Mark Tooley
has kindly replied to my paper which argued that
America’s War for Independence was unjust. His reply, much of
which is taken up with a broadly accurate summary of my paper,
makes some interesting points. It fails, however, to dent my
argument.
Tooley begins and ends by targeting the “Religious Left”
for trying to reinterpret the traditional “just war” criteria
into “impossibly stratospheric standards, so that no war can ever
be moral.” He claims that this “stratospheric standard” seems to
afflict my analysis. Not so. Regardless of what the “Religious
Left” may or may not think about war, I adopt the traditional
just war criteria without gloss. And while those criteria are not
“stratospheric” they are strict: a war must satisfy them all, and
do so convincingly, if it is to be just. The American War for
Independence signally failed to do so.
Tooley notes my conclusion that the colonial uprising may
have satisfied two of the seven criteria: “competent authority”
and “probability of success.” Of the latter he writes that it
seems obvious that it was satisfied because the rebels won. This
does not follow: the probability of success must be judged at the
beginning, not the end. As David McCullough puts it in his
impressive book 1776 the result seemed, to those who had
been with George Washington from the beginning of the conflict,
“little short of a miracle.” What, then, of Tooley’s response to
my conclusion that the war did not satisfy the remaining
criteria?
Was war a “last resort”? Tooley comments that the colonial
trade embargo was “disrupted by events at Lexington and Concord.”
These “events” were, of course, the deliberate resort to lethal
violence by rebels in order to retain arms they had stolen from
the authorities (clearly with a view to turning them on their
lawful owners). Lexington and Concord were evidence, as one
military historian has put it, of “planned aggression” by the
rebels. Moreover, the response of the Continental Congress to
these “events” was not the reigning in of the New England
aggressors but an endorsement and escalation of their
violence.
To my point that other colonies, like Canada and India,
gained independence without resort to arms, Tooley replies that I
did not consider fully what effect America’s successful
Revolution had on British governance. Not only did I not consider
it fully, I did not consider it at all. I did not do so because
it has no bearing on whether the American rebels used force as a
“last resort.”
As for “right intention,” the rebels failed to meet this
criterion not only because they lacked a “just cause” which they
could intentionally pursue, but also because they unfairly
subjected loyalist Americans to unjust expropriation and exile.
Tooley’s speculation that the loyalists were treated better than
defeated rebels would have been is but another irrelevance. He
mentions the thousands of deaths of rebels on British prison
hulks. This was, indeed, appalling. But deaths from imprisonment,
disease and starvation are an obviously foreseeable consequence
of wars and serve to reinforce the immorality of waging
war unless all the just war criteria are satisfied. The “Patriot”
leaders must bear the awesome responsibility for much if not all
of the dreadful death and destruction which resulted, on both
sides, from the unjust war they prosecuted.
Tooley claims that my “most egregious” charge is that the
war surely prolonged slavery, since Britain abolished slavery
throughout the Empire in 1833 whereas it would take another 30
years, and a civil war of obscene, fraternal carnage to achieve
the same result in America. Would Britain have abolished slavery
in 1833, he asks, if it had meant freeing the many slaves in
America and compensating their owners? But, as he notes, the
British abolished their profitable slave trade in 1807 and,
“after decades of humanitarian appeals,” slavery itself. The
force of those appeals would surely have applied as much to
slavery in America as elsewhere. And why need abolition have
involved compensating owners? He may speculate that
Britain would not have abolished slavery in its American colonies
in 1833. But what we know is that Britain freed its
slaves decades before America and without resort to war. The
burden is on Tooley to show that, without the Revolution, the
British would have maintained slavery in its American colonies
(and even were he able to do so it would not justify the
Revolution.)
Significantly, only four years before the Revolution an
English court had freed an American slave in London on the ground
that slavery was “odious” to the common law. This celebrated case
may well have encouraged the American colonies, at least the
southern colonies, to break with Britain precisely to forestall
abolition of slavery by the British. For all the hypocritical
rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence (drafted by a man who
even enslaved his own children) about all men being created
equal, it was the British who abolished slavery first. As Dr.
Samuel Johnson so witheringly put it in his brilliant refutation
of the rebel cause: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
What of the requirement of a “just cause”? Tooley claims
that the British “aroused not unjustified suspicions” and that
the Founders, many inspired by Calvinist doubts about human
nature, feared “any assaults upon liberty, however incremental,
as potential steps towards tyranny.” But “suspicions” of
“potential steps towards tyranny,” whether inspired by
questionable religious beliefs or otherwise, are a long, long way
from providing an objectively just cause for war. This is all the
more so when those suspicions prove utterly unfounded, for it is
accepted that the British had no wish to impose tyranny on the
colonies. As a leading source on “just cause” explains, war is
permissible only to confront a “real and certain” danger, that
is, “to protect innocent life, to preserve conditions necessary
for decent human existence, and basic human rights.” As another
puts it: “the damage inflicted by the aggressor…must be lasting,
grave and certain.” Suspicions of potential future steps toward
tyranny, particularly when they are imaginary, simply do not
suffice.
What, in any event, were these supposedly “tyrannical”
steps? Indiscriminate slaughter? Pillage? Torture? No: steps such
as reasonable taxation. That the colonists could not elect
members of Parliament is neither here nor there. Many in Britain
were taxed, and taxed far higher than the American colonists, but
had no right to vote. “Taxation without representation” is a
crude slogan, not a rational argument. Why was it unjust
(let alone tyrannical) for the mother country to tax its
colonies? In particular, why was it unjust when the tax was to
help offset the massive cost the mother country had incurred to
protect the colonies from the predations of the French? (Had it
not been for that enormous expenditure, Americans might well now
be eating garlic rather than granola and playing boules rather
than baseball.) There is certainly nothing in the just war
tradition to support the extravagant claim that taxpayers who
(like the author, a resident of D.C.) cannot elect members of the
sovereign legislature have a just cause for rebellion.
The other alleged justifications for the rebellion cited by
Tooley, which are also answered in my original paper, fare no
better. For example, legislation was indeed enacted by Parliament
to provide for the quartering of soldiers (though not, contrary
to popular myth, in private homes). What did the rebels expect
when they engaged in treason by arson, assault, riot and robbery?
The British Government in 1776 did no more than the U.S. Federal
Government would have done in 1876 if confronted with open
rebellion in one of its Territories.
Tooley claims that I blame the repression of the French
Revolution on the example of the American Revolution’s ideals of
ordered liberty. This is misleading. I merely observed that the
financial cost of the war may have helped bankrupt the ancien
régime and thereby have precipitated the French
Revolution.
In conclusion, America’s War for Independence falls so far
short of meeting the just war criteria that it is surprising that
anyone who has considered the matter, at least anyone who
subscribes to the just war tradition, should think otherwise.
Endorsement of the Revolution rests more on emotion and myth than
on reason and fact. The war’s blatant injustice may well be why
two out of three American colonists did not support it. They were
right.
