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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR THE ISSUE OF RIGHTS Many scholars have doubted that the grievance of rights and the defense of rights were issues leading to the American Revolution, even though much evidence must be disregarded to conclude that rights were not an issue. Contemporaries said rights were an issue over and over again. It cannot be said that colonial whigs successfully explained to the British people their constitutional grievance about rights. What can be said is that there were many individuals in the mother country, a very high percentage of those who wrote pamphlets and newspaper articles about the question, who understood that the controversy had much to do with constitutional rights. Some of the strongest defenders of American rights were British - people who surely believed rights were an issue. It is not surprising , and little should be made of the fact, that the antiadministration publicist Catharine Macaulay and people of her political and constitutional persuasion claimed that the colonial controversy was about rights. The British government, Macaulay charged, "attempted to wrest from our American colonists every privilege necessary to freemen;privileges which they hold from the authority of their charters, and the principles of the constitution." What is worth thinking about is the fact that there were also anti-American publicists, such as John Wesley, who acknowledged that the colonial controversy involved security of rights. 199 200 THE ISSUE OF RIGHTS Wesley wrote pamphlets strongly rejecting the American constitutional case, even plagiarizing some of the misrepresentations published by Samuel Johnson, yet, in a letter to the secretary of state for the colonies, Wesley conceded a point that he publicly did not admit in his pamphlets: that Americans were motivated by rights. "All my prejudices are against the Americans," Wesley told Lord Dartmouth, "for I am an High Churchman , the son of an High Churchman, bred up from my childhood in the highest notions of passive obedience and non-resistance; and yet in spite of all my rooted prejudice, I cannot avoid thinking (if I think at all) that an oppressed people asked for nothing more than their legal rights and that in the most modest and inoffensive manner which the nature of the thing would allow."l THE RIGHTS INSTRUCTIONS "I wish most sincerely with you," Benjamin Franklin wrote Joseph Galloway from London, "that a Constitution was form'd and settled for America, that we might know what we are & what we have, what our Rights and what our Duties in the Judgment of this Country as well as in our own." It is evidence of how much people thought that rights were an issue in contention that Franklin's wish was repeated over and over in the 1770s. The first order of business for restoring harmony within the Empire, it was said, was to settle the matter of rights, privileges, and grievances on a permanent, constitutional foundation. "[T]he Extent of the Rights which the Colonies ought to insist upon," a subcommittee of the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence wrote to the Viriginia committee in October 1773, "is a Subject which requires the closest Attention and Deliberation; and this is a Strong Reason why it should claim the earliest Consideration of, at least, every Committee; in order that we may be prepared, when time and Circumstances shall give to our Claim the surest prospect of Success." The Massachusetts committee thought the right time would be when Britain became involved in a "general War." Once that happened, colonial assemblies should "withhold all kinds of Aid" from the mother country "until the Rights and Liberties which they ought to enjoy are restored, and secured to them upon the most permanent foundation."2 A suitable occasion did not occur. Great Britain's next war was with the colonies. To learn what colonial assemblies thought were rights issues , therefore, we must dissect credentials voted by assemblies instructing delegates to the Continental Congresses and examine congressional resolutions. Instructions were a well-established practice in the colonies, THE ISSUE OF RIGHTS 201 especially in New England where town meetings routinely instructed lower-house representatives on business they wanted conducted in the assembly. The purpose of instructions, the town of Rowley explained to its representative during the Stamp Act crisis, was "to prevent all unwarrantable suspicions that might arise hereafter, and to leave upon record a lasting testimony to posterity, that we do not quietly, and for no consideration, give up our and their inestimable Rights as British subjects ."3 The assemblies and conventions that instructed delegates...

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