The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition: 1943 and All That
• Preface to the 1965 Edition
• Part One: the English Heritage and the Colonial Historical View
• Chapter I: History and the Eighteenth-century Colonist
• Chapter II: The Colonial Perspective: Ancient and Medieval
• Chapter III: The Colonial Perspective: Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians
• Part Two: the Revolutionary Use of History
• Chapter IV: The New England Historical Conscience
• Chapter V: John Adams: Political Scientist As Historian
• Chapter VI: Three Pennsylvanians: John Dickinson, James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin
• Chapter VII: The Historical Mind of the South
• Chapter VIII: Thomas Jefferson and the Rights of Expatriated Men
• Chapter IX: The Whig Historical Tradition and the Origins of the American Revolution
• Appendix I: The Saxon Myth Dies Hard
• Appendix II: History In the Colonial Library

CHAPTER VII

The Historical Mind of the South

The intellectual history of the American Revolution was largely a history of political ideas, English history invoked against each new policy inaugurated by a British ministry. After 1765, colonial reactions to imperial regulations varied little from New Hampshire to Georgia. The rights of Englishmen applied to all colonists, whether they resided in northern, middle, or southern colonies; the colonial argument against “ministerial injustice” was all pervasive.

Born to power and position, the planter aristocrats of the southern colonies, like the leaders in the other colonies, were determined to maintain their rights and privileges. As political leaders they developed a familiarity with the history of the rights they sought to maintain. As landed litigants they necessarily developed an intimate knowledge of the law. Conflict with the mother country was far from a new experience, and long-standing disputes with their governors prepared them well for the political battles of the 1760s and 1770s.

I

In 1728 Daniel Dulany the elder used arguments against the proprietary government of Maryland that were strikingly similar to those employed by the Revolutionaries four decades later. When Governor Benedict Leonard Calvert vetoed the legislature’s third attempt to apply English statutes to Maryland, Dulany insisted upon the right of Marylanders to “the Enjoyment of English liberties; and the Benefit of the English Laws.”1 A Maryland gentleman of taste and wealth, the elder Dulany had studied law in England at Gray’s Inn, and in his political disputes in Maryland he earned a reputation as one of “the ablest lawyers of his generation.”2

Like so many of his political successors, Dulany attacked from a firm legal and historical base. His library included such whig works as Rapin’s History, Gordon’s translation of Tacitus, and Molesworth’s Account of Denmark.3 His own pamphlet, The Rights of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of the English Laws, referred frequently to “the great Oracle of the Law” Sir Edward Coke, Cato’s Letters, Rushworth’s Historical Collections, and Henry Care’s English Liberties. “What I contend for,” he asserted, “is, that we derive our Right to British Liberties, and Privileges, as we are British Subjects.” His rights came from English common law, “the best and most Common Birth-Right, that the Subject hath.” Under common law “every Subject has a Right to the Enjoyment of his Liberty and Property,” and when that right was threatened, “recourse must be had to the Law for a Remedy.”4

For Dulany one of the many attractions of Coke’s First Institutes lay in its claim that “a British Subject, may with Courage and Freedom, tell the most daring, and powerful Oppressor, that He must not injure him, with Impunity.” He knew his English history, and he knew there had been many attacks on the rights and liberties of Englishmen. He looked to Magna Charta as merely “a Declaration of the Common Law” and Parliament’s many confirmations of Magna Charta as substantiation of the need for vigilance. Quoting the “ingenious” Cato’s Letters, he asked “if Men … will be great Knaves, in spight of Opposition; how much greater would they be if there were none?”5 Dulany argued for a historical title to English liberties and urged resistance to encroachments. Readers of his Rights of the Inhabitants of Maryland were fully informed of their historical rights.

Dulany’s son, Daniel Dulany the younger, brilliantly adapted such arguments to the new imperial problems of the 1760s. Also an outstanding lawyer, the younger Dulany attended Eton, Cambridge, and then the Inns of Court, where he studied at the Middle Temple in company with William Blackstone. Aided by his father’s fine library, the younger Dulany was well equipped for his chosen role as critic of the Stamp Act in 1765.

Along with many colonists Dulany was angered not only by the taxation imposed by the Stamp Act, but also by the constitutional assumptions made by its proponents. He was particularly aroused by the ministerial claim “that the colonies were all virtually represented in Parliament, in the same manner as those of the subjects in Great Britain, who did not vote for representatives.”6 Dulany’s most successful pamphlet, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies,7 made a frontal assault upon this argument: “It is alledged,” complained Dulany, “that there is a Virtual, or implied Representation of the Colonies springing out of the Constitution of the British Government.” Indeed, he observed, it must be virtual, “or it doth not exist at all.” The fundamental and historical right of all Englishmen was the guarantee that no part of their property could be taken without their consent; thus if the House of Commons did not virtually represent the colonies, there was no constitutional basis for the Stamp Act.

Dulany’s fame rests largely upon the thoroughness with which he demolished British contentions for virtual representation. He noted, for example, that a nonelector was safe from oppression only when such oppression would also fall upon the electors and their representatives; Americans enjoyed no such safeguard. Thanks to county representation, all of England had some measure of real representation in the House of Commons; Americans enjoyed no such security.8 But Dulany’s pamphlet went beyond the issue of virtual representation. He was concerned with the larger question of the constitutional rights of Americans. He looked to the common law as the inheritance of Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic. He looked to colonial charters as formal acknowledgment “that their Privileges as English Subjects should be effectually secured to Themselves, and transmitted to their Posterity.” Charters not only confirmed colonial rights under the English constitution, but did so with a precision absent in England, where theory had to reckon with “the veil of Antiquity.” Dulany was well aware that once he left the common law, he entered an area of historical uncertainty. He noted that the ancient English constitution “is differently traced by different Men; but of the Colonies the Evidence of it is clear and unequivocal.” The best affirmations of English rights were in Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights; in both was the guarantee that “no Part of their Property shall be drawn from British Subjects without their Consent.” This, Dulany repeatedly insisted, “was an essential principle of the English Constitution.”9

This essential principle could only be maintained by the sort of energy which secured Magna Charta. He reported that in his father’s copy of Molesworth’s Account of Denmark there was a grim enough warning of “an Instance of the excessive Temerity of political animosity.” Everyone knew how an apathetic Danish assembly had allowed its powers to be seized by a tyrannical aristocracy; unless Americans stood firmly for their “constitutional Magna Charta privileges,” they would deserve a similar fate.10

