William Smith (1728-93) was one of the New York "Presbyterian Triumvirate" of lawyers who organised legal resistance to the 1765 Stamp Act. However, in later years, he decided to not support full independence for the American colonies.
In October 1777 British regiments burned down a number of Whig properties in New York state, including Declaration of Independence co-author Robert R. Livingston's home manor of Clermont. A few weeks later on Christmas Day, Livingston and James Duane said to Smith "you'll become a Republican too". Smith told them –
"If you wanted a new Government, it should have been on the British model. I am a Whig of the old stamp - no Roundhead - one of King William's Whigs: for Liberty and the Constitution".
• In 1780 during the War of Independence, Smith wrote The Candid Retrospect; or The American War Examined, by Whig Principles, the text of which is online here.
• The Library of Congress publication The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality: Papers presented at the first symposium, May 5 and 6, 1972 is online here, with excellent papers by a number of academics such as Caroline Robbins ('European Republicanism in the Century and a Half Before 1776'), Pauline Maier ('The Beginnings of American Republicanism, 1765-1776'), Mary Beth Norton ('The Loyalist Critique of the Revolution'), and Esmond Wright ('Men With Two Countries'). Here's some from Maier –
Americans of the mid 18th century held defined and emphatic views on government. They were “no friends to republicanism,” as Charleston’s Christopher Gadsden emphasised in 1763, but instead “ardent lovers” of the British Constitution, which was for them “the Work of Ages... the Envy and Admiration of the Universe, the Glory of the English Nation.”
No form of government seemed so fitted for the preservation of liberty. King, Lords, and Commons shared power in a mixed structure that prevented any one of them from pursuing its own interests at the cost of the nation’s freedom.
Even the colonial Sons of Liberty, who organised to resist the Stamp Act in 1765 and 1766, were outspoken in their conviction of “the Superior Excellence of the English Constitution to that of any other Form of Government upon Earth.” And should independence ultimately become necessary—a prospect the Sons of Liberty envisaged only with the “darkest Gloom and Horror”—they assumed that the institutions of a separate America would resemble those of the mother country, that ex-colonists would set about “erecting an Independent Monarchy here in America.”
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