John P. Reid - In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution

Here you can read online John P. Reid - In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1990, publisher: Penn State University Press, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution
Author:
John P Reid
Publisher:
Penn State University Press
Genre:
Books / Detective and thriller
Year:
1990
Rating:
4 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 80
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

A fresh view of the legal arguments leading to the American Revolution, this book argues that rebellious acts called lawless mob action by British authorities were sanctioned by whig law in the eyes of the colonists. Professor Reid also holds that leading historians have been misled by taking both sides forensic statements at face value.

The focus is on three events. First was the Malcom Affair (1766), when a Boston merchant and his friends faced down a sheriffs party seeking smuggled goods, arguing that the search warrant was invalid. Second was a parade in Boston to celebrate the second anniversary (1768) of the repeal of the Stamp Actan occasion when some revenue officials were hanged in effigy. Third was the Liberty riot (1768), when customs officers boarded John Hancocks ship and were carried off by a crowd including the aforementioned Malcom.

Legal inquires into the three events were marked by hyperbole on both sides. Whigs depicted Crown officials as lawless trespassers serving a foreign tyrant. Tories painted the Sons of Liberty as lawless mobs of almost savage ferocity. Both sides, as the author shows, had extralegal motives: whigs to enlist supporters in the other colonies for the cause of independence; tories to bring British troops and warships to Massachusetts in support of the status quo. Both succeeded in their polemical aims, and both have gulled most historians.

John P. Reid: author's other books

Who wrote In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

In a Rebellious Spirit

Library of Congress
Cataloging in Publication Data

Reid, John Phillip.

In a rebellious spirit.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. LawMassachusettsHistory and criticism.
2. MassachusettsHistoryPrerevolutionary period, ca. 17661775.
3. LawUnited StatesHistory and criticism.

I. Title. KFM2478.R43

340.09744 78-50065

ISBN 0-271-00202-6

For
Macdonald and Agnes Smith Budd
of Monroe Place

That in general, our opposition to the Stamp-Act has been highly approved of in England,except the acts of violence,the destruction and plunder of private property; which tho generally disapproved among us, and executed by Men not all concerned in our cause, who, taking occasion from the tumults which oppression naturally produces, to perpetuate their evil designs without discovery, furnish the enemies of the colonies, (authors of their oppression, and consequently of all the tumults and disorders arising therefrom) with arguments which they are glad to improve against them, and endeavour to impute to the general body of the inhabitants, whom they would represent as actuated by a rebellious spirit, disaffected to the legal government of their country.

A private letter quoted in the Boston Evening Post, 3 March 1766.

CONTENTS

Law and history must be approached with caution. Although often mixed, they do not mix well. To employ history as legal precedent is to tempt the anger of Clio. To use legal briefs, litigation, or forensic confrontation as historical evidence of motivations is to run the risk of distortion and misinterpretation. The historian cannot treat the words of a lawyer speaking professionally as the words of a nonlawyer might be treated. All too often what an individual says while engaged in a forensic argument tells us not what that person thought, but what he wanted someone else to think. Historians cannot rely on an argument of facts as evidence of events that have occurred or explanations of why those events occurred. It may bein truth it is most likelythat a forensic argument of facts is evidence only of what the arguer wanted someone to believe had occurred or why it had occurred.

During the stamp-act crisis of 1765, when mobs moved freely on the streets of Boston, Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts Bay was a man besieged. Then, as whigs anticipated repeal of the act, a period of good feelings and political calm reigned in the colony. There is such an appearance of tranquility that I may remain here a cypher some time longer, the governor then wrote London. When we read this statement our first reaction is to think that Bernard was fearful of events or had been fearful at the time of the stamp-act riots. Far more likely, the words do not reveal that the governor, in fact, was afraid of Bostons mob. He may have been but it is not certain. Rather, what the words reveal is that Bernard wanted his superiors in Great Britain to believe that he was afraid.

Francis Bernard, when he wrote of an appearance of tranquility, was not so much reporting a fact as using a fact to make an argument. He had a case to win and that case was a forensic case. He was making an argument of law, not an argument of fact.

Other imperial officials representing Great Britain on the North American continent would argue the same case, although not all saw the need until the prerevolutionary crisis erupted. I do not believe, Thomas Hutchinson, who was lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts, had written before the stamp-act riots occurred, that the officers of the customs are better supported in the execution of their trust in any government upon the continent than they are in this. Within less than a year, all would change. In the capital towns of several of the colonies, & of this in particular, the authority is in the populace, Hutchinson was to write, no law can be carried into execution against their mind. I am not sure that the Acts of Trade will not be considered as grievous as the stamp act. I doubt whether at present, any custom house office would venture to make a seizure.

