From Resistance to Revolution by Pauline Maier

Author:Pauline Maier [Maier, Pauline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82806-4
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2012-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

FROM RESISTANCE TO REVOLUTION

CHAPTER SIX

THE INTERNATIONAL SONS OF LIBERTY AND THE MINISTERIAL PLOT, 1768–1770

[I]

THE AMERICANS WERE NOT DEDICATED to overthrowing the King’s authority at the outset of the Townshend agitation. Yet they were, in a sense, already world revolutionaries. Arthur Lee later summarized the far-reaching aspirations of contemporary radicalism. No man, he said, could be a sincere lover of liberty who was not in favor of communicating that blessing to all peoples: the “giving or restoring it, not only to our brethren of Scotland and Ireland, but even to France itself, were it in our power, is one of the principal articles of Whiggism.” Appropriately, then, colonial observers were acutely interested whenever or wherever militant reform movements or insurrections broke out against repressive regimes—in Spain, France, Turkey, Poland. Their newspaper editors put together accounts from whatever fragmentary sources were available, frequently adding comments to celebrate the successes or lament the failures of the freedom fighters of their day, whom they called the “sons of liberty.” The use of that term, which after 1765 was strongly associated with the Stamp Act agitation, was significant. Even the colonists’ resistance to the Stamp Act, which would have taxed only Americans, was considered but one episode in a worldwide struggle between liberty and despotism.1 This absorption in affairs outside their continent played a central role in the colonists’ own conversion from loyalty to active revolution.

Certain revolutionaries or militant reformers were especially compelling to Americans. In 1765–6, attention was drawn to a Prince Heraclius of Georgia, who was leading an apparently successful fight against the Turks. More enduring and significant was colonial interest in Pascal Paoli, whom John Holt’s New York Journal called “the greatest man on earth,” and in Paoli’s followers, the “sons of liberty in Corsica,” who for decades had opposed Genoese rule. Their “glorious struggle,” Holt claimed, was “extremely … interesting to every friend of liberty and the just rights of mankind.”2

Nor did the British Empire lack its militants. In Ireland, a group of patriots were struggling for a broad slate of constitutional reforms. Among these Irish “sons of liberty” Dr. Charles Lucas, apothecary, editor of the Freeman’s Journal, and member of the Irish Parliament for Dublin, whose patriotic activities dated back to the 1740’s, was apparently best known to Americans. In London, John Wilkes had assumed Liberty’s cause by opposing general warrants, which were issued at large and authorized the seizure of private papers. America’s involvement with all these causes was emphasized by Silas Downer in 1768, when he dedicated Providence’s Liberty Tree “in the name and behalf of all the true SONS of LIBERTY in America, Great-Britain, Ireland, Corsica, or wheresoever they may be dispersed throughout the world.”3

As of 1766, this camaraderie was one among victors. The Stamp Act was repealed, Wilkes had won a court decision that general warrants were illegal, and there were signs of change in Ireland that might work to the patriots’ advantage. Indeed, it seemed to be “an Aera peculiarly favorable to Liberty in all Parts of the World.

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