Philosophical Foundations of the American Revolution

An Instance of American Loyalty

1777 → 1776

In November 1777, Thomas Hutchinson, once the king's governor of Massachusetts, was living in exile in London. His hostess asked if he wanted to see “an instance of American loyalty.”

Thomas Hutchinson · diary, 22 November 1777 The nose is wounded and defaced, but the gilding remains fair;

It was the head of King George the Third, from a statue that a crowd in New York had pulled down in July 1776.

Six years earlier, New York had put up that same statue to thank the king. In those six years, many colonists stopped loving their king, and they turned to new ideas to justify the break.

Faithful Subjects

1770 → 1775 → 1774

New York's assembly had ordered the statue in 1766, the year Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. Colonists blamed Parliament for the taxes and trusted the king to protect their rights.

After the fighting at Lexington and Concord, a young Black minuteman named Lemuel Haynes marched to the camps outside Boston. He had been an indentured servant until age twenty-one, so he had been free for less than a year.

By July 1775, the Second Continental Congress had an army fighting the king's troops. Yet it sent him the Olive Branch Petition, written by Pennsylvania's John Dickinson, pledging loyalty and asking for peace:

John Dickinson · Congress's petition, July 1775 That your Majesty may enjoy a long and prosperous reign, and that your descendants may govern your dominions with honor to themselves and happiness to their subjects, is our sincere and fervent prayer.

In August 1775, before the petition was even formally delivered, King George proclaimed the colonies in open rebellion. He never answered the petition, and in December, Parliament cut off all trade with the colonies.

In October 1775, British warships burned the town of Falmouth, today's Portland, Maine.

In November 1775, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Randolph, a relative who had sided with the king and sailed for England:

Thomas Jefferson · letter, 29 November 1775 there is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a Union with Gr. Britain than I do.

Thomas Jefferson But by the god that made me I will cease to exist before I yeild to a connection on such terms as the British parliament propose

The Nobody

1774–1776

Thomas Paine had arrived in Philadelphia from England in late 1774, carrying a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. In England, he had failed as a corset maker, a tax collector and a shopkeeper.

In January 1776, the king's October speech to Parliament reached Philadelphia.

King George III The rebellious war now levied is become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent Empire.

Congress still denied that it wanted independence. That same week, Paine published a pamphlet demanding it, called Common Sense. Earlier protests had blamed Parliament and the king's ministers. Common Sense attacked the king, and the very idea of having one.

Thomas Paine There is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

During the Great Awakening, many colonists had learned to question the authority of established churches and their ministers. Now Paine used the Bible itself against kings:

Thomas Paine That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the scripture is false.

Thomas Paine One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is, that nature disapproves it,

Thomas Paine otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.

Paine argued that birth gave no one the right to rule.

Paine said what should take the king's place:

Thomas Paine in America THE LAW IS KING.

Historians call this idea republicanism: power comes from the people and the representatives they elect, and no one rules by birth.

Choose the argument that reaches beyond the rights of Englishmen.

Thomas Paine A government of our own is our natural right:

In 1765, colonists had claimed the rights of Englishmen. Now Paine claimed natural rights, which belonged to all people, English or not.

Read It Aloud

1776

Paine wrote in plain language for ordinary readers, and Americans read Common Sense aloud in clubs, in schools and even from a pulpit.

In Massachusetts, Abigail Adams read the pamphlet while her husband, John, served in Congress.

Abigail Adams I am charmed with the Sentiments of Common Sense;

Not everyone agreed. Charles Inglis, an Anglican minister in New York, wrote for the Loyalists, colonists who stayed loyal to the king.

Charles Inglis Limited monarchy is the form of government which is most favourable to liberty—which is best adapted to the genius and temper of Britons;

Historians estimate that about one in five colonists sided with Britain.

Still, the pamphlet spread fast. Outside Boston, General Washington praised its “sound doctrine, and unanswerable reasoning.” By April, Paine claimed one hundred and twenty thousand copies, a number that no surviving records can confirm.

In taverns like this one, readers met Paine's charge that the king had stirred up Native nations and enslaved people against the colonists. The liberty he promised did not clearly include them.

To one listener, independence meant self-government. To a storekeeper who traded with Britain, it could mean losing his customers.

A Sentence Too Large

June 1776

On June 7, 1776, Virginia's Richard Henry Lee moved that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” Congress put off the vote until July, and a committee of five chose Thomas Jefferson to draft a declaration. His job was to explain a decision that Congress had not yet made.

