The First Journal of the American Revolution Collection

I’ll finish off this week of mew books about the Revolution with the first volume from the Journal of the American Revolution, which posts a variety of interesting daily historical articles at AllThingsLiberty.com.

Edited by Todd Andrlik, Hugh T. Harrington, and Don N. Hagist, this book collects some of the most popular essays from the site with newly commissioned articles on many aspects of America’s move toward independence. Topics include:

• What was the true start of the Revolution?
  
• Were the Founding Fathers young enough to be called Founding Teenagers or Twentysomethings?
  
• What role did dogs play in the war?
  
• How did George Washington’s army actually cross the Delaware River?
  
• At what moment did Washington become a politician as well as a general?
  
• What was it really like to walk the streets of colonial Boston, Philadelphia, New York, or Charleston?
  
• What was the treatment for a scalped head or arrow wound?
  
• Was the most hated Loyalist in America really a Patriot spy?

I have three articles in the book, all with roots on Boston 1775 over the years. Two are slightly updated versions of the essays on the phrases “taxation without representation” and “Intolerable Acts” that have appeared on AllThingsLiberty.com. The third is an investigation of “Who Killed Major John Pitcairn?” assembled for this book; you can read the start of that article here.

Following the model of Todd’s Reporting the Revolutionary War, which came out last year, all the essays are attractively illustrated in full color. Ertel Publishing is now taking orders for the limited edition in hardcover.

“Preserving American Freedom” from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Preserving American Freedom is “a digital history exhibit that explores the complicated history of American freedom through 50 documents in the collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.”

In addition to those documents, the exhibit includes eight essays about American ideas of freedom in different eras. In the introductory essay, “The Contested History of American Freedom,” Eric Foner writes:

The early settlers of Great Britain’s North American colonies brought with them long-standing ideas about freedom, some of them quite unfamiliar today. To them, freedom was not a single idea but a collection of distinct rights and privileges that depended on one’s nationality and social status. “Liberties” meant formal, specific privileges—such as self-government or the right to practice a particular trade—many of which were enjoyed by only a small segment of the population. . . .

The struggles in England that culminated in the Civil War of the 1640s and, half a century later, the Glorious Revolution, gave new meanings to freedom. Alongside the idea of “liberties” that applied only to some groups arose the notion of the “rights of Englishmen” that applied to all.

Or at least all English men.

Resistance to British efforts to raise revenues in America began not as a demand for independence but as a defense, in colonial eyes, of the rights of Englishmen. The Stamp Act Congress of 1765 condemned the principle of taxation without representation by asserting that residents of the colonies were entitled to “all the inherent rights and liberties” of “subjects within the Kingdom of Great Britain.” But the Revolution ended up transforming these rights—by definition a parochial set of entitlements that did not apply to other peoples—into a universal concept. The rights of Englishmen became the rights of man.

The struggle for independence gave birth to a definition of American nationhood and national mission that persists to this day—an idea closely linked to freedom, for the new nation defined itself as a unique embodiment of liberty in a world overrun with oppression. This sense of American uniqueness—of the United States as an example to the rest of the world of the superiority of free institutions—remains alive and well even today as a central part of our political culture. Over time, it has made the United States an example, inspiring democratic movements in other countries, and has provided justification for American interference in the affairs of other countries in the name of bringing them freedom.

The loyal Boston 1775 reader who first pointed me to this site saw that sort of rhetoric and all the prominent mentions of the project’s corporate sponsor and wondered how solid the history was. The essayists are top-notch historians. The sort of “American exceptionalism” Foner writes about is the version of the progressive left—that the U.S. of A. has a legacy of moving toward equality and democracy to live up to, as opposed to a divine fiat to stand over the rest of the world.

TOMORROW: A prominent Pennsylvanian.

What the Rev. William Stith Truly Said

The Summer 2013 issue of Colonial Williamsburg contains an article titled, “Life, Liberty, and No Pistole,” by Susan Berg. It begins:

Twenty-three years before Virginia patriot Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” the Reverend Mr. William Stith of Williamsburg raised a glass and toasted “Life and liberty, and no pistole.” That sparked a protest against Lieutenant-Governor Robert Dinwiddie that spread throughout the colony and across the Atlantic to the upper levels of English government.

