The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Events and Grievances Leading to the Revolutionary War, Independence Day Series Pt. 1

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Taxation was not the only reason the colonists declared their independence from Britain, but it was certainly a factor, according to Bill McClay. "Americans believed in self-government because they lived self-government," says McClay, the Victor Davis Hansen Chair in classical history and western civilization at Hillsdale College. The colonist's desire to maintain self government played a critical role in the decision to declare independence, according to McClay. The Declaration of Independence served as a "press release to the world," McClay says, adding that the document laid out the "what" and "why" of the revolution, but was "much more than that." On July 4th, McClay says Americans "can say, our national birthday commences with this document that expresses these very high and noble imperishable sentiments. 'All men are created equal endowed by their creator with unalienable rights.'" McClay joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" for the first episode of a three part series celebrating Independence Day and discussing America's founding.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Sentinel podcast for Friday, June 30th. I'm Virginia Allen. July 4th is around the corner. And today, we're kicking off a three-part Independence Day series. The stirrings of the revolution began long before 1776, according to Hillsdale College professor, Dr. Bill McLeigh. The colonies were becoming agitated with England's demands, especially when it came to taxes. Dr. Bill McLeigh is joining us here on the show. today to talk about the events that led up to the Revolutionary War and, of course, the crafting of the Declaration of Independence. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. We get it. With big media bias, it's hard to find accurate, honest news.

That's why we've put together the Morning Bell newsletter, a compilation of the top stories and conservative commentary. To subscribe, just head to DailySignal.com slash Morningbe bell subscription or visit dailysignal.com and click on the connect button at the top of the page. We are joined today by the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College, Dr. Bill McLeigh. Dr. McLeigh, thank you so much for being with us today. Oh, it's my pleasure. And what a wonderful occasion to talk about. That's right. We're so excited to be kicking off this series as we head towards the 4th of July, our Independence Day series,

And today we're going all the way back to the 1770s to discuss some of the events that led up to the start of the Revolutionary War. So if you would, let's begin our conversation today by just talking about some of the original tensions that the colonies had with England. How early did that, did that tension and friction begin between the colonies in England? Well, it really, I think, starts in a very important way in the 1760s after the French during and after the French and Indian Wars. But I'd like to lay some historians. They always say, oh, you haven't gone back far enough. You have to go back further.

So I want to go back to what was distinctive about British colonization. And it was that it was very not a part of a big planned project. It was not a, there was no imperial design. As a famous historian said, the British Empire was founded in a fit of absence of mind. We had all these different colonies that were run by different proprietors on different principles. Some of them are strictly interested in material wealth, Virginia, mainly. Massachusetts, of course, was a religious refuge.

And there was a kind of utopianism in it, in Pennsylvania, even in a way in Georgia, a guiding concept for the humanitarian improvement of the human condition. So meanwhile, the Spanish, who are our main competitors, and were really ahead in this process. had a very centralized approach to colonization. Everything was for the sake of the mother country, to extract wealth, not to build settlements. And as a result, the British colonies flourished in a way because there was freedom.

There was freedom of exchange. There were free markets. There was private property. There was encouragement of these things. And nothing like that on the Spanish end. And it meant that people got used to governing themselves. Now we're getting into issues of the revolution. People were accustomed to running their own show because, you know,

the mother country wasn't really interested in or able to govern, to control very much over that vast expanse of ocean. So when the time comes around, the revolution, this is getting back more to your question. The 1760s, you have the 50s and 60s, you have the French in the French and Indian War, settled in 1763

with the Treaty of Paris. But one of the things that the Brits realized is that this cost them a lot of money. And they were deeply in debt from fighting the cause of the colonists. Really, they could not have fought on their own.

We don't have time to go into the French and Indian War, but it is definitely a marker in the process of the mother country taking responsibility for the colonies, for their remaining British. And there was a strong feeling, not unjustified, that if this is what we're going to be doing, the colonies need to be paying for it, paying something like their fair share. but they were not taxed. Parliament did not have the ability to tax the colony. So it really is issues relating to the British Empire kind of coming of age and as an empire and having leaders who sought often in very ham-handed and even stupid ways, in effectual ways, to consolidate the empire more, to bring the colonies in line, and make them pay some of the freight for their own defense and their own well-being.

