Divided by a Common Language

In Great Britain, to say that a motion should be “tabled” is to say that it should be brought forward for discussion immediately. In America, the same phrase is used to say that any discussion of the motion should be postponed to a later time, if ever. I have been present at a meeting that nearly descended into chaos and animosity until the British and American participants realized they were using the same words, but not speaking the same language. It was proof, yet again, of the profound truth of the old joke that America and Great Britain are two nations separated by a common language.  

The joke is not as old as the Declaration of Independence, but the featured pamphlets this month suggest that it certainly could have been.

The anonymous authors of these two pamphlets, one written in support of the American revolutionary cause and one written against it, use the same language. Both are written in English. But the meanings behind their words are often as distinct as the American and British uses of “tabling a motion.”

Two areas in which the pamphlets, 1774’s A Very Short and Candid Appeal to Free Born Britons by an American (hereafter A Short and Candid Appeal) and 1776’s The Rights of Great Britain Asserted against the Claims of American: Being an Answer to the Declaration of the General Congress (hereafter The Rights of Great Britain), provide particularly stark examples of the “divided by a common language” problem are in their use of familial terms for the relationship between Great Britain and America and in their reliance on the ideas of English liberty.

The author of The Rights of Great Britain uses the language of family to counter the claims made in the 1775 Declaration of the General Congress, which the author reprints in full at the end of his text. While the language of the 1775 Declaration is contractual in tone, the author of The Rights of Great Britain salts his legal arguments with the emotionally-laden language of a family quarrel. 

Like an indulgent mother, Great Britain has supported the colonies: “Did not the Mother-country, with more than a mother’s fondness, upon all occasions nourish,cherish, support this prodigal child…? “(13-14) In response, they have been met with nothing but a monstrous ingratitude best conveyed in all capital letters. “With a peculiar refinement on Parricide, they [Congress] bind the hands of the MOTHER, while they plant a dagger in those of the DAUGHTER, to stab her to the heart.” (70-71)

 Great Britain’s response has been, like a gentle parent, to continue to forgive her erring children. “With the indulgence and patience of a Parent, she soothed, flattered, and even courted them to a reconciliation. In pity to the weakness, in condescension to the folly, in consideration to the prejudices of a froward child, she held out the olive-branch when she ought, perhaps, to have stretched forth the rod of correction.”(77) And in return for her over-indulgence she has received nothing but offenses like rebellions and declarations. Poor payment, argues the author, for their years of care and toil. “Is this the return we ought to expect from Colonies, who with parental indulgence we have cherished in infancy, protected in youth, and reared to manhood? (80)

The author of A Short and Candid Appeal is also interested in the family relationship between Great Britain and America–referring to Great Britain as the “Mother-country,” for example, and reminding his British readers regularly that the Americans are their “brethren, the descendants of Britons”. (24)  Like the author of The Rights of Great Britain, he couches the political turmoil in terms of a family squabble, asking “What must now be done to annihilate and drown for ever, in the gulph of oblivion, the unnatural contest which at present subsists between the parent and her offspring?” (22)

But A Short and Candid Appeal is not just interested in parents (Great Britain) and children (the original colonists). It is interested in generations yet to come. Unlike The Rights of Great Britain which focuses intently on the individuals involved in the quarrels of the present, A Short and Candid Appeal looks ahead: 

The Americans believe the political axe to be laid to the tree of liberty, and would hold themselves monsters of ingratitude, and will deserve the expectations of posterity, where they to suffer it to be hewn down; I repeat it again, they would deserve the execrations of posterity,, where they by their timidity or indolence, to permit that tree to be destroyed, under the shadow of whose branches their progenitors and themselves have for many years been so happily sheltered. (25)

For A Short and Candid Appeal, the protection of a parent dwindles to nothing compared to the protection of liberty. And the history of a family is unimportant compared to its posterity. 

The author does draw on that language of family history in order to make a claim about the colonists’ rights. He argues that the colonists should by right, be recognized, “in their liberties as Englishmen,  particularly including their descendants as inheritors of their parents rights, which may seem rather unnecessary, as it is clear that the children always succeed to their parents place on the political stage.” (7) The argument is made for the sake of posterity, however, as “children always succeed.” Later, he argues that the colonists “should enjoy, unmolested, the liberties which their ancestors have transmitted to them, and which they, their posterity, have not forfeited.” The tangle of parents and children and imagined future children here is really shorthand for an argument that legal rights arise as a natural, almost genetic inheritance. People have them because their forebears had them. The children, and grandchildren, and so on, of English subjects specifically have English rights because their parents had them.

This sort of argument would have endlessly exasperated the author of The Rights of Great Britain. His lengthy pamphlet is a careful and detailed account of British legislation about colonies in general and about the American colonies in particular. He argues that rights come from legal precedents, and seems fairly indifferent to any sort of natural rights that might have existed before a legal system. He argues that the precedent is for Parliament to make laws concerning all Britain’s colonies, and he does not see–or he pretends that he does not see–how extensive and encroaching legislation over colonial life and commerce had become over time. Instead, he relies on arguing that such legislation is only following precedent, and that because precedent has been followed, there is no ground for any objections from the colonists.

Parliament hath been uniformly accustomed to extend its supremacy over all the Colonies. In matters of revenue, in commerce, in civil, in all judicial regulations; and, in short, with regard to the general constitution of their government, the Provinces of North-American till taught otherwise by a disappointed Faction in this Kingdom, allowed, that the whole fabric of their polity might be new-modelled and reformed by the superintending power of Parliament. In fact, it has been so new-modelled and reformed, whenever abuses in the Administration of their Government, under their civil polity, or the general interest of the British Empires, made it necessary for Parliament to interpose its authority. (25)

Just in case there is any misunderstanding, he summarizes a few pages later by saying, ““The authority of Parliament to bind America, in all cases whatsoever…was never disputed; and it was often exerted to correct abuses, and to suppress the ideas of independence…” (29) 

The Rights of Great Britain specifically points to legislation that bans the exportation of hats from the colonies and the conveyance of hats by land between colonies as a sample of the kind of sensible legislation that a caring parliament enacted for the American colonies. (32) It is perhaps an artifact of my colonial American ancestry that I cannot imagine anyone seeing such legislative pettifogging as anything less than overreach. The author’s example does, however, serve to bring home his point that, “There is hardly any object of Legislation in which the laws of this Country have not bound America” (37)  This, of course, is exactly why the colonists are in revolt. And it is why the author of A Short and Candid Appeal casually dismisses all of English law with an airy “I do not so much appeal to learned authors, and old musty records, as to that tribunal of common justice and equity erected in the mind of every man” (21-2)

The terms of the arguments, which seemed to be so similar at first–family relationships and the rights of English citizens–turn out to be similar only on their face. As with “tabling a motion” it is vital for those hearing the arguments to know where the author’s feet are planted before they begin to understand the real meaning of the words that are being used.

It is the author of The Rights of Great Britain who best sums up the point. The Americans, he says, “speak no longer as subjects” (10). And once that happens, once a people have changed the way they think and speak of themselves, once they see themselves as citizens rather than subjects, there is no going back, no matter what common ground might remain.