In 1765 Dulany achieved a reputation for patriotism, but it was soon dissipated. As the colonial crisis with England worsened, Dulany became more disturbed over the dangers of drastic domestic change than over the constitutional dangers emanating from London. He finally found it necessary to retire from political strife, a decision hastened by his famous debate with a fellow Maryland aristocrat, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Since Carroll had spent much of his youth in France before visiting London to read some English law, he was less English than Dulany in his educational background. He returned home to a well-stocked paternal library, read widely, and became familiar with Rapin, Blackstone, Robertson, Hume, Gordon’s Tacitus, and Petyt’s Ius Parliamentum.11 With this preparation he criticized the Stamp Act with much the same kind of vigor and language used by the Dulanys, appealing to English common law as the foundation of colonial rights: “By that Law, the most favourable to liberty, we claim the invaluable privilege, that distinguishing Characteristick of the English constitution of being taxed by our own representatives.” To Carroll as to Daniel Dulany the younger, British claims of “virtual” representation were cruel mockery. Colonial acceptance of the Stamp Act would subject Americans to the sweeping powers implicit in that legislation and place the colonies at the whim of Parliament. “Are we to trust to the moderation of a British Parliament?” he asked. What manner of men made up the contemporary House of Commons? Men who had been so openhanded with their constitutents’ money surely would not be considerate of colonial feelings. Recent Parliamentary behavior, Carroll warned, appeared to carry the strongest marks of despotism.12

In 1765 Carroll claimed a colonial right to representative government, denying the constitutionality of the Stamp Act and charging Parliament with being reliable only for its corruption. Unlike the younger Dulany, Carroll did not soften his views. He increased his reading and his book purchasing so that he could be better informed on colonial claims. “Money cannot be laid out better,” he told William Graves in 1772, “than in the purchase of valuable books,”13 and he proceeded to acquire such volumes as Robertson’s Charles V, Lyttleton’s History of Henry II, and Dalrymple’s Feudal Property.14 As the imperial crisis deepened, he saw less and less cause for hope. Convinced that England’s government had declined too far from its former balance and virtue, he was sure that England was ruled by the worst of all governments, “a corrupt aristocracy … the least of all others fitted to extensive empire.” In a private letter written in 1771, Carroll concluded that the present House of Commons, “which ought to be the representative of the People, has become the instrument of the Ministry, to raise money from the subject.” The ministry, he observed, “is commonly composed of rich noblemen, and of some rich commoners, connected together by the ties of kindred or of interest.” The Crown had developed “vast influence,” and the common people were now utterly corrupted.15

The clash between Carroll and the younger Dulany arose over an internal issue, provoking a newspaper debate which called upon history to an extraordinary degree. Early in 1773, Governor Robert Eden claimed the right of setting Crown officers’ fees; but the Maryland Assembly insisted that this was their privilege. Dulany, a councilor and a recipient of such fees, sided with the Governor; Carroll with the Assembly. Carroll claimed that the fees were a form of taxation, and that no Englishman should pay taxes to which he had not consented. Eventually, Eden gave up his claim, but the bitter argument which he had started remained a lively political issue. The “Antilon—First Citizen” dispute,16 an important chapter in the history of the Revolution in Maryland, was carried on in almost exclusively historical terms. For the Revolutionary generation nothing could be more impressive, nothing could be more persuasive than a political view couched in phrases of legal precedent and historical simile.

In his attack on the Governor, Carroll likened Eden’s assertion of the right to set fees to Charles I’s policy in Hampden’s ship money case, and he attacked Dulany as an evil adviser to the Governor. Authority had corrupted the Governor’s councilors, Carroll declared; history was full of examples proving that “power is apt to pervert the best of natures.” After citing illustrations of Court lawyers betraying the cause of the people, he warned the Governor of the mischief misguided ministers had caused the unfortunate Charles I. Carroll’s first letter was warmly applauded by admirers who signed themselves “Independent Whigs.”17

Dulany’s response was weak and injudicious. He conceded Carroll’s charges against Charles I: the King’s extortion of ship money was “against the fundamental principles of a free constitution” and contrary to the Petition of Right. The best Dulany could offer was a distinction between fees, a proper function of the royal prerogative, and taxes, which were not.18 Dulany contended that the Crown set and paid the fees of court officers in Westminster Hall, that there was constitutional precedent for the similar action by Governor Robert Eden in Maryland.19 Carroll denied this, citing Coke and Hawkins as support; but seemingly uncertain of his case, he went on to argue that even if Dulany’s facts were correct, an English aberration was hardly justification for similar error in America. Dulany’s examples of royal fee-setting were met by Carroll’s assertions that such precedents were meaningless out of context. The English constitution, Carroll claimed, was an evolving, changing political structure; English history revealed frequent tyranny, but even more frequent effort to set it aside.20

Dulany thus afforded Carroll an excuse for reviewing English constitutional history. He depicted at the outset a happy state of liberty among the ancient Saxons in England; but their freedom was “wrested from them by the Norman conqueror,” who “entirely changed the ancient constitution.” Carroll’s concept of post-Conquest history was not that of the usual whig writer: after 1066 he saw “struggles between monarchy, and aristocracy, not between liberty, and prerogative.” The common people were but pawns in the game of politics, remaining oppressed and “a prey to both parties.” Only at the end of Henry III’s reign did Carroll discover evidence of a House of Commons, which from obscure beginnings, rose to become “the most powerful branch of our national assemblies, which gradually rescued the people from aristocratical, as well as from regal tyranny.” Medieval times Carroll described as “that rude and unlettered age,” when a barbarous monarchy, unregulated by any “fixed maxims, nor bounded by any certain rights,” imperfectly understood the meaning of “publick liberty.” He drew often from David Hume in his descriptions of Richard II and Edward III, citing him again when writing of Henry VII’s reign as “one continued scene of rapine and oppression on his part, and of servile submission on that of parliament.” Henry VIII was no improvement: he “governed with absolute sway”; under the Tudors Parliaments generally acted “more like the instruments of power than the guardians of liberty.” Carroll found time to agree that his readers, searching for more comment on the constitutionality of Governor Eden’s fees, might wonder at the relevance of his historical excursion; but his main point was that during this evolution of the government such constitutional questions went unnoticed. “Silent leges inter arma,” he commented.

