The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (53 page)

the Intolerable Acts were of great importance and affected the actions of the Congress itself. But they should not be overplayed. The fact is that a Continental Congress met and proved capable of making decisions crucial to the future of the empire. It did in part at least because the values and interests its delegates represented overrode the disagreements that marked its origins.

When the Congress met on September 5, 1774, most Americans agreed that Parliament had no power to tax the colonies. This proposition had been announced almost ten years before, and attachment to it had swollen to near unanimity long before the crisis over the Stamp Act ended. At that time almost no one openly repudiated Parliament's claim to legislate on matters of general concern to the colonies as constituent parts of the empire. Within a few years, however, that claim also met flat opposition from an occasional essayist. Parliament of course had stimulated this rejection by passing the Townshend acts in a fit of fatuity, as though the colonists were not really serious in their objections to attempts to take their property without their consent.

The denial of Parliament's authority occurred under various guisesdiscussions of the powers of representative bodies, for example, or in arguments over the nature of the empire. William Hicks's Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power exemplifies the first in its concentration on the act of delegation as essential to legislative power. By what means, he asked, had the colonies -- unrepresented in Parliament -- delegated power to it? Obviously they had not delegated power to Parliament, and its decisions regarding them were nothing more than "violence and oppression." James Wilson's
Considerations on the Authority of Parliament
, which lies in the second category, assumes that the colonies owe allegiance only to the Crown. Parliament, Wilson held, simply had no jurisdiction in an empire of states virtually independent except for their connection to the Crown.
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The monarch too underwent some cutting down in the political theory published on the eve of the meeting of the Congress. In the fray over the Stamp Act, the king had escaped all abuse while the Parliament and ministry absorbed it. In the careful conventions observed in these writings he appeared the unwitting prisoner of evil ministers, a creature

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apparently at once wise, just, and by implication blind to his subjects' interests. This delicately ironic treatment of the monarch continued in most writings published in 1774, but with one difference. In the mood of defiance engendered by the Intolerable Acts, the colonists did not hesitate to implicate the king directly in the misrule and oppression they felt themselves to be enduring. At the same time they shrank from saying that George III was evil; rather he had made mistakes; he had, as the young Thomas Jefferson said in
A Summary View,
"no right to land a single armed man on our shores." But "his majesty has expressly made the civil subordinate to the military" -- in order to enforce "arbitrary measures" which began in England with the Norman Conquest and which were extended to the colonies with their founding. The worst of these measures, according to Jefferson, was the royal claim to all lands in England and America -- the introduction of feudal tenures and all the exactions which accompanied them. Whatever the justice of such arrangements in England, they had no place in America, Jefferson believed, for "America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him or any of his successors." Rather the colonies were founded by free men exercising their natural right to depart from Britain, "the country in which chance, not choice has placed them." The colonies were settled under laws and regulations these founders deemed most likely "to promote public happiness."
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Jefferson's assumptions about the empire appear clearly in this argument: Parliament did not have jurisdiction over the colonies -- all that it had done was usurpation. The king on the other hand did have authority in America but only of a limited kind. Kings, Jefferson observed, are the "servants, not the proprietors of the people." This sort of flourish -so typical of Jefferson -- described what he and others made explicit elsewhere. The king was bound by laws; he was a party to a contract and governed according to the limits and regulations it established. The empire was composed of parts virtually independent and tied together only under rules agreed to by its members.

This view of the empire did not conceal the problem of reconciling the various interests of members; nor did it resolve the question of which agency, if any, should mediate differences of interpretations of the contract. The traditional way of meeting such issues was of course to concede power to Parliament as a superintending agency.
When the first Conti-

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nental Congress opened, many in America surely still believed that Parliament should exercise such power. One who did, Jonathan Boucher, the distinguished Anglican clergyman in Virginia, published his convictions in
A Letter from a Virginian to Members of Congress,
an extended and powerful statement on behalf of Parliamentary supremacy and colonial subordination. Boucher's argument rested in part on a denial of the realities of the previous ten years. A "British community" existed in the world, he argued, and the colonies made up only a small part of it. A majority represented in Parliament governed the empire; the colonies owed obedience to that majority as a small part owed its being to a whole.
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Boucher had little chance of convincing most Americans in 1774. He not only assumed that Parliament's power was unchallengeable; he phrased this assumption in language that could only infuriate most Americans. The cause of liberty, he wrote, had always attracted "knaves" and "Qua[c]ks in Politics." "Impostors in Patriotism" who imposed upon the "credulity of the well-meaning deluded Multitude."

