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RIGHTS and CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTIES of the BRAVE Americans” as well as the rights of Englishmen at home.29
Shaw’s first essay used the same literary tactics as others in the series, ranging through the past to find examples that could be used for the present. Having already printed numerous pieces that decried the corruption and fall of republican Rome, Shaw railed against “Neronian Cruelty,” knowing that previous issues had set the stage for his historical allusion. Likewise, he could warn that conspiracies were afoot to destroy English and American liberties, and simply mention the king and his ministers without having to explain which particular ministerial or parliamentary actions he had in mind; those points too had already been raised. He placed God and Magna Carta on the side of good, arrayed against pensioners and placemen who personified the bad; he juxtaposed liberty and progress against slavery and ruin. These were all familiar tropes, words evoking symbols, symbols incarnated in the political reality he constructed for his readers. Although Shaw reminded those readers of their duty to defend their rights, when he called for Englishmen to rise up and fight oppression he did not mean literally, as the colonists were doing. Rather, he expected them to be able to make subtle distinctions, to know what separated Britons from Americans as well as what joined them in common cause.
The Crisis is notable for the assumptions that Thomas Shaw and the other men behind it had about the intellectual world of their readers.30 They played off Britons’ deepest fears, capitalizing on a state of mind that they did not create but sought to reinforce. Conspiracy theory was as popular then as ever; not surprisingly, conspiracies loomed large in the Anglo-American political world described by The Crisis. Conspiracy against American rights marked imperial policy; conspiracy
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against the rights of Englishmen, in England itself, would come next, readers were warned. The weekly reserved its sharpest, harshest comments for those most responsible for these dark designs: Lord North, “engendered in the womb of hell,”31 who headed a depraved ministry; the Earl of Bute, long out of power but still active behind the scenes, corrupting others with his baneful influence;32 Lord Chancellor Apsley and Chief Justice Mansfield, who twisted the law to serve unjust ends; secretary of state for American affairs Lord George Germain and his predecessor, the Earl of Dartmouth, who endorsed and passed along the nefarious policies that brutalized Americans; General Thomas Gage, who in his dual role as army commander in North America and governor of Massachusetts, set loose the troops to murder and plunder; Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, mercenaries whose pens were for hire, defending the indefensible actions of “A Bloody Court, A Bloody Ministry, And A Bloody Parliament.”33
Unlike other newspaper essays and pamphlets that attacked George III obliquely through his ministers, The Crisis targeted the King directly and repeatedly, utterly undeterred by Axtell’s conviction in court. The authors did not mince words, even likening George III to Charles I and suggesting that he deserved the same fate. One issue addressed him derisively as his “TYRANNIC MAJESTY—the DEVIL” and ticked off a litany of his wrongs before concluding that in his case there could be only one proper judgment: the”Wages of these Sins is Death.”34 Nevertheless, The Crisis still held out hope that the empire could be restored and the nation saved if George III found his better
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self—that is, if he embraced Viscount Bolingbroke’s notion of the patriot king.35 Remembering what George III himself had stated over the years about his commitment to serving his subjects, Shaw and his compatriots dismissed their flesh and blood monarch as a perversion of Bolingbroke’s ideal of the people’s king who would selflessly protect them and uphold the principles of the Glorious Revolution.36 Asking, rhetorically, “are we not Descendants” of those patriots who overthrew James II and restored balanced government, The Crisis urged its readers to denounce Tyranny “in the Name of those Ancestors.”37
Although the authors associated with The Crisis stood by the idea of mixed and balanced government within a monarchical system, they reflected the republican tendencies of what historian Caroline Robbins called the “commonwealth” tradition.38 There lay an inherent tension between their own brand of libertarianism and their desire to preserve, even strengthen, constitutional government. Like so many of their generation, including those whose politics may have differed from theirs, the authors who wrote for The Crisis took it as a given that fundamental
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rights came from God and through nature, that all legitimate government depended on the consent of the governed, and that even though the king-in-parliament reigned supreme, no one stood above the law and no power short of God’s could be unlimited. The Glorious Revolution had restored principles going back to the ancient constitution of Britain, historically difficult to reconstruct but no less real because of it, disappearing into a foggy Saxon past for some and back to even earlier Gothic antecedents for others.39
Where modern scholars have attempted to separate intellectual threads, The Crisis was typical of the age in weaving them all into its own ideological fabric. For example, one issue alluded approvingly to the great medieval jurists Henry de Bracton and Sir John Fortescue. “The king must not be under man but under God and under law, because law makes the king,” de Bracton had written, adding that there “is no rex where will rules rather than lex”—a position on limited government not so different from what The Crisis would champion five hundred years later.40 That so many of the pen names of the authors in its pages—Junius, Brutus, Casca—were drawn from the history of republican Rome was indicative of the tendency to run ancient and modern together, to
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deal in archetypes when advising those living in the present on how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Americans had been right, insisted The Crisis, to resist the foolish policies pursued by Lord North and, before him, the unconstitutional connivings of George Grenville. Virtual representation arguments had been a canard; Americans should have been allowed to tax themselves, which better and worthier men like Lord Camden and the Earl of Chatham—when Chatham was true to his principles, that is—understood.41 Oppressed by crown and parliament, Americans had the right, even the duty, to resist, as indeed did all people who suffered from tyranny.42 The Crisis hinted broadly that any conflict between mother country and colonies would eventually draw in France and Spain, a geopolitical awareness shared by dissident colonists across the Atlantic.43
When The Crisis first went to press it had not been difficult to draw analogies between British and American conditions, to speak of the common cause, a transatlantic association of the aggrieved. To those who defended government and contended that protesting Americans would not be satisfied with anything less than full independence, The Crisis countered that discontented colonists only wanted those rights guaranteed them as Englishmen: they would not leave the empire unless driven from it. Early on, Shaw and his associates seemed to believe that reconciliation was still possible, that the empire could serve the needs and meet the aspirations of Americans as well as Britons.
After the shooting started, The Crisis joined a chorus of those calling for commissioners to be sent out from London to negotiate a
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peaceful settlement.44 When, after more than a year of bloodshed, it became evident that no accommodation could be reached, that Americans who had once argued they only wanted their rights within the empire now insisted they could only secure them outside it, The Crisis did not denounce them as disingenuous
