120 Chapter VI
can governing class; nor did what they knew of the realities of parliamentary poli-
tics inspire them with much confidence. On one point the truculent young John
Adams and the moderate Virginia gentleman, Richard Bland, were agreed: that
they enjoyed the English constitution in greater purity in America than did the
English in England. And if so, asked Adams, whose fault was it?^14
Already, in the minds of some, a sense of American distinctiveness was well
developed. This was most especially true of New England, which was more
acutely conscious of its own history than the other colonies, and where there was
a kind of folk memory of having fled from England long ago, the better to estab-
lish a good life in a new world. This now seemed to be threatened. “Will they
never let us rest in peace?... Is it not enough that they persecuted us out of the
old world?... What other world remains as a sanctuary?.. .”^15 The words were
written in 1763 on a different subject, but they suggest the emotions on which
the Stamp Act grated. John Adams’ Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law,
written in 1765, just before the Stamp Act, contains a theory of the meaning of
America already fully worked out: “I always consider the settlement of America
with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design of Provi-
dence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish
part of mankind all over the earth.” In Virginia the feeling was less exalted. Im-
portant Virginians did not think of their forefathers as humble or impoverished
fugitives, destined to save the world; they saw them rather as gentlemen of means
who had emigrated voluntarily at their own expense, but who, on setting up in
America, brought all English liberties with them, including an assembly which
in its own sphere was the equal of Parliament. According to a recent study of this
elusive subject, during the arguments over the Stamp Act the peculiarly New
England view of American origins spread to the colonies as a whole, entering
deeply into the formation of American nationality. Forced to reflect upon them-
selves, the Americans developed a “legend of the Founding Fathers,” or belief that
from the very beginning America had been the refuge of political liberty. But
enough such feeling already existed, in 1765, to produce an immediate, concerted,
and excited resistance to the Stamp Act.
At any event, most politically conscious Americans, in all the colonies, from the
moment the implications were clearly presented to them, agreed in seeing no au-
thority in England above them except the King himself; and if Americans were
still stoutly loyal in a legal sense, it may be strongly suspected (since the same was
true of England in the early Hanoverian era) that they were lacking in true royalist
warmth. All the arguments aimed at the British—that Parliament could levy ex-
ternal but not internal taxes in America, that it could levy external taxes for trade
regulation, but not for revenue, etc.—were in the nature of rationalizations; the
Americans really did not wish to be actually governed by the British Parliament at
14 J. Adams, Novanglus, 1774, in Work s (1851), IV, 117; R. Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the Brit-
ish Colonies, 1766, quoted by C. Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (N.Y., 1953), 273–74.
15 Quoted by W. F. Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (N.Y., 1956), 22, to which I am
indebted for this whole paragraph. See also C. Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic ( N.Y., 1953).