Violence and the Source of Government

In 1788, Edmund Burke opined that there “is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginning of all governments.” Speaking during the prosecution of Warren Hastings, Burke understood that origin stories  — especially political ones — are seldom as tidy or idealistic in truth as we want them to be for the purposes of inspiring the appropriate forms of political reverence, apart from which governments crumble. As with so much of his writing, it seems this reminder came too late, offered to people who did not want to hear it. ¹

Even if Americans desire to draw a sacred veil over our origins, the Declaration of Independence makes this all but impossible: the American origin story is all too public, the faults of our forefathers readily visible, and thus, even their accomplishments are subject to the disdain and disenchantment of the present. This is dangerous, as Burke pointed out. Yet for Americans, ironically, the more pernicious threat may be that the powerful and inspiring rights claims of the Declaration itself tend to draw a veil over the harsh realities of the political separation and war it announced. That this is so is an odd fact given how central the use and abuse of military power is to the very cause the Declaration set out to vindicate. Perhaps it is our own political tendencies that cause us to ignore these facts? Government exists to secure rights, and only enjoys its “just powers” through the ongoing consent of the people:

whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

We today prefer a far more expansive conception of what our government ought to do to secure us, and have broadened what counts as a threat to our safety and the pursuit of our happiness. This is at least as problematic as vilifying the founders, for in forgetting our martial origins, we forget it is just as true now as it was in 1776 that government only tends to become destructive of these ends through action backed by force.

Americans were not quick to jump from abuse to rebellion, as the Declaration reminds us. It echoes Locke’s Second Treatise on the way a responsible, free people ought to pursue grievances:

In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.

Read with the dangers of military power in mind, the charges against the crown that make up the bulk of the Declaration illuminate how the colonists viewed problems of authority, power, and the use of force.

While the charge that the King “has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislators” appears near the middle of the Declaration’s indictments against the Crown, the presence of the British Army created a specific kind of alarm. The colonists inherited a republican political tradition born out of the English Civil War, which emphasized the dangers of using mercenaries or instituting standing armies. The decisive case against mercenaries dates to Machiavelli at least: They lack loyalty to the legitimate political authority, and worse, they either lack the motivation to fight difficult battles, or if they have such motivation, could easily install themselves as rulers over the population. Hence, the horror implicit in the charge that:

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

Whigs of the era (and their successors in the colonies) thought that professional standing armies posed a different danger: while their loyalty was less in question, such forces were seen as a permanent threat to civil liberties and a free government that the crown could deploy against a recalcitrant citizenry. The citizen militia was considered the natural guardian of liberty.

In “No Standing Armies!”, a study of the anti-army tradition, historian Lois Schwoerer observed that the annual commemoration of the Boston Massacre during the Revolutionary period was often dedicated to educating the public about this truth. In 1773, for example, “the town of Boston testified that its citizens had not forgotten that lesson by declaring ‘standing armies have forever made shipwreck of free states’ and by asserting that the militia was the natural and best defense.” Military forces, these men argued, were another unaccountable form of bureaucracy, one that would drain the public coffers and serve as “a resource to reward self-serving, propertied citizens willing to condone the actions of potential tyrants.”²

This fear leads directly into a second of the Declaration’s major charges, that the king desired “to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.” The British government certainly did not intend to do this at home; they absolutely evinced a desire to do this with respect to the colonial assemblies. In an essay on the implementation of martial law in Boston, historian John D. Roche writes that “Whig propagandists vehemently opposed the British ministry’s deployment of troops to Boston in 1768 as an attempt to establish a military government,” and he argued that they did so because of their belief that “unless their representatives in Parliament kept a firm bridle on the military, it would threaten their liberties with burdensome taxes and coercive power.”³

Even if professional armies are restrained from visiting unjust violence on the civilians in their care, it is easy for Americans accustomed to the way military forces of our day are garrisoned to miss the danger that even the presence of soldiers in peacetime poses to civilians. Drive along highways in the South and West, and one finds massive bases with dormitories — bases that are cities unto themselves, where soldiers are sequestered to a degree and live apart from the locals. This is as far from eighteenth century practice as one could imagine. The Quartering Act of 1774 allowed royal governors to quarter British soldiers without regular barracks in “uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings.” In practice, the Declaration’s phrasing about quartering evokes British soldiers regularly evicting Americans from their homes. However, even soldiers peacefully cohabiting in unused buildings near civilians cast a shadow of force over the population.

