Answer to Considerations on Certain Political Transactions of the Province of South Carolina
- Arthur Lee (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
Published in London in 1774, this essay is a polemical pamphlet written anonymously by Arthur Lee (though sometimes attributed to William Henry Drayton). It was written as a direct rebuttal to Sir Egerton Leigh, attorney general of South Carolina, whose Considerations had defended certain colonial government actions. Lee’s preface pulls no punches, condemning Leigh for boasting about his role in the Stamp Act controversy, for seeming to relish the colony’s hardships, and for cloaking partiality in claims of candor and love of truth.
The body of the work advances a broader argument: that Britain’s disputes with America stem not from the colonists themselves but from self-interested, unprincipled men who curried favor in London by feeding ministers false and flattering intelligence, perverting sound judgment and inflaming zeal for policies that were “originally wrong and eventually obnoxious.” Lee presents Leigh as a prime specimen of this corrupt type—rewarded with honors and offices he did not deserve while the colonies were driven toward breaking the bonds of affection that had once tied them to Britain.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.