But this observation was substantially appropriate for later history too. Up to 1688, Parliaments were either embroiled in contests with the Crown, or seeking to heal “the bleeding wounds of the nation.” He admired the Revolution of 1688, ranking it “among the most glorious deeds, that have done honor to the character of Englishmen”; James II, “by endeavouring to introduce arbitrary power, and to subvert the established church, justly deserved to be deposed and banished.” But the eviction of the Stuarts had not been sufficient to secure the ancient English constitution: Parliaments, noted Carroll with regret, “have relaxed much of their antient severity and discipline.” Overwhelmed by gratitude to William III, “their great deliverer,” and later anxious to prove their trust in the Hanoverian dynasty, Parliaments forgot their proper suspicion of the Crown. In the eighteenth century, continued Carroll, “a liberality bordering on profuseness has taken place of a rigid and austere economy; complacence and compliment have succeeded to distrust and to Parliamentary inquiries, into the conduct and to impeachment of ruling ministers.” Carroll knew recent writers in England who complained of “the vast increase of officers, placemen, and pensioners, and to that increase have principally ascribed an irresistible influence in the Crown over those national councils.” No one familiar with the House of Commons debates could ignore charges such as those leveled by Edward Southwell in 1744, charges with an immediate pertinence to Carroll’s debate in 1773: “Not only large salaries have been annexed to every place or office under government, but many of the officers have been allowed to oppress the subject by the sale of places under them, and by exacting extravagant and unreasonable fees, which have been so long suffered that they are now looked upon as the legal perquisites of the office, nay, in many offices they seem to have got a customary right to defraud the public.” Here was an object lesson on the dangers of granting either a colonial governor or an English monarch broad authority over judicial offices.

There was, however, an important difference between England and Maryland: in Carroll’s colony, the proprietary government did not, thanks to quitrents, derive its income substantially from taxes voted by the Assembly. If further power were allowed the executive, then the Assembly of Maryland would become a meaningless appendage. In England, on the other hand, the financial necessities of the Crown forced it to make frequent recourse to Parliamentary grants, and thus the House of Commons had emerged in the seventeenth century as a bulwark of the subject’s liberty. Only by “the unanimous, steady, and spirited conduct of the people” was liberty achieved. Magna Charta and its confirmations, the Petition of Right of 1628 and the Bill of Rights of 1688, all were “the happy effects of force and necessity.” Carroll was anxious to maintain an executive dependency upon the people in Maryland. He was only too aware that this essential ingredient to liberty was disappearing in England: “Let us, my countrymen, profit by the errors and vices of the mother country; let us shun the rocks, on which there is reason to fear her constitution will be split.”21

Carroll dominated the “Antilon—First Citizen” duel. His shafts struck home at Dulany, who responded with intemperate ad hominem criticisms of his tormenter. Dulany, even more than Carroll, lost sight of the original issue of fees; he wandered into unfortunate byways, attacking Carroll’s sources and his Roman Catholic faith. Hume’s History, declared Dulany, was “a studied apology for the Stuarts”; reliance upon so partisan a writer, Dulany insinuated, was logical for the Roman Catholic Carroll seeking sympathy for his coreligionists. Carroll retorted that Dulany was judging the seventeenth century by the constitutional expectations of the eighteenth; the English constitution “was not so well improved and so well settled in Charles’ time as at present.”22

But if the constitution was better “settled” in Carroll’s day, its execution was not. If the fee controversy distressed Carroll in 1773, the consequences of the Boston Tea Party seriously alarmed him in 1774. Now he saw “insatiable avarice,” the “ambition of corrupt ministers intent on spreading that corruption thro’ America, by which they govern absolutely in G[reat] B[ritain].”23 Resistance was Carroll’s choice. It was not Dulany’s. Dulany had always been more concerned with the proper limits of sovereignty than its popular origins. In 1765 he had denied Parliament’s propriety in enacting the Stamp Act; he had questioned the constitutionality of Parliamentary taxation of Americans; but he had not doubted the supremacy of Parliament and could not countenance turbulence, disorder, or disobedience to law. And so, a decade later, Dulany declined to join Carroll in resisting British tyranny, despite substantial agreement on the essential constitutional rights at stake. Dulany could criticize tyranny and employ history to identify it; but his respect for law, for authority, was such that he could not offer overt resistance. And so, unlike Carroll, Dulany was not a signer of the Declaration of Independence; nor, like several of his close relatives, was Dulany a loyalist. An uneasy neutral, Dulany had spent his political force; his unwitting contribution to the Revolution had long since been made.24

II

If Maryland achieved a priority in her appeal to certain historical rights, her Virginia neighbors could point to an earlier resistance to British impositions in the 1760s. A leader in such resistance was Richard Bland, a Virginia aristocrat and one of the most active members of the House of Burgesses. Like many a planter’s son, Bland studied with a series of itinerant tutors and secured enough of a classical education to enter the College of William and Mary. After graduation he continued an informal course of self-education, relying on a disciplined program of private reading. A self-taught lawyer and historian, he impressed John Adams as “a learned, bookish man.”25 Much of his fine library was later bought by Thomas Jefferson, only to be lost in the Library of Congress fire of 1851, but it is possible to piece together something of the reading interests of this learned gentleman and discover the use to which they were put.

Richard Bland’s life was one of continuous public service. For more than thirty years, he served in the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he was said to be a very John Selden in his advocacy of liberty.26 Bland admired Selden; he would have savored the comparison. When Governor Dinwiddie tried to impose and collect a land-patenting fee—the pistole fee—in 1753, Bland led the opposition to “an Infringement of the Rights of the People,” a subversion of “the Laws and Constitution.”27

Three years later the Virginia Assembly passed, and Governor Fauquier approved, the Two-Penny Act, a temporary wartime anti-inflationary measure which allowed contracts, rent, salaries, debts, and fees usually payable in tobacco to be paid at the rate of sixteen shillings and eight pence per hundred pounds of tobacco, or two pence per pound. The regulation was dictated by the rapid rise in the price of tobacco, which had climbed to six pence per pound, three times its pre-war value. Although the act applied to all transactions involving tobacco as currency, it was the clergy rather than the merchants who complained. Their annual pay had been set in 1696 at 16,000 pounds of tobacco and confirmed as recently as 1748. For the clergy the Two-Penny Act meant a cut of two-thirds of their real income, at least for the year’s duration of the act, while their living costs mounted during wartime inflation. They memorialized the Board of Trade, praying for a royal disallowance of the Two-Penny Act on the constitutional ground that it lacked the usual suspending clause; it had gone into effect before receiving royal examination. The Reverend John Camm represented the clergy in England, and the Privy Council disallowed the act. The clergy then brought suit for recovery of their unpaid salaries, and the case of the Reverend James Maury, Jefferson’s teacher, gave Patrick Henry his chance to contest the constitutionality of royal disallowance. Since there were no statutory grounds for denying Maury’s recovery, Henry argued that the original compact between the King and the people had been breached; “a King,” he declared, “by annulling or disallowing Acts of so salutary a nature [as the Two-Penny Act], from being the Father of his people degenerated into a Tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects’ Obedience.”28 Henry denied the right of the King to refuse Virginians the privilege of enacting their own legislation. The jury awarded damages of one penny to the Reverend Mr. Maury, and the clergy’s case for full compensation collapsed.

