An Introduction to the Pamphlet Debate on the American Question

I

As a project designed to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and to facilitate the use of a substantial and vastly under-used literature published in Great Britain and Ireland during the twelve-year debate that led to the independence of thirteen of Britain’s thirty-two American colonies and their transformation into a new nation, The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776: A Digital Collection, makes available in modern digitized form more than 400 surviving books and pamphlets that directly addressed what became known in metropolitan Britain as the American Question. Along with a plethora of newspaper essays, these pamphlets constituted the first, most intensive, and most sustained public examination of the foundations and distribution of constituted authority within the early modern British Atlantic Empire, and the most thorough and widespread public discussion of the domestic constitution and governing conventions of Great Britain itself since the Glorious Revolution and probably even since the Leveler debates of the English Civil War. This is an exceptionally rich literature that enhances and complicates our understanding of the eight-year war in which a substantial portion of Great Britain’s transatlantic empire withdrew from the jurisdiction of Great Britain and established itself as a new national entity on the world stage. By further opening a large window onto competing conceptions of liberty and constitutional governance within the late eighteenth-century Anglophone world, it is also worth careful study in its own right.

II

The foundation for this project rests heavily upon the distinguished bibliographic work of Thomas R. Adams, the long-time director of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1965, the now defunct Brown University Press published his American Independence: A Bibliography of American Political Pamphlets, which provided a systematic listing of a literature that was already well-known, at least to scholars of the origins of the American Revolution. Of the 230 titles that Adams listed, 192 were first issued in the revolting American colonies,[1] and almost all of them were probably known to his father, Randolph G. Adams, when he wrote his 1922 study of The Political Ideas of the American Revolution,[2] and even to Moses Coit Tyler, when he put together his 1897 volume, The Literary History of the American Revolution.[3] Moreover, Adams’s study came out in the very same year as Bernard Bailyn’s brilliant and comprehensive introduction to the first volume of his projected four-volume selection of 72 of the most important Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1756-1776.[4] This introduction was republished a year later as The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution[5] and more than a half century later remains the most influential book ever published on the American Revolution.

Adams’s own most important contribution to the study of this era was his extraordinarily thorough two-volume study, appropriately entitled The American Controversy: A Bibliographic Study of the British Pamphlets About the American Disputes, 1764-1783, published by Brown University Press in 1980. In contrast to his first study, this second work ferreted out, opened up, and directed attention to a literature that, although much more extensive, was largely unknown to and certainly under-examined by historians on either side of the Atlantic. Bailyn’s proposed edition of Pamphlets of the American Revolution included no pamphlet originally published in Britain, as if British pamphlets on the subject were of little or marginal importance to an analysis of the origins of the American Revolution.

Requiring more than a quarter of a century to complete, Adams’s comprehensive survey of the holdings of all of the major and not a few of the minor rare book depositories in Great Britain and the United States turned up an astonishing number of titles published in Britain or Ireland about American matters between 1764 and 1783. In The American Controversy Adams included 1,178 separate titles, more than four times the number of pamphlets produced in the revolting colonies, and this number does not include a fair number of titles, perhaps as many as thirty, that he found in contemporary reviews or advertisements, of which no copy seems to have survived. Moreover, many British pamphlets went through several editions, which I have left out of this calculation. As The American Controversy made emphatically clear, a genuinely comprehensive study of the pamphlets of the American Revolution would require an analysis, not just of the 192 pamphlets of American origin that Adams had listed in American Independence and on which Bailyn had principally relied in the introduction to his edition of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, but also the additional 1,374 British items that Adams had uncovered while collecting materials for The American Controversy.

The 34 British pamphlets that Adams had listed in American Independence in 1965 were thus merely the tip of a giant iceberg whose mass revealed just how widely and deeply American subjects stirred public debate–not only in London but throughout the British Isles–and whose scope was unsuspected before Adams’s second work. As he pointed out in his introduction, pamphlets relating to the American Question accounted for 30% of the British pamphlet press between 1763 and 1783 and 60% for the five parliamentary years between 1773 and 1778.[6]

