Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism by Staughton Lynd

Author:Staughton Lynd [Lynd, Staughton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

II

Quakerism provided American abolitionists not only with Elizabeth Heyrick’s program of “immediate emancipation,” but with a systematic discussion of civil disobedience in the works of Jonathan Dymond. Dymond was a Quaker linen draper in southwestern England whose Essays on the Principles of Morality were published in America in 1834, six years after his death. Dymond and Algernon Sidney were Garrison’s two favorite prose authors, according to Garrison’s children; Garrison’s sometime opponent James G. Birney also admired Dymond, citing his statement that even “savages, to whom the gospel has never been preached” observe the Golden Rule; Charles Sumner, in his speech “War System of the Commonwealth of Nations” in 1849, referred familiarly to Dymond as an exemplar of absolute pacifism.42

Dymond’s thinking on civil disobedience grew organically from earlier discussions of the theme by the Dissenting radical Granville Sharp and by William Godwin, son and grandson of Dissenting ministers and graduate of a Dissenting academy. All three men went beyond the concept of Christian disobedience characteristic of Dissenters. That traditional conception envisoned quiet resistance to the “offenses which dishonor our country, by declaring our sentiments about them, on all proper occasions, with modesty and humility; by never complying in any instance contrary to our sentiments; and giving, as far as possible, a publick testimony in favour of universal Liberty and the simplicity of the Gospel.”43 The recommended response to bad law was

to make a remonstrance to the legislature; and if that be not practicable, or be not heard, still, if the complaints be general and loud, a wise prince and ministry will pay regard to them; or they will, at length, be weary of enforcing a penal law which is generally abhorred and disregarded, when they see the people will run the risk of the punishment, if it cannot be evaded, rather than quietly submit to the injunction. . . .44

Good enough for quiet times, this model was abandoned during the American and French revolutions.

For Sharp, we have seen, the laws of God, nature, and England were all one. That had been the basis of Sharp’s argument when, in the Sommersett decision of 1772, he extracted from England’s leading jurist the judgment that slavery was illegal. To the end of his life in 1813 Sharp quoted Scripture and the law of England interchangeably. The Eleventh Psalm, he wrote in 1797, contains

exactly the same first principles of right which our ancient English Lawyers very properly deemed “the two first foundations of English Law,” viz. 1st, Reason, or the Laws of Natural Right, written, as it were, on the heart of man by his Creator. . . . And, secondly, the revealed laws of God, written in the Holy Scriptures. . . .45

In 1807, the year of the abolition of the slave trade in both England and America, Sharp responded to a petition of West Indian planters and merchants which complained that such a bill would “violate the system of colonial laws relative to property,” by quoting (once again) the sixteenth-century treatise Doctor and Student: “Statutes exist not against REASON, nor against the DIVINE LAW.

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