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

The other specific figure against which Jefferson and Dickinson directed their ire – in the twelfth paragraph of their 1775 Declaration – was the sitting Governor of the Province of Quebec, one Guy Carleton (1724-1808). While, like Gage, Carleton was for all intents and purposes a fairly typical British official in the contemporary mold – i.e. career military, blessed with certain influential allies, and practically-minded – his assignment as chief administrator of British Quebec was arguably bound to make him an object of suspicion in the eyes of British America’s more quarrelsome residents. Having been ceded by France to Great Britain in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1754-1763), Quebec was something of an oddity within the contemporary British Empire. Possessing a population of over ninety percent French-speaking Roman Catholics and subject to minimal English Protestant immigration, its inaugural British governors – James Murray (1721-1794) and Carleton himself – were quick to point out the necessity of accommodation rather than assimilation – i.e. recognition of existing conditions rather than a concerted attempt to change them. This need became increasingly acute into the late 1760s and early 1770s amid the social and political unrest then unfolding in neighboring British America. Fearing that the popular discontent of the Americans would spread to the restive Quebecois, Murray and Carleton both strongly advised Parliament to allay whatever anxieties their constituents may have been feeling under English Protestant rule by firmly securing their accustomed faith, legal traditions, and territory.

The result, in 1774, was the Quebec Act, by which the borders of the province were expanded threefold over their previous extent, Roman Catholics were permitted to hold civil office without renouncing their faith, the primacy of French law was affirmed in civil cases, and the seigneurial system of land distribution and management was restored. For reasons practical, moral, and philosophical, these measures met with resentment and indignation among the population of British America. Frontiersmen from colonies like Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York had already laid claim to lands that fell within the boundaries allotted by the Act to Quebec, the vast extent of which appeared to them to have been designed specifically to hem in the continued expansion of Britain’s American subjects. That this territory was also to be governed directly by the Crown and peopled by Roman Catholics was further cause for alarm, seeming as it did to secure an immense reserve of land in the interior of the continent for a religion and a style of government – i.e. one lacking in legislative oversight – fundamentally antithetical to the culture, laws, and traditions of Britain’s various American dependencies. As one of the authors of the Act, and the administrator of the resulting colonial polity, Carleton naturally became a focus for these and other fears, anxieties, and reservations as to the purpose and significance of Quebec within the dynamics of Britain’s North American empire.

Bearing all of this in mind – as well as Jefferson and Dickinson’s noted attribution of acts otherwise unfavorable to American interests to certain elements within the British Parliament rather than to Parliament itself – the nature of the claims made of Carleton within the text of the 1775 Declaration were very likely grounded in existing feelings of personal antipathy. Consider, to that end, the relevant passage of the twelfth paragraph therein. “We have received certain intelligence,” it began, “That General Carleton, the Governor of Canada, is instigating the people of that Province, and the Indians, to fall upon us; and we have but too much reason to apprehend, that schemes have been formed to excite domestick enemies against us.” Note the identification of Carleton as the sole named author of this particular conspiracy against the efforts of the united colonies. Like Gage, his actions evidently warranted specific recognition. Perhaps this was a consequence of the nature of his rule in Quebec and the enormity of the threat he theoretically posed to the efforts of the Continental Congress to secure a redress of grievances on favorable terms. Unlike the governors of the various colonies that comprised British America –each of which possessed an elected legislature – Carleton’s authority in British Canada was largely unchecked and absolute. That this ran counter to the norms and traditions held dear by the peoples of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, etc., and that it was furthermore the result of Carleton’s own attempts to reform the government of Quebec was doubtless cause enough for concern. That he should then have used this authority to rally the French-speaking, Roman Catholic inhabitants of the province as well as the native peoples thereof in an attempt to quash the campaign of armed resistance then solidifying in British America surely represented an almost existential affront to the efforts of the united colonies and the ideals to which they laid claim.

