CHAPTER 10
People Power Rebellion

Britain was forced not to give, grant, concede, or release our independence, but to acknowledge it, in terms as clear as our language afforded, and under seal and under oath.¹

John Adams

The American colonies were products of imperial expansion, and they replicated the imperial social structures of plutocracy and theocracy of the European nations that created them. From the beginning, however, there were also important counterforces at work that fostered a rebellious spirit, favored religious pluralism, and prepared the way for a people to walk away from their king, discover their common identity, and form a new nation bathed in the rhetoric of liberty and justice for all.

FORCES OF PLURALISM

There were early exceptions to the narrow and brutal Calvinist and Episcopalian sectarianism. Some settlers, particularly the Quakers, came to North America with a truly democratic consciousness tolerant of religious diversity, at least within the boundaries of the Protestant faith, and a concern for the rights of all.

William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania, was a Quaker who had spent time in prison in England for his religious beliefs. Penn populated the lands granted to him by royal charter by appealing to religious dissenters from across Europe with the promise of land and religious liberty. He attracted Quakers and Baptists from England, Huguenots from France, and Pietist and Reformed groups out of favor with Lutheran or Catholic princes in Germany. Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which were both predominantly Quaker, welcomed all persons of Protestant faith, but excluded atheists and non-Christians—a category that by their reckoning included Catholics.

Roger Williams, a Puritan minister from Salem who was a fierce advocate of the separation of spiritual and civil power, contended that all people are answerable only to God for their religious beliefs, not to the state. Banned from Massachusetts for his defiance of both religious and civil authority, he founded a new colony in Rhode Island that welcomed all Protestants.

Although Anglicanism was the official religion in Georgia and New York, it was much weaker in those states than in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. Both Georgia and New York guaranteed tolerance for dissenters. Georgia welcomed settlers of all faiths, including Jews.

The struggle between theocrats and religious pluralists also played out in Pennsylvania, however, as factions of Calvinists, Anglicans, and others complained that the Quakers were restricting their religious freedom by prohibiting them from making their religion the official religion to be imposed on all by law. The Quakers who dominated the legislative bodies eventually split into two factions, one of which remained committed to religious pluralism while the other called for making Quakerism the official faith.

As populations grew and exchanges between colonies and between the church parishes within the colonies became inevitable, the diversity of faiths made it increasingly difficult to maintain uniformity. In 1684, the Crown withdrew the original charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in part because of its discrimination against Anglicans, and issued a new charter guaranteeing religious liberty to all Protestants.

The individual parish churches were strong enough to maintain their establishment for a time, but by the 1740s the pressures of a growing immigrant population and an increasing flow of trade began to break down the established religious boundaries. Itinerant evangelical preachers traveled from parish to parish preaching that salvation is a matter of individual conscience, not church doctrine.

Denominations fragmented and churches of diverse faiths began springing up everywhere—Congregational, Baptist, Anabaptist, Quaker, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Huguenot, and in some places even Catholic and Jewish. Within the space of little more than a generation the nation had moved from a consensus that an imposed uniformity of religious views was essential to the social and moral order to a consensus that the social order and moral order were best served by guaranteeing freedom of conscience to all people. 173

By the time the founding fathers declared the formation of a new nation independent from England’s rule, it was clear that unless the laws of the new nation prohibited the establishment of any of the competing Protestant sects as the official religion, unification would be impossible. Thus, Article VI of the U.S. Constitution established that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,” and the First Amendment established that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” In a historic breakthrough of epic importance the pluralism of Earth Community prevailed over the theocratic hegemony of Empire.

A REBELLIOUS AND ITINERANT SPIRIT

In another of history’s great ironies, the imperial processes by which the American colonies were settled created a population prone to a rebellious spirit. The slaves and bonded laborers who came by force or desperation had little stake in the prevailing system of authority. Those who came in dissent against established religious authority had a history of walking away from distasteful constraints. Members of the continent’s new Cloud Minder class had become accustomed to ruling their fiefdoms largely free from English taxes and oversight and resented the arrogance of European elites who treated them as less worthy country cousins.

