences of their fellow citizens, the keeper of the
Quakers' conscience was John Woolman,
Woolman's compassion and
sympathy were directed toward the freeing of black men and women held
as slaves by his fellow members of the Society of Friends. Conquering
his coreligionists, he made many of them, in turn, advocates of the
antislavery cause. [p.81]
The Southern Colonies / 5
few if any members of the British aristocracy came to Virginia
or any other colony. Prosperous and ambitious tradesmen and craftsmen
like the original William Byrd came, as did some substantial
immigrants of the middle rank who wished to improve their situation in
life or ape the manners of the upper classes. A few of the minor
gentry also came, looking for greener pastures and cheap land. [p. 85]
The Virginians engaged in no manufacturing of any kind, although raw
materials were plentiful. All they did
was raise tobacco, and "as
they can get anything they need for this commodity they become so lazy
that they send to England for clothes, linen, hats, women's dresses,
shoes, iron tools, nails, and even wooden furniture, (although their
own wood is very fine to work on and they have loads of it) such as
tables, chairs, bedsteads, chests, wardrobes." [p. 86]
Not a tenth of the land was cultivated, "and that which is
cultivated," [Reverend Andrew Burnaby] wrote, "is far from
being so in the most advantageous manner." [p. 89]
In the old country, a man's life and labor were spent on land that
was not his own, and therein lay the basis of all his various
dependences. He was dependent for his bread and for that of his wife
and children on the good will of the landlord. If he grew restive or
openly rebellious, if he stepped out of line, he was stigmatized as "a
rude, rough fellow" with ideas above his station, and the society
mustered all its agents and agencies to put him down again. [p. 92]
So to "live independent" was to live transformed from an
underling to someone who could stand on his own two fee and insist on
a proper regard for his rights, who owned the land he farmed, made the
bread that fed his own, and owed no one for the livelihood. Secure in
his modest holdings, aware of his rights as an Englishman, hardy and
self-reliant, this independent farmer was the sort of citizen of which
a free and independent nation might in time be built. [p. 92]
"The public or political character of the Virginians
corresponds," he wrote, "with their private one; they are
haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and
can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior
power [italics mine]. Many of them consider the colonies as
independent states, not connected with Great Britain, otherwise than
by having the same common king, and being bound to her by natural
affection." [p. 93]
Aristocracy, whether in ancient Greece or Renaissance Florence,
England or Virginia, seems to be the form of social organization that
is most fecund for men of unusual gifts. Along with a large number of
amiable fools and effete snobs, an aristocracy can also produce a
significant proportion of men of the highest capacity; equally
important, it is quick to patronize the unusually gifted in lower
social orders and give them scope and encouragement for the exercise
of their special talents. The democratic spirit, on the other hand, is
commonly, as Alexis de Tocqueville and others have noticed, jealous of
excellence and assiduous in trying to reduce everyone to a common
level. [p. 94]
From the frontier counties of the more settled colonies -
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia - families moved south looking
for cheaper land and more fertile soil. Those who were restless,
discontented, dissenting, or simply adventurous made their way in
substantial numbers to North Carolina, where the absence of a great
landed aristocracy or an established commercial class produced a
liberal and democratic atmosphere much to these restless settlers'
taste. [p. 94]
North Carolina is hard to characterize. Yet it was by no means a
nonentity. Without great figures or brilliant leaders, it represented,
better in fact than Virginia, the ideal of the yeoman farmer: the
small, independent landowner who tended his acres and was jealous of
his rights. North Carolinians would have doubtless been more at home
in New England than sandwiched between Virginia and South Carolina.
[p. 95]
In the backcountry, alienated white settlers had the same grievances
against the colonial rulers as the residents of Charles Town had, in
turn, against Great Britain: taxation without representation,
manipulation of the law, selfishness, and callous disregard of the
rights and needs of the frontier. The Revolution, when it came, seemed
less a fight for freedom than an effort of the seacoast aristocracy to
protect its own narrow interests, interests that frequently were quite
at odds with the interests of the inhabitants of the interior country.
