Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (2 page)

Notes, and For Further Reading.

 

General Introduction, Header Introductions, Notes,

and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2006 by Jack N. Rakove.

 

Founding America: A Timeline

Copyright © 2006 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

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Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-230-7

eISBN : 97-8-141-14322-0

ISBN-10: 1-59308-230-4

LC Control Number 2005935854

 

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FIRST PRINTING

A decade after signing the Declaration of Independence, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush made an important observation that historians are fond of citing. “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of the American revolution with those of the late American war,” Rush wrote in 1786. “The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed” (pp. 308-309).

As Rush recognized, the events he consciously called a revolution had two main elements. The first, which had ended successfully only three years earlier, was to secure political independence from Great Britain. That story in turn hinged on two great questions. First, how did the colonists move from resistance to revolution, from seeking to maintain their rights within the British Empire to renouncing its authority entirely? Second, once the last hopes for reconciliation had evaporated, how did the Americans prevail in a long and difficult military struggle against the greatest power in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world?

But winning independence, Rush also recognized, was only the first part of a greater story. In his mind, the Revolution was more than a struggle for independence and home rule. It had also become a movement to establish new forms of government, modeled on republican principles that made the people the only proper source of political authority. Rush devoted the remainder of his essay to discussing how this new form of government could be “perfected.” Within a year, this effort culminated in the form of the federal Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, a Constitution whose first stated purpose was “to form a more perfect union.”

These two great themes—the achievement of independence and the “perfection” of republican government—are the subject of the documents collected in this volume. These documents cannot capture the experience of the Revolution in its totality. No single volume, however carefully edited, could illustrate the diversity of experience and the range of issues that were felt and voiced during the quarter century of history that separates the beginning of the crisis with Britain in the mid-1760s from the adoption of the Constitution in the late 1780s.

When Benjamin Rush spoke of the Revolutionary War, he meant both the movement that led to independence and the military struggle that secured it. Defined in this way, the Revolution really began in the mid-1760s, when the colonists first argued that Parliament had no authority to impose taxes or other laws on a people who sent no representatives of their own to distant London. In the crises over the Stamp Act ( 1765-1766) and the Townshend duties ( 1767-1770), Americans and Britons defined and sharpened their arguments about the nature of the British Empire and the rights and duties of its American colonies.

By 1773 these rival theories had exposed a deep fault line between the dominant political views in each country. Americans insisted that they could be governed only by laws to which they had directly consented, through the votes of their freely elected representatives in their own separate legislative assemblies. The British position rested on different assumptions. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Parliament had been recognized as the sovereign source of law within Britain. If Americans were part of that realm, as they professed to be, then they were ultimately subject to Parliament, even if no American members sat in the House of Commons.

Even in 1773, however, no one in America was actively promoting the idea of national independence. Nor, of course, was anyone in Britain intent on forcing the colonies into a state of rebellion. On both sides of the Atlantic, political leaders of goodwill hoped the controversies of the late 1760s would soon be forgotten, and the underlying harmony of the empire restored. What happened instead was that a crisis no one had foreseen erupted in the fall of 1773 and then spun out of control in the spring and summer of 1774.

Its immediate cause was Parliament’s passage of a Tea Act, adopted to alleviate the financial woes of the East India Company by giving this powerful corporation a monopoly over the sale of tea in America. The colonists disliked the idea of a monopoly, but what disturbed them even more was that the Act retained the duty on imported tea that had been left in place in 1770, when colonial protests finally persuaded the British government to repeal the duties on other imports levied in the Townshend Act of 1767. Once again, colonists protested. In most ports, royal officials prudently allowed the tea ships to return to Britain, their cargoes unloaded. In Boston, however, Governor Thomas Hutchinson insisted on enforcing the letter of the law, and refused to grant the three ships the necessary clearances. Rather than allow the tea to be landed and the duties paid, the townsmen held their own Tea Party on the evening of December 16, 1773. Some 342 chests of tea, valued at £9000, were soon brewing in Boston Harbor.