Two years after Adams published The American Controversy, he and British historian Colin Bonwick followed it up by bringing out a microfilm edition of British Pamphlets Relating to the American Revolution, 1764-1783. Consisting of 49 reels of microfilm and published by Microform Limited in Yorkshire, this project included an astonishing 1,166 (all but 12) of the 1,178 titles Adams listed in The American Controversy, along with a 77-page guide, thereby bringing together from thirty widely-scattered libraries and a few private holdings a surprisingly complete collection and making it available to scholars in most research university libraries. Together, Adams’s The American Controversy and this microfilm collection held out enormous potential for a major expansion of knowledge about the British side of the events that led up to and included the war that lost Britain the thirteen North American continental colonies plus East and West Florida and the West Indian island of Tobago. More than forty years later, this potential remains unrealized. The publication in 2007-08 of Harry T. Dickinson’s eight-volume facsimile edition of a very small sample of this literature led to no improvement in this situation.[7]

Adams’s work was not altogether ignored. In the mid-1980s, I made considerable use of it in gathering materials for a book on the formation of the British imperial constitution during the colonial era and the bearing of that experience upon the formation of state and national constitutions in the late-eighteenth-century United States. [8] I made even more use of it during the first decade of this century for two chapters in a book on the ways metropolitan Britons spoke about and conceived of the British Empire over what I called the short eighteenth century from about 1730 to 1790. [9] In important works published during the last three decades of the twentieth century or the opening decade of the twenty-first. John Brewer,[10] Kathleen Wilson,[11] and Christopher L. Brown,[12] all used some of these pamphlets. Most importantly, Eliga H. Gould drew heavily upon them in his 2000 analysis of British adjustments to the resistance and loss of thirteen continental colonies as a result of the American Revolution.[13] But these efforts only scratched the surface of this mine of historical literature.

At first glance, this neglect seems almost incomprehensible. Following an old and still deeply rooted tradition and with their eyes narrowly focused on the unexpected creation of the new nation of the United States, most American historians have evinced little interest in the British dimensions of the American controversy, evidently operating on the assumption that a handful of British pamphlets by well-known writers such as Thomas Pownall, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, or Richard Price served as sufficient background for analyzing the British pamphlet literature. Using impressive amounts of empirical data, British historians over the past century studied this period of British history intensively. Sir Lewis Namier and his many followers explored in detail the composition and interactions of political factions, [14] students of political culture such as John Brewer and Kathleen Wilson focused on the wider arena of domestic British politics, and historians of political ideas chased down and categorized intellectual genealogies.[15]

But none of these historians has paid close attention to the intricacies and complexities arising at every stage of the long and substantive British debates over government-sponsored policies and American resistance, nor to the prudential and constitutional considerations that framed them. The Namierites thought that political discussion did not matter and looked upon an issue such as American resistance, not as a subject for serious scholarly investigation, but as just another divisive point that contending politicians used to score points against their rivals and help themselves get into or stay in office, while students of political culture and political ideas were insufficiently interested in the debate over the American Question to delve into it. As a result, the British side of the story, in particular the ways that metropolitan Britons defined and responded to the problem of American resistance, remains grossly understudied.

My own engagement with this subject dates back to a late 1960s review article, “The Plunge of Lemmings,” a title I borrowed from Namier, which surveyed the proliferating secondary literature on this era and concluded that the British political nation was so committed to the idea of a unitary Parliamentary sovereignty over the entire British world that virtually no leading political figures and few within the British political nation could appreciate colonial arguments, fully and unambiguously articulated in the years between the Stamp Act Crisis in 1765-66 and the crisis over independence in 1774-76. [16] According to these arguments, as I defined them in later work, the British Empire had never been, was not then, and need never be a unitary empire, but had always been, and might have continued to be, a federal empire in which matters of general concern would come under the authority of the metropolitan government in London, while those of internal concern would be under the authority of the many local polities of which the overseas empire was composed, and that all matters of serious disagreement might be negotiated between metropolis and provinces, as they always had been. [17]

Over the last decade, however, while researching Evaluating Empire,[18] I waded more deeply into the extensive literature that Adams had uncovered and became ever more aware of the inadequacies of this explanation. I realized that, while Namier, I, and many others were not wrong to insist on the widespread commitment within the British political nation to the idea of parliamentary imperial supremacy as expressed in the Declaratory Act of 1766, by no means were all those engaged in the debate over the American Question lemmings thoughtlessly plunging into the sea of war and imperial separation in defense of that commitment. In fact, the nation’s political leadership was almost equally divided between those who were “Lemmingists” and those who wanted to step back and consider other alternatives. Each side worked out a rich and multi-stranded set of arguments during a long and vigorous debate that continued from 1764 right through to 1783. During this debate each side exhibited an impressive consistency of argument and a stability of goals and priorities as the British polity confronted an ever-changing situation and its actions met with unexpected consequences. The only point on which they agreed was the desirability of keeping the empire intact, albeit Josiah Tucker and a small cadre of his followers challenged even that point by arguing that Great Britain’s national interests would be better served by expelling the recalcitrant colonies from the empire and sending them off on their own.[19]

