The colonists at the time of the Revolution have often been described as speaking of England as home and regarding the mother-country with no little degree of affection; and while there is no doubt some truth in this, especially as regards the people who were loyalists, yet a very large proportion of the colonists had become totally differentiated from the people of England. This was the inevitable result of having lived for over a hundred years in the American environment. They were no longer Englishmen. They had become completely Americanized. Certain classes kept up their connection with England, and many of the rich planters of the South sent their sons to England to be educated. But a very large part of the colonists, especially in the older settled provinces, like Massachusetts and Virginia, had forgotten England and were another people.
Instead of speaking, as novelists often describe them, in a formal archaic way, using quaint phrases of old English life, the colonists spoke with mannerisms and colloquial slang which were peculiarly American. These peculiarities were ridiculed by Englishmen of the time and formed part of Grant’s famous speech in Parliament, the burden of which appears to have been that the colonists had become entirely different from English people, and Grant is said to have given imitations of what he considered their strange speech and manners. Mrs. Knight, in her Journal of Travel from Boston to New York, had, many years before the Revolution, given specimens of this difference; and the language of the New Englanders which she describes was certainly not like anything in England.
“Law for me—what in the world brings you here at this time of night? I never see a woman on the Rode so Dreadful late in all the days of my versall life. Who are you? Where are you going?”—Mrs. Knight’s Journal, p. 23.
In 1775 some one wrote a set of humorous verses, said to have been the original Yankee Doodle song, to illustrate the colloquial Americanism of the time. “Slapping” was used for “large,” as in the phrase “a slapping stallion.” “Nation” was used for “a great deal,” as in such a phrase as “only a nation louder.” “Tarnal” was used for “very.” “I see” was used for “I saw,” “I come” for “I came,” and “I hooked it off” in place of “I went away.”
Not only did the patriots feel themselves to be quite different from Englishmen, but they had a consciousness of ability and power, the result of having governed themselves so long in their towns, counties, and provinces, and of having carried on a commerce of their own in defiance of the English navigation laws. They felt that they, not Englishmen, had created the country; and they had a resolute intention to develop its future greatness in their own way without the advice of aliens across three thousand miles of ocean.
This high confidence, which was a conspicuous motive in the patriot party, was always ridiculed by the loyalists as mere bumptiousness and conceit. It was difficult for a loyalist to understand how any one could seriously put himself in opposition to the British empire or want any form of government except the British constitution. But the patriot estimate of their own ability was by no means an exaggeration. They could be overcome, of course, as the Boer republics and other peoples have been overcome, by the superior numbers or wealth of Great Britain. But the history of the Revolution disclosed qualities in which the Americans notoriously excelled Europeans as well as the Anglo-Saxon stock in England from which they were derived. They were of keener practical intelligence, more promptness in action, more untiring energy, more originality in enterprise, better courage and endurance, and more natural military skill among the rank and file. These distinctively American qualities, we now call them, seem to have been much more in evidence among the patriot party than among the loyalists.
Every circumstance of their past and every consideration of their present convinced the patriot of the infinite pleasure and value of home rule and they had codified their opinions into a political philosophy which not only justified their semi-independence and disregard of acts of Parliament, but would also justify them in breaking off from England, at the first opportunity and becoming absolutely independent. They had gathered this philosophy from the works of certain European writers—Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu, and others—who had applied to politics and government the doctrines of religious liberty and the right of private judgment which had been developed by the Reformation. Being such extreme Protestants, and having carried so far the religious ideas of the Reformation, the colonists naturally accepted in their fullest meaning the political principles of the Reformation. If we are looking for profound influences in the Revolution, it would be difficult to find any that were stronger than two of the writers just mentioned, Locke and Burlamaqui, whose books had a vast effect in the break-up of the British empire which we are about to record.
Beginning with Grotius, who was born in 1582, and ending with Montesquieu, who died in 1755, the writers mentioned covered a period of about two hundred years of political investigation, thought and experience. In fact, they covered the period since the Reformation. They represented the effect of the Reformation on political thought. They represented also all those nations whose opinions on such subjects were worth anything. Grotius was a Dutchman, Puffendorf a German, Locke an Englishman, Burlamaqui an Italian Swiss, and Montesquieu a Frenchman.
Hooker, who lived from 1553 to 1600, and whom Locke cites so freely, might be included in the number, and that would make the period quite two hundred years. Hooker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” declared very emphatically that governments could not be legitimate unless they rested on the consent of the governed; and this principle forms the foundation of Locke’s famous essays.
There were, of course, other minor writers; and the colonists relied upon them all; but seldom troubled themselves to read the works of the earlier ones, or to read Hutchinson, Clarke and other followers of that school, because Locke, Burlamaqui, and Beccaria had summarized them all and brought them down to date. To this day any one going to the Philadelphia Library, and asking for No. 77, can take in his hands the identical, well-worn volume of Burlamaqui which delegates to the Congress and many an unsettled Philadelphian read with earnest, anxious minds. It was among the first books that the library had obtained; and perhaps the most important and effective book it has ever owned.