Volume I Part 47 (1/2)
McKean sent an express to Rodney, at Dover, which procured his attendance, and secured the vote of Delaware in the affirmative; while the same result was reached for Pennsylvania by d.i.c.kenson and Morris absenting themselves, and allowing Franklin, Wilson, and Morton to give the vote against Willing and Humphries. The South Carolina delegates concluded to vote for the measure. Thus twelve colonies united in adopting the following resolution:
”'That these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.'”
(Frothingham's Rise of the Republic of the United States, Chap. xi., pp.
537, 538.)
On the adoption of this resolution, continues the same historian, ”Congress went immediately into Committee of the Whole to consider the draft of a Declaration of Independence, or the form of announcing the fact to the world. During the remainder of that day, and during the sessions of the 3rd and 4th, the phraseology, allegations, and principles of this paper were subjected to severe scrutiny. Its author relates: 'The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with still haunted the minds of many. For this reason, those pa.s.sages which conveyed censure on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence. The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.' (Memoirs of Jefferson, i. 15.) The striking out of the pa.s.sage declaring the slave trade 'piratical warfare against human nature itself,' was deeply regretted by many of that generation. Other alterations were for the better, making the paper more dispa.s.sionate and terse, and--what was no small improvement--more brief and exact. On the evening of the 4th the Committee rose, when Harrison reported the Declaration as having been agreed upon. It was then adopted by twelve States, unanimously.” [That is, by the majority of the delegates of twelve provinces, and, of course, _reported_ as ”unanimous,” according to previous agreement.]--_Ib._, p. 539.]
CHAPTER XXVI.
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE DISCUSSED.
The foregoing chapters bear ample testimony how heartily I have sympathized with our elder brother colonists of America, in their conception and manly advocacy and defence of their const.i.tutional rights as British subjects; how faithfully I have narrated their wrongs and advocated their rights, and how utterly I have abhorred the despotic conduct of George the Third, and of his corrupt Ministers and mercenary and corrupted Parliament, in their unscrupulous efforts to wrest from the American colonists the attributes and privileges of British freemen, and to convert their lands, with their harbours and commerce, into mere plantations and instruments to enrich the manufacturers and merchants of England, and provide places of honour and emolument for the scions and protegees of the British aristocracy and Parliament. But I cannot sympathize with, much less defend, the leaders of the old American colonists in the repudiating what they had professed from their forefathers; in avowing what they had for many years denied; in making their confiding and distinguished defenders in the British Parliament--the Chathams, Camdens, Sherburnes, the Foxes, Burkes, and Cavendishes--liars in presence of all Europe; in deliberately practising upon their fellow-colonists what they had so loudly complained of against the King and Parliament of Great Britain; in seeking the alliance of a Power which had sought to destroy them for a hundred years, against the land of their forefathers which had protected them during that hundred years, and whose Administration had wronged and sought to oppress them for only twelve years.
After many years of anxious study and reflection, I have a strong conviction that the Declaration of American Independence, in 1776, was a great mistake in itself, a great calamity to America as well as to England, a great injustice to many thousands on both sides of the Atlantic, a great loss of human life, a great blow to the real liberties of mankind, and a great impediment to the highest Christian and Anglo-Saxon civilization among the nations of the world.
In this summary statement of opinion--so contrary to the sentiments of American historians and to popular feeling in the United States--I mean no reflection on the motives, character, patriotism, and abilities of those great men who advocated and secured the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in the General Congress of 1776. I believe America has never produced a race of statesmen equal in purity of character, in comprehensiveness of views, in n.o.ble patriotism and moral courage, to ”the Fathers of the American Revolution.” Their discussions of public questions, during the eleven years which preceded the Declaration of Independence, evince a clearness of discernment, an accuracy of statement, a niceness of distinction, a thorough knowledge of the principles of government, and the mutual relation of colonies and the parent State, elegance of diction, and force of argument, not surpa.s.sed in discussions of the kind in any age or country; their diplomatic correspondence displays great superiority in every respect over the English statesmen of the day, who sought to oppress them; the correspondence of Was.h.i.+ngton with General Gage commanded alike the admiration of Europe and the grat.i.tude of America; the memorials and other public papers transmitted to England by the American Congress, and written by Jay and other members, drew forth from the Earl of Chatham, in the House of Lords, January 20th, 1775, the following eulogy: ”When your lords.h.i.+ps look at the papers transmitted to us from America--when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must avow that in all my reading--and I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master States of the world--for solidity of reason, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion under a complication of difficult circ.u.mstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. The histories of Greece and Rome give us nothing equal to it, and all attempts to impose servitude upon such a mighty continental nation must be vain.”
