The American Museum in Bath, England, is one of my favorite places. Housed in a handsome 18th-century manor house, honey-colored like most Cotswold buildings, it perches on a hillside on the edge of town, commanding views that make visiting Americans feel a stab of British patriotism.
Like the rest of Britain, it is in celebratory mode, cheering the 250th birthday of the world’s greatest republic. Among other things, it is exhibiting one of the 26 surviving copies of the Declaration of Independence printed by John Dunlap on July 4, 1776, a copy captured by Loyalists during the fighting and sent to Britain by Gen. William Howe.
Americans are often surprised by the enthusiasm with which Independence Day is marked in the United Kingdom. Most Brits go along jokily with the nationalist tone of Fourth of July events in the United States, but, in truth, it leaves us baffled. Was the war not fought, as the Virginia-born Lady Nancy Astor was to put it in 1940, “by British Americans against a German King for British ideals”? Did its instigators not, until well into the fighting, see themselves as defenders of their inherited British liberties?
James Otis set out the case for what was to become the patriot cause in 1764: “Every British Subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British Dominions, is by the Law of God and Nature, by the Common Law, and by Act of Parliament entitled to all the Natural, Essential, Inherent and Inseparable Rights of our Fellow Subjects in Great-Britain.”
In the end, asserting those rights meant a revolution, but only in the original sense of the word, namely, a full turn of the wheel, a righting of that which had been set upon its head.
When the tour guides at Lexington talk of “the British” lining up over there, they are using language no one at the time would have recognized. The whole population of Massachusetts was British.
Only the eventual involvement of foreigners — French troops on the revolutionary side and German mercenaries for the crown, which had struggled to raise soldiers from an English population that sympathized with the colonists — began to create a sense of different nationality.
Listen to how the Declaration of Independence frames its grievance against King George III: “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny.” Foreign mercenaries: soldiers, in other words, who were not fellow Brits.
Dunlap himself, like several of the Founders, was an Ulsterman, born in Co Tyrone. Ulstermen — Scots-Irish as they became known in their new land — saw resisting the claims of an overweening monarchy as quintessentially British behavior. I happened to be in Belfast last weekend, which is running numerous exhibitions about Dunlap, the Founding Fathers, and the 17 U.S. presidents with Ulster roots.
The Revolution, in short, was a rejection of British citizenship, not of British values. On the contrary, it was a clamorous assertion of all the things that, in the eyes of the Founders, had made them British in the first place: personal autonomy, representative government, religious liberty, habeas corpus, jury trials, the sanctity of contract, the rule of law, and constraints on executive power.
As Prime Minister Winston Churchill was to put it in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: “The Declaration was in the main a restatement of the principles which had animated the Whig struggle against the later Stuarts and the English Revolution of 1688.”
Americans in London are sometimes taken off guard by the prominent statues of six U.S. presidents, including Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square and George Washington in Trafalgar Square. Yet, even in 1776, the American cause enjoyed widespread support in Great Britain. The most brilliant parliamentarians of the era, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and Pitt the Elder, all favored the patriots. So, as far as we can make out, did a majority of the population, though, with a more limited franchise than in the colonial assemblies, that majority was not replicated in the House of Commons.
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Now for a hard thing that needs saying: The Revolution was premised on a QAnon-level conspiracy theory, widespread on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1760s, namely that George III, that dim, dull, dutiful king, was planning to create a medieval-style absolute monarchy. In the event, both successor states developed along similar lines, becoming more liberal, more law-based, and more democratic. This consanguinity of values became the basis of our alliance from the beginning of the 20th century.
Both countries, tragically, are now moving away from those values, mine faster than yours. That, though, is a column for another day. For now, cousins, let’s celebrate what we have in common, and cling to it while we can.