Michael Auslin – "National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America" – "...the leaders did not see themselves as revolutionaries. They thought they saw themselves as conservators..."

Today's the day. It was 2nd August 1776 when the "engrossed" version of the Declaration of Independence was signed. This interview, with author Michael Auslin (Wikipedia here), is among the very best that I've seen in this semiquincentennial year – as is his truly excellent new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.

At 53:45 during the Q&A session, he explains the conceptual inspirations such as the 1689 Bill of Rights and also the Bible, quoting President Calvin Coolidge's 150th anniversary address of 1926 (online here). I recommend you watch the whole interview. 

There's certainly an argument that the leaders did not see themselves as revolutionaries. They thought they saw themselves as conservators, conservators of the rights as Englishmen that they had that they had exercised in their colonies on this continent for nigh on 160 years or so, 150 plus years by the time of 1776, that the king and parliament in what they called the "great conspiracy" were trying to take away from them. They were not year zero people, they were "this is our inheritance", what they called their "constitutions", their unwritten constitutions of self-government

Charles Thomson's "Corrected Transcript Journal", and the entry for 2 August 1776

For the Declaration of Independence, 4th July 1776 gets all the attention because it was the date that was printed in huge font at the top of the first unsigned version. But it was 2 August 1776 when the new calligraphic "engrossed" version was signed, by most of the 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia.

Here's the page from Charles Thomson's handwritten "Corrected Transcript Journal" for what Congress did that day. No pomp or ceremony, just an efficient reference –

“Friday August 2. 1776.

The declaration of independence being engrossed and compared at the table was signed by the members.”

and then they moved on to regular business. 

Image from Fold3.com

........

It would be over 40 years later when the United States began to craft its national narratives - like all nations, a blend of history and mythology, to shape a sense of common identity and patriotism.

The Declaration was then given new life and reverential importance – historian Pauline Maier described it as "American Scripture".

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had fallen out, and they had differing memories of what had happened back on 4 July 1776. So it was one of the signers, Thomas McKean, who put pen to paper to clarify who did what and when.

Jefferson would later say that, had he known what a big deal the Declaration would become, he wouldn't have allowed anyone to edit his first version, and would have kept the fame for himself.

In 1817, artist John Trumbull was commissioned to paint a imagined scene of 2 July 1776, when the committee presented its draft to Thomson. 

The painting was unveiled on the 50th anniversary – 4 July 1826. That very same day, their life's work complete, Jefferson and Adams both died.

A "United Irishman" and the American Revolution - William Steele-Dickson's sermon in Ballyhalbert, 27 February 1778

In a back garden along the Harbour Road in Ballyhalbert (between the graveyard and the Moat Road) was where the village's original Presbyterian meeting house once stood.

On 27 February 1778, Rev. William Steele-Dickson preached a sermon there, packed with Old Testament references, calling for peace in the American War of Independence. Best known as a future "United Irishman", he told his listeners:

"A few Generations lead us back to the Origin of American Colonization, when the Inhabitants of the British Isles first explored its pathless deserts, in Quest of that Liberty and Peace which their Country denied them: And every succeeding Year has transported Multitudes from every Corner of these Lands, so that there is scarcely a Protestant Family, of the middle and lower Classes among us, who does not reckon Kindred with the Inhabitants of that extensive Continent. How many Parents, in the narrow Circle of our own Acquaintance, are agitated with the most painful Anxiety for the uncertain Fate of favorite Children whose Habitations have become the Seat of War"

He described the War as a "civil war", he called France "the jealous enemies of our liberties and religion" and he said that Ireland's Presbyterians "are ready to approve ourselves the steady friends of the Constitution and the rights of our country".

• The full sermon, entitled "The Ruinous Effects of Civil War", is on GoogleBooks here. 

....................

This extract from the same sermon is in Thomas Witherow's 1880 book Historical and Literary Memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland (p. 236; online here).  

