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The documents at the end of chapter 16, “Opponents of the Atlantic Revolutions,” offer varied critiques of the Atlantic Revolutions. In your initial post, and with reference to the history described in our textbook, describe which of these critiques you found to be the most persuasive, given the particular Atlantic revolutionary historical context from which it arose. In your replies you should agree or disagree with your fellow classmates’ posts and cite evidence that supports your position. I’ve cut-and-pasted the textual sources below.
Don’t forget the sample posts or the rubric either!
Opponents of the Atlantic Revolutions
The radical notions that authority to govern derived from the people and that human societies could and should be improved through political and social engineering inspired many in the Atlantic world to overthrow their rulers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But others voiced their opposition to revolution. In doing so they raised concerns about the violence and disorder that often accompanied the overthrow of governments, the disruptive pace of change, the rejection of long-established traditions and institutions, and the social and cultural implications of new conceptions of liberty, equality, and religious freedom. Moreover, once in power, some revolutionaries denied or limited “universal rights” for slaves, women, and other groups. The sources that follow give voice to these opponents of the Atlantic revolutions.
Source 16.1 A New York Clergyman’s Criticism of the Continental Congress
Samuel Seabury (1729–1796), an Anglican minister and resident of Westchester, New York, was a vocal critic of the American Revolution who published a series of letters under the pseudonym “a Westchester Farmer.” In his letters, Seabury frequently criticized the Continental Congress — the convention of delegates that became the governing body for the American revolutionaries — for infringing on the same personal freedoms that it accused the British government of disregarding. In this passage, Seabury expresses his opposition to the Non-Consumption agreement — a boycott established in late 1774 barring American colonists from engaging in direct trade with Britain.
- Which personal freedoms does Seabury accuse the Continental Congress of infringing upon?
- In what specific ways does Seabury draw on the language of rights and liberties to oppose the Continental Congress?
- Is Seabury a loyalist supporter of British colonial government, a supporter of the American Revolution, or a critic of both? Why?
SAMUEL SEABURY
Letter of a Westchester Farmer
1774
My Friends and Countrymen,
Permit me to address you upon a subject, which . . . demands your most serious and dispassionate consideration. The American Colonies are unhappily involved in a scene of confusion and discord. The bands of civil society are broken; the authority of government weakened, and in some instances taken away: Individuals are deprived of their liberty; their property is frequently invaded by violence. From this distressed situation it was hoped, that the wisdom and prudence of the [Continental] Congress lately assembled at Philadelphia, would have delivered us. . . . We ardently expected that some prudent scheme of accommodating our unhappy disputes with the Mother-Country, would have been adopted and pursued. But alas! they are broken up without ever attempting it: they have taken no [sic] one step that tended to peace . . . and have either ignorantly misunderstood, carelessly neglected, or basely betrayed the interests of all the Colonies. . . .
Let us now attend a little to the Non-Consumption Agreement, which the Congress, in their Association, have imposed upon us. . . . [W]e are not to purchase or use any East-India Tea whatsoever; nor any goods, wares, or [newly imported] merchandise from Great-Britain or Ireland . . . nor any molasses, syrups, &c. from the British plantations in the West-Indies . . . nor wine from Madeira. . . .
Will you submit to this slavish regulation? — You must. — Our sovereign Lords and Masters, the High and Mighty Delegates, in Grand Continental Congress assembled, have ordered and directed it. They have directed the [Revolutionary] Committees in the respective colonies, to establish such further regulations as they may think proper, for carrying their association, of which this Non-consumption agreement is a part, into execution. . . . The Committee of New York . . . [will] inspect the conduct of the inhabitants. . . . Among other things, Whether they drink any Tea or wine in their families . . . or wear any British or Irish manufactures; or use any English molasses, &c. . . . If they do, their names are to be published in the Gazette, that they might be publicly known, and universally condemned, as foes to the Rights of British America, and enemies of American Liberty. — And then the parties of the said Association will respectively break off all dealings with him or her. — In plain English, — They shall be considered as Out-laws, unworthy of the protection of civil society, and delivered over to the vengeance of a lawless, outrageous mob, to be tarred, feathered, hanged, drawn, quartered, and burnt. — O rare American Freedom! . . .
Will you be instrumental in bringing the most abject slavery on yourselves? Will you choose such Committees? Will you submit to them, should they be chosen by the weak, foolish, turbulent part of the country people? — Do as you please: but, by HIM that made me, I will not. — No, if I must be enslaved, let it be by a KING at least, and not by a parcel of upstart lawless Committee-men. If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion, and not gnawed to death by rats and vermin.
Did you choose your supervisors for the purpose of enslaving you? . . . You ought, my friends, to assert your own freedom. Should such another attempt be made upon you, assemble yourselves together: tell your supervisor, that he has exceeded his commission: — That you will have no such Committees: — that you are Englishmen, and will maintain your rights and privileges, and will eat, and drink, and wear, whatever the public laws of your country permit, without asking leave of any illegal, tyrannical Congress or Committee on earth. . . .
. . . If you like it better, choose your Committee, or suffer it to be chosen by half a dozen Fools in your neighbourhood. — open your doors to them, — let them examine your tea-cannisters, and molasses-jugs, and your wives and daughters petty-coats, — bow, and cringe, and tremble, and quake, — fall down and worship our sovereign Lord the Mob. — But I repeat it, by H—n, I will not. — No my house is my castle. . . . Before I submit, I will die: live you, and be slaves. . . .
