This month several contributors from the Helwys Society Forum are going to offer essays related to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. Each post will address a specific aspect of the founding and suggest some applications for our present moment.
Sometime in the early 2010s, I attended a community get-together in early July where the organizers decided to give printed handouts of the Declaration of Independence to everyone to read aloud together. We each took turns reading a few sentences until we made our way through the entire document. This experience has stuck in my memory partly because the group that gathered that evening came from very disparate political commitments.
Reading this foundational document together bridged some of the space between us all. But I was also struck by how anticlimactic the experience of reading it was. Several in our group started out excited about the expansive rhetoric of the preamble, reading loudly and expressively. But the mood gradually became more subdued as they began to realize that the bulk of the document is taken up with the list of the “long train of abuses and usurpations.” The further we made our way into the list, the quieter everyone became. It turned out the Declaration of Independence was not very effective at enflaming patriotic spirit.
In the following years, as I began teaching history at Welch College, I came to understand that our public reading that night flagged because of the immense practicality of the Declaration. Most textbooks and history and government courses focus on the preamble to the Declaration, which is poetic about the nature of rights. But the founders were not solely aiming to put together a treatise or manifesto on political philosophy, as the French Revolutionaries were with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). Instead, they were building a legal argument for the justice of their actions, founded on the English tradition of constitutionally limited government that had been empowered by Protestant theology. A refreshed understanding of their motives and arguments is much needed by our generation, which has seen politicians at every level show contempt for the limitations of the law.
Imposing Taxes
At the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, the British government began to realize that maintaining the American colonies could be very costly.[1] The war had begun in the frontier territory of the Ohio Valley where the French, who at that time controlled all of Canada and the territory following the Mississippi River down to New Orleans, were building forts on contested land. The English colonists of Virginia were so incensed with the prospects of French expansion east that Governor Robert Dinwiddie sent a small band of colonial troops under the command of young George Washington to oust the French from the area in 1754. This engagement along with conflicts in the Great Lakes area eventually drew Britain and France into open war on two continents (North America and Europe). The British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder deployed approximately 45,000 British soldiers to North America alone.
After the dust settled, George Grenville, the chief policy officer of the British government, began working to recoup the financial losses incurred by the conflict. He and other royal officers noticed that North American colonists enjoyed an incredibly light tax burden compared to their peers in England and continental Europe. Therefore, he proposed a two-pronged plan for addressing the situation: (1) better enforcement of collection on taxes already in place; and (2) creation of new taxes.[2]
The better enforcement of collecting old taxes began immediately with the Revenue Act (1864), or Sugar Act (1864). The collection of duties was notoriously corrupt and easily evaded through smuggling.[3] The British government overhauled the collection system, replacing corrupt tax men in the colonies with more trusted men and tasking the British navy with patrolling the coast for smugglers. While the colonists directly involved in import trade, mostly in New England, New York, and Philadelphia, were frustrated by these changes, there was no great outcry against perceived injustice.[4] The adjustments made to duties were focused on external taxes paid by merchants for voluntarily importing goods rather than the internal taxes levied against individual colonists as they carried out their daily business.
When Grenville attempted to raise new taxes through the Stamp Act (1765), the response was more extreme. Undoubtedly, the colonists were angry about the proposition of an increased tax burden during a post-war economic slump. However, Grenville’s major error was his decision to circumvent the colonial legislatures in the process. Historically, when Parliament sought to adjust the internal tax burden of the colonists, they sent a requisition request to the colonial governments to raise as they saw fit. Thus, the colonists’ internal tax burdens were set and administrated by their local elected assemblies.[5]
By assessing the tax directly from Parliament, Grenville was intentionally asserting the sovereignty of the British government over the taxation of individuals in the colonies.[6] The growing friction between the colonies and the British government during the next decade was legally grounded in opposition to this important shift in imperial policy toward the American colonists and culminated in the specific legal arguments of the Declaration of Independence.
