Why did the colonists revolt?

We are approaching our 250^th anniversary of Independence Day. In the 1770s, American colonists were comparatively prosperous, lightly taxed, and their safety was protected by the military might of the British Empire. The American colonists were relatively well-fed, sheltered, literate, unthreatened by war, with land and opportunity just over the horizon for the industrious. So, why did the colonists revolt? 

Because they believed in God-given rights.

American colonists were far more educated than most of the world. In 1776, the American colonies had nine well-established colleges. These included Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, William and Mary, the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), College of New Jersey (Princeton), King's College (Columbia University), Queen's College (Rutgers), and College of Rhode Island (Brown University). Beyond formal education, life-long self-learning was fashionable, and most of the Founders were familiar with the teachings of Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Our people … were observed by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.” Ben should know. He built an enormous fortune selling products that required a literate audience.

The Declaration of Independence lists the particulars for the revolt, but the overarching reason was that the British monarchy believed the colonists were mere subjects. Under English common law, anyone born within the King’s dominions was a natural-born subject, not a citizen, of the British Crown. This lack of British citizenship chafed the American colonists. They viewed themselves as English and took the Enlightenment's definition of “natural rights” seriously. As Boston tour guides are fond of saying, the colonists never yelled, “The British are coming,” because they believed themselves to be British.

Almost three years prior to the Declaration, the Boston Tea Party made rebellion the topic of conversation at the dinner table, in taverns, and in churches. The battle cry was “No taxation without representation!” Today, we naively assume the colonists were angry about taxes, but the operative part of that slogan was the last two words. That’s what got their ire up.

The British were on top of the world. The popular patriotic song of the day, Rule Britannia, made that clear. Englishmen had rights, limited at the time, but those rights were sacrosanct. Even these limited rights were not bestowed upon the colonists. Propertied English males could vote for a person to represent them in the halls of government, but the powers-that-be refused to bestow that same right to colonists. Thus, no representation.

The irony is that even without representation in Parliament, the colonists enjoyed more personal liberty than their English counterparts. To have properly functioning colonies three thousand miles away from the mother country, the colonists were allowed to make many of their own rules through locally elected legislatures. The colonists had developed a taste for self-government and preferred to be somewhat independent of the rulers of the British Empire. Edicts that sailed in from across the Atlantic were more than annoying. The colonists grew increasingly enraged with the palpable disrespect they received from London. Two examples illustrate this point.

The view was different from London, of course. The rulers of the British Empire saw the colonists as getting a free ride. The great British Navy kept the seas safe for New England ships, and the mercantilist Parliament regulated trade, allowing the American maritime industry to prosper. To keep the colonies safe from foreign invasion, England built forts and posted troops throughout their North American holdings. The French and Indian War caused a major drain on the British treasury. Parliament looked at these costs and saw colonials acting like ungrateful, spoiled children who had grown large enough to pay their own way.

Were the colonists’ feelings hurt because the English refused to allow them to join their club as full members? Not exactly. Their belief in self-governance was heartfelt and part of their character. The American Revolution may have been sparked by an overbearing crown, but the fuel was an educated populace that was experienced in home rule. The edicts from England rubbed the colonists the wrong way because they were used to making decisions for themselves and had adopted Enlightenment teachings, which held that self-governance was a natural right.

Or as Thomas Jefferson powerfully put it, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Read all about it!

Samuel Adams and the Boston Tea Party

“Friends! Fellow Countrymen! We have petitioned. We have remonstrated. We have supplicated. We have prostrated ourselves before the throne of British majesty, and it avails us nothing! This meeting can do nothing more to save the country! Let every man now turn his face toward Griffin’s Wharf.”

I heard these words from Samuel Adams at the Old South Meeting House in Boston. I immediately leaped to my feet and joined the throng marching to Griffin’s Wharf. The destination of the rowdy mob was a cargo of tea owned by the British East India Company. We tossed the tea into the harbor in protest of taxation without representation.

My participation was not on December 16, 1773, the famed night of the Boston Tea Party. It was December 16, 2005. Although a reenactment, it remained a stirring call to arms. Adams’s meaning was clear: the time for talk was over. Samuel Adams’ famous words, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!” forced the protesters out of their pews and into the street.