"... From all these things taken together, it appears that in whatever point of view we consider the present civil war, we have cause to reprobate it. If we consider it as trampling humanity under foot and violating the ties of blood, it is unnatural and barbarous; and if we consider it as dissolving the bonds of Protestantism, wounding the interests of Britain through the sides of America, or exposing us to the inroads of a jealous enemy, it is foolish, impolitic, and wicked. Can we, therefore, hesitate what were best and safest to be done? Is not the way of peace in all respects to be preferred? And while faction roars for blood and upstart loyalty beats to arms, doth not every real friend to his country look forward with earnest desire to the happy day when the sword shall cease to devour? Is it not the first prayer of his heart that the wisdom of Britain may yet stretch forth the peaceful olive to the Western world, and the second that she may not stretch it forth in vain ?

Yet such is the rage of ambition, that even this measure, for which humanity, religion, policy, and precedent jointly plead, is loudly declaimed against as humiliating and dishonourable, and many circumstances of guilt are alleged against the Colonists to justify the continuance of war in order to reduce them. "Prerogative has been infringed, allegiance withdrawn, the omnipotence of Parliament insulted, and an independent state erected in contempt of its authority." Now let all this be granted, without raking up provocations, injuries, or anything which may tend to irritate, and what will be the consequence? Though these offences are great, are we to sacrifice our all to a point of honour? Or, to use a favourite mode of expression, does authority require that a parent should risk his own perdition in an attempt to chastise the ingratitude of a child, when experience shows that he is unequal to the task? Surely no. Such pleas for war are lighter than dust in the balance when opposed to the weighty considerations which call for peace.

While peace is thus the object of our desire, we must receive a peculiar satisfaction from a review of the conduct of Irish Presbyterians on this trying occasion. Our enemies, if any such we have, can scarcely deny that as a body we have been guided by the spirit of moderation. We have neither attempted to clog the wheels of Government by frantic opposition, nor to encourage measures of violence by sanguinary addresses. If we have in any instance censured the principle or conduct of the war, our censures have been justified by the general feelings of humanity and a zealous interest for the common concern of Britain and America. And should necessity call us forth to oppose the jealous enemies of our liberties and religion*, we are ready to approve ourselves the steady friends of the Constitution and the rights of our country.

* Witherow's footnote says: He means the French, who, it was feared, might invade Ireland while England was engaged in the American war.

"The Protestant Idea of Liberty" – Professor Marianne Elliott (1985) - A Field Day Pamphlet

Times change and so, as CS Lewis once wrote, to escape the biases of the present, old books are essential.

This Field Day Pamphlet from 1985, by (Professor) Marianne Elliott, is excellent reading - especially in this year of USA250.

“… it was in Ireland, Scotland and colonial America that it retained its dogged purity, and the most lasting testimony to presbyterian libertarianism is the American Constitution.

In explaining the foundations of civil society, the contract theory assumes the surrender of individual liberty, by mutual consent of a community, to a government which in return undertakes to act for the general good.

The contract assumes mutual obligation; but in its more radical form of government as a trust, the obligations are one-sided and the government can be rejected when that trust is seen to have been betrayed.

It was this more radical form which reached Irish dissent from Scotland, especially from Glasgow University, where the influence of the Armagh-born presbyterian, Francis Hutcheson, continued long after his death in 1746.” 

 

The pamphlet was designed by my old art college tutor Ralph Dobson, five years before I met him. How time flies. Here's another, magnificently insightful, extract:

"... In a culture where the past is so much part of the present, a protestant who opposes perceived threats to his freedom and his religion is acting radically, in the same tradition as the Covenanters, the Commonwealthmen and the 'real Whigs' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who made 1688 and the protestant succession fundamental to the British tradition of liberty. 

Behind the seemingly antiquated bigotry, there is a dynamic libertarianism, at times a millenarianism, which still finds its inspiration in Old Testament imagery of the Israelites fighting their way to possess the promised land. It is, however, a brand of libertarianism ill-attuned to modern secular thinking which accepts nationality, rather than religion, as a badge of identity.

