Silliman's Papers

HISTORY PAPER
A Conservative Revolution:
How the American War for Independence sought to defend the old order.
By Daniel Silliman

The English ideal of self-government stretches far into the past. The idea of men governing themselves has roots in Hebrew law, Greek democracy, and the Roman Republic. Yet, the ideal of self-government was an idea Englishmen clung to as uniquely their own. It was a habit; a sentiment confirmed in the hearts of all Englishmen, it had become a self-definition. The ideas of self-government and limited rule became firmly established as an English idea on June 15, 1215, when King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta by the barons of England. The tradition of the English assumed men had the right to govern themselves. They had the right to elect their representatives and to be tried by their peers. They had the final approval of, the ultimate authority over government. The tradition was maintained when settlers, subjects of the English monarch, came to North America. They settled in colonies that were given a charter by the crown, ruled internally. They were self-ruled by grant of the king and by their right as Englishmen. The English colonists of North America declared independence in order to preserve this old order, defending their habit of self-government.

The Americans were not upset about tea or stamps but about the imposition of a government where they felt they had no representation, about Parliament violating a tradition of self-government that defined free Englishmen. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and imitated by Thomas Jefferson in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, declared in article IV:

"That all elections ought to be free, and that all men having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to the community, have the right of suffrage, and cannot be taxed, or deprived of their property for public uses, without their own consent, or that of their representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not in like manner assented, for the public good" (qtd. Rossiter, 60).

Self-government was being overturned by King and by Parliament. Charters and traditions—both written and unwritten contracts—were being dispensed with. The rights natural to Englishmen were being overthrown by a revolution led by the King. The colonists were, by nature, conservatives seeking to maintain the old order. Where king and parliament was implementing untried ideas the Americans held to the past, relied on the wisdom of experience. The colonists were trying to preserve their established rights, their contracted agreements. Contract theory, as political theorist John Locke wrote in his Second Treaties on Civil Government, allowed men to disband from a society when it was not fulfilling the needs of the contract. Locke wrote: “Men, as it has been said, by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his Estate, and subjected to the political power of another without his own Consent” (330).

Historian Russell Kirk describes the conservative justification for the war of independence:
What Whiggish America stood for was the long established chartered right of the colonies to govern themselves. They looked upon George III as a monarch who intended to make a revolution, by subverting their old ways of self-government; they protested that they, in resisting Crown and Parliament, were preventing royal revolution (Kirk, 395).

Edmund Burke, a Whig in Parliament at the time of the war, in his Address to the King in 1777, said the Americans were British and saw a lack of self-government as slavery, for which they would not stand. But beneath the arguments of the definition of freedom and slavery we find the conservative defense of the American War for Independence:

"The grievance is as simple in its nature, and as level to the most ordinary understanding, as it is powerful in affecting the most languid passions, it is:

'AN ATTEMPT TO DISPOSE OF THE PROPERTY OF A WHOLE PEOPLE WITHOUR THEIR CONSENT.'

"Your Majesty’s English subjects in the colonies, possessing the ordinary faculties of mankind, know, that to live under such a plan is not to live in a state of freedom. Your English subjects in the colonies, still impressed with the ancient feeling of the people from whom they are derived, cannot live under a government that does not establish freedom as its basis.

"This scheme, being therefore set up in direct opposition to the rooted and confirmed sentiments and habits of thinking of an whole people, has produced the effects which ever must result from such a collision of power and opinion" (Burke, 150).

The Declaration of Independence referred to a “long train of abuses” (35). These abuses did not exist in a vacuum. They were abuses of the tradition and habit of self-government. As conservatives, they were bound by duty and responsible for the defense of their rights. The Declaration of Independence said
(36) it was this right and duty that made the revolution, the withdrawal from the contract that bound America and England, necessary and unavoidable.

The American colonists were facing the indignity of tradition being uprooted, cast aside without respect. The king was not, Burke argues and the colonists would agree, treating them as Englishmen. By tradition Englishmen have the authority to consent to their governance. By tradition Englishmen must consent to their rule and will not accept an imposition of government. By tradition they had the right to choose their representatives. But George III was casting aside experience for new and temporarily profitable ideas. The English subjects of the North American Colonies were facing a revolution by the throne of England. The King was instigating a revolution against the old order, tearing down established English ways and confirmed English rights. The actions of the patriots were conservative. Faced with a conflict between tradition and crown they sought to maintain the order, preventing its subversion. As Kirk explains: “In this, the American Revolution differed vastly from the French evolution. The Americans, in essence, meant to keep their old order and defend it against external interference” (396).

The English colonists of North America declared independence in order to preserve this old order, defending their habit of self-government. They were conservatives maintaining their tradition, defending their experience, upholding their habits of self-rule.

Works Consulted:

American Heritage: A Reader. Acton: Tapestry, 2001.
Burke, Edmund. On the American Revolution: Selected Speeches and Letters. Ed. Elliot R. Barkan. New York: Harper, 1966.
Declaration of Independence, The. Washington, D.C., Commission on the Bicentennial, 1991.
Kirk, Russell. The Roots of American Order. Washington, DC: Regency, 1991
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Governent. New York, Cambride, 1997.
Rossiter, Clinton. The Political Thought of the American Revolution. New York: Harcourt, 1963.
Tindal, George Brown, and David Emory Shi. America: A Narrative History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.