Friends Divided
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It was left to John Dickinson in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768), the most popular patriot pamphlet of the 1760s, to explain that America opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation. Dickinson, however, was willing to recognize Parliament’s right to levy duties in order to control the flow of commerce in the empire; after all, most colonists had not constitutionally challenged the duties levied by the Molasses Act of 1733 and by other trade regulatory measures. But how would the colonists distinguish between one kind of duty and the other? The answer, said Dickinson, would be based on the intention of the parliamentary act, whether it was to raise revenue or to regulate trade. So the colonists conceded that Parliament had some authority over them but not the authority to tax them.
To counter all the colonists’ halting and fumbling efforts to divide parliamentary authority, the British offered a simple but powerful argument based on the sovereignty of Parliament.
Because the British polemicists could not conceive of the empire as anything but a single, unified community, they found absurd and meaningless all the American distinctions between trade regulations and taxation, between “external” and “internal” taxes, and between separate spheres of authority. If Parliament even “in one instance” was as supreme over the colonists as it was over the people of England, wrote a sub-ministerial official and a spokesman for the British government, William Knox, in 1769, then the Americans were members “of the same community with the people of England.” On the other hand, if Parliament’s authority over the colonists was denied “in any particular,” then it must be denied in “all instances,” and the union between Great Britain and the colonies must be dissolved. “There is no alternative,” Knox concluded. “Either the Colonies are part of the community of Great Britain, or they are in a state of nature with respect to her, and in no case can be subject to the jurisdiction of that legislative power which represents her community, which is the British Parliament.”31
Since tyranny in British history had always come from the Crown, good Whigs like Knox found it inconceivable that anyone in his right mind would want to escape from Parliament’s libertarian protection. In eighteenth-century English politics, Whigs were those who placed their confidence in Parliament—in opposition to the Tories, who tended to favor the Crown and the established Church of England. The Whigs knew that Parliament was the august author of the Bill of Rights of 1689, the historical guardian of the people’s property, and the eternal bulwark of their liberties against the encroachments of the Crown.
Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, like Knox, could not imagine the colonists wanting to be outside of the authority of Parliament, and he unwisely invoked the doctrine of sovereignty in order to convince the colonists of the foolishness of their opposition to Parliament. In speeches to the Massachusetts General Court in January 1773, Hutchinson declared that he knew of “no line that can be drawn between the supreme Authority of Parliament and the total Independence of the Colonies. It is impossible there should be two independent Legislatures in one and the same State, for although there may be but one Head, the King, yet the two Legislative Bodies will make two Governments as distinct as the Kingdom of England and Scotland before the Union.”32
In response, the Massachusetts Council wanted to avoid the stark alternatives the governor had laid down and sought instead to find some limits on Parliament’s authority. But the members of the lower house, the House of Representatives, chose to take a more radical position. Dissatisfied with an initial draft of a reply to the governor, they asked John Adams, who was not at this point a member of the House, for help. They knew there was no one in the province who knew more law and more history than he. In fact, at this moment in January and February 1773 Adams was publishing his articles in opposition to the Crown’s paying the salaries of judges of the superior court, which he believed compromised the independence of the colony’s judiciary and was contrary to the English constitution.
Adams believed, as he told his diary, that the governor and the General Court were engaged in a debate “upon the greatest Question ever yet agitated”—the idea of sovereignty: that there must be in every state one final, indivisible, and supreme power.33 Naturally, Adams wanted to be part of this great debate. According to his recollection, the initial draft of the House of Representatives was “full of very popular Talk and with those democratical Principles which have since done so much mischief in this Country.” In the place of those democratic principles, he furnished the House “with Law Authorities and the legal and constitutional Reasonings” more in line with the governor’s own argument.34
In writing the House’s reply, Adams drew on his 1765 essay “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” and invoked once again the twin tyrannies of kings and the Roman Catholic Church. These two sources of subjugation had long prevailed in the Old World “to the almost utter Extinction of Knowledge, Virtue, Religion, and Liberty,” until they were undone by the Protestant Reformation. The knowledge produced by the Reformation “darted its Rays upon the benighted World, increas’d and spread among the People,” and made them impatient under the “heavy Yoke” of oppression. “The most virtuous and sensible among them, to whose Steadfastness we in this distant Age and Climate are greatly indebted, were determined to get rid of it.”35
Adams then entered into a long and detailed history, piling citations and examples one upon the other in the most lawyerlike fashion, all designed to reveal the manner in which the Stuart kings of the early seventeenth century issued charters to the various English colonies. The House contended that this history proved that “our Ancestors considered the Land which they took Possession of in America as out of the Bounds of the Kingdom of England, and out of the Reach and Extent of the Laws of England.” Since the colonies were settled outside the realm, they were therefore beyond parliamentary jurisdiction. The seventeenth-century charters, said Adams, speaking for the House, were “repugnant to the Idea of Parliamentary Authority: And to suppose a Parliamentary Authority under such Charters, would necessarily induce that Solecism in Politics Imperium in Imperio.”
