PART 6: THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

THE TRUE HISTORY OF 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

BY SYDNEY GEORGE FISHER

CHAPTER VII 

THE RIGHTS OF MAN

THE patriot party's definition of a colony as an independent state with its independence guaranteed and protected by the British crown was not then, and never has been, accepted by Great Britain. A protectorate is quite distinct from a colony. 

To the Romans the word colony meant a conquered province, garrisoned and controlled by military authority, governed by officials sent out from Rome, and held as the property of the empire for the benefit and profit of the Roman people, very much as crown colonies are held by England. To the Greeks it meant a separate community, planted by the mother-country, to become almost immediately self-sustaining and independent, and to be assisted at times in its wars by the mother-country. In England the term has usually meant an outlying community of people, completely under the authority of Parliament, with no self-government at all, or with a certain amount of representative or self-government, according to circumstances, but with no view to ultimate independence. 

The American idea was altogether Greek. They had approximated towards it, especially in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and in early times in Massachusetts, before the French were driven from Canada. The moderate patriots were now for independence, but wishing to avoid, if possible, the question of treason and a civil war, and many of them being uncertain as to their ability to stand alone against France and Spain, or their own disunion and sectionalism, they expressed a willingness to have a protectorate from the British crown, in return for which they would assist the king in his wars by voluntarily voting him supplies in their legislative assemblies.* 

* This doubt as to their ability to stand alone, which as time went on turned many patriots into loyalists, is well expressed in a letter from Robert E. Livingston to his son, who had been elected to the Continental Congress of 1775 : "Every good man wishes that America may remain free. In this I heartily join ; at the same time I do not desire that we should be wholly independent of the mother-country. How to reconcile these jarring principles, I confess I am altogether at a loss. The benefit we receive of protection seems to require that we should contribute to the support of the navy if not to the armies of Britain. 7 ' De Lancey's note, Jones, " New York in the Bevolution," vol. i. p. 712.

While in their documents they professed to believe that England was so good and great that she would in the end take their view of the situation, most of them were well aware that there was every probability that she would reject both their definition of a colony and their definition of loyalty. They knew 'the weakness of their argument for entire freedom from Parliament, and they sought for stronger, broader ground, an argument which would in the nature of things justify revolution, or, if you please, rebellion, under certain circumstances. 

I have already intimated that they were much influenced by certain doctrines known as the rights of man. In their pamphlets we find frequent reference to those ideas and also to certain writers who were the exponents of them, Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu, and others. The patriots relied on these doctrines for the right which they now claimed of governing themselves independently of Parliament, with a mere protectorate from the British crown. Two years later they relied on the same doctrines for breaking off all relations with Great Britain and establishing absolute independence.

Those books and doctrines were very remarkable literature. Two of them alone, Locke's and Burlamaqui's small volumes, wrought as much harm to the cause of the British empire as the efforts of some of the patriot leaders. Beginning with Grotius, who was born in 1583, and ending with Montesquieu, who died in 1755, the writers mentioned covered a period of about two hundred years of political investigation, thought, and experience. In fact, they covered the period since the Reformation. They represented the effect of the Reformation on political thought. They represented also all those nations whose opinions on such subjects were worth anything. Grotius was a Dutchman, Puffendorf a German, Locke an Englishman, Burlamaqui an Italian Swiss, and Montesquieu a Frenchman.

Hooker, who lived from 1553 to 1600, and whom Locke cites so freely, might be included in the number, and that would make the period quite two hundred years. Hooker, in his "Ecclesiastical Polity," declared very emphatically that governments could not be legitimate unless they rested on the consent of the governed. Locke enlarged and drew out this thought so liberally that the prevailing party in England before the revolution of 1688 thought it necessary to exile him.

