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CHAPTER TWENTY THE COLONIAL GRIEVANCES The topic of the evidence of charter completes the survey of the various authorities on which the civil rights of the people depended in eighteenth-century British constitutional theory. Before turning to our final questions-what issues the possession of rights raised in the revolutionary controversy and how the American defense of rights contributed to the coming of the Revolution - another subject - colonial grievances - merits brief discussion. Grievances are the other side of rights. Not every expression of grievance in the eighteenth century alleged a right violated, but generally that was the rule. It was the practice of the opponents of the British administration to state their opposition less by proposing alternative programs than by reciting grievances. The technique had been standard procedure in English and Irish constitutional government since the days of Coke and James I. That tradition explains why the English Bill of Rights was cast in the same legal form as the American Declaration of Independence, an indictment of the king by counting the grievances of the people.l During the age of the American Revolution, the political literature of Great Britain was top-heavy with carefully but extravagantly phrased lists of grievances. A short example is John Wilkes's answer to the Carmarthen grand jury in 1771. "We have scarcely a Right which they have not in169 170 THE COLONIAL GRIEVANCES vaded," he wrote of the "venal" House of Commons that had expelled him from membership. "Without any Account they have voted away the Property of the People ... violated the Rights of Election, usurped the legal Powers of Juries, imprisoned our Fellow-subjects, under the Pretence of their Privileges [of Parliament] contrary to Law, refused even to enquire into the foulest Murders, because perpetrated by the Connivance, at least, of Administration."2 In the retrospect of the constitutional government that emerged in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, these charges may strike us as exaggerated. Ifso, we would be missing the point. Eighteenth-century readers on both sides of the Atlantic understood the technique of grievances. The usual method was not just to complain of governmental measures actually taken, but to warn of more dire consequences yet to come if constitutional vigilance was not strengthened. "In other countries," Edmund Burke explained, "the people, more simple and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil and judge the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze."3 That tactic, the British opposition tactic of claiming civil and political rights by stating grievances, made a minor but valuable contribution to the American whig side of the constitutional controversy leading up to the American Revolution. Among people supporting colonial whigs in the mother country were antiministerial members of the Houses of Parliament who frequently employed that tactic, revealing to us what they understood to be American complaints. In November 1775, at a time when a British army was besieged in Boston, the Antigua-born Richard Oliver, a London West Indies merchant and alderman for Billingsgate, moved in the House of Commons that George III be asked who were the original authors and advisers of the following measures , before they were proposed by parliament: The taxing America without consent of its assemblies, for the purpose of raising a revenue; for the extending the jurisdiction of the courts of admiralty and vice-admiralty; for taking away the charter of the province of Massachusett's Bay; for restraining the American fishery; for exempting murderers from trial in America; for transporting accused colonists to England to be tried for offences committed in America, and more especially for establishing popery and despotism in Canada. This series of charges, as well as similar ones, should be seen from two perspectives: both as a listing of British grievances and a schedule of THE COLONIAL GRIEVANCES American rights. "They," the London Common Council inveighed against the ministry, "have established numberless unconstitutional Regulations and Taxations in our Colonies; they have caused a Revenue to be raised in some of them by Prerogative; they have appointed Civil Law Judges to try Revenue Causes, and to be paid from out of the Condemnation Money." The lord mayor, aldermen, and livery protested the "intolerable acts" in language at least as extreme as any employed by colonial assemblies . The Boston Port Act was described as...

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