The American Mind and Parliament

Thomas Jefferson famously called the Declaration of Independence “an expression of the American Mind.” Those words prompt the important question of what turned the American Mind to break with Great Britain? Declaring independence on July 4, 1776, drew a line from which Americans would not retreat. Repeated British overtures, most notably the Carlisle Commission in 1778, fell on barren ground. Congress demanded nothing less than full recognition as a separate and sovereign country. The value Americans had long placed on ties with Britain, especially amidst what they saw as the shared triumph in the Seven Years War (1756–1763), underlines the magnitude of the shift to independence. Many future patriots, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, envisioned a future for the colonies within a larger British Atlantic world. What then changed American minds to bring about such a break?

America’s turn to independence first happened gradually over the 1760s and then all at once following British reactions to the Boston Tea Party. Claims by Britain’s parliament to legislative supremacy over the colonies as part of a larger program of imperial reform drove escalating cycles of conflict. Asserting control over internal governance by imposing taxes and regulations sparked American resistance. Even where British ministers could cite precedents for parliament’s authority over the colonies, the exercise of those powers had lapsed over a period Edmund Burke called salutary neglect. Reviving them as part of a new set of policies to tighten metropolitan control over the wider empire was an innovation that threatened colonial self-government. The effort to define the terms of the implicit constitution governing Britain and its colonies sparked a debate that alienated both sides. By 1774, the dispute over parliament’s role posed a question over who governed America, in which neither would yield.

John Murrin, the noted Princeton historian of early America, claimed that the consequences of the American Revolution have drawn more scholarly attention than its causes. Steps leading to the Declaration of Independence help explain the larger story. Disputes that fueled those tensions addressed key questions of liberty and authority in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world. They show a widening gap between colonies and metropole that would set the later development of both sides on different trajectories. British innovations leading to 1776 clashed with customary understandings of self-government deeply rooted within colonial societies. Murrin described the American Revolution as “a crisis of imperial integration that the British state could not handle.” Efforts by ministers in London to enforce parliament’s claim to authority over the colonies precipitated that fatal crisis and closed off other possibilities.

The fact that it took a lot for Americans to seek independence from Britain underlines how important the reasons for that step were. Conflict seemed unlikely in 1763. American colonies evolved from English settlements established separately, each one at different points and under different terms, into British provinces engaged with an imperial metropole that set the standards for taste and polite manners. Colonists had brought institutions and practices, especially common law, across the Atlantic and then modified them to fit local circumstances. Mid-eighteenth-century conflicts with France built on earlier British efforts to promote the Hanoverian dynasty as a focus for imperial loyalty. Recent victory in what Franklin had called a national war regarding the interests of the whole empire supported a common patriotism. Rejecting British authority made little sense under those circumstances. Indeed, the way Americans drew on English law and historical precedent to challenge policies made in London highlights a shared culture.

British efforts to exert control over America and collect revenue opened a widening divide. Officials in London and the colonies had complained that local authorities resisted demands to support the war effort. Frustration with recalcitrant legislatures ran through correspondence from them even before the Seven Years War. The Board of Trade under Lord Halifax argued for steps to integrate the colonies into an imperial system more effectively. Persistent smuggling and non-enforcement of commercial regulation posed a growing concern. From the perspective of key groups in Britain, official neglect had been anything but salutary. Integrating the empire to promote shared interests and make the metropolitan government’s authority effective became an important undercurrent even before peace forced long-postponed questions.

Parliament’s role in the eighteenth-century British constitution shaped how the next steps unfolded. Sovereignty rested with the Crown-in-Parliament where king, lords, and the commons represented the community of the realm. That synthesis drew on Medieval precedents worked out under the Tudors and Stuarts. After the 1707 Union with Scotland, the English Parliament became a British one encompassing the United Kingdom and its dependencies. Parliament imposed limits on kings, but it also extended their power by mobilizing consensus. It joined the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a dynamic equilibrium while ensuring representation for varied interests. Ideas of a balanced political order drew on Cicero and Polybius through Aristotle to reinforce more recent English practice. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, in Lord Macaulay’s later words, had brought the Crown into harmony with Parliament through a settlement that George III and his successors had sworn to uphold.

Along with common law, English settlers had brought Parliament across the Atlantic as part of their political inheritance. Colonies, including those in the Caribbean, established legislatures on Parliament’s model as part of their government, with royal charters endorsing the practice. Observers thought the absence of such an assembly in the eighteenth century marked a lack of institutional development and relative newness. Colonists tended to view their assemblies with authority to manage internal affairs as versions of Parliament, but metropolitan authorities considered them subordinate. Few pressed the point before the 1760s. Lines of authority within the wider sphere remained undefined within an implicit constitutional order governing the empire.