The passage of time also brought important changes. The conditions of life became less harsh, and communities grew less dependent on strong leadership and cultural homogeneity to hold them together. Those who had arrived as bonded laborers eventually gained freedom for themselves and their children. Even some slaves won their freedom. The children of those whose parents had come with visions of “a city upon a hill” harshly ruled by biblical law grew weary of the restraints on their own freedom of conscience. These developments fueled resentment of the continuing injustice of the deep divisions between those who enjoyed lives of privilege and pampered luxury and the free farmers, workers, and artisans who struggled in comparative hardship at the margins—to say nothing of the increasing bitterness of the slaves condemned to perpetual bondage.

Those who had come voluntarily to America to seek their fortune or their liberty demonstrated by that act a rebellious and itinerant spirit 174ready to pull up stakes and move on when things didn’t work out, a spirit that sustained a continuous westward push. The frontier promised both opportunity and liberty from the tyranny of class in return for the harsh reality of a life in which each man depended for his survival on his own wits and labor. The hardy frontiersmen were a particularly rowdy lot ill disposed to taxes and to any attempt to curtail their individual liberty. They were also skilled in the use of firearms to hunt game and protect the land they occupied.

Forerunners of contemporary America’s militiamen and libertarians, they lived by the aphorism “A fool can put on his own coat better than a wise man can do it for him.”² The lives of these self-reliant individualists posed a stark contrast to life in the strong but socially stratified communities of the coastal settlements ruled by appointed governors, corporations, landed gentry, and wealthy merchants. The frontiersmen and the coastal settlers, however, shared a deep hostility to the rules and taxes of a distant king and a parliament in which they had no representation. Together these conditions set the stage for an alliance between widely disparate elements in a call for liberty from the Crown.

WALKING AWAY FROM THE KING

In the 1750s and ‘60s, the British government began to assert greater authority over its American colonies, which by now had developed economies of sufficient consequence to attract attention as a source of taxes and trading profits. Britain began to assert stronger administrative authority and to impose new taxes on an increasingly rebellious and independent-minded people accustomed to the benign neglect of the Crown and disinclined to accept such an intrusion. Their response was, in effect, to walk away from the king. Herein lies a profound lesson in democracy.

Imperial rulers of whatever title depend on the obedience of the ruled. If the people choose en masse to ignore the king’s demands to serve in his armies, he is powerless. The power of the king, and by extension the power of Empire, resides ultimately with the people, and it is within the people’s means to withhold it.

Initial efforts by the Crown to increase tax collections through import duties largely failed, as a New England merchant class given to slave trading and piracy had no reservations about adding smuggling to their business portfolios and easily evaded the notice of a distant king’s tax 175collectors. The Crown turned to increasingly intrusive measures, and the people responded with growing defiance.

Tax Revolt

The end of the Seven Years’ War among the great European powers in 1763 left the British treasury deep in debt. Many in Britain felt that the colonies had been the primary beneficiaries of the war, which had strengthened Britain’s position in North America, and that it was only right and proper for the colonies to pay a share. To this end, the British parliament imposed a stamp tax in 1765 on all colonial commercial and legal papers, newspapers, pamphlets, and almanacs.

The colonists felt differently. Under the banner of Sons of Neptune, maritime workers organized a widespread tax revolt that featured demonstrations, a refusal to use the stamps, and attacks on the property of British officials. Some wealthy merchants supported the protests behind the scenes but became increasingly nervous when the anger began to spill over to a general resentment of the rich. The British parliament caved in and repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766, only to replace it with the Revenue Act of 1767, which imposed tariffs on a number of imported goods, including lead, glass, paper, and tea.

The Revenue Act taxes were rescinded in 1770, with the sole exception of the tax on tea. Later, Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773 to benefit the financially troubled British East India Company, in which the king and prominent members of Parliament held shares. The act gave the company a special exemption from the tea tax and refunded the taxes it had already paid on the large quantities of tea it was holding unsold in inventory, thus allowing it to undercut the prices of its smaller competitors, put them out of business, and establish a tea monopoly.

Outrage over the Tea Act gradually grew and on December 16, 1774, a group of Boston rebels organized the Boston Tea Party. Dressed as Indians, they boarded three British ships anchored in the harbor, broke up chests of tea, and threw them into the sea. Similar tea parties were held in other ports. In Annapolis a tea ship was burned. Some students of the American Revolution consider this a tax revolt. More than that, however, it was a protest against the legally sanctioned abuse of corporate monopoly power.³

The British responded to these acts of rebellion by closing Boston Harbor and demanding compensation for the tea, dissolving the Bay 176Colony government, prohibiting public meetings without explicit permission of the British governor, building up British military fortifications and troop presence, and ordering colonists to quarter British troops in their homes. This further fanned the flames of rebellion. Colonists throughout Massachusetts responded by forming local militias, stockpiling weapons, and holding town meetings in defiance of British orders.

