Responding to my critique of his rejection of the American
Revolution based on traditional Christian Just War teachings,
Georgetown University Professor John Keown insists that two thirds
of colonial Americans agreed with him.
Unless he has previously undisclosed early American
polling data, his point is unproven. Probably he references an
aging John Adams’ famous supposed conjecture, 40 years after the
war, that one third of early Americans supported revolution, one
third were unsure, and one third were partial to Britain. One
writer has surmised that Adams was actually referring to American
attitudes towards the French Revolution and its British adversary,
a chief issue during Adams’ presidency.
Some scholars estimate that 15 to 20 percent of American
colonials favored Britain. Possibly about 2 percent of the
newly independent United States’ population migrated to Canada
because of their British sympathies. America’s war for independence
remarkably united 13 previously disparate colonies, as expressed by
their elected representatives. Americans sustained an often ill
clad, unfed but still viable and spirited multi-racial army for
more than 7 years, against superior invading forces that occupied
American cities and frequently ravaged the countryside. As a
percentage of population, the Revolution’s death toll would equal
about 2-3 million fatalities today, making it the most deadly
American conflict after the Civil War.
Not once after the conflict began did the cash-strapped
and often fleeing Continental Congress seriously consider surrender
or anything less than full independence. Such perseverance had to
have required considerable popular support. In contrast, dissent
against the war in the British Parliament was considerable. And
Britain’s merchant class, among others, loudly protested the war’s
costs and impact on trade. Although Britain was far more populated
and wealthier, and it did not endure attacks on the homeland except
for a spirited naval foray by John Paul Jones, it was British
public opinion that turned; America’s never did.
Keown disparages the “planned aggression” of the American
rebels at Lexington and Concord. The famous “shot heard round the
world” came only after 10 years of American political and economic
protests against British attacks on freedoms that had been historic
for Englishmen and their once loyal colonists. And no one knows who
fired it while the farmers and tradesmen lined up on Lexington
Green against invading British regulars. These uninvited royalist
troops sought to seize the arsenal of the Massachusetts colony,
arms purchased by Massachusetts taxpayers, for their own defense,
through the Massachusetts militia. The British military commander
in Boston had already dissolved Massachusetts’ legislature and
aspired to crush the colony’s new provincial congress. Britain’s
own revolts against royalist tyranny in the 1640s, after King
Charles dissolved Parliament, and in 1688, after King James II
dissolved militias in favor of his own royalist army, were fought
over similar outrages. As Winston Churchill smilingly observed to
Americans, during World War II, American Revolutionaries fought in
defense of ancient English liberties against a Germanic king
(George III’s family was from Hanover) and his German (i.e.
Hessian) mercenaries.
Keown questioned whether the American Revolution employed
force as a “last resort.” But after 10 years of appeals for redress
of grievances, appeals supported by British statesmen like the Earl
of Chatham and Edmund Burke, how much longer should the Americans
have persisted? Should they have waited until all their
legislatures were dispersed, their leaders imprisoned, their arms
seized, their cities occupied, and their courts usurped by British
military judges? How could they possibly have met Just War
teaching’s calls for legitimate authority and probability of
success at that late hour?
As Chatham, Britain’s famed premier during the French and
Indian War, declared in Parliament in 1777, two years after war
began: “If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a
foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my
arms — never — never — never! You cannot conquer America.” And
at the start of the political struggle with Britain, in 1766,
Chatham was similarly sympathetic: “I rejoice that America has
resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of
liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit
instruments to make slaves of the rest.”
Chatham understood what Keown evidently does not.
Britain’s Tory regime of that time was assaulting not just American
liberties but ultimately English liberties, in pursuit of what
Burke denounced as “injustice, oppression and absurdity.” America’s
struggle was more than a mere tax dispute but an assertion of
inalienable rights rooted in British custom and law and further
refined in the Declaration of Independence. Keown faults Americans
for all the war’s inevitable horrors. But why not fault instead the
Tory regime’s dispatch of troops to America to suppress their
previously faithful subjects? Does Just War permit colonial
governments unlimited license upon their colonists, while allowing
the colonists no resort at all, except to suffer endlessly until
both law and liberty are extinguished?
As to slavery, Keown’s connection of it to Just War
teaching in this case is unclear. The British were not fighting to
end slavery, and Americans were not fighting to defend it. Colonies
where slavery least existed, in New England, were the most adamant
for independence. Deep South colonies were more reluctant. British
Tories who fled to Canada took their slaves, protected by British
law. Thousands of black Americans fought in the American Army,
influencing George Washington’s own eventual anti-slavery views. In
contrast, the infamous British General Banastre Tarleton, author of
the “Waxhaw Massacre” in South Carolina, later served in the
British Parliament as a fervid defender of the slave trade. Britain
abolished slavery, which was confined mostly to its Caribbean
colonies, only more than 50 years after the war and could do so
only by agreeing to compensate the owners. Could Britain have
afforded this enormous expense had America’s slaves added several
times to the cost? And did not the words of the Declaration of
Independence, affirming human equality, fan the tide of eventual
abolition by both Britain and America?
Uncharitably, Keown berates the Declaration’s author for
supposedly having enslaved his own children. In fact, all of Sally
Hemmings’s children eventually were freed or permitted to escape.
Their paternity remains unproven. And the latest scholarship argues
against an aging Jefferson fathering multiple children with a young
slave mistress while also living with his grown daughters, their
husbands, his grandchildren, and hundreds of house guests, with
none of them apparently noticing. Unlike Washington, Jefferson
failed to free all but a few of his slaves, partly thanks to
enormous debts that deprived him of ownership. But when signing the
law outlawing America’s external slave trade (permitted but not
mandated by the Constitution, as I incorrectly said in my earlier
article), contemporaneous to Britain’s own ban, he became the last
president publicly to denounce slavery until Abraham
Lincoln.
Of course, America’s religious and secular left commonly
deride America as little more than a long catalogue of crimes
against the Indians, slaves, later immigrants, Japanese internees,
and countless ostensible global victims of American imperialism, in
stark comparison with an otherwise supposedly blameless humanity
outside America. For them, the American Revolution is a petty tax
dispute waged by hypocritical slave masters, ushering in an
infamous empire. These scoffers are also typically campus lounge
pacifists, who see Just War teaching primarily as a tool for
proving no war is just.
Keown is more sophisticated than this crowd and, as an
orthodox Catholic, cannot be easily counted among the utopians of
the Religious Left. But his analysis shows a bias against America.
And his stringent portrayal of Just War teaching begs the question
of whether he would ever support any armed conflict. Even the most
noble among fallen humanity are unlikely to neatly thread all the
needles that academics like Keown demand. And Just War teaching,
traditionally, is not just a limitation on war but is also, no less
strongly, a command for force when required by
justice.
America’s flawed but heroic founders, who risked their
livelihoods and shed their blood that future generations might live
better than they, pursued justice. The whole world has benefited
from their sacrifice. If their cause was not just, then whose cause
is?
