Among the Powers of the Earth

The Declaration of Independence set forth American grievances against Great Britain in claiming for the United States a place “among the powers of the earth.” It marked a pivotal step from which Americans would not recede despite protracted struggle and hardships. Eventual recognition by Britain in the 1783 Treaty of Paris tends to obscure very real hopes for reconciliation. Had the quarrel gone too far by 1776 for either side to recede? George Washington doubted that spring whether British ministers would offer an accommodation that Americans could accept. Henry Laurens, who took a leading part in South Carolina’s break from Britain before representing it in the Continental Congress, firmly denied being a rebel. “Driven away by my king,” he insisted, “I am at worst a refugee.” The abandonment felt when George III upheld the authority of parliament and his ministers over subjects in America strengthened momentum behind independence.

What light do British perspectives shed on America’s turn to independence? Lord Sandwich, a veteran politician heading the Admiralty in Lord North’s administration, wrote in October 1775 “that the nation seems more unanimous against the Americans, than I ever remember them in any point of great national concern.” Able pamphleteers, including Samuel Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny, laid out the ministerial case for parliament’s sovereignty over the empire. Colonists, he argued, were bound by parliamentary statute along with the rest of the British Empire. They could not separate rights claimed as Englishmen from the duties and laws that accompanied them. Besides making Johnson a personal target for opponents, Taxation no Tyranny became a reference point for their own arguments favoring American colonists or at least granting that they had a case.

Hopes for reconciliation persisted alongside the general commitment to parliamentary sovereignty. While the American Secretary, Lord George Germain, saw forcibly imposing British rule as a way to end the dispute for good, others sought less than full submission. Richard, Viscount Howe, who commanded British naval forces in America alongside his brother General William Howe, had met Benjamin Franklin with his sister Caroline to explore grounds for a compromise. Those conversations in early 1775 failed to bear fruit, but Lord North, the prime minister, hoped for some compromise. He pushed with support in the Cabinet to appoint the Howe brothers as peace commissioners. British politics made offering terms Americans would accept difficult, but the idea remained in play. It had a constituency among both parliamentary opposition to Lord North’s administration and others further outside the metropolitan establishment in London.

I.

The emollient tone of two British pamphlets from 1776—one attributed to Richard Goodenough, the other by the Scottish clergyman and writer John Erskine—reflect dissenting voices in the dispute between the colonies and Britain. Both aimed to soften British resentment by offering a contrary take on the points at issue. “Every reader,” Goodenough’s cover insists, “may form his own Judgement concerning the Justice and Policy of the Present War with America.” Those words deserve emphasis as the authors considered British policy impolitic as well as unjust. Coercion, like the original measures provoking the quarrel, ran against Britain’s own interests which rested on friendly relations with America. Instead of subjection imposed by a costly war, cordial union should be the aim.

Writing as “The Constitutional Advocate,” Goodenough asks whether refusing submission to parliamentary taxation made Americans “Fomenters of Faction, Rebels against the British Government, and Subverters of the British Constitution”? The generous loyalty he attributes to Englishmen makes the public “almost instinctively exasperated against a Body of People who are called Rebels” and makes essential a fresh look at the merits of the case based on fundamental principles of the constitution. Rhetoric sets up the argument that follows where Goodenough insists that, far from showing Americans to be rebels subverting the constitution, a clearer view demonstrates them acting in support of it.

The pamphlet’s tone as much as its argument contrasts with Johnson to whom it refers in passing as “the Lexographer.” Goodenough, trained as an attorney though more known for amateur dramatics and his eventual suicide, was a political outsider associated with patriot Whigs and their sympathy for the American cause. Critical of “Old Corp” Whigs who had long been insiders associated with Sir Robert Walpole and the Pelham brothers—Henry Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle—patriots upheld national or public interest against oligarchy and valued civil liberties, especially a free press and legal due process. They favored consumers over producer groups and spoke for provincial outsiders. Johnson’s notorious description of patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels targeted a political movement associated with the demagogue John Wilkes, but patriots could be found across the British Empire by the 1770s. Goodenough takes a softer, less antagonistic tone from Wilkes even when substantively criticizing policy.

