If there was any man in England who understood the folly of attempting to bring America to its knees through punishment, rather than through meaningful conciliation, it was Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish member of Parliament, political theorist, orator and, not at all coincidentally, paid lobbyist for the colony of New York. On March 22, 1775, after listening to the barrage of denunciation of the rebellious American colonies from his parliamentary colleagues, Burke rose in Parliament and pleaded with his colleagues to adopt a more conciliatory approach. It was a remarkable speech, both for its profound understanding of the unique character of the American colonies and for its repudiation of nearly all of the logic of current British policies toward America. Although Burke had never been to America, he began by observing that “a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes” the people of the American colonies. And, he noted, “as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and intractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this from a variety of powerful causes.”
Burke then proceeded to enumerate the reasons why Americans were so attached to and jealous of their freedom, the foremost of which was that “the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.” He reminded his listeners, that England “is a nation, which still I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom.” He went on to present an extraordinarily perceptive catalogue of those aspects of life that were peculiar to America. He noted the exceedingly “popular” character of the American governments, in which representatives directly elected by their neighbors in local constituencies were esteemed as “the most weighty.” He called attention to the effect in the colonies of dissenting Protestant religions, which further nurtured a jealous regard for the preservation of liberty. Anticipating the objection that the Church of England was the dominant religion in most of the southern colonies, he observed, with astonishing astuteness, that free white residents owned “vast multitudes of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world,” he noted, “those who are free are by far most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal.” In that single piece of his analysis, Burke had captured the essence of why so many of the slaveholding gentry of the South were every bit as fiery in their defense of American rights as were their dissenting Protestant New England brethren.
Burke also pointed to patterns of education in America, which leaned particularly to the study of the law, a profession that made the Americans all the more attentive to their legal and constitutional rights as Englishmen. And finally, he noted the fundamental, geographic fact that may have acted more powerfully than all the rest:
Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government. Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system. You have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance who carry your bolts in their pounces to the remotest verges of the sea. But there a power steps in that limits the arrogance of raging passions and furious elements, and says, “So far shalt thou go, and no farther.”
Having stated the causes of the Americans’ extreme attachment to freedom, he pointed to the utter folly of attempting to coerce their submission by further punishment, by the very denial of freedom. “In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties,” Burke admonished, “we are every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself.” Such an effort, Burke insisted, was not only self-defeating, for Americans, far from submitting, would only grow more rebellious. But, equally serious, it was an effort that violated those very things “for which our ancestors have shed their blood.”7
Burke’s analysis and admonishment fell on deaf ears in Parliament, as, indeed, he knew it would. He would later note that he and the few others who opposed North’s so-called peace plan did so “more for the acquittal of their own honour and discharge of their own consciences” than from any realistic hope that a majority of his colleagues would agree with him. Nevertheless, he accompanied his speech with a set of eleven resolutions, including a statement that Parliament would refrain from taxing the colonies, as well as proposals for the outright repeal of the Townshend Duties, the Boston Port Bill and the Massachusetts Government Act. These steps were, he argued, essential if the British government hoped to head off the secession of the colonies from the British Empire. In fact, in spite of Burke’s vastly more sympathetic and realistic view of a path toward reconciliation between the colonies and the British government, most Americans would have found at least some of his proposals unacceptable. For example, Burke’s proposals contained the necessary assertion—necessary, at least, from the perspective of any member of the British Parliament—of Parliament’s superior power over any and all of the colonial legislatures. But it didn’t matter, because the vast majority of the members of Parliament would have none of it. They emphatically rejected Burke’s proposals by a vote of 270 to 78.8
It was not merely Parliament and the king who were unpersuaded of the justice of America’s cause. Most members of Parliament, occupying safe seats that did not require that they expend any effort to win the voters’ favor on election day, did not pay much attention to the opinions of their constituents. In this case, however, it appears that most of those constituents would have agreed with their parliamentary representatives. The Address to the People of Great Britain adopted by the First Continental Congress on October 21, 1774, may or may not have been widely circulated on the other side of the Atlantic, but either way, the English people seemed largely unmoved by the colonists’ plea for their support. Even British merchants, the one group that had in the past tended to side with the Americans because of the ill effects that a boycott might have on their businesses, were at best divided on whether to make any concessions to the Americans.9
