At every turn in the history of the American colonies, before and after the 1776 War of Independence, unbiased readers will encounter the concept of inalienable, natural-law rights as the bedrock of colonial resolution.
The concept of natural law is inseparably bound up with the understanding that a Being vastly beyond human comprehension created the cosmos and imposed upon it the orderliness that we call the laws of nature.
Our War of Independence was neither a matter of random, chance evolution, as atheistic Darwinists depict everything, nor was it a radical socialist revolution aimed at destroying existing order to make way for socialism.
In earlier postings, I noted that Samuel Adams rested the colonists case for “no taxation without representation” squarely upon John Locke’s 1689 defense of ousting autocratic James II, on the ground that the king had abrogated his right to rule by arbitrarily abridging God-given, inalienable, individual rights to life, liberty, and private property.
In the October 20, 2006, issue of the Wall Street Journal, Alan Pell Crawford reviews Mark Puls’s “Samuel Adams: Father Of The American Revolution.”
Mr. Crawford writes:
It was Adams—before Patrick Henry, before Thomas Jefferson, before Thomas Paine—who decided that the colonies could establish their own nation and who then labored relentlessly and systematically to make it happen. The first American of any real prominence to dispute Parliament’s right to tax the colonies at all, Adams led the city of his birth through the ordeal of occupation that led, in 1770, to the Boston Massacre and, in 1773, to the Boston Tea Party.
Taking protest to the rest of the colonies, Adams organized the Committees of Correspondence in 1772 and the Continental Congress in 1774. In recognition of these efforts and more, the other delegates, in July 1776, asked Adams to be the first among them to sign the Declaration of Independence after the president of the Congress, John Hancock. (Sign Adams did, but without Hancock’s self-regarding flair.)
Mr. Puls also demonstrates the extent to which we have all come to see Adams, ironically enough, through British eyes. This man whom we consider even today as the most radical of revolutionaries, Mr. Puls reminds us, was a radical and a revolutionary in a limited sense. He was, in fact, a pious churchgoer who fashioned his arguments with a scrupulous devotion to legal precedent, who urged his fellow citizens to refrain from violence except in self-defense and whose aims, while ambitious, were also finite.
Unlike the French revolutionaries, Adams was no ideologue. In the beginning, his goal, it seems, was simply to ensure that Massachusetts merchants could operate without interference from Parliament or the Crown and without taxes to which they had not consented. Such freedom of commerce, it turned out, required political independence, which Adams promoted. He sought no overthrow of established values, however. Liberals and civil libertarians will wince to learn that he wished Boston to become a “Christian Sparta,” where public theatrical performances were banned as injurious to morals.
In his last letter, dictated a year before his death, at 71, on Oct. 2, 1803, Adams took [Thomas] Paine to task for his attacks on religion. “Do you think that your pen, or the pen of any man, can un-Christianize the mass of our citizens,” Adams wrote to the author of “The Age of Reason,” “or have you hopes of converting a few of them to assist you in so bad a cause?”
Visit MoveOff Network Members
Back to summary...