There is a tendency to see the problem of Northern Ireland simplistically in terms of a protestant/catholic conflict. But protestantism is not a monolith, and it is the failure to recognise the libertarian tradition, particularly in presbyterianism, which causes many commentators to dismiss such appeals to freedom as either rhetoric or pure hypocrisy. 

Yet the presbyterians' heightened sense of persecution is as old as that of the Irish catholics and the Irish problem is as much one of conflicting ideas of liberty as anything else."

Belfast and the French Revolution – the "Belfast Review and Celebration", 14 July 1792

This is an oft-repeated account of a major "military and civil procession" celebration in Belfast on 14 July 1792 – online here, in The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times by Richard R Madden (1857 edition). I'm not as enamoured with the 1789 French Revolution as others appear to be, as it soon descended into a bloodbath - just six weeks after the Belfast event, the massacres in Paris began. 

An important first-hand account is by Archibald Hamilton Rowan in his autobiography (see previous post here). A big story I do think needs to be unpicked is the philosophy of the Belfast dissenters and Whigs of the 1700s, and the Patriot Party in Dublin Parliament, who were advocates of many of the achievements of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. 

Edmund Burke famously critiqued the French Revolution; the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his 2020 book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times explains that the French Revolution said that rights came from the state, whereas the American Revolution said that rights came from God –

“It is genuinely sad to see how, almost without people noticing, Britain and the United States have abandoned their own unique tradition, that of (John) Locke and (Thomas) Jefferson, and instead embraced the Rousseau-esque French revolutionary model of rights as claims against the state, instead of ***rights as the protection of individuals from the state*** so that they could achieve by their own local, cooperative, altruistic efforts what politics and power cannot achieve, namely a devolved sense of responsibility for the welfare of others”. 

The 1792 Belfast event was more complex and varied than one might assume. The participants carried "the colours of five free nations" which were Ireland, America, France, Poland and Great Britain - a Dutch flag was also prepared, but not used, perhaps because the War of the First Coalition had just begun.

Among the individuals who were celebrated were John Locke, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Grattan and William Molyneaux. The Belfast Address to the People of Ireland reads a lot like the many documents that were published in the 13 Colonies during the 1760s & 1770s:

We have not to innovate, but to restore. The just prerogatives of our monarch we respect and will maintain. The constitutional power of the peers of the realm we wish not to invade. We know that in the exercise of both, abuses have grown up; but we also know that those abuses will be at once corrected, so as never again to recur, by restoring to us, the people, what we, for ourselves, demand as our right, our due weight and influence in that estate, which is our property, the representation of the people in parliament.

Edward Dumbauld, The Declaration of Independence (1950)

Edward Dumbauld (1905–1997) was a Princeton graduate, a Harvard graduate, an author, and a legal scholar of the highest calibre (Wikipedia here). He had also studied at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and became a special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States. President John F Kennedy appointed Dumbauld as a Senior Judge in 1961.

Dumbauld's 1950 book, The Declaration of Independence and What It Means Today, has many superb references to the 1688 Glorious Revolution:

"...Jefferson's own first version of the Declaration was not the fruit of mere ratiocination, although he asserts that he "turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. " It followed familiar precedents.

It invoked the hallowed heritage of English constitutional history. It voiced the doctrines of accepted political philosophers, particularly John Locke, whose writings were esteemed as authoritative expressions of established principles. It recapitulated the substance of previous state papers, some of them drafted by Jefferson himself, in which the American contentions had been formulated during the course of the prolonged dispute with England.

Jefferson was unquestionably familiar with the Stamp Act resolutions, the Massachusetts circular letter of February II, 1768, to the assemblies of the other colonies, the resolutions, petitions, and addresses of the Continental Congress, the declaration on taking up arms, the replies to Lord North's conciliatory motion, and similar utterances which would inevitably leave their trace upon a document intended to be an authentic "expression of the American mind."

Particularly significant, it seems to me, are two sources upon which Jefferson manifestly drew when drafting the Declaration: his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in I774, and his preamble to the Virginia Constitution of 1776. In each of these is contained a recital of grievances which closely parallels the Declaration of Independence.