November 16, 1774.
- W. Farmer
Source: Samuel Seabury, Free Thoughts, on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress, Held at Philadelphia Sept. 5 1774 (New York: James Rivington, 1774), 3, 17–19. Spelling of some words has been modernized.
Source 16.2 A British Conservative’s Critique of the Universal Rights of Man
Edmund Burke (1729–1797), a member of the British Parliament and statesman from Ireland, was one of the first and most influential critics of the principles on which the French Revolution was based. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published in 1790, Burke accepts that political change can and should occur but argues that successful political reform must happen incrementally and be based on existing political structures and traditions. Political systems founded on statements of universal rights were fatally flawed in Burke’s view because they encouraged excessive individualism, selfishness, and personal ambition. At the root of all political communities, Burke identified the sacrifice of natural or universal rights as a positive trade-off that allowed individuals to live in peaceful civil societies. In some ways, Burke’s more cautious approach reflected the experiences of his native Britain, which in the previous century had experienced two revolutionary upheavals, one of which included a prolonged and violent civil war that culminated in the execution of the king. Burke, however, was not an opponent of all revolutions. He had supported the American revolutionaries, whom he saw as working within British political traditions rather than abandoning them.
In Source 16.2, Burke rejects the idea that French revolutionaries could found a successful new state based on the principles espoused in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Burke published these objections before war, violence, and the Terror radicalized the French Revolution, so his arguments focus on those principles on which the Atlantic revolutions were based rather than on revulsion with the disorder and violence that often accompanied the overthrow of political regimes.
- What is Burke’s understanding of universal human rights and their place in government?
- Which rights does Burke grant to individuals in a civil state?
- How might Burke have reacted to Seabury’s objections to revolutionary committees in Source 16.1?
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
1790
[I]t is in vain to talk to them [revolutionaries] of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a constitution, whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience, and an increasing public strength and national prosperity. They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up at one grand explosion all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have “the rights of men.” Against these there can be no prescription; against these no agreement is binding: these admit no temperament, and no compromise: any thing withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice. Against these their rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration. The objections of these specialists, if its forms do not quadrate [conform] with their theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny, or the greenest usurpation. . . .
In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those [rights] which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice. . . . They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. But as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. . . .
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it. . . . By having a right to every thing, they want every thing. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants [desires]. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want . . . of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out[side] of themselves; and not . . . subject to that will and to those passions which is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.
Source: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: John Sharpe, 1820), 1:80–84.
Source 16.4 The French National Assembly and Slavery
Victory in 1789 left revolutionaries in control of France and faced with the task of reconciling their idealistic slogans and principles with the competing demands of government. Few debates were more contentious than that surrounding the status of free men of color and slaves in the French colonies and especially the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Some revolutionary voices pressed for the outlawing of slavery as incompatible with a new state based on universal rights and liberties. Others pressed for free men of color to be embraced as full citizens while maintaining slavery, which, they argued, was too important for the colonial and French economies to be abandoned. Meanwhile, many white plantation owners and people in France whose livelihoods depended on colonial trade argued forcefully against granting any rights to peoples of color because this could lead to the emancipation of slaves in the future. In 1791 the lawmaking body in France known as the National Assembly opted for a compromise, rejecting freedom for slaves while granting citizenship to free men of color. Source 16.4 reproduces the text of this decree and an explanation offered by the Assembly for its decision. The law of 1791 set the stage for the Haitian Revolution. Only after the successful uprising of slaves in Haiti did the French revolutionary government finally pass a law abolishing slavery in 1794. But this law was short-lived; Napoleon rescinded it in 1802.
- How did the National Assembly justify its decision to maintain slavery in French colonies?
- What does the decision to grant the rights of citizenship to free men of color but not to slaves tell us about the reasoning of the Assembly?
- What does this source reveal about the thinking of French revolutionaries concerning race, property rights, and personal freedom?
Decree and Explanation of the French National Assembly
May 15 and 29, 1791
Decree of May 15
The National Assembly decrees that the legislature will never deliberate on the political status of people of color who were not born of free fathers and mothers without the previous free, and unprompted request of the colonies; that the presently existing Colonial Assemblies will admit the people of color born of free fathers and mothers if they otherwise have the required status.
Explanation of May 29
The National Assembly, attentive to all means of assuring prosperity in the colonies, to ensure that the citizens living there enjoy the advantages of the constitution . . . , recognizes that local circumstances and the kind of agriculture that brings colonial prosperity appear to require introducing into the colonial constitution several exceptions to the [French Revolution’s] general principles.
. . . [On March 28, 1790] The National Assembly declared that the legislature would discuss the status of nonfree persons only on the unprompted request of the Colonial Assemblies.
The National Assembly was able to make this commitment because it only involved individuals [this paragraph refers to slaves] of a foreign land who, by their profound ignorance, the misfortune of their exile, the consideration of their own interest, and the urgent law of necessity, can only hope that in time the progress of public opinion and enlightenment will produce a change of conditions that, in the present state of things, would be contrary to the general good and might become equally dangerous for them.
Source: Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017), 70–71.
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