”We shall be forced ultimately to retract; let us retract while we can, not when we must. These violent Acts must be repealed; you will repeal them; I pledge myself for it, I stake my reputation on it, that you will in the end repeal them.”
(Those violent Acts were repealed three years afterwards.)
When the Earl of Shelburne read the reply, written by Jefferson, of the Virginia Legislature, to Lord North's proposition, his Lords.h.i.+p said: ”In my life, I was never more pleased with a State paper than with the a.s.sembly of Virginia's discussion of Lord North's proposition. It is masterly. But what I fear is that the evil is irretrievable.”
Among the statesmanlike productions of that period, the correspondence of Franklin, the masterly letters of d.i.c.kenson, the letters and State papers of Samuel and John Adams, Jay and Livingstone, and of many others, exhibit a scholarly race of statesmen and writers of whom any nation or age might be proud.
But it must not be forgotten that the education of every one of these great men, and their training in public affairs, was under English const.i.tutional government, for which every one of them (except Samuel Adams) expressed their unqualified admiration, and to which they avowed their unswerving attachment to within twelve months of the declaration of independence. Though the United States can boast of many distinguished scholars and politicians and jurists, I believe American democracy has never produced a generation of scholarly, able, and stainless statesmen, such as those who had received the whole of their mental, moral, and political training when America formed a part of the British empire.
It is not surprising, indeed, that the major part (for they were not unanimous) of so n.o.ble and patriotic a cla.s.s of statesmen should, by the wicked policy and cruel measures against them by the worst administration of government that ever ruled England, be betrayed into an act which they had so many years disavowed. Placing, as they rightly did, in the foreground the civil and religious liberties of Englishmen as the first ingredient of the elements of political greatness and social progress, they became exasperated into the conviction that the last and only effective means of maintaining those liberties was to sever their connection with England altogether, and declare their own absolute independence. We honour the sentiments and courage which prompted them to maintain and defend their liberties; we question not the purity and patriotism of their motives in declaring independence as the means of securing those liberties; but we must believe that, had they maintained the integrity of their professions and positions for even a twelvemonth longer, they would have achieved all for which they had contended, would have become a free and happy country, as Canada now is, beside the mother country and not in antagonism to her, maintaining inviolate their national life and traditions, instead of forming an alliance for b.l.o.o.d.y warfare with their own former and their mother country's hereditary enemies.
It was unnatural and disgraceful for the British Ministry to employ German mercenaries and savage Indians to subdue the American colonists to unconditional obedience; but was it less unnatural for the colonists themselves to seek and obtain the alliance of the King of France, whose government was a despotism, and who had for a hundred years sought to destroy the colonists, had murdered them without mercy, and employed by high premiums the Indians to butcher and scalp men, women, and children of the colonists--indeed, to ”drive them into the sea,” and to exterminate them from the soil of America? Yet with such enemies of civil and religious liberty, with such enemies of their own liberties, and even their existence as Anglo-Saxons, the colonists sought and obtained an alliance against the mother country, which had effectually, and at an immense expenditure, defended them against the efforts of both France and Spain to destroy them. Had the American colonists maintained the position and professions after 1776, as they had maintained them before 1776, presenting the contrast of their own integrity and unity and patriotism to the perfidious counsels, mercenary and un-English policy of the British Ministry and Parliament, they would have escaped the disastrous defeats and bloodshed of 1777-8, and would have repeated the victories which they had gained over the English soldiers in 1775 and the early part of 1776. Unprepared and sadly deficient in arms and ammunition, they repulsed the regular English soldiers sent against them at Concord, at Lexington, at Bunker's Hill; they had shut up as prisoners the largest English army ever sent to New England, and, though commanded by such generals as Howe and Clinton, compelled their evacuation of the city of Boston. In the Southern States they had routed the English forces, and had compelled the Governors of Virginia and South and North Carolina to take refuge on board of English men-of-war.