The catalogue of charges against George III in Jefferson's preamble to the Virginia constitution strongly indicates, by its rhythm and phrasing, that it was patterned upon passages in the English Bill of Rights where the people of England were enumerating the reasons which justified their choice of new rulers in place of James II. The misdeeds of that monarch were there itemized in a fashion strikingly similar to Jefferson's impressive indictment of George III.

To the men of 1776 the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 in England was a vivid and thrilling reality. It had occurred less than a century before; it was a living and vital force in their daily conduct and thinking; for them it had not become what it is to us today, a dimly remembered story of ancient events in the history of a foreign nation, buried in obscure chronicles of the past, and familiar only to historians. Americans resisting what they regarded as infringements of their constitutional rights conscientiously studied the precedents and principles enshrined in English history. They felt themselves to be following in the path of Coke, Pym, Hampden, Eliot, Milton, Algernon Sidney, and the patriots who decapitated Charles I in 1649 and deposed James II in 1689 for violations of the compact between king and people…

Jefferson's use of the Bill of Rights as pattern for his preamble makes it evident that in his judgment George III could rightfully be "deposed from the kingly office" by Americans because the situation was identical, constitutionally, with that which had existed when James II was lawfully ousted by English patriots. The same inference may be drawn from those passages in the Declaration of Independence which show the influence of Locke, for that philosopher's political treatises were written as a defense of the revolutionists who placed William and Mary on the throne "abandoned" by James II.

Besides inspiring the American votaries of liberty in 1776, the English Bill of Rights proclaimed in 1689 was the pattern and prototype for the constitutional safeguards added a century later to the Constitution of the United States at the insistence of Jefferson and other friends of democratic government.”

Thomas Jefferson and King James II

The more you read the more you find. Here is Thomas Jefferson in later life, writing his autobiography, and comparing the context of 1776 with that of 1688, and of King George III's actions with King James II –

"...the question was not whether, by a declaration of independence, we should make ourselves what we are not; but whether we should declare a fact which already exists:

That as to the people or parliament of England, we had always been independent of them, their restraints on our trade deriving efficacy from our acquiescence only, & not from any rights they possessed of imposing them, & that so far our connection had been federal only & was now dissolved by the commencement of hostilities:

That as to the King, we had been bound to him by allegiance, but that this bond was now dissolved by his assent to the late act of parliament, by which he declares us out of his protection, and by his levying war on us, a fact which had long ago proved us out of his protection; it being a certain position in law that allegiance & protection are reciprocal, the one ceasing when the other is withdrawn:

That James the IId. never declared the people of England out of his protection yet his actions proved it & the parliament declared it:

No delegates then can be denied, or ever want, a power of declaring an existing truth..."

• From Thomas Jefferson's autobiography, 1821 (online here)

The 1689 Glorious Revolution in New England – account by Daniel Neal (1720)

 

Published in 1720, this is a superb source for early New England history. Daniel Neal's (Wikipedia here) summary of the 1689 Boston Revolt and Glorious Revolution is concise and punchy – it's in Chapter 10, starting with the second paragraph on page 429 (online here).

In Volume I, Neal dedicated both volumes (online here) to Governor Samuel Shute, who had of course famously been written to by Ulster Presbyterians in 1718 in their "Shute Petition".

Neal appealed to Governor Shute that:

"it will be a noble design, and worthy of men in your station, to preserve New England a pleasant habitation to its present possessors, and a blessed retreat for oppressed Protestants in all parts of the world."

