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- [00:00]
Podcast Host 1
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- [01:38]
Podcast Host 2
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- [02:01]
Podcast Host 2
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Podcast Host 1
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Professor Adam Smith
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Podcast Host 2
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- [02:24]
Professor Adam Smith
I'm Kiana, and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business. But Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted to Start your free trial@shopify.com. Welcome to the History Extra podcast. This year marks 250 years since the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence, the nation's founding document and a key moment in the American Revolution. Over the next four weeks in this new Sunday series, Eleanor Evans will be talking to Professor Adam Smith about this foundational moment beginning today with a look at the road to the Declaration.
- [03:24]
Podcast Host 2
The United States of America looms large as one of the most powerful countries in the world politically, culturally and economically. It dominates headlines, shapes global debates, and through the story of its birth, often presents itself as the natural inheritor of liberty and democracy. But like any origin story, the history of the American Revolution is not a straightforward one. What's often told as a clear cut battle between freedom and tyranny becomes, on closer inspection, a story of confusion, miscalculation and division. A messy and uncertain conflict fought by people who didn't all want independence, didn't all agree on what liberty meant, and didn't all benefit from the outcome. I'm Eleanor Evans and today I'm joined by Professor Adam Smith, Osborne professor of United States Politics and Political History at the University of Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American Institute. Welcome Adam. Thank you so much for joining.
- [04:18]
Professor Adam Smith
Pleasure to be here.
- [04:19]
Podcast Host 2
It's lovely to have you. And I want to start by referring to your own podcast, the Last Best Hope, which looks back at American history through the lens of today. And I hope we'll be doing this a lot through the four episodes we've got ahead of us. But to situate us in this series particularly, can we look back at this story, this foundational story, and what do you think it means to America today 250 years on?
- [04:43]
Professor Adam Smith
That's a big question to open with, Eleanor. The United States in so many ways remains a kind of post revolutionary society. It's a nation, it's an idea, it's a policy that was created at this moment 250 years ago in a very self conscious way. It's extraordinary looking from the outside as we are here recording this podcast in London, how strange the United States is in global comparative terms, that their politics to some degree still revolves around the views of bewigged silk stocking gentlemen who wrote the Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787, that they have the longest continuously operating written constitution of any country in the world. In so many Ways it's a really old country and its oldness, its imagined oldness, is kind of rooted in this period that we're going to be talking about over the next four episodes, the 1760s and 70s and 80s. So that structures so much of American life and always has in ways that are highly contested, never more so than now.
- [05:54]
Podcast Host 2
Highly contested. We're going to be getting into a lot of that detail. Is it fair to say, I guess with any origin story, Romulus and Remus or Alfred the Great in England, there's a lot of mythology and folklore tied up in this period as well. Is that fair?
- [06:08]
Professor Adam Smith
For sure, for sure. Institutions, entities, nations need origin stories. Few nations have such a powerful origin story as the United States. Most countries have much more fragmented, much more diffused origin stories. One of the ways of thinking about the United States is as the first post imperial entity, it itself became an imperial power. But. But it was the first big colonial revolt. Other nations subsequently, and especially in the 20th century, of course, also have a kind of origin moment in the rejection of something. The United States was the first nation to have that as part of first modern nation to have that as part of its historical imaginary, the rejection of something. And that's obviously gonna be a key part of the story we're talking about over the next four episodes as well.
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Podcast Host 2
Absolutely. Well, let's stay on this idea of rejection to start us off on the road that we're on. Take us into Life in the 18th century in the colonies. I realise we're talking about a very diverse picture here geographically, lots of different places. Can you situate us a bit? And what were they beginning or in the earlier stages of rejecting?
- [07:24]
Professor Adam Smith
Probably we need to begin our story, Eleanor, in 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War. So let's talk about what the colonies, the British colonies in North America were like at that date. They are very diverse, as you say, and they range, if you're viewing this from London, they range from the Sugar Islands in the Caribbean, Barbados and Jamaica and Antigua, all the way up to Nova Scotia. The end of the Seven Years War, which was a extraordinary triumph for the British, expelled the French from the whole of the continent of North America. And so the colonies also include Quebec, with its French speaking Catholic population that somehow needs to be integrated into the British Empire. And then there are these colonies, eventually 13 colonies, who are the ones who lead a successful revolt against the British government, many of which have been established by this point for a century and a half. Some much less so Georgia, much more. The far South, a much more sparsely settled newer entity. But Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and Virginia, very long established places with different forms of government from each other, with some with royal charters, others set up in different ways, all with forms of self government and with generations and generations of people who've been used to running their affairs. They're very prosperous by the standards of the time. One estimate suggests that white colonial Americans in the 1760s are on average 2 inches taller than the average British person at the same time, which is a reflection of the quality of their diet and the abundance of land and the health of the population. It's not some backwards place. Sometimes people in Britain, looking across at the Atlantic, very few people here have been there, imagined in the 1760s and 70s that these were just kind of backwoodsmen who had known not at all. I mean, Boston, Philadelphia, to a slightly lesser extent, New York, these were major Atlantic cities, as busy and bustling as most cities in the British Empire, apart from London and maybe Bristol and Glasgow at the time, with well built wooden houses, prosperous merchants, well established clergy and an elite of printers and lawyers and journalists and writers with colleges of higher education. These were very sophisticated, self governing, prosperous communities.
- [10:17]
Podcast Host 2
That's great insight into what life was like in many of these places. And is it fair to say that in the wake of the Seven Years War, also known as the French and Indian War, as per who was fighting these self governing places, their big beginning to look back across the Atlantic, they're beginning to look at how they are taxed, what policies are maybe being enacted on them, perhaps without that representation. Can you talk a bit more about this phenomenon and how it manifests in organisation and where that organization maybe centres?
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Professor Adam Smith
Yeah, so the problem arises here because up until the Seven Years War, these colonies had benefited from what Edmund Burke, the great politician, philosopher, statesman, was later to call salutary neglect. From London, they considered themselves to be Englishmen transplanted across the ocean. They were patriotic Englishmen who enjoyed the rights of Englishmen, albeit in the New World. London was obviously very far distant and one of the challenges as we get into describing the war, is that it took a couple of months, sometimes longer, for news and information and support, supplies and horses and goods and everything to but critically information and news to travel across the Atlantic. London was a very, very long way away. But the Seven Years War, this great victory, brought in its wake massive challenges for the British government in London. You're looking at this from London. This is a vast, vast continent, a populated continent filled with powerful indigenous nations which are well armed, well organized, have effective sort of diplomatic representation and ways of operating with the British government are used to being able to kind of triangulate Britain and France and sometimes Spain, depending where we're talking about. It's a huge business now to try to manage this entire continent. And there's a massive war debt. A massive war debt. And so somehow the government in London has got to sort of manage this situation. And so the ministries after 1763 set about what seemed to them to be extremely sensible and moderate modest proposals to, for example, enforce the navigation laws which have been on the statute books since the end of the previous century and which have been widely flouted. The Americans have been smuggling in goods.
- [12:50]
Podcast Host 2
These are trading rules.
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Professor Adam Smith
These are trading rules that have been put in place at the end of the 17th century really in order to kind of manage the empire. So we try to enforce the navigation rules and let's try a little bit to ask the colonists in their very prosperous 2 inch taller world to contribute a little bit to their own defense. So after 1763, the British government, as you say, decides that it needs to raise just some taxation directly from the colonies in order to pay for the defence of those 13 colonies from the threat of indigenous people, potentially from the renewed threat from France and Spain. France is the great enemy that looms over this whole story, really. This is indeed a story about France, much as that's not Americans.
- [13:42]
Podcast Host 2
They'll get American every episode, I'm sure.
- [13:44]
Professor Adam Smith
The first attempt to do this is a disaster. It's an attempt to impose in the colonies a stamp duty, which is a perfectly normal form of tax in Britain. It requires a government approved literal stamp to be placed on official documents to show that you've paid a small amount of tax in Great Britain. This is a tax that may well be resented, but is entirely kind of normal. The problem with the stamp tax is that the people that it affects are lawyers and journalists.
- [14:21]
Podcast Host 2
The people you don't want to annoy. Exactly.
- [14:22]
Professor Adam Smith
The people you don't want to annoy. Most people don't pay the stamp tax. Right. The ordinary people very, very rarely come into contact with the stamp tax, but the lawyers and the journalists definitely do. And so there is a huge unrest in the colonies about this new stamp duty involving forms of kind of mob action and mass protest as well as resolutions and petitions.
- [14:50]
Podcast Host 2
And it gets quite violent. Right. I think there are, you know, there are agents hung in effigy and I think people are maybe tarred and feathered. Yes, I think that part surprises me in that you don't often hear about this early stage getting that violence.
- [15:04]
Professor Adam Smith
There is a lot of violence. I mean, I suppose to contextualize it, we should say, you know, lot of violence in politics in Great Britain as well at this time. And there's not much happens in Boston in the 1760s and 70s that isn't also happening in London. I mean, this is also the era in London of the Gordon riots and there's huge mob action is, as it were considered sort of almost part of
- [15:31]
Podcast Host 2
the de facto way.
- [15:33]
Professor Adam Smith
So you're right that it is violent in some ways, though it would have been more surprising if it had not been. But the stamp duty in any case is repealed. I mean, it's an attempt by the British government to raise money. They say, okay, this is not gonna work. So they retreat. Immediately, though, we can see in this story. So we're in 1765 at this point. Immediately we can see in this story a breakdown of communication. Because the lesson in London is, okay, that was the wrong kind of tax to try to impose on the colonies. We antagonized the wrong people. We went about it in the wrong way. That is part of the story. What the British government is largely missing is that the reaction in the American colonies was not solely to the imposition of an extra tax, which no one ever wants to pay, but to the principle of the British government directly taxing people in the American colonies, because that was new. Of course, Americans paid taxes. They paid taxes at a much, much lower rate than people in Great Britain did. But they paid them to their colonial governments, and those taxes were levied locally by colonial assemblies. The British government persistently failed to recognize, or at least to, were unwilling to acknowledge the implications of that fundamental disagreement basically over the constitution of the British empire. So by 1765, what had already become clear was that this was an argument over the constitution of the British Empire. Who had power over who? How was the British imperial system to work? The view from London was that we'd had the glorious revolution in 1688-9 that established this important principle of the king in Parliament. Parliament in Westminster was sovereign. And therefore the British constitution was whatever parliament the House of Commons and the House of Lords decided that it was. There were other assemblies and parliaments within the British Empire at this point. There was still a parliament in Dublin, for example, quite importantly, as well as parliaments in these 13 or assemblies in these 13 colonies. But in the view of London, these assemblies were subordinate to Westminster and could be abolished or reorganised at will. They did their own job but they didn't contain the sovereignty of the British nation as the King in Parliament did. That was the view of the British Constitution from London. And basically that view was not to change. In fact, arguably it still hasn't changed, you know, up. Well, up until the present day, perhaps. The view from the colonies, however, was that their colonial assemblies had the same relationship to the King as the Parliament in Westminster had to the King. Right up until the very last minute, really, right up until into early 1776, the colonists were trying to negotiate a relationship with the King. They rejected the ministry, they rejected the authority of Parliament, they didn't reject the authority of the King. What they wanted was for the King to override the government in London and to deal directly with them. So there was a fundamental, really materially consequential, substantive disagreement over how power should operate within the British Empire. And on that front, even the people who ended up being loyalists in the colonies, or most of them anyway, most of the people who ended up being Loyalists, that is, retained their loyalty to Britain even after the outbreak of war. Even the Loyalists generally held to this constitutional view because they were people who were themselves participating in self government, had been running their own affairs. This was a reflection of their lived experience. This was how they'd experienced things up until the end of the Seven Years War when there was this attempt to directly raise money from the colonies.
- [19:51]
Podcast Host 2
So it sounds like this is such a transformative decade that we get from 1765 and the Stamp act to 1776, where people are raising a list of grievances against George iii. So it's a real transformative sense in how power is being asked for and deployed. You've mentioned there is a disconnect between Britain between Parliament and the people organising in the colonies in their self governing bodies. How do the colonies themselves begin to interact? I know there are intercolonial boycotts, for example. What are other ways in which they're organizing and these grievances are maybe coalescing.
- [20:27]
Professor Adam Smith
It's such an important issue this, Eleanor, because up until this point, these 13 colonies had had nothing to do with one another. I mean, practically speaking, they didn't really think of themselves as being part of any kind of collective entity. If you lived in Boston, you were much more likely to have visited London than you were to have visited New York and certainly Charleston, South Carolina. But they were all affected in the same way by the Stamp act and the other subsequent attempts to raise taxation in one form or another from the colonies. And so this generated for the first time an intercolonial movement, congresses that met, that attempted to speak for all of the colonies initially, you know, with the hope that the Sugar Islands and Nova Scotia and Canada would also be part of this collective resistance to London. It was a source of some frustration that there were no representatives from Barbados and Jamaica were ever interested in that. There's an interesting story about why that wasn't so, but it wasn't so. But they attempted to speak on behalf of the continent, of America, of this new world, this new British world as it now was in the end of the Seven Years War. And so it was the actions of the British government that created the intercolonial consciousness which was the necessary, essential prerequisite for the imagining of a new nation which came into being in the end through the war.
- [22:07]
Podcast Host 1
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- [23:52]
Professor Adam Smith
think it would actually be the bicycle.
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Podcast Host 1
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- [24:02]
Podcast Host 2
Britain seems to zero in on New England and Boston in particular, as a place to crack down upon. There are a number of moments I wonder we can go into briefly, particularly New England and Boston, that are flashpoints in this story of the road to revolution. Despite repealing the Stamp act, more policies follow that tax different things. You've got the Townsend act, you've got the Tea act. Most notably, that follows.
- [24:26]
Professor Adam Smith
The British government thought these were extremely reasonable taxes because these were not internal taxes. These are customs duties, essentially. These are tariffs, tariffs that are being charged. So they thought, well, even it was a sort of acknowledgment of the Americans objection to the British Parliament levying it. The, the stamp duties. Was that, okay, fair enough. Internal taxes, you can, you, we'll give you those. You, you can deal with those, but you can't possibly object to the Imperial Parliament levying duties on. On trade. That was the view in London. Right, but they were wrong about that too.
- [25:03]
Podcast Host 2
Right. Because the colonies still wanted that representation. It had become a bigger issue than just these levies. So that does coalesce In Boston in 1770, there is more unrest continuing on from the Stamp act riots. Really. What can we say about a particular moment in Boston? There's a violent moment which really causes a flashpoint of anger and begins to sort of give a picture of two opposing sides.
- [25:29]
Professor Adam Smith
I think, yes, what happens in Boston is that because Boston appears again, the view from London appears to be the centre of colonial resistance. The governor requests the presence of British troops in order to keep order in Boston. Benjamin Franklin, who was for most of his time in London as the colonial representative from America, warned that sending troops into Boston would be like setting up a smith's forge in a magazine of gunpowder. And he was proved right, as is very often the case when you station troops in urban environments. And on 5 March 1770, a group of nine British soldiers found themselves literally backed against a wall, facing a large number of protesters, and they opened fire. Counts differ as to whether they aimed to kill, but five Bostonians were killed in what became known, is known to Americans as the Boston Massacre. And this event obviously catalyzed colonial resistance. I mean, interestingly, it was a complicated situation even then. By 1770, John Adams, who later to become president and a leader of the Patriot cause, defended the British soldiers in court. I mean, let's just note, for example, that British soldiers were tried in a court. Right. I mean, this was so this notion that this was some kind of tyrannical imposition.
- [27:02]
Podcast Host 2
They were Being held to account.
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Professor Adam Smith
They were being held to account. And John Adams defended them, saying that the crowd that had provoked the soldiers was, Adams said, a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattos, Irish teagues and outlandish Jack tars, putting a lot of blame, particularly on an African American man called Crispus Attucks, formerly enslaved, who John Adams said his very look was enough to terrify any person. It's such an interesting moment, that of John Adams defending the British soldiers in the Boston so called massacre. By attacking the crowd, what that moment lifts the lid on are the class tensions within colonial society. John Adams, very well to do, bewigged gentleman looking down on this kind of threatening mob appearance, looking down on this Boston mob as he saw it and
- [28:08]
Podcast Host 2
condemning it and saying that we want to agitate in a way that is in keeping with British traditions, essentially. Yeah, okay. So this becomes, I think maybe part of the myth making we spoke about before. Paul Revere, a silversmith who will come into our story later, as I'm sure some listeners will know. He creates an engraving of this event, the Boston Massacre, which is shared widely and becomes part of this broader sense that British justice is not fair, that it's violent, it's heavy handed. We then have the Tea act, which comes in and riles people further. Am I right in saying it's not really about America at all, the Tea Act?
- [28:49]
Professor Adam Smith
Americans at the time, no doubt ever since thought the Tea act was about America. It's not at all about them. It's about the East India Company, vast corporation, too big to fail, as we'd say in the 21st century. This is what the British government thinks is a essential kind of bailout for the East India Company to allow them for the first time to directly export their big stockpiles of tea to the American colonies. They previously had to do so through intermediaries. The practical effect of the Tea act, it should be emphasized, is to lower the cost of tea to the American colonists. The problem is that it cuts out the business of the tea merchants who'd been used to dealing directly with the Dutch and evading the Navigation Acts by not paying any duty at all to the British government. So it's the tea merchants who are in the vanguard of the protests against the 1773 Tea Act. And this leads to the famous Boston tea party of 16 December 1773, which is quite a well organized, decorous protest in which Bostonians, allegedly, many of them at least dressed as Native Americans, as Indians, board a couple of ships with East India Tea that are docked in Boston Harbour, prise open the tea chests, often trying to find the key so they don't do any damage even to the chests, and dump the tea in Boston Harbour. And was known at the time as the destruction of the tea, so the tea couldn't be landed. And this was regarded with absolute outrage in London. I mean, even people who had been broadly supportive of the American cause, who had understood their grievances, people in Parliament, British people in Parliament and outside Parliament, almost all of them were like, right, this is enough, we gotta draw the line here. And once again, Boston is the centre of the problem. So the British government passed a series of laws, the Coercive Acts, all the Intolerable Acts, as they were known, which attempted to punish the port of Boston specifically for this wanton attack on property
- [31:23]
Podcast Host 2
and destruction of property. It was just to give listeners a sense of the act of destruction. Professor Benjamin Karp, when he was talking on our podcast series on the Boston Tea Party, if you imagine a ton of tea worth the same as Paul Revere's house in the North End of Boston and 46 tons were destroyed, so 46 houses, essentially. So I thought that was a useful analogy. But, yeah, this destruction of property, it is beyond the pale, as you say. It's the British crackdown imposing these acts. So they close the port of Boston, they restrict town meetings. What's the reaction at this time?
- [31:58]
Professor Adam Smith
So the Massachusetts Government act, which was one of these coercive acts, brought the colony of Massachusetts under direct rule from London, limited town meetings, for example. And this was regarded not just obviously in Massachusetts, but in the other colonies as well. This is the point where you say, right, that is tyranny, then, because our government, including our local government structures like these new. These famous New England town meetings, are being suspended, overrode by direct royal authority. So that is the moment when, you know, tyranny, as it were, appears in its most direct form. One thing that's also notable, though, is that what the Americans also include often when they're listing the Intolerable act, is the Quebec Act. The Quebec act had nothing to do with this part of the story. The Quebec act was a way of dealing with the incorporating the French Catholics in Quebec, who'd been absorbed into the British Empire in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years War. It recognised Catholicism in a way that wasn't true anywhere else in the British Empire. Obviously, Britain was defined by its Protestantism. It also extended the provincial boundaries of Quebec from the point of view of London, it was a terrific success, the Quebec Act. I mean, even today, Quebec is still part of Canada. Right. This is an extraordinary achievement, actually, of the British government to make a very measured tactical concession to a well established Catholic community in a way that neutralized them. The French Catholics were on the side of the British when we come to the Revolutionary War that we're going to be talking about later in practical terms. So it was very successful. But viewed from New England, this looked like an extraordinary attack on their Protestant identity.
- [34:06]
Podcast Host 2
So the Quebec act you just mentioned, along with the installation of troops on Boston Common, is all leading to a sense that something needs to be done from the colony side. In September 1774, we have what's known now as the First Continental Congress. When various delegations come together and representatives start discussions, what does this look like in practice?
- [34:27]
Professor Adam Smith
Yes. So they meet in Carpenters hall in Philadelphia and send a set of resolves to the King. They talk about organising a boycott of British goods. They protest what's happening in Boston, the way the British government is targeting Massachusetts. But really, the interesting thing about this First Continental Congress, I suppose lots of interesting things about it. One is that they're describing themselves as a Congress of the Continent. I mean, let's just note that that's a big aspiration and big claim they're making just then. They had met before in an Albany Congress and a Stamp Act Congress about specific issues, but this is a Continental Congress in so many ways. It does, viewed to the benefit of hindsight, lead into the Second Continental Congress, which effectively runs the colonial resistance, the American resistance, at this sort of stage.
- [35:17]
Podcast Host 2
1773, 1774, is this at the point where there is no return? Is independence being floated at this stage?
- [35:24]
Professor Adam Smith
It's being floated by some people, but I don't think at this point, even at this point, I don't think we've reached the point of no return in this story. So the First Continental Congress does not call for independence. Instead, it calls for a boycott of British goods. It sets up a Continental association to coordinate resistance among the colonies and it once again appeals directly to the King. So the idea here is still the old idea of the King's wicked advisors, that the King has been led astray. The objection is not to George iii. There's still faith that George iii, the patriot King, they're all patriotic Englishmen. There's still faith even at this late stage, that George III can't possibly know what is being done in his name and that he will intervene, dismiss the ministry, change course and in some sense, things might go back to normal. That's still the feeling and the hope and the aspirations of the great majority of the elite gentlemen who are feeling extremely frustrated and increasingly angry about the situation, but they're still protesting very much in the name of Englishmen.
- [36:40]
Podcast Host 2
Given that, then if a lot of these colonial leaders are identifying as British, they want this agency, but they're not yet railing against the King in the way they might later. How do we get to a point where hostilities start in earnest, as so often by accident?
- [36:54]
Professor Adam Smith
So Thomas Gage, the military governor of Boston, was conscious in the spring of 1775 of the antagonism between the local population and the British regulars. And he was anxious about the presence of ammunition that was stored in various places in the countryside for use by the local militias. These weren't groups that had just sprung up from nowhere as part of the patriot cause. They had been long established with the support and encouragement of the British government to defend the colonies. On 19 April 1775, Gage sent out a detachment of troops to Cambridge and then on to Lexington and Concord, which are now all just suburbs of Boston. It's not very far, but it was, you know, in those days, it was a fairly long march to collect the guns. The news of the marching British troops was carried forward in the famous horse ride by Paul Revere, who's become a larger character in this story than I had anticipated. The alert was put out. The local militia in Lexington and then in Concord mustered and took a stand against the British. And so, although these were very small skirmishes involving, you know, literally just hundreds of men very far from the. The big battles that had taken place on the European continent. And small scale compared with the Battle of Long island, for example, that was to take place the following year. In the Revolutionary War, these are small scale skirmishes, essentially, but nevertheless, it was the first time that there was formal military combat between an organized group of American militia and British redcoats. By the time that the British eventually retreated back to Boston, 65 British soldiers were dead, 180 wounded, and another 27 were missing. And the Americans had lost 50 men, with 39 wounded and five missing. So that's the scale of the loss. But this was nevertheless shocking because this was, albeit on a small scale. This was a genuine military confrontation. And so this raised the stakes even further.
- [39:16]
Podcast Host 2
And just a note that if you want to go a little further into this moment, I've put together some further reading from the archive. There's a piece by George Goodwin called who Fired the Shot heard around the world. And the link to that will be available in the show notes as part of this episode description. So this moves us into a new phase of engagement. Is it fair to say at the moment that it's still regarded as a British on British fight? I guess a sense that there are two sides, but both sides would still regard themselves in that sort of British constitutional mindset?
- [39:46]
Professor Adam Smith
Yes. By the middle of 1775 already, things have moved on since the First Continental Congress had met in September the previous year. And there are more and more people now arguing in the colonies that the only outcome can be secession from the British Empire. They are still nevertheless, you know, transplanted Englishmen. And the rights that they are arguing for are the rights that they had always argued for. The self government that they are advocating is self government. They thought they already had Thomas Jefferson, who is to become an important part of this story later in Virginia planter, a slaveholder, writes a pamphlet in 1774 called A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which essentially argues, look, we're already independent. We're not advocating for anything new here. We are simply, we have already, practically speaking, already been running ourselves for all of these years. So in that sense, there's nothing new here. This isn't some incipient new nationalism. This is simply a matter of British colonists defending what they thought they already had against a newly aggressive, militarized British presence which they had not previously experienced.
- [41:05]
Podcast Host 2
Well, we're going to look next episode at how that actually manifests in practice in the next crucial couple of years, so 1775 into 1776, moving towards this Declaration of Independence. Adam, as part of this series, I asked if you would provide a quote or two at the end of some of these episodes. For this one in particular, you highlighted a quote from Patrick Henry which was given in March 1775 at the Second Virginia Convention. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already in the field. Why stand we here idle? What is that gentleman wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but for me, give me liberty or give me death.
- [42:03]
Professor Adam Smith
Very famous quote from Patrick Henry, who was reputedly a great orator in his prime. So many interesting things we can talk about in that speech. He's actually saying this before Lexington and Concord. So he's already, in his mind, at war. He thinks the British government have effectively declared war on the colonies, and he thinks this is now an existential fight. The way he puts this, there is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. He is a slaveholder. He's talking in a slave society, and yet he's using the metaphor, or maybe because of that, he's using the metaphor of slavery to describe how he feels the white American colonists are being treated by the British government. You know, the famous 18th century British writer, the author of the first dictionary, Samuel Johnson, famously said in 1774 in a pamphlet called Taxation no Tyranny, he asked the rhetorical question, why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes, as he puts it, the answer to that rhetorical question, the implication of Samuel Johnson's, of course, is that they're all being hypocrites. Perhaps the answer to that question is that you're hearing the loudest yelps for freedom, the give me liberty or give me death, precisely because they're the drivers of Negroes, to use the 18th century language, because Virginians like Patrick Henry have this real lived, everyday experience of themselves being enslavers, that that language of slavery and freedom springs very readily to their mind and to their lips. And so the Americans go into this conflict in 1775 believing, many of them, that what is at stake is in some deep sense the prospect of them as white colonists being reduced to the level of the people that they enslave.
- [44:13]
Podcast Host 2
That's such interesting context that they might be bringing to this. We are going to hear much, much more about their call for freedom, their call for independence, next episode and lots of the contradictions therein. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [44:28]
Professor Adam Smith
Thank you.