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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE THE SHARED PERSPECTIVE There was a third constitutional perspective in addition to the British and American perspectives. It is the perspective that has been the emphasis of this book and might be called the "shared," or "common," or even '~tlantic" perspective. It was a way of looking at government and law from a taught or received cultural heritage. This heritage has almost invariably been depicted as a British political or social culture that the American colonists received from and shared with their mother country. More accurately, it should be recognized as a common English constitutional and legal culture. To sum up the shared perspective in this chapter is to sum up one of the prime intellectual origins of the American Revolution. The shared constitution was the dominant intellectual fact of the revolutionary controversy. A speaker mentioning "the constitution" might mean the British constitution, the imperial constitution, the colonial constitution , two of them, all three, or only one. Even if three were meant, it would have been understood that all had identical foundations in a single English constitutional culture. The same shared doctrines or principles , although they might be phrased in different legal terminology, were recognized on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans, for example, spoke of the constitutional right of taxation by consent; contemporary 275 THE SHARED PERSPECTIVE British constitutional treatises expressed the same maxim in terms of restraint upon the Crown. The emphasis was different, but the substance was the same. An important product of this 1fhared understanding was ease of communication . The earl of Chatham was able to appeal to British constitutional values when he pleaded for American constitutional rights during the January 1775 debate on his motion to recall the British troops garrisoned in Massachusetts Bay. "The Bostonians," he said of the Tea Party, "did not then complain upon a slight, or temporary evil; but on an evil which sapped the very vitals of their constitution, and reduced all the great blessings of life to chance, equivocation, and insecurity." By insisting on the taught, shared principles of the common constitution, Chatham pointed out, '~merica means only to have safety in property; and personal liberty." The felt need for such safety was so strongly thrust upon eighteenth-century Britons by the common constitutional heritage, Chatham believed, that not only were American whigs compelled to claim it, whigs in the mother country should feel compelled to support them: "The cause of America is allied to every true Whig. They will not bear the enslaving America. Some Whigs may love their fortunes better than their principles; but the body of Whigs will join; they will not enslave America." Chatham's historical principle was not as well understood as he assumed . Even after the Revolution had begun and people were asking how the fighting could be stopped, many had to be reminded that the constitutional principles claimed by colonial whigs were derived from their own cultural heritage and that the Americans were asking to share rights the English had won in earlier constitutional struggles. The issue of the war, one writer told the British, was whether the right of Americans to share in their common liberty "is annihilated if they are not to have the disposal of their property like Englishmen, and if the supreme legislature of Great Britain is to enact laws for them." That issue could be amicably settled only by invoking the taught, common constitutional culture. "The whole Dispute, about which so much Altercation has passed, resolves itself into this simple Question: - Are the Inhabitants of the Colonies Subjects of this free Kingdom, or are they not? If they are, we have no Right to demand Taxes from them, but by the Consent of their Representatives; if they are not we have no Right to tax them at all."l ThE SHARED LANGUAGE AND HISTORY Part and parcel of the constitutional heritage that the colonists shared with the British was a common constitutional language. Constitutional THE SHARED PERSPECTIVE principles were expressed in formulas that belonged to a taught legal tradition , using language that could have originated on either side of the Atlantic. For purposes of this summary, it is necessary to refer to only one instance, the British tax on cider and perry enacted in 1763. In the colonies the cry against the Stamp Act would be "Liberty, Property, and no Stamps." Two years earlier in Great Britain the cry had been "liberty and property and no excise."2 The excise on cider and perry...

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