The Means of Self-Defense

250 years ago, the governor took the gunpowder

Williamsburg gunpowder magazine, via Joe Shlabotnik / Flickr

It was a Murray who misgoverned Virginians so badly they were compelled to revolt, though the 4th Earl of Dunmore is not known to have written any unreadable neocon tracts like YouTube’s top genocide tourist. Within 48 hours of the British raid on colonial arms at Concord, which happened 250 years ago this week and was answered with gunfire, Virginia’s Scottish governor did the same in Williamsburg in the dead of night. His theft was discovered the morning of April 21.

Lord Dunmore was a better man than the British constitution at the time deserved. The tragedy of his life is that he was a page of Bonnie Prince Charlie as a child, but became a full-fledged civil servant in nominal service of parliament’s German hood ornament. In the course of this he unsuccessfully tried to enforce parliamentary supremacy on an unwilling colony that had been appealing to the king in a way that evokes an older type of British constitutionalism which his Jacobite father might have preferred.

Dunmore’s tenure as Virginia governor reads a lot like the conflicts between Charles I and parliament in miniature, and that’s the spirit in which the colonists interpreted it; he tries to govern without them, which just upsets them. At the time the gunpowder is stolen, the Second Virginia Convention is already meeting on its own authority to send delegates to the Continental Congress. Without the support of the Virginian oligarchy it would be impossible to do anything, including trade; the only town facing the sea with a substantial mercantile class with a stake in imperial trade was Norfolk. After the seizure of the gunpowder Dunmore had less than two months with a dry foot on Virginian soil.

It is called an incident rather than a battle because Peyton Randolph, the speaker of the General Assembly at the time, talked down the militia, which convened in Fredericksburg in Indian dress in early May and was prepared to march on Williamsburg. Nobody knows how to work a crowd, or a mob, like a Virginia assemblyman—to get elected to the General Assembly you have to bribe, flatter, and cajole, all while pretending that’s not actually what you’re doing.

The governor’s decisions in the middle of 1775 left the colonists with every reason to believe he intended to prevent them from defending themselves against both internal and external enemies, especially by stealing their means to do so. There is no further conversation to be had, at that point. He promised, in the midst of the stand-off over the gunpowder, to burn Williamsburg and decree all the slaves freed, something he eventually did, though the former slaves who went to fight for him mostly died of smallpox on British ships. One conspiracy theory even argued he had intentionally depleted the colonial militia on the Western frontier in sorties against the Indians.

Prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the first commander in chief of the continental Navy would be assigned to the Chesapeake to pursue Dunmore, a man the Virginians had by that point decided was a thief and a pirate, but he disappeared after the burning of Norfolk on New Year’s Day, 1776.

The American revolution is of a piece with a century and a half of wars over the British constitution which starts with what are now called the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. In the face of an overweening parliament, a lot of older questions were reopened. All the features of Anglo rebellions are present by 1775, the appeal to old rights and the idea of limited war in defense of them.

The previous summer, Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America was published, and viewed by the First Continental Congress. It is usually described as a radical document, and was seen that way by the Virginia Conventions, but we might ask in what way. It is an appeal to the king against parliament.

Only in the case of the Plymouth Plantation and Rhode Island are there instances of government without royal permission in North America. The separatists had only a land patent from the Plymouth Company, and the Mayflower Compact more or less incorporates a town, which is relevant to Jefferson’s argument in that essay, which frames debates at the Continental Congresses. In the case of Rhode Island, the land was purchased from the local Indians by an exile, so was operating under common law until a charter was issued by parliament during the English Civil War, and later confirmed after the restoration.

