Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

If ten years' discussion convinced American patriots that they possessed more rights than their philosophy had yet dreamed of, constant dwelling on their condition developed a sensitiveness which registered oppression where none had been felt before. What a profound influence had those liberty-pole festivals so assiduously promoted by men like Samuel Adams and Alexander MacDougall: "for they tinge the minds of the people; they impregnate them with the sentiments of liberty; they render the people fond of their leaders in the cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers." In August, 1769, John Adams dined with three hundred and fifty Sons of Liberty at Dorchester, in an open field. "This," he said, noting the effect of the patriotic toasts and the inspiring popular songs, "is cultivating the sensations of freedom." For a decade these excitable Americans did, indeed, cultivate the sensations of freedom; went out periodically, as it were, to "snuff the approach of tyranny on every tainted breeze"; a practice which, becoming habitual, developed a peculiar type of mind which marked a man out from his fellows. Such a man was William Hall, Esquire, of North Carolina, at whose house Josiah Quincy stopped; "a most sensible, polite gentleman, and, although a Crown officer, a man replete with the sentiments of general liberty." How useless, indeed, were arguments drawn from positive law, or the citation of many legal precedents, to convince men replete with sentiments of general liberty!

And those who so assiduously cultivated the sensations of freedom could not easily deny themselves the martyr's crown. Like the Girondins in France at a later day, many American patriots, such as Josiah Quincy himself and Richard Henry Lee, have somewhat the air of loving liberty because they had read the classics. They liked to think of themselves as exhibiting "a resolution which would not have disgraced the Romans in their best days"; and seem almost to welcome persecution in order to prove that the spirit of Regulus still lived. It was no mere dispute in the practical art of politics that engaged them, but a cosmic conflict between the unconditioned good and the powers of darkness. "It is impossible that vice can so triumph over virtue," writes Lee in all soberness, "as that the slaves of Tyranny should succeed against the brave and generous asserters of Liberty and the just rights of Humanity." Even the common people, said Joseph Warren, "take an honest pride in being singled out by a tyrannous administration." Knowing that "their merits, not their crimes, make them the objects of Ministerial vengeance," they refused to pay a penny tax with the religious fervor of men doing battle for the welfare of the human race. Consider the dry common sense with which Dr. Johnson disposed of the alleged Tyranny of Great Britain: "But I say, if the rascals are so prosperous, oppression has agreed with them, or there has been no oppression"; and contrast it with the reverent spirit which pervades the writings of John Dickinson or the formal protests of the Continental Congress. Reconciliation was indeed difficult between men who could treat the matter lightly, in the manner of Soame Jenyns, and men who, with John Adams, thought themselves one company with that "mighty line of heroes and confessors and martyrs who since the beginning of history have done battle for the dignity and happiness of human nature against the leagued assailants of both."

This lyric enthusiasm for liberty, and the radical political theories which were its most formal expression, were all the more incomprehensible to the average Briton inasmuch as they were the result of a conflict of interests in America quite as much as of English legislation. "The decree has gone forth," said John Adams, "that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be established in America." Not for home rule alone was the Revolution fought, but for the democratization of American society as well. The quarrel with Great Britain would hardly have ended in war, had the landed and commercial interests, those little aristocracies which had hitherto controlled colonial politics, been free to conduct it in their own fashion. At every stage in the controversy, the most uncompromising opponents of Parliamentary taxation were those who felt themselves inadequately represented in colonial assemblies. Fear of British tyranny was most felt by those who had little influence in shaping colonial laws. And half the bitter denunciation of corruption in England was inspired by jealous dislike of those high-placed families in America whose ostentatious lives and condescending manners were an offense to the laborious poor, or to men of talent ambitious to rise from obscurity to influence and power.

What Heaven-sent opportunity, then, was this quarrel with Britain for all those who resented the genial complacence with which fortune's favorites, "with vanity enough to call themselves the better sort," monopolized privilege in nearly every colony! The Virginia Stamp Act Resolutions, which according to Governor Bernard of Massachusetts sounded "an alarum bell to the disaffected," would assuredly never have been passed by the Pendletons or the Blands, nor yet by Peyton Randolph, who swore with an oath that he would have given £500 for a single vote to defeat them. They were carried by the western counties under the leadership of Patrick Henry, recently elected from the back country to sit in sober home-spun garb with the modish aristocrats of the tide-water. Product of the small farmer democracy beyond the "Fall Line," uniting the implacable temper of the Calvinist with the humanitarian sentiments of the eighteenth-century philosophe, he joined hands with Jefferson and the Lees to form the radical party. It was this party which carried Virginia into rebellion against England. And it was this party which destroyed the domination of the little coterie of great planters by abolishing entail, disestablishing the Anglican Church, and proclaiming a state constitution founded, in theory if not altogether in fact, upon the principles of liberty and equality and the rights of man.

