Jacob Green's Revolution by S. Scott Rohrer

Author:S. Scott Rohrer [Rohrer, S. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), Modern, 18th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Religious, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Historical
ISBN: 9780271066103
Google: U4YtCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2014-09-10T02:48:09+00:00

The Loyalist Down the Road:

Thomas Bradbury Chandler Flees to London

As Green waited impatiently for the colonists to declare independence, Chandler was fretting that the independence movement was becoming stronger. Green saw the Revolution as a chance to achieve a moral reformation; Chandler feared the opposite would happen, that anarchy would ensue if the colonies achieved independence. For a lover of the state church and the Crown, the radicals’ scariest accomplishment was their ability to construct a parallel system of government that operated through local committees and congresses.

This ability to bypass the legally constituted state in the early 1770s left Chandler in a rage, and he again took up his pen to thunder against the threat to royal authority. In What Think Ye of the Congress Now? written in 1775, he warned the American people that the true tyrants resided not in London but in Philadelphia. In this caustic, forty-eight-page tract, he laid out his case against patriot organizations, at times in mocking tones: the “Gentlemen of the Congress” were not true representatives of the people, but were usurpers overstepping their bounds and “increase[ing] the evil, which they were sent to remove.”

More darkly, Chandler foresaw calamity if the colonies were foolish enough to take up arms against the greatest military power on earth: “That we should have expectation or hope of being able to conquer or withstand the force of Great-Britain, is to me astonishing. I doubt not but the Americans are naturally as brave as any other people; and it is allowed, that they are not wanting in numbers. But they are without fortresses, without discipline, without military stores, without money. These are deficiencies which it must be the work of an age to remove; and while they continue, it will be impossible to keep an army in the field.”

Chandler charged that members of the Continental Congress were fanatics who were ignoring the will of their constituents: “They have altogether neglected the work they were sent upon; that the powers delegated to them by their constituents, for the good of the colonies, were prostituted to the purposes of private ambition; and that all their proceedings as far as we can judge, were instigated and directed by New-England republicans, to the utmost confusion of the Colonies, the disgrace of their constituents, and their own infamy.” The tyrannical nature of Congress, Chandler believed, meant that good Americans should reject it and everything it recommended: “We manifestly owe them no obedience at all; we owe them no respect as a body: Much less are we bound to plunge ourselves headlong into that abyss of misery and destruction which they have opened; an abyss, which indeed must soon swallow us up.” Chandler’s opinion of the committees of correspondence was no better, nor that of the Sons of Liberty. The extralegal patriot organizations all deserved the same fate, he concluded. Failure to restrain Congress and the committees, Chandler warned, would result in the loss of liberties for all Americans. To prevent that, “we must rescue our necks from the yoke of the Congress, and our legs and arms from the fetters of Committees.

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