[pp. 97-98]
Precisely those qualities that made it virtually impossible for the
black slave to accommodate himself to white society made him most
valuable doing the simple if arduous work of a field hand. His
distinctive appearance made him easy to identify; his inability to
shift for himself in the world beyond the plantation bound him to his
master, who provided food, clothing, and even, in a degree,
protection. [p. 103]
For a people who were engaged in a struggle not only for their own
liberties and rights as Englishmen but for, as they so often said, the
universal rights of man, the anomaly of black servitude in their own
household was a grim reminder of the compromised nature of all human
aspirations. [p. 105]
Indians and Settlers / 6
The Reformation, which made its adherents into "individuals,"
also made them hopelessly alien to a people who still lived in a
tribal consciousness. [p. 113]
Observing the Indians, who "have few but natural wants and those
easily supplied," Benjamin Franklin was inclined to propose a
whole new theory of human development. If man could be so content in a
state of nature, he asked himself, how had civilization ever arisen?
It must have been as a consequence of a condition of scarcity, where
some peoples, driven from lands that afforded an easy living, were
forced to create a more complex and varied economic and social life.
Franklin wrote to a friend: "They are not deficient in natural
understanding and yet they have never shown any inclination to change
their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts." [pp.
113-114]
"They think," [Reverend John Heckewelder] wrote, "that
[God] made the earth and all it contains for the common good of
mankind
it was not for the benefit of a few, but of all. Every
thing was given in common to the sons of man. Whatever liveth on the
land, whatsoever groweth out of the earth, and all that is in the
rivers and waters flowing through the same, was given jointly to all,
and every one is entitled to his share. From this principle,
hospitality flows as from its source.
They give and are
hospitable to all, without exception, and will always share with each
other and often with a stranger, even to their last morsel."
"Yours" and "mine," "ours," "his,"
"hers," were not the determinative words for the Indians
that they were for the white man. The Indian did not think that the
land was "his" in the sense that the white man insisted that
it was his property. The whole notion of buying and selling land was
so alien to the Indian that while he could understand driving an enemy
off a hunting range or general territory, he had no notion of marking
off a specific area as belonging in perpetuity to some individual
tribe, and certainly not to an individual Indian. [p. 116]
Common Grievances and Common Dangers / 7
Diversity in unity is one of the major themes in American history;
certainly it is the essence of the idea of a federal union. [p. 120]
It was doubtless Washington's thoroughness and attention to detail
that assured his scouts of a few moments' advantage in spotting the
enemy. [p. 124]
Some historians have agreed with Bedford and Choiseul that the
British retention of Canada was the key factor in bringing on the
American Revolution. In the absence of the threat from the French and
their Indian allies, so the argument goes, the colonies were
emboldened to resist unpopular measures of the British ministry. [p.
129]
The perpetual menace of Catholic New France was removed. For
frontiersmen, the Indian problem was reduced to manageable
proportions. And once the common dangers were removed, common
grievances could assert their primacy. Further, the colonists, as a
consequence of their contributions to the victory, modest as these
were in British eyes, felt a greatly increased boldness and
self-confidence. [p. 130]
John Adams
wrote to a friend in 1756 reflecting on the
rise and fall of civilizations. History recorded a number of nations
that had risen "from contemptible beginnings" to spread
their influence "till the whole globe is subjected to their sway."
"When," he continued, "they have reached the summit of
grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly effects their
run, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place."
So it had been with Rome, and so in time it might well be with
England, presently "the greatest nation upon the globe."
Some years back England had lost a small and, for the most part,
inconspicuous number of its citizens, for reasons of conscience, to an
untamed wilderness. "This apparently trivial incident,"
Adams wrote, "may transfer the great seat of [power] into
America." With the threat of French Canada removed, the colonies
within one hundred years would have a greater population than the
mother country, Adams pointed out. The only way for Great Britain "to
keep up from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us.
Divide et imipera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and, then,
some great men in each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole,
they will destroy each other's influence and keep the country in equilibrio.
[p. 131]
Mercantilism / 8
In essence, mercantilist theory held that the interests of any colony
should be entirely subordinated to those of the mother country.
Colonies were weapons in the continuing trade warfare between nations.
As England applied the principles of mercantilism to her colonies,
they were designed to give her a favorable balance of trade (thus
insuring an inflow of gold), and to develop her merchant marine as the
primary means of commercial supremacy and as the foundation of a
strengthened navy. [p. 134]
The colonials remained unimpressed. They saw plainly enough that
their interests were invariably subordinated to those of English
merchants who, form the American perspective, seemed greedy and
rapacious. [p. 136]
Smuggling was endemic - and quite easy, because law enforcement was
lax. Parliament wished to squeeze maximum profit from colonial trade
but did not bother to see that its statutes were obeyed. Since trade
profits went largely into private hands and the return to the royal
exchequer was relatively modest, it seemed dubious policy to expend
large sums to employ sufficient customs officials to prevent smuggling
and other infractions on the Navigation Acts. [p. 136]
The board [of Trade] was so inefficient and so clogged with work
through much of its existence that important correspondence sometimes
lay unread for a year or so; it might take several years for a
colonial governor or assembly to receive an answer to a query or a
request. As a result of this inefficiency, the board's existence
encouraged the growth of an independent spirit in the colonies. [p.