Every revolution needs a rabble-rouser, and Adams was the pervasive firebrand of the American Revolution. He was of normal height for the time, with sharp, angular features. One observer described him as “lean as a greyhound.” John Adams, his second cousin, said, that when riled, his eyes “sparkled like diamonds.” His roots were Puritan, and he disdained finery. A British officer sneered that he looked like a “threadbare clergyman.” Despite appearing average in stature, Adams possessed a larger-than-life personality.

Samuel Adams formed the Boston Committee of Correspondence (1772) to share information, coordinate protests, and expose British tyranny. Within two years, there were 300 similar committees throughout the colonies, converting Boston activism into a colony-wide fight. He amplified a small riot until it became the infamous “Boston Massacre.” He helped found the clandestine Sons of Liberty, which added street muscle to the resistance. He popularized James Otis Jr.’s slogan, “no taxation without representation,” orchestrated the Boston Tea Party, and helped organize Paul Revere’s Ride. Samuel Adams was omnipresent. No wonder he is called the “Father of the American Revolution.”

Adams was a revolutionary, but of a different nature than most. British officials scoffed that Adams’ followers were a “tippling, nasty, vicious crew” from seedy taverns. The truth of the matter is that he recruited Sons of Liberty partisans from church choirs. Adams blended faith and rebellion to build a grassroots army that toppled an empire.

Today, we hear “no taxation without representation” and think the hullabaloo was about taxes. Our Revolution was primarily about the lack of representation, rather than taxes. Prominent men of the era, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were angry that they did not have the privileges of British citizenship. They were subjects of the empire. If the colonists could not be British, then they would become Americans.

Adams signed the Declaration of Independence immediately after John Hancock’s oversized signature. He did not serve as a soldier in the war, stating that his weapon was “the pen, not the sword.” Adams refused to attend the Constitutional Convention because he feared giving more power to the government and fought for a Bill of Rights before supporting ratification. Revolutionaries often fade away in disillusionment or take control of the government they helped foment. Adams chose the second course and served three terms as governor of Massachusetts. Ironically, as governor, he crushed Shays’ Rebellion.

Revolutions require more than rabble-rousers; otherwise, they go awry. Successful revolutions require a clear and workable philosophical underpinning. The Enlightenment provided the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution. The Founding of the United States of America is the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment.

Samuel Adams studied Enlightenment ideas at Harvard and referenced Locke in his short and forceful “Rights of the Colonists” (1772). He did not write intellectual treatises. He was a man of the street. He turned Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau into slogans, riots, and policy.

Samuel Adams had a knack for exciting people to act. He envisioned a new nation where “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.”

His genius was getting others to share this vision … and make it happen.

This article was first published in Constitution America.

Buy the American Exceptionalism Series HERE.

Abraham Lincoln and The Second American Revolution

 

Abraham Lincoln and The Second American Revolution by James M. McPherson

This book is a collection of seven essays on the Civil War. Originally, these essays were lecture notes. They are well written and thoughtful. The common theme is that the Civil War was a second revolution because it resulted in revolutionary transformations of the country and was accompanied by a counter-revolution a couple decades after Appomattox. Each essay covers a single premise and can be read separately.

Slavery divided the nation in 1787 and severed the nation in 1860. Many have said that the Civil War settled the key issue kicked down the road by the Constitutional Convention. Did the Civil War finish the Founders’ work or was it in and of itself revolutionary? Read Abraham Lincoln and The Second American Revolution and decide for yourself.

Ending slavery in the United States was horrendously difficult. It took a four year war with about 620,000 deaths. The politics were byzantine and the warfare brutal. Reunification was even more ferocious, and absent Lincoln, the backsliding undid much of the accomplishment.

In the end, I found this to be a sad book.

The State of History in the United States

The New York Times

On May 11, 2019, the New York Times published Rick Atkinson's “Why We Still Care About America’s Founders.” 

Atkinson is the author of the forthcoming book, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777. Promotional articles are often written to build momentum for a nonfiction book launch. Regrettably, this op-ed says more about the state of history as a discipline than it does about Atkinson’s book.

