Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, Part III: Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner, contd.

            Strange though it may seem to have delved so deeply into an examination of 1760s British partisan politics during a discussion of a document written years later and thousands of miles away, the authors of the 1775 Declaration themselves affirmed the connections that they perceived between the machinations of statesmen in London and the events which moved them to take up arms in America. They cited the “Peers and Commoners” whose support they had theretofore enjoyed, the cities and towns that had spoken in their defence, and the one minister in particular whose successes and failures they tied to their own. They spoke of the glories of the Empire, affirmed their pride of place therein, and spoke with respect of its great institutions – its kings and parliaments, and its vaunted constitution. These were not words uttered on behalf of a people who held themselves apart from Britain, rejected membership in the associated socio-political community, and believed formal independence to be a forgone conclusion. Rather, they were the honest assessments of a people still very much invested – even in the midst of an increasingly bloody campaign of armed opposition – in the ebb and flow of British political and cultural life. Speaking for the Continental Congress – and thus for the governments of thirteen separate colonies – Jefferson and Dickinson testified to this emphatically. America remained, and wished to remain, a part of the Empire whose triumph they had aided in the late war with France. The colonists had friends in the Commons, the Lords, and the military, regarded the king with affection and respect, loved the constitution and treasured the rights and liberties it guaranteed. Indeed, their concerns – which had compelled them to resist the abrogation of their prerogatives to the point of armed resistance – had never been with the institutions of the British Empire, or with the British people themselves. Rather, as the 1775 Declaration attested, the source of their discontent lay in the greed, corruption, and duplicity of certain powerful individuals who had perhaps mistakenly been vested with undue authority over the affairs of the Empire.

            Most of these people were not identified by name, though their influence was noted by the manner in which Jefferson and Dickinson described their machinations. Of the train of abuses heaped upon the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s, enumerated in the third paragraph of the Declaration, the document declared that, “Parliament was influenced to adopt the pernicious project [.]” Mark the difference between this phrasing – an attribution of wrongdoing to an element separate from Parliament – and a claim that Parliament itself was responsible for the abuses in question. It was not the British legislature – a venerable institution whose form and function nearly every American colony sought to imitate – that was responsible for the repeated ills suffered by British America, but rather an influence therein. Just so, it was not Great Britain – a nation and a people worthy of affection and respect – that the united colonies blamed for their misfortunes, but this or that government thereof. To that end, as Jefferson and Dickinson affirmed, the Crown’s subjects in America had every reason to acclaim the Newcastle-Pitt Ministry, and to perceive its triumphs as parallel to their own. By the same token, residents of British America were well-justified in recognizing the Bute, Grenville, and North Ministries as having acted in a fashion inimical to their own particular priorities and desires. Again, the issue was largely one of personality. Some agents, ministers, and even leaders of the British government behaved in a way that comported with the understanding nurtured by the majority of Americans of the British Constitution, the Empire, and their relationship to the same. Others, of course, did not.

            Of these others, Jefferson and Dickinson offered two specific examples. The first, beginning in the seventh paragraph of the 1775 Declaration and continuing through the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, was General Thomas Gage. Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America since 1763 and Governor of Massachusetts since 1774, Gage was a common source of disdain and frustration among the American opposition to contemporary British tax and trade policies and a frequent target for accusations of cruelty, ruthlessness, and tyranny. Since the pronouncement of the Restraining Acts in April, 1775 – which blocked all trade between British America on one hand and Great Britain, the West Indies, and Ireland on the other – and the associated bolstering of the troops and vessels under Gage’s command (paragraph seven), Jefferson and Dickinson attested to a litany of abuses perpetrated at his behest. First, in that same month in 1775, the General proceeded to make an, “Unprovoked assault on the inhabitants of the [Province of Massachusetts Bay], at the Town of Lexington” wherein his men, “Murdered eight of the inhabitants, and wounded many others [,]” and, “From thence proceeded in a warlike array to the Town of Concord, where they set upon another party of the inhabitants of the same Province, killing several and wounding more” (paragraph nine). Though an assemblage of Massachusetts militias ultimately met this assault upon the lives and liberties of the inhabitants of that colony by driving the remaining British forces back into Boston – where they were thereafter contained under siege conditions – Gage’s campaign of abuses evidently continued apace.

            Having effectively become the inhabitants of an occupied city, Jefferson and Dickinson further explained in paragraph nine, the residents of Boston who found themselves trapped in that city upon its encirclement by American militia forces – and after June 14^th, 1775 by the Continental Army – became the next logical target of their nominal Governor’s ruthless intentions. Hoping to depart in peace, the 1775 Declaration explained, and doubtless regarding the integrity of an officer in the British Army as a sufficient guarantee, these individuals naturally, “Entered into a treaty with him, [in which] it was stipulated that the said inhabitants, having deposited their arms with their own Magistrates, should have liberty to depart, taking with them their other effects.” The relevant articles were thereafter delivered to the occupying authorities, so that, “They might be preserved for their owners,” and the prospective evacuees made ready to depart. At this point, Jefferson and Dickinson declared, “In open violation of honor, in defiance of the obligation of treaties, which even savage nations esteemed sacred,” Gage ordered a body of men under his command to seize the arms in question, “Detained the greatest part of the inhabitants in the Town, and compelled the few who were permitted to retire, to leave their most valuable effects behind.” This act of knowing duplicity was then followed on June 12^th by the issue of a proclamation under Gage’s name – “Further emulating his Ministerial masters” – which allegedly declared the colonists having taken up arms to be, “Rebels and traitors; to supersede the course of the common law, and instead thereof to publish and order the use and exercise of the law martial” (paragraph eleven). Combined, these actions – “This perfidy,” Jefferson and Dickinson labelled it in paragraph ten – were said to have the effect of separating families from their most vulnerable members, resulted in the destruction of an untold amount of real and movable property, and reduced those accustomed to living, “In plenty, and even elegance,” to a state of, “Deplorable distress.”