In his rented rooms in Philadelphia, Jefferson was not alone. Robert Hemings, a teenager whom Jefferson enslaved, was there to serve him.

Thomas Jefferson · June 1776 draft that all men are created equal & independant,

Thomas Jefferson · June 1776 draft that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;

These were natural rights, which people had simply because they were human, not because they were English. A government could violate those rights, but it had not created them.

Jefferson drew on the Enlightenment, and especially on the English philosopher John Locke. Locke had written that people are by nature “free, equal, and independent,” and that no one can be ruled without his own consent. Under this social contract, power came from the consent of the governed, not from a divine right that God gave to kings.

In June, Virginia's Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason, promised natural rights, but the convention added a condition: when they enter into a state of society, The phrase let slaveholders argue that enslaved people stood outside that promise.

In the draft, “sacred and undeniable” became “self-evident,” truths that any reasoning person could see. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Jefferson leaned toward Deism, the belief that a Creator made the world to run by natural laws.

Suppose a ruler keeps seizing property and shutting down your elected assembly. Choose what the people may do.

Thomas Jefferson whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it,

Jefferson's sentence had room for Robert Hemings, but the law did not. By law, Hemings belonged to the man who wrote it.

Silence Would Be Guilt

July 1776

On July 1, 1776, John Dickinson, who had written the Olive Branch Petition, rose in Congress to argue against independence. He expected the speech to ruin his popularity, but he believed he had to give it:

John Dickinson Silence would be guilt.

He argued that the colonies should first form a confederation and win foreign allies, or they would face the British Empire alone. He was already leading the committee that drafted the Articles of Confederation. Fearing power like the king's, Congress kept that government weak.

On July 2, Dickinson stayed away, and without his vote, Pennsylvania's delegates voted for independence. That day, twelve colonies approved Lee's resolution. New York's delegates abstained while they waited for instructions from home.

He Has

July 1776

From July 2 to July 4, Congress edited Jefferson's draft line by line while he sat and watched.

The Declaration had three parts: a preamble on rights, a list of grievances against the king, and a declaration of independence. This time the colonists blamed the king himself. The Declaration never mentioned Parliament by name.

Open each accusation and ask whose freedom it defended. Most grievances traced back to Britain's tighter control after 1763: taxes, troops in peacetime, and limits on western land. The tax grievance defended colonists' freedom. The charge of “domestic insurrections” cast enslaved people seeking freedom as a threat. Congress's insult for Native nations hid why many sided with Britain: since 1763, Britain had tried to keep settlers off their land.

In his draft, Jefferson had blamed the king for the Atlantic slave trade:

Jefferson · draft, June 1776 he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him,

The man who wrote that line enslaved people himself, including the teenager in his rooms. The same passage also attacked the king for offering freedom to enslaved people who fought for Britain. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, Virginia's royal governor, had promised freedom to enslaved men who escaped rebel owners and joined his forces.

Congress cut the whole passage. What disappeared was an accusation against the king, not a plan to free anyone.

In 1821, Jefferson recalled that Congress cut it to please South Carolina and Georgia, and to spare Northern delegates whose merchants had shipped enslaved people.

On July 4, 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

Melted Majesty

July 1776–November 1777 · c.1776 essay

On July 9, in New York, Washington's Continental Army, dug in to defend the city, heard the Declaration read aloud.

A Continental officer · reads the Declaration to the brigade · July 9, 1776 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, …

That night, soldiers and townspeople pulled down the king's statue at Bowling Green.

Patriots carted much of the lead to Litchfield, Connecticut, where women and girls turned it into 42,088 musket cartridges.

The king's head went to Fort Washington, on Manhattan. After the British took the fort in November 1776, an officer shipped it to England. That is how Hutchinson came to see it in London. He never saw Massachusetts again.

Colonists stopped loving their king once they decided that power belonged to the people. That left a harder question: who counted as the people.

Lemuel Haynes, the Black minuteman who had marched to Boston in 1775, gave his own answer in an essay around 1776. He opened it with the Declaration's own words, but the essay went unpublished until 1983.

Lemuel Haynes · essay, c.1776 Even an affrican, has Equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen.

In 1777, Black petitioners in Massachusetts, led by Prince Hall, asked the legislature for freedom in the same language of natural rights.

In 1848, women's rights activists at Seneca Falls, New York, rewrote it to say that “all men and women are created equal.” Congress stopped editing the Declaration on July 4, 1776. Americans never did.