REVOLUTION AND REACTION

After the whole group of colonies had long been left in salutary neglect by the British authorities, George III and his ministers undertook the creation of an imperial control; and Parliament was too much at the king’s command for opposing statesmen to stop the project.  The Americans wakened resentfully to the new conditions.  The revived navigation laws, the stamp act, the tea duty, and the dispatch of redcoats to coerce Massachusetts were a cumulation of grievances not to be borne by high-spirited people.  For some years the colonial spokesmen tried to persuade the British government that it was violating historic and constitutional rights; but these efforts had little success.  To the argument that the empire was composed of parts mutually independent in legislation, it was replied that Parliament had legislated imperially ever since the empire’s beginning, and that the colonial assemblies possessed only such powers as Parliament might allow.  The plea of no taxation without representation was answered by the doctrine that all elements in the empire were virtually represented in Parliament.  The stress laid by the colonials upon their rights as Britons met the administration’s emphasis upon the duty of all British subjects to obey British laws.  This countering of pleas of exemption with pronouncements of authority drove the complainants at length from proposals of reform to projects of revolution.  For this the solidarity of the continent was essential, and that was to be gained only by the most vigorous agitation with the aid of the most effective campaign cries.  The claim of historic immunities was largely discarded in favor of the more glittering doctrines current in the philosophy of the time.  The demands for local self-government or for national independence, one or both of which were the genuine issues at stake, were subordinated to the claim of the inherent and inalienable rights of man.  Hence the culminating formulation in the Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  The cause of the community was to be won under the guise of the cause of individuals.

In Jefferson’s original draft of the great declaration there was a paragraph indicting the king for having kept open the African slave trade against colonial efforts to close it, and for having violated thereby the “most sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”  This passage, according to Jefferson’s account, “was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.  Our Northern brethren also I believe,” Jefferson continued, “felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."[1] By reason of the general stress upon the inherent liberty of all men, however, the question of negro status, despite its omission from the Declaration, was an inevitable corollary to that of American independence.