Granted, Guy Carleton was not in truth the autocrat or intriguer Jefferson and Dickinson described. While he did, upon receiving word of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Crown Point in May, 1775 by a combined force of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont militias, attempt to raise a force from among the Quebecois to see to the defense of Britain’s newest colonial acquisition, his efforts to this effect were neither particularly successful nor wholly without cause. Not only were the French-speaking inhabitants of Quebec unenthusiastic about the notion of undergoing militia duty in service of the British Crown, but they had already been subject to concerted efforts by the First and Second Continental Congresses to seek their cooperation in the ongoing Anglo-American crisis. First on October 26^th, 1774 and then again on May 29^th, 1775, the delegates assembled in Philadelphia approved the distribution of letters drafted by certain of their colleagues – among them Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson, New York’s John Jay, and Massachusetts radical Samuel Adams – and addressed to the inhabitants of the Province of Quebec. Both of these documents characterized Carleton’s administration as tantamount to tyranny, attempted to alert the Quebecois to the rights they were entitled to as British subjects – representative government, trial by jury, freedom of the press, etc. – and implored them to form a provincial congress of their own and send a delegation to Philadelphia. Though this propaganda campaign ultimately failed to sway the general population of Quebec to a violent rejection of British authority – thanks in part to the privileges extended by the Quebec Act and the efforts of Carleton to suppress the distribution of the offending letters – it nevertheless represented a undisguised attempt on the part of American radicals to foment insurrection in a neighboring British province. Carleton’s subsequent efforts to see to the defence of Quebec – including his admitted but notably cautious authorization of Iroquois forces under British Superintendent Guy Johnson (1740-1788) – therefore very much took the form of a reaction to attempted invasions by the Continental Congress upon his authority as governor.

As with Gage, of course, such mitigating circumstances as described above had little bearing on the manner in which Jefferson, Dickinson, and their colleagues in Congress understood Carleton’s actions or intentions. Their own efforts to incite an insurrection among his subjects notwithstanding, Governor Carleton doubtless appeared to them as the embodiment of all those violations of English rights and English liberties against which Americans had been railing since 1765. Through patronage and persistence he had secured for himself a position in Britain’s North American empire that was nearly without peer in the degree of authority it enjoyed. The passage of the Quebec Act in 1774 – another product of his efforts – effectively sealed this outcome by ensuring the continued loyalty of a people wholly lacking in elected representation and possessed of legal and cultural norms which had little use for the constitutional guarantees whose observation – or abrogation, as the case may be – so often made attempting to govern British America an exercise in frustration. In essence, therefore, Guy Carleton was like a king who ruled without a Commons, without a Bill of Rights, and without a Magna Carta. Or so he doubtless appeared to the authors of the 1775 Declaration, determined as they were to explain and to justify the need they felt to take up arms in defence of their accustomed liberties. Within that specific intellectual and philosophical context, though Thomas Gage certainly represented the greater practical threat to the ability of the colonists to enjoy the rights to which they believed they were entitled, Guy Carleton symbolized the more fundamental danger.

Having attained a position of significant authority in British Quebec via a personal connection – the Secretary of State for the Northern Department at the time of his appointment as Lieutenant Governor in 1766 was a former superior in the military, the aforementioned Duke of Richmond – Carleton then proceeded to aid in and directly benefit from the creation of a government therein that almost wholly disregarded every tenet of the British Constitution intended to guarantee the rights and liberties of all subjects of the Crown. Surely, Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration seemed to posit, this is not what the king or Parliament intended. Surely the English rights and English liberties within which every inhabitant of British America located their freedom and security would never allow themselves to be so blatantly corrupted. Unwilling yet to answer otherwise, the conclusion of the united colonies – as of July 6^th, 1775 – was evidently to reject any such possibility. Britain had not failed them, their chosen scribes asserted, nor any principle or institution thereof. Rather – as argued at length – America had become the victim of ministerial corruption and favoritism, military expediency, and personal ambition. Whether in the form of ministers like Bute, Grenville, or Townshend, officers like Gage, or magistrates like Carleton, the ranks of power in the contemporary British Empire evidently abounded in men who were all too willing to sacrifice the principles upon which their nation was grounded in service of their own petty desires. The united colonies would not stand for this kind of behavior – this rampant perversion of the legal and philosophical principles upon which the British Empire was based – to the point of taking up arms in defence of what they knew to be the proper and accustomed relationship between the Crown, Parliament, the government, and British America.

Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration made this case at length, though perhaps not always with the finest attention to detail. To that end, while the manner in which the two scribes differentiated between Great Britain and the British Empire as concepts and certain specific policies or agents of the same exhibits an intriguing quality of finesse not often associated with the frequently bombastic rhetoric of the American Revolution, details not favorable to their position were often elided or omitted. Doubtless this penchant for selective recollection embodies the propaganda purpose of the document itself, aimed as it surely was at both wavering Americans and potentially sympathetic Britons.