Between 1763 and 1782 one of the sides that was most like lemmings was in power for all but a few months in the mid-1760s during and immediately after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1764-66 and, less effectively, in the succeeding Chatham Administration. British historians have conventionally talked about this division as one that pitted Opposition against Administration or, as many contemporaries were wont to say, using party names that had long since lost their meaning, as Whigs versus Tories. Such terminology masks a much more complex set of considerations and beliefs that divided the British political nation. Touched off by the Grenville administration’s reforms and widespread colonial resistance to them during the Stamp Act Crisis, the most descriptive general terms for describing the divisions over the American Question would seem to be between those who granted no validity to colonial claims and those who supported them, both groups simultaneously claiming the title of and considering themselves to be patriots.

III

Dating back to the early decades of England’s transatlantic ventures, this division was rooted in the tension between the two languages that framed English understandings of overseas expansion. On the one hand, the language of planting or colonization implied newness, inferiority, dependency, and incapacity on the part of new and small colonial polities and protective and supervisory responsibilities on the part of the national state to which those polities were attached. On the other hand, the language of liberty, then under intense deployment in England as a result of the efforts of Sir Edward Coke and other legal theorists to undermine James I’s claims to divine right and unlimited authority, found its way into state charter guarantees that migrants would be considered as full English subjects and enjoy all the rights thereof in the new polities established in the Americas. When distance, inattention, lack of funds, and insufficient knowledge of the colonies in London resulted in a failure of the English state to work out a precise form of colonial governance and thrust the responsibility for internal police, defense, and relations with local indigenous populations upon them, settlers desiring to protect the properties they were creating in America used their familiarity with English patterns of governance to fashion empirically provincial constitutions that would insure that they had a prominent voice in and financial control over the polities, economies, and societies that they were building.

Only after the Restoration of Charles II in the early 1660s did the English state create a permanent institution, the Lords of Trade, to provide long-term continuity in colonial oversight, one of the first acts of which was to specify that the constitution of Jamaica, recently seized from its Spanish inhabitants, should follow the form of the constitutions settlers had worked out for the older colonies over the previous half century, with a representative assembly to guarantee the liberty that would attract English emigrants to the new colony.[20] As the Lords of Trade quickly discovered, however, these assemblies not only had extensive authority over the fiscal and domestic affairs of the colonies but theoretically had long since justified their entitlement to that authority as an inherent right of their constituents as English subjects.

In an attempt to enhance English state authority within the colonies immediately under royal jurisdiction, the Lords of Trade invented the contention that, so far from resting upon inheritance, provincial assemblies, at least in colonies under direct royal control, were dependent on nothing more than a clause in the governor’s instructions requiring him to call an assembly. Vigorously contested in both Virginia and Jamaica, the only royal colonies during the early years of the Restoration, this contention met a chilly reception among colonial legislatures, and, as one colony after another came under royal jurisdiction over the next century and the Board of Trade replaced the Lords of Trade in 1696, it remained a heated focus of dispute in metropolitan-colonial relations. These contentions came to a head between 1748 and 1756 when a reinvigorated Board of Trade sought, almost entirely unsuccessfully, to curb the extensive powers of colonial assemblies and enhance metropolitan authority throughout the American empire. This effort not only led to imperial authorities’ threatening to turn to Parliament to bring the colonies to heel but also created widespread fear across the colonies for the security of their longstanding and deeply embedded claims to inherited English rights. [21]

