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In 1790, the British statesman Edmund Burke published the work that made his name. Part diatribe and part manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France denounced that world-shaking upheaval not only for its “crude and violent schemes of liberty,” but also for its “prattling about the rights of man.” Aghast at what he called the “tyranny and cruelty employed to bring about and to uphold this revolution,” Burke preached the virtues of “a monarchy directed by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation; and both again controlled by a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people at large acting by a suitable and permanent organ.” An immediate hit upon release, Burke’s Reflections would seal its author’s reputation as the great conservative defender of traditional values and the settled social order.
It also drew the fury of Burke’s more radical contemporaries. His Reflections revealed him to be no “friend of liberty,” declared Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering British feminist and liberal whose daughter, Mary Shelley, would achieve literary immortality as the author of Frankenstein. “If there is anything like argument, or first principles, in [Burke’s] wild declamation,” Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, her book-length attack on the Reflections, it is “that we are to reverence the rust of antiquity, and term the unnatural customs, which ignorance and mistaken self-interest have consolidated, the sage fruit of experience.”
The great American revolutionary Thomas Paine, who was by then a passionate supporter of the French Revolution, was also horrified by what Burke had wrought. “I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead,” Paine wrote in The Rights of Man, his own book-length assault on the Reflections. “Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.”
Yet when it came to the cause of American liberty, Burke actually stood closer to Paine than to King George III. While the British monarch and his ministers were weighing increasingly severe reprisals against the wayward colonials, Burke used his perch in Parliament to advocate peace, accommodation, and a hands-off approach that would restore the “wise and salutary neglect” that had once characterized relations between the colonies and the Crown.
Why did the famously hardline foe of the French Revolution adopt a far softer line toward the rebellious Americans?
In 1774, several months after the storied colonial uprising known as the Boston Tea Party, Burke rose in Parliament to call for repealing the offending tax on tea. He also took the opportunity to blame the British government for senselessly pushing the Americans to the brink.
“Leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself,” Burke urged. “When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If [British] sovereignty and [American] freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No-body will be argued into slavery.”
A year later, Burke delivered what some scholars consider his greatest speech, a moving plea for Parliament to seek “conciliation” with the colonies before it became too late to patch the breach.
“This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth,” Burke observed. Like it or not, he told his colleagues, that overriding American spirit had left the British authorities with only one viable option going forward.
The British might attempt to alter the American spirit of liberty by “removing the causes” or even “prosecut[ing] that spirit in its overt acts, as criminal,” he observed. But such repression would inevitably backfire: “Will it not teach them that the Government, against which a claim of Liberty is tantamount to high treason, is a Government to which submission is equivalent to slavery?” Burke demanded. “It may not always be convenient,” he dryly added, “to impress dependent communities with such an idea.”
A similar point was once made by a great fictional rebel leader, Leia Organa. “The more you tighten your grip,” she told an imperial commander in a galaxy far, far away, “the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
As far as Burke was concerned, the spirit of American liberty was an incontrovertible fact that the British government had to face. There was just no getting around it. In fact, every attempt to get around it only made matters worse. “To prove that the Americans ought not to be free,” Burke noted, “we are obliged to depreciate the value of Freedom itself.”
So if the Americans could not be talked out of their principles, and if they could never truly be stripped of them by force, what else was left to do but to “comply with the American Spirit as necessary; or, if you please, to submit to it as a necessary Evil”? The Americans had protested “that they are taxed in a Parliament, in which they are not represented,” Burke noted. So be it. “If you mean to satisfy them at all,” he declared, “you must satisfy them with regard to this complaint.” Otherwise, the king would surely lose control over the colonies forever.
Surprisingly, it is here where the Burke of 1775 most nearly resembles the Burke of 1790. The latter Burke opposed the French Revolution because of its shattering effect on the established order. Now we find the earlier Burke opposing the British crackdown on American liberty for similar reasons. “We never seem to gain a paltry advantage over [the Americans] in debate,” Burke noted, “without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.”
In effect, Burke thought it far wiser for the British to back down and let the Americans enjoy much greater freedoms, lest any attempt to cure them of their rebellious ways prove more deadly than the disease. With the French Revolution, Burke thought that particular outbreak had already reached epidemic proportions, and he reacted accordingly.
What if the British government had followed Burke’s advice in 1775? Might the American Revolution never have been fought? Might we be living today in a Burkean America that still retained some sort of official loyalty to the king?
Burke’s own analysis suggests that the answer to such questions is probably no. As he had tried to warn Parliament, the American colonies were already well on their way to independent self-government by 1775. “Until very lately, all authority in America seemed to be nothing but an emanation from” British authority, Burke said. “We thought, Sir, that the utmost which the discontented Colonists could do, was to disturb authority; we never dreamt they could of themselves supply it.”
Yet supply it themselves they did. In 1774, the first Continental Congress had begun meeting in Philadelphia, gathered, in the words of its members, to “obtain such establishment, as that their religion, laws, and liberties, may not be subverted.”
Burke correctly saw that development as a momentous step toward independence. “The Colonists having once found the possibility of enjoying the advantages of order in the midst of a struggle for Liberty,” he said, “such struggles will not henceforward seem so terrible to the settled and sober part of mankind as they had appeared before the trial.”
In short, Burke’s speech may have come too late even if its advice had been followed. For a growing number of Americans in the mid-1770s, there was already vanishingly little chance of turning back. The road to American independence would prove long, twisted, and bloody, but the journey had begun.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Edmund Burke’s America.”