Participatory Democracy

Opponents of the Crown’s effort to tighten colonial administration and tax collection formed local resistance groups, with names such as Sons of Liberty, Regulators, Associators, and Liberty Boys, to engage in acts of noncooperation such as refusing to purchase and use the Crown’s tax stamps, boycotting British goods, and subjecting merchants who failed to honor the boycott to public humiliation. Artisans and laborers refused to participate in building military fortifications for the British. When the British Crown decided to assert its authority over the Massachusetts Supreme Court by paying its judges directly from the royal treasury, the people responded by refusing to serve as jurors under the judges.

The colonists also undertook initiatives aimed at getting control of economic life through local production. Women played a particularly crucial role by organizing Daughters of Liberty committees to produce substitutes for imported products.

Others formed Committees of Correspondence, groups of citizens engaged in sharing ideas and information through regularized exchanges of letters carried by ship and horseback. These committees linked elements of diverse citizen movements in common cause—carrying out a function similar to that of the Internet in our own day. The first such committee was formed in Boston in 1764. A similar committee formed the next year in New York and took the lead in convening representatives of nine colonies as the Stamp Act Congress in New York in October 1765 to formulate a unified response to Stamp Act provisions. By 1774, all the colonial legislatures had responded to a proposal of the Virginia legislature that they each appoint a standing committee to engage in intercolonial correspondence, which led to their convening the First Colonial Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774.

The Congress was composed of white male property-owning aristocrats who were educated in the ideas of the Enlightenment and desirous 177of winning recognition as equals of the English aristocracy and obtaining greater freedom to govern their own affairs and those of the colonies. Thoughts of creating an independent nation were still far from the minds of the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia. Their concern was with securing a guarantee of their rights under a distant British king and a parliament in which they had no representation.

To this end, the Colonial Congress adopted a Declaration of Colonial Rights on October 14, 1774, that claimed for the people of the English colonies the rights to life, liberty, property, assembly, and trial by jury. It denounced taxation without representation and the maintenance of British troops in the American colonies without local consent. It called for a boycott of all British goods and an embargo on the export of American products to Britain in the event that the king failed to accept their demands.⁴ These events awakened a new political consciousness throughout the colonies.

We see in these actions two ultimately competing strands of activity that continue to play out in U.S. politics to this day. One was a self-organizing populist uprising that created the social and institutional infrastructure of a coherent, nonviolent, and radically democratic bottom-up resistance movement similar in its underlying dynamic to the global peace and justice movement of our own time. The other involved a top-down alliance of the ruling elites of previously insular colonies to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the king, regularize the competition among themselves, and protect their privilege from the threat of what they viewed as mob rule. These two strands created a new reality and provided experience in two quite different forms of democratic practice —one radically populist and the other fundamentally elitist—that remain in dynamic opposition to this day.

Creating a New Reality

John Adams, one of the defining figures of the founding, set forth in his correspondence near the end of his life the thesis that the history of the founding of the United States should not be confused with the Revolutionary War. By Adams’s account, the war was not a war to gain the independence of the thirteen colonies, but rather the military defense of an existing system of independent government already in place against an attempt by a foreign power to force what was effectively an independent nation back into the fold of imperial rule.⁵ In this same spirit, 178historian Roger Wilkins suggests that the decade preceding the Declaration of Independence may have been the most important in U.S. history.

The stunning achievements of the 1765–1775 period were not only instances of resistance to specific obnoxious acts of the British government but also key stages in the development of a continental revolutionary consciousness and impulse toward self-government, as well as the creation of the rudimentary instruments to carry out those purposes.…

All of the practices and arts of politics were deployed in that fruitful decade. The colonists paid careful attention to public affairs. They spent time alone exploring and honing their opinions on important issues by reading history and philosophy as well as the latest correspondence, dispatches, and political tracts. They thought hard about what was occurring and consulted with others in order to inform and sharpen their views. They became involved in local and colonial politics by standing for office and putting forward proposals for action. When necessary—when, for example, colonial legislatures were disbanded, or when new instruments for protest and self-governance were required—they crafted appropriate new mechanisms. But most of all they thought, talked, debated, listened to one another, wrote, and created in ever-widening circles. All the while, their activities were fraught with great personal, political, and financial risk.⁶

A diverse, and in many respects deeply divided, people preoccupied with matters of their own daily survival had found the time to create a new political reality through acts of participatory democracy: engaging in dialogue, forging new alliances, and creating institutions of democratic communities. Once the people had expressed their will through their actions, the British had only Empire’s final option, the use of troops to force submission on pain of death.