Within Britain this situation was exacerbated by the intensification of contact between metropolis and colonies during the Seven Years’ War. Although most of the continental colonies, including especially Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, made substantial contributions in money and soldiers to the British war effort and the defeat of the French, wartime experiences confirmed existing concerns among metropolitan authorities about the tenuousness of British authority over those provinces that had, as had become increasingly evident over the previous half century, contributed so substantially to Britain’s commercial and internal economic development and defensive capabilities through their consumption of British goods, their heavy demand for African slaves, and their stimulation of the development of Britain’s maritime resources and internal economic development. Widespread colonial evasions of metropolitan trade laws during that war had evoked demands for stricter enforcement. The refusal of colonial legislatures to accept any previously unprecedented restrictions on their authority over their respective domestic affairs had inspired demands for the new modeling of colonial governments, while the chicanery of frontier traders and the relentless encroachment of a prolific settler population upon Indian lands seemed, if peace was to be maintained on North American frontiers, to require metropolitan direction of both Indian affairs and territorial expansion. [22]

Following the logic arising out of the rapid emergence of the modern military fiscal state that Britain had become over the six decades since the Glorious Revolution, the Bute and Grenville administrations between 1763 and 1765 committed themselves to an agenda in which an all-powerful metropolitan state would impose commercial and legal reforms and taxation upon its colonial dependencies in the Americas, the culmination of which was the Stamp Act of 1765. Few if any of the advocates of such measures suspected that the colonies had the disaffection, the cohesion, or the capacity to mount any serious resistance to them, especially not when the metropolis had a sizeable post-war military contingent scattered among the colonies and a powerful navy to help enforce metropolitan directives.

Hence, when so many colonies protested these reforms on constitutional grounds and, citing long and perpetual usage and charter guarantees to defend their ancient rights to exclusive jurisdiction over taxation and legislation within their respective colonies, flatly refused to accept the Stamp Act, a substantial proportion of the British political nation responded, not just with surprise and disbelief, but with rage. Opposing any modification of the Stamp Act, pamphleteers, newspaper essayists, and parliamentary speakers of this persuasion expressed their dismay at any advocacy for its repeal and demanded a swift and effective exertion of metropolitan authority to enforce it. For such people, the solemn petitions and strident resolutions adopted by colonial legislatures denying Parliament’s authority over the internal affairs of free British polities in America, and the many other examples of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act, exhibited a flagrant disregard for metropolitan authority and levels of ingratitude, disloyalty, and dissatisfaction with metropolitan constraints. Such sentiments seemed little short of outright rebellion and, they suspected, expressed smoldering aspirations for total independence from the parent state. Nor did they shrink from calling for the use of force to impose metropolitan power upon the recalcitrant colonies.

To combat the colonial constitutional case, moreover, these proponents of the Stamp Act employed a theory of state organization that insisted that in every state, sovereignty or supreme and unlimited authority rested in the hands of whatever institutions of governance presided over it. Rooted in the French political philosopher Jean Bodin’s late-sixteenth-century argument that states needed to be endowed with absolute and undivided authority over the polities over which they presided, a position reiterated and refined by Thomas Hobbes in mid-seventeenth-century England, this doctrine had been endorsed and brought to prominence in November 1765 at the very moment of the Stamp Act Crisis by the English legal commentator Sir William Blackstone in the first of his four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England, (Oxford, 1765-69). Adopting this theory, and expressing themselves through a new post-Seven Years’ War language of imperial grandeur, these writers never questioned their belief that colonies were by definition in all ways subordinate to the state that presided over them. Stamp Act defenders, in pamphlets, newspaper essays, and speeches, contended that in Great Britain since the Glorious Revolution, Parliament–defined as Crown, House of Lords, and House of Commons–had been the unchallenged seat of sovereignty throughout the extended British polity and that, notwithstanding the extraordinary distance of the colonies from the metropolis or colonial claims of entitlement to full British liberties, its supremacy extended over the colonies to all matters of legislation, including taxation.

Early in 1765, before Parliament passed the Stamp Act on March 22, Thomas Whateley, a junior secretary in the Treasury, anonymously published the first systematic British exposition of this doctrine. Authorized by Grenville, whom some contemporaries thought to be its author, Whateley’s The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies, And The Taxes Imposed Upon Them, Considered, at once laid out the constitutional case for Parliamentary supremacy over the whole of the British Empire, provided a long and detailed discussion of the objectives and rationale of the Grenville administration’s American policies, and attempted to head off Opposition support for colonial denials, also on constitutional grounds, of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies for revenue and to legislate for their internal affairs–denials that had been made in formal petitions sent to Parliament by the New York and Virginia assemblies in the fall of 1764. During the Stamp Act Crisis many other supporters repeated and enlarged on Whateley’s foundational formulation. Thereafter, assertions of supremacy and even omnipotence were central to the British constitutional case in favor of colonial subordination. Perhaps its advocates may most accurately be referred to as Supremacists.

