On Not Celebrating the Government’s Birthday

by Joseph R. Stromberg

Some of us will not be celebrating the Government’s Birthday this week. If we hang any flags out, they will not be stripy, star-filled banners, but will be rather different ones with the cross of St. Andrew on them, albeit with a similar color scheme. I do not, however, begrudge people’s right to barbecue, watch sporting events, or blow off their surplus fingers. I just hope that no one confuses July Fourth, as presently understood, with freedom, patriotism, or any other genuinely American values.

It is too easy to forget, amidst the ritualized patriotic blather which has attended the Fourth for more than a century, just what it was that Americans fought for from 1776 (or earlier) through 1783. The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 2, 1776, and then re-adopted with some changes on July 4, by delegates of the thirteen colonies (New York excepted), was the culmination of an ideological and political struggle which had raged for at least a decade. As John Adams famously put it, the change in Americans’ views on their relations with Great Britain was the Revolution. What followed was a war to make it stick.

No more than December 7, 1941, did July 4, 1776, suddenly spring forth as an historical turning point without any earlier background of events. Let us look at a few of these events. As George III, our slightly dotty sovereign, and Parliament worked to "reinvent government" in the colonies after 1763, Americans did not take to their plans. Americans began to oppose, vocally and physically, measures seeking to curtail further their trade, impose internal taxes on them, and to restrict their westward migrations. Already in 1770, the Boston Massacre had pitted the radical "mob" against British troops – a great propaganda coup for the radicals.

Speaking to the Boston Town Meeting on November 20, 1772, Samuel Adams stated the American case: "Among the natural rights of the colonies are these: First, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. Those are evident branches of, rather than deductions from the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature – All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another...."

Soon Committees of Correspondence were being organized to co-ordinate colonial resistance. On December 16, 1773, came the Boston Tea Party. The issue here was not the tea, but the authorities’ attempt to make good the losses of the East India Company by intruding that state-chartered monopoly with its legal privileges into the American market. Americans knew full well how the Company had been governing India and did not welcome its arrival on our shores.

Britain responded with the Coercive Acts and more British troops for North America. Americans answered those initiatives by holding a Continental Congress in late 1774 and setting up a boycott of British products. Throughout the colonies, radicals were either taking over existing governments or setting up parallel structures alongside them. On October 11, 1774, the extra-legal Massachusetts Provincial Congress set up a committee "authorized to call out the provincial militia and to collect munitions and supplies in preparation for meeting any future aggression by the British armed forces" (Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, III, p. 319). Virginia followed suit in March 1775.

Colonials were arming in an organized way. Bunker Hill took place in June of 1775. The point is that the fighting began before the declaration. Independence was effectively declared by separate state action before the joint declaration in July. After all, Britain never authorized colonial radicals to take over old governments or establish new ones. On April 5, 1776, Georgia authorized its delegates (who of course favored independence) to vote on independence in the Continental Congress. On April 12, North Carolina authorized its delegates to vote for independence.

On May 15, Virginia instructed its delegation to pressure the Continental Congress to "declare the United Colonies free and independent states, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain." On June 29, Virginia adopted a constitution whose preamble specifically repudiated British sovereignty and asserted Virginia’s independence. So the Declaration on July 2^nd or 4^th, is actually a bit anticlimactic. It amounts to a summary of what the colonies were already undertaking months beforehand.

There is good Lockean rhetoric in the Declaration, of course. There is a nice indictment of the "long train of abuses" by George III. But in view of what had gone before, it seems irrefutable that Americans fought – in loose concert co-ordinated by the Continental Congress – for their private rights and the rights of their communities to self-government. There was no charter here for a new centralized American government to replace that of the King.

Would-be U.S. nationalists like James Wilson began spotting "implied powers" in the Continental Congress and tried to espy penumbras and emanations in the Articles of Confederation, once those were ratified in 1781 (that is, when the war was nearly over). But Article II of the Confederation made matters fairly clear: "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled."

No one need believe that Americans fought their revolution to set up our own version of the modernizing British state on these shores. They fought for life, liberty, property, and local self-government. I don’t expect to hear much about those items on the Fourth. No, the Fourth is now seen as the central state’s birthday. This British North American homeboy will stay home, or go to the office and do some useful work, on the Fourth, rather than celebrate that.

We may hear some boiler-plate patriotic rhetoric this week. Compared to that sort of thing, there is more wisdom in Hank Jr.: "if heaven ain’t a lot like Dixie, I don’t want to go, if heaven ain’t a lot like Dixie, I’d just as soon stay home." I suppose there may be similar sentiments in other parts of British North America. Real patriotism is local. That was what the American Revolution was substantially about.

July 4, 2001

Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for Antiwar.com. He has an ancestor or two who fought in the American Revolution.

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com

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