Bland, more thoughtful than Henry, addressed himself to the history of the constitutional power of the King to disallow laws of the Virginia Assembly. His essay, The Colonel Dismounted (1763), was a landmark in the evolving colonial argument for self government, outlining in bold strokes what later became the familiar argument of an independent dominion: Virginia had not been created by the King or by Parliament. It was not, therefore, part of the British realm. The English emigrants to America had settled at their own expense in blood and treasure; they owed no economic obligations to the mother country, nor were they under any obligations except that of allegiance to the King. Colonial charters, as Coke had ruled, were compacts by which the King had granted colonists “the Laws of England, or a power to make Laws for themselves.” Compacts are binding: neither the grantor nor his successors “can alter or abrogate the same.”29

As “descendants of Englishmen,” Virginians were entitled to “the native Privileges our Progenitors enjoyed,” privileges which “could not be forfeited by their Migration to America.” In England “all Men are born free, are only subject to Laws made with their own Consent, and cannot be deprived of the Benefit of these Laws without a transgression of them.” So, too, were the King’s subjects in Virginia born free, under the rule of law. Clearly implying that the colonial legislature had exclusive jurisdiction over internal polity, Bland declared that royal instructions about the suspending clause, however much they might serve as “Guides and Directions for the Conduct of Governors,” could not “consistently with the Principles of the British Constitution … have the Force and Power of Laws upon the People.” Only the “Legislature of the Colony,” he concluded, “have a Right to enact ANY Law they shall think necessary for their INTERNAL Government.”30

Bland’s position was bold and original, grounded in history and foreshadowing his most important literary and historical effort, his Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766). Bland’s work, the most important publication in Virginia during the Stamp Act crisis, was in Jefferson’s opinion “the first pamphlet on the nature of the connection with Great Britain which had any pretension to accuracy of view on that subject.”31 Jefferson’s initial excitement is easy to understand.

Bland had been busy reading. He knew the works of William Petyt, Robert Brady, Rapin, Tacitus, and Temple. He seems to have become familiar with Samuel Squire’s Enquiry into the Foundations of the English Constitution (1753), which proclaimed itself “an Historical Essay upon the Anglo-Saxon Government both in Germany and England.” Squire described England’s Saxon forefathers as manifesting an “invincible love of liberty”: they “were born free, lived under a free government in their first settlements, brought freedom with them into Britain, and handed it down to us inviolate.”32 Following Squire, Bland opened his Inquiry with an assertion of the English birthright: it was “as certain as History can make it that the present civil Constitution of England derives its Original from the Saxons, who, coming over to the Assistance of the Britons … established a Form of Government … similar to that they had been accustomed to live under in their native Country.” The original Saxon constitution was “founded upon Principles of the most perfect Liberty.” Landholding was allodial (as Squire also insisted), and “every Freeman, that is, every Freeholder, was a Member of their Wittinagemot, or Parliament,” until it proved impossible for all freemen to attend in person, when a representative system developed. Under this, all freemen “had a Right to vote at the Election of Members of Parliament.”33 The source of rights and duties, therefore, far from being in “utopian constitutions … [which] perhaps never actually existed but in the imagination of speculative men,”34 or being found in theories of a natural law and divine prescription, was actually to be found in recorded Saxon history.

Saxon history showed a people exerting their “natural Right to relinquish their Country, and by retiring from it, and associating together, to form a new political Society and independent State.” Bland drew a parallel with the Englishmen who crossed the Atlantic to America: they had exerted a similar natural right. The natural right of migration was a critical factor in Bland’s case for the colonists’ “natural rights of British Subjects.” “When Subjects are deprived of their civil Rights,” his Inquiry explained,

The right to a social compact was inherent in the human being. Bland discussed Magna Charta as a contract; it led him immediately back to the historical rights of Englishmen in America. When Virginians contended for “the natural Rights of British Subjects,” or the “Blessings of a British Constitution,” they meant the specific constitutional rights inherited from their Saxon ancestors and transferred in their ancient purity to American shores.36 Between the ancient Saxon representative system and the Parliament existing in England in 1765, a vast difference existed. Parliament was now unrepresentative; so far had the constitution departed “from its original Purity.” Bland estimated that 90 per cent of English citizens were denied the right to vote, and he denounced the idea of a “virtual” representation, as had the younger Dulany. No restoration of England’s constitution in “pristine perfection” seemed likely; Bland feared “the Gangrene has taken too deep Hold to be eradicated in these Days of Venality.”37 Only in America did he believe that the ancient constitution had a chance of survival, but if measures like the Stamp Act were tolerated, the prospect for freedom in America would be as dim as in England.

Colonists had “as natural a Right to the Liberties and Privileges of Englishmen, as if they were actually resident within the Kingdom.” “Under an English Government all men are born free, are only subject to Laws made with their own Consent, and cannot be deprived of the Benefit of these Laws without a transgression of them.” “An essential Part of British Freedom,” he argued, was that taxes could be levied only by elected representatives.38 But Bland not only stressed the unconstitutionality of taxation without representation; he also denied the propriety of internal legislation without representation. “If then the People of this Colony are free born,” he continued, “and have the Right to the Liberties and Privileges of English Subjects, they must necessarily have a legal Constitution, that is, a Legislature, composed, in Part, of the Representatives of the People, who may enact Laws for the internal Government of the Colony, and suitable to its various Circumstances and Occasions; and without such a Representative, I am bold enough to say, no law can be made.”39 Bland claimed for Virginians the “Right … of directing their internal Government by Laws made with their own Consent.” Indeed, Bland went further than most colonial spokesmen when he wrote that the colonists were “distinct People from the Inhabitants of Britain,” “independent, as to their internal Government, of the original Kingdom, but united with her, as to their external Polity, in the closest and most intimate LEAGUE AND AMITY, under the same Allegiance.”40 Thus far had Bland’s use of whig history led him by 1766.

