A Defense of Constitutional Traditions
Richard Alan Ryerson’s excellent opening essay starts this forum off on a firm footing by explaining the immediate causes of Lexington and Concord. This is not a shock as no scholar has studied the coming of the Revolution in Massachusetts and the role of its famous son, John Adams, more than Ryerson. But here, his essay focused more on the immediate events surrounding Lexington and Concord, I aim to pull back and place the shot heard around the world within the larger context of the decade that preceded it.
Looking back at the battle, it is easy to see how that event served as both the concluding act of a decade-long struggle over the nature of the English constitution and the first act of a new movement, this one towards independence. Placing this first battle in a deeper context, we can expand upon Ryerson’s first question: Why did the colonies believe they had a right to an armed rebellion?
Ryerson suggests that part of the answer to his question rests in the century-and-a-half history of colonial self-government. This process began in the early seventeenth century and continued throughout the establishment of all the colonies. All colonial assemblies possessed a policing power for all internal aspects of the colonies, including taxation. To be sure, those assemblies could not enact legislation directly repugnant to English law, but for all intents and purposes, these bodies were autonomous. The colonies’ self-governing proved considerably more important to the coming of Lexington and Concord than Ryerson’s essay suggests.
Much of that importance is rooted in the clash between the British and colonial understandings of the English constitution. Ryerson provides the “British perspective in 1775” of their constitution in which King-in-Parliament ruled by enacting laws, followed the “rules of constitutional government, and employed coercion when necessary to compel obedience.” This description is of the constitution of command, or, in eighteenth-century parlance, a constitution of power rather than right. To paraphrase Blackstone, the rights of sovereignty within this constitution rested with Parliament (or King-in-Parliament, to be more precise).
Emerging in the decades following the Glorious Revolution, by the mid-eighteenth century, the constitution of command was on the verge of becoming sacrosanct—although Ryerson is correct that it was “by no means universal,” at least not yet. Nevertheless, this post-Glorious Revolution order led Parliament to believe that it could tax the colonies and, in the words of the Declaratory Act, legislatively “bind” them in “all cases whatsoever” because it was the supreme governing body of the mother country, and, by extension, the empire.
Critically, this constitutional development did not cross the Atlantic. Instead, the colonies adhered to an older, pre-Glorious Revolution constitutional order in which usage, or continual custom and traditions, breathed legitimacy into actions. In practical operations, this customary constitution can best be described as “King-in-Colonial Assembly.” Only the colonial assemblies could tax and legislate because they represented the people of their respective colony. And since all colonial legislation required the monarch’s consent, the monarch played the same role in this constitutional structure as he did in the mother country. Since colonial self-government, with its powers to tax and legislate, existed for a century and a half before Parliament’s taxation efforts, by customary right, that power rested with the individual colonies. From the colonists’ point of view, because Parliament had never claimed or exercised the right of direct taxation upon the colonies by custom and usage, it lacked that legitimate constitutional power.
The Americans at Lexington and Concord did not seek to inaugurate a new world made after their ideals. They sought to preserve a way of life derived from the traditions of self-governing freeman.
Another important aspect of the colonial adherence to the customary constitution directly affected why Lexington and Concord occurred. That is the relationship between liberty, arbitrariness, and slavery. Modern Americans—both in and out of the academy—believe that Lexington and Concord and the subsequent Revolution that resulted was a story about Americans attempting to defend natural rights—the idea that individual rights are the foundation of liberty. Eighteenth-century Americans, though, placed greater stress on defining liberty as the right of self-government than merely the lack of restraint. To be self-governing meant to be independent from someone else’s coercive will. Thus, freedom was as much a status as it was a condition. Self-government based upon a customary constitutional order, they believed, placed limitations upon governmental actions and required the society’s consent. Arbitrariness, by definition, eroded those barriers. In place of custom came the unfettered whims and will of another and destroyed the ability of society to govern itself according to long practiced norms. If arbitrary government gained a foothold, the consequence would be the political enslavement of colonies.
Throughout the decade of 1765 to 1775, the argument that England was attempting to enslave Americans became a frequent refrain in the colonies. John Dickinson, in his famous 1768 Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, noted in the seventh essay:
These duties, which will inevitably be levied upon us—which are now levying upon us—are expressly laid FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF TAKING MONEY. This is the true definition of “taxes.” They are therefore taxes. This money is to be taken from us. We are therefore taxed. Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—SLAVES.
