The colonists had been groping toward this denial of Parliament’s power from the beginning of the controversy. For a decade they had engaged in a remarkable constitutional debate with the British over the nature of public power, representation, and the empire. This debate exposed for the first time just how divergent America’s previous political experience had been from that of the mother country.
With the passage of the Stamp Act, Parliament’s first unmistakable tax levy on Americans, American intellectual resistance was immediately raised to the highest plane of principle. “It is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted rights of Englishmen,” the Stamp Act Congress declared in 1765, “that no taxes should be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.” And since “the people of these colonies are not, and from their local circumstances, cannot be represented in the House of Commons in Great Britain,” the colonists would be represented and taxed only by persons who were known and chosen by themselves and who served in their respective legislatures. This statement defined the American position at the outset of the controversy, and despite subsequent confusion and stumbling, the colonists never abandoned this essential point.
Once the British ministry sensed a stirring of colonial opposition to the Stamp Act, a number of English government pamphleteers set out to explain and justify Parliament’s taxation of the colonies. Although the arguments of these writers differed, they all eventually agreed that Americans, like Englishmen everywhere, were subject to acts of Parliament through a system of “virtual” representation. These writers argued that it was this concept of virtual representation, as distinct from actual representation, that gave Parliament its supreme authority—its sovereignty. One government pamphleteer wrote that even though the colonists, like “nine-tenths of the people of Britain,” did not in fact choose any representative to the House of Commons, they were undoubtedly “a part, and an important part of the Commons of Great Britain: they are represented in Parliament in the same manner as those inhabitants of Britain are who have not voices in elections.”
During the eighteenth century the British electorate made up only a tiny proportion of the nation; probably only one in six British adult males had the right to vote, compared with two out of three in America. In addition, Britain’s electoral districts were a confusing mixture of sizes and shapes left over from centuries of history. Some of the constituencies were large, with thousands of voters, but others were small and more or less in the pocket of a single great landowner. Many of the electoral districts had few voters, and some so-called rotten boroughs had no inhabitants at all. One town, Dunwich, continued to send representatives to Parliament even though it had long since slipped into the North Sea. At the same time, some of England’s largest cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, which had grown suddenly in the mid eighteenth century, sent no representatives to Parliament. Although radical reformers, among them John Wilkes, increasingly criticized this jumbled political structure, parliamentary reform was slow in coming and would not begin until 1832. Many Englishmen, as did Edmund Burke in 1774, justified this hodgepodge of representation by claiming that each member of Parliament represented the whole British nation, and not just the particular locality he came from. According to this view, people were represented in England not by the process of election, which was considered incidental to representation, but rather by the mutual interests that members of Parliament were presumed to share with all Englishmen for whom they spoke—including those, like the colonists, who did not actually vote for them.
The Americans immediately and strongly rejected these British claims that they were “virtually” represented in the same way that the nonvoters of cities like Manchester and Birmingham were. In the most notable colonial pamphlet written in opposition to the Stamp Act, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes (1765), Daniel Dulany of Maryland admitted the relevance in England of virtual representation, but he denied its applicability to America. For America, he wrote, was a distinct community from England and thus could hardly be represented by members of Parliament with whom it had no common interests. Others pushed beyond Dulany’s argument, however, and challenged the very idea of virtual representation. If the people were to be properly represented in a legislature, many colonists said, not only did they have to vote directly for the members of the legislature, but they also had to be represented by members whose numbers were proportionate to the size of the population they spoke for. What purpose is served, asked James Otis of Massachusetts in 1765, by the continual attempts of Englishmen to justify the lack of American representation in Parliament by citing the examples of Manchester and Birmingham, which returned no members to the House of Commons? “If those now so considerable places are not represented, they ought to be.”
In the New World, electoral districts were not the products of history that stretched back centuries, but rather were recent and regular creations that were related to changes in population. When new towns in Massachusetts and new counties in Virginia were formed, new representatives customarily were sent to the respective colonial legislatures. As a consequence, many Americans had come to believe in a very different kind of representation from that of the English. Their belief in “actual” representation made the process of election not incidental but central to representation. Actual representation stressed the closest possible connection between the local electors and their representatives. For Americans it was only proper that representatives be residents of the localities they spoke for and that people of the locality have the right to instruct their representatives. Americans thought it only fair that localities be represented more or less in proportion to their population. In short, the American belief in actual representation pointed toward the fullest and most equal participation of the people in the process of government that the modern world had ever seen.