Strengthened Resolve at Home
And so in the several months after the conclusion of the First Continental Congress, it became clear that that body’s efforts to reach some sort of accommodation—largely on American terms—had failed miserably. Yet the Congress’s actions, and the British government’s hostile reactions to those actions, would prove strikingly successful in strengthening the resolve of Americans and their leaders. In spite of Lord Dartmouth’s stern instructions to royal governors to clamp down on the opposition in their colonies, all of the colonial legislatures, with the exceptions of those of New York and Georgia, had within a month of the Congress’s adjournment endorsed the addresses, petitions and, most important, the call for the creation of the Association to enforce the boycott on all trade with the British. At the same time that they endorsed the Congress’s proceedings, most colonial legislatures moved quickly to elect delegates to the Second Continental Congress to meet in May, a clear sign that many of them were already pessimistic about the prospect of their grievances being satisfactorily addressed in London. Somewhat tardily, on April 7, 1775, North Carolina, which, along with New York and Georgia had been excepted from Lord North’s order for punitive actions against American commerce, disappointed the British chief minister by announcing its support of the Second Continental Congress and selecting its delegates. On that same date, North Carolina’s royal governor, Josiah Martin, dissolved the legislature.10
The royal governors did indeed hav
e the power to dissolve recalcitrant provincial assemblies, but by now that act was nearly useless. If dissolved, the assemblies simply continued to meet as extra-legal conventions or congresses in taverns and churches. In the face of increasingly united resistance from the colonies’ provincial political leaders, and lacking the military power to coerce them into submission, the royal governors all watched any semblance of authority over the colonies they were supposed to be governing slip away. In Virginia, the royal governor, Lord Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, who had taken up his position only in 1771, in the midst of deteriorating relations between royal officials and provincial leaders, found himself unable to enforce his will on an implacably hostile Virginia “convention.” Challenged by Lord Dartmouth to put a stop to such rebellious behavior, Dunmore assured his superior that he was doing everything in his power to bring the Virginians to heel, but, he confessed, every effort to “counteract the dangerous measures pursuing here . . . is entirely disregarded, if not wholly overturned.” The particular bane of Dunmore’s existence was Patrick Henry, who, when the Virginia Convention met in St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 23, 1775, to select its delegates to the Second Congress, resoundingly rejected efforts at accommodation with Great Britain. Henry immortally proclaimed,
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that the gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!11
The New York provincial assembly, still operating under the strong influence of conservatives like James Duane and John Jay, refused even to recognize the resolutions and petitions of the First Continental Congress as binding on their colony. Although Jay, Duane and other New York delegates to the First Congress had reluctantly signed on to the decisions of that body, their support of actions such as the Declaration of Rights and the Association was tepid at best. Moreover, when they returned home to their own provincial legislature—a body dominated by wealthy upstate manor lords and conservative New York City merchants—they discovered that the mood among those legislators was actually hostile to the initiatives proposed by the Congress. Indeed, on February 17, 1775, the legislature refused even to give a vote of thanks to the New York delegates who had served in the Congress; on February 21 it refused to endorse the Association; and on February 23 it refused to appoint a delegation to the Second Continental Congress. In March, the legislature approved its own petitions to the king and Parliament, the language of which included a general statement of colonial subordination to Parliament and was notably milder than that of the petitions from Congress. Once again, however, the gulf between British political opinion and even the most moderate American opinion proved unbreachable. Both Houses of Parliament refused even to consider the New York petition, and although George III received the petition with a “gracious expression of regard,” according to Lord Dartmouth, he was nevertheless not moved to act on it.12
In January of 1775, a provincial “Convention” replaced New York’s provincial assembly, which had been prorogued by the governor. On April 21, that Provincial Convention appointed delegates to the Second Continental Congress. Their delegation would be a large one, including all of the members of the First Congress except for Isaac Low. New delegates were Lewis Morris, Philip Schuyler, George Clinton, Francis Lewis and Robert Livingston.13