So you have a series of actions taken by the British government, by the parliament by and large, to begin to extract some revenues from the colonies. And the colonies are very irate about it. And it's not only this, there was smuggling that went on during the French and Indian War. And the British government sought to put a stop to that by enabling their naval ships to impress and to stop and take over and extract for trial in maritime courts, in martial courts. under martial law, Americans without going through the process of a formal accusation and depriving them basically of their legal rights. So there are all sorts of things, not just taxation, that represented intrusions of what had been formerly the practice of self-government.

Americans believed in self-government because they lived self-government. Every colony had its own little sort of replica of what was going on in the mother country, where Parliament and the King were sort of battling for supremacy. You have similarly in each of the colonies, something like that going on. But they were doing their own thing. It was not all directly tied to what was going on. back in the mother country. Okay.

So, yeah, go ahead. As this tension is building and there's this growing frustration, who are the voices who are calling and saying we really do need independence and who are trying to mobilize the colonies towards that? And who were the voices that were saying, no, we need to stay faithful to the mother country? Well, it changed over time. It was a gradual process. I think a lot of people don't realize how long it took to get to the point of actually declaring independence.

I mean, the war had already been going on without a declaration of independence for a year. But the, you know, the figures, many of the figures you know, like John Adams, Sam Adams, Massachusetts was really the hotbed of patriot resistance. And we use the term patriot here. We're talking about those in favor of independence. Not the New England Patriots, which I am a fan of. No, no, no. Well, we all have our burdens.

No, it's not all the Patriots, your Patriots, derived from these former patriots, for sure. And there were quite a number of people of patriotic sentiment who were not necessarily in favor of independence. One good example of that is John Dickinson of Pennsylvania who was a patriot who was irate about the intrusion of the intrusion of Royal or at least of British authority. into what had formerly been American Affairs. And yet in the end, he did not sign the Declaration of Independence because he felt, well, it's a lot of different feelings, but he mainly felt that we couldn't possibly prevail in a war of independence over the greatest military power in the world.

And it was for all involved. This was an enormous undertaking. When they concluded the declaration by pledging their lives, their fortunes in sacred honor, they weren't kidding around. They knew what this was going to mean to make a break like this. So, and yes, Thomas Jefferson, you know, a lot of the names that are very familiar to you who ended up being part of the founding generation

and even framers of the Constitution were ad, for independence, but was a very gradual thing. There were, of course, several things that caused it to flame up. The incidents at Lexington and Concord in 1775, April 1775, that's really when the war begins. And General Gage's troops were sent, and by the way, what were General Gage's troops? troops drewing there, well, it was part of the strategy of the British was to occupy Boston

and bring it to eel, because Boston had been the worst offender in terms of resisting all the efforts of the British to bring the colonists to heal. So they would bring Boston to heal. But General Gage was asked to take a contingent out to conquer. where there was a patriot armory of sorts and to seize the weapons and presumably destroy them or bring them back. And they were met along the way, thanks to Paul Revere, who alerted the militias in that area.

And that's all there were. They were malicious. There wasn't a continental army yet involved in this effort. aroused their awareness and they were waiting in Lexington, where the first shot was fired, and then in Concord, where the British found empty, you know, the armory was empty, and on their way back they were strafed by the fire of Americans, you know, militiamen, you know, snipers firing at them all the way back, and they had significant losses. And actually, the so-called battle at Lelah, Bunker Hill,

was another rousing triumph for the colonists. And so things looked pretty good at the beginning. But the very day that the Declaration of Independence was signed, the British landed a huge force at Staten Island. And I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but these early victories were not. indicative of the way things were going to go for a long time. Now, I want to emphasize that April 1775, between April 1775 and July 4th, 1776, that's a significant passage of time. It took a while

for the political will to make the break to coalesce. And there were several things involved. I think one thing we have to give an awful lot of credit to is Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet, Common Sense, which was a call to arms that was not only, it advanced thinking in a couple of different ways. One was that it was a strong endorsement of independence that, What do you have to gain? What do we have to gain? He's a recent immigrant, but he immediately adopted the colonial causes his own. What do we have to gain anymore from our attachment to the other country?

Nothing. Well, you know, that actually was not entirely true, but it was for those who had been through this series of convulsions, and boycotts and other efforts to kind of push back against British intrusion. It fell true. And second, he turned this into not just a cause of the Americans deserving their independence from Britain, but of the Americans declaring their independence from monarchy itself. It was a Republican, small, our Republican document in that sense. It was endorsing the idea that we do not need kings.