Yet while Americans were denying Parliament’s right to tax them because they were not represented in the House of Commons, they knew that Parliament had exercised some authority over their affairs during the previous century. They therefore tried to explain what that authority should be. What was the “due subordination” that the Stamp Act Congress admitted Americans owed Parliament? Could the colonists accept parliamentary legislation but not taxation? Could they accept “external” customs duties for the purpose of regulating trade, but not “internal” stamp taxes for the purpose of raising revenue? In his famous Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson rejected the idea that Parliament could rightly impose “external” or “internal” taxes and made clear that the colonists opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation. But Dickinson recognized that the empire required some sort of central regulatory authority, particularly for commerce, and conceded Parliament’s supervisory legislative power so far as it preserved “the connection between the several parts of the British empire.” The empire, it seemed to many colonists, was a unified body for some affairs but not for others.
To counter all these halting and fumbling efforts by the colonists to divide parliamentary authority, the British offered a simple but powerful argument. Since they could not conceive of the empire as anything but a single, unified community, they found absurd and meaningless all these American distinctions between trade regulations and taxation, between “external” and “internal” taxes, and between separate spheres of authority. If Parliament even “in one instance” was as supreme over the colonists as it was over the people of England, wrote a subcabinet official, William Knox, in 1769, then the Americans were members “of the same community with the people of England.” On the other hand, if Parliament’s authority over the colonists was denied “in any particular,” then it must be denied in “all instances,” and the union between Great Britain and the colonies must be dissolved. “There is no alternative,” Knox concluded. “Either the colonies are part of the community of Great Britain or they are in a state of nature with respect to her, and in no case can be subject to the jurisdiction of that legislative power which represents her community, which is the British Parliament.”
What made this British argument so powerful was its basis in the widely accepted doctrine of sovereignty—the belief that in every state there could be only one final, indivisible, and uncontestable supreme authority. This was the most important concept of eighteenth-century English political theory, and it became the issue over which the empire was finally broken.
This idea that, in the end, every state had to have one single supreme undivided law-making authority had been the basis of the British position from the beginning. The British expressed this concept of sovereignty officially in the Declaratory Act of 1766, which, following the repeal of the Stamp Act, affirmed Parliament’s authority to make laws binding the colonists “in all cases whatsoever.” It was natural for the British to locate sovereignty in Parliament, for it was the institution to which they paid the greatest respect. Indeed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the veneration felt by metropolitan Britons toward their Parliament. All good Britons could be suspicious of crown power but not of Parliament. Parliament had always been the bulwark of their liberties, their protector against crown abuses.
The colonists could never share this traditional reverence toward Parliament, and on this issue they inevitably parted from their fellow Englishmen, not by rejecting the doctrine of sovereignty but by relocating it. In 1773, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson was provoked into directly challenging the radical movement and its belief in the limited nature of Parliament’s power. In a dramatic and well-publicized speech to the Massachusetts legislature, Hutchinson attempted once and for all to clarify the central constitutional issue between America and Great Britain and to show the colonists how unreasonable their views were. “I know of no line,” he declared, “that can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies, as it is impossible there should be two independent legislatures in one and the same state.”
By 1773 many Americans despaired of trying to divide what royal officials told them could not be divided. The Massachusetts House of Representatives had a simple answer to Hutchinson’s position. If, as Governor Hutchinson had said, there was no middle ground between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies from Parliament, the House members felt that there could be no doubt that “we were thus independent.” The logic of sovereignty therefore forced a fundamental shift in the American position.
By 1774 the leading colonists, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were arguing that only the separate American legislatures were sovereign in America. According to this argument, Parliament had no final authority over America, and the colonies were connected to the empire only through the king. The most the colonists would concede was that Parliament had the right to regulate their external commerce only “from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries,” as the Declarations and Resolves of the First Continental Congress put it. But the British government remained committed to parliamentary sovereignty embodied in the Declaratory Act, which no American leader could any longer take seriously.
It was now only a matter of time before these irreconcilable positions led to armed conflict.