Americans of all stripes recently celebrated our country’s 234th
birthday. But it is fashionable by some on the Religious Left to
discredit the American Revolution as primarily the selfish
reaction against reasonable taxation. In their eyes, the original
Tea Partiers of 1773 are as offensive and today’s Tea Party
rebels against big government. And since the Iraq War, if not
before, the Religious Left has tried to reinterpret traditional
Just War criteria into impossibly
stratospheric standards, so that no war can ever be moral. Just
War teaching thereby becomes a reflexive rebuke to all force,
rather than a careful reasoning tool.
The stratospheric standard seems to afflict the critique of
the American Revolution by John Keown, a respected ethicist at
Georgetown University.
Recently I
wrote for The American
Spectator about an Evangelical Left commentator
mocking America’s War for Independence as simply about greed. But
that commentator, like most on the Evangelical Left, is overtly
pacifist. Religious pacifists will sometimes deploy their version
of Just War rules to prove the supposed impossibility of moral
force. But they do not treat the tradition very seriously, except
as an occasional rhetorical tool. Keown treats the
tradition more seriously, and his critique of America’s founding
late last year (“America’s War for Independence: Just or
Unjust?”) was in the intellectually weighty Journal
of Catholic Social
Thought, affiliated with Villanova University.
Keown’s rejection of America’s war for independence as immoral
deserves a response.
Keown acknowledged that many Roman Catholics in
revolutionary America enthusiastically supported independence
from Britain. John Carroll, later America’s first Catholic
bishop, famously accompanied Benjamin Franklin to Quebec to
persuade (unsuccessfully ) Quebecers to join them against
Britain. John’s brother, the statesman Charles Carroll, became
the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence. But
Keown still deduces that the American Revolution failed to meet
the 7 traditional standards of Just War teaching: just cause,
proportionality, right intention, competent authority,
probability of success, last resort, and comparative
justice.
Reluctantly, Keown granted that the Continental Congress
may have qualified as a “competent authority” to wage war. The
delegates were “moderates,” mostly elected by mass meetings in
their respective jurisdictions and they waged war in a
“controlled fashion.” Keown also seemingly admitted that
America’s Revolutionaries had the “probability of success,” which
should seem obvious, since they did in fact win. He is skeptical
the Americans could have won without France. But it would seem
that the British capacity to subdue a large and prosperous colony
spread across half a continent, and opposite an ocean, was always
doubtful, assuming American will persevered. Forty years later,
the Duke of Wellington advised his government to end the War of
1812 with America, even after Napoleon’s defeat, thinking the
mission unnecessary and unwinnable. What was true in 1815 was
probably true in 1775.
So Keown focused on the remaining 5 standards. Regarding
whether war was a justified last resort, he surmised the
colonists could have been more patient with economic pressure,
while admitting that the ongoing boycott of British goods was
disrupted by events at Lexington and Concord. Even that British
military excursion Keown defended as a legitimate action by a
“sovereign power” to “neutralize” arms potentially aimed against
it. Keown pronounced the American insurrection “precipitate,”
especially when Canada, Australia, and New Zealand achieved
independence peacefully, and India gained it through civil
disobedience. But Keown did not fully consider what impact
America’s successful revolt and republic had on British
governance, not to mention its eventual attitude towards other
colonies.
Regarding the demand for “comparative justice,” Keown is
skeptical that sufficient “values” were imperiled to “override
the presumption against war.” He primarily disputed that war for
American independence was a “just cause,” and accused the
Americans of exaggeration when their Declaration of Independence
inveighed against Britain’s plans for “absolute despotism”
through “death, desolation and tyranny.” Regarding taxation,
Keown asserted that American colonists were less taxed than the
British, that Britain rightly expected help in paying for the
French and Indian War, and that the colonies were unwilling to
pay for their frontier defense. Besides, the Americans paid for
more in taxes after the American Revolution, he noted.
As to American complaints of taxation without
representation, Keown wrote that American legislatures were more
democratic than the British Parliament, the colonies had
effective paid agents representing them in London, and most
British themselves had no direct role in electing their
Parliament. Interestingly, Keown extensively quoted two English
Protestants, the man of letters Samuel Johnson, and the Methodist
evangelist John Wesley. Dr. Johnson insisted the Americans, or at
least their ancestors, had foresworn the potential for voting at
home in favor of riches in America. Rev. Wesley professed that
he, like 90 percent of all Britons, had no direct representation
in Parliament, yet still enjoyed civil and religious liberty to
the “utmost.”
Keown defended the British closure of Boston’s port and
other coercive acts as the justified reaction against American
“criminality,” like the famous destruction of British tea. And
British trials for Americans outside their own colony, without
benefit of a local jury, was justified with local opinion
unwilling to punish acts against the British crown. American
fears for their liberty were “misplaced,” Keown insisted, as the
British had “no plan to restrict colonial liberties or impose
authoritarian administration.”
