Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
stilts of ambition, are sure to be losers in the end. The best
they can expect, is to be thrown neglected by, when they are no
longer wanted; but they are seldom so happy; if they are subdued,
confiscation of estate and ignominious death are their portion;
if they conquer, their own army is often turned upon them, to
subjugate them to a more tyrannical government than that they
rebelled against.[223]
Leonard then proceeds to supplement the Hobbesian argument by an
elaborate appeal to the history of English law, and discovers ample
sanction in a recital of a long list of statutory enactments and
court decisions against the evil of sedition. As treason is the
gravest social crime, so it has always been visited with the severest
punishments. He states the history of legislation against treason, and
points out how the statutes have been construed to reach so far as to
embrace the gathering of private men in a warlike manner, with a design
to redress public grievances or to better their economic condition. He
makes a parade of the brutal laws of feudal times, and the decisions
of Tudor and Stuart judges, justifying those pronouncements as a
necessary defense of society against sedition-mongers and their
subversive ambitions. By a natural transition he brings the argument
home to his American readers. The aims and methods of the Whigs, he
contends, constitute a clear violation of the law of treason. They are
playing with the gallows, with their Committees of Correspondence--“the
foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent that ever issued from the
eggs of sedition,” and the imperative need of the hour was to put a
stop to all treasonable thought and action.
I saw the small seed of sedition, when it was implanted; it was, as
a grain of mustard. I have watched the plant until it has become
a great tree; the vilest reptiles that crawl upon the earth, are
concealed at the root; the foulest birds of the air rest upon its
branches. I now would induce you to go to work immediately with
axes and hatchets, and cut it down, for a twofold reason; because
it is a pest to society, and lest it be felled suddenly by a
stronger arm and crush thousands in the fall.[224]
From the first major proposition, that all sedition is heinous, Leonard
passed to his second, that the sedition of the American Whigs was
peculiarly wicked, for it was grounded in no injustice on the part of
England. If loyalty is the highest social virtue, that loyalty might
justly be claimed by Great Britain as her due. “Has she not been a
nursing mother to us, from the days of our infancy to this time? Has
she not been indulgent almost to a fault?” The Whigs, he asserted
broadly, have been patching together their supposed grievances out of
cloth that never came from an English loom. It is the shoddiest of
homespun, mean, and shameful.
We had always considered ourselves, as a part of the British
empire, and the parliament, as the supreme legislature of the
whole. Acts of parliament for regulating our internal policy were
familiar. We had paid postage agreeable to act of parliament, ...
duties imposed for regulating trade, and even for raising a revenue
to the crown without questioning the right, though we closely
adverted to the rate or quantum. We knew that in all those acts of
government, the good of the whole had been consulted, and whenever
through want of information any thing grievous had been ordained,
we were sure of obtaining redress by a proper representation of
it. We were happy in our subordination; but in an evil hour, under
the influence of a malignant planet, the design was formed of
opposing the stamp-act, by a denial of the right of parliament to
make it.[225]
Our patriots exclaim, “that humble and reasonable petitions from
the representatives of the people have been frequently treated
with contempt.” This is as virulent a libel upon his majesty’s
government, as falsehood and ingenuity combined could fabricate.
Our humble and reasonable petitions have not only been ever
graciously received, when the established mode of exhibiting
them has been observed, but generally granted. Applications of
a different kind, have been treated with neglect, though not
always with the contempt they deserved. These either originated in
illegal assemblies, and could not be received without implicitly
countenancing such enormities, or contained such matter, and
were conceived in such terms, as to be at once an insult to his
majesty, and a libel on his government. Instead of being decent
remonstrances against real grievances, or prayers for their
removal, they were insidious attempts to wrest from the crown, or
the supreme legislature, their inherent, unalienable prerogatives
or rights.[226]
The prerogative might not be argued, according to Leonard, nor the
sovereignty of parliament discussed, for any such comment was “an
insult to his majesty, and a libel on his government.” The illegal
Continental Congress had done both and thereby proved itself seditious.
The prince, or sovereign, as some writers call the supreme
authority of a state, is sufficiently ample and extensive to
provide a remedy for every wrong, in all possible emergencies and
contingencies; and consequently a power, that is not derived from
such authority, springing up in a state, must encroach upon it,
and in proportion as the usurpation enlarges itself, the rightful
prince must be diminished; indeed, they cannot long subsist
together, but must continually militate, till one or the other be
destroyed.[227]
The true animus of the Whig attack upon the nice balance of the British
constitution Leonard professed to discover in a dangerous republican
ambition. From the beginning there had been an excess of the democratic
element in the charters and practice of many of the colonies; and this
overbalance must in the end be rectified.