There were, of course, other minor writers; and the colonists relied upon them all ; but seldom troubled themselves to read the works of the earlier ones, or to read Hutchinson, Clarke, and other followers of that school, because Locke, Burlamaqui, and Beecaria had summarized them all and brought them down to date. Burlamaqui's book was particularly remarkable. To this day any one going to the Philadelphia Library, and asking for No. 77, can take in his hands the identical, well-worn volume which delegates to the Congress and many an unsettled Philadelphian read with earnest, anxious minds. It was among the first books that the library had obtained ; and perhaps the most important and effective book it has ever owned.* 

* The colonists were also fond of reading Montesquieu's " Spirit of the Laws, " but more in after years when they were framing their constitutions. He dealt more with the details of governmental administration, the legislative, executive, and judicial departments. Burlamaqui confined himself exclusively to the fundamental principles of political liberty and independence.

The rebellious colonists also read Locke's " Two Treatises on Government" with much profit and satisfaction to themselves. Locke was an extreme Whig, an English revolutionist of the school of 1688. Before that great event, he had been unendurable to the royalists, who were in power, and had been obliged to spend a large part of his time on the continent. In the preface to his "Two Treatises," he says that they will show how entirely legitimate is the title of William III. to the throne, because it is established on the consent of the people. That . is the burden of his whole argument, the consent of the people as the only true foundation of government. That principle sank so deep into the minds of the patriot colonists that it was the foundation of all their political thought, and became an essentially American idea.

Beccaria, who, like Burlamaqui, was an Italian, also exercised great influence on the colonists. His famous book, " Crimes and Punishments," was also a short, concise, but very eloquent volume. It caused a great stir in the world. The translation circulated in America had added to it a characteristic commentary by Voltaire. Beccaria, though not writing directly on the subject of liberty, necessarily included that subject, because he dealt with the administration of the criminal law. His plea for more humane and just punishments, and for punishments more in proportion to the offense, found a ready sympathy among the Americans, who had already revolted in disgust from the brutality and extravagant cruelty of the English criminal code.

But Beccaria also stated most beautifully and clearly the essential principles of liberty. His foundation doctrine, that " every act of authority of one man over another for which there is not absolute necessity is tyrannical," made a most profound impression in America. He laid down also the principle that " in every human society there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the highest power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery." That sentence became the lifelong guide of many Americans. It became a constituent part of the minds of Jefferson and Hamilton. It can be seen as the foundation, the connecting strand, running all through the essays of the Federalist. It was the inspiration of the " checks and balances" in the national Constitution. It can be traced in American thought and legislation down to the present time.

Burlamaqui's book, devoted exclusively to the subject of liberty and independence, is still one of the best expositions of the true doctrines of natural law, or the rights of man. He belonged to a Protestant family that had once lived at Lucca, Italy; but had been compelled, like the family of Turretini, and many others, to take refuge in Switzerland. He became a professor at Geneva, which gave him the reputation of a learned man. He also became a counsellor of state and was noted for his practical sagacity

He had intended to write a great work in many volumes on the subject to which he had devoted so much of his life, "The Principles of Natural Law," as it was then called. Ill health preventing such a huge task, he prepared a single volume, which he said was only for beginners and students, because it dealt with the bare elements of the science in the simplest and plainest language.

This little book was translated into English in 1748, and contained only three hundred pages ; but in that small space of large, clear type, Burlamaqui compressed everything that the patriot colonists wanted to know. He was remarkably clear and concise, and gave the Americans the qualities of the Italian mind at its best. He aroused them by his modern glowing thought and his enthusiasm for progress and liberty. His handy little volume was vastly more effective and far-reaching than would have been the blunderbuss he had intended to load to the muzzle.

If we examine the volumes of Burlamaqui's predecessors, Grotius, Puffendorf, and the others, we find their statements about natural law and the rights of man rather brief, vague and general, as is usual with the old writers on any science. Burlamaqui brought them down to date, developed their principles, and swept in the results of all the thought and criticism since their day.

