Thomas Hutchinson, Portrait by Edward Truman

[Reposted from July, 2013]

APROPOS of the discussion in this entry about the American Revolution and the motives of the Founders, here is the long rebuttal to the Declaration of Independence written in 1776 by deposed Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson. The 32-page letter was published anonymously at the time and was addressed to British Prime Minister Lord Frederick North. Hutchinson, whose Boston house was ransacked by a mob in 1765, called the Declaration’s complaints against the Empire “a list of imaginary grievances.” He writes in closing:

They have, my Lord, in their late address to the people of Great Britain, fully avowed these principles of Independence, by declaring they will pay no obedience to the laws of the Supreme Legislature; they have also pretended, that these laws were the mandates of edicts of the Ministers, not the acts of a constitutional legislative power, and have endeavoured to persuade such as they called their British Brethren, to justify the Rebellion begun in America; and from thence they expected a general convulsion in the Kingdom, and that measures to compel a submission would in this way be obstructed. These expectations failing, after they had gone too far in acts of Rebellion to hope for impunity, they were under necessity of a separation, and of involving themselves, and all over whom they had usurped authority, in the distresses and horrors of war against that power from which they revolted, and against all who continued in their subjection and fidelity to it.

Gratitude, I am sensible, is seldom to be found in a community, but so sudden a revolt from the rest of the Empire, which had incurred so immense a debt, and with which it remains burdened, for the protection and defence of the Colonies, and at their most importunate request, is an instance of ingratitude no where to be paralleled.

Suffer me, my Lord, before I close this Letter, to observe, that though the professed reason for publishing the Declaration was a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, yet the real design was to reconcile the people of America to that Independence, which always before, they had been made to believe was not [32] intended. This design has too well succeeded. The people have not observed the fallacy in reasoning from the whole to part; nor the absurdity of making the governed to be governors. From a disposition to receive willingly complaints against Rulers, facts misrepresented have passed without examining. Discerning men have concealed their sentiments, because under the present free government in America, no man may, by writing or speaking, contradict any part of this Declaration, without being deemed an enemy to his country, and exposed to the rage and fury of the populace.

— Comments —

R. Tressell writes from Europe:

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

With the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Presidents FDR and Truman adopted this (pagan) rule of warfare in abrogation of Jefferson’s earlier objection. Christians cannot support indiscriminate “total war”, in my opinion.

I do think the colonists were justified in their actions but I regret the consequence that the “cult of Revolutionary War” has lead the United States to promote many destructive revolutions including, but not limited to, the French and Bolshevik revolutions (the latter initially applauded by Wilson) and the Arab Spring.

Teresa writes:

I am gratified to see that this discussion concerning the roots of the Declaration of Independence and its corruption of the necessary adhesion to hierarchy.

Many of the Fathers of our nation were men of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment as espoused by Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Thomas Paine (the chief architect, if not the sole author of the Declaration of Independence) sat man in the shuttered house of materialism as the only end of man. They were men subject to their own mind, and unwilling to bend the knee to anyone above them. That they wanted men to be moral, no doubt; but, how that would happen is a mystery.

No, all men are not created equal. No, Our Lord did not endow us with Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as our chief end: rather that we should know Him, love Him, and do His Will. And, no, Government does not receive its just powers from the consent of the governed, but rather all authority comes from God.

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity has turned into slavery, abhorrent inequality, and fratricide. Hierarchy is a thing of beauty. Each one knowing his place, and doing his duty in his own little spot sets the whole in place. As the family is structured hierarchically, or so should it be, so should our government. The father of a family does not derive his patriarchal powers from the consent of his wife or children, but from God as the best order and governing of the home. The father is not equal to the mother, and the children are not equal to their parents.

Thank you, Alex, for being brave enough in the previous entry to counter the prevailing sentiments as to the origins of the United States. I do believe, though, in Russia presently there is a growing sentiment in seeing Tsar Nicholas II and his family as a good and holy family who were brutally murdered by a group of Jewish thugs. If I’m not mistaken, the Russian Orthodox Church is considering them for Sainthood.

A reader writes:

An Anabaptist’s view of the Revolution is presented In God We Don’t Trust, for those who wonder whether the colonists really were better off due to the Revolution. It also describes colonists’ persecution of those who refused to join their side – so much for freedom. It was ironic especially in Pennsylvania, considering Pennsylvania was founded by the Quaker William Penn who had sought a place for freedom from persecution.

Texanne writes:

Here’s a post at First Things on the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration.

Laura writes:

Comparisons of the American Founders to Bolsheviks, assassins, and the revolutionaries in France are not just. Nor is it true that they rejected all hierarchy. They did not identify with the more radical rationalists of the Enlightenment but with those who sought an ordered liberty in custom, habit and law. They particularly identified with Montesquieu, who affirmed natural law as it was understood by the Greeks, Romans and Christian Scholastics. As Montesquieu, who was widely read by the colonists, said, “Before laws were made, there were relations of possible justice. To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden by positive laws, is the same as saying that before the describing of a circle all the radii were not equal.” In other words, justice is pre-existent and unchanging.

This respect for law and the social bonds formed by it accounts for the unusual harmony that presided over American life. The early Americans did not lust for power in the way the Bolsheviks and French Revolutionaries did. The comparison is twisted for they did not unleash destruction, but order. In their prudence and wisdom, they sought order and peace for their posterity based on justice.

A reader writes:

Let’s not forget that the line of Georges that your commenters love so much were the end result of an earlier revolution – the Glorious of 1688. And that the kings themselves fermented their own revolution with the concept of ‘absolutism’ several generations earlier.

But the posters who are mocking the colonists — “Oh well the government of the U.K. can do whatever they want’ — then really have no right to criticize anything the modern state does to them. After all, the U.S., or U.K., or whatever country you want, is the legitimate government, what right do you have to object? It’s easy for us moderns to say ‘what was the big deal’ now, but it only shows how far we have come since the 1770s.

The Founders were of course fallible – yet great – men. But one thing that your posters are attacking is a literal straw man – the idea of a monolithic class of ‘Founders’ who are Deist and Enlightenmentists is something of an early 20th century invention.

This anti-Americanism BY Americans I consider another sign of the decline of Western Civilization – self critical to the point of wishing your own country didn’t exist.

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