Deluded or not, the multitude did not care to be likened to "froward children, who refuse to eat when they are Hungry, that they vex their indulgent Mother." Thomas Bradbury Chandler adopted similar language in
The American Querist,
which appeared three days after the Congress began its meetings. One of Chandler's queries was "whether some degree of respect be not always due from inferiors to superiors and especially from children to parents?" Chandler, like Boucher, found in the Declaratory Act the appropriate description of the colonies' relations to Parliament. They were to be bound by Parliament in "all cases whatsoever."
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That phrase from the Declaratory Act still angered Americans. John Hancock had quoted it in March in the Old South Meetinghouse in the oration he gave commemorating the Boston Massacre. The British claim to tax the colonies without their consent was one of the "mad pretensions" of the government, pretensions so mad in fact that an army had to be sent to enforce them. Hancock spoke before plans for the Continental Congress took shape. By summer with planning well advanced and more British pretensions known, many Americans responded even more harshly. The responses in general carried few substantial surprises: Parliament had no authority in America, but, as a matter of expediency born of the complexity of the empire, it might exercise a general superintending power. It might regulate imperial trade, always

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²⁷
([ New York], 1774), 20-23, and
passim
.

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The American Querist: or, some Questions . . .
([ New York), 1774), 4, 6.

remembering that the colonies agreed to the principle of regulation. But it could not tax or otherwise interfere with the internal governance of the colonies.

These concessions struck minor notes in the blasts directed against the British government by writers and preachers in America. The main theme of essays and sermons of the summer concentrated on what seemed apparent -- the Intolerable Acts left no doubt that the British government had set out to destroy American liberties. The British "Ministry," an anonymous New Yorker wrote, "are bent on the establishment of an uncontrollable authority in Parliament over the property of Americans." 29 William Henry Drayton of South Carolina said that matters had proceeded beyond unconstitutional taxation to the point where the question was whether Britain "has a constitutional right to exercise Despotism over America!" Elsewhere colonials made assessments equally bleak. 30

The remedies available to an America willing to follow a Continental Congress might produce a redress, but no optimistic predictions of easy accomplishment were made. Parliament and the British'ministry appear in dark hues in these accounts, and no brightening seemed likely. Something had to be tried, however. Some Americans urged that a total prohibition of trade, including a ban on exports to Britain, should be instituted. Others suggested that military preparations should be made, and at least one minister preached on the doctrine of a "just war." 31

In all the outrage and the proposals for getting things changed there was a sense that the Americans faced evil and corruption which would spread to their own shores if they failed to defend themselves. The sources of this conviction lay deeply within Protestant culture, especially the belief that most conflict involved questions of good and evil, and right and wrong. Self-government, in this view, rested on virtue, on righteousness, and in the conflict the Americans confronted a government, as John Hancock pointed out, that was not "righteous." The proof of the evil appeared everywhere -- in the standing army the British had sent to America, an institution which, as Josiah Quincy said, "had

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A Serious Address to the Inhabitants of . . . New York, Containing a Full and Minute Survey of the Boston Port Act
( New York, 1774), 9.

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[ William Henry Drayton],
A Letter from Freeman of South Carolina, to the Deputies of North America . . . at Philadelphia
(Charleston, S.C., 1774), 7-8.

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John Lathrop,
A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery-Company in Boston . . . June 6th, 1774
( Boston, 1774), 6-15, and
passim.
This sermon is also notable for its evocation of the virtues of the Protestant Ethic, its praise of the sumptuary laws of the seventeenth century, and its citation of Trenchard and Gordon on the advantages of militia over standing armies.

introduced brutal debauchery and real cowardice" among the lower classes and "venal haughtiness and extravagant dissipation" to the "higher orders of society." Proof existed too in the Quebec Act by which, Ebenezer Baldwin insisted, "Popery is established," a forecast of what awaited the thirteen English colonies. Evil and corruption appeared too in the protection extended by the Administration of Justice Act to the "harpies and bloodsuckers" of the Customs service.
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