Here's the text, from page 429 onwards –

p. 429

Things went on after this manner till the news of the Prince of Orange's expedition into England reached Boston, which spread an universal joy throughout the whole country. The Governor took all imaginable care to conceal the success of it from the people; he imprisoned the man that brought over a copy of the Prince's Declaration, and published a Proclamation, requiring all persons to use their best endeavours to hinder the landing of any whom the Prince might send thither; but the hearts of the people were turned against him, his army deserted him, and his counsellors began to think of shifting for themselves, rumours were spread about the town of unintended massacre, and several murthering engines were said to be in the Rose frigate, one of the King's ships then in the harbour. The people hereupon both in

p. 430

town and country gathered together in clubs, and resolved to stand by one another with their lives and fortunes; the wiser and more considerate gentlemen were for letting things go on in the present course, till they should receive orders from England how to behave themselves, but the common people and several gentlemen who were animated with a zeal for the recovery of their ancient liberties, resolved to follow the example of England, and put an end to the arbitrary Government they had so long groaned under. Accordingly, on the 18th of April, 1689, about 8 o'clock in the morning a report was raised at the South End of the town of Boston, that at the North End, the people were all in arms, and the like report was at the North End with respect to the South, whereupon Captain George was immediately seized, and about 9 o'clock the drums beat through the town, and an ensign was set up upon the Beacon; then Mr. Bradstreet, Mr. Dantfort, Major Richards, Dr. Cook, and Mr Addington, were conducted to the Council-House by a company of soldiers under the command of Captain Hill; In the meanwhile, the people seized upon Justice Bullivant, Justice Foxcroft, Mr. Randolph, Sheriff Sherlock, Captain Ravenscroft, Captain White, Farewell, Broadvent, Crafford, Larkin, Smith, and several others, and put them into gaol. They likewise turned out Mercy, the gaol-keeper, and put Skates, the bricklayer, into his place.

 

About noon, the following message was sent by Mr. Oliver and Mr. Eyres to Sir Edmund Andros, who kept himself shut up in the Fort.

 

Inserted here is the text of the broadside 'At The Town-House, Boston, April 18, 1689'

 

p. 432

Sir Edmund did not think fit to obey the gentlemens summons at first, but sent to the frigate for fire-arms, hand-grenadoes, and match, but the boat that was bringing them was seized by the soldiers in the town. After which Mr. John Nelson at the head of the soldiers, demanding the Fort a second time, the Governor came down and surrendered himself and the Fort into their hands, He was first conducted to the Council-House, and afterwards confined with Lieutenant-Colonel Ledgett in the Fort till he was sent home to England, where instead of suffering for the many irregularities of his government, he made a shift to justify his conduct to the mild and gentle administration of King William and Queen Mary, so far as to be intrusted with the government of Virginia in the year 1692, where after some years he died. Mr. Fairweather, Mr. West, Mr. Graham, Mr. Palmer and Captain Tryfoye were imprisoned in the Castle; Mr. Dudley was then out upon the Circuit, but was seized at Major Smith's at Narrhaganset and brought a prisoner to Boston.

 

The whole town of Boston was now in arms, and the country came in so fast that there were 20 companies of soldiers in the town, besides above a thousand at Charles-town, that could not get over the ferry. To this vast concourse of people the gentlemen in the Council-Chamber, who were at the Head of the Revolution, ordered the following Declaration to be read out of the Gallery.

 

Inserted here is the text of the broadside 'The Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Country adjacent, April 18, 1689'

 

p. 442

The Government being thus dissolved, the Gentlemen in the Council-Chamber agreed to call a General Assembly to meet as soon as possible, and in the meantime took the Government into their own hands, under the character of A Committee of Safety. The Assembly met towards the latter end of May, and after many debates what form of Government to set up, they resolved at length to resume their Charter, as appears by the following Declaration, published at Boston, May 24, 1689.

 

Inserted here is the text of the broadside 'At A Convention of the Representatives of the several Towns and Villages of the Massachusetts Colony in New England, May 24, 1689'

 

p. 447

‘Tis hard to determine whether the Assembly was right in this vote; if indeed their Charter had been taken from them without Form of Law they might have resumed it, as the colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island did, but when after a legal Tryal Judgement had been given against them in the Court of Chancery, none but the highest powers in the nation could reverse it, which certainly were not the assembly at Boston, but the parliament of England. 