By no means, however, did the whole of the British political nation accept this line of argument. On the contrary, a second large group of political writers eschewed calls for coercion in favor of a philosophy of flexibility, negotiation, and conciliation that would begin with the repeal of the Stamp Act. Regarding the success of the Seven Years’ War as an opportunity to expand the commercial and strategic benefits of a growing empire and arguing that the colonists were fellow subjects who ought to be treated with tenderness and liberality, such writers urged Parliament to approach the critical situation created by colonial resistance with deliberation and good will rather than rashness and violence. Contending that the principal objective of Britain in sponsoring colonizing schemes had been to establish and extend the commerce of all the British dominions and not just the parent state, people of this persuasion queried whether levying taxes upon colonies was consistent with sound policy and called upon Parliament to consider the colonies’ prominent role in enriching and strengthening Britain and the loyal disposition they had always displayed toward the parent state.

Declaring that it was “bad policy in free states” to treat their “colonies with severity,” proponents of conciliation contended that Britain had established colonies to create “a dominion founded on freedom,” not “an uncontroulable power over slaves.” Especially in view of the colonists’ “unanimous” expression, through “the Remonstrances of their Assemblies,” of their settled determination not to submit to the Stamp Act, they cautioned against measures that through “injury or oppression” might produce further “resentments.” “Not abject Submission,” they argued, but “wise and proper Management” designed to encourage “a liberal obedience” and “filial affection” and, following the Irish model, “a very cautious . . . exercise” of Parliamentary authority, were the best means to restore colonial respect for that authority, retain the colonies within the imperial orbit, and promote their “gradual assimilation” to the British state. [23]

If such pleas on the part of writers sympathetic to the American cause were largely prudential and constituted the principal grounds on which the Rockingham administration was able to persuade Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act in 1766, a substantial number of the pro-colonial pamphlets challenged the constitutionality of the assertions of state supremacy advanced by the defenders of the Stamp Act. Rather, they emphasized the primacy of a constitutional theories that denied the validity of such assertions, denounced them as unconstitutional, and contended that traditional and hard-earned constitutional principles and fundamental law, not the state nor the governing institutions thereof, dictated the distribution of authority within and over the British world. This contention had a venerable history stretching back to Sir John Fortescue in 1453, Sir Edward Coke’s efforts to moderate the absolutist aspirations of the Stuart monarchy during the reign of James I, and, finally after deep, if intermittent, discussions of constitutional issues over the course of the seventeenth century, that position was confirmed by Parliamentary declarations at the time of the Glorious Revolution and accurately explained by the political writings of John Locke. Throughout the first six decades of the eighteenth century, this historically grounded and fully articulated Lockean tradition of constitutional thought was still alive and well and continued to be the prevailing view of the foundation and operation of the British state, available to both metropolitans and colonials as a viable and persuasive defense against government efforts to extend the power of the state. [24]

Within Britain, from the Stamp Act Crisis to the Declaration of Independence, traditional constitutionalist writers continuously invoked this tradition to support their contention that the underlying principles of the English constitution protected the lives and property of English people wherever they resided from any state efforts to tax them without their consent and not only invited but required and legitimated resistance to all such efforts. On this basis, during the Stamp Act Crisis, writers endorsed colonial claims that they could only be taxed by their own legislatures, rejecting the Grenville administration’s concept of virtual representation as a failed constitutional innovation and a feeble and unconvincing subterfuge to suggest that colonists had voice in the House of Commons, a position that was immediately belied by every part of the state’s refusal even to hear colonial petitions against the Stamp Act. [25]

The repeal of the Stamp Act did not, however, represent an endorsement of these anti-supremacist contentions. Indeed, the Rockingham case for repeal rested entirely on prudential considerations and required parallel legislation declaring Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever. This Declaratory Act encouraged supremacists to attempt to establish Parliament’s right to tax the colonies by imposing limited duties on a few British imports in the Townshend Acts of 1767. Nor did the partial repeal of the Townshend duties in 1771, also largely based on prudential considerations, represent any diminution of the administration’s commitment to the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.