From the point of view of most cultivated and conservative Americans, admirable indeed were the restrained and conciliatory arguments of John Dickinson in support of the right of the colonies to be taxed only by their own representatives. But how vulnerable was his position in defending the existing government in Pennsylvania, by which the three Quaker counties, with less than half the population of the province, elected twenty-four of the thirty-six deputies in the assembly! "We apprehend," so runs a petition from the German and Scotch-Irish counties of the interior, "that as freemen and English subjects, we have an indisputable title to the same privileges and immunities with his Majesty's other subjects who reside in the counties of Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks." German Protestants and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, resenting Quaker domination more than they feared British tyranny, and the mechanics and artisans and small shopkeepers of Philadelphia, unwilling "to give up our liberties for the sake of a few smiles once a year," made the strength of the radical and revolutionary party in Pennsylvania. Opposed to all attempts to infringe their rights "either here or on the other side of the Atlantic," they at last gained control of the anti-British movement, and made use of it, employing the very arguments which Dickinson and his kind had used in resistance to British oppression, to overthrow the Quaker-merchant oligarchy that had so long governed the colony in its own interests.

One day in 1772 old Governor Shirley, then living in retirement, heard that the "Boston Seat" was responsible for the opposition to Hutchinson's administration. When they told him who it was that made the Boston Seat, he is said to have replied: "Mr. Cushing I knew, and Mr. Hancock I knew, but where the devil this brace of Adamses came from I know not." He might have been told that they had risen from obscurity to inject into politics the acrid and self-righteous spirit of their Puritan ancestors. It would be interesting to inquire to what issue the quarrel with England would have been conducted had it been left to Mr. Cushing and Mr. Hancock. Half the persistent opposition of the brace of Adamses to British legislation was inspired by the commanding position of a few families in Boston—the Hutchinsons and Olivers, who "will rule and overbear in all things." As a youngster John Adams had confided to his Diary: "I will not ... confine myself to a chamber for nothing. I'll have some boon in return, exchange: fame, fortune, or something." Laborious days had gained him little. "Thirty seven years, more than half the life of man, are run out," he complains in 1773, "and I have my own and my children's fortunes to make." Yet there was his boyhood friend, Jonathan Sewall, already attorney-general, "rewarded ... with six thousand pounds a year, for propagating as many ... slanders against his country as ever fell from the pen of a sycophant." And the Hutchinsons and Olivers! With what concentrated bitterness does the young lawyer write of these men who, he is convinced, had submitted to be ministerial tools for the aggrandizement, of their families. His bitterness is the greater, and his conscious rectitude the more obtrusive, because he also, the virtuous Adams, might have sat in that gallery. For the wily Hutchinson had offered him the lucrative post of solicitor-general—the open road to power; but he had declined it; he could not be bought by the man "whose character and conduct have been the cause for laying a foundation for perpetual discontent and uneasiness between Britain and the colonies, of perpetual struggle of one party for wealth and power at the expense of the liberties of this country, and of perpetual contention in the other party to preserve them." Not in England was the plot hatched, but in Boston itself; and much brooding on his injuries and his abnegations had brought Adams to the pass, in 1774, that he could set down the names of the three "original conspirators."

It was this opposition of interests in America that chiefly made men extremists on either side. Adams would have been less radical had Hutchinson and Jonathan Sewall been more so; and perhaps Hutchinson and Sewall might have been more loyal patriots had the brace of Adamses been less bitter ones. Most of those who in the end became Loyalists were men who had once been opposed to the ministerial policy, and many remained so to the end of their lives. But with every stage in the conflict they looked with increasing apprehension upon the growing influence of obscure leaders who proclaimed the rights of the people. The prevalence of mobs; the entrance of the unfranchised populace, by means of "body" meetings and mass meetings, into the political arena; the leveling principles and the smug self-righteousness of the patriot politicians;—all this led many a conservative to consider whether his interest were not more threatened by the insurgence of radicalism in America than by the alleged oppression of British legislation. Boston is indeed mad, Hutchinson writes in 1770. The frenzy, kept up by "two or three of the most abandoned atheist fellows in the world, united with as many precise enthusiast deacons, who head the rabble in all their meetings," was not higher "when they banished my pious great-grandmother, when they hanged the Quakers." People of "the best character and estate ... decline attending. Town Meetings where they are sure to be outvoted by men of the lowest orders." And even in Philadelphia, where, according to Joseph Reed, "there have been no mobs, the frequent appeals to the people must in time occasion a change." "We are hastening on to desperate resolutions," he assured Dartmouth, and "our most wise and sensible citizens dread the anarchy and confusion that must ensue."