 

‘Tis certain the Massachusetts Province had hard measure in the loss of their Charter and harder yet in not having it restored at the Revolution but whether they were in the right in attempting to do themselves justice before they had tried all methods for a legal recovery of their Charter, is what I will not venture to affirm; nor was the Assembly itself fully satisfied with their own vote, for when the anniversary election of magistrates for the following year came about, they had not the courage to proceed to a choice, but agreed to let things continue as they were ‘till they should receive directions from the King and Queen of England.

 

In this uncertain state of things, people imagined the Government to be dissolved, and that there was no legal authority to punish them for their crimes, which gave occasion to innumerable disorders, the mob met together in a riotous and tumultuous manner, plundering the favourers of the late Government, and committing robberies in divers places; the poor Indian converts could hardly escape their insults for a party of English attempting to carry off some sheep from a little island near Martha's Vineyard, in the possession of the Indian converts, under pretence of their being stole from them; the inhabitants drove them off the island and to prevent any false impressions that the Governour might receive from the report of this scuffle. The Sachem sent him the following handsome manifesto.

 

Inserted here is the text of the Manifesto

p. 449

But at length a Letter arrived from the King and Queen of England, bearing Date August the 12th, 1689; wherein their Majesties were pleased to testify their Allowance and Approbation of their late Proceedings, and to authorize the present Magistrates to continue the Administration of the publick Affairs... 

 

 

The first printers' proof of the Declaration of Independence – with Thomas Jefferson's inverted commas!

Great story here of how, on the evening of 4 July 1776, John Dunlap's type compositors were hyper-accurate in recreating the handwritten manuscript by Thomas Jefferson, which Charles Thomson had brought to the print shop, reproduced his "double diacriticals" as inverted commas.

Click here for the Library of Congress webinar by Patrick Hastings, Curator, Rare Book and Special Collections Division - jump to 10 minutes in to see the inverted commas.

"The United States of all British America" – 1774

Happy 250th birthday to my friends and readers in the United States of America. It was spring 1775 when the 13 British colonies, meeting together as the Second Continental Congress, first decided to to describe themselves as "United Colonies". That term did the job for almost a year.

Of course, on our side of the Atlantic there was the United Kingdom, the United Provinces of Holland, and the United States of Sweden.

On 2 January 1776,  Stephen Moylan from Cork was George Washington's secretary and is said to have been first to write the term "United States of America" in a letter to Joseph Reed (article about the letter is online here).

However, digitised newspapers make it easy to text-search and to find sources from long ago.

Rev. Edmund Marshall (1730-1797) was the Church of England clergyman of St Peter and St Paul Parish Church in Charing in Kent. He wrote articles about history and current affairs commentary in the Kentish Gazette newspaper, under the name 'Candidus on American Affairs'. Here's an extract from one of his articles which was published on 16 November 1774:

"On the other hand, you have the United States of all British America, a people numerous, warlike, virtuous, firm, sagacious, and, what is more, our own Christian Protestant brethren, descended from the same common stock, and leagued together in the sacred cause of what they esteem their common inheritance, the right of taxing themselves - the basis of liberty."

 

Mark Skousen on "Socrates in the City" podcast - "the Americans are being true to the British Constitution, and the Parliament and King George III are not being true to it"

From 25:50 here:

"there are so many great members of Parliament, obviously Edmund Burke and William Pitt, who really understand that the Americans are right, they are correct, they are in a sense being true to the British Constitution, and the Parliament and King George III are not being true to it..."

From "The New Eclectic History of the United States" (1890) - "governments exist for the benefit of the people, and not for the selfish advantage of their rulers"

The New Eclectic History of the United States (1890) was a standard popular history book, laid out in tiny, punchy stories – not unlike Twitter / X in our era. All of this stuff was once well-known – so much of today is a Nehemiah-like rebuilding of the walls which interim generations have shamefully neglected and allowed to crumble.

.........................

141. Monmouth's Rebels —The Duke of Monmouth rebelled against King James II, and tried to seize the crown. The movement was put down and its leader beheaded, but a cruel vengeance was taken upon all who were suspected of having part in it. Hundreds were sold as servants to work in the tobacco fields of Virginia, and their wealth, with the price paid for them, went to enrich the king's courtiers. But Virginia was more merciful than her sovereign. In 1689 these exiles were set free, and many of them became honored citizens of the colony.

