The most interesting response from Parliament to the imperial crisis came, not surprisingly, from Edmund Burke. An Irishman by birth, Burke had been raised Church of England though his mother and sister were Roman Catholic. Crucially, this upbringing in a mixed family radically shaped Burke’s understanding of the world, he as always sided with the oppressed. Indeed, throughout his pre-French Revolutionary career, he supported Irish independence, Roman Catholic normalization, supported Hindus in India, and, of course, adamantly sided with the Americans during the Revolution. From his opening speech in Parliament against the Stamp Act, calling for immediate repeal, to the end of the conflict, Burke regretted the war against men and women who so clearly—at least to his mind—defended the proper notions of the English tradition. From the opening of hostilities in the spring of 1775, Burke thought of the conflict as a civil war with little hope for the restoration of a peaceful empire. He sympathized with the colonists that Parliament had innovated against them, thus depriving them of their ancient liberties. “These things depend on conventions real or understood, upon practice, accident, the humour or Genius of those who Govern or are governed, and may be, as they are, modified to infinity,” he wrote in July 1775. “No bounds ever were set to the Parliamentary power over the Colonies; for how could that have been but by special Convention. No such convention ever has been; but the reason and nature of things, and the growth of the Colonies ought to have taught Parliament to have set bounds to the exercise of its own power.” A month later, Burke held his own people in contempt. Most Englishmen, in and out of power, despised the conflict in North America, but none would stand up against the king. It was, Burke argued, a “collective madness.” In this madness and attack against Englishmen in North America, the English in the mother country had forgotten all proper political decorum. “The despair that has seized upon some, and the Listlessness that has fallen upon almost all, is surprising, and resembles more the Effect of some supernatural Cause, stupyfying and disabling the powers of a people destined to destruction, than anything I could have imagined,” a bewildered Burke wrote in August of 1775. “The people seem to have completely forgot the resources of a free government for rectifying publick mismanagements and mistakes.” Burke held feasts and parties when the king declared fast days to support the war in America, and he even briefly seceded from Parliament in protest. Perhaps, most surprisingly, in a speech before the House of Commons, Burke equated the King, as the head of the Anglican Church, with the king of the fallen angels.
In this situation, Sir, shocking to say, are we called upon by another proclamation, to go to the altar of the Almighty, with war and vengeance in our hearts, instead of the peace of our blessed Saviour. He said ‘my peace I give you;’ but we are, on this fast, to have war only in our hearts and mouths; war against our brethren. Till our churches are purified from this abominable service, I shall consider them not as the temples of the Almighty, but the synagogues of Satan. An act not more infamous, as far as respects its political purposes, than blasphemous and profane as a pretended act of national devotion—when the people are called upon, in the most solemn and awful manner, to repair to church, to partake of a sacrament, and at the foot of the altar, to commit sacrilege, to perjure themselves publicly by charging their American brethren with the horrid crime of rebellion, with propagating ‘specious falsehoods,’ when either the charge must be notoriously false, or those who make it, not knowing it to be true, call Almighty God to witness, not a specious but a most audacious and blasphemous falsehood.
Given the time period and cultural norms of the eighteenth century, it would be hard to label Burke as either a monarchist or a conservative after his actions and words during the American Revolution. He continued to hope against hope for a reconciliation and a move toward a more “federal” empire than a centralized one. England had been moving in this direction during the reign of George II, William Pitt, and Lord Newcastle, but George III had favored a much stronger empire. When, after the spring of 1778, Burke realized no reconciliation was possible, he defended America’s right to be independent. Again, it must be noted, Burke defended the American Revolution throughout the conflict with Britain, and he even helped negotiate the peace treaty in 1783.
His greatest statement in favor of the Americans came in his celebrated—at least by Americans—March 22, 1775 speech and resolutions, “Conciliation with the Colonies.” Famously, again from the standpoint of the Americans, Burke argued that Britain had created such a successful empire was because it had never intended to do so. Sounding very much like his friend, Adam Smith a year later, Burke claimed that Britain found itself with an empire by accident rather than by design. As such, it had treated its colonies well and, specifically through a policy of salutary neglect. “When I contemplate these things; when I know that the Colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form of government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection,” Burke declared.[1] In other words, America has been left to her own devices, she had flourished, and she had contributed mightily—through resources and economics—to the British commonwealth.
According to Burke, there were several reasons why the British should continue their policy of salutary neglect. First, and most important, he notes, Americans cherished their liberty.
