William Gerard Hamilton MP, 1767 - "every man is obliged to have a musket, a pound of powder ... you have no right to tax them"

William Gerard Hamilton (1729-96) was the Chief Secretary for Ireland and MP for Killybegs in Donegal. After all of the protests about the 1765 Stamp Act, and then its withdrawal, in 1767 Hamilton wrote a warning letter to John Calcraft:

"As to America, I wish we may not burn our fingers, and do our enemies work for them, by quarrelling among ourselves.

There are, in the different provinces, above a million of people, of which we may suppose at least 200,000 men able to bear arms; and not only able to bear arms, but having arms in their possession, unrestrained by any iniquitous Game Act.

In the Massachusetts government particularly, there is an express law, by which every man is obliged to have a musket, a pound of powder, and a pound of bullets always by him: so there is nothing wanting but knapsacks (or old stockings, which will do as well) to equip an army for marching, and nothing more than a Sartorius or a Spartacus at their head requisite to beat your troops and your custom-house officers out of the country, and set your laws at defiance.

There is no saying what their leader may put them upon; but if they are active, clever people, and love mischief as well as I do peace and quiet, they will furnish matter of consideration to the wisest among you, and perhaps dictate their own terms at last, as the Roman people formerly in their famous secession upon the sacred mount.

For my own part, I think you have no right to tax them, and that every measure built upon this supposed right stands upon a rotten foundation, and must consequently tumble down, perhaps, upon the heads of the workmen."

Nationality is not the same as Liberty

 On 28 February 1776, Patrick Henry walked away from an offer to be a colonel in the Continental Army. He had famously announced "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!" less than a year before, at the Second Virginia Convention in St John's Church in Richmond on 23 March 1775. He was the commander of all of the patriot militias in Virginia. So why a demotion? Orthodox histories have presented it as a personal affront, but it was an ideological difference.

Henry's focus was on the rights of the people in America. His objective was not to merely replace London rule with a new ruling class of American élites. As Tad Stoermer says in a recent YouTube video:

"the patriot resistance drew on mostly ... the idea that a community exists to promote the mutual safety and prosperity of its members - all of them - and that authority is only legitimate when it serves that purpose. Rights were what the community used to defend itself against power that had stopped serving it and started serving itself".

The danger of this year's USA250 commemorations is that they will reinforce nationalisms – American, British, and Irish – rather than explain rights and liberty. 

Here in the constitutional ambiguity of Northern Ireland, that means being dragged into the "two tribes" mire. People are so invested in their binary choice of nationality that they can't think beyond it. And challenging that binary risks a backlash.

Northern Ireland / the island of Ireland is a poisoned society – but there are many lucrative careers in poison management.

Nationality is not the same as liberty.