Thomas Gage, for instance, while portrayed by Jefferson and Dickinson as arbitrary, brutish, and tyrannical, was in fact a fairly typical example of the contemporary British military administrator. He did see to the seizure of a number of powder reserves in rural Massachusetts beginning in September, 1774, though this was arguably a defensive measure intended to stave off an outbreak of violence between Patriot and Loyalist factions of the colonial population in the midst of the heightened tensions that followed the Boston Tea Party (December 16^th, 1773) and the enforcement of the Intolerable Acts (1774). He also did choose to abrogate the agreement guaranteeing freedom of movement that was sealed in April, 1775 between his administration in Boston and the residents thereof, though only after his Loyalist allies – on whose material support his forces depended – demanded it of him. And it likewise cannot be denied that his June 12^th declaration did lay a number of fairly damning accusations at the feet of the Patriot opposition and affirm the criminal status of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, though this document also offered, “In his Majesty's name […] his most gracious pardon in all who shall forthwith lay down their arms, and return to the duties of peaceable subjects [.]” Though the wisdom of these decisions on Gage’s part may be fairly debated – as might the evident contradiction between certain of his actions and the principles which those actions were ostensibly intended to uphold – it would seem manifestly unreasonable to attribute malice to any one of them, or to perceive in them evidence of Gage having behaved otherwise than in parallel with the administrative norms of the contemporary British Empire.

Guy Carleton’s behavior in the months and years preceding the publication of Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration was similarly far less sinister than that document indicated. His successful efforts to lobby Parliament for a reform of the government of contemporary British Quebec – the effect of which, among other things, was to place Carleton himself in a position of greatly enhanced authority in that province – while no doubt sincerely understood by certain residents of British America as a threat to their continued expansion into the continental interior, also represented perhaps the only means by which that newly-conquered territory could be kept from eventually devolving into civil insurrection. Just so, while the duly-empowered Governor Carleton did call for the recruitment of local militias and authorize the use of Iroquois war parties following the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Crown Point in May, 1775, these measures were not nearly what Jefferson and Dickinson made them out to be. Putting aside the fact that his efforts to recruit his Quebecois constituents to military service largely failed, and that the native forces organized by Col. Guy Johnson were limited by the Governor to operate only within British Quebec, all of the efforts Carleton undertook in the name of armed opposition to the united colonies in the spring and summer of 1775 occurred against a backdrop of attempts by the First and Second Continental Congress to foment rebellion within the territory then under his administration. From the perspective of the Governor of Quebec, therefore – and doubtless that of his supporters in Parliament, the government of Lord North, and very likely the Crown – efforts undertaken to see to the military disposition of that realm were wholly justified by the circumstances at hand. As the magistrate charged by the Crown to oversee the government of British Canada, it was not only prudent of Carleton to respond to invasions of his remit with all due energy, it was surely his duty to do so. The aforementioned Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada most certainly constituted such an invasion, and the governor thereof reacted as any magistrate in the contemporary British Empire surely would have.

Acknowledging these facts, of course – these mitigating circumstances upon the otherwise reckless and reprehensible behavior of certain British officials in North America – would have warped the narrative Jefferson and Dickinson were arguably attempting to promote in their 1775 Declaration of a virtuous, aggrieved America at the mercy of rapacious and brutish imperial functionaries. Battle had been joined between the united colonies and British forces in Massachusetts, an invasion of Quebec had been authorized by the Continental Congress, and militias were being raised and dispatched across the colonies in response to the events of Lexington and Concord and the ongoing Siege of Boston. Reconciliation remained the ultimate goal of the American provisional governments and their representatives in Congress – as so much of the content of their 1775 Declaration attests – but the situation remained a delicate one. While support for organized resistance to the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties, and Tea Act had been common in both the colonies and in Britain proper – particularly among the merchants whose livelihood was affected by recurrent boycotts – a resort to military force by the aggrieved parties in America risked alienating those who were otherwise sympathetic but dreaded the thought of an Anglo-American civil war. The solution, as embodied by Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration, was to craft a message that affirmed the loyalty of Britain’s American subjects and justified their resort to arms by describing a campaign of oppression and hostility perpetrated by men who claimed to represent the interests of the Crown but whose cited behavior clearly demonstrated their corruption, their lack of integrity, and their ultimate responsibility for the deplorable state of affairs then unfolding in British America. Provided that this narrative managed to convince a sufficient percentage of British America’s Loyalist population and a critical mass of merchants and ministers in Britain proper of the justice of the position maintained by the united colonies, the likely – if not inevitable – outcome would surely have been a peaceful settlement of the present crisis on favorable terms to the aggrieved colonists.