“The orator then traced,” says Frothingham, “the rise and progress of the aggressions on the natural right of the colonists to enjoy personal freedom and representative government.” Not a word in behalf of national independence: on the contrary, he said, “An independence on Great Britain is not our aim. No: our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and ivy, grow and increase together.” What he protested against was the taking of individual property without granting the owner a voice in it, personally or through some authorized representative. And—observe!—this authorization must not be a merely negative or vaguely understood thing: it must be attested by “some compact between the parties in which it has been explicitly and freely granted.” Any thing short of this was “a wicked policy,” under whose influence the American had begun to behold the Briton as a ruffian, ready “first to take his property, and next, what is dearer to every virtuous man, the liberty of his country.” The loss of the country’s liberty was thus staked as a result, a deduction, a corollary; the original offence lay in the violation of the natural right of each to control his own personal freedom and personal property, or else, if these must be subordinated to the public good, to have at least a voice in the matter. This, and nothing else than this, was the principle of those who fought the Revolution, according to the statement of their first eminent martyr.
And it was for announcing these great doctrines, and for sealing them, three months later, with his blood, that it was said of him, on the fifth of March following, “We will erect a monument to thee in each of our grateful hearts, and to the latest ages will teach our tender infants to lisp the name of Warren with veneration and applause.” That the opinions he expressed were the opinions current among the people, is proved by the general use of the cry “ Liberty and Property” among all classes, at the time of the Stamp Act; a cry which puzzles the young student, until he sees that the Revolution really began with personal rights, and only slowly reached the demand for national independence. “Liberty and Property” was just as distinctly the claim of Joseph Warren as it is the claim of those women who now refuse to pay taxes because they believe in the principles of the American Revolution.
LXXV.
SOME OLD-FASHIONED PRINCIPLES.
There has been an effort, lately, to show that when our fathers said, “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” they referred not to personal liberties, but to the freedom of a state from foreign power. It is fortunate that this criticism has been made, for it has led to a more careful examination of passages; and this has made it clear, beyond dispute, that the Revolutionary patriots carried their statements more into detail than is generally supposed, and affirmed their principles for individuals, not merely for the state as a whole.
In that celebrated pamphlet by James Otis, for instance, published as early as 1764, “The Rights of the Colonies Vindicated,” he thus clearly lays down the rights of the individual as to taxation:—
“The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights as freemen; and, if continued, seems to be, in effect, an entire disfranchisement of every civil right. For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man’s property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure, without his consent? If a man is not his own assessor, in person or by deputy, his liberty is gone, or he is entirely at the mercy of others.”[[15]]
[15]. Otis: Rights of the Colonies, p. 58.
This fine statement has already done duty for liberty, in another contest; for it was quoted by Mr. Sumner in his speech of March 7, 1866, with this commentary:—
“Stronger words for universal suffrage could not be employed. His argument is, that, if men are taxed without being represented, they are deprived of essential rights; and the continuance of this deprivation despoils them of every civil right, thus making the latter depend upon the right of suffrage, which by a neologism of our day is known as a political right instead of a civil right. Then, to give point to this argument, the patriot insists that in determining taxation, ‘every man must be his own assessor, in person or by deputy,’ without which his liberty is entirely at the mercy of others. Here, again, in a different form, is the original thunderbolt, ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny;’ and the claim is made not merely for communities, but for ‘every man.’”
In a similar way wrote Benjamin Franklin, some six years after, in that remarkable sheet found among his papers, and called “Declaration of those Rights of the Commonalty of Great Britain, without which they cannot be free.” The leading propositions were these three:—