Six weeks before the Boston Massacre, there was a battle in New York of seamen against British soldiers taking their jobs, and one seaman was killed. In the Boston Tea Party of December , the Boston Committee of Correspondence, formed a year before to organize anti-British actions, "controlled crowd action against the tea from the start," Dirk Hoerder says.
The Tea Party led to the Coercive Acts by Parliament, virtually establishing martial law in Massachusetts, dissolving the colonial government, closing the port in Boston, and sending in troops. Still, town meetings and mass meetings rose in opposition. The seizure of a powder store by the British led four thousand men from all around Boston to assemble in Cambridge, where some of the wealthy officials had their sumptuous homes.
The crowd forced the officials to resign. The Committees of Correspondence of Boston and other towns welcomed this gathering, but warned against destroying private property. Pauline Maier, who studied the development of opposition to Britain in the decade before in her book From Resistance to Revolution , emphasizes the moderation of the leadership and, despite their desire for resistance, their "emphasis on order and restraint.
Similarly in Virginia and South Carolina. And "New York's leaders, too, were involved in small but respectable independent business ventures. Many of the Sons of Liberty groups declared, as in Milford, Connecticut, their "greatest abhorrence" of lawlessness, or as in Annapolis, opposed "all riots or unlawful assemblies tending to the disturbance of the public tranquility. In Virginia, it seemed clear to the educated gentry that something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England.
Listen to no doctrines which may tend to divide us, but let us go hand in hand, as brothers It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He was, as Rhys Isaac puts it, "firmly attached to the world of the gentry," but he spoke in words that the poorer whites of Virginia could understand. Henry's fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph recalled his style as "simplicity and even carelessness.
His pauses, which for their length might sometimes be feared to dispell the attention, rivited it the more by raising the expectation. Patrick Henry's oratory in Virginia pointed a way to relieve class tension between upper and lower classes and form a bond against the British. This was to find language inspiring to all classes, specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.
Tom Paine's Common Sense , which appeared in early and became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies, did this. It made the first bold argument for independence, in words that any fairly literate person could understand: "Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.
Paine disposed of the idea of the divine right of kings by a pungent history of the British monarchy, going back to the Norman conquest of , when William the Conqueror came over from France to set himself on the British throne: "A French bastard landing with an armed Bandits and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.
It certainly hath no divinity in it. Paine dealt with the practical advantages of sticking to England or being separated; he knew the importance of economics:. As for the bad effects of the connection with England, Paine appealed to the colonists' memory of all the wars in which England had involved them, wars costly in lives and money:.
Common Sense went through twenty-five editions in and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It is probable that almost every literate colonist either read it or knew about its contents. Pamphleteering had become by this time the chief theater of debate about relations with England. From to four hundred pamphlets had appeared arguing one or another side of the Stamp Act or the Boston Massacre or The Tea Party or the general questions of disobedience to law, loyalty to government, rights and obligations.
Paine's pamphlet appealed to a wide range of colonial opinion angered by England. But it caused some tremors in aristocrats like John Adams, who were with the patriot cause but wanted to make sure it didn't go too far in the direction of democracy. Paine had denounced the so-called balanced government of Lords and Commons as a deception, and called for single-chamber representative bodies where the people could be represented.
Adams denounced Paine's plan as "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter-poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.
Paine himself came out of "the lower orders" of England-a stay-maker, tax official, teacher, poor emigrant to America.
He arrived in Philadelphia in , when agitation against England was already strong in the colonies. The artisan mechanics of Philadelphia, along with journeymen, apprentices, and ordinary laborers, were forming into a politically conscious militia, "in general damn'd riff-raff-dirty, mutinous, and disaffected," as local aristocrats described them.
By speaking plainly and strongly, he could represent those politically conscious lower-class people he opposed property qualifications for voting in Pennsylvania. But his great concern seems to have been to speak for a middle group. Once the Revolution was under way, Paine more and more made it clear that he was not for the crowd action of lower-class people-like those militia who in attacked the house of James Wilson.
Wilson was a Revolutionary leader who opposed price controls and wanted a more conservative government than was given by the Pennsylvania Constitution of Paine became an associate of one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania, Robert Morris, and a supporter of Morris's creation, the Bank of North America. Later, during the controversy over adopting the Constitution, Paine would once again represent urban artisans, who favored a strong central government.
He seemed to believe that such a government could represent some great common interest, in this sense, he lent himself perfectly to the myth of the Revolution-that it was on behalf of a united people. The Declaration of Independence brought that myth to its peak of eloquence. Each harsher measure of British control-the Proclamation of not allowing colonists to settle beyond the Appalachians, the Stamp Tax, the Townshend taxes, including the one on tea, the stationing of troops and the Boston Massacre, the closing of the port of Boston and the dissolution of the Massachusetts legislature-escalated colonial rebellion to the point of revolution.
The colonists had responded with the Stamp Act Congress, the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Correspondence, the Boston Tea Party, and finally, in , the setting up of a Continental Congress-an illegal body, forerunner of a future independent government.
It was after the military clash at Lexington and Concord in April , between colonial Minutemen and British troops, that the Continental Congress decided on separation.
They organized a small committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote. It was adopted by the Congress on July 2, and officially proclaimed July 4, By this time there was already a powerful sentiment for independence. Resolutions adopted in North Carolina in May of , and sent to the Continental Congress, declared independence of England, asserted that all British law was null and void, and urged military preparations.
