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CHAPTER TWO RIGHTS IN GENERAL The American colonists were interested in "two great points," Thomas Pownall, former governor of Massachusetts, asserted in 1764. Those two points were "the establishment of their rights and privileges as Englishmen , and the keeping in their own hands the revenue, and the pay of the officers of government, as a security for their conduct."l Events would prove Pownall prophetic. Had Parliament during the next decade left the Americans undisturbed in these "two great points," the Revolution might not have occurred. To catalog what the colonists meant by "their rights as Englishmen" is an easy task, as those rights were clearly and frequently stated. To assess the relative importance attached to particular rights is more difficult . The right to consent to taxation, the right to representation, the right to resist unconstitutional government, and the right to liberty, were so vital due to the dynamics of the prerevolutionary debates, they took on an existence separate from the general claim to English rights. That is, they became so central to the constitutional dispute, they assumed the character of discrete issues and can be treated by historians as separate topics deserving individual studies. These rights, although mentioned in this study, are not discussed to the extent that they would be in books devoted to the constitutional authority to tax, the constitutional princi16 RIGHTS IN GENERAL pIe of government by representation, the constitutional right of resistance, or the constitutional concept of liberty. At the other extreme were rights that contributed little to the coming of the American Revolution. An example was the right of the British to be free of a standing army. That right had been one of the most persistent staples of English and British constitutional rhetoric, yet for most of the revolutionary period the right had slight impact on the crisis leading to revolution. Even so, it should be noted that American whigs thought the right in sufficient peril for the Maryland Convention to describe "any standing army" as "dangerous to liberty," and for the Continental Congress to mention standing armies as a grievance in the Declaration of Independence.2 There were other rights besides the right of the people to be free of standing armies that were not in constitutional controversy, yet were occasionallyasserted . One, claimed by the Provincial Congress of Georgia, was the "right to examine with freedom and to pass censure or applause upon every act of government." It is quite likely the British, had they been able, would have curtailed this right, but it was beyond their governmental capabilities to restrict American speech, and the colonists could not make it a grievance. Another, stated by both Georgia's Commons House of Assembly and the Continental Congress, claimed "the benefit of such of the English Statutes as existed at the time of ... Colonization ." Denial of such laws to Americans might have constituted a constitutional grievance had it been fact, which it was not. What was true was that Parliament denied to the colonists the benefit of several significant statutes, such as the Habeas Corpus Act, the Act of Settlement, and the Bill of Rights. These were, however, postcolonization laws, not the precolonization laws Congress complained of. It would have been difficult to make them an issue, as colonial assemblies could have enacted them into law without parliamentary approval. Only had that legislation been vetoed by London would Americans have had a grievance- a grievance about arbitary government quite different from claiming the right to enjoy British legislation.3 CONTINENTAL RIGHTS Some rights claimed by American whigs need not be considered in this study because they were never at issue. An example, provided by Georgia 's Commons House, was the right of the colonies not only "peaceably to assemble and consider of their Grievances, and petition the King," but also "that all Prosecutions, Prohibitory Proclamations, and Commitments for the same are illegal." Rights such as these must be distinguished from 18 RIGHTS IN GENERAL rights substantively in controversy. The rights of legislators to assemble when not called into session by the Crown, or to meet in provincial conventions or Continental Congresses, and to petition, were in contention. The right to be free of prosecution for assembling or petitioning was not. No one was prosecuted or committed for exercising those rights. A second category of rights claimed by colonial whigs that does not merit extensive consideration is that asserted by individuals or by informal gatherings of small groups. We must seek what Edmund S. Morgan...

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