William Macdonald

“ With notable moderation and restraint, and in a tone pervadingly judicial rather than partisan, Otis argued the case for the colonies, appealing as before to the British constitution as he understood it, and to the logic of right, liberty, and justice. A colony being an integral part of the mother country, though territorially separated from it, its people are, “by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of Parliament ... entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent, and inseparable rights of our fellow-subjects in Great Britain.” ”

“ No history of the American Revolution, or of the political literature to which it gave birth, would be complete without consideration of the loyalists. That independence was in fact the work of a minority, and that the methods by which the loyal majority was overawed and, in part, expelled were as high-handed and cruel as they were active and vigorous, must be freely conceded. Weighty as was the colonial argument, force and violence were freely employed to give effect to it. ”

“ The conduct of the king, the ministry, and the Parliament, the history and necessities of the colonies, and the constitutional foundations of empire had all been repeatedly and ably examined by lawyers and publicists, and the findings set forth by accomplished writers, long before Jefferson was called upon to say the final word. Of all the criticisms that have been passed upon the Declaration of Independence, the least to the point is that it is not original. ”

“ Without the legal mastery of Thacher or Dulany, but, fortunately, also without the discursiveness and extravagance of Otis or the intellectual and religious bias of John Adams, Dickinson reviewed, earnestly and directly, the colonial case; warned the colonies of the grave danger of admitting any form of parliamentary taxation, external or internal; sustained the right of protest and petition, and urged economy, thrift, and the development of American industry. Forcible resistance, indeed, is with him not to be thought of, and the idea of independence is spurned ”

“ Such a time of storm and stress, of revolution and evolution, is pretty certain, especially in a new country, if it bring forth literature at all, to bring forth such as is predominantly political in content, style, and purpose. The Revolutionary leaders who have left a large and permanent impress upon American literature were concerned chiefly with such weighty matters as the nature of the British constitution, the formulation of colonial rights, and the elaboration of schemes of government and administration ”

“ That persistent opposition to Parliament, whether through elaborated constitutional arguments or by such practical devices as commercial non-intercourse, might in the end raise the issue of independence, had early been perceived; and the earnest protestations of loyalty to the crown which are found in the resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress or the declaration and resolves of the First Continental Congress, if read chiefly in the light of subsequent events, do not seem entirely unequivocal. ”

“ The freedom of one’s house was violated by it; the only precedent for it belonged to the days of arbitrary power under Charles II. “No acts of Parliament can establish such a writ.... An act against the constitution is void.”
Otis could impede, but he could not defeat, the applicaiton, and the writs were eventually issued. He had, however, raised the important question of the application of English law to the colonies, and the nature and extent of the “rights of Englishmen” which the colonial charters, in express terms, had guaranteed. ”

“ For the next two years and more the agitation was not actively kept up, and even such violent disorders as the Boston Massacre (March, 1770) and the burning of the revenue schooner Gaspée (1772) occasioned hardly more than local excitement. Colonial newspapers continued to print essays on American rights, and houses of assembly embodied their views in resolutions; but these occasional writings, while doubtless not without their influence upon public opinion, hardly constitute a political literature of importance. ”

“ Of the important papers agreed to by the Stamp Act Congress, two—a declaration of rights and grievances and a petition to the king—were mainly the work of John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, whose notable career as a political writer, already begun in the controversial atmosphere of his own colony, was to earn for him the title of “the penman of the Revolution.” ”

“ The Pre-eminence of American Political Literature. AMERICAN history between 1760 and 1789—from the end, that is, so far as military operations were concerned, of the Seven Years’ War to the inauguration of the new government under the Federal Constitution—falls naturally into three well-marked periods. The first, comprising the development of the constitutional struggle with Great Britain over taxation and imperial control, reaches its culmination in the armed collision between the British and the patriot forces at Lexington, 19 April 1775. ”

“ The only outcome for the colonies was independence, and independence was the word which, as yet, most colonial leaders appeared anxious to avoid.
Before the attacks of the “Westchester Farmer” had ceased, Daniel Leonard, a Boston lawyer of social prominence, began the publication in a loyalist newspaper, over the pen-name of “Massachusettensis,” of a series of seventeen letters, To the Inhabitants of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay (1774–75) . Seabury had emphasized the impracticability and political unwisdom of the recommendations of the Congress. ”

“ Otis voiced effectively the first impulse of thoughtful, patriotic Americans as they contemplated the prospect of parliamentary taxation. The proposed act violated the constitution whose benefits the colonists claimed, but forcible resistance would be treason. The same line of argument, more systematically and cogently put, characterized Oxenbridge Thacher’s Sentiments of a British American (1764) . Thacher was a fellow townsman of Otis, and the two had been associated in the case of the writs of assistance. ”