In the end, the House of Representatives accepted the logic of sovereignty that Governor Hutchinson had set forth in his naïve belief that the Massachusetts colonists would never want to be independent of Parliament’s protection. “If there be no such Line [between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies],” it declared, “the Consequence is, either that the Colonies are the Vassals of Parliament, or, that they are totally Independent. As it cannot be supposed to have been the Intention of the Parties in the Compact, that we should be reduced to a State of Vassalage, the Conclusion is, that it was their Sense, that we were thus Independent.” Since, as Governor Hutchinson had said, two independent legislatures in the same state were impossible, the colonies had to be “distinct States from the Mother Country,” united and connected only through the king “in one Head and common Sovereign.”36 The logic of sovereignty was forcing a fundamental shift in the American position in the empire—a shift that Jefferson would soon quicken.
By 1770 the British government had repealed all the Townshend duties except that on tea. That levy was retained, said Prime Minister Lord North, to serve “as a mark of the supremacy of Parliament, and as an efficient declaration of their right to govern the colonies.”37 Many Boston patriots were looking for an opportunity to arouse opposition, and in 1773 the British government gave it to them. Parliament passed the Tea Act, which granted the East India Company the exclusive privilege of selling tea in America. Although the British government intended this Tea Act only to be a means of saving the East India Company from bankruptcy, it set off alarms throughout the colonies. In several ports colonists stopped the ships from landing the company’s tea. After tea ships in Boston were prevented from unloading their cargoes, Governor Hutchinson refused to allow the ships to leave without landing the tea. In response, on December 16, 1773, a group of pa
triots disguised as Indians dumped about £10,000 worth of tea into Boston harbor.
Adams was ecstatic. “This is the most magnificent Movement of all,” he exclaimed. “This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid, and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it an Epocha in History.” “The Sublimity of it,” he told his friend James Warren, “charms me!”38
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DURING 1773 JEFFERSON and a few colleagues in the House of Burgesses, including Patrick Henry, the brothers Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, and Dabney Carr, had been meeting privately to discuss imperial issues. They believed, as Jefferson recalled, that older, senior members of the House lacked “the forwardness & zeal which the times required.”39 Many of the Virginia gentry were not pleased by the Bostonians’ destruction of private property. And without Virginia, which was the biggest, richest, and most populous colony in North America, American resistance would go nowhere.
But the British government, increasingly frustrated by its repeated appeasement of the colonists, played into the radicals’ hands. In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament in 1774 passed a succession of laws—the Coercive Acts or, as the colonists called them, the Intolerable Acts. These acts closed the port of Boston, altered the Massachusetts charter, reorganized the government, restricted town meetings, allowed for removing the venue for trials of certain crimes from the colonies to England, and strengthened the quartering of troops in the colonies. At the same time, Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the British army in America, was made governor of the colony of Massachusetts.
These Coercive Acts changed the Virginians’ minds overnight. “Not the hundredth part of the inhabitants of that town [Boston],” wrote Jefferson, “had been concerned in the act complained of; . . . yet all were involved in one indiscriminate ruin, by a new executive power, unheard of till then, that of a British parliament.” In other words, “property, of the value of many millions of money, was sacrificed to revenge, not repay, the loss of a few thousand.” If Parliament could do what it did to Massachusetts, the Virginians became convinced that it could do the same to any other colony. 40
In response to the Coercive Acts, Jefferson and some other members of the House of Burgesses, as he recalled, “cooked up a resolution” appointing June 1, 1774, which was the date the port of Boston was to be closed, as “a day of fasting, humiliation & prayer.” When the royal governor of Virginia dissolved the House, the members convened informally at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and laid plans for the meeting of a provincial convention in August 1774, which would elect members to attend a Continental Congress in Philadelphia the following month.41
Because of illness, Jefferson was unable to attend the provincial convention in Williamsburg. Instead, he wrote out instructions for the Virginia delegates who were to attend the Congress with the hope that they would be embodied in an address to the king. Without his knowledge, his instructions were published in Williamsburg as A Summary View of the Rights of British America. He did not supply the title, nor was his name on the pamphlet. It was soon reprinted in Philadelphia and twice in England. It was the most radical statement of American rights yet to appear.