Continuing American resistance in the late 1760s and early 1770s served only to deepen government convictions that the repeal of the Stamp Act had been a mistake, that the colonies, especially in New England, were dominated by turbulent politicians who were aiming at independence, and that decades of metropolitan neglect had fostered the development of such sentiments as well as the groundless constitutional arguments that colonials employed. Widespread resistance to the Tea Act of 1773 among the North American colonies, including especially the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, powerfully reinforced these views, and the British ministry responded in early 1774 by pushing through Parliament a set of coercive measures designed to alter the weight of popular power in Massachusetts governance. By driving the colonies to unite in opposition to them, these measures inaugurated a new phase in the internal British debate over how best to keep the empire whole, its central focus being on the utility and morality of using force to do so.

Both the Townshend and the Coercive Acts stimulated traditional constitutionalists to expand their case against parliamentary supremacy. In the late 1760s several writers of this persuasion began to take a deeper look at the distribution of authority within the empire and argued either, as did at least two writers in the winter of 1768-69, that the colonies had from the beginning been distinct states linked to Britain only through the Crown,[26] or, as Thomas Parker, in great detail, with Granville Sharp seconding him, argued in June 1774, that every part of the British Empire had always, through the operation of the principles of the English constitution, had jurisdiction over taxation and its internal affairs, with the British state providing oversight over all matters beyond their immediate purview.[27] Such contentions anticipated Thomas Jefferson’s and James Wilson’s similar contentions in their 1774 colonial pamphlets that these English writers could not have seen.

When in 1775 the administration hired the celebrated lexicologist Samuel Johnson to defend the Coercive Acts and the ministry’s claims that Parliament had unlimited authority over the entire British Empire, that the Americans had crossed the line into rebellion, and that the British state had been compelled to resort to force to subject the colonies to its absolute authority, and, when, in an effort to reach a wider audience, the administration encouraged the much-published cleric John Wesley to repeat Johnson’s message in another pamphlet, Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny, and Wesley’s Calm Address to Our American Colonies, quickly became lightning rods for traditional constitutionalist writers, who insisted that fundamental law and the British constitution limited the scope of state authority both in Britain and throughout its overseas empire. In short order, they produced sixteen substantial pamphlets that attacked Wesley’s Calm Address and eight intended to refute Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny.[28] This proliferation of anti-supremacist writings from 1774 through 1776 functioned to energize, solidify, and perpetuate the large community of traditional and Lockean English constitutionalists within Britain and to provide a formidable counter perspective to administration supremacy claims.

From the late 1760s on, this anti-supremacist literature dealt with the problem of sovereignty–a word they rarely used–by locating it not in the institutions of government but in the people at large. Parliament, declared one critic of administration behavior, citing Locke, received “all its powers by delegation, and consequently” could have “no more powers than the people” had delegated to them. For that reason, he explained, the “omnipotence of parliament” could extend no further than its constituents had authorized through a specific compact. And, he added, there was “no compact whereby the people of America have subjected themselves to be taxed by the people of Britain.” Expressing his amazement that any body of English people could promote the Bodinian and Hobbesian conception of the state as being endowed with absolute power, the same writer complained, in his critique of Wesley’s Calm Address, that Wesley had laid “an improper stress upon the word supreme, as if men could give absolute supremacy to any man, or body of men, however dignified with titles, whereas supremacy without limitation, absolute supremacy, is the attribute of God alone.” [29]

Although a few contributors to the pamphlet debate over the American Question professed to be and may well have been neutrals, most contributors fell into one of two warring categories. In power except for a brief period during the Rockingham and early years of the Chatham administrations in the mid-1760s, one was friendly to state modernization, implicitly Hobbesian in the sense of being willing to adopt and espouse a new constitutional theory that placed unlimited authority in the hands of government, favored coercion and the use of force to overcome any resistance to that authority, and was increasingly anti-American. On the other side, traditional constitutionalists, explicitly Lockean, favored conciliation and negotiation to resolve imperial problems, believed that state authority was subordinate to fundamental law and the constitution and did not extend beyond the bounds delegated by the people, in whose hands alone absolute sovereignty resided. Advocating the importance of keeping the peripheries of the empire free, as well as the center, they were highly sympathetic to American contentions about the structure and operation of empire.