Goodenough defends colonial resistance with an historically grounded argument for government by consent. More than half the pamphlet traces English and then British precedents on taxation. Even under feudalism no free subject could be taxed without consent. Property rights—the disposing of one’s own goods—underpinned the right to representation. William of Normandy, who held the realm by conquest, yielded the principle that nothing be required or taken of subjects except by free service. Other kings elaborated that precedent through Magna Charta and the emergence of parliament. Goodenough accordingly claims “this right of giving our own money and making our own laws” as the pillar sustaining free government. If colonists are subjects of what he calls “this free Kingdom,” he continues, parliament has no right to tax them without representation. The fact that taxation on those terms is “a law by which the makers of it are not governed” makes it unjust

Critics might ask whether Parliament—or rather the Crown in Parliament as the sovereign power governing the realm—had not legislated for colonies before. Precedents laid out in such detail only cover Britain itself with little discussion of colonial matters themselves. The absence of colonial examples to bolster the point stands out the more against so extensive an historical overview of representation at home. Goodenough has a better practical case against taxation than a legal one in arguing that since the unlimited power of taxation claimed makes reconciliation impossible, it should be dropped to mend relations. Friendly relations between metropole and colonies matter far more in his view than the principle of sovereignty.

II.

Colonial precedents weigh more heavily for John Erskine, a Scottish presbyterian clergyman, in trying to soften British resentment at their recent actions. Interestingly, Erskine follows a line among current historians of the 18th century British Atlantic World who ask what turned Americans from imperial patriotism to rebellion. He cites former Massachusetts Governor Thomas Pownall’s description of colonists before the Stamp Act as “loyal to their sovereign, well affected to the mother country, zealous for her prosperity, and far from harboring any rebellious designs against the just rights of government.” While some Americans might have held republican principles or ambitions to set themselves at the head of a separate kingdom or commonwealth, Erskine thinks such men would have been few in number and “could never have persuaded twelve provinces to revolt from a government, under which they had felt themselves safe and secure.”

British measures instead pushed Americans into resistance. Erskine finds Johnson’s argument in Taxation no Tyranny calculated more to provoke than persuade. The emphasis on sovereignty with Johnson insisting that every society must have “some power or other from which there is no appeal” prompts him to reply that no “gentleman of good sense and penetration” could see such reasoning as likely to reconcile colonists to parliament’s claim. Indeed, Erskine saw it as telling Americans that without “acknowledge[ing] in Britain an unlimited power to give you law” they had renounced their allegiance and “deserve to be hanged as rebels.” Arguments like these can only escalate tensions by driving colonists to “the madness of despair” and then “inflame in the mother country the rage of resentment.” It surprises Erskine “that many who profess and fancy themselves Whigs” seem to approve. Would an earlier generation of Whigs who opposed despotism in a prince, he asks, now hear with patience that a House of Commons might “lawfully divest its constituents of every right, privilege, and power” with no way to resist except by rebellion? A case Erskine joins others in framing as a Tory position against established constitutional principle since 1688 had damaged British interests more in his view than the invective of radicals like John Wilkes who caused so much unrest during the 1760s.

Erskine’s background in the Presbyterian established Church of Scotland and ties among Scottish Whigs friendly to America shaped his perspective. Educated at Edinburgh University where he had originally studied law before turning to divinity, Erskine had studied alongside John Witherspoon, later president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton and a leading American Founder. Interestingly, He and Witherspoon opposed the moderate party within the Church of Scotland that sought to accommodate church teaching with polite culture fostered by the Scottish Enlightenment. A biographer describes Erskine as unusual in remaining on good terms with opponents in those disputes even when opposing their position. He followed American news closely and corresponded with religious leaders there including with Jonathan Edwards.