142. Covenanters in New Jersey — King James's persecution of the Covenanters in Scotland led thousands of worthy people to emigrate to New Jersey. Here, instead of being hunted among dens and caves of the mountains, they went to work in peace and security upon fertile fields; schools and churches multiplied, and it was soon said, "There is not a poor body, nor one that wants, in all the colony."'

145 Revolution in England — James II had been King of England only three years when the Whig or liberal party called his son-in-law and daughter, the Prince and Princess of Orange, to take his place on the throne. The accession of William and Mary was hailed with great joy by the people of New England, who hastened to throw off the hated government of Andros and resume all their chartered rights. A new charter, in 1690, made the "Old Colony " of Plymouth a part of Massachusetts, and added to the latter all the country between the eastern boundary of New Hampshire and the St. Lawrence.

149 The English Revolution established the principle that governments exist for the benefit of the people, and not for the selfish advantage of their rulers. It was a long step toward that greater revolution which made the United States independent of Great Britain; but for a time the colonies were subject to a worse despotism than before, namely, that of the English Parliament.

171 King William III was the sworn foe of Louis XIV of France, and their wars were fought out even more fiercely in American forests than on battle-fields in Europe. For here the French had savage* allies, who, falling upon the inland settlements of the English, murdered women, children, and defenseless men, with cruelties which civilized people can hardly imagine.

172. Four distinct wars between the French and English colonies are commonly named as:

King William's War: AD 1689-1697

Queen's Anne's War: AD 1702-1713

King George's War: AD 1744-1748

The Old French and Indian War: 1754-1763

These wars were ended in Europe by treaties of peace, but fighting hardly ceased on this continent at any time within the seventy-four years.

• Available here on Archive.org

* this would of course be expressed very differently today, and this specific term would not be used.

Daniel Hannan (Lord Kingsclere) - 1776 & 1688 "Declarations of Liberty"

I had the immense privilege of an almost front row seat at this event in Belfast just over a week ago. A glimpse of transatlantic liberty delivered impeccably by Daniel Hannan, now Lord Kingslere.

 

I sat there with a mental checklist of all the points I hoped he would make, and he knocked pretty much every one of them out of the park, with precision and skill. And no notes, and no Powerpoint!

Huge credit to all involved for putting together an event of such quality and international vision. The real narrative of 1688-89 is far bigger, and far more important, than we have all been led to believe.

(PS Hannan is wrong about "Scots-Irish" though. Another theme for another day)

Tad Stoermer- "Jefferson made a tactical choice in 1776 to put the blame on a single figure"

American academic Tad Stoermer has been putting out some terrific content over the past few years, almost "iconoclastic" in nature, challenging the usual mythological narratives about the Declaration of Independence. He's rapid-fire and content-rich. 

He's in blistering form in this one, showing that (contrary to what the Declaration said), it was the London Parliament that was the problem, having eroded rights and liberties over the previous 16 years. The election of 1774 made everything worse. Most political leaders in America and Britain knew that.

However, the PR campaign needed a villain, and a simple story... so they pinned it on the King. But the system was the real issue.

As Stoermer says "Jefferson made a tactical choice in 1776 to put the blame on a single figure because the patriots needed a story for two audiences who could not be sold the real one. And that choice worked..."

He also points out how institutional, corporate, history – what he calls in this video liberal nationalism - skews storytelling to comply with the cultural gatekeepers' already-defined orthodoxies. Jump to 5:55 for this section –

"...The distinction between Parliament doing the thing and the King doing the thing is the point, then and now. Pointing the patriots at the King when the problem was Parliament masked the structure of power for people who needed to see it.

Pointing you at Trump when the problem is the regime around Trump is doing the same exact thing. Misdirection then misdirection now. The harm's the same.

Can't fight a problem you've been trained not to see. Think about what got the patriots to independence. Right? It was not their first move. It was not where they started. 