Normally, a book launch is a joyous occasion, especially when the tome is by a prominent historian who has won Pulitzer Prizes in history and journalism. But these are tough times for historians, especially historians of American history. Progressive activists have belittled white men and toxic masculinity as the scourge of humankind, and American history is just filled with dead, white men.  Some of them slaveholders, as well. Atkinson spent years writing a history book fraught with landmines that could offend the political correctness vigilantes. What’s a historian to do?

Grovel. 

Before getting into the meat of his article, Atkinson pays homage to social warriors hunting for offense. Here are the first three paragraphs of his article. 

There’s a lot to dislike about the founding fathers and the war they and others fought for American independence.

The stirring assertion that “all men are created equal” did not, of course, apply to 500,000 black slaves — one in five of all souls occupying the 13 colonies when those words were written in 1776. Nor was it valid for Native Americans, women or indigents.

Those who remained loyal to the British crown, and even fence-straddlers skeptical of armed rebellion, were often subjected to dreadful treatment, including public shaming, torture, exile and execution. In a defensive war waged for liberty and to secure basic rights, the Americans invaded Canada in an effort to win by force of arms what could not be won by negotiation and blandishment — a 14th colony.

Although voting rights did not extend to women, slaves, or Native Americans, Atkinson failed to mention that voting rights were broader in the United States than in any other major power. In fact, voting rights for free males were greater in the colonies than in Great Britain itself. (In the late 18^th Century, English voting rights were still doled out by nobility.)

The third paragraph is just gratuitous genuflecting. Loyalists who didn’t actively work for the British were seldom subjected to the atrocities listed, and the Canadian invasion is likewise skewed to appear more belligerent toward Canadians than the British. Military leaders certainly hoped to spark a simultaneous rebellion in Canada, but if that failed, they would be content to draw British forces to the north. American colonialists had no intention of conquring new territory while simultaneously fighting the strongest military force on earth.

Historians should not skew the past to make our ancestors look better, nor should they present the past in a way to advance the narratives of present-day social warriors. People and events should be judged in their time, not ours.

Another irritation with modern historians is the tendency to over-play the perspective of ordinary people. Letters and diaries can provide contemporaneous insight, and as a historical novelist, I greatly appreciate research into past lifestyles. It provides me the details to bring my characters to life. But ordinary people don’t bend history. Extraordinary people do. If we want to change our world, we need to study how it has been done in the past.

As Theodore White wrote, In Search of History, “Threading an idea into the slipstream of politics, then into government, then into history…is a craft which I have since come to consider the most important in the world.”

The Founding of this great nation was unique. Up until 1776, with a few brief exceptions, world history was about rulers and empires. The American experiment shook the world. Not only did we break away from the biggest and most powerful empire in history, we took the musings of the brightest thinkers of the Enlightenment and implemented them. Our Founding was simultaneously an armed rebellion against tyranny, and a revolution of ideas—ideas that changed the world.

And that is why we still care about America’s Founders.

The Happiness or Misery of Millions Yet Unborn

 (Excerpt from Principled Action)

The truly exceptional work in the founding began after the war for independence was won. During the Constitutional Convention , George Mason wrote, “The revolt from Great Britain and the formations of our new governments at that time, were nothing compared to the great business now before us; there was then a certain degree of enthusiasm, which inspired and supported the mind; but to view, through the calm, sedate medium of reason the influence which the establishment now proposed may have upon the happiness or misery of millions yet unborn, is the object of such magnitude, as absorbs, and in a manner suspends the operation of the human understanding.”

The writing and ratification of the Constitution made the United States of America unique. The origins of our republic were not by the sword, but through the calm, sedate medium of reason. There was a long and bloody revolution, but four years of peace had calmed the infant nation before the Founders collectively sat down to debate the design of a republic for millions yet unborn.

The Anti-Constitution Mercenaries

In the past, I blogged at What Would The Founders Think? One of my articles was titled, “The Founders Fear.” The article asserted that the Founders architected a limited government because they feared unrestrained power. This was written way back in 2011, but I received a scolding from a troll last week. Reeve wrote: