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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX THE REDRESS OF RIGHTS Today we may no longer understand the many proposals made to solve the imperial crisis about rights. One problem is that most were, at least by twentieth-century standards, too imprecise to set guidelines for either legislative solution or constitutional settlement. It is impossible to guess what program the Delaware Assembly wanted implemented when it instructed its delegates to the second Continental Congress: That you do adhere to those claims and resolutions made and agreed upon at the last meeting of the Congress; yet, for the restoration of that harmony with the Parent State ... you may, on your parts, yield such contested claims of right as do not apparently belong to the Colonists, or are not essentially necessary to their well being. Two years later, on the other side of the Atlantic and the other side of the controversy, John Hinchcliffe, Bishop of Peterborough, told the House of Lords that the way to restore harmony was to "convince the colonies (hitherto they have had no means to be convinced of it) that parliament is really disposed to attend to and redress their grievances." Why Americans should trust the institution of Parliament over which they held no check, even if completely convinced of the good intentions of the Parliament then in session, the bishop did not say.l 218 THE REDRESS OF RIGHTS 219 These broad arguments would hardly be worth quoting were they not representative of most solutions offered to the rights controversy. There is a vast literature from the revolutionary period, in pamphlets and parliamentary motions, that does not bear analytical examination. The few detailed plans for resolving rights can be quickly summarized; they fall into two categories: (1) comprehensive plans (discussed in the next section); and (2) solutions to single grievances or single solutions to all grievances. The simplest solutions dealt with one or two grievances. The easiest of these were grievances about rights that had been altered recently or were applied differently in the colonies than in English law. An example is the vice-admiralty grievance; there was virtual unanimity as to how it should be redressed. Even the most militant colonial whigs did not demand that the jurisdiction be abolished. It should, rather, be restored to "its constitutional bounds" or what the people of Boston termed the court's "proper Element." That is, confine the jurisdiction "to transactions upon the seas," "according to the antient English Statutes." Most of the British peace plans submitted to Parliament would have solved the viceadmiralty grievance in this way. The bill of "conciliation" offered by former Secretary of State Henry Seymour Conway, for example, provided that "the powers of the Admiralty, and Vice-Admiralty Courts, be restrain 'd within their ancient limits, and the trial by jury, in all civil cases, where the same may have been abolished, restored."2 Another species of the single solution to the rights controversy was the blanket solution, redressing all or most grievances, not just one. An example of this technique would have repealed all objectionable parliamentary legislation. That scheme may have been the favorite American solution to the imperial crisis, premised on a constitutionally naive belief that, once constitutionally threatening statutes were null and void, the imperial constitution could revert to where it had been before Parliament claimed authority to legislate internally for the colonies. The usual formula was to ask for a "return" to the law of 1763. That was the most frequently suggested and simplistic of the solutions proposed to the grievance against imperial legislative authority or parliamentary supremacy, and evaluation of its merits is best left to a constitutional history dealing with that topic. Less often it was suggested as an answer to the rights controversy, as, for example, by New York's General Assembly. We claim but a restoration of those rights which we enjoyed by general consent before the close of the last war; we desire no more than a continuation of that ancient government to which we are intitled by the principles of the British constitution, and by which alone can be secured to us the rights of Englishmen.3 220 THE REDRESS OF RIGHTS Equality was a second general or blanket solution frequently proposed. "[O]nly grant us the liberty you enjoy," Americans insisted, "and we shall always remain one people," but the problem was how to establish equality within a constitutional theory of a sovereign Parliament in which some of the equals were not represented. At the first...

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