Post-war reforms to secure adequate revenue and shift administrative costs onto the colonies forced questions hitherto neglected, putting British and colonial understandings in conflict. The Stamp Act unleashed a crisis by imposing an internal tax that ministers believed would be self-enforcing because no legal document would be valid without payment. Although stamp duty had long operated in Britain, massive resistance brought a crisis in America, followed by repeal. The Declaratory Act that accompanied the repeal asserted Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies by a position that kept the issue alive. Colonial assemblies circumvented a separate Quartering Act in 1765, which required them to house and provision British troops by a requirement amounting to another internal tax that Parliament had voted. Franklin and some Americans recognized the colonies had a duty to contribute revenue for shared expenses, but distinguished internal from external duties. But others who entirely rejected the distinction opposed the import duties imposed by Charles Townshend’s program, which brought another cycle of resistance that included organized boycotts. Repealing most of those taxes, saving the one on tea, did not yield parliament’s claim to levy them without American consent.

Franklin distinguished the King’s sovereignty over the colonies, which he and other Americans recognized, from that of Parliament, which they did not. He complained privately of British subjects, crowding themselves onto the throne by seizing a share of royal power. George Grenville, as the historian Jack Greene argues persuasively, had raised the question of parliamentary right with the Stamp Act and, by tying that claim to sovereignty, led British observers to interpret colonial resistance as a repudiation of metropolitan authority entirely. Both sides in the dispute stepped back from confrontation before 1774, but each cycle entrenched them in new positions where compromise on the principle became harder. Concession meant yielding not policies, but fundamental claims of right that each side insisted must be upheld.

The English-speaking Atlantic world of the eighteenth century shared a view of liberty as independence from arbitrary power. As Quentin Skinner notes, rights held at the discretion of another were not considered rights at all. Cicero had claimed in De Officiis that subjection to arbitrary will meant servitude, and a free man would defer only to law or persons governing lawfully for the common good. Avoiding dependence meant having a share in government that ensured consent to laws applied impartially. Eighteenth-century Britain saw Parliament as the guarantor of liberty under law, a function that American colonists believed their own assemblies performed. Americans consequently reacted to arguments, like those of Samuel Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny (1775), that the latter were subordinate bodies whose structure and powers might be adjusted at Parliament’s discretion as an attack on their liberty.

Punitive legislation after the Boston Tea Party rallied Americans beyond Massachusetts, including many who opposed the destruction of private property as an act of mob violence, against British policy. What ministers and George III considered efforts to restore order and end persistent defiance, colonists feared would subordinate them to a distant and unaccountable Parliament. Troops in Boston, with their commander General Thomas Gage as governor, seemed an echo of James II’s earlier plans to abridge colonial charters and form a Dominion of New England, thwarted in 1688. Levi Preston, a veteran of the clash at Concord on April 18, 1775, captured a larger point when he later said that they went for the redcoats because colonists had always governed themselves and always meant to, while the British didn’t mean they should. The question had now become one of who governed in America? Colonists insisted it would be they and their assemblies, not ministers or Parliament.

British officers besieged at Boston found it quizzical that Americans referred to them as a parliamentary army. The New England militia they faced soon came under the authority of the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, which appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief of its forces. Labeling the British forces as Parliament’s troops made sense from the colonists’ reasoning, even if that army operated under the Crown. Ministers responsible to Parliament had sent those forces and set the policies their commanders were sent to enforce. Americans had appealed to the King for relief from what they considered arbitrary depredations, but George III could not yield the constitutional presumptions of eighteenth-century Britain. A King could not overrule Parliament — of which the crown itself was an estate — to satisfy American demands.

A dispute over sovereignty and taxes had roused the American mind to reject Parliament’s authority. What did that break mean for the colonists’ ties with Britain and allegiance to the King? The Pennsylvania delegate to Congress, James Wilson, noted in January 1775 that “the compact between king and people is mutual, and both are equally bound.” By not protecting Americans from Parliament and ministers, George III, in their view, had abdicated his crown and relieved them of the duty of allegiance. The August 23, 1775, proclamation declaring the colonies in rebellion and calling on loyal subjects to help suppress it marked a significant point. The King’s refusal to receive the Olive Branch Petition was another escalating step. South Carolina’s Henry Laurens would reject the label rebel and instead declare that “driven away by my King, I am at worst a refugee.” Breaking with Parliament meant a break with the Crown. Independence logically followed.

George III famously described himself as “fighting the battle of the legislature.” He saw principle, along with national honor, at stake in the dispute with the colonies. He had told the prime minister, Lord North, in 1774 that “blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.” British opinion increasingly viewed the dispute in those terms, making compromise difficult. Although North would eventually yield the claim of parliamentary supremacy in 1778, that overture followed the surrender of a British army at Saratoga the year before. It came in the looming shadow of French intervention. By then, the Declaration of Independence had set a line of no retreat. It was a concession too late.

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