            In fairness to General Gage – a career military officer who by all indications attended to his duties with commendable zeal and initiative – the accusations cited above as having been heaped upon his character and conduct by the authors of the 1775 Declaration did not necessarily represent an accurate accounting of his behavior during the first weeks and months of what would become the opening campaign of the American Revolutionary War. Laying aside the casualties inflicted upon the assembled militiamen by British forces during the Battles of Lexington and Concord – an outcome which both sides would doubtless have preferred to avoid but which circumstances had quite possibly made inevitable – Gage’s actions during the Siege of Boston were not nearly as despotic as Jefferson and Dickinson would have had their readers believe. As to the agreement arrived at between the General and the inhabitants of occupied Boston – sealed on April 22^nd, 1775 – its terms permitted the safe and unmolested passage of women and children, “With all their effects,” and extended the same privilege to all male residents upon the condition, “That they will not take up arms against the king’s troops.” Furthermore, in the event that armed conflict occurred within the limits of the city, Gage promised that, “The lives and properties of the inhabitants should be protected and secured, if the inhabitants behaved peaceably.” Firearms were among the relatively small list items not permitted to be removed from the city, and all residents desiring to depart were required to secure and present a pass issued under the authority of Gage himself.

            As often happens during even the most well-intentioned efforts by military authorities to secure a major population centre, however, these fairly reasonable conditions very soon fell victim to logistical complications and short-term strategic thinking. Earnest though Gage may have been in his promise to prevent the properties of departing residents from being seized, pillaged, or otherwise disturbed, it simply was not in his power to enforce any such guarantee. Not only were the soldiers tasked with searching the belongings of prospective evacuees for contraband materials quite often willing to confiscate whatever item(s) happen to catch their fancy, but the presence of thieves and looters among those who opted to remain in the city made it virtually impossible for any property or item to be left unattended by its owners wholly absent the possibility of its being damaged or stolen. This unfortunate reality ultimately resulted in a large number of residents electing to remain in the city to keep watch over their possessions while sending their families to seek relative safety in the surrounding countryside. Meanwhile, as the inhabitants sympathetic to the Patriot cause departed from Boston in the thousands and those residents of nearby communities whose professed loyalty to the Crown and Parliament sought protection in the wings of its British occupiers, it soon enough became evident to Gage and his Loyalist allies that their strategic position was becoming increasingly precarious. In the event that the city became host solely to British troops and their Crown-aligned supports, there would seemingly have been little to prevent the encircling Continental Army from, say, setting it ablaze. Pressed by his local patrons – upon whom the maintenance of his forces in large part depended – to take steps aimed at preventing this outcome, Gage ultimately determined to abrogate the April 22^nd agreement, severely limit the number of inhabitants permitted to leave the city thereafter, and wholly foreclose on any attempts to remove personal property.

            All that being said, the rather strained circumstances under which General Gage was forced to operate in occupied Boston – and the decisions he had to make as a result – bore little significance upon the perspective manifested by Jefferson and Dickinson in their 1775 Declaration. However much he might have sincerely believed that his efforts to preserve peace and stability in the British America were both in the best interests of its inhabitants and ultimately served to protect the rights and liberties that they held dear, the membership of the Continental Congress clearly disagreed. Whereas he perceived the movement of British troops into urban centers like Boston and New York City after 1768 or the seizure of local gunpowder stores after 1774 as necessary to maintaining social stability and avoiding bloodshed, the Patriot opposition saw them as one man’s wholly unconstitutional attempt to place a people guilty of no crime or transgression under military occupation. Likewise, whereas Gage doubtless viewed his actions during the Siege of Boston as striking a necessary balance between liberality and necessity – between his own sense of fairness and the practical needs of his subordinates and local supporters – his opponents had little reason to construe his behavior as anything other than ruthless or corrupt. This essential dichotomy of perception seems not only to define the relationship between Gage and his American opponents, but it is in many ways the essential condition of the Anglo-American crisis of the 1760s and 1770s.

As an agent of the British state in America and a lifelong officer of the Crown, Thomas Gage very likely nurtured a personal respect for and dedication to the social and political values embedded in the British Constitution which was in every way the equal of that professed by his American adversaries. It is accordingly almost certain that he would have agreed with them upon many fundamental points of law, or politics, or philosophy – the sovereignty of Parliament, for example, or the importance of the writ of habeas corpus. Where he and his opponents differed, therefore, was mainly upon questions of execution. The Patriot resistance to Gage’s administration in Massachusetts was of the evident opinion that the English liberties to which they all held dear were wholly inviolable, and that protecting them at all costs was perhaps less important than observing them at all costs. Gage himself seemed to conversely understand that it was permissible – even necessary – to abrogate certain liberties in the short run if it meant securing them in the long run. It should be fairly obvious how and why these differing assessments ultimately brought Gage and his American constituents to blows. For, indeed, it was Gage at which Jefferson and Dickinson’s ire was aimed in 1775. Rather than direct their anger at his superiors in the British military, the Parliament that had assigned him to the North American garrison, or to the larger apparatus of the British Empire whose continued expansion arguably required and rewarded the service of men like Gage, the agents chosen by the Continental Congress to articulate its position upon military resistance chose to blame the individual – his attempts to seize gunpowder, his abrogation of the April 22^nd agreement, his declaration of July 12^th, etc. – for the crimes they believed he had committed against them. Again, the rebellious colonists’ evident desire and ability to draw a line between Great Britain in the abstract and certain British governments, magistrates, or ministers seems clear enough.