Conservative History Journal

Tory Historian, being an Anglospherist, takes the view that the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent war was, in actual fact, another civil war within the English commonwealth, the last act of that struggle between autocracy and liberty that started in the 1640s and continued through the 1680s.

A recent book by Michael Barone, the well-known American political analyst, “Our First Revolution”, deals with that theme through a history and discussion of the 1688 Revolution.

Here we run into a difficulty for it was a Whig Revolution. In the case of the American Revolution, political opinion was divided in Britain not according to party lines in so far as there were set political parties at the time. The great hero of conservative thought, Edmund Buke, famously supported the colonists. Others, such as Dr Johnson, were more sceptical, to put it mildly.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Given the important part played by Virginia plantation owners in those events of 1776, this remains an important and hard to answer question.

For all of that few can resist the words of that Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

James Rummel defines Fourth of July on Chicagoboyz while Rick Moran on Right Wing Nuthouse “liveblogs” from the Continental Congress.