It is the realized fear of arbitrariness that led so many colonists to become revolutionaries. Arbitrary taxes, regulations, and trade barriers were bad enough, but the presence of military force made the political danger of unbounded power real. The Declaration gives great prominence to these concerns: It highlights the danger posed by losing the rule of law (“For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states”). Later, the text ruminates on the direct consequences of using the British military to enforce the law, observing that where government by law disappears, legitimate government itself ends: “He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us.”

Partisans of the anti-army ideal viewed the British turn to a professional military force as a sign of their decadence and over-refinement. Bostonian Henry Knox viewed the escalating British responses to the colonies’ successive petitions in this light, linking their use of military power in America to the corruption of British politics as a whole:

We are contending with a people cruel indeed that far from being enterprizing, far from being mark’d with scarce one Characteristick of Greatness, except a total debauch of morals be a mark of overrefindness of Manners, the consequence of ease and Luxury. ⁴

Men like Knox came to believe that the British had fallen into a kind of delusional corruption — for without some significant delusion, they would not have believed that a free people would submit to a distant, arbitrary force from across the Atlantic, a people with whom they had fallen out of union and mutual affection.

In excoriating abuses of and by military power, the Declaration does not neglect helping us see the legitimate role of coercion in political life. The Declaration’s political philosophy recognizes both the long-standing political tradition of common law and the notion of politics as a breakable compact, both of which rely on the ceding of individual political powers to an authorized representative. Americans in the revolutionary era knew firsthand the dangers of anarchy as well as tyranny, for many of the most radical Sons of Liberty in places like Massachusetts and New York had used mob violence against Crown officials and Tory politicos, and destroyed public and private property alike.

The Declaration assumes that the government must use force to address those who would violate our peace. It is not the existence of law and order that is the threat, but injustice in law and excess in the pursuit of order that are to be avoided. Law, indeed, is praised as “wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Legislative authority is likewise praised, and as a power that needs to be exercised in an orderly fashion — indeed, one of the Declaration’s many charges against the King is the violation of that good order, calling “together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant.”

Implicit in their arguments against the King is the idea that what comes next must both restrain power — for fear of both standing armies and the potential unruly violence of the mob — as well as make secure a future commonwealth against possible injuries both foreign and domestic. This idea bookends the Declaration: the second paragraph’s mandate “to provide new Guards for their future security” in the wake of illegitimate government and the conclusion’s announcement of the full and independent rights of sovereignty align in the moral claim that power itself must be wielded in justice. The Declaration points us to a world where the military is subordinate to the civilian authorities and restrained from being used against them.

The great challenge that they faced — and which would not be addressed until 1789 — was to both limit the scope of legislative power while also endowing the government with sufficient authority to build military forces and establish policies that would secure the nation. Balancing these two concerns was central to many of the great political conflicts of the early republic. But the Declaration remains a profound document about the need to justify and restrain the use of military power, and a reminder of how serious the matters involved in self-government truly are. It also offers us a resource for understanding that rights are inextricably linked to the power to defend them. We forget this at our peril.

¹ Edmund Burke, “Speech in Opening the Impeachment. Second Day: Saturday, February 16, 1788” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (John C. Nimmo, 1887), 9: 401.

² See Lois G. Schwoerer, “No Standing Armies!” The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 197, and James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763 –1789, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 2006), 8.

³ John D. Roche, “‘Where the Power of Law Ceases, There War Begins’: The British Army’s Implementation of Martial Law in Boston, 1768–1776,” in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War of Independence, eds. Glenn A. Moots and Phillip Hamilton (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 103.

⁴ Moots and Hamilton, “‘A Contest of Virtue with Vice’: Henry Knox’s Just and Honorable War for Independence,” in Justifying Revolution, 134.

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