The Declaration is best understood as the final act in a drama between British loyalists and patriot Americans. We must understand the assumptions about the nature of political power and the sources of liberty that both sides articulated if we are to understand the “American mind” that Jefferson sought to express in the Declaration. This was not merely a debate between one branch of Whigs (patriots) who favored more local and popularly representative assemblies and another branch (loyalists) who sought to preserve the authority of Parliament.
The original English Whig critique had been set against monarchical abuses of power, a Crown that governed apart from Parliament with no accountability. The culmination of this struggle was the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689), which witnessed the rise of Parliament that limited boundless monarchical rule. However, the subsequent increase in parliamentary strength at the expense of the King was accompanied by the decline of the Whigs’ original concern with power as they came to embrace Parliament as the seat of power and saw Parliament’s law as the seedbed of social order. In the words of Founding-era historian Hans Eicholz, “the ‘new’ Whigs set their support for Parliament on a Tory foundation, substituting legislative supremacy for the divine right of kings. However, the Old Whigs, both in England and in America, continued to hold that social order stemmed not from the government, but from the various institutions of society that had developed spontaneously in law, custom, and the market.”6
The loyalists were new Whigs who upheld the parliamentary authority of government. The patriots were Old Whigs who supported limited government and opposed abuses of power. Loyalists thought Parliament’s power was limitless and that its rejection would invite social chaos. Patriots insisted that opposition to the monarch and Parliament—and even independence from Britain—were not sources of social disorder. On the contrary, it was the abuse of power, not resistance to it, that bred social chaos. If the law had a foundation in natural rights, then it had a basis of authority independent of the state, and state officials were not creators of the law but its stewards.
After the conclusion of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), Parliament turned its sights toward more active regulation of the colonists. Britain had incurred great debts to evict the French from North America, and it looked to the colonists to help repay this debt. But this is only one part of the story. British imperial designs on the colonies had existed for decades, stretching back to 1747 under Prime Minister Henry Pelham’s administration. After a period of inattention, there was mounting anxiety in Britain that the colonists were growing in wealth and population. Many feared that the mother country would lose control of the colonists if such a course was left unchecked.7 A contemporary, David Ramsay, judged that “British politicians saw, or thought they saw, the seeds of disunion, planted in the too widely extended empire.”8
This debate did not ultimately turn on the types of taxes imposed or whether the British government was interfering a bit too much in the colonies. Rather, this was a contest for the very meaning of constitutional liberty. The colonists were right when they claimed in the Declaration that, by design, the British were “pursuing invariably the same object” to “reduce them under absolute Despotism.”
If Britain’s plan to control the colonies began decades before the end of the French and Indian War, American cognizance of this change registered fully with Parliament’s passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. The Stamp Act met with unified resistance. Numerous forms of communication—newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, and other official documents—would need a stamp to circulate, so the tax imposed a heavy cost on the well-read colonists. The colonists (particularly attorneys and merchants) resented the increased cost, but they resented even more Britain’s imposition of the tax without their consent and by force. Another issue emerged: The legislation called for disputes to be resolved in Admiralty Courts, which meant that a royal judge would determine the application of the law without a jury. The Stamp Act struck at the heart of a free and self-governing people.
Richard Bland’s 1766 pamphlet An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies was one of the most notable responses to the Stamp Act. Bland articulated the American colonists’ legal, historical, and philosophical arguments against British power. His pamphlet, notably, influenced Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America,9 an essay published in 1774 that in turn heavily influenced the Declaration of Independence. Bland’s position was that the colonies could not be virtually represented in Parliament and taxed without their consent. Bland invoked both custom and the natural right of all men to leave one society and establish a new one. He contended that the colonists had never consented to Parliament’s rule but rather had quit English society, no longer believing it conducive to their happiness, and had entered a contract with the King to form new societies in North America. The monarch recognized this, he argued, by appealing only to their general assemblies for needed revenue. If Bland’s colony, Virginia, consented to Parliament’s passing the Stamp Act, it would be contrary to natural rights and law, placing Virginians “even below the Corporation of a petty Borough in England.”10 The colonies, in other words, would be represented in a manner below that of an unpopulated “petty Borough” district of Parliament, which at least would have some kind of representation.