Unfortunately, the article renders Stith’s toast inaccurately. It didn’t actually start out like Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which the article quotes at the end. Stith’s words were “Liberty and property and no pistole.”

In this political dispute from 1753, Lt. Gov. Dinwiddie had imposed a one-pistole (16s.8d.) fee on new land patents. Naturally, Virginians who speculated in land disliked this. The House of Burgesses, which included a lot of land speculators, also disliked it on principle since Dinwiddie hadn’t gone through them; in essence, this was “taxation without representation” before that phrase was coined.

Stith, the new president of the College of William and Mary, became a leading voice against the fee. In 1940 the William & Mary Quarterly published his 21 Apr 1753 letter to the bishop of London in which he admitted:

Once in a publick Company, where that Subject had been much debated, being called upon for my Toast, I gave Liberty & Property and no Pistole; and I believe, I might afterward drink it six or eight times at my own Table. However, the thing took; and I have been told, that it has been since frequently drunk in various Parts of the Country.

A 1954 footnote in the same journal reported that a man named John Blair had also written to the bishop accusing Stith of making “the same toast,” but a 1958 issue of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography said Blair accused Stith of toasting, “Liberty & No Pistole.”

Percy Scott Flippin had quoted the same 1753 letter from Stith in his monograph “The Royal Government of Virginia,” published in Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law in 1919. But I mention that mostly because I just don’t have enough opportunities to write “Percy Scott Flippin.”

No period source quotes Stith as saying, “Life and liberty…” As of this writing, Google finds only three domains on the web which render his words that way. Two are run by Colonial Williamsburg and point back to this article. The third is a 2009 homework assignment from a California school.

Most of the article about Stith concerns his work as a minister, teacher, and historian. He does appear to have been a significant figure in the history of Virginia. The pistole-fee dispute was also a forerunner of the larger issues that led to the break between colonies and Crown. It’s a shame the article’s title and opening are based on a mistake.

The Earliest Appearance of “No Taxation without Representation” (so far)

In March 1766, Parliament repealed its Stamp Act for North America but passed the Declaratory Act, meant to establish that it had the power to pass laws governing those colonies—including, implicitly, new tax laws.

One of the few voices against the Declaratory Act was Charles Pratt, first Baron Camden, soon to be Lord Chancellor of England. He argued, as he’d done when the Stamp Act was proposed, that since the colonists didn’t have any representatives in Parliament, by British tradition Parliament shouldn’t have the power to tax them.

Very few Members of Parliament agreed. Camden’s political ally William Pitt actually wrote the Declaratory Act. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, said Camden was mistaken. Only four other Lords voted against the bill.

That debate occurred just before London printers made a routine of reporting Parliament‘s proceedings in detail. But a few months later someone sent the text of Camden’s speech to printer John Almon (1737-1805), who included it in his Political Register for 1767. The text appeared in a gingerly form, perhaps as a thin guard against accusations of sedition: all the proper names were removed, so it recorded “L— C——” speaking to the “B—— p———” on the issue of taxing the “A——— c——.”

Camden had said:

My position is this—I repeat it—I will maintain it to my last hour,—taxation and representation are inseparable;—this position is founded on the laws of nature; it is more, it is itself an eternal law of nature; for whatever is a man’s own, is absolutely his own; no man hath a right to take it from him without his consent, either expressed by himself or representative; whoever attempts to do it, attempts an injury; whoever does it, commits a robbery; he throws down and destroys the distinction between liberty and slavery. Taxation and representation are coeval with and essential to this constitution. . . .

In short, my lords, from the whole of our history, from the earliest period, you will find that taxation and representation were always united; so true are the words of that consummate reasoner and politician Mr. [John] Locke.

As you can see, Camden’s argument was based on the linkage of taxation and representation. But nowhere in the speech did the baron use the phrase “taxation without representation.”

The Scots Magazine reprinted Camden’s speech in 1767. The London Magazine, or Gentlemen’s Monthly Intelligencer ran the text on two pages the following February. That magazine’s running head for the first page was “L— C——’s Speech.” The second page, as preserved by Google Books, was summed up this way:

And that page, published in February 1768, is the earliest appearance of the phrase “[No] Taxation without Representation” that I’ve found. It debuted in big letters at the top of a page of a widely circulated magazine. I suspect that pithy, rhyming summary of the argument below stuck in many readers’ minds and became the slogan for the American cause.