It is worth a moment to be certain that we do not misunderstand what Hutchinson said. It is not a matter of legal definitions or statutory implications that worries him, but of law enforcement. In May 1765, he was not claiming that Americans were reconciled to the novelty of imperial taxation, only that the local colonial government was capable of enforcing the customs laws. In March 1766, he says much more than that the government is helpless. Government, Hutchinson asserts, has slipped into the hands of the populace. He exaggerates, of course, but foretells the future. It will be a decade before the imperial influence is erased. What has occurred during the ten months from the first to the second letter is the beginning of a stalemate between the institutions of local government and the institutions of imperial government, a struggle between whig and tory that will be marked by the slow growth of whig law on one hand, the steady erosion of imperial authority on the other.

Writing less than two weeks before Hutchinsons second letter, Governor Bernard described the current conditions of law with far more accuracy. The executive council, from which he had to obtain consent for any gubernatorial action, was elected by the house of representatives, whose members, in turn, were elected by those citizens qualified to vote at town meetings. The people, Bernard explained, have felt their strength, and flatter themselves that it is much greater than it is; and will not, of their own accord, submit readily to any thing they do not like; and there is no internal principle of policy which can by any means restore the power of Government, and enforce a due subordination. In this Province (which, though Royal in appointment of a Governor, is democratical in all its other parts, especially in, what is frequently regretted, the appointment

Much had happened in just two years. As late as 1764, Thomas Hutchinson believed, Americans would never have dreamed of denying the supremacy of parliament. Then came the sugar act of that year, raising for the first time the constitutional question of how far the Parliament of right might impose taxes upon them. The stamp act of 1765 furnished Londons answer to the question. The American crowds that rose up in most of the mainland colonies provided a different answer. They forced all the stamp agents to resign and saw to it that no stamps were ever issued. Parliament, they believed, had exceeded its constitutional authoritythe constitution was to be their guide throughout a decade of controversy with the mother countryand when parliament disagreed, the mobs took to the streets, not to oppose the constitution, but to uphold it. They won their point, though not the principle. Parliament repealed the stamp act and at the same time reasserted its supremacy. Then, as if to prove its own point, parliament reduced the duty on molasses to one penny a gallon. It was a tax pure and simple, a revenue measure, not even disguised as an effort to protect the sugar islands of the British West Indies, marking a definite departure from the old mercantilism that had levied duties only for the purpose of regulating commerce. Once again the American crowd arose.

On the eleventh of March 1766, William Jenkins, a customs officer at Newburyport, went to the neighboring town of Salisbury and there seized a schooner. Before he got the vessel back to Newburyport, as Bernard explained, the same were beset by six Boats full of armed Men in Disguise, which took the Boat and Goods from the said Officer by Force, together with the Boat he went down in, leaving him and his Men on the Beach all Night in a Snow Storm. The quotation is from the governors proclamation offering a reward for the discovery of the perpetrators. A futile gesture, according to Hutchinson. A proclamation with promise of reward upon discovery, he lamented, is nothing more than the shew of authority, no man will venture a discovery and I imagine a few more such instances will make it settled law that no act but those of our own legislature can bind us.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution»

Look at similar books to In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Christopher Forest

The Rebellious Colonists and the Causes of the American Revolution

Francis Russell

Boston 1775

Elaine Landau

The Boston Tea Party

iMinds

Boston Tea Party

Ray Raphael

The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord

J. Patrick Mullins

Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution

Wood

The American Revolution Writings from the Pamphlet Debate Vol. 1 1764-1772 ed. Gordon S. Wood

Recorded Books Inc.

The American Revolution Writings from the Pamphlet Debate Vol. 2 1773-1776 ed. Gordon S. Wood

Anderson

Biographies of the American Revolution: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Paul Jones, and more

Allison David K

American Revolution: a World War

Elaine Landau

The Boston Tea Party. Would You Join the Revolution?

Michael Burgan

The Boston Tea Party

Reviews about «In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution»

Discussion, reviews of the book In a Rebellious Spirit: The Argument of Facts, the Liberty Riot, and the Coming of the American Revolution and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.