The colonists entered compacts to cease importing and exporting British goods, among other measures, to prevent the Stamp Act from having an effect. Although the act was repealed in July of 1765, Parliament had no intention of ending its policy of imposing controls and taxes on the colonists. Accordingly, Parliament soon introduced the Townshend Duties of 1767 that taxed goods like lead, glass, paper, dye, and tea imported into the colonies from England.
Parliament argued this small but vigorously enforced tax was an external tax, not an act of interference with colonial assemblies, but John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer directly countered this reasoning. Yes, the colonists had recognized regulation of trade that could limit or even prohibit certain goods from being traded as a matter of the common good, but the Townshend Duties were taxes, again levied without consent, to raise revenue. Dickinson reasoned that if Parliament’s insistence that colonies pay tax on Britain’s exports to America was recognized, the next logical step would be to prohibit the colonists from manufacturing those items so they would have to purchase them from Britain as a taxed good, in which case “the tragedy of American liberty is finished.”11
Dickinson’s point was not about the types of taxes imposed, but about the fundamental disposition and control of property that Parliament’s measures rendered insecure. Dickinson emphatically stated that:
[W]e cannot be happy without being free—that we cannot be secure in our property, if, without our consent, others may, as by right, take it away—that taxes imposed on us by parliament, do thus take it away—that duties laid for the sole purpose of raising money are taxes—that attempts to lay such duties should be instantly and firmly opposed….”12
The British abandoned the Townshend Duties in 1770, concluding the revenue it generated was low and assessing levies on British products on such a broad scale undercut their position vis-à-vis the colonists. The tax on tea, however, remained, and its consequences would prove Dickinson’s point.
In 1773, Parliament granted the East India Company the power to be the sole provider of tea to the colonies. The company’s fortunes were fading, but members of Parliament had invested heavily in its operations. They sought a return on their investment and were determined the colonists should provide it. Parliament had once again imposed a tax without the colonists’ consent, ending American liberty by “compelling Americans to buy only taxed goods.” Dickinson’s warning had come true. Americans reacted emphatically on December 16, 1773, dressing as Indians, boarding the ships carrying East India tea cargo, and emptying an estimated £10,000 of tea into Boston Harbor.
In 1774, Parliament reacted harshly with measures that punished Massachusetts by (1) closing the Port of Boston until compensation was provided to the East India Company; (2) nullifying the Massachusetts Charter; (3) restricting town meetings and increasing the power of the Royal Governor to make appointments;(4) authorizing royal government officials charged with capital offenses to remove their trials to Britain; (5) ordering owners of private dwellings to accommodate British soldiers; and (6) affirming Quebec’s nonuse of the English jury system, which had the effect of leading the colonies to believe that Parliament could abolish the jury in each of their colonies. Collectively, these acts became known among the colonists as the “Intolerable Acts.”
Although intended to isolate Massachusetts, these prohibitions soon united the colonies, which sent aid to Massachusetts and formed Committees of Correspondence that provided the backbone of the revolutionary movement. Massachusetts and Virginia rebelled against their royal governors’ orders, declaring that Massachusetts’ fate was every colony’s fate. Both states announced they would send delegates to a Continental Congress, the first representative intercolonial assembly. They would petition for relief from the Intolerable Acts and draw up a list of grievances.
ENDNOTES:
6. Eicholz, Harmonizing Sentiments, p. 4.
7. Jack P. Greene, Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), pp. 52–53; Jack P. Greene, “The Origins of the New Colonial Policy, 1748–1763,” Chapter 10 in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 95–106.
8. David Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, Vol. 1, ed. Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1990), p. 46, https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/814/Ramsay_0015-01_EBk_v6.0.pdf (accessed October 4, 2024).
9. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Philadelphia: Reprinted by John Dunlap, 1774), https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/GLC/documents/2023-07/GLC00962_OS.pdf (accessed October 4, 2024).
10. Richard Bland, “An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, 1766,” in American Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760–1805, Vol. 1, ed. Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), pp. 70–72, 75–76, and 81, https://oll-resources.s3.us-east2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/2066/Hyneman_0153.01_Bk.pdf (accessed October 4, 2024).
11. Quotations from Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer can be found in Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation 1763–1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1975), p. 133. See also A Farmer [John Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Philadelphia, 1774), https://ia801406.us.archive.org/9/items/DKC0004/DKC_0004.pdf (accessed October 4, 2024).
12. Greene, Colonies to Nation 1763–1789, p. 128.
