FORERUNNERS OF THE NATION

SAMUEL ADAMS AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

American civil liberty and American political institutions began wherever English civil liberty and English political institutions began. If that be, as many think and teach, in the well-watered forests of the North German plain, so be it. If it be on the soil of England itself and at the impulse of those traits which we call Anglo-Saxon, well and good. If it be in the conflict between Anglo-Saxon and Norman traditions and influences and their ultimate merging, equally well and good. Wherever English civil liberty began, there American civil liberty and American political institutions had their origin. Magna Carta and the rise of the power of Parliament are part of American history. The Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights applied to and directly affected the inhabitants of the American colonies. By general consent, and by explicit provision in some of the earliest state constitutions, the common law of England was incorporated as part of American law. It must be remembered that the American colonies were English institutions worked for the most part by Englishmen, although under new conditions, and that they cannot possibly be

understood without a knowledge of the British imperial system, of which they were so essential a

part.

When, then, does the history of the new American nation begin? It begins at that indefinite and indeterminable point about the middle of the eighteenth century when the restlessness under distant British authority which had often given evidence of its existence became sufficiently wide-spread and sufficiently self-conscious to contemplate and to discuss revolt, and when the differences between the several colonies and their conflicting interests were overborne by a consciousness of a common interest and a common aim. It would be an error to suppose that this restlessness passed into revolt because of any single specific act on the part of the British Government, or because of any systematic oppression to which the colonies were subjected. As a matter of fact, it was the freest part of the British Empire which revolted against the authority of Parliament. We owe to the ripe scholarship and fair-mindedness of a distinguished American scholar, the late Professor Herbert L. Osgood, the best key to a knowledge of what really happened. Professor Osgood makes it quite plain that the supporters of national independence in America advocated it as an end in itself, and that no great fundamental question affecting civil or political liberty was involved. "It would be foolish to assert," he says,

"that the citizen of the United States to-day enjoys a greater degree of liberty than the subject of the crown either in England or Canada. It would be hazardous to maintain that the progress of liberty in England itself was aided to any important degree by the revolt of the colonies.” 1

The truth is that the controversies which arose between the colonies and the British Government were episodes and incidents in the life of the British imperial system, modified, strengthened, and directed by peculiar geographic and economic causes. They cannot otherwise be fully understood. The colonists came to object to a control over them that was exercised from so great a distance, quite apart from the incidents of that control. When once this feeling took root, every incident, whether in itself significant or insignificant, added strength to it. The desire for separation grew by what it fed on. It is a fair subject of discussion, however, whether the colonists did not fare better just because of their distance from Westminster. Had they been nearer and more in evidence they might readily have been treated with greater severity. Moreover, the changes and chances of English politics at home were directly reflected in the sentiments and the interests of the colonies. To be sure George III was never anything but George III; but Walpole and the elder Pitt were quite different persons from Lord 1 Political Science Quarterly, 1887, II, 441.

Bute and Lord North, who followed them. No less a person than Chief Justice Marshall, however, is authority for the statement that "at no period of time was the attachment of the colonists to the mother country more strong, or more general," than in 1763, when the definitive articles of the treaty which restored peace to Great Britain, France, and Spain were signed.1

It is only thirteen years from this date to the Declaration of Independence, and clearly events must have moved rapidly to have brought about so great a change within so short a time. Perhaps the very spirit which had carried British arms and British prestige to great heights, both on the continent of North America and on the distant plains of India, had something to do with what followed. Doubtless the logic of the colonial system, with its doctrine of the economic dependence of colonies, had still more. Some place must be found, however, for the stirring in America of those very same ideas which, English in origin, had been carried to France, largely no doubt by Voltaire's Lettres sur les Anglais, and which were at that very moment building the path that was to lead to the French Revolution. The commanding influence of John Locke in all this must never be overlooked. If the voices of James Otis and of Patrick Henry were voices of political discontent and revolt, those of Samuel Adams and 1 Marshall, John, Life of George Washington (Philadelphia, 1804), II, 72.

of Thomas Jefferson were also voices of a more or less well-defined political philosophy.

It is important to be clear about the constitutional aspects of the American Revolution, for it was a real revolution. Legally and practically the supremacy of both crown and Parliament over the colonies was complete. Control and supervision of them were exercised in all departments of governmental activity. The colonies were founded when the monarchy was absolute. As Parliament increased its authority and widened the area of its control, colonial affairs naturally passed from crown to Parliament. With the revolution of 1688 the Tudor and Stuart theory of a kingship by divine right disappeared and something very like a contract or compact between crown and Parliament took its place. As Parliament increased its control at home it naturally tended to increase its control in more distant parts of the empire. For a long period the American colonies had been governed in spasms of alternating interest and neglect. It was Lord Clarendon who first comprehended the importance of colonial administration and sought to put it on a sound and orderly basis. As a matter of fact, the colonies had enjoyed exceptional liberty in such vitally important matters as local government, taxation, and organisation and control of the militia. Social life in the colonies, developing freely at a great distance from England, for many reasons became