by Edward Cline
“Resolve the fourth, gentlemen: That His Majesty’s liege people of this his most ancient and loyal colony of Virginia, have without interruption enjoyed the precious right of being thus governed by their own Assembly in the article of their taxes and internal police, and that the same hath never been forfeited or in any other way given up or surrendered, but hath been constantly recognized by the kings and people of Great Britain.
“Those, sirs, are the premises of a uniquely extended syllogism. Here is its conclusion.
“Resolved, that the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony, and that every attempt to vest such power in any person or persons whatsoever, other than the General Assembly of this colony, has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom!
“There are two more resolves to be read, sirs, but these five are their foundation, and must be adopted before the sixth and seventh can have any meaning or force.”
The next day, in reply to criticisms of the “violence” of the Resolves, Henry answers:
“If this House elects to wait on Parliament, sirs, may I ask in what capacity? Ought we to wait idle in the foyer of those eminences’ concerns, in the mental livery of a menial, while they complete the latest business of oppressing the good people of England, not daring to whisper the persecution of their own brethren, lest it some how insinuate our own? Some men in this chamber may prefer to approach the bar of Parliament, hats in hand, on raw knees, as humble supplicants, in search of redress and restitution. I, sirs, prefer to wait for Parliament to call on me, to beg my forgiveness for that body’s attempt to dupe and enslave me and this my country!”
Given a second chance to speak, Henry rises and verbally accosts the Attorney-General, Peyton Randolph, who had delivered a speech advocating conciliation.
“The honorable gentleman there spoke now, not of the rightness or wrongness of the resolve in question, but of ominous consequences, should this House adopt it. I own that I am perplexed by his attention to what the Crown can and may do, and by his neglect to speak to the propriety of the resolve and the impropriety of this Stamp Act. Should he have examined for us the basis of his fears? Yes. But, he did not. Perhaps he concluded that they were too terrible to articulate. So, I shall examine them, for I believe that he and I share one well-founded fear: The power of the Crown to punish us, to scatter us, to despoil us, for the temerity of asserting in no ambiguous terms our liberty! I fear that power no less than he. But, I say that such a fear, of such a power, can move a man to one of two courses. He can make a compact with that power, one of mutual accommodation, so that he may live the balance of his years in the shadow of that power, ever-trembling in soul-dulling funk lest that power rob him once again.
“Or—he can rise up, and to that power say ‘No!’, to that power proclaim: ‘Liberty cannot, and will not, ever accommodate tyranny! I am wise to that Faustian bargain, and will not barter piecemeal or in whole my liberty!’
“Why are you gentlemen so fearful of that word? Why have not one of you dared pronounce it? Is it because you believe that if it is not spoken, or its fact or action in any form not acknowledged, it will not be what it is? Well, I will speak it for you and for all this colony to hear!
“Tyranny! Tyranny! Tyranny! There! The horror is named Tyranny! There is its guise, sirs! What a Janus-faced object it is, smirking at you on one side of its mask, shedding tears for you on the other! What a contemptible set of men who authored it, but whom you wish to accommodate! What a disgraceful proposition! And what a travesty you ask us to condone! ’Tis only a mere pound of flesh we propose to remove from you, they tell you in gentle, proper language, and we promise that you will not bleed. Hah! You will recall how the Bard proved the folly and fallacy of that kind of compact! Are not accommodation and compromise another but greater form of it? He proved it in a comedy, sirs! You propose to prove it in a tragedy, and if you succeed in penning finis to your opus, you may rue the day you put your names on its title page!
“You gentlemen, you have amassed vast, stately libraries from which you seem to be reluctant to cull or retain much wisdom. Know that I, too, have books, and that they are loose and dog-eared from my having read them, and I have profited from that habit.
“History is rife with instances of ambitious, grasping tyranny! Like many of you, I, too, have read that in the past, the tyrants Tarquin and Julius Caesar each had his Brutus, Catiline had his Cicero and Cato, and, closer to our time, Charles had his Cromwell! George the Third may—”
It is here that many burgesses rose and accused Henry with speaking treason.
“—may George the Third profit by their example!…If this be treason, then make the most of it!”
* * *
SPEECHES FOR REPEAL OF THE STAMP ACT
Parliament, March 1766
William Pitt, member for Bath in the Commons, but virtual Prime Minister over Rockingham (Pitt would form his own government the same year, and also be elevated to Lords, a move meant to diminish his political influence), spoke for repeal of the Stamp Act, but in terms that left open to Parliament the rationale to enact more oppressive legislation against the American colonies.