The term natural law, which all these writers used, has long since gone out of fashion. They used it because, inspired by the Reformation, they were struggling to get away from the arbitrary system, the artificial scholasticism, the despotism of the middle ages. They were seeking to obtain for law and government a foundation which should grow out of the nature of things, the common facts of life that everybody understood. They sought a system that, being natural, would become established and eternal like nature ; a system that would displace that thing of the middle ages which they detested, and called " arbitrary institution."

Let us, they said, contemplate for a time man as he is in himself, the natural man, his wants and requirements. 

"The only way," said Burlamaqui, "to attain to the knowledge of that natural law is to consider attentively the nature and constitution of man, the relations he has to the heings that surround him, and the states from thence resulting. In fact, the very term of natural law and the notion we have given of it, show that the principles of this science must he taken from the very nature and constitution of man." "Principles of Natural Law," p. 156.

Men naturally, he said, draw together to form societies for mutual protection and advantage. Their natural state is a state of union and society, and these societies are merely for the common advantage of all of the members. 

This was certainly a very simple proposition, but it had required centuries to bring men's minds back to it ; and it was not altogether safe to put forth because it implied that each community existed for the benefit of itself, for the benefit of its members, and not for the benefit of a prince or another nation, or for the church, or for an empire.

It was a principle quickly seized upon by the Americans as soon as their difficulties began in 1765. In their early debates and discussions we hear a great deal about a " state of nature," which at first seems rather meaningless to us. But it was merely their attempt to apply to themselves the fundamental principles of the Reformation. Were the colonies by the exaction's and remodeling of the mother country thrown into the "state of nature," where they could reorganize society afresh, on the basis of their own advantage ? How much severity or how much oppression or dissatisfaction would bring about this state of nature? "Was there any positive rule by which you could decide? Patrick Henry, who was always very eloquent on the subject, declared that the boundary had been passed; that the colonies were in a state of nature.

Any one who is at all familiar with the trend of thought for the last hundred years can readily see how closely this idea of going back to natural causes and first conceptions for the discovery of political principles is allied to every kind of modern progress ; to the modern study of natural history, the study of the plants and animals in their natural environment, instead of by preconceived scholastic theories ; the study of the human body by dissection instead of by supposition ; the study of heat, light, electricity, the soil, the rocks, the ocean, the stars by actual observation, without regard to what the Scriptures and learned commentators had to say. 

A large part of the American colonists were very far advanced in all the ideas of the Reformation. Burlamaqui's book, applying in clear every-day language these free and wonderful principles to politics and government, came to a large section of them as the most soul-stirring and mind-arousing message they had ever heard. It has all become trite enough to us ; but to them it was fresh and marvellous. Their imaginations seized on it with the indomitable energy and passion which the climate inspired, and some who breathed the air of Virginia and Massachusetts were on fire with enthusiasm. 

" This state of nature," argued Burlamaqui, " is not the work of man, but established by divine institution." 

"Natural society is a state of equality and liberty ; a state in which all men enjoy the same prerogatives, and an entire independence on any other power "but God. Por every man is naturally master of himself, and equal to his fellow-creatures so long as he does not subject himself to another person's authority by a particular convention." " Principles of Natural Law,' 7 p. 38. 

Here we find coupled with liberty that word equality which played such a tremendous part in history for the succeeding hundred years. And we must bear in mind that what the people of that time meant by it was political equality, equality of rights, equality before the law and the government ; and not equality of ability, talents, fortune, or gifts, as some have fancied. 

Burlamaqui not only found liberty, independence, and equality growing out of nature herself; but he argued that all this was part of the divine plan, the great order of nature and the universe. Indeed, that was what he and his Reformation predecessors had set out to discover, to unravel the system of humanity, to see if there really was a system that could be gathered from the actual plain facts ; and to see also if there was a unity and completeness in this system. 