“ Jefferson and John Adams were absent from the country on diplomatic service, the former in France, the latter at the Court of St. James; and Franklin, prince of American diplomatists, was not, in the larger field of government, a constructive statesman. But Washington, Madison, Jay, Hamilton, Patrick Henry, and other leaders were busy with their pens, discussing with one another, particularly in the interval from 1785 to 1787, the defects of the Articles, the need of a firmer national organization, and the practical possibilities of united action. ”

“ Not all who entered the lists, however, agreed so unreservedly with the sentiments of Congress or of the patriot leaders. A series of papers in The Pennsylvania Packet, reprinted in a pamphlet with the title A Few Political Reflections Submitted to the Consideration of the British Colonies, by a Citizen of Philadelphia, and a attributed to Richard Wells, urged compensation for the tea and the abandonment of violent protest, at the same time arguing for united rejection of the claim to taxation on the ground that the colonies were too old and too strong to be kept in leading-strings. ”

“ The pamphlet literature was equally important. Noah Webster, best known to later generations as a lexicographer, came to the support of the new instrument in An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution; as did John Jay, in An Address to the People of the State of New York; Pelatiah Webster of Philadelphia, in The Weakness of Brutus Exposed, a reply to the first of a series of sixteen essays ascribed to Thomas Treadwell of New York; Tench Coxe, in An Examination of the Constitution, written over the pseudonym of “An American Citizen” ”

“ Like Otis, Thacher’s legal argument closes with a strong profession of loyalty to the crown, and there is no good for thinking that in either case the profession was insincere. Argument and dissent were an Englishman’s right, and the constitution had grown by protest against abuses.
An even more effective statement of the American case is found in The Rights of Colonies Examined, a pamphlet written by Stephen Hopkins, governor of Rhode Island, and pub lished at Providence in 1765. ”

“ The Massachusetts Circular Letter [9] (11 February, 1768) , prepared by Samuel Adams for a committee of the House of Representatives, and addressed to the speakers of other representative houses throughout the colonies, introduces to us the man who, more zealously and persistently than anyone else, devoted himself to achieving American independence. ”

“ The salaries of governors and judges, hitherto paid by the colonial assemblies, were now to be paid by the crown, thus insuring, it was believed, a better enforcement of the trade laws and a proper revenue from customs; and a standing army of ten thousand men was to be maintained in America, in anticipation of an attempt by France to recover what it had lost, the expense of the troops to be met by parliamentary taxation of the colonies. ”

“ Admitting the right of Parliament to regulate the affairs of the whole empire, Hopkins not only claims for the colonies “as much freedom as the mother state from which they went out,” but dwells forcibly upon the dangerous tendency of the new policy, the widespread apprehension which it has already aroused, and the absence of any clear necessity for raising an American revenue by parliamentary fiat.
What motive ... can remain, to induce the parliament to abridge the privileges, and lessen the rights of the most loyal and dutiful subjects ”

“ In our own native land, in defence of the freedom that is our birthright, and which we ever enjoyed till the late violation of it—for the protection of our property, acquired solely by the honest industry of our fore-fathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms. ”

“ On the whole, it is the form rather than the substance of the Letters from a Farmer that is most original. Dickinson wrote as a cultivated, prosperous gentleman, addressing an audience of intelligent, but plain, people the soil of whose minds had been already somewhat prepared. ”

“ Howard retorted with A Defence of the Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, to his Friend in Rhode-Island, to which Otis responded with Brief Remarks on the Defence of the Halifax Libel on the British-American-Colonies. The tide of patriotism was rising, however, and the populace presently took a hand. ”

“ Quincy’s pamphlet was shortly followed by James Wilson’s Considerations on the Nature and the Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, an ingenious rejection of such authority in favour of allegiance to the king alone. The writer, a young lawyer of Philadelphia, was later to contribute powerfully to the acceptance of the Federal Constitution by Pennsylvania. ”

“ Boston, 1818. III. THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS Ford, W.C., and Hunt, G. Journals of the Continental Congress. Washington, 1904– (in course of publication. Vol. XXIII carries the record through 1782. Bibliographical appendices for each year list the publications of the Congress for the year.) IV. THE FEDERAL CONVENTION Elliot, Jonathan. Debates in the several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, & c. 4 vols. Washington, 1827. 2d ed., 1836. “New” ed. 5 vols. Philadelphia, 1906. ”

“ Works. 4 vols. Philadelphia, 1802. The Federalist. In the [New York] Independent Journal, October, 1787–April, 1788. Collected ed., 1788. Many eds. The best are those by Lodge, H. C., 1886, and Ford, P. L., 1898. VI. MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS Ford, P. L. [ed.] . Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, 1787–1788. Brooklyn, 1888. (Privately printed.) ——Essays on the Constitution of the United States, 1787–1788. Brooklyn, 1892. Sparks, J. [ed.] . Correspondence of the American Revolution; being Letters of Eminent Men to George Washington. 4 vols. Boston, 1853. ”