Ch. 2.4. Jefferson’s Charges Against the King, Group 2

(Continued from Maier, pp. 116-19.)

NO ONE WOULD DESCRIBE as trivial or insignificant the next group of charges against the King, which was based upon the ninth clause in Jefferson’s preamble to the Virginia constitution. The King had endeavored to establish a tyranny, the preamble said,

by combining with others to subject us to a foreign jurisdiction giving his assent to their pretended act of legislation

1. for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
2. for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
3. for imposing taxes on us without our consent:
4. for depriving us of the benefits of trial by jury:
5. for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
6. for suspending our own legislatures & declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

With a rewritten opening statement and the addition of three new subsidiary “for” clauses (numbers two, seven, and eight below), this became the thirteenth accusation in the Declaration of Independence as it emerged from the drafting committee:

he has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation,

1. for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
2. for protecting them by a mock-trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;
3. for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;
4. for imposing taxes on us without our consent;
5. for depriving us of the benefits of trial by jury;
6. for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses;
7. for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example & fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these states;
8. for taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments,
9. for suspending our own legislatures, & declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in call cases whatsoever.

The “others” with whom the’ King had combined were the mem­bers of Parliament. By the mid-1770s, Jefferson’s conception of the Empire as a set of separate political communities bound together under the King was shared by many other leading Americans, for whom the British Parliament was therefore a “foreign jurisdiction” with only a “pretended” power of legislation over the colonies.

The framers of the Declaration, as Carl Becker noted, made it “a point of principle not on any account to pronounce the word Parliament” – and, in fact, the final version of that document did not use the word even once. We seem to hear the framers say, Becker went on, “Of course, our British brethren have their legislature, as we have ours. But with their legislature we have nothing to do, God forbid! The very name of the thing escapes us!” From the British point of view, that position was ridiculous, but since the colonists had repeatedly and vo­ciferously contested acts of Parliament from the beginning of the Anglo-American controversy, these charges recalled conspicuous and readily identifiable public events.

The order in which Jefferson listed the charges was, however, not altogether obvious. The Stamp Act of 1765, by which Parliament pro­posed to levy a direct tax on the colonists, provoked the first general wave of opposition by colonists, who insisted they could be taxed only by representatives whom they had chosen, that is, by those in their provincial legislatures. Jefferson seems to have considered beginning the list of “pretended acts of legislation” in the Virginia constitution with the phrase “for imposing taxes on us without our consent.” How­ever, he crossed out the phrase there and inserted it further down the list.

The order of the “pretended acts of legislation” in the committee’s draft Declaration of Independence bore no relationship whatsoever to the order in which they occurred: the first recalled the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774, the second the Administration of Justice Act of 1774, the third the, New England Restraining and Prohibitory Acts of 1775. The next item, on taxes, was based on several Parliamentary enact­ments including the Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), and Town­shend Acts (1767) and possibly the Tea Act of 1773.

Colonists’ right to trial by jury was injured by Parliament’s extending the jurisdiction of Admiralty Courts, which lacked juries, to cover offenses against the Stamp Act. The right to trial by juries “of the vicinage” was also threatened by an act of 1772 “for the better securing and preserving His Majesty’s Dock Yards, Magazines, Ships, Ammunition and Stores” and the Administration of Justice Act of 1774, under which colonial of­fenders could be tried in England, and by Parliament’s encouraging the King to apply against the colonists an old statute of Henry VIII that allowed trials in England for treason or misprision of treason committed outside the realm (35 Hen. VIII, c.2). Even the most assid­uous efforts have, however, identified no colonists of the revolutionar­ies’ generation who were actually transported “beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

The seventh provision referred to the Quebec Act of 1774, the eighth to the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, the ninth to the New York Restraining Act of 1767 and the Declara­tory Act of 1766.

Jefferson’s arrangement of grievances may seem random, but it was in fact carefully considered. His purpose, it seems, was to arrange this set of grievances in order of increasing political atrocity, and so to build rhetorical momentum, ending with the sus­pension of colonial legislatures–about as extreme an outrage as one independent legislature could commit on another–and the assertion of power to bind the colonists in “all cases whatsoever.” Those two acts alone, he observed in his draft of the Declaration on Taking Up Arms, formed “a basis broad enough whereon to erect a despotism of un­limited extent.”