Even if America’s revolution was just, was it
“proportionate” to the good it sought? Keown thinks not, even
though the new nation’s democracy was “impressive.” But arguing
against it, Keown claimed the revolution “opened the door to the
decimation of the Native Americans [and] also pitted colonist
against Parliament, white American against African-American,
neighbor against neighbor, and father against son. He also
alleged that America’s Revolution may have spawned the French
Revolution and its “bloodbath.” Finally, Keown argued that
Americans’ lacked “right intent,” because they refused British
peace overtures and mistreated loyal Tories, often seizing their
property. In fact, all of the British “peace” overtures,
including the 1778 overture by Lord Carlisle, demanded America
submit to the British crown. Adamant Tories got better treatment
than defeated American “traitors” likely would have. And the
atrocities on British prisoner ships, where American deaths
exceeded combat mortality, likely rank as the war’s worst
crimes.
Perhaps Keown’s charge that American independence prolonged
slavery is his most egregious. Britain abolished slavery in 1833,
freeing about 800,000 slaves in its colonies, primarily the
Caribbean. British abolition was achieved after decades of
humanitarian appeals but was accelerated by a bloody slave revolt
and repression in Jamaica. Interestingly, abolition of the
British slave trade in 1807 was almost concurrent with America’s
own end to the importation of slaves, as mandated by the
Constitution. Would Britain have abolished slavery in 1833, with
compensation for owners, if America’s own then 2 million slaves
were included?
And to what extent did America’s Revolution, with its
rhetoric about human equality, fuel abolitionism in both America
and Britain? How would an imperial and unchallenged Britain have
dealt with America’s tribal peoples? Britain’s record before the
Revolution, and its treatment of indigenous people in Africa and
Asia later, provide no clear evidence that the end result would
have differed. As to Keown’s claims of American paranoia about
British plots against their liberties, he of course wrote with
benefit of hindsight. Americans were primarily Whigs and
identified with the 18th parliamentary cause against
royal authoritarianism. The Tory regime in London, still tainted
for many by its historic fealty to the crown, aroused not
unjustified suspicions. More importantly, America’s Founders,
many of them inspired by Calvinist doubts about human nature,
rightly feared any assaults upon liberty, however incremental, as
potential steps towards tyranny.
America’s British overlords were revoking colonial
charters, imposing direct parliamentary taxes without consent
from colonial legislatures, dissolving and relocating those
legislatures, restricting the right to trials by their peers,
putting colonial judges onto their own payroll, and quartering
large numbers of British troops in the colonies whose targets
clearly were the colonials and not external enemies. After
Lexington and Concord, the British king declared war on his
subjects, for which he hired German mercenaries. As to Boston’s
“criminality,” the Americans were to be taxed for any offloaded
tea, whether they bought it or not. Peacefully dumping the tea in
Boston Harbor seems almost Gandhi-like.
As to faulting the French Revolution’s crimes on the very
different American Revolution, this is akin to blaming
Christianity for its heresies and imposters. The French collapse
into irreligion, murder and dictatorship, in the aftermath of
royal ineptitude and repression, should not be faulted on the
American Revolution’s principles of ordered liberty. Keown quoted
John Wesley’s opposition to the American Revolution, which was
mostly a rehash of Samuel Johnson’ s critique. But Wesley as late
as 1775 called Americans an “oppressed people” who “asked for
nothing more than their legal rights, and that in the most modest
and inoffensive manner.” Only later, fearing potential revolution
in Britain itself, did Wesley condemn the Americans.
Wesley’s main disciple in America, who would essentially
create American Methodism, was Francis Asbury, who vigorously
dissented from Wesley’s view on the war, saying he was “truly
sorry that the venerable man ever dipped into the politics of
America.” If Wesley had “been a subject of America, no doubt he
would have been as zealous an advocate of the American cause.”
Asbury would later meet President George Washington, that
“matchless man,” and hail the “most excellent constitution of
these states, which is at present the admiration of the world.”
As Keown acknowledged, early American Catholics largely agreed
with the Methodist Bishop about the new republic.
Keown concluded that the American Revolution is widely
viewed as “just” but likely failed to satisfy all, or perhaps not
any, of Just War’s 7 criteria. He hoped this conclusion would
“provoke a renewed appreciation of the strictness of the just war
tradition.” But bending Just War standards into an asymptotic and
unattainable measure, rather than simply disputing American
independence per se, seems to be the wider goal of many on the
Religious Left, who will welcome Keown’s arguments. Meanwhile,
shouldn’t Keown, who is himself English, also examine whether
British actions during 1775-1781 meet Just War criteria?!