Jefferson, who years later thought Bland’s Inquiry superior to Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer, appraised Bland’s methodology with some perception. “He would set out on sound principles, pursue them logically till he found them leading to the precipice which he had to leap, start back alarmed, then resume his ground, go over it in another direction, be led again … to the same place, and again back about.”41 But Bland wrote his Inquiry nine years before Jefferson addressed the same problem more directly in his Summary View. Bland’s Revolutionary role was that of a political scout, reconnoitering the future battleground but avoiding a pitched battle. Defending the Virginia Assembly in the Parson’s Cause—two years before the Stamp Act and nearly five years before the publication of the Letters from a Farmer—Bland insisted that “any Tax respecting our INTERNAL Polity, which may hereafter be imposed on us by Act of Parliament, is arbitrary, as depriving us of our Rights, and may be opposed.”42 He undertook to remind his fellow colonists what their rights were and just how substantial were their historical foundations, then boldly stated an important corollary, “Rights imply Equality.”43 He left to Jefferson’s generation the final decision on how best to maintain its constitutional inheritance.

When Richard Bland and the Virginia delegation took their seats in the Continental Congress in 1774, Joseph Reed of Pennsylvania was among the many who were impressed. “There are some fine fellows come from Virginia,” he wrote, “but they are very high. … We understand they are the capital men of the colony, both in fortune and understanding.”44 Reed’s appraisal was substantially correct. Among those in Bland’s party were Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and George Washington.

Like Bland, Patrick Henry had been an eloquent opponent of the Two-Penny Act, and his fiery courtroom oratory in the Reverend James Maury’s case had defeated the clergy’s opposition to the Assembly’s regulation. Henry’s preparation for politics was better than reputed. Although he did not have a college education, his father, Colonel John Henry (whose idea of a diversion was reading a Latin dictionary), had spent four years at King’s College, Aberdeen, and for five years he served as his son’s tutor, imparting a knowledge of Latin and a smattering of Greek. Patrick considered himself “well versed in both ancient and modern History” and acquired a modest library in which law, politics, and history were well represented. When Patrick Henry presented himself for admission to the Virginia bar his examiners found him extraordinarily strong on the laws of nature and nations, on the history of law, and on feudal history.45

If Henry attracted the attention of Virginians by his performance in the Parson’s Cause in 1762, he achieved national recognition by his response to the Stamp Act in 1765. The House of Burgesses had completed much of the routine business of its May session and many had left Williamsburg when Henry rose to unleash his “torrents of sublime eloquence” against the Stamp Act.46 He drew heavily on his legal and historical learning in challenging Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. The rights which Henry claimed for the colonists were “all the Priviledges, Franchises and Immunities that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, and possessed by the People of Great Britain.” He reviewed the royal charters granted Virginia, with their guarantee of the same rights for Virginians “as if they had been abiding and born within the Realm of England.” Taxation by and with the consent of the people’s representatives was “the distinguishing Characterick of British Freedom and without which the ancient Constitution cannot subsist.” Any British action contrary to such constitutional rights would have “a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.”47

In the “most bloody debate” that followed his Stamp Act resolutions, Henry uttered his celebrated and yet far from unique warning to George III: “Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus,” he cried, “Charles the First his Cromwell.”48 But these were now clichés of history, decorating political arguments widely familiar—historical lessons from which Americans, if not George III, could learn.

George Mason was another Virginian who claimed for Americans all the rights of Englishmen. His contributions to the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the first Virginia constitution are well known; his intellectual background is not. Only ten years old when his father died, George Mason was educated by his learned uncle, John Mercer of “Marlborough,” whose large library had over five hundred volumes dealing with law and history. By the 1750s, when he attained his majority, Mason emerged as a scholar who enjoyed “a modest but independent fortune,” “the blessings of a private station,” and a warm attachment to his native colony and the mother country.49 He declared that Americans had “sucked in with our mother’s milk” the principles of English freedom. Americans were but transplanted Britishers. “We are still the same people with them in every respect”—every respect save one: Americans were “not yet debauched by wealth, luxury, venality and corruption.” He insisted on his devotion to the English Crown. As he put it, he was “an Englishman in his principles, a zealous assertor of the Act of Settlement, firmly attached to the present royal family upon the throne.” For those who identified criticism of George III with Jacobitism, Mason affirmed his loyalty to the Hanoverians, denouncing Jacobitism as “the most absurd infatuation, the wildest chimera that ever entered into the head of man.” He was, Mason repeated, a man “who adores the wisdom and happiness of the British constitution.”50 It was to their British inheritance that Americans appealed: “We claim nothing but the liberty and privileges of Englishmen, in the same degree, as if we had still continued among our brethren in Great Britain.” “We cannot be deprived of … [our rights], without our consent,” Mason warned. He also issued other warnings: a warning that “another experiment [such] as the stamp act would produce a general revolt in America”; that the colonists would not fight alone, but would surely secure outside support from England’s enemies—as had the Dutch in their revolt against Spain, from Spanish enemies; that “the same causes will generally produce the same effects … what has happened may happen again”; that George Grenville would lead England to disaster—Grenville, who “dared to act the part that Pericles did, when he engaged his country in the Peloponnesian War, which … ended in the ruin of all Greece.” England must recall “the vigor and spirit of her own free and happy constitution,” if she would preserve her empire. In Mason’s mind there was a direct relationship between England’s political health and England’s respect for colonial rights.51

In 1773 Mason undertook a review of Virginia’s constitutional connection with England. There had been no historical precedent for American colonization; “to the people of Great Britain the scene then opening was entirely new.” Although English immigrants to America would “by the laws of Nature and Nations” have carried with them the constitution of the country they came from, entitled to all its advantages, they did not trust themselves completely “to general principles applied to a new subject.” To be absolutely secure in their title to “the rights and privileges of their beloved laws and Constitution,” they made a firm compact with the Crown in their colonial charters. Charters emanated from sovereignty, Mason observed. To the Crown belonged the constitutional power to dispose of newly acquired territory; to the people belonged the power of limiting their rights. “The American Charters, therefore, are legal ab origine” compacts in actuality and in theory—American colonies were not like Wales or Ireland, conquered lands. England had no right to govern her colonies as conquered provinces. “We are the Descendants, not of the Conquered, but of the Conquerors.”52

