BY DANIEL JUPP
As the Founding Fathers of the United States of America moved towards the Revolution of 1776, their thoughts dwelt of course on the recent causes of discontent that occurred during the reign of George III. They discussed the specific ‘intolerable burdens’ that were provoking them to rebellion (such things as a tax on tea), but it was a broader and deeper sense of grievance that provided the true foundations of Revolution.
And that grievance was in one way a very paradoxical one.
They felt particularly aggrieved by what they saw as arbitrary and tyrannical rule from England, precisely because they strongly identified as Englishmen. And the key marker of Englishness was to be possessed of Liberty, of “inalienable rights” that no Monarch and no Parliament could dilute, discard or destroy.
In an article titled The Ancient Rights of Englishmen, the libertarian historian David Edwards put it like this:
“In 1776 thirteen British colonies in North America declared their independence from the British Empire and began an experiment in republican government. If one were to ask those colonists, they would likely would have denied any radicalism, seeing their revolution as a fight against a tyrannical British government that was abrogating their traditional rights as Englishmen. While their decision to abandon a long-standing monarchy and embark on representative democracy was more radical than they may have considered, it was perfectly in line with their history as Englishmen.”
If we look at the statements of the key figures whose rebellious activities created the United States of America, we quickly see that Edwards is right to focus on this sense of Englishness and liberty being the same thing as inherent to the rebellion taking place at all. George Mason bluntly stated, “We claim nothing but the liberties and privileges of Englishmen in the same degree, as if we had continued among our brethren in Great Britain.”. He was not alone in this sentiment. In fact, it was the common position amongst almost all the Founding Fathers.
In a letter to George Bryant in 1774 Washington took the trouble to separate the petty causes of rebellion from the profound ones, going out of his way to frame the movement towards independence not as the result merely of a tax dispute but as a far more meaningful assertion of the rights inherent to the American colonists as Englishmen:
“For, Sir, what is it we are contending against? Is it against paying the duty of three pence per pound on tea because burdensome? No, it is the right only, that we have all along disputed….we applied to the House of Lords and House of Commons in their different legislative capacities, setting forth, that, as Englishmen, we could not be deprived of this essential and valuable part of our constitution.” (my italics).
We get the fullest understanding of this quotation if we think of the word constitution referring to multiple things at once. Most obviously it refers to the terms specific to the colonies, the agreements made between the Crown and colonists when the various States were founded. These, the rebels believed, guaranteed protection from arbitrary power such as displayed through novel taxations imposed without debate or representation. But constitution here also invokes the unwritten but well understood constitution of England itself, the whole body of common law and ancient rights which also made arbitrary power intolerable to those used to the possession of those ancient rights. And finally, but most importantly, all legal rights pertaining to Englishmen derive ultimately from the nature of Englishmen, from their bodily, spiritual and ethical constitution as a particular type of human being.
It is not in the constitution of an Englishman to accept tyranny, both because the body of English common law denies it, and because his own body, his own mind, his own constitution raised and bred with the inheritance of Liberty, cannot stomach the denial of Liberty.
To an extent how we talk about the American Revolution today is fundamentally wrong because it mistakes entirely what the Founding Fathers themselves thought they were doing. They were not denying their Englishness by rebellion. They were asserting it, against a Monarch and a government which had forgotten the ancient rights owed to all Englishmen. It was not a Revolution but rather a Restoration. This made it fundamentally different to the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution and in large degree explains why American ‘Revolution’ was not followed by a Terror like that witnessed in France, or by a new autocracy such as that formed by Red Tsars such as Lenin or Stalin.
Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex. Daniel’s SubStack is available here.