Constitutional Government and Representation
Some, like historian Robin Einhorn, wrongly believe the colonists decided to overthrow British rule because of the increase in their tax burden following the French and Indian War. As a result, they find it ironic that the liberated Americans ended up with a higher tax burden.[7] Worse, some go further and argue that the independence movement was unjust or born of foolishness. If the issue were the weight of the tax burden alone, perhaps they would have the makings of a good argument.
However, while the colonists clearly did cry out against the tax burden (in fairness, who does not make such pleas from time-to-time), the heart of the argument for independence was constitutional, explains historian Robert Middlekauff.[8] From the New England lawyer James Otis’ The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764) to the Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), the argument was clear: the historic constitutional rights of the American colonists were being overthrown by the British government.[9]
The colonists’ consistent assertion that the law of England was being broken when new internal taxes were raised without representation reflects the deep influence that the Reformation had on English political thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francis Schaeffer is very helpful in showing how the theological reflections of Samuel Rutherford on the nature of good governance contained in Lex Rex (1644) were picked up directly by the colonists through the Presbyterian minister, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and New Jersey representative to the Second Continental Congress John Witherspoon and indirectly through a rationalistic version of Rutherford’s thinking in John Locke’s political philosophy. Rutherford argued that Scripture’s account of godly government limits the power of the king, and the state more broadly, with the law. Furthermore, the law of the land should be derived from the principles revealed in God’s law.[10]
While Lex Rex was indeed deeply influential for the colonists, Rutherford was clarifying and refining through theology the general sense of English limitations on government as derived from the Anglo-Saxon government prior to the Norman invasion (1066) and reclaimed under Magna Carta (1215). These expectations for limits undergirded the Roundheads in their opposition to Charles I in the English Civil War (1642–1651), and they guided Parliament in the negotiations with William and Mary that led to the Glorious Revolution (1688). Most of the English colonists in America were fully aware of these precedents because they had been taught them at home, school, and in church.
When it came time to draft a formal declaration of independence to which all the colonists would subscribe at the Second Continental Congress in 1776, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York served on the committee that drew up the first draft. While Jefferson was tasked with the bulk of the writing, the rest of these serious men gave their full approval to his draft with minor alterations, and the remainder of the colonial representatives voted to endorse it with a few more modifications.[11] Thus, the document is remarkably representative of the formal thoughts about the causes impelling the colonists to independence, and its focus was the breaking of the constitution by the British government.
Conclusion
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding this year, we need to give attention to the actual motives and arguments of the founders. Certainly, we should re-examine the principles of individual and communal rights and celebrate them with gusto. But we must also retrieve the founding generation’s passion for constitutional government, pursuing politics through the lens of Scripture and the English tradition, and expecting even the state to abide by the law. Politicians who flaunt the law or seek to promote laws that are in clear opposition to God’s law should be opposed as much as is possible. Lastly, let us pray for good government officials who will abide by the limitations of the law and hold others accountable in the process.
[1] Adam Smith concluded The Wealth of Nations by advising the government to sever their ties with the colonies because they were too expensive to maintain and prone to draw Britain into wars (Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 17).
[2] Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 94–96.
[3] Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 15.
[4] Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, rev. and exp. ed., Oxford History of the United States, ed. David M. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66–67.
[5] For an excellent overview of this process, see Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 4th ed. (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2003), 323–32.
[6] Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 66; Taylor, American Revolutions, 96.
[7] Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 18.
[8] Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 66, 115–17, 127, 222.
[9] See Merrill Jensesn, ed., Tracts of the American Revolution: 1763–1776, The American Heritage Series, ed. Leonard W. Levy and Alfred Young (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967).
[10] Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, 50th L’Abri Anniversary ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 109–10.
[11] For more on Jefferson’s original draft and the modifications made by the committee and general congress, see Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper Perenniel, 1999), 154–56.
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