Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, Part V: American Ego

            Though much of the content of Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration appears constructed in such a way as to make explicit the loyalty and affection that the people of British America continued to feel for Britain proper’s legal and cultural customs – while simultaneously assigning blame for their burgeoning campaign of armed resistance upon certain individual ministers, magistrates, or military officers – a few notable passages appear to present an altogether different motive. Rather than portray the united colonies as having been – and endeavoring to continue as – enthusiastic members of the British imperial community whose resort to military confrontation represented only a momentary response to a set of very specific grievances, they instead seem to represent a quality of separateness and exceptionalism as forming a key characteristic of the American colonial project. Despite the fact that these sections occur quite infrequently over the length of the text – at no point, rest assured, do they significantly overpower or threaten the success of its overarching message – their significance ought not to be discounted. Not only do they indicate that the sense of identity and community nurtured by certain members of the various colonial populations was not as Anglo-centric as their public pronouncements would otherwise show – that there was, in their minds, a difference between being American and being British – but they also make clear the degree to which the authors of the 1775 Declaration were either inclined or permitted to bring their own personal philosophies to bear upon the task of crafting the official language of colonial resistance.

            As to the relevant passages themselves, their content, and their meaning, the first occurs at the beginning of the second paragraph of Jefferson and Dickinson’s 1775 Declaration. Though it is a lengthy one, it shall be excerpted here in full for the benefit of later comparison. “Our forefathers,” it reads,

Inhabitants of the Island of Great Britain, left their native land, to seek on these shores a residence for civil and religious freedom. At the expense of their blood, at the hazard of their fortunes, without the least charge to the Country from which they removed, by unceasing labor, and an unconquerable spirit, they effected settlements in the distant and inhospitable wilds of America, then filled with numerous and warlike nations of barbarians. Societies or Governments, vested with perfect Legislatures, were formed under Charters from the Crown, and a harmonious intercourse was established between the Colonies and the Kingdom from which they derived their origin.

Granting the difficulty in attempting to sum up the founding of British America – a project which began in the 16^th century and was arguably not completed until the 18^th century – in so few words, this exceedingly condensed chronicle nevertheless appears to omit details in a manner that has more to do with national myth-making than the needs of narrative concision.

Interpreted plainly, phrases like “religious freedom,” “At the expense of their blood,” “unconquerable spirit,” and “the distant and inhospitable wilds of America” would seem to conjure an image of self-sufficiency, righteousness, and perseverance. As Jefferson and Dickinson would accordingly have it, the colonies of British America were founded by individual seekers of personal and confessional sovereignty who braved the most profound hardships and carved out stable, prosperous communities for themselves – wholly unaided by the government they had left behind – through sheer grit, determination, and force of will. Whatever Americans possessed, therefore – both their personal properties and the liberties that sustained them – were owed as more to the individual industry of their forebears than whatever protection or assistance successive British governments may or may not have provided. This conception of “Americanness” – i.e. membership in a distinctly American cultural community – was later affirmed in paragraphs twelve and fifteen.

In the former, while accounting for the decision of the Continental Congress and the colonies it represented to embrace the course of armed resistance begun by the Massachusetts militia at Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, Jefferson and Dickinson declared that, “Honor, justice, humanity forbid us tamely surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.” The latter made use of somewhat different language while seeking to express a very similar sentiment. “For the protection of our property,” it declared, “Acquired solely by the honest industry of our forefathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms.” In both instances, note the affirmation of the supposed inheritance of liberty by the people of the united colonies from their familial predecessors. In spite of any affirmations to the contrary, it would seem – i.e. assertions made in the Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada asserting the possession of traditional British liberties by the Quebecois simply by virtue of their being British subjects – the membership of the Continental Congress were at the very least sympathetic to the belief that the rights possessed by British Americans were the earned possessions of a sovereign people rather than the attributes of membership in an larger socio-political community.  

