A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal | Page 3

withheld it where it was justly due; and appears to
be so frequently in and out of temper with his subjects and parties, that few or none of
them are decisively and uniformly marked.
It is yet too soon to write the history of the revolution; and whoever attempts it
precipitately, will unavoidably mistake characters and circumstances, and involve himself
in error and difficulty. Things like men are seldom understood rightly at first sight. But
the Abbe is wrong even in the foundation of his work; that is, he has misconceived and
misstated the causes which produced the rupture between England and her then colonies,
and which led on, step by step, unstudied and uncontrived on the part of America, to a
revolution, which has engaged the attention, and affected the interest of Europe.

To prove this, I shall bring forward a passage, which, though placed towards the latter
part of the Abbe's work, is more intimately connected with the beginning: and in which,
speaking of the original cause of the dispute, he declares himself in the following
manner--
"None," says he, "of those energetic causes, which have produced so many revolutions
upon the globe, existed in North-America. Neither religion nor laws had there been
outraged. The blood of martyrs or patriots had not there streamed from scaffolds. Morals
had not there been insulted. Manners, customs, habits, no object dear to nations, had there
been the sport of ridicule. Arbitrary power had not there torn any inhabitant from the
arms of his family and friends, to drag him to a dreary dungeon. Public order had not
been there inverted. The principles of administration had not been changed there; and the
maxims of government had there always remained the same. The whole question was
reduced to the knowing whether the mother country had, or, had not a right to lay,
directly or indirectly, a slight tax upon the colonies."
On this extraordinary passage, it may not be improper, in general terms, to remark, that
none can feel like those who suffer; and that for a man to be a competent judge of the
provocative, or, as the Abbe styles them, the energetic causes of the revolution, he must
have resided in America.
The Abbe, in saying that the several particulars he has enumerated did not exist in
America, and neglecting to point out the particular period in which the means they did
not exist, reduces thereby his declaration to a nullity, by taking away all meaning from
the passage.
They did not exist in 1763, and they all existed before 1776; consequently as there was a
time when they did not, and another when they did exist, the time when constitutes the
essence of the fact; and not to give it, is to withhold the only evidence which proves the
declaration right or wrong, and on which it must stand or fall. But the declaration as it
now appears, unaccompanied by time, has an effect in holding out to the world, that there
was no real cause for the revolution, because it denied the existence of all those causes
which are supposed to be justifiable, and which the Abbe styles energetic.
I confess myself exceedingly at a loss to find out the time to which the Abbe alludes;
because, in another part of the work, in speaking of the stamp act, which was passed in
1764, he styles it "An usurpation of the Americans' most precious and sacred rights."
Consequently he here admits the most energetic of all causes, that is, an usurpation of
their most precious and sacred rights, to have existed in America twelve years before the
declaration of independence, and ten years before the breaking out of hostilities. The time,
therefore, in which the paragraph is true, must be antecedent to the stamp act, but as at
that time there was no revolution, nor any idea of one, it consequently applies without a
meaning; and as it cannot, on the Abbe's own principle, be applied to any time after the
stamp act, it is therefore a wandering, solitary paragraph connected with nothing, and at
variance with every thing.
The stamp act, it is true, was repealed two years after it was passed; but it was

immediately followed by one of infinitely more mischievous magnitude, I mean the
declaratory act, which asserted the right, as it was styled, of the British Parliament, "to
bind America in all cases whatsoever."
If then, the stamp act was an usurpation of the Americans' most precious and sacred
rights, the declaratory Act left them no rights at all; and contained the full grown seeds of
the most despotic government ever exercised in the world. It placed America not only in
the lowest, but in the basest state of vassalage; because it demanded an unconditional
submission