Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia

by Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker

In the meanwhile, the century and a half old struggle between mother country and colonies was rapidly approaching a crisis. The issue had long been postponed because of the inactivity of the King's ministers, who were content to close their eyes to what was going on across the Atlantic. But the time was at hand when the question of whether the Americans should be governed from London or should govern themselves had to be settled.

This was in part due to the fact that as time passed Parliament had grown less and less representative of the people. In Great Britain there was no provision, as there is in the Constitution of the United States, for periodic reapportionments of the people's representatives to keep step with changes in population. For centuries most of the Commons had been elected under a very restricted franchise by certain old boroughs. Though with the passing of the decades many of these boroughs, once centers of population and wealth, had fallen into decay, they still sent their representatives to the House of Commons. Perhaps the most notorious was Old Sarum, a city of Norman times, whose castle and cathedral and crowded houses overlooked the Salisbury plain, but which for centuries had been deserted. Unless the ghosts of men long dead were to have a voice in running the nation, it was absurd for these old ruins to be represented in the Commons. In practice the rotten borough system, as it was called, tended to perpetuate the ascendency of the landed proprietors.

And the country squires wanted no change. They thought the British Government the best in the world, and were determined to defend their privileges. It never occurred to them that duty required that they should try to alleviate the miseries of the poor people; they were too intent on enjoying their great manor houses, their formal gardens, their stately dinners, their fox hunts, to heed the voices which were pleading for social and political reform.[37]

But it would be a mistake to assume that Great Britain had become static in intellectual, social, and institutional matters. On the contrary, the first seven decades of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous activity. It was the period of Richardson and Fielding in literature, of the great religious revival led by Wesley and Whitefield, of renewed interest in Shakespeare, of the birth of industrial Britain, of the bold defiance of authority by John Wilkes. Had Parliament truly reflected the spirit of the age, had it not revered the old system of government as the best attainable by man, it would have attuned itself to these changes.

If the Commons were out of step with the march of events in Great Britain, they were far more so with developments in the colonies. They knew nothing of the influence of the vast natural resources and the limited supply of labor in lifting the level of the common man and giving him a sense of self-respect, nothing of the democratizing power of the frontier. And what little they saw they disliked. No doubt some would have applauded Samuel Johnson when he said of the Americans: "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging."

With such irreconcilable differences between the ruling group in Great Britain and the people of the colonies the conflict was inevitable. The King, the Privy Council, the Board of Trade, the Commons construed the many instances of colonial disobedience as attacks on the foundations of the established order, as revolutionary innovations. To Americans they seemed no more than the assertion of rights inherent in all free men. And though many of their claims had no precedent in English experience, they began to speak of them as ancient and necessary for the existence of representative government.

That the clash came when it did was in part due to the passing of the laissez-faire period in the British Government. New figures had made their appearance at Whitehall, who had no patience with the old slipshod way of doing things. They wanted a consolidated empire, ruled from London, rather than a loose federation of semi-independent states. To them it seemed intolerable that the colonial Assemblies should defy the King at will. "Must we and America be two distinct kingdoms, and that now immediately?" asked George Grenville.

The French and Indian War revealed much concerning conditions in the colonies which surprised and alarmed the Ministry. They had found it impossible to get the colonies to act in unison, they had defied the King's wishes repeatedly, the Governors were kept busy explaining why they had to disregard one instruction after another, they were disgusted at the pouring out of paper money, and they must have been influenced by the warnings that the Americans were too much of a republican way of thinking. The advice to have Parliament lay a general tax on the colonies had come, not only from Dinwiddie, but from various parts of America.

The determination of the Ministry to follow this advice was based ostensibly on the reasonableness of requiring the colonies to bear their share of the burden of the expense of the war. It may be argued that Virginia and some of the others, because of the disruption of trade, the very heavy taxes, the devastation on the frontiers, and their heavy losses in men, had already paid more than their share. But that there was something deeper, more vital, behind the resolve to tax than a mere matter of finance, is obvious. It was a demonstration of policy, a manifesto that Great Britain was determined to govern her colonies.

When word reached America that the Ministry planned to tax the colonies by a stamp Act, there was general dismay. There were many grave faces among the Burgesses as they took their seats in November, 1764. Some of the ablest men in Virginia, among them Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, and Richard Henry Lee, drew up a protest to the King and Parliament. They begged the King to protect the people of the colony in the enjoyment of their ancient right of being governed in internal affairs by laws derived from their own consent, with the approbation of their sovereign or his substitute. This right, as men and descendants of Britons, they had possessed ever since they left the mother kingdom to extend its commerce and dominion.