The Jamestown colony was initially private under royal charter, and had an assembly from 1619 until it was royalized over the company’s protestations in 1624. Some kind of assembly probably continued to meet thereafter, but its authority was only confirmed in 1639, and while most power was in the hands of the governor and council, there is nevertheless a strong argument for unbroken representative government in a royally-chartered colony as soon as was feasible. The second charter for the Carolinas (the first one was more or less defunct) was a royalist affair, whose Lords Proprietor included Charles II’s Lord Chancellor and George Monck, the skilled general whose grants in the Americas may have helped sweeten the pot of his defection. Only Georgia was actually chartered by the Hanoverians.

The British constitution changes quite a lot over the 170 years from Jamestown to the Declaration of Independence, and its legal relationship with the colonies is a patchwork. From the 1760s on, however, the colonies find themselves more or less on the same side in a dispute with the mother country, and language by which they could voice a common grievance needed to be found. This is where Jefferson is very important, who articulates the appeal to Anglo-Saxon liberty. A very common feature of enlightenment liberalism is the idea that the laws of the Anglo-Saxons are especially conducive to freedom, and Jefferson explicitly makes the comparison between the peopling of North America and the settlement of Britain in the völkerwanderung:

To remind him that our ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness. That their Saxon ancestors had, under this universal law, in like manner left their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe, had possessed themselves of the island of Britain, then less charged with inhabitants, and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country.

The radical quality of Jefferson’s essay is that he declares the individual settlers were what created British North America, as opposed to the various acts of incorporation. He is no doubt aware of the very complex group of charters and re-charters that was the actual basis of the colonies’ existence, but it’s an essay that tries to do away with all that, in part by articulating a right of regicide in an appeal to a king. Our political communications experts of today would probably advise against this:

A family of princes was then on the British throne, whose treasonable crimes against their people brought on them afterwards the exertion of those sacred and sovereign rights of punishment reserved in the hands of the people for cases of extreme necessity, and judged by the constitution unsafe to be delegated to any other judicature.

What Jefferson is doing is coming up with a basis for negotiating on behalf of the all the American colonies as if they were, collectively, another dominion—just like Ireland or Scotland, but English. Whether it’s a fundamentally propagandistic document is an interesting question, but this means, if the main grievance is with parliament, what Jefferson is arguing, though he would certainly deny it himself, is that Britain doesn’t have a strong enough king.

The most novel argument is the comparison of American colonists’ land tenure to that of the Saxons before William the Conqueror. It’s dubious considering the nature of proprietary grants by which several of the colonies were founded, but Jefferson is basically arguing that America is more English than the British government:

A general principle, indeed, was introduced, that “all lands in England were held either mediately or immediately of the crown,” but this was borrowed from those holdings, which were truly feudal, and only applied to others for the purposes of illustration. Feudal holdings were therefore but exceptions out of the Saxon laws of possession, under which all lands were held in absolute right. These, therefore, still form the basis, or ground-work, of the common law, to prevail wheresoever the exceptions have not taken place. America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him, or any of his successors. Possessions there are undoubtedly of the allodial nature. Our ancestors, however, who migrated hither, were farmers, not lawyers. The fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king, they were early persuaded to believe real; and accordingly took grants of their own lands from the crown.

There is, I daresay, a certain ethnonationalist quality to the document. None of these arguments would have been taken seriously before 1688, but enough Englishmen believed them by that point that it had a certain force, and is close enough to the ruling ideology of the Hanoverians that a compelling argument for British hypocrisy could be made. There was still hope, or at least the useful fiction, that the king might be able to do something. But that wouldn’t last long.

When Dunmore finally reconvened the House of Burgesses in June of 1775 to consider the Conciliatory Resolutions, its arguments rejecting it have a lot in common with Jefferson’s in his Summary View, and by this point the actual governing in Virginia is taking place somewhere else. They don’t mention the stolen gunpowder, but the precedent cited for taxing Virginians is an old law passed under the Stuarts, not by parliament at all, and the legislature denies they have any right to interfere, referring the matter to the Continental Congress. There is at this point an ideological disagreement; Lord North has offered an exemption to taxes, and the Virginians are telling him an exemption implies he has the right to tax them in the first place, which they deny.