For more than a decade, they tried to work in, with, through, around, and against the imperial system. Petitions, protests, boycotts, congresses, pamphlets, legal arguments, constitutional arguments, appeals to British rights, appeals to the empire's own functioning rules - now, the monarch and the monarchy (notable absences in much of that escalation after 1763). The resistance instead grew through permitted channels, until those channels stopped working and then were shut down altogether.

One of the last straws came when the patriots pinned their hopes on an election. 

The fall 1774 British general election was supposed to change everything. A hostile Parliament and ministry they hoped might be replaced. The Coercive Acts might be reversed. The empire might be pulled back from the edge. That's not what happened. The election returned Lord North and his allies with a working majority and a mandate to enforce the Coercive Acts.

Now for form, the Continental Congress sent the Olive Branch Petition directly to George III a few months later. Now he refused it, but it's not because he woke up that morning with a special hatred of the Colonies, but because by then the King, the ministry, Parliament closed ranks. The British state had chosen coercion and King George backed it because that's what he thought he was supposed to do – back parliament.

Independence was not the patriot's first move. 

It was what was left for many of them after every other move failed..."

• You can subscribe to Tad Stoermer's YouTube channel; his forthcoming book A Resistance History of the United States will be published by Penguin Random House next month.

Theology of Liberty – Richard Watson, Cambridge University: "The Principles of the Revolution Vindicated" (29 May 1776)

The dim thinkers will continue to insist that the American Revolution was about nationality, because they can't understand liberty, and that concepts of liberty might be transatlantic and transnational. You might expect the penny to drop with the line "that all men are created equal"...

There were prominent people in Britain and Ireland who supported the American colonists' cause. They understood, as this sermon title says, that there are circumstances in which revolution was vindicated.

This sermon was preached in the University of Cambridge just six weeks before the Declaration of Independence, and by the most unlikely source – Richard Watson (Wikipedia here) who was King George III's Professor of Divinity. Full text on Archive.org here

The House of Lords, the House of Commons, and the King himself - Watson blasts all of them. An extract here:

“if the Nobility, forgetting the duty they owe the people in return for the rank and distinction they enjoy above the other members of the community, should ever abet the arbitrary designs of the Crown;

if the Commons should become so wholly selfish and corrupt, as to be ready to support any Men and any measures;

if lastly, the King should be so ignorant of his true interest, or so ill advised, as to use such degenerate Parliaments as the tools of a Tyrannic Government;

then we have no doubt in asserting, that the people will have a full right to resume the reins of Government into their own hands, to lop off the rotten gangrened members, and to purge the corruptions of the body politic in any manner they shall think”

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From The Principles of the Revolution Vindicated: A Sermon preached before the University of Cambridge, Wednesday 29 May 1776, by Richard Watson DD FRS, Regius Professor of Divinity and Archdeacon of Ely.

(PS: 'theology of liberty' is not the same as 'liberation theology')

Theology of Liberty – Jacob Duché of Philadelphia: "The Duty of Standing Fast in our Spiritual and Temporal Liberties – A Sermon" (7 July 1775)

Jacob Duché (1737-1798) has a complex story. He was the grandson of Anthony Duché, a French Huguenot refugee who had fled the tyranny of France in 1682; one tradition says that he arrived in America on the same ship as William Penn.

Jacob attended the New London Academy founded by Donegal emigrant Rev Francis Alison, later the College of Philadelphia. Duché was a member of the Sons of Liberty, a brother-in-law to Francis Hopkinson, and was the first Chaplain to the Continental Congress from 6 July 1776. But later that year Duché's patriotic fervour began to waver.

At the height of his career, on 7 July 1775, he preached this sermon in Christ Church in Philadelphia, addressed to His Excellency George Washington Esquire, General and Commander in Chief of all the Forces of the United English Colonies in North America. It's on Google Books here.

Christ Church still exists today; its graveyard was the final resting place for five signers of the Declaration of Independence, and many other renowned historical figures, including John Dunlap the Strabane-born printer of the Declaration.