John Adams, in his second Novanglus essay, published just two months before Lexington and Concord, was more emphatic about this connection when he told his readers:
There are but two sorts of men in the world, freemen and slaves. The very definition of a freeman, is one who is bound by no law to which he has not consented. Americans would have no way of giving or withholding their consent to the acts of this parliament, therefore they would not be freemen. But, when luxury, effeminacy and venality are arrived at such a shocking pitch in England, when both electors and elected, are become one mass of corruption, when the nation is oppressed to death with debts and taxes, owing to their own extravagance, and want of wisdom, what would be your condition under such an absolute subjection to parliament? You would not only be slaves—But the most abject sort of slaves to the worst sort of masters! at least this is my opinion.
What all this means is that by the time Parliament began its reforms of the empire in 1764 and 1765, each side believed they adhered to the same constitution. As events of the next decade unfolded, it revealed how they spoke a constitutional vernacular unfamiliar and hostile to the other. Thus, to the colonies, the “government that they had regarded as legitimate since their youth” proved not to be legitimate at all. It was arbitrary, tyrannical, and sought their enslavement. From the colonial perspective, the events at Lexington and Concord were not a revolt against lawful authority but, instead, a rebellion designed to restore their pre-existing order.
One other aspect must be addressed briefly to help explain why the colonies believed they had a right to resist Parliamentary measures: the resistance theory that emerged out of the Protestant Reformation two centuries earlier. Over time, it became an essential aspect of Calvinist and Anglican political theory. It was one thing to argue that the government’s actions were tyrannical and needed correcting; it was another to resist and even subvert government when Christian teaching, starting with Paul’s epistle to the Romans, held that not only did God ordain government, but Christians were required to support it. Resistance theory provided much of the theological justification for rebelling against unlawful government. As expressed in numerous sermons in the mid-eighteenth century, but perhaps most famously by Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew’s two sermons, “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers” (1750) and “The Snare, Broken” (1766), whenever government stopped working for the common good of society, scripture “implicitly authorizes, and even requires us to make resistance, whenever this shall be necessary to the public safety and happiness.” Thus, resistance to tyranny was obedience to God and the duty of all Christians.
Scholars often overlook this line of Christian thought, preferring to draw connections from more philosophical sources such as Locke’s Second Treatise. Those connections are there, to be sure, but most everyday colonial Americans, such as the soldiers at Lexington and Concord, did not read Locke—they listened to their preachers. Thus, any understanding of why ordinary colonial Americans—especially those in Calvinistic Massachusetts—believed they had a right to take up arms against England must incorporate this line of thinking.
What can modern Americans, a quarter of a millennium removed, learn from the events at Lexington and Concord? One of its primary lessons is the need to deemphasize the role of natural rights in understanding the coming of the Revolution. While not unimportant, scholars devote far too much attention to the American references to natural rights as a cause of the events that led to the Revolution. They have somehow fashioned a mighty colossus from an evidentiary lump of clay. The actual conflict rested, rather, on a clash between a traditional or newer understanding of the English constitution. We do the past a grave disservice by ignoring or downplaying this constitutional conflict at the expense of our modern fascination with rights-talk.
The elevation of natural rights philosophy converts the entire decade of conflict that culminated at Lexington and Concord into an exercise in philosophy. I do not deny that philosophical reasoning was a factor, only that our modern focus obfuscates the critical contexts and important lessons of this history. Too often, we ignore the voices of the actual participants with regard to their reasoning for armed resistance. The Americans at Lexington and Concord did not seek independence from the mother country—much less were they hoping to inaugurate a new world made after their ideals; they sought to preserve a way of life derived from the traditions of self-governing freeman rooted in an inheritance from their father’s father’s father and stretched back to time immemorial.
While scholars today may see the flaws in that thinking, this nevertheless was their reality—and so strong was that reality they proved willing to die to preserve it. This was not a movement to establish a constitutional order based upon abstract notions but conflict over whether the colonies would remain traditionally free or shackle themselves and their prosperity to the will of others. Since they knew God sanctioned their cause, they undertook the righteous defense of their liberty.
