136 Chapter VI
And when Burke in 1777 again pleaded for conciliation, but blamed the war
with the Americans on the mere folly of ministers (and implicitly on the stupidity
of the King), still refusing to recognize the conflict of principle, and insisting that
Parliament must be supreme, he provoked a retort from a radical of high station,
Willoughby Bertie, the fourth Earl of Abingdon. Abingdon had spent several
years in the 1760’s at Geneva, where he had known Delolme and taken part in the
democratic movement. His reply to Burke went through five editions. A strong
friend of the Americans, and thinking that government should be representative of
the governed, he simply did not believe that Parliament was supreme in Britain
any more than in America. “Where is the difference,” he asked Burke (and it was
the question that all radicals put to all Whigs), “between the despotism of the
King of France and the despotism of the Parliament of England? And what is this
but to erect an aristocratic tyranny in the state?”^41
The British radicals had to live under Parliament, and had no course except to
hope to reform it. The Americans did not have to live under Parliament, and re-
fused to do so. Most Englishmen alive in 1776 were dead before Parliament gave
an inch of ground. The Americans, three thousand miles away, had more freedom
of action. They set up what amounted to anti- parliaments.
In Virginia, upon the news of the Boston Port Act, Thomas Jefferson drafted a
resolution in support of Boston; the house of burgesses adopted it, and was there-
upon dissolved by the governor. The house met illegally as an “association,” de-
nounced the Act, and summoned a “convention” of the Virginia counties. Similar
conventions of counties or other self-authorized gatherings met in the other prov-
inces. They sent delegates to an assembly that called itself the Continental Con-
gress. The Congress issued a Declaration of Rights, and took steps to force all
Americans into a concerted boycott of Great Britain.
At this First Continental Congress the delegates found that they differed on a
theoretically important question. It was a question that remained alive long after
American independence, and on which historians of the American Revolution
have inclined to differ to this day. There were those who thought America inter-
nally unchanged by the repudiation of British authority. They justified their rebel-
lion by appealing to their historic rights as Englishmen, or rights under the British
constitution, which, they said, they wished merely to defend. As John Jay said in
the Congress, they saw no need “to frame a new constitution.” Others preferred to
stand not on the rights of Englishmen but on the rights of man, and not on the
laws in the lawbooks, but on the laws of nature. They were more willing to believe
that a new era was at hand. As Patrick Henry said in the Congress: “Government
is dissolved.... We are in a state of nature.”^42
The Congress, significantly, simply put the two together. In America, in contrast
to most of Europe, nature and history were not felt to be opposites. The Ameri-
cans, fundamentally, were satisfied with their own past. They thought that their
rights under the British constitution were much the same as their rights as human
41 Burke, “Letter to... the Sheriffs of the City of Bristol on the Affairs of America” (1777) in
Writings (Boston, 1901), II, 187, 245; Abingdon, Thoughts on Mr. Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
on the Affairs of America (1777), quoted by Guttridge, op. cit., 94.
42 E. C. Burnett, The Continental Congress (N.Y., 1941), 37.