Thus, I posit that the person who coined the deathless phrase “taxation without representation” wasn’t James Otis, Jr., or the Rev. John Joachim Zubly or even Lord Camden. It was John Almon or an anonymous editor or printer in his shop, looking for a way to headline a couple of columns of text in a limited number of characters.

Irish Roots for “Taxation without Representation”?

Digging for the origin of the phrase “[no] taxation without representation,” I keep coming across some claims that haven’t held up:

• that James Otis, Jr., coined those words in arguing against writs of assistance before the Massachusetts high court in 1761. Surviving texts of that speech don’t include the phrase. Otis’s pamphlets in the next few years discuss the linkage of taxation and representation, but they don’t use that phrase. Otis’s biographer William Tudor did use that phrase while discussing the speech, and as a result it’s been grafted onto Otis.
• that the phrase appeared in an unidentified sermon by the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew of Boston in 1750. This claim appeared on Wikipedia on 2005. I knocked it down in 2009, but it still survives some places.
• that it was a common slogan in Ireland decades before the Americans adopted it.

David McCullough’s John Adams made that last statement in 2001. However, the book didn’t cite any example or source. And all the Irish examples I’ve found appear after the American Revolution, some of them explicitly pointing to that earlier conflict across the ocean.

The “Address from the Society of the United Irishmen of Dublin” dated 23 Nov 1792 stated:

Three millions—we repeat it—three millions taxed without being represented, bound by laws to which they had net given consent, and politically dead in their native land. The apathy of the Catholic mind changed into sympathy, and that begot an energy of sentiment and action. They had eyes, and they read. They had ears, and they listened. They had hearts, and they felt.

They said—“Give us our rights as you value your own. Give us a share of civil and political liberty, the elective franchise, and the trial by jury. Treat us as men, and we shall treat you as brothers. Is taxation without representation a grievance to three millions across the Atlantic, and no grievance to three millions at your doors? Throw down that pale of persecution which still keeps up civil war in Ireland, and make us one people. We shall then stand, supporting and supported, in the assertion of that liberty which is due to all, and which all should unite to attain.”

Arguing in the Irish Parliament to extend the franchise to Catholics on 22 Feb 1793, Henry Grattan (1746-1820, shown above) said:

I see no reason why the church [of England] should be more in danger from the catholics than from the presbyterians, who, in Ireland, are the majority of the protestants. If the church is in danger, it is from the times, not from the catholics; and I know of nothing so likely to encrease that danger as an opposition on the part of the church to the liberty of three parts of the island. To insist on a system of taxation, without representation, in order to secure a system of tithe, without consolation, would be to hazard both; but to make the latter in a time of some speculation on the subject of church emoluments, the best policy is to make those emoluments reconcileable to other interests and passions.

By that point the phrase had appeared in American political writing and then histories of the American war for twenty years. So I think these Irish activists picked up the words from the Americans. If anyone has found earlier examples of the phrase from Ireland, I’d be pleased to see them. (I’m not looking for previous examples of the argument, just the phrase.)

Until now, the earliest example of the phrase “taxation without representation” that I found was from the Rev. John Joachim Zubly of Georgia, published in 1769.

TOMORROW: The origin in 1768?

Looking for “Taxation Without Representation”

As I wrote yesterday, most sources credit James Otis, Jr., with coining the phrase “taxation without representation,” but he never actually used that phrase in his writings, and no contemporary quoted him directly as doing so. Otis certainly wrote about the problem, putting it at the center of the American objections to Parliament’s taxes in the 1760s and 1770s, but not in that exact way.

So is the phrase “taxation without representation” authentically Revolutionary, or actually a coinage of later years applied backwards, as the terms Intolerable Acts, lobsterback, and tricorn appear to be?