They were, indeed, hastening on to desperate resolutions on that 5th of September when men from twelve colonies assembled in Carpenter's Hall to form the First Continental Congress. A body of able men, it represented the division as well as the unity that prevailed in America; for there Galloway and Isaac Low, soon to become Loyalists, sat with Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, ready to welcome independence; of one opinion that American rights were threatened, irreconcilably opposed in their methods of defending them. John Adams, traveling by easy stages to Philadelphia, had noted with some surprise how greatly the Middle colonies feared "the levelling spirit of New England"; and he now found in the Congress many men who would hear "no expression which looked like an allusion to the last appeal"; men who were quite content to confine the action of Congress to protest and negotiation, deeming a non-intercourse measure useless if voluntary and revolutionary if maintained by force. For two weeks the advantage seemed to lie with these men; but on September 17, when the famous "Suffolk Resolutions" were laid before Congress, many conservatives, unwilling to abandon a neighboring colony however much they might regret the step it had taken, voted with the radicals of New England and Virginia to approve the act which virtually put Massachusetts in a state of rebellion. The final stand of the conservatives was made eleven days later when Galloway introduced his Plan for a British American Parliament, a serious and practicable plan according to Lord Dartmouth, "almost a perfect plan," thought John Rutledge, of South Carolina, for effecting a permanent reconciliation. But the motion, upon which "warm and long debates ensued," was finally rejected by a majority of one colony, and late in October the resolution itself, and all minutes concerning it, were expunged from the records of Congress.

After the rejection of Galloway's Plan, conservatives and radicals united to formulate the non-intercourse measures, which New England delegates thought so essential, and those famous addresses—to the King, to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies—which Pitt declared to be unsurpassed for ability and moderation. Able and moderate the addresses undoubtedly were; the work of conservative deputies, designed to conciliate conservatives in America and win Whig support in England. But the important work of the First Continental Congress was embodied in the "Association," through which Congress "recommended" to the colonies the adoption of non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreements to become effective December 1, 1774, March 1 and September 10, 1775. From previous experience it was well understood that such agreements as these, far more drastic than any which had yet been tried, would prove ineffective if they remained purely voluntary associations; and what made the non-intercourse policy of the First Congress distasteful to conservative men were the measures taken to enforce it. To this end it was provided that there should be appointed in "every county, city, and town" a committee of inspection "whose business it shall be to observe the conduct of all persons touching the Association"; to publish the names of all who violated it; to inspect the customs entries; and to seize and dispose of all goods imported contrary to its provisions. Thus was a voluntary agreement not to do certain things transformed into a kind of general law to be enforced upon all alike by boycott and confiscation of property.

The Association of the First Congress created a revolutionary government and gave birth to the Loyalist as distinct from the conservative party. Radicals and conservatives had differed in respect to the theoretical basis of colonial rights and the most effective methods of securing redress. But the authority now assumed in the name of Congress raised the ultimate question of allegiance. Of the pamphleteers and preachers who now denounced the Association as a revolutionary measure, Samuel Seabury perceived the issue most clearly and stated it most effectively: "If I must be enslaved, let it be by a King at least, and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless committeemen." Whether to submit to the king or to the committee—this was, indeed, the fundamental question during those crucial months from November, 1774, to July, 1776. For extremists on either side, the question presented no difficulty; for conservatives like Hutchinson, who had long since lost all sympathy with prevailing measures of resistance, or for radicals like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, who pressed eagerly forward toward independence. But in 1774 the great majority of thinking men, abhorring the notion of war or separation from England, were yet convinced that strong protest, and even a kind of forcible resistance, was justified in order to maintain their just rights. These men sooner or later found themselves "between Scylla and Charybdis ": compelled to choose what was for them the lesser evil; to acknowledge the authority of Parliament in spite of laws which they regarded as oppressive and unconstitutional, or to identify themselves with the cause of Congress however ill-advised they may have thought its action. Those men who wished to take a safe middle ground, who wished neither to renounce their country nor to mark themselves as rebels, could no longer hold together, and the conservative party disappeared: perhaps one half chose sooner or later to submit to British authority; the other half, either with deliberation or yielding insensibly to the pressure of events, went with their country.