Mr. President (3 page)

The patriots’ ability to engage in actual rebellion while professing deference appeared to have no bounds. A final caveat in the Suffolk Resolves offers a clue to their collective cognitive dissonance. Although “some unthinking persons” would understandably be tempted to engage in excess, patriots should at all costs abstain from rioting, for “in a cause so solemn, our conduct should be such as to merit the approbation of the wise, and the admiration of the brave and free.” Virtually all documents produced during the Massachusetts rebellion of 1774 contained similar disclaimers against mobs and riots. Rebels were trying not to tear down society but to shore it up and reset its course. They were
good
people, not traitors, and to prove this, they continued to profess allegiance to the crown that embodied their nation and culture—even as King George III opposed their every move.

In November 1774, upon receiving the latest news from Massachusetts, King George III wrote to Lord North, his prime minister: “The New England governments are in a state of rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.” Both the king and Lord North resolved at that moment to squelch the uprising with additional troops. The following spring, the first wave arrived in Boston and was dispatched to Lexington and Concord, where they met armed resistance from people who considered themselves patriotic subjects of the British Crown. The war was on, yet colonial rebels
still
refrained from leveling verbal abuse at the king. Through the summer and fall of 1775, even George Washington, as he commanded an opposition army, blamed the British suppression on the “diabolical ministry” rather than on King George III, who, as commander in chief of the British forces, had actually ordered the military offensive. Routinely, Washington called his opponents on the battlefield “ministerial troops,” in preference to the traditional “King’s troops.”
⁸

Delegates to the Continental Congress, continuing the mental gymnastics, implored King George III, with the “utmost deference for your Majesty,” to intervene with his ill-willed ministers. His Majesty’s
closest councillors, they informed him, were “artful and cruel enemies who abuse your royal confidence and authority, for the purpose of effecting our destruction.” Unrealistically, they asked the king to renounce the people he had been trusting to administer his regime for more than a decade.
⁹

Finally, on October 27, 1775, in front of a joint session of Parliament, King George III himself chided the rebels and vowed to suppress them. The Americans “meant only to amuse by vague expressions of attachment to the Parent State, and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me, whilst they were preparing for a general revolt,” he told the MPs. Since “the rebellious war now levied … is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire,” the king vowed “to put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions. For this purpose, I have increased my naval establishment, and greatly augmented my land forces.” He also planned to make use of “foreign assistance” to squash the rebellion.
¹⁰

How would Americans respond to this categorical affirmation of enmity from their beloved Majesty?

In Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress was meeting, news of the king’s speech arrived on January 8, 1776. Moderates like James Wilson, refusing to accept the evidence at hand, thought that if Congress made an unequivocal denial of any proclivities toward independence, maybe
that
would finally convince the king to alter the course of his ministers. Others, however, reasoned that since the king himself had broached the subject of independence, that option could finally be placed on the table here in America. The next day, January 9, an anonymous pamphlet called
Common Sense
appeared on the streets of Philadelphia. In truth it was authored not by an American but by a recent English immigrant, Thomas Paine, who had arrived penniless scarcely a year before. Paine was unencumbered by the local patriots’ fear of being labeled a traitor; in fact, because he had no reputation to lose, he didn’t have to worry about any label whatsoever. He could just speak his mind, and that he did.

Paine’s aim was to promote independence, but first he challenged the colonists’ habitual support for the British monarch. Not only the king’s ministers were at fault, Paine argued, nor even just King George III; the heart of the problem was the
institution
of monarchy, which was inherently destructive to the people’s liberties. The very existence of a
monarch, according to Paine, contradicted a fundamental tenet of the Enlightenment’s natural rights philosophy, the basic equality of human beings. He opened his assault with a rhetorical question: “How a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.” This “inquiry” into the origin of kings led him to conjure the image of William the Conqueror in 1066: “A French bastard landing with armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.—It certainly hath no divinity in it…. The plain truth is, that the antiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking into.”

For Paine, “hereditary succession” offered final proof of the “evil of monarchy.” Even if one man somehow convinced his contemporaries that he should serve as their king, this offered no assurance about the prowess of his descendants. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an
ass for a lion
.”

So a king was simply an ass? Here was an argument presented in the language of tavern-goers, who constituted a hefty proportion of adult male colonial Americans. For years, much of the political discussion had been taking place in taverns, so these made natural venues for public readings of
Common Sense
. Throughout the early months of 1776, patriotic men lubricated with hard cider and rum punch read, listened to, and discussed Paine’s daring book, and by and large they embraced it. Imagine hearing Paine’s closing argument against kings, in that setting and at that time:

Then the jeers—from the same men who had shouted “Huzzah!” for the king a short while back.