Convinced, like other Americans, that the British government was pursuing “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery,” Jefferson came close to describing the colonies as independent states. He had nothing moderate or accommodating to offer. He defended the Tea Party as an “extraordinary interposition” by “an exasperated people” and commiserated with Adams’s Boston, promoting a common sense of identity between Virginia and Massachusetts.42
To justify the colonies’ near independence, he invoked the myth that represented the most alienated strain of Whig or anti-establishment thinking in the eighteenth century—the idea of a golden Anglo-Saxon age of pure liberty and equality that existed before the imposition of the Norman yoke in 1066.43 Jefferson contended that Englishmen had settled the colonies in the seventeenth century in the same way the ancient Saxons had settled England a thousand years earlier. Just as the Saxons held their lands free of any feudal obligations before the Norman Conquest of 1066 and owed no allegiance to the German mother country from which they had migrated, so too, Jefferson suggested, did the American colonists own their lands outright and exist free of any allegiance to England. “America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him, or any of his successors.” The colonists settled the New World on their own and at their own expense, and not at the expense of the British public. Parliament, he said, was “a body of men, foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged in our laws,” and it had “no right to exercise authority over us.” Jefferson thus implied that whatever authority England claimed existed only at the sufferance of the colonies. The colonists, Jefferson said, had voluntarily decided to continue their union with England “by submitting themselves to the same common Sovereign, who was thereby made the central link connecting the several parts of the empire thus newly multiplied.”44
Jefferson thus offered a conception of the empire similar to that presented by Adams and the Massachusetts House of Representatives a year earlier—an empire in which each of the colonies was independent of Parliament but remained voluntarily tied solely to the king. In 1774 other colonial writers—Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton—reached conclusions similar to those of Adams and Jefferson about the nature of the empire. Historians have labeled this position the “dominion theory” of the empire because it anticipated the nature of the British empire worked out in the Statute of Westminster of 1931, which created the modern British Commonwealth, establishing the legislative independence of each of the separate dominions.
Jefferson in his radical pamphlet, however, went way beyond this dominion theory of the empire set forth by the other American polemicists. Jefferson was not content to deny all parliamentary authority over the colonies; he actually indicted the king himself for his failure to fulfill his duty in running the empire.
In fact, as historian Pauline Maier has pointed out, Jefferson’s Summary View was “the first sustained piece of American political writing that subjected the King’s conduct to direct and pointed criticism.”45 Relentlessly, one after the other, Jefferson described the colonists’ grievances at the hands of the king. George III, he wrote, had the power to veto the harsh parliamentary legislation against the colonists, but he had refused to exercise it. Instead, he had applied his negative against the laws of the American legislatures. “For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency.” And for his first example of the Crown’s abusive behavior, Jefferson selected the problem of slavery. In an extraordinary admission for a slaveholding planter, Jefferson declared that “the abolition of domestic slavery was the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” But before that would be possible, the colonists needed to stop the slave trade. But unfortunately the king time and again had vetoed the colonists’ efforts to prohibit the importation of slaves.46
Jefferson then went on to outline the other oppressive actions by the Crown, including neglecting to approve the colonies’ laws in a timely manner, arbitrarily dissolving the representative legislatures and refusing to call others, interfering with the right of the colonists to purchase land, and sending armed forces to the colonies without their consent. Jefferson, in other words, was already primed for the listing of charges against the king that he would place in the Declaration of Independence two years later. He ended by “asserting the rights of human nature” and speaking directly to the king. “Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the third be a blot in the page of history.”47
Although Jefferson didn’t go as far as Thomas Paine later did in calling George a “royal br
ute,” nevertheless, by claiming that George III was “no more than the chief officer of the people” and that “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” he came awfully close to delegitimizing the monarchy.48
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BY EARLY 1774 Adams was even more deeply involved in the patriot cause than he had been earlier. He was delighted to see “so much of a Republican Spirit among the People” as they resisted the “Avarice and Ambition” of Hutchinson and his crowd, including the Oliver brothers, Andrew, the stamp agent and lieutenant governor, and Peter, the chief justice of the Massachusetts superior court. The independence of the judges was still a hot issue in Massachusetts, and mobs were threatening the judges if they accepted their salaries from the Crown. Most of the patriot leaders, including Adams, did not want the judges tarred and feathered, but, as he recalled in his autobiography, no one knew what to do. Out of the blue, Adams came up with a constitutional remedy for the problem. He suggested “an Impeachment of the Judges by the House of Representatives before the Council.” His colleagues were stunned, or so he recalled. “Why such a thing is without Precedent,” they said. But Adams argued that just as “the House of Commons in England is the grand Inquest of the Nation, the House of Representatives is the grand Inquest of this Province.” Many patriots “hardly knew what an Impeachment was,” and they questioned whether this “strange Doctrine” could be extracted from the colony’s charter. But Adams’s impressive and unmatched display of legal scholarship convinced his colleagues that he was right, and the House went ahead and adopted articles of impeachment. Although the Council refused to participate in this unprecedented procedure, the impeachment of the judges of high crimes and misdemeanors was enough to bring the entire judicial process to a halt.49