Run-up to the Revolution, VII: For the love of freedom

On January 24, 1775, Lord Dartmouth, the British secretary of state, directed all the royal governors in America to prevent the appointment of delegates to the Second Continental Congress, scheduled for early May. Two days later, when American representatives in London, among them Benjamin Franklin, sought to address Parliament to explain the recent American petitions to the King and Parliament, their request was rejected by a vote of 218 to 68.

On the following day, January 27, Dartmouth directed his subordinate, General Thomas Gage, in Boston, then serving both as the governor of Massachusetts and the leader of all the Crown’s troops in the colonies, to arrest local former and future delegates to the forthcoming Second Congress, and to seize gunpowder and arms that might be used in any potential rebellion against the Crown. The letter was delayed, first by the need for bureaucratic tweaks and then by being borne across the Atlantic on a particularly slow boat. Earlier, Dartmouth had rejected Gage’s request for more men and munitions as unwarranted — all Gage had to do, Dartmouth believed, was arrest a few key leaders like John Adams and John Hancock, and any incipient rebellion would collapse. Yet others in the British government were alarmed enough by the growing prospect of armed rebellion to dispatch a few boatloads of troops and high-ranking officers to the colonies. After all, Gage had only 3,500 troops, nearly all concentrated in Boston.

By then the American boycott of British goods had begun to bite, with pain being felt by many in the British Isles. And in small and large American communities, alongside governing structures for enforcing the boycott, the stockpiling of weapons, powder, and ammunition, and the training of militias were in process.

It was in this atmosphere that Parliament adopted Lord North’s “conciliation plan” (discussed in my previous article), decried as no more than highway robbery by Franklin and such British independent thinkers as MP Edmund Burke.

On March 22, in a speech to Parliament that was remarkable not only in its opposition to the growing push to come down hard on the American colonies but also for its insight into the character of the potential rebels, Burke painted the “predominating feature” of the American people as “a love of freedom,” and pointed out that when their freedoms were threatened, Americans became understandably “suspicious, restive, and intractable.” He warned that Americans possessed unusual strengths that the British did not share: they had popularly-elected local governments to which they responded well; they were nurtured in dissent by the multiplicity of religions functioning on their soil; they particularly understood freedom because of slavery in their midst; and their education stressed the law, making them more acutely attentive to individuals’ rights. Attempts to curtail Americans’ liberty, he prophesied, would only foment greater rebellion. Burke’s proposals, based on lowering tensions and a lessening of the colonists’ tax burdens, were rejected by a 270 to 78 vote.

Shortly, the recently widowed Benjamin Franklin, after a decade abroad, set sail for home.

In most American colonies, when royal governors dissolved legislatures and otherwise attempted to enforce the Crown’s will, the popularly-selected legislators reconvened in other locations and under other banners. On March 23, one such alternate gathering was being held in St. John’s Church in Richmond to select delegates to the Second Congress. Some present wanted to be more accommodating to the governor and the king — but not Patrick Henry.

This avowed rebel, after having been shunted aside at the First Continental Congress as being too radical for the moment, dismissed any talk of seeking peace, because “the war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? …. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Next time: the battles of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written many books, including three about the Revolutionary Era.