A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal | Page 5

necessary they should oppose it, in its first stage of execution.
It is probable, the Abbe has been led into this mistake by perusing detached pieces in
some of the American newspapers; for, in a case where all were interested, everyone had
a right to give his opinion; and there were many who, with the best intentions, did not
chuse the best, nor indeed the true ground, to defend their cause upon. They felt
themselves right by a general impulse, without being able to separate, analyze, and
arrange the parts.
I am somewhat unwilling to examine too minutely into the whole of this extraordinary
passage of the Abbe, lest I should appear to treat it with severity; otherwise I could shew,
that not a single declaration is justly founded; for instance, the reviving an obsolete act of
the reign of Henry the Eighth, and fitting it to the Americans, by authority of which they
were to be seized and brought from America to England, and there imprisoned and tried
for any supposed offenses, was, in the worse sense of the words, to tear them by the
arbitrary power of Parliament, from the arms of their families and friends, and drag
them not only to dreary but distant dungeons. Yet this act was contrived some years
before the breaking out of hostilities. And again, though the blood of martyrs and patriots
had not streamed on the scaffolds, it streamed in the streets, in the massacre of the
inhabitants of Boston, by the British soldiery in the year 1770.
Had the Abbe said that the causes which produced the revolution in America were
originally different from those which produced revolutions in other parts of the globe, he
had been right. Here the value and quality of liberty, the nature of government, and the

dignity of man, were known and understood, and the attachment of the Americans to
these principles produced the revolution, as a natural and almost unavoidable
consequence. They had no particular family to set up or pull down. Nothing of
personality was incorporated with their cause. They started even-handed with each other,
and went no faster into the several stages of it, than they were driven by the unrelenting
and imperious conduct of Britain. Nay, in the last act, the declaration of independence,
they had nearly been too late; for had it not been declared at the exact time it was, I saw
no period in their affairs since, in which it could have been declared with the same effect,
and probably not at all.
But the object being formed before the reverse of fortune took place, that is, before the
operations of the gloomy campaign of 1776, their honour, their interest, their everything,
called loudly on them to maintain it; and that glow of thought and energy of heart, which
even distant prospect of independence inspires, gave confidence to their hopes, and
resolution to their conduct, which a state of dependence could never have reached. They
looked forward to happier days and scenes of rest, and qualified the hardships of the
campaign by contemplating the establishment of their new-born system.
If, on the other hand, we take a review of what part great Britain has acted, we shall find
every thing which ought to make a nation blush. The most vulgar abuse, accompanied by
that species of haughtiness which distinguishes the hero of a mob from the character of a
gentleman; it was equally as much from her manners as from her injustice that she lost
the colonies. By the latter she provoked their principles, by the former she wore out their
temper; and it ought to be held out as an example to the world, to shew how necessary it
is to conduct the business of government with civility. In short, other revolutions may
have originated in caprice, or generated in ambition, but here, the most unoffending
humility was tortured into rage, and the infancy of existence made to weep.
A union so extensive, continued and determined, suffering with patience, and never in
despair, could not have been produced by common causes. It must be something capable
of reaching the whole soul of man and arming it with perpetual energy. In vain it is to
look for precedents among the revolutions of former ages, to find out, by comparison, the
causes of this. The spring, the progress, the object, the consequences, nay the men, their
habits of thinking, and all the circumstances of the country, are different. Those of other
nations are, in general, little more than the history of their quarrels. They are marked by
no important character in the annals of events; mixt in the mass of general matters, they
occupy but a common page; and while the chief of the successful partizans stept into
power, the