That this was the issue, for thoughtful and informed people, on which decisions of loyalty to the government turned is nowhere so clearly and sensitively revealed as in the record Peter Van Schaack left of his tormented meditations of January, 1776. A wellborn, scholarly, and articulate New Yorker of 29 who prepared himself for deciding the question of his personal loyalty by undertaking in seclusion a critical examination of the works of Locke, Vattel, Montesquieu, Grotius, Beccaria, and Pufendorf, he noted first his fear of the destructive consequences of conceding Parliament’s right to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. That danger, he wrote, was perfectly clear. “But my difficulty arises from this,” he said:
that taking the whole of the acts complained of together, they do not, I think, manifest a system of slavery, but may fairly be imputed to human frailty and the difficulty of the subject. Most of them seem to have sprung out of particular occasions, and are unconnected with each other … In short, I think those acts may have been passed without a preconcerted plan of enslaving us, and it appears to me that the more favorable construction ought ever to be put on the conduct of our rulers. I cannot therefore think the government dissolved; and as long as the society lasts, the power that every individual gave the society when he entered into it, can never revert to the individual again but will always remain in the community.* [footnote:]* Locke.9
All of this, however, forms but one side of the role of conspiratorial thinking in the advent of the Revolution. There is an obverse to this that is of great importance, though, since in the end it was not in itself determinative of events, it has of necessity been neglected in the chapter above.
The opponents of the Revolution — the administration itself — were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspiratorial designs. Officials in the colonies, and their superiors in England, were persuaded as the crisis deepened that they were confronted by an active conspiracy of intriguing men whose professions masked their true intentions. As early as 1760 Governor Bernard of Massachusetts had concluded that a “faction” had organized a conspiracy against the customs administration, and by the end of the decade he and others in similar positions (including that “arch-conspirator” Thomas Hutchinson) had little doubt that at the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority and force a rupture between England and her colonies.10
The charge was quickly echoed in England. The Massachusetts Convention of 1768 elicited from the House of Lords resolutions based on the belief that “wicked and designing men” in the colonies were “evidently manifesting a design … to set up a new and unconstitutional authority independent of the crown of England.”11 Such dangerous charges, tantamount to treason but objectively indistinguishable from faction — which was itself, in eighteenth-century terms, merely the superlative form of party12 — had been a source of concern in the colonies since the start of the controversy. Under Grenville, Arthur Lee wrote, “every expression of discontent … was imputed to a desire in those colonies to dissolve all connection with Britain; every tumult here was inflamed into rebellion.” The fear that colonial leaders nursed secret ambitions that they masked, with greater or lesser success, by continuing professions of loyalty grew as the crisis deepened. If in 1771 Hutchinson, an equal with his arch-enemies the Adamses in detecting secret purposes behind open professions, could report with relief that “the faction in this province against the government is dying,” he still felt it necessary to add “but it dies hard.” After the Tea Party such cautious optimism faded, and officials confirmed once and for all their belief that malevolent factions were implacably at work seeking to satisfy hidden ambitions and to destroy the ties to England.13
Such charges were commonly heard: among crown officials, at every level; but also in other circles — among Tories, such as those in inland Worcester, Massachusetts, who defied the majority, and the leadership, of the Town Meeting, and published a denunciation of “the artful, crafty, and insidious practices of some evil-minded and ill-disposed persons who … intend to reduce all things to a state of tumult, discord, and confusion.” The committees of correspondence, they declared, had been the illegal creations of “a junto to serve particular designs and purposes of their own … tending directly to sedition, civil war, and rebellion.”14
Such denunciations of the work of seditious factions seeking private aims masked by professions of loyalty, which abound in the writings of officials and of die-hard Tories, reach the extreme of vilification in Chief Justice Peter Oliver’s scurrilous Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion and attain the ultimate in respectability in George III’s statement to Parliament of October 26, 1775 — a statement that may be taken as the precise obverse of Jefferson’s claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that there was a “design to reduce [the colonies] under absolute despotism.”
The authors and promoters of this desperate conspiracy [George III informed Parliament] have in the conduct of it derived great advantage from the difference of our intentions and theirs. They meant only to amuse, by vague expressions of attachment to the parent state and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me, whilst they were preparing for a general revolt … The rebellious war now levied is … manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.
