Contrary to popular belief, Paul Revere did not ride through the towns west of Boston yelling, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” If he yelled at all, it would have been “The redcoats (or the regulars) are coming!” Why is that? Because all his hearers considered themselves British, with all the rights and privileges thereunto belonging.
For over 150 years, ever since the Mayflower Compact of 1620, wherein the male passengers onboard that ship formed themselves into “a civil body politick,” New Englanders had run their own affairs, with the citizens themselves in the smaller towns acting as their own legislature in town meetings. Unlike his counterpart in the mother country, the average Massachusetts militiaman owned land and was quite literate. In most homes, there were at least two books – the King James Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. For better or worse, there were plenty of lawyers among them, and as Burke warned Parliament, most of the rest were at least “smatterers in law” who could “auger misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”
Burke also warned Parliament that the American colonists had not only the same love of English liberty that they possessed, but they, or their immediate ancestors, had also come to America to seek an expansion of their liberty and their opportunities, both of which they would jealously guard.
Then came the financial crisis Britain found itself in following its victory over France in the Seven Years War (known to the colonists as the French and Indian War). The resulting taxation policies over which the colonists had no control, extra-judicial admiralty courts, writs of assistance, etc. were not only burdensome, but an affront to their Yankee pride, which, in turn, made Boston a hotbed of resistance.
After years of protest and tumults culminating in the “Boston Tea Party” in December of 1773, the crown revoked the colony’s charter, closed the port of Boston, and sent redcoats once again to live amongst them. The name given to these actions was the Intolerable Acts. In April of 1775, when redcoats were sent out into the countryside to confiscate their arms and arrest their leaders, the various town militias turned out, and “fired the shot heard round the world.” These local militia organizations were as old as the Mayflower Compact itself, Myles Standish having trained the first of them.
By the summer of 1776, it had become obvious that full independence was the only viable option. Its Declaration, though, made it clear that it was the king and his minions who had changed the rules, so that the game could no longer be fairly played. It accused the king of “…a long train of abuses and usurpations… all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.” That was followed by what read like a fifteen-count criminal indictment, each beginning with “He has…” It read like a criminal indictment because, in their view, it was just that. Absolute monarchy was contrary to a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon Common Law – going all the way back to the tribal gatherings known as the “Thing,” at which any man’s case could be heard by the elders, through Alfred the Great’s shire and borough system, the Magna Carta of 1215, and affirmed by the relatively recent “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.
Contrast all that with the French Revolution of 1789, born of Rousseau’s tabula rasa and “positive liberty.” The French peasant of the day was desperate, starving, and mostly illiterate. He did not turn out to preserve what he had, for he had nothing. His intent was to take from those who have. His ever-changing leaders were masters of manipulation and recognized no moral, religious, legal, or customary boundaries. All must be swept away, even the calendar. Mankind is to be made anew, not in the image of God, but in the image of whoever could hold the reins of power before being eaten by his own. All the “-isms” of the 20th century – Marxism, fascism, Nazism, and communism are the bastard children of this pernicious and twisted ideology.
Properly understood, modern American conservatism (earlier known as classical liberalism) is not actually an “-ism” at all; it is the antithesis of all “ideology.” Its roots are deep in the soil of law and traditions going back far beyond the actual birth of this nation.
Let us end by returning to our Yankee militiaman. One of them, Levi Preston, lived to a ripe old age and was asked decades later by a historian why he turned out on that long-ago April morning. Was it the Stamp Act? The Tea taxes? The Intolerable Acts? “No,” he said, “What we meant in going for those redcoats was this: We had always governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean that we should.”
The culture doesn’t take a day off—and neither do we.
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