" The human understanding," he says, " is naturally right, and has within itself a strength sufficient to arrive at the knowledge of truth, and to distinguish it from error." That he announces as the fundamental principle of his book, "the hinge whereon the whole system of humanity turns," and it was simply his way of restating the great doctrine of the Reformation, .the right of private judgment. 

But he goes on to enlarge on it in a way particularly pleasing to the patriot colonists, for he says we have this power to decide for ourselves, " especially in things wherein our respective duties are concerned." 

" Yes," said the colonists ; " we have often thought that we were the best judges of all our own affairs." 

" Those who feel," said Franklin, in his examination before Parliament, " can best judge." 

The daring Burlamaqui went on to show that liberty instead of being, as some supposed, a privilege to be graciously accorded, was in reality a universal right, inherent in the nature of things.

"Let us consider the system of humanity, either in general or particular, we shall find that the whole is built upon this principle, reflections, deliberations, researches, actions, judgments ; all suppose the use of liberty." " Principles of Natural Law,' 7 p. 25.

Then appears that idea common to the great leaders of thought in that age, that man's true purpose in the world is the pursuit of happiness. To this pursuit, they said, every human being has a complete right. It was part of liberty ; a necessary consequence of liberty, This principle of the right to pursue happiness, which is merely another way of stating the right of self-development, has played as great a part in subsequent history as equality. It is one of the foundation principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is given there as the ground-work of the right of revolution, the right of a people to throw off or destroy a power which interferes with this great pursuit, " and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." 

It has been interpreted in all sorts of ways, as the right to improve your condition, to develop your talents, to grow rich, or to rise into the class of society above you. It is now in its broadest meaning so axiomatic in this country that Americans can hardly realize that it was ever disputed. 

But it was, and still is, disputed in England and on the continent. Even so liberal a man as Kingsley resented with indignation the charge that he favored the aspiration of the lower classes to change their condition. Once a cobbler, remain a cobbler, and be content to be a good cobbler. In other words, the righteousness which lie so loudly professed was intended to exalt certain fortunate individuals, and not to advance society.

This desire and pursuit of happiness being part of nature, or part of the system of Providence, and as essential to every man and as inseparable from him as his reason, it should be freely allowed him, and not repressed. This, Burlamaqui declares, is a great principle, " the key of the human system," opening to vast consequences for the world.

The consequences have certainly been vast, vaster far than he dreamed of. Millions of people now live their daily life under the shadow of this doctrine. Millions have fled to us from Europe to seek its protection. Not only the whole American system of laws, but whole philosophies and codes of conduct have grown up under it. The abolitionists appealed to it, and freed six millions of slaves. The transcendental philosophy of New England, that extreme and beautiful attempt to develop conscience, nobility, and character from within ; that call of the great writers like Lowell to every humble individual to stand by his own personality, fear it not, advance it by its own lines ; even our education, the elective system of our colleges, all these things have followed under that "pursuit of happiness" which the rebel colonists seized upon so gladly in 1765 and enshrined in their Declaration of Independence in 1776.

They found in the principles of natural law how government, civil society, or " sovereignty" as those writers were apt to call it, was to be built up and regulated. Civil government did not destroy natural rights and the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, it was intended to give these rights greater security and a fresh force and efficiency. That was the purpose men had in coming together to form a civil society for the benefit of all, that was the reason, as Burlamaqui put it, that " the sovereign became the depository, as it were, of the will and strength of each individual." 

This seemed very satisfactory to some of the colonists.You choose your sovereign, your government, for yourself, and make it your mere depository or agent. Then as to the nature of government, the right to govern, they were very much pleased to find that the only right there was of this sort was the right of each community to govern itself. Government by outside power was absolutely indefensible, because the notion that there was a divine right in one set of people to rule over others was exploded nonsense, and the assertion that mere might or superior power necessarily gave such right was equally indefensible. There remained only one plausible reason, and that was that superior excellence, wisdom, or ability might possibly give such right.