Before the declaration of independence, the colonists fought with the enthusiasm of Englishmen for Englishmen's rights, and the British soldiers fought without heart against their fellow-subjects contending for what many of both the soldiers and officers knew to be rights dear to all true Englishmen; but when the Congress of the American colonies declared themselves to be no longer Englishmen, no longer supporters of the const.i.tutional rights of Englishmen, but separationists from England, and seeking alliance with the enemies of England, then the English army felt that they were fighting against enemies and not fellow-subjects, and fought with an energy and courage which carried disaster, in almost every instance, to the heretofore united but now divided colonists, until France and Spain came to their a.s.sistance.
With these preliminary and general remarks, we proceed to state more specifically the grounds on which we regard, as a calamity to the interests of true liberty and of civilization, the change of position, policy, and principles avowed by the General Congress in the Declaration of Independence, 1776.
I. The Declaration of Independence was a renunciation of all the principles on which the General Congress, Provincial Legislatures, and Conventions professed to act from the beginning of the contest. The foregoing pages present abundant testimony and ill.u.s.tration how earnestly, how constantly, how unanimously the American colonists expressed their attachment to the mother country and to the principles of the British Const.i.tution--how indignantly they repelled, as an insult and a slander, every suspicion and statement that they meditated or desired _independence_, or that they would ever consent to sever the ties of their connection with the mother country and the glorious principles of her const.i.tution of government.
In the same Congress of 1775, by which Was.h.i.+ngton was appointed Commander-in-Chief, the higher departments of the army were organized.
Bills of credit to the amount of three millions were emitted to defray the expenses of the war, and after the battles of Lexington and Bunker's Hill, while the English army were shut in Boston by the Provincial volunteers, a declaration was signed by Congress, justifying their proceedings, but disdaining any idea of separation from England. They say, ”We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconst.i.tutional submission to the tyranny of irritated Ministers, or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honour, justice, and humanity forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us....
”With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before G.o.d and the world, _declare_ that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to a.s.sume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live slaves.
”Lest this declaration should disquiet the minds of our friends and fellow-subjects in any part of the empire, _we a.s.sure them that we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored_. Necessity has not yet driven us to that desperate measure, or induced us to excite any other nation to war against them. _We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain, and of establis.h.i.+ng independent States._ We fight not for glory or for conquest. We exhibit to mankind the remarkable spectacle of a people attacked by unprovoked enemies, without any imputation or even suspicion of offence. They boast of their privileges and civilization, and yet proffer no milder conditions than servitude or death.
”In our native land, in defence of the freedom that is our birthright, and which we ever enjoyed until the late violation of it, for the protection of our property acquired solely by the honest industry of our forefathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.”[393]
”Amidst these hostile operations, the voice of peace was yet heard--allegiance to the King was still acknowledged, and a lingering hope remained that an accommodation was not impossible. Congress voted a pet.i.tion to his Majesty, replete with professions of duty and attachment; and addressed a letter to the people of England, conjuring them, by the endearing appellations of 'friends, countrymen, and brethren,' to prevent the dissolution of 'that connection which the remembrance of former friends.h.i.+ps, pride in the glorious achievements of common ancestors, and affection for the heirs of their virtues had heretofore maintained.' _They uniformly disclaimed any idea of independence, and professed themselves to consider union with England, on const.i.tutional principles_, as the greatest blessing which could be bestowed on them.”[394]
It is needless to multiply authorities and ill.u.s.trations; the whole tenor of the history of the colonies, as presented in the preceding chapters of this volume, evinces their universal appreciation of the principles of the British Const.i.tution and their universal attachment to union with the mother country.[395]