Extending beyond the centers of power in Westminster and Whitehall, this pamphlet debate was not only manifest in a veritable explosion of pamphlets and newspaper essays, but also, as James E. Bradley has shown, in more than 50,000 signatories of petitions either for or against coercion. His observation that these petitions demonstrate that the English political nation was “politically informed, constitutionally astute, and deeply concerned about the authority of the British government, on the one hand, and the rights of their American brethren on the other,” applies equally to the pamphlets included in this collection. [30] Strongly represented in both print wars and petitions, pro-American and anti-supremacists failed to stop either the administration’s march toward coercion and force or the instantiation in British constitutional practice of the new doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. But they succeeded in articulating a powerful and defensible case, sustained it in opposition throughout a long imperial civil war, and in 1783 participated in the construction of a peace agreement by which Britain acknowledged the reality of an imperial divorce, an outcome rendered especially regrettable to those who advocated conciliation on both prudential and constitutional grounds because they were fairly sure that it could have been avoided had their counsels prevailed.

IV

In constructing The American Controversy, which has been the principal foundation for this project, Thomas Adams employed a very broad conception of which British-published items on American-related subjects were relevant to that controversy, almost 40% of the items he included having no more than a temporal relationship to it. The same can be said about his inclusive definition of the word pamphlet, which he usefully extended beyond small treatises to include broadsides and large books, entries ranging from 1 page to 596. Including only those pamphlets that were directly involved with questions raised by or relevant to the American Question as it was debated in Britain between 1764 through 1776, this project reproduces in digitized form over 400 of the total items of American interest that Adams listed.

The project has assigned each entry a Greene number which is listed in its online citation information. Whereas Adams arranged entries according to year and alphabetical order under either the last name of the author, where known or suspected, or the first letter of the title of those published anonymously, this project lists items according to year and month of announcement, publication, or first review, whichever is earliest, as recorded by Adams in his entries. The items for each month appear alphabetically. Those entries for which Adams did not supply such information are also arranged alphabetically and placed at the end of the entries for each year. To facilitate access to other information presented by Adams, his number is included on the online citation information as well. A chronological index making use of the Greene numbering is forthcoming.

Unsurprisingly, this arrangement has the advantage of immediately drawing attention to the close correlation between crisis severity and pamphlet production. Out of a total of 69 pamphlets issued over the period from 1764 through 1767, during and just after the Stamp Act Crisis, at least 48 (about 70%) were published between January 1765 and May 1766, nearly three-fourths of which came out during the first three months of 1766 while Parliament was actively engaged in working out how to respond to American resistance to the Stamp Act. Similarly, of the 50 pamphlets issued during the crisis over the Townshend Acts from 1768 to 1770, 21 (42%) came out between November 1768 and May 1769, when the utility and prudence of those measures was under most intense discussion in Whitehall and Westminster. Somewhat quieter imperial relations from 1771 through 1773 reduced the number of published pamphlets to a mere seven, but a renewal of conflict during and after passage of the Coercive Acts in the spring of 1774 provoked a deluge of pamphlets between then and the end of 1776, rising from 55 in 1774 to 108 in 1775 and 121 in 1776. This body of pamphlet literature totaled 284 items or almost 69% of the entire collection. Nor were there any significant downturns in this production, every month of the year, even the usually slack summer months of August and September, yielding a few items, the American Question having by then become a year-round problem.

Unacknowledged authorship is a prominent feature of these pamphlets, a majority of which were published anonymously or under a carefully chosen pseudonym. For whatever reason–class or gender conventions, disguise of party affiliation, bureaucratic dependency, or fear of reprisal–many authors concluded that keeping their authorship secret was the most appropriate strategy in the wider British world they were trying to understand. Although bibliographers, including Adams, have ferreted out credible designations from other sources for the names of a number of the authors of these anonymous entries, close to 50% in this collection remain without credible attributions of authorship: 39 of 68 (57%) of pamphlets published during and just after the Stamp Act Crisis, 30 of 47 (74%) entries during the Townshend Act controversy, and 123 of 277 items (44%) during the three years of the widening debate beginning in 1774. Why a higher percentage of writers were willing to disclose their authorship during certain years is an interesting subject for conjecture. At any time, however, almost half of them believed that what they had to say was more important than their identities or the credentials that they brought to the task.

The items included in this collection will all be presented in the same modern format with the original page numbers inserted in brackets. Errata have been silently inserted in the proper place, and obviously missing words from the original text have been inserted in brackets.