And placing the onus for the tyrannical acts of the British on the king, who had actually somewhat been in the background and was, was actually very well liked. A lot of the patriots early on distinguished between the king who they thought was okay and the parliament, which they did not think was okay. But with Payne's common sense,

he focused it on the king as the sole object, the object that stood in place of the whole in the act of declaring independence and finding a new path. I just want to say this was widely read. It went through a number of printings right off the bat. The numbers are not impressive unless you consider that the percentage of the,

I mean, 250,000 people bought it, that many, many more read it. This is at a time when the population of the colony, was in the low single digit of millions. So it's a significant portion of the population were read and were influenced by this document. Very critical. Wow. So then when did Thomas Jefferson actually sit down

and begin writing the Declaration of the Declaration? Well, it was in the early part of 1776. There was a committee. And Adams, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin were part of this. It's Jefferson's document. I think everyone concedes that. That it was his, the felicity of his prose style made him the, even though he was a very young man, I think 33 at that point,

but he was a logical choice to do this. And there were drafts. It's interesting, one of the drafts that we've seen, that has come down to us has features a paragraph under the grievances in the declaration

that blames the king for slavery, for the existence of slavery in North America. Well, you know, that was he had nothing to do with it. He wasn't around for it. He'd done nothing

to encourage or discourage it. I mean, George is the third. So that was fortunate, taken out because the other grievances were all valid. And if you actually read the declaration closely, it sort of has two parts, the preamble, which is the part we're all familiar with.

It has sort of the fundamental political philosophy of the new nation. And then the grievances, which list all these are all the things that the king did. And they pick up Payne's Jefferson, picks up Paine's stylistic change and directs everything towards the king. Almost everything. There are a few exceptions. But it's very much personifies the king as the object of scorn, the tyrant, who deserved to be left behind. I see.

Now, of course, we're about to celebrate July 4th. But the Continental Congress, they actually declared America's independence on July 4th. 2nd. So why is it that we celebrate on the 4th? Well, I think it's because of this magnificent document. It is, it was adopted. You know, John Adams famously wrote to Abigail going on and on about how the July 2nd is going to live forever in history. And it's sort of typical of John Adams, who, by the way, is my favorite founder, partly because of his quirks and foibles. But it's because of this.

document, which was so much more than just what its title suggests. It was a document that has inspired the whole world and continues to. It was being waved around during the Hong Kong protests a few years ago. Always comes up, and the language of the Declaration comes up in all sorts of human rights, liberty, democracy, pro-democracy movements all over the world. It was foundational in its influence on the French, the French Revolution, who I think did their revolution a little less carefully than ours, but that's another subject. So its influence was vast. And I do, often when I'm teaching, I say, well, first and foremost, the Declaration of Independence was a press release to the war.

world. It was saying this is what we're doing and this is why we're doing it. But it's much more than that. It is that very definitely, but it's much more than that. So I think given its eloquence and its eminence, it's not surprising that it becomes the day that we celebrate. But it says something about America that we are, that in some way we are a country that is inseparable from certain ideals, that the other countries may say our national birthday represents these things. We can say our national birthday commences with this document that expresses these very high and noble and imperishable sentiments. all men are created equal

endowed by their creator with an unalienable rights and that when the government becomes abusive with those rights we have the freedom and the duty even to change that government. In other words, self-rule that same principle

that caused the friction back at the beginning is what is declared in the declaration that comes at the end of that process and the beginning of our national life. So powerful.

Dr. Bill McCleigh of Hillsdale College, Dr. McLeigh, thank you so much for being here. Virginia, it's my pleasure. And you have a happy fourth. Happy fourth to you as well. Okay. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks again for joining us for this first edition of our Independence Day series.

We will have two more in this series coming out on Monday, and then, of course, July 4th also. So we look forward to those conversations, both on the Revolutionary War and on the Constitution. But in the meantime, if you haven't had the chance, be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed where we bring you the top news of the day. And also, take a moment to subscribe to the Daily Signal. It means a lot to us and helps us keep spreading the word to more and more listeners. But we hope you all have a wonderful Friday. We'll see you right back here around 5 p.m. for our top news edition.

The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheris. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.