138]
Mercantilist policy can be summed up as a patchwork of restrictive
laws conceived in a spirit of arrogance and administered with an
inefficiency that invited evasion. One example perhaps best indicates
the effect of this highhanded bungling: the chaotic state of the
currency. All trade in the colonies was hampered by the lack of a
reliable medium of exchange. In the absence of minted coins of
established value, the estimation of the worth of the jumble of
currencies that circulated was an art in itself, and one that added a
good deal to the economic instability of the colonies. [pp. 140-141]
The most popular scheme was that of a land bank that would issue
currency upon land as security. But seacoast merchants and Crown
officials were generally united in opposition to all land-bank
proposals, and the currency problem persisted as a symbol of British
indifference to colonial needs and a constant if minor source of
irritation to most Americans. [p. 141]
The Delights of the Homeland / 9
As the center of a Scottish renaissance, Edinburgh had a faculty
that, in the opinion of Benjamin Franklin, was "a set of as truly
great Professors of the several branches of knowledge, as have ever
appeared in any age or County. [p. 144]
As Presbyterianism grew stronger in the colonies, Scotland came to be
regarded by many colonists as their true homeland. [p. 144]
"What then is the American, this New Man?" / 10
"
Luther and Calvin invented the individual, and it was
just such individuals - secure in their relationship to God and
confident of their own powers - who dared to stand up for their rights
as Americans when they felt that the mother country was infringing on
those rights. Further, this new individual in turn could establish not
only new religious sects and new congregations, but also new
businesses, new financial enterprises, entire new communities, and
even new ways of conceiving of the relation of individuals to one
another - new ways, that is, of designing political and constitutional
arrangements. [p. 154]
The Reformation left its mark on every aspect of the personal and
social life of the faithful. In the family, in education, in business
activity, in work, in the community, and ultimately in politics, the
consequences of the Reformation were determinative for American
history. [p. 157]
PART II
The Revenue Act / 1
George Washington's comments on the Proclamation Line are revealing.
He wrote to a fellow land speculator, William Crawford: "I can
never look upon that Proclamation in any other light (but this I say
between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of
the Indians and must fail of course in a few years especially when
those Indians are consenting to our Occupying the Lands. Any person
who therefore neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good
Lands and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own
will never regain it.
" [p. 167]
a number of great land ventures were undertaken in the years
prior to the outbreak of the Revolution; not a few men of wealth and
substance on both sides of the Atlantic were engaged in American land
speculation. [p. 168]
Speculators (including Washington) formed companies to buy tracts of
land numbering in the millions of acres, undertaking at the same time
to extinguish the Indians' claims by treaty purchase. [p. 168]
For Rhode Island, considered a next of smugglers by the British, the
Sugar Act was especially severe. A resident of Providence pointed out
the implications for that colony. Rhode Island imported well over a
million gallons of molasses a year. A duty of three pence a gallon
would produce a revenue in excess of fourteen thousand pounds a year.
This was more hard money, one pamphleteer wrote, " that was ever
in [the colony] at one time: this money is to be sent away, and never
to return; yet the payment is to be repeated every year.
Can
this possibly be done?
There is surely no man in his right mind
believes this possible." [p. 174]
James Otis and the Beginnings of Resistance / 2
when word of the Sugar Act reached the colonies, Otis was
already armed with legal and constitutional arguments against it. A
town meeting was called in Boston, and there James Otis presented his
Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. His speech
was an extension of his earlier objections to the writs of assistance,
but here Otis mustered most of the arguments that were to be used by
colonial publicists and pamphleteers in the decade prior to the
outbreak of the Revolution. [p. 180]
The principle that Otis enunciated was so powerful an idea that it
came, eventually, to be embodied in the Supreme Court of the United
States, which was specifically charged with checking Congress when
that body should pass legislation that contravened, primarily, the
natural law as incorporated in the first ten amendments to the Federal
Constitution. [p. 182]
To some Englishmen the Americans wee "scum or off scourings of
all the nations," a "hotch potch medley of foreign
enthusiastic madmen," "a mongrel breed of Irish, Scotch and
Germans leavened with convicts and outcasts. [p. 186]
The Stamp Act / 3
Colonel Isaac Barre was a veteran of the French and Indian War who
had fought under General Wolfe and had been with him at the time of
his death on the Plains of Abraham.