To Mason, “general principles” of “the laws of Nature and Nations” were less tangible bases for rights than specific provisions of the constitution as it had developed historically. By clear and repeated decision, enactment, and charter, English subjects could be governed only by laws to which they had given their consent through representatives freely chosen by themselves. It was this specific constitutional provision the English ministry was violating: “There is,” Mason declared, “a premeditated design and system, formed and pursued by the British ministry, to introduce an arbitrary government into his Majesty’s dominions.” They were the King’s dominions, no part of Parliament’s, no part of the English realm. Evil ministers artfully prejudiced the King against his devoted American subjects, despite the efforts of English whig reformers to whom Mason tendered his “most sincere and cordial thanks” for “their spirited and patriotic conduct in support of our constitutional rights and privileges.” The ministry—the mass of the English people, too—were grievously misinformed on the historical justice of colonial claims.53

Mason persistently reminded Americans that shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 Parliament had succeeded in subverting the constitutional balance of the British government. And through corruption, political bribery, and venality England had entered a moral decline, until “every town and village in the kingdom” was fouled. Standing armies—regiments had been in America since the Pontiac Rising of 1763—were a badge of this corruption. “Recollect the history of most nations of the world,” urged Mason; “what havoc, desolation and destruction, have been perpetrated by standing armies!”54 His antidote was the ancient Saxon militia, “the natural strength and only stable security of a free government,” which would have the incidental virtue of relieving England of the need to tax Americans to support the standing army they did not want. If England refused to see the reasonableness of her colonists, then an American militia should be ready to fight for “the principles of the English Constitution.” America had become “the only great nursery of freemen now left upon the face of the earth. Let us,” concluded Mason, “cherish the sacred deposit.”55

Mason’s near neighbor, George Washington, gained fame for his defense of liberty by the sword rather than the pen. But although he did not play as prominent a role in formulating public opinion as Bland, Henry, Mason, Jefferson, or Richard Henry Lee, he was a well-read eighteenth-century gentleman-farmer with broad intellectual interests, and he eventually collected a library of some nine hundred volumes, a library replete with such authors as Vertot, Robertson, Burgh, Hume, and Mrs. Macaulay.56 Robert Bell, the Philadelphia publisher, usually found Washington ready to support his subscription editions; and had Bell ever thought to reprint Joseph Addison’s works, Washington would surely have been an eager customer. Washington particularly liked plays and history, and if the two were combined, so much the better. Addison’s popular play Cato was one of Washington’s favorites. In a youthful letter to Sally Fairfax, he wished he could play the part of Juba, the lover of Cato’s daughter Marcia—which role should naturally be the fair Sally’s. And in the dark days of Valley Forge, Washington scheduled a performance of the same Cato to cheer his troops.57 It is likely that Washington’s taste in drama was shared by Patrick Henry, whose famous request “Give me liberty or give me death!” found a strikingly similar echo in Cato’s remark

• It is not now a time to talk of aught
• But chains, or conquest; liberty or death.58

The historian whom Washington knew best was the widely read Catherine Macaulay. He bought a set of her History of England for Master Custis in 1769, and thanks to Richard Henry Lee, Washington later had the pleasure of meeting this representative of “the foremost rank of writers.”59 At Lee’s suggestion, Washington showed Mrs. Macaulay the hospitality of Mount Vernon during her American visit in 1785. Washington was soon writing of a lady “whose principles are so much and so justly admired by the friends of liberty and of mankind,” and there began a correspondence which was only terminated by Mrs. Macaulay’s death in the summer of 1791.60

Washington established no continental reputation as a writer or orator. Yet he was active in the political disputes long before the resort to arms. He opposed the Stamp Act strenuously, denouncing it as an “unconstitutional method of taxation.”61 When the courts in Virginia closed to avoid having to affix stamps to legal documents, Washington requested Mason, one of his constituents, to draft a scheme to expedite the processing of rent disputes without the use of stamped paper for the bond ordinarily required; but repeal of the Stamp Act made it unnecessary for Washington to introduce Mason’s measure in the House of Burgesses.

In a letter which adumbrated the nonimportation agreement adopted by the Stamp Act Congress, Washington wrote in 1765 that “the eyes of our people, already beginning to open, will perceive that many luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for, can well be dispensed with whilst the necessaries of life are (mostly) to be had within ourselves. This consequently will introduce frugality, and be a necessary stimulation to industry. If Great Britain therefore loads her manufacturers with heavy taxes, will it not facilitate these measures? They will not compel us, I think, to give our money for their exports, whether we will or no; and certain I am none of their traders will part from them without a valuable consideration.”62

Washington also collaborated with the more scholarly Mason in working out public policies in defense of colonial liberties. After the passage of the Townshend Acts, Washington, a member of the House of Burgesses, wrote Mason in 1769 for his opinion, and Mason recommended a nonimportation-nonexportation Association until the Acts were repealed. The Burgesses voted for nonimportation, and Washington entered into an association and directed his London merchant not to send him any taxed articles, “paper only excepted.”63

After the Boston Tea Party and Parliament’s retaliatory Coercive Acts, Washington argued that “the Cause of Boston … now is and ever will be considered as the cause of America.” He was convinced that the “Minds of People” in Virginia had never been more disturbed than by the “Invasion of our Rights and Privileges by the Mother Country.” The ministry, he concluded, “are endeavouring by every piece of Art and despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavery upon us,” but he warned that “the Ministry may rely on it that Americans will never be tax’d without their own consent.”64

To oppose this “regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us,” Washington and Mason collaborated on the formulation of the Fairfax Resolves, Mason spending the night at Mount Vernon on July 17, 1774, to work out the details in consultation with his neighbor. The Resolves, one of the most important pre-Revolutionary documents in Virginia, stated that “the most important and valuable part of the British Constitution, upon which its very existence depends, is, the fundamental principle of the people’s being governed by no laws to which they have not given their consent by Representatives freely chosen by themselves, who are affected by the laws they enact equally with their constituents, to whom they are accountable, and whose burthens they share, in which consists the safety and happiness of the community.”65

The Fairfax Resolves are usually ascribed to Mason, and the only manuscript copy is in his hand, but it is located in Washington’s papers. Whatever his role in drafting the Resolves, Washington presided at the Alexandria meeting on July 18 when they were adopted; as the Fairfax delegate to the colonial convention in August he presented them in Williamsburg, where they were adopted; and as one of the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress—along with Bland, Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, and Peyton Randolph—he secured acceptance of the Fairfax plan, the basis for the Continental Association.66

