Tyrants and Rogues

Today’s readers of the Declaration of Independence usually know its opening passages by heart—the equality of mankind, the inalienable rights, and so forth—but they’re often less familiar with the specific grievances that follow, which accuse King George III of everything from vetoing important laws to encouraging violent slave uprisings. In 1776, it was the Declaration’s list of twenty-seven complaints that sealed the deal as far as independence was concerned. Modern Americans, however, are likely to wonder what specifically they refer to.

Robert Parkinson sets out to explain this in Tyrants and Rogues, in a series of chapters that break down the list one by one to explore what exactly sparked the crisis with the mother country. His explanations are clear, vivid, and sympathetic without being jingoistic. As his title suggests, Parkinson believes the Americans were largely right to see the British government as determinedly hostile to their interests. But he remains objective throughout, noting instances where he thinks the colonists may have exaggerated the importance of minor controversies, or acted with too little information.

Better still, Parkinson offers many dramatic details describing the personalities responsible for the crisis of the 1770s. For example, in explaining the Declaration’s allegation that the king’s deputies had “plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, [and] burnt our towns”—a reference, among other things, to the Royal Navy’s obliteration of Falmouth, Massachusetts (now Portland, Maine) by British Lieutenant Henry Mowat—Parkinson offers a vivid narrative showing that Mowat actually had a unique grievance against that town. Just months before, while on a mission to defend Loyalists there against attacks by Patriot mobs, he had been kidnapped by those very Patriots and held hostage by a group of vigilantes led by a local man named Samuel Thompson. Thompson was eventually forced to release Mowat, and the lieutenant soon found the perfect opportunity to take his revenge against Thompson’s hometown.

Equally vivid is Parkinson’s description of the grievance that accuses the British of “constrain[ing] our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country.” This reference to the practice of “impressment”—i.e., conscripting Americans to serve in the Royal Navy against their will—was added to the Declaration only at the last minute, and, as Parkinson shows, it was probably as a consequence of an article that appeared in the Philadelphia papers on June 12, 1776, which Thomas Jefferson almost certainly read. That article described the plight of a sailor named William Barry, who was captured off the coast of Virginia and forced to serve on a British warship called the Roebuck, but who managed to escape back to American lines to tell his story. Impressment had been a source of violent friction between Americans and their British brethren for decades, but it seems that it was only by the coincidence of Jefferson reading about Barry in the newspaper that this complaint ended up in the Declaration—an example, as Parkinson puts it, of how the document’s language resulted from a “collision of cultural, [and] political economic forces, with the random, the chance, and the contingent” (p. 229).

More broadly, Parkinson shows why the American founders had good reason to think the British government was being run, not by politicians who were merely foolhardy, but by a cabal of malefactors who were literally pursuing what the Declaration calls “a design to reduce [America] under absolute despotism.” Some historians have treated this as a political exaggeration, or even a conspiracy theory, but Parkinson shows how Parliamentary leaders consciously decided in 1764 to embark upon what they euphemistically called “constitutional reforms” (p. 267)—changes that would bring the American colonies more directly under London’s control. They had sophisticated legal arguments for doing this, primarily the notion that Parliament’s power was supreme and unlimited over the whole British empire. But that was a legal theory that conflicted with the older notion of constitutionalism to which Americans had become accustomed over the previous century and a half. They thought the unwritten constitution guaranteed the autonomy of their own colonial legislatures, which meant Parliament had no power over them at all. It was that clash that started the ball rolling toward independence.

Nevertheless, had British colonial policy been open to negotiation and compromise, things might have turned out differently. After all, the colonists spent more than a decade petitioning, remonstrating, and effectively begging Parliament to change its ways—only to be ignored by leaders who refused on principle to read any petitions that challenged Parliament’s authority. In fact, not only did that refusal also make it into the Declaration (“our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury”), but King George’s rejection of the 1775 “Olive Branch” petition was probably the single most important incident for persuading Americans to accept the inevitability of independence.

Unfortunately, Parkinson omits that part of the story and devotes only cursory attention to the most extreme piece of Parliamentary legislation during that era: the 1766 Declaratory Act, which claimed that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws . . . to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.” This assertion of Parliament’s supposedly supreme, unlimited power perfectly crystallized the point of contention between the Americans and the British. It was so perfect, in fact, that the Act is not only included in the list of grievances, but also subtly satirized in the Declaration’s closing lines. “These united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states,” it asserts.

More problematic than these omissions is the fact that Parkinson’s book is organized in a way that readers unfamiliar with the history are likely to find confusing. Instead of being organized chronologically, Parkinson structures his book around the grievances themselves, with each chapter providing the backstory of a particular complaint, even if this involves incidents that occurred after incidents described in later chapters. As a result, the book shifts back and forth in time, necessitating the inclusion of a timeline at the beginning, so readers can stay oriented.

The book’s worst flaw, however, comes in a brief chapter at the end, when Parkinson falsely claims that the Declaration’s authors “believed that ‘all men’ shouldn’t apply . . . to all men,” and indeed that they “fixed racism at the climax of the document” (p. 272). The supposedly racist climax to which he refers is the Declaration’s assertion that the King’s deputies were “excit[ing] domestic insurrections” by slaves and encouraging the “merciless Indian savages” to engage in a terroristic war against western settlers. Yet Parkinson himself admits that Native American warriors employed astonishingly brutal tactics, including the wholesale slaughter of civilians, and that the British were, indeed, inciting Natives to attack white frontiersmen. The fact that whites were sometimes equally brutal hardly lessens the horror with which Americans regarded such a tactic. Likewise, the British government did indeed encourage slave insurrections by offering freedom to slaves who would rise up against Patriots—a tactic that ran a real risk of transforming the fight with America into a continent-wide, perhaps generations-long, race war. Liberating slaves to kill white Patriots was, so to speak, the “nuclear option” of British military strategy—and it hardly minimizes the slavery’s evil to recognize how colossally irresponsible that tactic was.

As to the phrase “all men,” while slavery obviously contradicted the proposition that “all men are created equal,” there is virtually no evidence for the notion—now almost a dogma in today’s universities—that the Declaration’s authors thought “all men” only meant whites. In fact, the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. The Patriots were amazingly candid about the fact that slavery was incompatible with that formulation, openly avowing that this meant the practice must be eradicated . . . somehow. In fact, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out in 1857—when refuting Roger Taney’s conclusion in the Dred Scott case that the American Revolutionaries did not really mean “all men”—the only piece of evidence to support this thesis is the fact that they did not abolish slavery on July 4, 1776. But “this grave argument comes to just nothing at all,” Lincoln pointed out, because “they had no power to confer such a boon.” Indeed, whatever one thinks of their motives, the fact that they did not eradicate slavery on that day simply does not prove that they thought “all men” meant something other than “all men.”

Still, while these are serious flaws, they’re more than outweighed by the book’s strengths. Parkinson adds layers of nuance—not to mention drama—to our comprehension of the nation’s founding document and accomplishes an extraordinarily difficult task: uncovering new and interesting details about one of the most meticulously studied documents in history. “Understanding the grievances,” he writes, “recovers the stakes of 1776 and the issues that brought patriot leaders to the edge of such a high cliff” (p. 14). We’re fortunate that Rogues and Tyrants so competently helps us understand why, once they reached that cliff, the founders chose next to take a leap of faith.