Barre was a fearless and
effective spokesman for the colonial cause and a
bete noire to George III. He immediately rose to challenge
Townshend's description of the colonies. "They planted by your
care?" he said scornfully. "No, your oppressions planted
them in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then incultivated
and unhospitable country - where they exosed themselves to almost all
the hardships of which human nature is liable, and maong others to the
cruelty of a save foe.
And yet actuated by principles of true
English liberty, they met all hardships with pleasure, compared with
those they suffered in their own country, from the hands of those who
should have been their friends.
"They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your
neglect of em: as soon as you began to care about em, that care was
exercised in sending persons to rule over em, in one department and
another, who were perhaps the deputies of deputies to some member of
this House - sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their
actions, and to prey upon em; men whose behavior on many occasions has
caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil with them.
"They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up
arms in your defence, have exerted a valor amidst their constant and
laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier was
drenched in blood. Its interior parts have yielded all its little
savings to your emolument. And believe me, remember I this day told
you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at
first will accompany them still - But prudence forbids me to explain
myself further. God knows I do not at this time speak from motives of
party heat; what I deliver are the genuine sentiments of my heart."
[p. 192]
In Boston, the Sons of Liberty (formerly the Loyal Nine) began to lay
plans for organized protest. The group was originally made up of
substantial craftsmen, artisans, and small businessmen. So far as it
is possible to tell, it grew up quite spontaneously, and there is no
evidence that it was a tool of radical patriots like James Otis and
Samuel Adams, or, conversely, of merchants still smarting from the
Sugar Act and alarmed by a measure with dangerous implications for all
colonial trade. [p. 195]
The Riots / 4
In all of the colonies, a particular resentment was directed against
those Americans, who
had been appointed or were rumored to have
been appointed as stamp distributors. Some of the new appointees, like
Pennsylvania's Ben Franklin and Virginia's Henry Lee, were good
patriots and enemies of Parliamentary taxation. They had opposed the
Stamp Act, but when its passage appeared inevitable they had applied
for distributorships, doubtless on the ground that if profits were to
be made from the sale of the stamps, it was better for them to be made
by good patriots. [p. 208]
If it is clear that from the beginning some leading citizens joined
in with the mass of demonstrators, most often they were the voices of
moderation who interceded at some critical moment to try to prevent
the more destructive acts of the mob. It may well have been that on
occasion they tried to direct the anger of the demonstrators toward
targets that were of special interest to them. It seems clear that, on
the whole, their influence was on the side of discouraging the worst
sorts of violence whenever possible, and it may have been due largely
to their presence and periodic intervention that no royal official,
however abused and reviled, lost his life. [p. 213]
the colonial riots that may be said to have begun with the
Stamp Act marked a new era in this familiar form of social protest.
They were, at least retrospectively, revolutionary and ideological.
They were more often planned than spontaneous; they were, to be sure,
directed to the redress of particular grievances but they frequently
looked beyond that to a radical alteration in the relationship between
the mother country and her colonies. If the change seemed to the
colonists simply a matter of preserving existing liberties from
encroachment, to the British it seemed genuinely revolutionary. The
relationship that the colonists wished was, to most Englishmen,
unimaginable, unconstitutional, and, in that fine, eighteenth-century
word, chimerical. [p. 213]
In an essay called "Considerations on the Propriety of imposing
Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue,"
[Maryland planter and lawyer, Daniel] Dulany attacked the concept of
virtual representation as "a mere cobweb, spread to catch the
unwary, and intangible the weak." [p. 215]
In effect, Dulany and other colonial writers were saying to
Parliament: "Having placed limits on the powers of the Crown in
order to free yourselves, and by proxy every Englishman, from the
exercise of arbitrary power, you must now do the same for us. You must
voluntarily forego some of those absolute powers that you hold, and
agree to limit yourselves to actions consistent with the tradition of
English rights and liberties, of which you have been, in better times,
the champions and defenders. We must know where we stand. What is
intolerable to us is just this feeling that was once intolerable to
you; a feeling that there is no check or limit on the actions that you
can take that will affect our lives and property." [pp. 215-216]
To a James Otis or a Daniel Dulany, England was a second home, the
most powerful and enlightened nation in the world, enhanced by fond
memories of their visits. But to a Philadelphia wheelwright or
cordwainer, Great Britain undoubtedly seemed an infinitely dim and
remote reality to which it was difficult to relate. [p. 217]
Studies of the nature of political protest have by now made clear
what thoughtful observers of history have known for a long time - that
public opinion cannot be manipulated unless it exists. And this is as
true of the Revolution as of any other event in American History. [p.