As to this "superior excellence" theory, if you admitted it you denied man's inherent right to liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness ; you denied his moral accountability and responsibility; you crippled his independent development, his self-development, his individual action; in a word, you destroyed the whole natural system. 

Because a man is inferior to another is no reason why he should surrender his liberty, his accountability, his chance for self-development, to the superior. We do not surrender our property to the next man who is an abler business manager. Our inferiority does not give him a right over us. On the contrary, the inferiority of the inferior man is an additional reason why he should cling to all those rights of nature which have been given to him, that he may have wherewithal to raise himself, and be alone accountable for himself. Or, as Burlamaqui briefly summarized it.

"The knowledge I have of the excellency of a superior does not alone afford me a motive sufficient to subject myself to him, and to Induce me to abandon my own will in order to take his for my rule ; . . . and without any reproach of conscience I may sincerely judge that the intelligent principle within mo is sufficient to direct my conduct" "Principles of Natural Law," p. 86. :

Moral obligation, moral responsibility, codes, conduct, life, happiness, development, and progress, he again shows, grow out of this right of private judgment, this right of individualism, the great protestant principle, which within the last one hundred and fifty years has brought such vast advancement and comfort to all nations that have adopted it.

No one has a natural inherent right to command or to exercise dominion. It is merely a privilege which may be granted by the people. They alone have inherent inalienable rights ; and they alone can confer the privilege of commanding. It had been supposed that the sovereign alone had rights, and the people only privileges. But here were Burlamaqui, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Locke, and fully half the American colonists, undertaking to reverse this order and announcing that the people alone had rights, and the sovereign merely privileges.

True sovereignty was then, in a word, a superior and wise power accepted as such by reason ; or, as the Americans afterwards translated it in their documents, " a just government exists only by consent of the governed/' All men being born politically equal, the colonies, as Dickinson and Hamilton explained, are equally with Great Britain entitled to happiness, equally entitled to govern themselves, equally entitled to freedom and independence.* 
* "Dickinson's "Works," vol. i. p. 202.
It is curious to see the cautious, careful way in which some of the colonists applied these doctrines by mixing them up with their loyalty arguments. This is very noticeable in the pamphlets written by Alexander Hamilton. He gives the stock arguments for redress of grievances, freedom from internal taxation, government by the king alone, and will not admit that he is anything but a loyal subject. At the same time there runs through all he says an undercurrent of strong rebellion which leads to his ultimate object. "The power," he says, " which one society bestows upon any man or body of men can never extend beyond its own limits."

This he lays down as a universal truth, independently of charters and the wonderful British Constitution. It applied to the whole world. Parliament was elected by the people of England, therefore it had no authority outside of the British isle. That British isle and America were separate societies.  

"Nature," said Hamilton, " has distributed an equality of rights to every man." How then, he asked, can the English people have any rights over life, liberty, or property in America. They can have authority only among themselves in England. We are separated from Great Britain, Hamilton argued, not only by the ocean, by geography, but because we have no part or share in governing her. Therefore, as we have no share in governing her, she, by the law of nature, can have no share in governing us ; she is a separate society.

The British, he said, were attempting to involve in the idea of a colony the idea of political slavery, and against that a man must fight with his life. To be controlled by the superior wisdom of another nation was ridiculous, unworthy of the consideration of manhood ; and at this point he used that sentence which has so often been quoted, " Deplorable is the condition of that people who have nothing else than the wisdom and justice of another to depend upon." * 
* "Works, Lodge edition, vol. i. p. 70. 
Charters and documents, he declared, must yield to natural law and the rights of man.

" The sacred rights of man are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of divinity itself and can never be erased by mortal power.".

The Declaration of Independence was an epitome of these doctrines of natural law applied to the colonies. The Declaration of Independence originated in those doctrines, and not in the mind of Jefferson, as so many people have absurdly supposed. In order to see how directly the Declaration was an outcome of these teachings, we have only to read its opening paragraphs.

