On this past Sunday we celebrated our 245th year of independence from British kings. In the spirit of the day I would like to share some words from a man who was there at the start of the fight.
Sixty-seven years after Lexington and Concord, 91-year-old Levi Preston, who was from Danvers, Massachusetts, and who had been a Minute Man, was interviewed by a young Dartmouth student named Mellen Chamberlain about the so-called English oppressions that had caused the war. By the time of Chamberlain’s interview in 1842, Preston had come to be regarded as an historical oddity and living relic of the past.
“Captain Preston,” asked Chamberlain, “why did you go to the Concord Fight, the 19th of April, 1775?”
“Why did I go?”
“Yes, my histories tell me that you men of the Revolution took up arms against ‘intolerable oppressions.’ What were they?”
“I didn’t feel them.”
“What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”
“I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William [in the harbor]. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them.”
“Well then, what about the Tea Tax?”
“Tea Tax! I never drank a cup of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.”
“Then I suppose you were reading Sydney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”
“Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns and the Almanac.”
“Well, then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to fight?”
“Young man,” said Preston, “What we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to govern ourselves. They didn’t mean we should.”
Here we see the cause of the American Revolution laid bare. Strip away the lustrous veneer of 18th Century notions like Rationalism and Enlightenment and we see once again that “all politics is local,” to quote the former Speaker of the House, Thomas “Tip” O’Neil.
This conversation also gives us a clear idea of one unexpected facet of the American Revolution: revolutions are not always caused by revolutionary ideas. Ours was a conservative venture fought to resist the growing power of the British state. There were appeals to the King about the oppression of Parliament; there were appeals to Parliament for relief from the King; there were appeals to the Courts based on colonial Charters.
Only after these complaints about the violation of the rights of Englishmen were exhausted did Americans begin to talk about the natural rights of man, what we now call human rights. Natural law was much safer ground. It was ambiguous, and it was fashionable at the time, and natural law was moral, since it was based in a faith on God and in the perfection of his creation. People accepted it as one of the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Paine of Virginia, Founding Father and author of the pamphlet “Common Sense,” described the new republican spirit: “What we formerly called revolutions were little more than a change of persons or an alteration of local circumstances. They rose and fell like things of course, and had nothing in their existence or their fate that could influence beyond the spot that produced them.”
But revolutions are much like a snowball rolling downhill: they may start small, but they soon grow to an avalanche, and probably the most remarkable aspect of the American Revolution is that it soon ceased to be a revolution. To be sure, political and social divisions still existed after the shooting stopped, but there was no guillotine, no “Terror” as there was following the French Revolution, nor was there civil war as after the Russian Revolution.
Instead of going to a gulag, men like Levi Preston went home, where they were free to work their fields and raise their children and worship their God without some unseen authority across the Atlantic Ocean telling them what to do.
Personally, I cannot imagine being ruled by a king. I probably would have picked up a musket, too.
Dwayne Walls Jr. has previously written a story about his late father’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease and a first-person recollection of 9/11 for the newspaper. Walls is the author of the book “Backstage at the Lost Colony.” He and his wife Elizabeth live in Pittsboro.