Had Thomas Paine been writing in a historical vacuum, his words would hardly have had the impact they did, but during the early months of 1776, as Americans read and debated
Common Sense
, external events confirmed that the British imperial government, a mixed monarchy, was hell-bent on destroying the American struggle for liberty and equal representation. Late in February, patriots learned that Parliament, with George III’s enthusiastic support, had prohibited trade with the rebellious colonies and declared all American vessels, even those anchored in port, to be property of the Crown. Warships from the Royal Navy were setting American ports ablaze, while the king’s army had recruited mercenaries from small states in Germany—foreigners!—to fire on American freemen.

Suddenly Americans no longer spoke only of the “diabolical ministry”; now they placed the blame for all their troubles, openly and unabashedly, on “Kingly persecution.” Almost in an instant, King George III was transformed from friend and protector to enemy. The British monarch, the ultimate symbol of national unity, became instead the devil incarnate.
¹²

Colonists had not deserted their king, they claimed; their king had deserted them. He had violated the original bargain, for instead of protecting his people, as a king must do, he was waging war against them, and for his betrayal King George III would pay a price. Like jilted lovers, Americans turned with a vengeance on the man they had once revered as a “Patriot King.”

In July 1776, when the splinter colonies made their final break from Great Britain, Congress declared its reasons to the world, and this time, in the Declaration of Independence, angry accusations against the British Crown replaced deferential posturing. The body of that document was a full-throated diatribe directed primarily against one man: King George III. “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” the Declaration of Independence stated boldly, and to prove its point, it listed seventeen specific grievances in venomous terms, each complaint starting with the simple pronoun “He”—referring to a king they now disowned. “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people,” the document read. “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.” By contrast, Congress made no mention of the wicked ministers who had served as whipping boys for patriot propagandists over the previous decade, nor of Parliament, certainly a full partner in the oppression of American interests and liberties. With contorted diction, Congress managed to blame even the laws passed by Parliament on the person of King George III: “He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.”

The moment of independence became deeply engraved in American consciousness and, with it, the complete and total disavowal of the British monarch. In the six years of military struggles that followed, every time American troops faced off against the king’s soldiers, and every time the king’s soldiers ran roughshod over civilians in occupied territory, their antipathy toward the king, and by association all things royal, was reinforced. Antimonarchical sentiments became intrinsically linked to the nation’s emergence, and therefore to its collective self-definition.

Any retreat to monarchy, in this context, was deemed a threat to the very existence of an independent nation. There was no turning back. Through the war years and beyond, the term “monarch” raised memories of dependency on a nation that had become the enemy, so to espouse it was akin to treason. The label had such clout that republicans hurled it with some frequency at any political opponent who espoused a greater concentration of power. Since a royal monarch was the supreme instance of concentrated power in the British political tradition, anything that leaned the slightest in that direction had to bear the extra burden of denial. Advocates of a stronger central government were forced into “I’m no friend of monarchy” disclaimers, much as rebels before the war felt the need to couple their protests with professions of loyalty to the Crown. The king, and all things kingly, had become an albatross.

Such was the legacy of the British monarch in America, up to and including the first week of June 1787. All delegates to the convention meeting in the Pennsylvania State House to devise a stronger government
knew this. If they happened to favor James Wilson’s motion to concentrate executive authority in a single individual, they would open themselves immediately to complaints and criticism. Better, perhaps, to let someone else speak and absorb the first blow.

On-the-ground executive authority in most colonies in British North America lay in the hands of royal and proprietary governors, by proxy from the king or queen. For the better part of two centuries, these governors had tried to exert and extend what they viewed as their prerogatives, and very often colonists resisted. While political players in the colonies were slow to oppose the British monarch, they willingly contested the men whom the monarch had chosen to execute the royal will.

The first colonial governors ruled as agents of commercial enterprises. A governor’s job was first and foremost to turn a profit for his company, and to this end he provided for the orderly occupation of land and the development of resources. A governor was entitled to collect fees and quitrents from his subjects, while the company, which he represented, benefited by exporting whatever the settlers were able to extract or produce.

All of this required the displacement of Native people, whether through negotiation or war. Governors thereby ruled with military authority, and they expected military obedience. In 1612 the Virginia Company codified its martial law in a proclamation called “Laws Divine, Morall, and Martiall”:

This was only one of more than three dozen measures, each intruding deeper into the lives of the colonists. “Every man” was to take “especiall
and due care, to keepe his house sweete and cleane … and set his bedstead whereon he lieth, that it may stand three foote at least from the ground, as he will answere the contrarie at a martiall Court.” Any fisherman who caught a sturgeon was to “bring unto the Governour” all the fish’s caviar “upon perill for the first time offending herein, of losing his eares.” Subsequent offenses would warrant a year and then three years in the galleys.