 "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 

" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal  that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 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, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ; and, accordingly, all experience hath, shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

By understanding the writings of Burlamaqui, Locke, and Beccaria, which the colonists were studying so intently, we know the origin of the Declaration, and need not flounder in the dark, as so many writers have done, wondering where it came from, or how it was that Jefferson could have invented it. Being unwilling to take the trouble of examining carefully the influences which preceded the Declaration, historical students are sometimes surprised to find a document like the Virginia Bill of Rights or the supposed Mecklenburg resolutions,* issued before the Declaration and yet containing the same principles. They instantly jump to the conclusion that here is the real origin and author of the Declaration, and from this Jefferson stole his ideas.
* Magazine of American History, vol. xxi. pp. 31, 221.
Jefferson drafted the Declaration ; but neither he, John Adams, Franklin, Sherman, nor Livingston, who composed the committee which was responsible for it, ever claimed any originality for its principles. They were merely stating principles which were already familiar to the people, so familiar that they stated them somewhat carelessly and took too much for granted. It would have been better, instead of saying, "all men are created equal," that they had said all men are created politically equal, which was what they meant, and what every one at that time understood. By leaving out the word politically they gave an opportunity to a generation unfamiliar with the doctrines of natural law to suppose that they meant that all men are created, or should be made, equal in conditions, opportunities, or talents.

British writers, and some Americans, anxious to secure the favorable regard of Englishmen, have in recent years been fond of asserting that the patriot colonists took their ideas of liberty and the principles of the Declaration of Independence from the writings of Rousseau. But after reading hundreds of pamphlets and arguments of the Revolutionary period, I cannot find Rousseau or any French writer of his sort cited with approval by any of the colonists. They confine themselves entirely to the school of writers already mentioned.

In the pamphlets written by loyalists there is no charge that the colonists were influenced by Rousseau. Peter Van Schaack, the loyalist whose memoirs and letters have come down to us, followed the arguments of the patriot portion of the colonists very closely. He notes the books which they were reading and which influenced them. He would have been very quick to notice and comment on Rousseau, if the colonists had been reading him. But he nowhere mentions such influence.* 
* In the " Address of the People of Great Britain to the Inhabitants of America," published in London in 1775, the author complains that the colonists are influenced by Montesquieu, and wishes that they would study, instead, the condition of the Greek states in the Peloponnesian War. In " A Letter from a Veteran to the Officers of the Army," published in 1774, the author, a very stout Tory, says that the colonists were too much influenced by Locke and Harrington. There is no mention of Rousseau. See, also, "The Constitutional Eight of the Legislature of Great Britain to tax the British Colonies," p. vii., London, 1768. Few Englishmen studied the colonies more closely than Dean Tucker, and he would have quickly commented on any influence from Rousseau. In Cui Bono," p. 20, he says, " The great grievance of the colonies and their bitter complaints against the mother-country were that they were not governed a la monsr Locke : for to give them their due they hardly made any objection to anything besides. ' ' The authorities the patriot colonists relied on and their way of citing them are well exhibited in Dickinson's " Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain," pp. 43, 44, 56, 76, 81, 101, 102, 106, etc. See, also, : { Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament," pp. 3, 5, 9, etc., Philadelphia, 1774; Works of John Adams, vol. ii. p. 388.
Writers who are out of sympathy with American ideas very naturally want to fasten the influence of Rousseau upon us ; and connect our principles in some way with the horrors of the French revolution. Rousseau was an immoral, eccentric, and violent man, and his view of liberty colonists seem to have been totally uninfluenced by these Frenchmen, who were carrying liberty to a ridiculous extreme in their attack on the corrupt and loathsome social system of France. The Americans, on the other hand, had no such problem to deal with. They had nothing against their own social system. On the contrary, they liked it so well that they were*' fighting for the independence of it.

TO BE CONTINUED...