Washington identified himself with the Fairfax Resolves because as he later wrote, “an innate spirit of freedom first told me, that the measures, which administration hath for some time been, and now are most violently pursuing, are repugnant to every principle of natural justice.” But he added that “many abler heads than my own hath fully convinced me, that it is not only repugnant to natural right, but subversive of the laws and constitution of Great Britain itself.” He was “satisfied then, that the acts of a British Parliament are no longer governed by the principles of justice, that it is trampling upon the valuable rights of Americans, confirmed to them by charter and the constitution they themselves boast of.”67

For Washington there was never any doubt of the justice of the colonial cause. So long as Britain pursued her evident policy of premeditated, systematic tyranny, no man’s life, liberty, or property would be secure.68 The rights of Americans which he championed by force of arms were both “natural” and, above all, “constitutional.” He was fully satisfied regarding the historical substance of American liberties. He knew that the colonists “as Englishmen” could not be justly deprived of their right to tax themselves. “The parliament of Great Britain,” he reminded Bryan Fairfax in 1774, “hath no more right to put their hands into my pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into yours for money.” The right of taxation, he repeated, was the “essential” part of the English constitution.69 No colonist should submit to its loss.70 By 1775 he had decided that continued petitions to Britain were futile, even demeaning: the colonies were contending not for a favor but a right. Grimly he concluded that “the once happy plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves.”71

III

Southerners, like their associates in revolution to the North, were highly sensitive to their rights and liberties. Some—such as the Dulanys, Charles Carroll of Maryland, or William Henry Drayton of South Carolina—had received an important part of their political education in England. Others—such as Washington and his colleague Richard Henry Lee—enjoyed correspondence with contemporary English historians. They all read, they all became reasonably well “informed in the English, ancient and modern histories, the Law of Nations, and the rights” of their country.72 They saw their constitutional inheritance, the ancient liberties of Englishmen, jeopardized by what Washington called “a systematic assertion of an arbitrary power.” Their mother country, as Lee observed, was in the grip of a corruption “which has now [1776] swallowed up every thing but the forms of freedom in Great Britain” and threatened a similar fate for the colonies.73 They sensed a mandate for action, a mandate from nature, from history—and for some a mandate from Heaven too.74 Their emphases varied, but in the South as elsewhere history lent strength and persuasion to the Revolutionaries’ argument. They determined, as Bland phrased it in 1766, to “enjoy the Freedom, and other Benefits of the British Constitution, to the latest Page in History!”75

[1.]Daniel Dulany, The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of the English Laws (Annapolis, 1728), 2; conveniently reproduced in St. George Sioussat, The English Statutes in Maryland (Baltimore, 1903). For the background of the Dulanys, see the excellent biographical study by Aubrey C. Land, The Dulanys of Maryland … (Baltimore, 1955).

[2.]Sioussat, English Statutes in Maryland, 62, 65.

[3.]Joseph T. Wheeler, “Reading and Other Recreations of Marylanders, 1700–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 38 (1943): 52–53.

[4.]Dulany, Right of the Inhabitants, 23, 19, 21, 12, 8.

[5.]Ibid., 4, 14, 25, 19.

[6.]See Land, Dulanys of Maryland, 168, 190.

[7.]Dulany Jr., Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament (London, 1766).

[8.]Ibid., 2–6.

[9.]Ibid., 39–42, 5.

[10.]Ibid., 67 n. Dulany’s pamphlet is best known—and properly so—as a criticism of the British claim for the colonists’ “virtual” representation in Parliament. But one reason for Dulany’s emphasis on this point is his concern with real representation as a historical and constitutional right belonging to all Englishmen.

[11.]Barker, Background of the Revolution in Maryland, 67; see also, Ellen Hart Smith, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (Cambridge, Mass., 1945).

[12.]Charles Carroll to William Graves, Sept. 15, 1765, Thomas M. Field, ed., Unpublished Letters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and His Father, Charles Carroll of Doughoregan (N.Y., 1902), 88–91.

[13.]Charles Carroll to William Graves, Aug. 14, 1772, J. G. D. Paul, ed., “A Lost Copy-Book of Charles Carroll of Carrollton,” Maryland Historical Magazine 32 (1937): 215.

[14.]Charles Carroll to Edmund Jennings, Aug. 9, 1771, to William Graves, Sept. 7, 1773, and Aug. 15, 1774, ibid., 198–99, 220, 223.

[15.]Charles Carroll to Edmund Jennings, Aug. 9, 1771, ibid., 198–99.

[16.]This exchange has been edited by Elihu S. Riley, Correspondence of “First Citizen”—Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and “Antilon”—Daniel Dulany, Jr., 1773 … (Baltimore, 1902).

[17.]Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), Feb. 4, Feb. 11, 1773.

[18.]Ibid., Feb. 18, 1773.

[19.]Ibid., Apr. 8, 1773.

[20.]Ibid., May 6, 1773.

[21.]Ibid., July 1, 1773.

[22.]Ibid., Apr. 8, 1773. Carroll defended Hume, asserting that the historian did not suppress facts but merely gave “an artificial coloring to some, softened others, and suggested plausible motives for the conduct of Charles.” Though “not entirely impartial,” Hume was substantially accurate. See ibid., May 6, 1773.

[23.]Carroll to William Graves, Aug. 15, 1774, Paul, ed., “Lost Copy-Book of Charles Carroll,” Maryland Historical Magazine 32 (1937): 225.

[24.]See Land, Dulanys of Maryland, 308–19.

[25.]John Adams, Diary, Sept. 2, 1774, Adams, Works, II, 362.

[26.]H. B. Grigsby, The Virginia Convention of 1776 … (Richmond, 1855), 57–58, quoted by Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (N.Y., 1953), 252.

[27.]H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1752–58 (Richmond, 1909), 143, 154.

[28.]This rather complex story is told in Gipson, Coming of the Revolution, 46–54, and Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1960), II, chap. 30. Patrick Henry’s speech was reported by James Maury to John Camm, Dec. 12, 1763, John Pendleton Kennedy, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1761–1765 (Richmond, 1907), lii–liii.

[29.]Richard Bland, The Colonel Dismounted (Williamsburg, 1763), in the William and Mary College Quarterly, 1st ser., 19 (1910): 32–33. There is an excellent essay on Bland in Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic, 248–80.

[30.]Bland, Colonel Dismounted, 33, 23, 26.

[31.]Jefferson to William Wirt, Aug. 5, 1815, Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., Writings of Jefferson, XIV, 338.

