April 19 was the 250th anniversary of American militiamen routing the best army in the world. Seven hundred British troops arrogantly came out of Boston early that day in 1775 to seize firearms and gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. By the time the tattered remnants of that force escaped back to Boston, hundreds of British troops were left dead, wounded, or captured along the road. The “shot heard around the world” became one of the most dramatic blows against tyranny in modern history.
But the hard truths of the American Revolution are being obscured by Leviathan-loving pundits. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—President John F. Kennedy’s court historian and a revered liberal intellectual—declared in 2004, “Historians today conclude that the colonists were driven to revolt in 1776 because of a false conviction that they faced a British conspiracy to destroy their freedom.”
The colonists revolted because they were being bayoneted down the road to serfdom. The British parliament passed law after law trumpeting Americans’ legal inferiority to their foreign masters. The Sugar Act of 1764 resulted in British officials confiscating hundreds of American ships, based on mere allegations that the shipowners or captains were involved in smuggling. To retain their ships, Americans had to somehow prove that they had never been involved in smuggling—a near-impossible burden.
The Declaratory Act of 1766 announced that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” That meant Parliament could never do an injustice to the Americans, since Parliament had the right to use and abuse colonists as it pleased. That law was modeled after an earlier British dictate—the Irish Declaratory Act of 1719. The British were notorious for treating the Irish as bad or worse than slaves. Perhaps the most influential political philosopher in America in the pre-Revolution times was John Locke, who warned in his Second Treatise on Government in 1690: “He who attempts to get another man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him.” Colonists paid fierce attention to Locke’s warning: “Tyranny is the exercise of Power beyond Right.”
Americans felt like they were being hit by a British blockade even before the Brits forcibly shut down the Boston harbor. Britain imposed heavy taxes on imports and prohibited Americans from erecting any mill for rolling or slitting iron; British statesman William Pitt exclaimed, “It is forbidden to make even a nail for a horseshoe.” The Declaration of Independence denounced King George for “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.”
To enforce heavy tariffs on tea and other items, King George issued “writs of assistance” that let British soldiers “search settlers’ belongings at random to find out who was evading import taxes by smuggling whiskey or tea.” These writs empowered “a civil officer [to] search any house, shop, warehouse, etc.; break open doors, chests, packages... and remove any prohibited or uncustomed goods or merchandise.” James Otis—a lawyer arguing against the writs in a Boston court in 1761—denounced them as “the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of law” and declared the writs conferred “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” In 1772, the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence described the writs’ effects: “Thus our houses and even our bedchambers are exposed to be ransacked and plundered by wretches, whom no prudent man would venture to employ even as menial servants…. By this we are cut off from the domestic security which renders the lives of the most unhappy in some measure agreeable.” Colonial opposition against writs, according to John Adams, ignited the flame that led to American independence.
Vermont patriots marched in 1775 against the British Army under a flag depicting a pine tree—a symbol of British tyranny. Because pine was an excellent material for building ships, Parliament banned cutting down any white pine trees—claiming them all for the British crown without compensation. Historian Jonathan Sewall, writing in 1846, claimed that the conflict with Britain “began in the forests of Maine in the contests of her lumbermen with the King’s surveyor, as to the right to cut, and the property in white pine trees.” Historian Robert Albion wrote in 1926: “The royal interpretation of ‘private property’ practically rendered that term nugatory, so…the pines were virtually being commandeered by the Navy.”
Any contemporary historian who seeks to exonerate Britain should be required to explain how freedom can co-exist with total disarmament. April 19 had proven that the British troops were ill-matched with colonial militia. As historian John Hyde Preston wrote in 1932, “The average British soldier was the poorest shot in the world; he couldn’t hit a horse at ten yards.” Two months after the clashes at Concord, American sharpshooters gunned down every British officer on the field at Bunker Hill—along with a third of the Redcoats who charged up that hill.
British General Thomas Gage responded to that debacle by decreeing that “anyone found in possession of arms would be deemed guilty of treason,” as Professor David Kopel noted. Britain planned to confiscate almost all the firearms in the colonies after suppressing the revolt. If they had succeeded, colonists could have been subjugated to London for generations. George Mason—the father of the Bill of Rights—declared that the British decided that “to disarm the people... was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
“Slavery by parliament” was a rallying cry in the colonies in the 1770s. Many American colonists believed that, for them, British representative government was a fraud. The “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” issued by the Second Continental Congress on July 6, 1775, a few weeks after Bunker Hill, highlighted the crimes of the British Parliament. (The Declaration of Independence, issued almost a year later, concentrated on King George III as the personification of British abuses.) The 1775 Declaration, written by John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson, complained that “the legislature of Great-Britain, stimulated by an inordinate passion for power...attempted to effect their cruel and impolitic purpose of enslaving these colonies by violence.” The Continental Congress demanded to know: “What is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power? Not a single man of those who assume it, is chosen by us; or is subject to our control or influence.”
The 1775 Revolution was largely a revolt against growing arbitrary power. Americans of the Revolutionary Era recognized that the passage of a law did not signal the end of a legislative onslaught. Instead, it is merely the starting point to pursue the act’s “logic” to stretch political power further. Americans looked at the precedents being established by British rulers—the suspension of colonial legislatures, the dragooning of Americans into the British navy, the suppression of the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers—and saw their cherished “ancient liberties” rapidly vanishing. John Dickinson—a prominent colonial pamphleteer—wrote in 1768 that “the crucial question in the colonists’ minds is ‘not, what evil has actually attended particular measures—but, what evil, in the nature of things, is likely to attend them.’” Edmund Randolph—George Washington’s first attorney general and governor of Virginia—declared that the American Revolution was a revolution “without an immediate oppression, without a cause depending so much on hasty feeling as theoretic reasoning.”
Thomas Paine, in his writings to stir Americans to support the Revolution, noted the widespread belief “that government is some wonderful mysterious thing.” The American Revolution succeeded, in part, because its leaders recognized the scams that British politicians sought to foist upon them. It was a common saying in the 1770s: “The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People.” Americans heeded another warning from Locke: “I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away every thing else.”
Studying the Revolutionary era can help vaccinate Americans against contemporary political frauds. As Sen. John Taylor—who had been a colonel in George Washington’s army—aptly declared in 1821: “In defining a tyrant, it is not necessary to prove that he is a cannibal.” Americans back then had far better philosophical compasses than the prevailing models nowadays. But it is not too late to learn from the heroic leaders and visionary thinkers who vanquished the world’s most powerful empire 250 years ago.
