The fine British tradition of wishing Americans well on Independence Day

Best wishes to all my American friends, this fourth of July.

I say that with complete sincerity, even though I’m British, and the celebration is of American independence from Britain. In fact, by wishing them well on this day, I’m merely perpetuating a tradition fully rooted in Britain. It stretches back to the time of that breach, nearly two and a half centuries ago.

The names of many of the leaders of the American side in that struggle still resonate today. Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin, though we draw a delicate veil over the inconvenient truth that the first two of those champions of liberty were slave owners, and the other two endorsed a constitution which allowed them to continue.

Their opposite numbers in Britain are far less well remembered. Maybe some retain a vague sense that there were two William Pitts, the elder and his son the younger, and even maybe that they both became Prime Minister. Some still recall the name of Edmund Burke, if only as the father of modern Conservatism. And there may even be those who remember the great wit and maverick, rival of the younger Pitt, Charles James Fox.

Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke

If I had to pick four figures who stand out as extraordinary from that period of British history, it would certainly be those. And they stand head and shoulders above those who prosecuted the war against the Americans, most notably King George III and his Prime Minister, Lord North.

What did those four have to say about British action against the colonists?

In 1775, even before the Declaration of Independence was issued, the elder Pitt, by then Earl of Chatham, by then already suffering from his final illness, came into the House of Lords to call for conciliation of the colonists:

We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.

On 12 June 1781, his 22-year old son, by then a Member of Parliament himself, made his own heartfelt declaration about the conflict in America to the House of Commons:

It is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical war… Where is the Englishman who on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-fought contests can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory might be declared?

The British blood whose loss he lamented was being shed on both sides – like most of his contemporaries, he saw this fight as pitting British subjects against British subjects.

Charles James Fox said something similar, speaking presciently to denounce Lord North’s behaviour towards the colonists in October 1775. He was:

the blundering pilot who had brought the nation into its present difficulties ... Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost—he has lost a whole continent.

In a pamphlet of April 1777, Edmund Burke was even blunter in his denunciation of British government policy:

When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour…

They have been told that their dissent from violent measures is an encouragement to rebellion. Men of great presumption will hold a language which is contradicted by a whole course of history. General rebellion and revolts of an whole people were never encouraged, now or at any time. They were always provoked.

The government had provoked the uprising against its rule. But it wasn’t an uprising against Britain, only against certain British leaders. Burke, Irish born and therefore aware of what oppression from London could feel like, knew what he was talking about and backed an opposition that would have hoped to do things differently had it been in office.

It was indeed the short government in which he held ministerial office that ultimately forced the King to recognise American independence.

It’s not the outlook of the men who waged a brutal and futile war in North America, but that of these outstanding figures, that I’d like to emulate.

And it’s in the spirit that I wish all my American friends a happy July the fourth.

US Independence Day Thoughts

Happy Independence Day to my US friends.

Today’s a good time to think a moment about the main architect of the document whose signing you’re celebrating, the Declaration on Independence.

Fourth of July: a time for celebration in the US,
Perhaps also for reflection everywhere...

At a time when rising racial tensions are belying the hope raised by the Civil Rights movement and the reforms that followed, it’s worth recalling one of the principal denunciations it hurls at the British King, George III:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

Don’t worry, if you know the Declaration well and don’t recognise these words, it’s not your memory letting you down. They appeared in Thomas Jefferson’s draft, but were excised from the final version. He explained later that they were removed to satisfy slave-owners in Georgia and South Carolina, and slave-traders from the Northern States.

Besides, although this passage denounces the transatlantic slave trade, it stops short of condemning slavery itself. Jefferson was a slaveholder till his death. The only slaves he ever freed were Sally Hemings, with whom he had a near forty-year affair, and the children he fathered with her.

However, he undoubtedly disliked slavery. That shouldn’t be taken as implying, though, that he was a champion of the kind of integration the US still needs so badly:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [African Americans] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Gary Younge is an outstanding (Black) British journalist with The Guardian. He and his (Black – or perhaps I should say African) American wife and their children are about to leave the US for Britain after twelve years. In an excellent valedictory piece, he mentions the hopes for progress on racial issues many expressed over the election of Barack Obama. He didn’t believe much would improve:

…one person cannot undo centuries of discrimination, no matter how much nominal power they have… He was the most progressive candidate viable for the presidency, which says a great deal, given the alternatives, but means very little, given what would be needed to significantly shift the dial on such issues as race and inequality.

Centuries of discrimination indeed. And we can see it deeply embedded in the writings of even so liberal a figure as Thomas Jefferson.

Still, none of us is free of the assumptions of our times. Jefferson is remarkable for his ability to adopt thoughts that were revolutionary for his epoch. Some of them have become part of the fabric of societies that aspire to democracy, sometimes to the point of being so familiar we run the danger of forgetting them altogether. It’s salutary to remind ourselves of what some of them were.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence
Contradictory as we all are, but he got a lot right
as well as a few things badly wrong

For instance, in his first inaugural address, he called on his fellow citizens to bear in mind:

…that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

What of his political opponents, those in particular who might oppose the very existence of the Union or its republican basis?

…let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

A couple of years earlier, Jefferson wrote to a political ally:

I am for freedom of religion, and against all manoeuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another: for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents. And I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches; and not for the raising a hue and cry against he sacred name of philosophy…

Well worth reflecting on these thoughts. Especially at a time when many are calling for restrictions of liberties in the US for the sake of religious faith (such as the refusal to perform legal gay marriages), while others are resisting the progress of science (for example by denying climate change).

More important still, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the principle that the majority is not entitled to trample on the beliefs and behaviours of a minority, simply because we dislike them. We don’t like the burqa? That doesn’t give us the right to ban it.

Worst of all, we keep forgetting that it’s essential in a democracy that “error of opinion may be tolerated.” Today the talk is all of resisting radicalisation, principally among young Muslims. But the holding of radical views isn’t and should never be illegal – that’s a net that would have caught Jefferson himself. To believe that ISIS is right and deserves support may be a view so misguided as to be imbecilic, but we have no right to forbid it.

Pick up a gun for ISIS, or conspire to give it material support, or even incite others to do so, and you have broken the law and can and should expect action against you. But espouse the opinion? That must be legitimate.

Ah, well. July 4th is not a day for too much heavy thinking. I’ll stop there.

Enjoy the fireworks!