April 19 was the 250th anniversary of American militiamen routing the best army in the world. Seven hundred British troops arrogantly came out of Boston early that day in 1775 to seize firearms and gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. By the time the tattered remnants of that force escaped back to Boston, hundreds of British troops were left dead, wounded, or captured along the road. The “shot heard around the world” became one of the most dramatic blows against tyranny in modern history.
But the hard truths of the American Revolution are being obscured by Leviathan-loving pundits. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—President John F. Kennedy’s court historian and a revered liberal intellectual—declared in 2004, “Historians today conclude that the colonists were driven to revolt in 1776 because of a false conviction that they faced a British conspiracy to destroy their freedom.”
The colonists revolted because they were being bayoneted down the road to serfdom. The British parliament passed law after law trumpeting Americans’ legal inferiority to their foreign masters. The Sugar Act of 1764 resulted in British officials confiscating hundreds of American ships, based on mere allegations that the shipowners or captains were involved in smuggling. To retain their ships, Americans had to somehow prove that they had never been involved in smuggling—a near-impossible burden.
The Declaratory Act of 1766 announced that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” That meant Parliament could never do an injustice to the Americans, since Parliament had the right to use and abuse colonists as it pleased. That law was modeled after an earlier British dictate—the Irish Declaratory Act of 1719. The British were notorious for treating the Irish as bad or worse than slaves. Perhaps the most influential political philosopher in America in the pre-Revolution times was John Locke, who warned in his Second Treatise on Government in 1690: “He who attempts to get another man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him.” Colonists paid fierce attention to Locke’s warning: “Tyranny is the exercise of Power beyond Right.”
Americans felt like they were being hit by a British blockade even before the Brits forcibly shut down the Boston harbor. Britain imposed heavy taxes on imports and prohibited Americans from erecting any mill for rolling or slitting iron; British statesman William Pitt exclaimed, “It is forbidden to make even a nail for a horseshoe.” The Declaration of Independence denounced King George for “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.”
To enforce heavy tariffs on tea and other items, King George issued “writs of assistance” that let British soldiers “search settlers’ belongings at random to find out who was evading import taxes by smuggling whiskey or tea.” These writs empowered “a civil officer [to] search any house, shop, warehouse, etc.; break open doors, chests, packages… and remove any prohibited or uncustomed goods or merchandise.” James Otis—a lawyer arguing against the writs in a Boston court in 1761—denounced them as “the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of law” and declared the writs conferred “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” In 1772, the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence described the writs’ effects: “Thus our houses and even our bedchambers are exposed to be ransacked and plundered by wretches, whom no prudent man would venture to employ even as menial servants…. By this we are cut off from the domestic security which renders the lives of the most unhappy in some measure agreeable.” Colonial opposition against writs, according to John Adams, ignited the flame that led to American independence.
Vermont patriots marched in 1775 against the British Army under a flag depicting a pine tree—a symbol of British tyranny. Because pine was an excellent material for building ships, Parliament banned cutting down any white pine trees—claiming them all for the British crown without compensation. Historian Jonathan Sewall, writing in 1846, claimed that the conflict with Britain “began in the forests of Maine in the contests of her lumbermen with the King’s surveyor, as to the right to cut, and the property in white pine trees.” Historian Robert Albion wrote in 1926: “The royal interpretation of ‘private property’ practically rendered that term nugatory, so…the pines were virtually being commandeered by the Navy.”
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