218]
The Stamp Act Congress / 5
The convening of the Stamp Act Congress was certainly one of the most
significant episodes in the history of the colonial resistance to the
authority of Parliament and the Crown. That fact, in turn, makes the
Congress one of the most important bodies in the development of modern
political institutions. [p. 219]
There is a good deal of evidence that most patriot leaders - almost
all substantial members of the upper and middle classes - were
dismayed at the destructiveness of the populace or, more plainly, the
lower classes. [p. 221]
America In Rebellion / 6
Revolutions are not usually remarkable for their tolerance of
dissent, and the American Revolution was in this regard, no different
from others. [p. 231]
those merchants whose ships, without stamps, lay idle in port,
or sailed with unstamped cargoes on uncertain voyages, stood to lose
large sums, or indeed their entire fortunes; the greater part of their
wealth, in the absence of banks of deposit, was tied up in ships and
cargoes, so that even very rich merchants had little liquid capital
except that which floated or the molasses or rum that lay in the holds
of their vessels. [p. 232]
What the Stamp Act doubtless would have done was, by draining off a
good part of the precious specie or hard money that circulated in the
colonies, to make trade and commerce even more difficult and awkward
than it had been prior to the act, but it is hard to believe that
colonial ingenuity would not have found a way to cope with this
problem, as it had with all others that imposed constraints on
colonial commercial activity. [p. 233]
Parliament's Battle Over Repeal / 7
William Pitt, responding to Grenville: "The gentlemen
[Grenville] tells us America is obstinate; America is almost in open
rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. Three million of
people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to
submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of
the rest." [p. 241]
Of all those in England who were unmoved by the appeal for colonial
liberties, there were few, ironically, less sympathetic than the king.
All the autocratic tendencies of this ambitious and headstrong
monarch, frustrated by the protections surrounding Parliament, came to
focus on the colonies. [p. 247]
The Stamp Act In Retrospect / 8
If there is one immutable law of history, it is this: when the
response is out of all proportion to the provocation, look further for
the causes than the apparent facts of the matter. The response of the
colonists to the Stamp Act was out of all proportion to the
provocation - or so it certainly seemed to virtually all Englishmen,
and to many startled colonists as well. The Stamp Act was, therefore,
not so much the cause as the occasion of the riots. The cause was to
be found in the fact that the colonists were no longer willing to
accept a completely subordinate and dependent relationship to the
mother country. [p. 253]
Perhaps the most dramatic effect of the Stamp Act crisis on the
patriot leaders was to impel them to sharpen and refine their own
notions about the nature of constitutional government. In the decade
between the Stamp Act and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the
patriot leaders went to school with the greatest ancient and modern
philosophers who considered the nature of the universe and the proper
forms of government. They ransacked all the leading authorities on
natural law, constitutional government, and individual rights. They
read vast amounts of history and pondered its lessons. [p. 253]
Frances Hutcheson, whose
Moral Philosophy had this to say about the relations between
the colonies and Great Britain: "If the plan of the mother
country is changed by force or degeneration by degree from a safe,
mild, and gentle limited power to a severe and absolute one
or
if any colony is so increased in numbers and strength that they are
sufficient by themselves for all good ends of a political union; they
are not bound to continue in their subjection when it is grown so much
more burdensome than was expected.
There is something
immaterial in supposing a large society sufficient for lal the good
purposes of an independent union, remaining subject to the direction
and government of a distant body of men who know not sufficiently the
circumstances and exigencies of this society.
" [p. 255]
Henry Home, Lord Kames,
held that there was nothing in the
nature of man "that subjects him to the power of any, his Creator
and his parents excepted.
Hence it is a principle embraced by
the most solid writers that all men are born free and independent of
one another." [p. 255]
The generation of revolutionary lawyers read with a special
intensity; they searched through all the wisdom of the past to find a
formula n the name of which the liberties of all Englishmen might be
preserved. [p. 256]
The American Revolution thus is distinguished from other revolutions
in that its most radical popular phase came first, its moderate phase
last. [p. 257]
The people did not need to be taught revolutionary principles - they
had given evidence enough of these - they needed to be instructed in
the principles of free government. [p. 259]
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