This charge, emanating from the highest source, could not be left unanswered, and there lies in the records of the Continental Congress an elaborate refutation of the King’s accusation — an essay, remarkably verbose and rhetorical, crowded with exclamations and gesticulations yet full of subtle perceptions, that fills no less than thirteen pages in the printed Journals of the Congress. Cast in the form of an “Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies,” it was written by a committee headed by John Dickinson and James Wilson, and though it was tabled by the Congress because it seemed unduly apologetic and defensive at the time (February 1776) and, in Madison’s phrase, was “evidently short of the subsisting maturity” of opinion then in favor of independence, it nevertheless remains a most revealing exposition of the intellectual, political, and psychological dilemmas created by an escalating mutuality of conspiratorial fears. The Crown’s representation of the actions of the Congress as those of “a seditious and unwarrantable combination,” Wilson and Dickinson wrote, is malicious and false.
We are, we presume, the first rebels and conspirators who commenced their conspiracy and rebellion with a system of conduct immediately and directly frustrating every aim which ambition or rapaciousness could propose. Those whose fortunes are desperate may upon slighted evidence be charged with desperate designs. But how improbable is it that the colonists who have been happy and have known their happiness in the quiet possession of their liberties; who see no situation more to be desired than that in which, till lately, they have been placed; and whose warmest wish is to be reinstalled in the enjoyment of that freedom which they claim and are entitled to as men and as British subjects — how improbable is it that such would, without any motives that could tempt even the most profligate minds to crimes, plunge themselves headlong into all the guilt and danger and distress with which those that endeavor to overturn the constitution of their country are always surrounded and frequently overwhelmed? … Whoever gives impartial attention to the facts we have already stated and to the observations we have already made must be fully convinced that all the steps which have been taken by us in this unfortunate struggle can be accounted for as rationally and as satisfactorily by supposing that the defense and re-establishment of their rights were the objects which the colonists and their representatives had in view as by supposing that an independent empire was their aim. Nay, we may safely go farther and affirm, without the most distant apprehension of being refuted, that many of those steps can be accounted for rationally and satisfactorily only upon the former supposition and cannot be accounted for,
in that manner, upon the latter … Cannot our whole conduct be reconciled to principles and views of self-defense? Whence then the uncandid imputation of aiming at an independent empire? Is no regard to be had to the professions and protestations made by us, on so many different occasions, of attachment to Great Britain, of allegiance to His Majesty, and of submission to his government upon the terms on which the constitution points it out as a duty and on which alone a British sovereign has a right to demand it? … But the nature of this connection, and the principles on which it was originally formed and on which alone it can be maintained seem unhappily to have been misunderstood or disregarded by those who laid and conducted the late destructive plan of colony-administration.
Their conclusion was resigned: “Let neither our enemies nor our friends make improper inferences from the solicitude which we have discovered to remove the imputation of aiming to establish an independent empire. Though an independent empire is not our wish, it may — let your oppressors attend — it may be the fate of our countrymen and ourselves.”15
By then, in February of 1776, the lines of political division had long since hardened; troops were engaged in hostilities. Yet the accusations of malign purpose continued, culminating on the American side in the enumeration of conspiratorial efforts that forms the substance of the Declaration of Independence, and on the English side in a group of publications refuting those charges. The most interesting, if not the ablest, of these replies is by the ubiquitous Thomas Hutchinson, an exile in England since 1774, and, though consulted by the ministry and honored by Oxford University, still desperately eager to convince the world that his original suspicions had been correct. His Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia was his penultimate effort (his History would be the last) to prove that “if no taxes or duties had been laid upon the colonies, other pretenses would have been found for exception to the authority of Parliament.” For the colonies, he explained, had been “easy and quiet” before the famous controversies started; “but there were men in each of the principal colonies who had independence in view before any of those taxes were laid or proposed … Their design of independence began soon after the reduction of Canada.” Failing to attain their goals by arguments from the natural rights of mankind, they found “some grievances, real or imaginary, were therefore necessary.” These they produced simply by seeing to it “that every fresh incident which could be made to serve the purpose … should be improved accordingly.” Professions of loyalty and concessions were “only intended to amuse the authority in England.” No indulgence short of independence could ever have satisfied them, “for this was the object from the beginning.” The chiefs of the rebellion in each colony found grounds “to irritate and enflame the minds of the people and dispose them to revolt”; and so it was that “many thousands of people who were before good and loyal subjects have been deluded and by degrees induced to rebel.” The design, Hutchinson concluded, after answering one by one every charge in the Declaration, “has too well succeeded.”16
