scholarly journals Essay: The Mad Patriot

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Adams
Keyword(s):  
Bipolar Disorder ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
John Adams ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Exact Moment ◽  
Precise Time

Historians have tried to trace the origin of the American Revolution, but few, if any, have dared indicate an exact moment in time. Yet sufficient evidence points to the chilly afternoon of February 24, 1761, inside the Old Town House (now the Old State House) in Boston as the precise time and place. Future president John Adams, who, as a 25-year-old Boston attorney in attendance at that occasion, later declared, “Then and there was the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the Child Independence was born” (Adams to Tudor, 29 March 1817). It was “then and there” that one of the American colonies’ most notable attorneys, James Otis, Jr., gave a speech that caused tremors throughout the British Empire. Textbooks have often downplayed this moment because the man who first sparked the American Revolution—James Otis, Jr.—was considered mad. However, we know today that James Otis Jr. was probably suffering from bipolar disorder and his condition was exacerbated by alcoholism.

Sophistry, Security, and Socio-Political Structures in the American Revolution; or, Why Jamaica did not Rebel

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Political Structures

Britain's most important American colonies did not rebel in 1776. Thirteen provinces did declare their independence; but no fewer than nineteen colonies in the western hemisphere remained loyal to the mother country. Massachusetts and Virginia may have led the American revolution, but they had never been the leading colonies of the British empire. From the imperial standpoint, the significance of any of the thirteen provinces which rebelled was pale in comparison with that of Jamaica or Barbados. In the century before 1763 the recalcitrance of these two colonies had been more notorious than that of any mainland province and had actually inspired many of the imperial policies cited as long-term grievances by North American patriots in 1774. Real Whig ideology, which some historians have seen as the key to understanding the American revolution, was equally understood by Caribbean elites who, like the continental, had often proved extremely sensitive on questions of constitutional principle. Attacks of ‘frenzied rhetoric’ broke out in Jamaica in 1766 and Barbados in 1776. But these had nothing whatsoever to do with the Stamp Act or events in North America.

2. Diplomacy of the American Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
John Adams ◽  
The Us

‘Diplomacy of the American Revolution’ considers the United States' battle for independence and the diplomatic efforts required to reach agreement with Great Britain. In order to win independence, the United States had found it necessary to involve itself in the international rivalries and politics of Europe. The negotiations between the US peace commissioners — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay — and the Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, the Earl of Shelburne, Richard Oswald, and the Spanish are worth examining at this point. A number of key treaties were signed during the negotiations, including the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce and Treaty of Alliance between America and France.

II. Adam Smith's Project of an Empire

1925 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. A. Benians
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural System ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
General Opinion

It is now nearly one hundred and fifty years since the publication of the Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of American Independence. The two events, closely associated in time, recall each other; for in his famous chapter on colonies Adam Smith predicted, with little apparent regret, the loss of the American colonies, and outlined the project of an empire which he thought could have been preserved and been worth preserving. That chapter, though it did not influence the course of the controversy which called it forth, nor, for a time, the colonial policy of Great Britain, has become, none the less, a landmark in the history of the British Empire. After Adam Smith had written, it was possible to think of colonies in a new way, though it was still not impossible to treat them in the old. The united empire of which he dreamed never became a fact, or even a political programme, but the ideas which he advanced bore their fruit in general opinion, and the spirit in which he wrote was in due course to animate a generation of colonial reformers and to bring forth a new and better colonial policy. Durham and his friends did not advocate Smith's imperial Parliament, the “States General of the British Empire,” and they did advocate imperial control of colonial trade, and not his “natural system of perfect liberty and justice”; but one may believe that the faith in the future of the British Empire which inspires the speeches of Molesworth and Buller, the Report on Canada and the Art of Colonization, owed some of its vitality to the courageous Utopia imagined in the Wealth of Nations.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain

This introductory chapter briefly considers why the British American colonists had broken away from an empire that they had long revered. Americans like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from Europeans—both more democratic and more libertarian. But during the eighteenth century, Britain and its North American colonies were actually becoming more alike. However, the United States followed a different path from the dramatic transformation that painted the globe French blue and British red. That path reflected the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire.

British Historians and the American Revolution

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Middleton
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Colonies

In the year of Lexington, the irascible Dr Johnson wrote to a correspondent: ‘The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.’ Extreme in his Tory views, Johnson nevertheless reflected popular sentiment concerning the American colonies and their pretensions to independence, and his bias was to be reflected in many of the writings of the first historians who attempted to account for the late destruction of the first British empire.

Rights and Constitutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-106
Author(s):  
Mark Somos
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Inflection Point ◽  
The State ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
European State ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Enslaved African Americans

This chapter examines Otis’s speech in Paxton’s Case to understand why John Adams regarded it as the start of the American Revolution, and describes Otis’s speech as the inflection point when European state of nature theories began to turn into a revolutionary American discourse. In Otis’s system, the state of nature was a source of substantive rights (including life, liberty, and property) that endured in the polity and remained inalienable for both white colonists and enslaved African Americans. Newly discovered archival evidence about this key speech is presented. The chapter follows further strands of state of nature interpretation before the Stamp Act, including Williams’s 1762 election sermon and polemical publications by Otis, which introduced the meaning of the state of nature as interstate relations into the revolutionary discourse. It concludes with Thomas Pownall’s view of citizens of the British Empire sharing the sociability, interdependence, and common rights that characterize the state of nature.

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