And I’m pleased to report that yes, we can document the phrase being used in the Revolutionary years. In 1769 the Rev. John Joachim Zubly (1724-1781) of Georgia authored a pamphlet titled An Humble Enquiry into the Nature of the Dependency of the American Colonies upon the Parliament of Great-Britain, and the Right of Parliament to Lay Taxes on the Said Colonies. He wrote:

In England there can be no taxation without representation, and no representation without election; but it is undeniable that the representatives of Great-Britain are not elected by nor for the Americans, and therefore cannot represent them...

The available databases being incomplete, I’m not entirely sure Zubly coined the phrase “no taxation without representation,” but so far his pamphlet is the earliest use I’ve seen.

James Burgh (1714-1775) also used the phrase in his long work Political Disquisitions; or, An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, published in 1774. He even titled the second chapter of his Book II “Of Taxation without Representation.”

So “taxation without representation” is authentically American! Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Zubly was Swiss by birth and, though he represented Georgia in the Second Continental Congress, advocated reconciliation with Britain. He was driven out of Savannah when it was under independent government and returned there and died under royal rule.

As for Burgh, he was a Scottish by birth, and a clergyman in a parish near London. He advocated the American cause, and Political Disquisitions became quite popular in the U.S. of A. But, like Zubly, Burgh considered himself British.

But don’t worry! I’ve also found some examples of Americans using the phrase. “Taxation without representation” appears in statements issued by Dover, New Hampshire, on 10 Jan 1774; by York, Massachusetts (Maine), on 20 Jan 1774; and by John Smith on 6 July 1775, while he was locked up in “Strafford Prison” as a suspected Loyalist. But the fact that I didn’t stumble across more citations might indicate that the phrase wasn’t as dominant as we’ve come to expect.

“Taxation without representation” appeared in several early histories of the conflict:

• David Ramsay’s History of the Revolution of South-Carolina (1785) and History of the American Revolution (1789).
• William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America (1789).
• Tobias Smollett’s The History of England, from the Revolution to the End of the American War, and Peace of Versailles in 1783 (1796), discussing how the same issue was raised in Ireland.

So historians might have snatched up that quick, three-word formulation of the colonies’ problem soon after the war, and it became one of the major ways we remember the American Revolution.

James Otis, Jr., on Taxation Without Representation

Until 2 Nov 2005, the phrase “taxation without representation” has almost always been credited to the Boston lawyer and legislator James Otis, Jr. The basis for this attribution is John Adams’s recollection of how Otis argued the writs of assistance case in 1761, in a letter to Otis’s biographer William Tudor, Jr., in 1818. After quoting that letter at length Tudor wrote:

From the navigation act the advocate [Otis] passed to the Acts of Trade, and these, he contended, imposed taxes, enormous, burthensome, intolerable taxes; and on this topic he gave full scope to his talent, for powerful declamation and invective, against the tyranny of taxation without representation.

From the energy with which he urged this position, that taxation without representation is tyranny, it came to be a common maxim in the mouth of every one. And with him it formed the basis of all his speeches and political writings; he builds all his opposition to arbitrary measures from this foundation, and perpetually recurs to it through his whole career, as the great constitutional theme of liberty, and as the fundamental principle of all opposition to arbitrary power.

However, neither Adams’s contemporaneous notes on what he’d heard in 1761 nor his letter contained the “taxation without representation” phrase or argument. We know he was urging Tudor to write about Otis as a way to capture some of the attention that William Wirt’s romanticized biography had brought to Patrick Henry of Virginia. Adams and Tudor had strong motives to present Otis, a Massachusetts man, as the first to establish the fundamental political conflict of the Revolution.

And in fact Otis did so—even if he didn’t use the words we remember. In his 1764 pamphlet The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (extensive extracts here), Otis concluded:

