Faces of Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

Author:Bernard Bailyn [Bailyn, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79847-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Parliament, moving gradually at the will of an imperious ministry, “first on the colonies—then upon Ireland—then upon Great Britain itself,” could destroy the liberties of Britain. But in the end, the effort, Johnson concludes, was not likely to succeed. For America would rise to its dangers and fight for its freedom—with two possible consequences. If the British people and their government responded wisely to the colonists’ resistance, these early efforts of the ministry would be reversed, the chief manipulators cast out, and the country and its empire put back on their former course. If the proper responses were not forthcoming, the result would be not ministerial success but “a very fatal civil war”: “such a revolt and wide breach” between Britain and America “as could never be healed”; “a bloody civil war in which, by sending away their men of war and forces against America [the British people] would have every thing to fear—from the sword in their own bowels from the powers of France and Spain and the invasion of the Pretender, who would not fail to improve such an opportunity”; a “most unnatural war with the colonies,” resulting not only in “the loss of two millions of the best affected subjects” but also “one third, some say one half, of the profits of the national trade.” He hopes, however, “in the mercy of God, things may never be pushed to this bloody! this dreadful issue! which must be attended with infinite ill consequences to the mother country and colonies, and, considering the advantage France and Spain would certainly make of such a crisis, could scarce fail of ending in the ruin of England and America.” Americans must prevent it from happening not only by being generally vigilant at this early stage but by launching a specific program of action, which Johnson crisply outlines: investigation of the truth; petition for redress; propaganda to counter the misinformation (“printing and dispensing many thousands of the tracts … it can’t fail of a great and good effect”); and the organization of resistance on a continental scale.

Johnson’s six newspaper articles, written and published in a short period of time in the fall of 1765, encapsulate almost the entire range of arguments and issues that would be discussed in the decade that followed. They bring to bear on the Stamp Act crisis the everyday inheritance of British political thought, and while occasional phrases and references—“taskmasters,” “councellors of Rehoboam’s stamp”—reveal a mind attuned to the language of the Bible, they can in no significant way be described as derivatives or applications of essentially religious ideas. There is scarcely a notion in the series that is not squarely compatible with, if not essentially repetitive of, ideas that had been familiar in opposition writing, including that of the most un-Puritan Bolingbroke, for half a century, or that would not be advocated in the coming years by Americans of every denomination and persuasion and by Englishmen as different as Burke and Priestley.

How does Johnson’s fast-day sermon, Some Important

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