“I hope a day may soon be appointed to consider the state of the nation with respect to America. I hope gentlemen will come to this debate with all the temper and impartiality that His Majesty recommends and the importance of the subject requires; a subject of greater importance than ever engaged the attention of this House, that subject only excepted when, near a century ago, it was the question whether you yourselves were to be bond or free. In the meantime, as I cannot depend upon my health for any future day—such is the nature of my infirmities—I will beg to say a few words at present, leaving the justice, the equity, the policy, the expediency of the act to another time.
“I will only speak to one point—a point which seems not to have been generally understood. I mean to the right. Some gentlemen seem to have considered it as a point of honor. If gentlemen consider it in this light, they leave all measures of right and wrong, to follow a delusion that may lead to destruction. It is my opinion that this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same time, I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and supreme, in every circumstance of government and legislation whatsoever. They are the subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen; equally bound by its laws and equally participating in the Constitution of this free country.
“The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England! Taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power!
“The taxes are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. In legislation the three estates of the realm are alike concerned; but the concurrence of the peers and the Crown to a tax is only necessary to clothe it with the form of a law. The gift and grant is of the Commons alone.
“In ancient days, the Crown, the barons, and the clergy possessed the lands. In those days, the barons and the clergy gave and granted to the Crown. They gave and granted what was their own! At present, since the discovery of America, and other circumstances permitting, the Commons are become the proprietors of the land. The Church—God bless it!—has but a pittance. The property of the Lords, compared with that of the Commons, is as a drop of water in the ocean; and this House represents those Commons, the proprietors of the lands; and those proprietors virtually represent the rest of the inhabitants. When, therefore, in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax, what do we do? ‘We, your Majesty’s commons for Great Britain, give and grant to Your Majesty’—what? Our own property? No! ‘We give and grant to Your Majesty the property of your Majesty’s Commons of America!’ It is an absurdity in terms!
“The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty. The
Crown and the peers are equally legislative powers with the Commons. If taxation be a part of simple legislation, then the Crown and the peers have rights in taxation as well as yourselves; rights which they will claim, which they will exercise, whenever the principle can be supported by power.
“There is an idea in some that the colonies are virtually represented in the House,” said Pitt with a wryness that almost produced a grin on his face. “I would fain know by whom an American is represented here.
“Is he represented by any knight of the shire, in any county in this kingdom?” asked Pitt. “Would to God that respectable representation was augmented to a greater number! Or will you tell him that he is represented by any representative of a borough?—a borough which, perhaps, its own representatives never saw!” Pitt laughed once in dismissal of the idea. “This is what is called the rotten part of the Constitution! It cannot continue a century! If it does not drop, it must be amputated. The idea of a virtual representation of America in this House is the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of a man. It does not deserve a serious refutation.
“The Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this their constitutional right of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it! At the same time, this kingdom, as the supreme governing and legislative power, has always bound the colonies by her laws, by her regulations, and restrictions in trade, in navigation, in manufactures, in everything, except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent.
“Gentlemen, sir, have been charged with giving birth to sedition in America. They have spoken their sentiments with freedom against this unhappy act, and that freedom has become their crime. Sorry I am to hear the liberty of speech in this House imputed as a crime. But the imputation shall not discourage me. It is a liberty I mean to exercise. No gentleman ought to be afraid to exercise it. It is a liberty by which the gentleman who calumniates it might have profited. He ought to have desisted from his project. The gentleman tells us America is obstinate; America is almost in open rebellion. Well, I rejoice that America has resisted! Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to makes slaves of the rest!
“Since the accession of King William, many ministers, some of great, others of more moderate abilities, have taken the lead of government. None of these thought, or even dreamed, of robbing the colonies of their constitutional rights. That was reserved to mark the era of the late administration. Not that there were wanting some, when I had the honor to serve His Majesty, to propose to me to burn my fingers with an American stamp act. With the enemy at their back, with our bayonets at their breasts, in the day of their distress, perhaps the Americans would have submitted to the imposition; but it would have been taking an ungenerous, an unjust advantage.
“The gentleman boasts of these bounties to America! Are not these bounties intended finally for the benefit of this kingdom? If not, he has misapplied the national treasures!
“I am no courtier of America, I stand up for this kingdom. I maintain that the Parliament has a right to bind, to restrain America! Our legislative power over the colonies is sovereign and supreme. When it ceases to be sovereign and supreme, I would advise every gentleman here to sell his lands, if he can, and embark for that country. When two countries are connected together like England and her colonies, without being incorporated, the one must necessarily govern. The greater must rule the less. But she must so rule as not to contradict the fundamental principles that are common to both.