The sum of my argument is: that civil government is of God; that the administrators of it were originally the whole people; that they might have devolved it on whom they pleased; that this devolution is fiduciary, for the good of the whole; that by the British constitution this devolution is on the King, Lords and Commons, the supreme, sacred and uncontrollable legislative power not only in the realm but through the dominions; that by the abdication, the original compact was broken to pieces; that by the Revolution it was renewed and more firmly established, and the rights and liberties of the subject in all parts of the dominions more fully explained and confirmed; that in consequence of this establishment and the acts of succession and union, His Majesty GEORGE III is rightful King and sovereign, and, with his Parliament, the supreme legislative of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging; that this constitution is the most free one and by far the best now existing on earth; that by this constitution every man in the dominions is a free man; that no parts of His Majesty’s dominions can be taxed without their consent; that every part has a right to be represented in the supreme or some subordinate legislature; that the refusal of this would seem to be a contradiction in practice to the theory of the constitution; that the colonies are subordinate dominions and are now in such a state as to make it best for the good of the whole that they should not only be continued in the enjoyment of subordinate legislation but be also represented in some proportion to their number and estates in the grand legislature of the nation; that this would firmly unite all parts of the British empire in the greater peace and prosperity, and render it invulnerable and perpetual.

In case you missed it within that magnificent 311-word sentence, Otis wrote: “that no parts of His Majesty’s dominions can be taxed without their consent; that every part has a right to be represented in the supreme or some subordinate legislature;...”

So James Otis certainly focused on the idea that the Parliament in London couldn’t lay taxes (or Customs duties) on American colonists because that legislature didn’t represent those colonists, that the only legislatures which could impose such taxes were those the colonists elected according to their charters. But Otis didn’t phrase his argument in rhyme.

TOMORROW: So did any Americans in the Revolutionary era use the phrase “taxation without representation”?

Who Coined the Phrase “No Taxation Without Representation“?

The American Revolution Blog alerted me to a new meme, or misapprehension, about the famous phrase “No taxation without representation.” Brad Hart’s article on the Astroturfed “tea parties” earlier this month said that phrase “had been coined in 1750 by Reverend John Mayhew.”

That should be Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766; shown here courtesy of NNDB.com), but it’s a minor slip. The real question is what evidence suggests that Mayhew wrote those words a full decade before the Boston Whigs started sparring with Gov. Francis Bernard and fifteen years before the Stamp Act.

Mayhew did deliver a famous sermon in 1750 which some people see as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement. It has this catchy title:

A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and
Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers:
With some Reflections on the Resistance made to King Charles I.
And on the Anniversary of his Death:
In which the Mysterious Doctrine of that
Prince’s Saintship and Martyrdom is Unriddled.

In that discourse Mayhew was looking back to a previous conflict within the British Empire, not ahead. He was arguing that the Puritans who deposed and killed Charles I had acted justly because that king had turned into an oppressor. Along the way, Mayhew took swipes at the notion of the divine right of kings and the Church of England. This was the voice of the unrepentant New England Puritan.

But Mayhew’s sermon didn’t include the words “taxation” or “representation.” Nor did he address those political issues. In hindsight, Boston Whigs and chroniclers looked back on Mayhew’s preaching (including a sermon in 1765, shortly before the Stamp Act riots) as offering a theological justification for resistance to the new government measures. But that was just the groundwork, not an actual argument for that resistance. Mayhew actually spent much of his last five years preaching against the Anglican Church and its missionaries rather than about the basis of civil government.

Did Mayhew coin “No taxation without representation” in some other 1750 sermon or essay? I haven’t even found another published, much less cited. Is the phrase in Mayhew’s 1754 Election Sermon, which also touched on a lot of political issues? Nope. Instead, the attribution of that famous phrase to Mayhew seems to have appeared on the internet in the last five years, and we may be able to date it precisely.

On 2 Nov 2005, at 20:21 by the server’s clock, an anonymous user started an article on Wikipedia about the Old West Church in Boston, stating along the way:

Jonathan Mayhew, the church’s second Congregational pastor, coined the phrase, “no taxation without representation” in a sermon in Old West.

There was no source cited for that statement. A minute later, the same user added this sentence to Wikipedia’s entry on “No taxation without representation”:

(The phrase was originally coined by Rev. Jonathan Mayhew in a sermon at Old West Church, Boston, Massachusetts.)

And a few minutes after that this statement appeared in the entry on Jonathan Mayhew:

He is credited with coining the phrase “no taxation without representation”, and with very early advocacy of what became Unitarianism.

Since then, the Unitarianism part of that sentence has been removed, though the Mayhew article still describes the minister’s unorthodox Congregationalism.

TOMORROW: So who did coin the phrase “taxation without representation”?