About the same time, the town of Maiden, Massachusetts, responding to a request from the Massachusetts House of Representatives that all towns in the state declare their views on independence, had met in town meeting and unanimously called for independence: ". Then, in its second paragraph, came the powerful philosophical statement:. It then went on to list grievances against the king, "a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
All this, the language of popular control over governments, the right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks, was language well suited to unite large numbers of colonists, and persuade even those who had grievances against one another to turn against England.
Some Americans were clearly omitted from this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence: Indians, black slaves, women. Indeed, one paragraph of the Declaration charged the King with inciting slave rebellions and Indian attacks:. Twenty years before the Declaration, a proclamation of the legislature of Massachusetts of November 3, , declared the Penobseot Indians "rebels, enemies and traitors" and provided a bounty: "For every scalp of a male Indian brought in For every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian under the age of twelve years that shall be killed Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph of the Declaration accusing the King of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and "suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.
Behind it was the growing fear among Virginians and some other southerners about the growing number of black slaves in the colonies 20 percent of the total population and the threat of slave revolts as the number of slaves increased.
Jefferson's paragraph was removed by the Continental Congress, because slaveholders themselves disagreed about the desirability of ending the slave trade. So even that gesture toward the black slave was omitted in the great manifesto of freedom of the American Revolution. The use of the phrase "all men are created equal" was probably not a deliberate attempt to make a statement about women. It was just that women were beyond consideration as worthy of inclusion. They were politically invisible.
Though practical needs gave women a certain authority in the home, on the farm, or in occupations like midwifery, they were simply overlooked in any consideration of political rights, any notions of civic equality. To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was limited to life, liberty, and happiness for white males is not to denounce the makers and signers of the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century.
Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch-and sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay impossible moral burdens on that time.
It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely, inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts of the human race. The philosophy of the Declaration, that government is set up by the people to secure their life, liberty, and happiness, and is to be overthrown when it no longer does that, is often traced to the ideas of John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government.
That was published in England in , when the English were rebelling against tyrannical kings and setting up parliamentary government. The Declaration, like Locke's Second Treatise , talked about government and political rights, but ignored the existing inequalities in property. And how could people truly have equal rights, with stark differences in wealth? Locke himself was a wealthy man, with investments in the silk trade and slave trade, income from loans and mortgages.
He invested heavily in the first issue of the stock of the Bank of England, just a few years after he had written his Second Treatise as the classic statement of liberal democracy. As adviser to the Carolinas, he had suggested a government of slaveowners run by wealthy land barons.
Locke's statement of people's government was in support of a revolution in England for the free development of mercantile capitalism at home and abroad. Locke himself regretted that the labor of poor children "is generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old" and suggested that all children over three, of families on relief, should attend "working schools" so they would be "from infancy.
The English revolutions of the seventeenth century brought representative government and opened up discussions of democracy. But, as the English historian Christopher Hill wrote in The Puritan Revolution: "The establishment of parliamentary supremacy, of the rule of law, no doubt mainly benefited the men of property.
The Levellers and the Diggers, two political movements which wanted to carry equality into the economic sphere, were put down by the Revolution. One can see the reality of Locke's nice phrases about representative government in the class divisions and conflicts in England that followed the Revolution that Locke supported.
At the very time the American scene was becoming tense, in , England was racked by riots and strikes-of coal heavers, saw mill workers, halters, weavers, sailors- because of the high price of bread and the miserable wages. The Annual Register reviewed the events of the spring and summer of I mean the middling people of England, the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman.
In America, too, the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence issued in the same year as Adam Smith's capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that had developed over years of colonial history. Indeed, 69 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held colonial office under England.
When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft.
The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting: "Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may. As Nash puts it: James Otis, Samuel Adams, Royall lyler, Oxenbridge Thacher, and a host of other Bostonians, linked to the artisans and laborers through a network of neighborhood taverns, fire companies, and the Caucus, espoused a vision of politics that gave credence to laboring-class views and regarded as entirely legitimate the participation of artisans and even laborers in the political process.
In , Otis, speaking against the conservative rulers of the Massachusetts colony represented by Thomas Hutchinson, gave an example of the kind of rhetoric that a lawyer could use in mobilizing city mechanics and artisans: I am forced to get my living by the labour of my hand; and the sweat of my brow, as most of you are and obliged to go thro' good report and evil report, for bitter bread, earned under the frowns of some who have no natural or divine right to be above me, and entirely owe their grandeur and honor to grinding the faces of the poor..
A contemporary account of the Regulator movement in Orange County describes the situation: Thus were the people of Orange insulted by The sheriff, robbed and plundered. When riots against the Stamp Act swept Boston in , they were analyzed by the commander of the British forces in North America, General Thomas Gage, as follows: The Boston Mob, raised first by the Instigation of Many of the Principal Inhabitants, Allured by Plunder, rose shordtly after of their own Accord, attacked, robbed, and destroyed several Houses, and amongst others, that of the Lieutenant Governor People then began to be terrified at the Spirit they had raised, to perceive that popular Fury was not to be guided, and each individual feared he might be the next Victim to their Rapacity.
The same Fears spread thro' the other Provinces, and there has been as much Pains taken since, to prevent Insurrections, of the People, as before to excite them. I repeat the challenge; not a single advantage is derived. Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paid for by them where we will.. As for the bad effects of the connection with England, Paine appealed to the colonists' memory of all the wars in which England had involved them, wars costly in lives and money: But the injuries and disadvantages which we sustain by that connection are without number..
He built slowly to an emotional pitch: Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. Then, in its second paragraph, came the powerful philosophical statement: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government Indeed, one paragraph of the Declaration charged the King with inciting slave rebellions and Indian attacks: He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
The Annual Register reviewed the events of the spring and summer of A general dissatisfaction unhappily prevailed among several of the lower orders of the people.
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