ELITE TAKEOVER

The colonial resistance had on occasion involved violence against property, but avoided violence against persons. The British changed the rules of engagement by initiating the use of deadly military force and thereby confronted the rebels with Empire’s classic fight-or-die logic. 179British troops landed in Boston Harbor and armed conflict broke out on April 19, 1775, when they attempted to destroy the military stores of American rebels at Concord. It escalated from there.

Not even the patriots who organized the resistance had fully come to terms with the new reality they had already created. Even as the armed engagement began, scarcely anyone was thinking of total independence. It is especially significant that the armed conflict between local militias and British troops was already under way when the Continental Congress decided in mid-June 1775 to bring order to the rebellion by appointing an army and commissioning George Washington to head it. The colonial elites who controlled the Continental Congress were responding to the leadership exercised by thousands of ordinary people engaged in a living democratic expression. If the delegates to the Congress had not acted to bring the rebellion under their control, they would have been reduced to an irrelevant debating society with no political base or authority and would likely have been swept away by the victor, whether the British or the rebels.

Within a year popular sentiment shifted and talk of independence filled the air. The Continental Congress responded by signing a formal Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, giving expression to what had by then become a widespread public sentiment. It was a revolutionary document written by men of property and privilege to stir the passions of the masses to fight for liberty from a king who refused them the respect and rights they felt they were due. The people led and the leaders followed, which is how real democracy is supposed to work.

In the end, General Washington and his army expelled the British with the help of France, Spain, and the Netherlands. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783. A rebellious people inspired by a vision of liberty gave birth to new nation. It was a remarkable contribution to humanity’s long journey beyond monarchy and theocracy, but it was only a beginning on the road to real democracy.

The diversity of circumstances, interests, races, values, religious beliefs, and national origins of the people who made up the new nation speaks to the magnitude of the ambition of joining together the thirteen colonies into a new nation with a democratic vision.

Overall, precious little beyond their shared antipathy to British taxes and corporate monopolies bound the people of the new nation together. Accustomed to being the subjects of arbitrary rule by those in positions of power, many had no experience beyond the frame of the Imperial Consciousness that equates personal liberty with a license to abuse others, and they had no particular reason to consider the law as anything other than a means by which the few exploit the many.

Aristotle would not be alone in considering these conditions an inauspicious beginning for the formation of a democratic nation. Yet for all their diversity and lack of experience with organized self-rule, the grassroots rebels who initiated and led the revolution in its earliest manifestations demonstrated a remarkable capacity to express the popular will through self-organizing groups and networks—long one of democracy’s most meaningful and effective forms of expression.

It is also significant that the American Revolution did not start as an armed rebellion. This was an auspicious sign of a greater maturity of thought than might have been expected under the circumstances. It is axiomatic: democracy cannot be achieved at the point of a gun. The gun itself affirms the imperial principle of domination by superior force, which affirms the relationships of Empire. Violence against life, by its nature, is antithetical to the relationships of Earth Community.

When the British changed the rules of engagement from nonviolence to violence, the rebels felt compelled to respond in kind. As the violence escalated, it created a situation that both allowed and compelled the elites of the Continental Congress to assert their authority by raising an army that assumed control of the rebellion and restored imperial order under a new command. The colonial elites who had long aspired to equal status with their European counterparts went on to form a new nation ruled by a wealthy aristocracy with its own agenda of imperial expansion. The British lost the war, but Empire remained robust, reasserting its dominion in North America as plutocracy cloaked in the guise of democracy.

We are left with a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question: Did the American Revolution, as widely believed, bring democracy to North America and to the modern era? Or, by consolidating the power of America’s own ruling aristocracy and giving birth to an imperial nation destined to become far more powerful than any empire that preceded it, did that revolution set back the advance to universal suffrage and democratic citizen rule by many generations?