The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774-1804

1 The Revolutionary Moment: Natural Rights, the People, and the Creation of American Citizenship

19 [฀1 ] The Revolutionary Moment natural rights, the people, and the creation of american citizenship There will be no end of it. new claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man, who has not a farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all acts of state. it tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all ranks, to one common Levell.—John Adams, May 1776 We expect from the representatives of a free people, that all partiality and prejudice, on any account whatever, will be laid aside, and that the happiness of the citizens at large will be secured upon the broad basis of perfect political equality. This will engage confidence in Government , and unsuspicious affection toward our fellow citizens. . . . strangers will be encouraged to share our freedom & felicity, & when civil and religious liberty go hand in hand, our late posterity will bless the wisdom & virtue of their fathers.—Presbytery of Hanover, Virginia, 1784 When the first Continental Congress began to organize itself in the fall of 1774, early rumors of Boston being bombarded by the British navy heightened the sense of crisis. The orators took the initiative, and Patrick Henry, the firebrand from the Virginia Piedmont, struck a radical pose: Government is dissolved. fleets and armies and the present state of Things shew that Government is dissolved. Where are your Land marks? Your Boundaries of colonies. We are in a state of nature, sir. as he famously proclaimed, “The Distinctions between Virginians, Pensylvanians, new Yorkers and new englanders, are no more.” He denied that there remained “any such distinctions as colonies.” He was the citizenship revolution 20 “not a Virginian, but an american.” a bit later in the debate, lest delegates forget his position, he thundered again: “Government is at an end. all Distinctions are thrown down. all america is thrown into one mass.”1 such braggadocio had been heard in the colonies by 1774, but few such speeches had this potential to create havoc.This was not a gathering of tavern politicians or a speech at a liberty tree, but an assembly of colonial leaders who could in fact lead a revolt against Great Britain. for over ten years american provincials had been challenging the authority of the British Parliament in a variety of ways, but this group of men found themselves at the head of a widely articulated popular outrage , expressed through numerous petitions and remonstrances “of the people,” by various types of extralegal meetings, committees, and rump assemblies throughout the British north american colonies. The petitioning began in response to the first news of Parliament’s punishments for the destruction of the tea in Boston—the closing of the port of Boston , the revocation of the massachusetts charter, the establishment of military rule in massachusetts—and it served as a call for action, both a mandate and a threat, to the men assembling as a continental congress . in massachusetts, royal government had ceased to exist outside of the military reach of General Gage in Boston. courts were closed, militias organized, and an ad hoc and illegal convention and committee system began to take on the powers of government. Henry’s claims, if taken seriously, would be tantamount to a declaration of independence. But very few were ready to take Henry seriously, especially on those terms.2 Two facets of Henry’s opening salvo are notable, for their revolutionary implications. first, by claiming the mantle of “american” and assuring his surprised audience that “all distinctions”—that is, British colonial distinctions—were “thrown down,” Henry embarked on a bold imagining of a new nationhood, of a type that would eventually inspire colonized peoples throughout the age. Here would be something, if not entirely unprecedented, then completely revolutionary in the world, a new nation to take its place among european nations. a real, civilized national people “beyond the line,” that would change forever the way americans and europeans throughout the hemisphere thought of themselves and of the world. But just as powerful and revolutionary in Henry’s speech was his invocation of the mythic “state of nature.” a “state of nature” was a philosophical abstraction—a time and place imagined by jurists, divines, and moral philosophers—the kind of thing for books and speculation, not something to willfully invoke in what was still a transatlantic con- 21 the...