Our council boards are as destitute of the constitutional authority
of the house of lords, as their several members are of the noble
independence, and splendid appendages of peerage. The house of
peers is the bulwark of the British constitution, and through
successive ages, has withstood the shocks of monarchy, and the
sappings of democracy, and the constitution gained strength by the
conflict.[228]
Lacking a peerage, which Leonard regrets, but which will come with
time, American political practice is less stable than the English,
more exposed to “the sappings of democracy”; but necessary steps have
already been taken to stabilize it. The hands of the royal governor and
judges have been strengthened against the democratic House, and “town
meetings are restrained to prevent their passing traitorous resolves.”
The ideal towards which America must travel as fast as circumstance and
the colonial temper will permit, is the wise balance of the English
government, with local powers vested in colonial lords and commons,
supervised by the King and the Imperial Parliament. In the midst of
these present agitations, wickedly fomented by Whig smugglers--“a
smuggler and a whig are cousin germans, the offspring of two sisters,
avarice and ambition”--it should be remembered that “the terms whig
and tory have been adopted according to the arbitrary use of them in
this province, but they rather ought to be reversed; an American tory
is a supporter of our excellent constitution, and an American whig a
subverter of it.” To bring these American subverters of the glorious
British constitution to a sense of their obligations, Leonard refers
them to the words of James Otis written ten years before:
It is a maxim, that the king can do no wrong; and every good
subject is bound to believe his king is not inclined to do any. We
are blessed with a prince who has given abundant demonstrations,
that in all his actions, he studies the good of his people, and
the true glory of his crown, which are inseparable. It would
therefore be the highest degree of impudence and disloyalty, to
imagine that the king, at the head of his parliament, could have
any but the most pure and perfect intentions of justice, goodness
and truth, that human nature is capable of. All this I say and
believe of the king and parliament, in all their acts; even in that
which so nearly affects the interests of the colonists; and that a
most perfect and ready obedience is to be yielded to it while it
remains in force. The power of parliament is uncontroulable but
by themselves, and we must obey. They can only repeal their own
acts. There would be an end of all government, if one or a number
of subjects, or subordinate provinces should take upon them so
far to judge of the justice of an act of parliament, as to refuse
obedience to it. If there was nothing else to restrain such a step,
prudence ought to do it, for forcibly resisting the parliament and
the king’s laws is high treason. Therefore let the parliament lay
what burdens they please on us, we must, it is our duty to submit
and patiently bear them, till they will be pleased to relieve
us.[229]
The argument comes back finally to a threat; sovereignty rests not on
good will but on coercion. The insincerity and unreality of the Tory
appeal are only too patent. Those old pleaders were true to their
breeding and their interests, for they regarded fact as little as
a modern diplomat. They ignored or denied open and plain evidence.
Nowhere, perhaps, does the weakness of Leonard’s argument become
more evident than in his refusal to admit the theoretical right of
revolution. He professed allegiance to a king whose claim to the crown
rested on revolution, and was justified by the apostle of Whiggery,
Locke. But nowhere does he refer to Locke, and not until he was
prodded by John Adams, who insisted that the Whig principles were “the
principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sydney,
Harrington and Locke,” did he concede that any other interpretation of
revolution than the Hobbesian, was justifiable. In his last paper, of
April 3, 1775, he replied to Adams thus:
I hold the rights of the people as sacred, and revere the
principles, that have established the succession to the imperial
crown of Great Britain, in the line of the illustrious house of
Brunswick; but that the difficulty lies in applying them to the
cause of the whigs ... for admitting that the collective body
of the people, that are subject to the British empire, have an
inherent right to change their form of government, or race of
kings, it does not follow, that the inhabitants of a single
province, or of a number of provinces, or any given part under a
majority of the whole empire, have such a right. By admitting that
the less may rule or sequester themselves from the greater, we
unhinge all government.[230]
By such logic does he whittle away the doctrine of the right of
revolution. As a lawyer Daniel Leonard discovered a distinction between
the Continental Congress of 1774 and the Revolutionary Convention
of 1689, which rendered the former treasonable and the latter
glorious. But the rising liberalism of America could see no such nice
distinction, and a year later the brilliant young lawyer was forced to
withdraw to Halifax. He was rewarded by a grateful King with the post
of chief justice of Bermuda, lived to be nearly ninety, and died in
London in 1829, one of the last of the exiled Loyalists.
III • Jonathan Boucher • Tory Priest
The extremest expression of American Toryism came not unfittingly from
an Anglican priest. The English church has always been the mother
of loyalty, and Jonathan Boucher of Virginia and Maryland was the