[32.]Samuel Squire, An Enquiry into the Foundations of the English Constitution: or, an Historical Essay upon the Anglo-Saxon Government both in Germany and England, new ed. (London, 1753), 9, 11, 84. Professor Clyde Henson of Michigan State University has for many years investigated the contents of the Bland library; the Bland copy of Squire, signed “R. Bland” and heavily underlined, was last located in the library of the late Dr. Magnus Martin. I am in Dr. Henson’s debt for information on the Bland library in general and for confirming my estimate of the importance of Squire’s Enquiry in particular.

[33.]Richard Bland, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (Williamsburg, 1766), reprinted, ed. E. G. Swem (Richmond, 1922), 7.

[34.]Squire, Enquiry, 84.

[35.]Bland, Inquiry, 14–15.

[36.]John Pendleton Kennedy, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1766–1769 (Richmond, 1906), 165–66.

[37.]Bland, Inquiry, 11–12.

[38.]Ibid., 26, 21.

[39.]Bland, Colonel Dismounted, 33.

[40.]Bland, Inquiry, 19–21.

[41.]Jefferson to William Wirt, Aug. 5, 1815, Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., Writings of Jefferson, XIV, 338. Jefferson’s critique of Bland’s Inquiry was not inappropriate: as we have seen, Bland did open with an appeal to “the fundamental principles of the English constitution,” did then appeal to a record that was “as certain as history can make it” to show how the present English constitutional practice had “departed … from its original purity.” Bland then drew back, remarked that “we can receive no light from the laws of the kingdom or from ancient history,” and appealed to “the law of nature, and those rights of mankind which flow from it.” But this in turn led him to an immediate review of the charter history of Virginia, from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of George III, where he found proof that “Virginia shall be free from all taxes, customs, and impositions whatsoever.” After all, added Bland, the constitution of the colonies was “established on the principles of British liberty.”

[42.]Bland, Colonel Dismounted, 34.

[43.]Bland, Inquiry, 25.

[44.]Quoted in Rowland, George Mason, I, 179.

[45.]George Morgan, The True Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1907), 431, 464–68. Henry’s copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries survives in the Lilly Library of Indiana University. William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1817), 29–30.

[46.]The best account of the debate of the Virginia House of Burgesses—and an evaluation of its impact and importance—is supplied in Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1953), 88–97. See also Robert D. Meade, Patrick Henry: Patriot in the Making (Philadelphia, 1957), 170–71.

[47.]Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 91–95.

[48.]Meade, Henry, 171–73; see also Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 90–91.

[49.]Rowland, George Mason, I, 52–53; II, 368; I, 388.

[50.]George Mason to the Committee of Merchants in London, June 6, 1766, ibid., I, 381–89.

[51.]George Mason to a young relative, Dec. 6, 1770, ibid., 150.

[52.]George Mason, Extracts from the Virginia Charters, with some remarks on them made in the year 1773, ibid., 398–99 n.

[53.]George Mason, Fairfax County Resolutions, July 18, 1774, ibid., 418–27. See p. 155 for a discussion of Washington’s identification with these Resolutions.

[54.]Mason at the Virginia Convention, June 4, 1788, ibid., II, 398; June 19–23, 1788, ibid., II, 124–25; June 14, 1788, ibid., II, 409.

[55.]George Mason, Resolutions of the Fairfax County Committee, Jan. 17, 1775, ibid., I, 430, 432.

[56.]A. P. C. Griffin, ed., A Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenaeum (Boston, 1897).

[57.]See Samuel E. Morison, The Young Man Washington (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), 19–21.

[58.]Joseph Addison, Cato, in Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald, ed., The British Theatre, 25 vols. (London, 1808), VIII, 31.

[59.]Richard Henry Lee to George Washington, May 3, 1785, James C. Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, 2 vols. (N.Y., 1911–14), II, 352. For Lee’s admiration of Mrs. Macaulay, see Lee to Arthur Lee, Apr. 5, 1770, to Mrs. Macaulay, Nov. 29, 1771, ibid., I, 44, 163; in the latter communication, Lee enclosed some colonial pamphlets and invited Mrs. Macaulay to pass along to him “any other of her works that may be published.”

[60.]Entries for June 4 and 8, 1785, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., Diaries of George Washington, 1748–1799, 4 vols. (Boston, 1925), II, 381–82.

[61.]George Washington to Francis Dandridge, Sept. 20, 1765, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington …, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931–44), II, 425–26.

[62.]Ibid.

[63.]Washington to Robert Cary and Company, July 25, 1769, ibid., 512.

[64.]Washington to George William Fairfax, June 10, 1774, ibid., III, 224.

[65.]Rowland, George Mason, I, 426. For a discussion of Washington’s connection with the Resolves, see Curtis P. Nettels, George Washington and American Independence (Boston, 1951), 89–92. There is no doubt that Washington contributed to their contents, that he was in full accord with their sentiments; in short, the Fairfax County Resolutions speak for Mason and Washington.

[66.]Nettels, Washington and American Independence, 92–93.

[67.]Washington to Bryan Fairfax, Aug. 24, 1774, Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, III, 240–41.

[68.]Washington to Captain Robert Mackenzie, Oct. 9, 1774, ibid., 245–46.

[69.]Washington to Bryan Fairfax, July 20, 1774, ibid., 231–33.

[70.]Washington to Mackenzie, Oct. 9, 1774, ibid., 246.

[71.]Washington to George William Fairfax, May 31, 1775, ibid., 292. Washington conceded the melancholy nature of the alternatives, but asked rhetorically, “can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?”

[72.]John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution …, 2 vols. (Charleston, 1821), I, xiii. William Henry Drayton remains a neglected figure, and the recent study by William M. Dabney and Marion Dargan, William Henry Drayton and the American Revolution (Albuquerque, 1962), does little to rescue the judge from undeserved obscurity, beyond reprinting Drayton’s Charge to the Grand Jury, Apr. 23, 1776. Drayton’s was a historical polemic, a comparison of the causes of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the new glorious revolution of 1776.

[73.]Washington to Mackenzie, Oct. 9, 1774, Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, III, 245; Richard Henry Lee to [Edmund Pendleton?], May 12, 1776, Ballagh, ed., Letters of Richard Henry Lee, I, 191.

[74.]William Henry Drayton, Charge to the Grand Jury, Apr. 23, 1776, Drayton, ed., Memoirs, II, 274: “The Almighty created America to be independent of Britain.”

[75.]Bland, Inquiry, 29–30.