Page 141 - American Stories, A History of the United States

justifying Resistance
5.1 The political ideology that had the greatest popular appeal among the colonists con-

loyalists colonists sided with tained a strong moral component, one that British rulers and American Loyalists
britain during the American (people who sided with the king and Parliament during the Revolution) never fully
5.2 Revolution. understood. The precise origins of this highly religious perspective on civil govern-
ment are difficult to locate, but the Great Awakening created a general awareness
of an obligation to conduct public and private affairs according to Scripture (see
5.3 Chapter 4).
Americans expressed their political beliefs in language borrowed from English
writers. The person most frequently cited was John Locke, the influential seventeenth-
5.4 century philosopher. His Two Treatises of Government (1690) seemed, to colonial
readers at least, a brilliant description of what was in fact American political practice.
Locke claimed that all people possessed natural and inalienable rights. To preserve
these God-given rights—life, liberty, and property, for example—free men (the status
of women in Locke’s work was less clear) formed contracts. These agreements were
the foundation of human society and civil government. They required the consent
of the people who were actually governed. There could be no coercion. Locke justi-
fied rebellion against arbitrary government that was by its very nature unreasonable.
Americans delighted in Locke’s ability to unite traditional Protestant religious values
with a spirited defense of popular government. They seldom missed a chance to quote
“the Great Mr. Locke.”
Revolutionary Americans also endorsed ideas associated with the so-called
Commonwealthmen. These radical eighteenth-century English writers helped per-
suade the colonists that power was dangerous, a force that would destroy liberty
unless it was countered by virtue. Persons who shared this charged moral outlook
regarded bad policy as not simply the result of human error. Rather, it indicated sin
and corruption.
Insistence on public virtue—sacrifice of self-interest to the public good—became
the dominant theme of revolutionary political writing. American pamphleteers sel-
dom took a dispassionate, legalistic approach to their analysis of power and liberty.
Instead, they exposed plots hatched by corrupt courtiers, such as the Earl of Bute.
None of them—or their readers—doubted that Americans were more virtuous than
the British.
During the 1760s, however, popular writers were not certain how long the colonists
could hold out against arbitrary taxation, standing armies, and Anglican bishops—in
other words, against a host of external threats designed to crush American liberty. In
1774, for example, the people of Farmington, Connecticut, declared that “the present
ministry, being instigated by the devil and led by their wicked and corrupt hearts, have
a design to take away our liberties and properties, and to enslave us forever.” These
Connecticut farmers described Britain’s leaders as “pimps and parasites.” This highly
emotional, conspiratorial rhetoric sometimes shocks modern readers who assume that
America’s revolutionary leaders were products of the Enlightenment, persons who
relied solely on reason to solve social and political problems. Whatever the origins of
their ideas may have been, the colonial pamphleteers successfully roused ordinary men
and women to resist Britain with force of arms.
Colonial newspapers spread these ideas through a large dispersed population.
Most adult white males—especially those in the northern colonies—were liter-
ate, and the number of journals published in this country increased dramatically
during the revolutionary period. For the first time in American history, persons
throughout the colonies could follow events in distant American cities. The avail-
ability of newspapers meant that the details of Bostonians’ confrontations with
Quick Check British authorities were known throughout the colonies. These shared political
How did American colonists justify experiences drew Americans together, allowing—in the words of John Adams—
their resistance to parliamentary “Thirteen clocks . . . to strike together—a perfection of mechanism which no artist
sovereignty?
had ever before effected.”
108