CHAPTER II

THE STAGING OF THE REVOLUTION

It is the year 1760. No student of the American Revolution, says an American writer, can have failed to notice how, from the beginning to the end, its several stages unfolded themselves and succeeded one another with something of the logical sequence, the proportion, and the unity of a well-ordered plot. It is quite other than a rhetorical commonplace to speak of the Revolution as a drama.1

This is choice rhetoric and fits in well with the ideas of many American writers, who have come to look upon the Revolution as the expression of a burning love of an idealistic conception of liberty; as if the colonists had been animated by purely unselfish motives and were, as Otis said in opposing the issuance of writs of assistance, "arguing in favor of British liberty." To Tyler that argument on the powers of the Massachusetts court to grant these writs appears "to have begun a new era in the history of the human race," 2 and was "in itself an authentic token of that sensitive and proud condition of the American colonial mind out of which all the later acts of Revolutionary resistance were

1 Tyler: The Literary History of the American Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 30-31. 2 Tyler: Op. cit., p. 32.

born." It has been repeatedly said that no single cause produced the American Revolution and brought a nation into being, and there was no catastrophic climax. The causes began with the first coming of the English. They grew with the years. They were as many and as diverse as the influences that go to make the character of man. It was long held by American historians that the stamp tax was the spark to fire the Revolutionary train. They have since shifted their ground. That event in the harbor of Boston, schoolboys were taught, was the thing to make loyal Englishmen American rebels. No American now teaches that. It is impossible to explain the Revolution in a page or a chapter, for you cannot crowd into any such small space the mind of a people that had been moulded under the pressure of a century and a half of life amidst new surroundings and under new conditions; that had lost some of its old qualities and received new impressions. To understand the Revolution one must read forward and backward; one must know the history of the English people from before the time they settled in America until the middle of the eighteenth century; from then until argument ceased and the sword was drawn.2

1 Tyler: Op. cit., p. 33.

2 "In short, what we call the American Revolution was simply a culmination that had been going on for a hundred and fifty years. New England was never more prosperous and happy than in 1770." Oration of ex-Governor John D. Long, at Springfield, Massachusetts, July 4, 1909. (Springfield Republican, July 5, 1909.)

If for the sake of the rhetorical figure we may regard the Revolution as a drama with "the proportion and the unity of a well-ordered plot," we shall see that here were the coherent motives that every master of stagecraft has always employed; but motives somewhat different from those that popular imagination has created.

In the first volume it was my effort to emphasize certain facts the significance of which it is essential to grasp if American psychology is to be understood and a clear idea obtained of the causes that brought about the Revolution; and although it may be less picturesque, it is more in consonance with truth, to regard the Revolution as an episode in history rather than as a dramatic climax in American development.

From almost the first coming of Englishmen to America they had assumed control over their own affairs and become masters of their own taxation. They had made themselves practically independent of King and Parliament and maintained the inherent right of governing themselves subject only to nominal control of the mother-country. It is no less important to remember that in the hundred and fifty years that followed the coming of the English into the New World they had grown in strength and prosperity; they were no longer small, weak, straggling settlements supported by the money and arms of England, in danger of starvation or destruction if that protection was withdrawn.

"They had taken Louisburg, and had assisted in taking Quebec." The day of the settlement had passed; the settlements had expanded into miniature states, the seeds of empire and nationality had been sown, the harvest was ripening. The century and a half that followed the planting of Jamestown saw on the American continent a vigorous, self-reliant, masterful race, inspired by their English inheritance of glorious traditions; proud of their achievements, facing the future with the confidence born of success; rich in actual possessions and sustained by the security founded in the knowledge that even greater riches were in store for them.

Materially they were strong; steadfast, too, in strength of purpose, in that resolute courage that has given to the world its fanatics and martyrs, and the world needs its martyrs as much as it needs its saints and prophets and tyrants. In the fibre of their being was woven the Puritan strain. "Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work, this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England, a creed simple enough for this life and the next,” cisely describes them. It was the Puritan teaching and training and the Puritan influence that was the basis of character and gave these men their individuality. The Puritan, with many admirable qualities, was selfish, hard, self-centred. His well

1 Weeden: Economic and Social History of New England, vol. 11, p. 2 Lowell: Among My Books, vol. 1, p. 229.

con

872.

read Old Testament had given him an exaggerated sense of justice and taught the theologic lesson of vengeance; resistance to oppression was ordained; and he had very pronounced ideas of what constituted oppression. The Puritan, as we shall soon see, passing through the same evolutionary stages that mark the development of all society, ceased to give the first thought to theology and paid more attention to politics, but he brought to his politics the same methods that had distinguished his religion. The Puritan was a fanatic and would tolerate no alien creed; in politics he was equally obstinate. In the early days of Massachusetts we have the gentle Pilgrim and the harsh Puritan. In the drama of the Revolution was the Puritan spirit, not the sweetness and simple charity of the Pilgrim.

A resolute, pugnacious, determined people were making history in the New World when the sunlight of the eighteenth century was dispelling the fogs of Old-World political tradition; a people with a fierce hatred of everything that seemed to savor of tyranny or to curtail their own formulas of liberty. To the south were men of their own race, less austere but no less liberty-loving; softened by climate and with some of the angularities of character rounded; to whom God and the Devil were more impersonal, but who were equally resolute in holding to that which they had won, and who would brook no interference with what they regarded as the imprescriptible right to govern themselves ac