One colony of the thirteen was absent from the first months of the Second Congress. Georgia, which in 1774 had a population of about 40,000 people, nearly evenly divided between free whites and black slaves, was the youngest of the English colonies in America. For the most part, it had been relatively uninvolved in the protests against British attempts to tax the colonies in the previous decade. Preoccupied with purely local concerns—in particular an ongoing conflict with American Indians on its western frontier—Georgia had not sent a delegation to the First Continental Congress and would continue, at least for the first part of the Second Congress, to remain absent. But at least some of the residents of the colony were beginning to awaken to the fact that a threat to the liberties of neighboring colonies might be a threat to their own. On July 4, 1775, nearly two months after the Second Continental Congress began its meetings, the Georgia legislature formally approved the actions of the First Continental Congress and elected members to join the delegates already serving in the Second Continental Congress. Finally, all thirteen North American mainland colonies had joined together to delegate at least some measure of authority to a Congress that could now claim to represent the “united colonies of America.” And with the endorsement of its previous actions by all of the colonial legislatures except for that of the stubbornly cautious New York, it had gained yet another important measure of legitimacy in its effort to speak for those united colonies.14
The People’s Resistance
Revolutions do not happen by accident, nor are they affected simply through the will of a small cadre of political leaders. They can only be successful if they gain the broad, active support of the people at large. For such support to happen, an organizational structure is needed that mobilizes and channels the popular will. Among the most important actions of the First Continental Congress had been the creation of the Association, which by November 1774, began to show results. The Association would pave the way for the creation of a multitude of grassroots organizations unprecedented in America’s colonial history.
Beginning in November and continuing through and beyond the battles at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, popularly elected local committees effectively took control of local government in nearly all of the American colonies. Even in New York, where the provincial legislature had explicitly refused to endorse the Association, local committees nevertheless sprang up, seizing the initiative and radicalizing the American resistance beyond anything that most of New York’s political leaders would have desired.15
Americans had used the device of the economic boycott as a way of protesting British policies on previous occasions—most notably during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 and as a way of forcing repeal of the Townshend Duties a few years later. But those boycotts were loosely organized and relied on voluntary compliance, which in some colonies proved only partially effective. The great task facing the local committees charged with carrying out the provisions of the Association was enforcement. Article Eleven of the Association stipulated that these popularly elected local committees would closely “observe the conduct” of the communities’ residents, and if a majority of the members of the committee found that any member of a community was violating the boycott of British goods, the committee would “forthwith cause the truth of the case to be published in the gazette; to the end that all such foes to the rights of British Americans may be publickly known, and universally condemned as the enemies of American liberty; and thenceforth we respectively will break off all dealings with him or her.”16
The essence of the enforcement mechanism of the Association was, then, not to be physical violence against the offenders, but, rather, shame and ostracism, which were, apparently, great motivators. During the first year in which the committees’ efforts took hold, the value of commercial imports from Great Britain to America decreased from £3,000,000 in 1774 to £220,000 in 1775.17
One of the most striking features of the Association was the vagueness with which the small group of men in the First Continental Congress had delegated authority to these local committees. They made no attempt to keep the enforcement of the economic boycott in their own hands, nor did they spell out what they thought the size or composition of the local committees should be. Aside from a provision that restricted voting in the selection of committee members to those eligible to vote for
representatives to their legislatures—in most colonies free, white males who owned at least a modest amount of property—residents of each locality were free to form their committees as they saw fit. By delegating such important authority to local committees, the Congress had, either wittingly or unwittingly, extended political authority to some 7,000 Americans, most of whom had never before exercised political leadership in their communities. And they interpreted the grant of authority given to them liberally. Not only did the size and composition of the hundreds of local committees that sprung up across America vary considerably, but, equally important, some committees felt free to exercise their authority across an area that extended well beyond commercial regulation.18
As time went on, many of the committees began to operate as extra-legal governments themselves. Drawing their authority as much from the people in the local communities who had elected them as from the Congress that had created them, many of the committees began to operate as de facto governments themselves. In so doing, they were, simultaneously strengthening the legitimacy and authority of the Congress and at the same time staking out their claim as independent entities, sharing power with that Congress. The mutually supportive roles of both the Congress and the people of America at large would prove to be of greater and greater importance as Americans across all of the colonies began to debate in earnest the possibility of declaring America’s independence from Great Britain.19
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 23