“If the gentleman does not understand the difference between external and internal taxes, I cannot help it. There is a plain distinction between taxes levied for the purposes of raising a revenue and duties imposed for the regulation of trade, for the accommodation of the subject; although, in the consequences, some revenue may incidentally arise from the latter. The gentleman asks, when were the colonies emancipated? I desire to know, when were they made slaves?
“A great deal has been said without doors of the power, of the strength of America. It is a topic that ought to be cautiously meddled with. In a good cause, on a sound bottom, the force of this country can crush America to atoms. I know the valor of your troops, I know the skill of your officers. There is not a company of foot that has served in America out of which you may not pick a man of sufficient knowledge and experience to make a governor of a colony there. But on this ground, on the Stamp Act, which so many here will think a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up my hands against it! In such a cause, your success would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man; she would embrace the pillars of the state, and pull down the Constitution along with her.
“Is this your boasted peace—not to sheathe the sword in its scabbard, but to sheathe it in the bowels of your countrymen? Will you quarrel with yourselves, now the whole house of Bourbon is united against you; while France disturbs your fisheries in Newfoundland, embarrasses your slave trade to Africa, and withholds from your subjects in Canada their property stipulated by treaty; while the ransom for the Manilas is denied by Spain, and its gallant conqueror basely traduced into a mean plunderer—a gentleman whose noble and generous spirit would do honor to the proudest grandee of that country?
“The Americans have not acted in all things with prudence and temper; they have been wronged; they have been driven to madness by injustice. Will you punish them for the madness you have occasioned? Rather let prudence and temper come first from this side. I will undertake for America that she will follow the example. There are two lines in a ballad of Prior’s, of a man’s behavior to his wife, so applicable to you and your colonies, that I cannot help repeating them:
‘Be to her virtues very kind.
Be to her faults a little blind’
“Upon the whole, I will beg leave to tell the House what is my opinion. It is that the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately! And that the reason for the repeal be assigned—because it was founded on an erroneous principle. At the same time, let the sovereign authority of this country over the colonies be asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, and be made to extend to every point of legislation whatsoever; that we may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever, except that of taking money from their pockets without consent.”
Dogmael Jones’s speech in Parliament for repeal of the Stamp Act answers objections to repeal and particularly William Pitt’s pragmatic speech for repeal and tolerance.
“It is the anxious concurrence among the advocates of repeal and the defenders of the colonies here that some form of declaration of supremacy must accompany any act of repeal, for otherwise it is imagined, and not entirely without truth in the notion, that it would appear that the Crown, in such an act, would implicitly grant the colonies a unique state of political and economic independence not enjoyed by other Crown dominions.
“I join in that concurrence. For if the colonies are exempted from ‘internal’ legislative authority by Parliament, in little time it is supposed, also not entirely without justification, that they would begin to chafe under the proscriptions of the navigation laws and other constraints, and subsequently question that authority as well, and press for the immediate removal of those fetters.
“This is a true fear which I have often heard spoken in hushed words or delicate insinuations amongst both friends and foes of the colonies in this chamber. This fear may be credited, I am sorry to say, not to honest foresight, but to the natural apprehensions of frustrated and foiled political ambition and avarice.
“But, what have these gentlemen and lords to fear? I do not believe that the consequences of repeal by itself have occurred yet even to the most eloquent colonials, for, if the reports and testimony in this chamber are any guide, the most vocal and robust opposers of the Sugar and Stamp Acts there do
not have political independence in mind so much as a fair and just regard by the Crown for their rights under our excellent constitution. An accompanying declaration of Parliamentary authority, if it comes to pass, will not much be noted by our fellow Britons over there. Only a few of them, and fewer of us, will see in such a sibling act the foundation of a more ruinous and angry contention than they believe the Crown is capable of handling, except in the manner of Turks.
“So, rather than seek to defend the temple of liberty, as many here purport to do, we will instead decide to prop up a moldy, half-collapsed, vine-smothered gazebo, which is infested with vermin and home to numerous rude and spiteful insects.
“Bind and confine the colonials? Should we not be honest about what this House intends to do? It is to bind and confine the colonials as captive felons, but take niggling, fussy care not to invade their pockets and appropriate what pittance is left to them after we have charged them the costs of their binding and confinement! What generosity! What kindness! What fairness! We propose to grant them the sanctity and liberty of their pockets, but not of their lives! But, should anyone in this House ever call this mode of supremacy tyranny, would he then be accused of treason?
