For once in his life your ancestor could not reply.
"Is this the object for which I have been contending, said I to myself; for I rode along without any answer to this wretch. Are these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in the country? Half the nation for what I know; for half the nation are debtors, if not more; and these have been in all countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, health and everything else?" (Works of John Adams, Vol. II, p. 420.)
I have made these lengthy statements and quotations for the sake of reminding you that the man who was responsible for your existence and also very largely for the existence of the revolution, faced with his eyes open the very state of affairs which you say should in conscience and good morals compel a man to surrender and give up. He faced a far worse state of affairs than the Boers face, and he had less excuse for his conduct.
He, however, did not follow your advice; and one reason may have been that his wife, whose blood is also in your veins, would have despised him if he had. I need not quote those beautiful letters of hers which are in print, in which she declares not only her own unalterable affection, but her willingness, to go down with him to disaster and poverty and labor with her hands. Among all the men of that time I do not know of one who was more uncompromising, more obstinate, more determined as President Kruger put it, to make Great Britain "pay a price that would stagger humanity," or according to your own theory, more immoral, than your own great grandfather and his wife.
During the seven years fighting of the revolution Great Britain sent out peace commissioners and kept offering terms which steadily increased in liberality, entire freedom from taxation, in fact almost everything the rebel colonists had demanded, up even to a sort of semi-independence. Your great grandfather voted down everyone of them. He attended with Franklin the famous peace meeting with Lord Howe on Staten Island and rejected Lord Howe's terms. And why? Because none of them contained the one essential condition, absolute independence. Your great grandfather was a Kruger.
But let us pass from him. Let us see what others thought and what was the general situation during the revolution.
At the very beginning of that contest our forces were of an irregular and guerilla character. The farmers, who attacked the British regulars at Lexington and followed them back to Boston picking them off from behind stone fences and trees, were the most irregular fighters it is possible to imagine. They were not acting under the authority of any legitimate or even a de facto government. They were not even officered, directed or authorized by the rebel Continental Congress, which had met the year before in Philadelphia. They were acting in a purely voluntary manner in obedience to a mere sentiment of that faction of the colonists who resented an invasion from Great Britain and wanted this country for their own. They were acting in the same manner and on the same sentiment by which the Boers now act and which you say is a crime.
It is very important to remember that the moral position of the Boers is vastly stronger than was ours. Before the present Boer war began the Boers were two independent nations whose independence had been acknowledged by England on two or three different occasions and in two or three different documents. We were not independent and never had been. We were colonies and some of our communities were not even charter colonies; they were crown colonies; and one of the charter colonies, Pennsylvania, had a clause in its charter acknowledging the right of parliament to tax as it pleased. Our revolution was an out and out rebellion against legitimate control because we wanted to govern ourselves; because we did not want to be governed by people who lived three thousand miles away in another and far separated country; because we did not want to be taxed by the outsider; because we did not want him to maintain an army amongst us to keep us in order, because we did not want him to regulate our commerce or our manufacturing industries; because in short, we wanted to keep house for ourselves and believed that the colonial position was at its best essentially a degradation to manhood or as we called it at that time "political slavery." If the Boers are wrong in defending against England by guerilla methods an independence long since acknowledged, then we were ten thousand times wrong in supporting by the same methods a rebellion for independence against that same country which it is said can rule any people better than those people can rule themselves.
The Boers at the beginning of the present war had the regularly organized armies of an independent nation. With the money obtained from the gold mines they had bought the most modern artillery, small arms and ammunition. We on the other hand being mere rebels had none of these things. Our guns were at first antiquated or blacksmith-made muskets and shot guns; and we were the ridicule of the British regulars because we had no bayonets. Whenever we had a chance we used the superior weapons taken from British prisoners just as the Boers now use the Lee-Metford rifles taken from their prisoners. We never were decently armed until France sent us shiploads of guns and ammunition. Many of the straps and cartouche boxes worn by our people had the British army letters G. R. stamped on them. Graydon relates in his memoirs how when he was taken prisoner a cartouche box with those letters on it was instantly wrenched with violence off his person.
As our first meeting in arms with the British was irregular so was our second. Bunker Hill was so much of a guerilla battle so far as we were concerned that it is disputed to this day whether Putnam or Prescott was in command. As a matter of fact there was nobody in particular in command. It was a voluntary sort of affair; and the description of it reads exactly like a Boer battle.