Fear of Catholic France and Spain also contributed to his plea for conciliation with America lest tensions push colonists towards Britain’s foes. Erskine, who later would oppose the proposal to end penal laws against Roman Catholics in 1778, criticized the 1774 Quebec Act for not only protecting, but legally supporting the Catholic Church there. Warning it would attract Catholic immigrants and thereby endanger the old colonies, he insisted on the importance to Britain that Protestantism should prevail in America. Erskine complained further “how small a share of the indulgence shown to the Papists in Canada, hath been granted to the Presbyterians in New York, though that country, when conquered from the Dutch was Calvinist and Presbyterian!” He firmly rejects the idea that Protestants outside the Church of England who rejected episcopacy had fueled late disturbances in the colonies which sprang instead from British policy since the Stamp Act.

What seems in retrospect a narrow sectarian point captured an important perspective on the quarrel at the time. High Church Anglicans in England like William Jones of Nayland drew parallels between New England and Puritan resistance in the 1640s. Indeed, Jones called the American conflict a “Presbyterian War” citing the support of New England clergy for the patriot cause. Erskine argued the opposite, following a Whig tradition contrasting Protestant liberty with Catholic absolutism. Indeed, he laments to see Catholicism “esteemed politically innocent, nay friendly to government” while the principles of Protestant Dissent “are traduced as seditious and rebellious.” Tory high churchmanship with its distrust of Dissenters as threats to political and social order seemed a renewed threat in Britain by the 1770s as part of what opponents saw as a larger reactionary turn also visible in policy toward America.

Erskine argues more in sorrow than anger and closes by warning that “more and worse evils may be dreaded” from continuing the breach. The parties must consider “not so much what they can justly claim, as what they can safely yield.” Though writing for British readers he urges compromise on the colonists. While Americans might be mistaken in thinking they can resist, little can be gained from fighting. “We may probably pull down American grandeur, we bid fair to bury the honor and happiness of the British Empire.” The affection of the colonies, not severe measures, can alone secure lasting power over them. Erskine accordingly yielded a little to prevent losing all.

III.

The arguments both pamphlets offer for conciliation with the American colonies tap strains of Whig rhetoric that had fallen on the defensive in Britain. While part of the public debate, they lacked traction with government supporters as Sandwich’s insistence on a strong consensus behind firm action suggests. Edmund Burke and others aligned with the Marquess of Rockingham took a different line on America as did figures like Lord Chatham and his allies Shelburne and Camden. They tapped different strains of Whig sentiment that had lost power in the 1760s to rivals increasingly labeled Tory whether or not that description fit. For Burke and other critics, Tory became a term for a bad or apostate Whig. Later historians like Sir Keith Feiling would date the growth of the Second Tory Party into something more than a marginal faction from the period of the American War with its rise following Britain’s recovery from that defeat.

Erskine’s opening announcement, however, points to a critical challenge for hopes of reconciliation with America. Dated October 18, 1776, it reports that “he prepared for the press the following reflections about a year ago.” Erskine thus intended it as a rejoinder to Johnson. A printer’s neglect delayed publication and it took months to recover the manuscript. “Want of leisure, and very imperfect and doubtful information as to late facts and reasonings,” Erskine continued, “have permitted him to make no important addition, unless a paragraph occasioned by the pamphlet entitled Common Sense.” That delay in publication was crucial as events by October 1776 had overtaken his aim and the case he made.

British authority collapsed across the thirteen American colonies in 1775 with no security for officials or loyalists except where troops or warships protected them. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with its attack on monarchy and call for independence from Britain appeared anonymously in January 1776. Opinion in the colonies and Continental Congress shifted that direction over months of discussion. The Declaration of Independence formalized the decision on July 4 and set a marker from which Americans would not withdraw. As General William Howe told his brother Richard who sought to open talks as peace commissioners, defeating the Continental Army would be the precondition for any negotiation. In the end, defeats in battle proved insufficient to weaken American resolve or compel submission as Germain hoped.

The pamphlets urging reconciliation closed the proverbial barn door after the horse had bolted. Their arguments had little weight in Britain, especially among elites determined not to compromise with America. Colonists themselves had turned from ties with Britain to claiming their own independence. While events had overtaken the pamphleteers, the arguments they make illustrate a sympathetic view of the American cause and hopes for partnership with the colonies that had more adherents in Britain than older accounts recognize. There were not enough of those friends to America for the case to have taken hold when it might have had an effect.