The accusations of conspiratorial designs did not cease with the pamphlet series touched off by the Declaration, nor even with the American successes in battle. They merely shifted their forms, and began a process of adaptation that has allowed them to survive into our own time. Just as radical pamphleteers in England, patriot historians in America, and such Whig leaders as the younger Pitt continued after the war to blame the Revolution on the deliberate malevolence of the administrations of the 1760’s and 1770’s, so loyalists like Galloway and Thomas Jones continued to “expose” the Americans’ conspiracy; continued to argue that no error had been committed by the government of George III in not conceding more to America since the colonists had been secretly determined from the start to cast off their dependence upon England; continued too to link the rebels with opposition factions in England; and began, in the nadir of military defeat, darkly to suggest that the strangely defeated commander in chief, Sir William Howe, was himself not above suspicion of secret collaboration with the faction that had carried out so successfully the long-planned design of independence.17
These wartime and postwar accusations were both an end and a beginning — an end of the main phase of the ideological Revolution and the beginning of its transmutation into historiography. Charges of conspiratorial design settled easily into a structure of historical interpretation, on the one hand by Hutchinson, in the manuscript third volume of his History of … Massachusetts-Bay (published 1828); by Peter Oliver, in his frenzied Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion (1781, published 1961); by Thomas Jones, in his History of New York during the Revolutionary War (1780–1790, published 1879); by Jonathan Boucher, in the book-length Introduction of his View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (1797); — and on the other hand by Mercy Otis Warren, in her three-volume History of the … American Revolution (1805); by David Ramsay, in his History of the American Revolution (1789); and by patriot historians of individual states: Belknap, Burk, Trumbull, Ramsay. These are the histories of participants, or near-participants: heroic histories, highly personified and highly moral, in which the conspiratorial arguments propounded during the Revolution are the essential stuff of explanation. These views, caricatured and mythologized in such immortal potboilers as Weems’ Washington, survived almost unaltered through the next generation — survived, indeed, through the next two generations — to enter in a new guise into the assumptions of twentieth-century scholarship. The “progressive” historians of the early twentieth century and their successors of the post-World War I era adopted unknowingly the Tory interpretation in writing off the Revolutionary leaders’ professed fears of “slavery” and of conspiratorial designs as what by then had come to be known as propaganda. They implied when they did not state explicitly that these extravagant, seemingly paranoiac fears were deliberately devised for the purpose of controlling the minds of a presumably passive populace in order to accomplish predetermined ends — Independence and in many cases personal advancement — that were not openly professed. No Tory or administration apologist during the Revolution itself ever assumed more casually than did such distinguished modern scholars as Philip Davidson and John C. Miller that the fears expressed by the Revolutionary leadership were factitious instruments deliberately devised to manipulate an otherwise inert public opinion. Conversely, nowhere in the patriot literature of the Revolution proper is there a more elaborate effort to prove that there was in actuality a ministerial conspiracy — a plot of King’s friends aimed at victimizing the colonists — than that made by Oliver Dickerson in his Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (1951).18
But the eighteenth century was an age of ideology; the beliefs and fears expressed on one side of the Revolutionary controversy were as sincere as those expressed on the other. The result, anticipated by Burke as early as 1769, was an “escalation” of distrust toward a disastrous deadlock: “The Americans,” Burke said, “have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them: we have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion against us … we know not how to advance; they know not how to retreat … Some party must give way.”19
1. The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1968).
2. [Oxenbridge Thacher], The Sentiments of a British American (Boston, 1764: JHL Pamphlet 8), p. 4; [Martin Howard, Jr.], A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax … (Newport, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 10), p. 6. Similarly, Daniel Dulany felt obliged to argue the point, writing in 1773, when he was neutral in his sympathies, that “I should hardly expect to find [substantial merchants] in a plot against liberty, since commerce is ever engrafted on the stock of liberty, and must feel every wound that is given to it.” Elihu S. Riley, ed., Correspondence of “First Citizen” — Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and “Antilon” — Daniel Dulany, Jr.… (Baltimore, 1902), p. 35.
3. Dickinson, Farmer’s Letters (JHL 23), pp. 58–59 (cf. pp. 62–64).
4. Rudé, Wilkes
and Liberty, p. 186.
5. Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (London, 1962), p. 32. Burke expressed his more general fears privately to his friend Charles O’Hara in the year the Thoughts was published: “Without some extraordinary change … the court [working with the mob] may assume as uncontrolled a power in this country as the King of Sweden has done in his, without running any risks or meeting any more opposition than is just convenient to give their measures the sort of countenance that things receive from the supposition of their having been fairly debated. I know that this has been said ever since the Crown has got its great influence in Parliament. But it was not truly said while the people preferred one man to another; it was not said truly while a new ministry supposed a new Parliament; it was not said truly whilst it required art, address, and influence to secure a majority. Whether or no things were prepared for this in the last reign I cannot justly say; but this sort of power was then either not fully discovered, or nobody chose to venture upon it.” Burke to O’Hara, September 30, 1770, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Thomas W. Copeland, et al., eds., Cambridge and Chicago, 1958–), II, 336–337.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 21