There is, of course, a great deal that these reflections upon the circumstances and significance of the colonial founding fail to acknowledge. Turning again to the particularly lengthy passage cited above, a number of arguably calculated omissions present themselves for further consideration. The statement, for instance, that the, “Inhabitants of the Island of Great Britain, left their native land, to seek on these shores a residence for civil and religious freedom [,]” makes no mention as to the specific mechanisms by which much of would become British America was colonized during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Taken at face value, the excerpted phrasing would seem to indicate that the migrations which ultimately gave rise to the various colonies were the product of individual initiative and grounded solely upon the desire of their founders for administrative and/or confessional autonomy. In point of fact, however, though the promise of religious freedom for members of dissenting churches in 17^th century Britain was indeed a common motivation among early colonists, the means by which charters, land grants, trans-Atlantic passage, and logistical support were secured was often far less noble. The Virginia Company of Plymouth and the Virginia Company of London, for example, were a pair of joint-stock ventures chartered by James I (1566-1625) in 1606 and funded by merchant-investors for the purpose of extending British sovereignty in North America, extracting valuable natural resources, and ultimately enhancing the wealth and prestige of both the holders of company shares and the Crown itself. In spite of initial failures – the Popham Colony on the Kennebec River and the first shaky years of the Jamestown Colony – both of these ventures ultimately succeeded in planting the seeds of full-scale colonization in New England – in the form of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Plymouth Colony – and the Chesapeake Bay – in the form of the Province of Virginia. 

While the sincerity of the colonists who took part in these ventures, the hardships they endured, or the initiative they demonstrated ought not to be discounted, it similarly cannot be denied that their presence in North America was in large part the result of official patronage and mercantile enterprise. The Calvinist founders of the Plymouth Colony, for instance, most certainly believed that their exodus to the New World represented an escape from the corruption and oppression that dogged them in 17^th century England, and their success in building a functioning society was undeniably a direct result of their shared sense of solidarity and determination. That being said, they and their neighbors in Massachusetts Bay did not pay for their own passage across the Atlantic Ocean, often sought material relief from company investors, and keenly understood the security and stability that royal favor promised to provide. The Virginia Colony was no different in this sense, though its founders were not religious refugees, while the proprietary colonies of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania functioned based on a very similar relationship of capital, patronage, and labor.

Maryland, for example, was the personal project of Cecil Calvert, 2^nd Baron Baltimore (1605-1675), a Catholic aristocrat who parlayed his father’s relationship with Charles I (1600-1649) into a land grant for the founding of a settlement in North America wherein other persecuted Catholics might find freedom from molestation. Admirable though this may sound, however, successful tobacco harvests are what kept the venture afloat and justified the continued attentions of the Lords Baltimore. The territory later comprising the Province of Carolina – and later still North Carolina and South Carolina – was also granted by a monarch as a return on a personal favor. Specifically, in exchange for their aid in seeing him restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II (1630-1685) awarded the eight Lords Proprietors deed and title to tens of thousands of miles of un-colonized wilderness between Virginia and Spanish Florida in 1663. Not only did this serve to justify the loyalty these eight men felt for their sovereign during the first years of his rule, but it served the vital purpose of shielding the productive interiors of Virginia and Maryland from encroachment by Spaniards venturing northward. As with the shareholders of the Virginia Company and the Lords Baltimore, the Carolina Proprietors encouraged rapid settlement by offering very generous terms to potential migrants – religious freedom, grants of land, low or delayed rents, etc.

While it again bears noting the degree of suffering and hardship endured by the founding settlers of these various colonies, and the degree to which success depended upon their industry and endurance, the circumstances cited above under which certain colonies came into being would seem to indicate that the narrative of individual sacrifice put forward by Jefferson and Dickinson in their 1775 Declaration represents but one aspect of what was in fact a very complex process. However hard the first colonists worked – however much blood and fortune they sacrificed in creating homes and governments “In the distant and inhospitable wilds of America” – their presence in the New World was often indisputably the result of private enterprise or noble patronage. The much-mythologized Pilgrims of Plymouth did not – could not – physically transport themselves to the site of their famous landing in Massachusetts, nor were the inhabitants of Jamestown capable of surviving that settlement’s first tumultuous years without the aide expeditions dispatched by the Virginia Company in 1607, 1608, and 1609. Just so, the settlers of Maryland or Carolina would not have been given the opportunity to take possession of and work their individual grants were it not for favors owed by the reigning British monarch to certain members of the landed gentry, the high market value of the crops they raised, or the strategic significance that their settlements enjoyed within the institutional conception of Britain’s expanding presence in North America. In short, while often seeking the autonomy that Jefferson and Dickinson cited, these hardy homesteaders were in fact moving and acting within a framework of capital, patronage, and labor that made little allowance – if any – for truly autonomous behavior. Indeed, while likely little intending it, their endeavors on behalf of confessional isolation, self-sufficiently, or personal wealth arguably helped to found the increasingly centralized British Empire with which their descendants would be forced to contend.