Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

In a point-by-point assessment that followed, reminiscent of modern-day cost-benefit analysis, the Declaration’s signatories concluded that rebellion was warranted by the intolerable conduct of the British government. And yet, a mere decade earlier, responding to the Stamp Act, many of these same colonists had seemed overjoyed with their good fortune in having such a marvelous sovereign. Remember the opening statement in their petition to the king: “The members of this Congress, sincerely devoted, with the warmest sentiments of affection and duty to His Majesty’s Person and Government, inviolably attached to the present happy establishment of the Protestant succession . . .” It seems that their “long train of abuses and usurpations” can have occurred in no longer than a decade and surely, if we are to take their earlier and later claims as sincere, must have been shorter. The king, after all, repealed the Stamp Act within a year of its issuance as well as withdrew his Proclamation of 1763 not long after issuing it. True, in 1770 he then imposed a small tax on tea in an effort to establish no more than the principle that he, as sovereign over the colonies, had the right to exact some tax from them. But in these acts it is hard to see oppression and despotism verging on tyranny . . . unless one happened to be a wealthy landowner who suffered severely from the Currency Act and from the king’s declaration of sovereignty over the very Ohio Valley in which such speculators as Washington were aggressively engaged.

What, then, did the Declaration’s signatories enumerate as the abuses that warranted their break from the past? What were the particulars that made their grievances neither light nor transient? What had the British done to cross the line from sufferable to insufferable oppression? The document answers these questions, justifying rebellion with a detailed list of grievances against the Crown. The first six grievances can be joined together as a complaint that the king neither agreed to laws passed by the people’s legislatures nor respected the legislative process in the colonies, interfering with its good works however he could. These matters were an implicit part of their earlier complaint against the Stamp Act. Recall point five of the Stamp Act Congress, “That the only representatives of the people of these colonies, are persons chosen therein by themselves, and that no taxes ever have been, or can be constitutionally imposed on them, but by their respective legislatures.” So, starting at least in 1765, the powerful colonists had already proclaimed that only their own legislatures could tax them; their legislatures—which they controlled—and no others.

Ten items later in the sequence of the list of grievances is the complaint we all remember: that the king was levying taxes on the colonies without their enjoying the benefits of representation (“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”), a deliberate reemphasis of the earlier allegations. Collectively, these were tough charges, carefully crafted to leave no room for a remedy deemed acceptable by the British government.

The subsequent complaints, with one notable collective exception—which forms the heart of our assessment of the casus belli for Washington, and perhaps for Jefferson and other founding fathers—are profound objections to the absence of an independent, honest judiciary and the compulsion to quarter British soldiers in private homes. Before we explore the fundamental grievance from which all these others follow, we should, however, pause to understand the historical foundations of the colonists’ complaint about taxation without representation.

Taxation Without Representation

THE COMPLAINT THAT THE COLONIES WERE TAXED WITHOUT representation itself had its foundation in long past history, as well as in contemporary complaints about the same thing in Ireland. Thanks to the fact that Edward I agreed in 1297 that new taxes could not be levied without the approval of all Englishmen represented in the House of Commons, everyone subject to the British Crown could argue, as the Americans did, that they had a right to participate in Parliament in making decisions about their taxation. In the colonists’ day, the issue was straightforward. The British government had learned through hard experience that the defense of the colonies was extremely costly. King George III and his Parliament—truly he acted as a constitutional monarch, deferring to Parliament on policy in exchange for their support of his lifestyle—wished to tax the colonists for their own defense and not for his own profit. They, however, objected to being taxed by a government that did not include representatives of their choosing in Parliament even as they contended that they could never be represented in Parliament, a claim we will contend later that the king could readily have overcome.

Whether born in England or on American soil, the colonists considered themselves to be English, subject to the rules of governance long established in English history and, to a lesser degree, practice. The question of the moment was whether the king or his prime minister, or, for that matter, the people in England, thought of the colonists as English. If the government in England saw the colonists as English, then, in keeping with centuries-old commitments, the colonists were as entitled to representation and a say in any new taxation as any other Englishman.

Apparently, at least to the colonial leaders, the Crown either did not consider them Englishmen or it did not feel bound in their case by the ancient promise by Edward I to consult even the commons before levying new taxes. To be sure, that promise had often been breached, but by the time of King George III’s constitutional form of monarchy it seemed fairly well established. Provided these assumptions were true, then these violations of their rights and interests might well have been viewed by the colonists as a justification for war. Yet, right above this complaint was a completely different objection to the Crown’s policies, one that we believe was at least as crucial to the decision to revolt.

The Right to Land—Not in the Colonies

BURIED AMONG THE GRIEVANCES OVER THE COLONIAL LEGISLATURES, the lack of judicial independence, the quartering of soldiers, and the tyranny of taxation without representation was a complaint that was more attuned, we believe, to personal rather than to general abuses of the public good by the Crown. It states of the king that

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

The signatories resented the king’s interference in these three related areas, particularly as concerned their entrepreneurial zest for acquiring income-producing real estate situated beyond the colonies. Of course, without additional settlers, the opportunity to profit from land that could then be sold or, as in Washington’s case, leased to new settlers for profit, would be diminished. Here, indeed, was a grievance that George Washington felt most keenly. The Proclamation of 1763 and the king’s actions in 1767 were designed to thwart the new appropriation of land by colonists. These appropriations were a big part of the foundation of Washington’s fortune and of his self-image. Here was a threat to his way of life that one can readily see would have lit the flame of revolution in his breast.

In the great divide between light and transient offenses and insufferable abuses that warranted rebellion, this challenge to just a few private interests suffering economic damage at the king’s hands was given a prominent place in the Declaration of Independence. In addition to Washington, Thomas Jefferson—whose father, Peter, founded a land speculation company in competition with the Ohio Company—stood to suffer grievously from the Crown’s restrictions on population growth, naturalization, and land acquisition. Did these three measures harm the greater public good? Perhaps in the long run they would have, but most assuredly this grievance was about the immediate economic harm done to a few prominent private interests who led the movement for revolution. We should not be surprised to learn that short-run personal losses may have been at the forefront of the thinking of the leading colonial revolutionaries. We all live in the moment, in the short run, more emphatically than in the long run.