Mr. President Read Free Page A

Parliament. One New England minister told his congregation that when the king signed the repeal, he said that “if he had known it would have given his good subjects in America so much uneasiness, he never would have signed the former act.” 5
    In 1767 John Dickinson, in his influential
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
, urged colonists to apply economic pressures to force the repeal of a new round of taxation, but he simultaneously entreated them to eschew any measures that would alienate them from their mother country, and in particular from their king. “We have an excellent prince, in whose good dispositions toward us we may confide,” he wrote. Even if the king was momentarily deceived “by artful men,” he would not become “cruel or unjust,” and his “anger” would not be “implacable.” “Let us behave like dutiful children who have received unmerited blows from a beloved parent,” he concluded. “Let us complain to our parent; but let our complaints speak at the same time the language of affliction and veneration.” 6
    Through the late 1760s and early 1770s, as Parliament continued to thrust taxes on American colonists, and as colonists continued to resist, not even the wildest rebel dared question the king himself. In part to prove they were patriots rather than traitors, protesters continued to profess allegiance, to celebrate the king’s birthday and the anniversary of his coronation, and to begin all their raucous toasts with a drink to his health. Patriots believed that if the king would only cast away his devious advisers and listen to the colonists’ complaints without prejudice, he would side with his American subjects. At least publicly, they
had
to profess that belief; otherwise, they would be challenging the very heart of British government and culture.
    With each new round of repression, colonists selected appropriate scapegoats. In 1768, for instance, the villain of choice was Earl of Hillsborough, the newly elected secretary of state for the colonies, who ordered a clampdown on those resisting the Townshend duties. When crowds covered the doors of Tories with dung, they labeled it “Hillsborough paint.”
    In the Tea Act controversy of 1773, colonials directed their ire at Parliament, Prime Minister Lord North, the East India Company directors, and the agents who expected to sell tea in the colonies, whom they reviled as “political bombardiers.” When thousands upon thousands of citizens met in Boston’s Old South Church to protest the three boatloads of tea anchored in the harbor nearby, their angry speeches never tied King George III personally to the Tea Act, the East India Company, or any foul deed, even though he certainly had been a willing partner and active agent.
    Even in September 1774, as citizens throughout Massachusetts cast off all British rule outside of Boston, and as they riddled their protests with such rancorous phrases as “ransack our pockets,” “the parricide which points the dagger to our bosoms,” “numberless curses of slavery upon us,” and “unparalleled usurpation of unconstitutional power” (these quotations from the Suffolk Resolves), their resolutions always included a deferential disclaimer, offered at the beginning. Again, from the Suffolk Resolves:
    That whereas his majesty, George the Third, is the rightful successor to the throne of Great-Britain, and justly entitled to the allegiance of the British realm, and agreeable to compact,of the English colonies in America—therefore, we, the heirs and successors of the first planters of this colony, do cheerfully acknowledge the said George the Third to be our rightful sovereign, and that said covenant is the tenure and claim on which are founded our allegiance and submission. 7
    The patriots’ ability to engage in actual rebellion while professing deference appeared to have no bounds. A final caveat in the Suffolk Resolves offers a clue to their collective cognitive dissonance.