In this Character of the Americans, a love of Freedom is the predominating feature, which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of their minds, and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely. First, the people of the Colonies are descendents of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation, which still I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The Colonists emigrated from you, when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to Liberty, but to Liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.[2]
In large part, Burke continued, the Americans so profoundly adore liberty because they are not just Protestant, but the most Protestant of Protestants, and “all Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent.” [3] In America, though, Protestantism forms the basis of all culture. “Religion, always a principle of energy, is this new people is now way worn out or impaired,” Burke argued, “and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit.” Again, Burke asserts, these are the Protestants of Protestants. “The people are protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.”[4]
Additionally Burke notes, the Americans love the law. In particular, they love English and common law, and lawyers predominate the non-agricultural interests of the colonies. Everywhere in the colonies, one finds lawyers.
I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the Deputies sent to the Congress were Lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent Bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the Law exported to the Plantations. The Colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone’s Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states, that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law.[5]
The people nurture law and the legal profession throughout the colonies, but especially in Boston. Such a love of the law, Burke continues, makes the American population “acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources.”[6]
Yet, another reason for the colonists’ love of liberty comes from the very fact of nature itself. An ocean and months separate from the colonies from the mother country. Such a circumstance will always weaken government as nothing can transpire with speed. Rather, in a Stoic fashion, those in the empire must accept nature, its consequences, and do so with patience.
All of this taken together, Burke reiterates, leads to a “fierce Spirit of Liberty.” The British should not judge America for her love of liberty, only recognize its reality. “The question is, not whether their spirit deserves praise or blame; but—what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?”[7] Again, Burke desires and invokes a Stoic response. Indeed, to harshly judge America’s love of liberty is to attenuate it at home.
In effect, we suffer as much at home, by this loosening of all ties, in this concussion of all established opinions, as we do abroad. For, in order to prove, that the Americans have no right to their Liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims, which preserve serve the whole Spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of Freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.[8]
When the issues comes to a head, Burke forcefully reminds his audience, an “Englishman is the unfittest person on earth, to argue another Englishman into slavery.”[9] Additionally, such a move toward unfreedom would be to go against the spirit of the times, the spirit of the age.
I think it is nearly as little in our power to change their republican Religion, as their free descent; or to substitute the Roman Catholick, as a penalty; or the Church of England, as an improvement. The mode of inquisition and dragooning, is going out of fashion in the old world; and I should not confide much to their efficacy in the new. The education of the Americans is also on the same unalterable bottom with their religion. You cannot persuade them to burn their books of curious science; to banish their lawyers from their courts of law; or to quench the lights of their assemblies, by refusing to choose those persons who are best read in their privileges. It would be no less impracticable to think of wholly annihilating the popular assemblies, in which these lawyers fit. The army, by which we must govern in their place, would be far more chargeable to us; not quite so effectual; and perhaps, in the end, full as difficult to be kept in obedience.[10]
Even if England should conquer the American colonies through military force, what would the military then do? Turn on England herself?
Again, Burke reminds Parliament, an ocean lays between England and her American colonies, and such can never be abolished or transcended. He further reminds the august body that the British empire is composed of a variety of parts, communities, and varieties. To centralize authority and insist on uniformity, Burke warns, will only anger the colonies and turn them against the mother colony. “Will not this, Sir, very soon teach the provinces to make no distinctions on their part? Will it not teach them that the Government, against which a claim of Liberty is tantamount to high treason, is a Government to which submission is equivalent to slavery?”[11] To be sure, the British empire could sour its relationship with the colonies, but it could also render them happy to be a part of the empire. As of March 22, 1775, Burke thought, the empire was at a crossroads, and Parliament should choose wisely. As it chooses, Burke urged, it should take into consideration the wisdom of the ancestors especially as understood through the Magna Carta and the very history of the institution of Parliament. If not, Parliaments risks the very destruction of the commonwealth. “Magnanimity in politicks is not seldom the truest wisdom,” Burke stated, “and a great empire and little minds go ill together.” It must be remembered, Burke concluded that
By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests; not by destroying, but by promoting, the wealth, the number, the happiness, of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.[12]
This essay is an excerpt from Bradley J. Birzer, The Declaration of Independence: 1776 and All That (forthcoming, AIER Press, 2026).
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Notes:
[1] Edmund Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” in Select Works of Edmund Burke: A New Imprint of the Payne Edition, vol. 1, (Liberty Fund: Indianapolis, IN, 1999): 235.
[2] Burke, Conciliation, 237.
[3] Burke, Conciliation, 239.
[4] Burke, Conciliation, 239.
[5] Burke, Conciliation, 241.
[6] Burke, Conciliation, 242.
[7] Burke, Conciliation, 243.
[8] Burke, Conciliation, 245.
[9] Burke, Conciliation, 248.
[10] Burke, Conciliation, 249.
[11] Burke, Conciliation, 251-252.
[12] Burke, Conciliation, 289.
The featured image is extracted from page 370 of volume 2 of The Cabinet of Irish Literature: selections from the works of the chief poets, orators, and prose writers of Ireland. [Vol. 1-3.] With biographical sketches and literary notices by C. A. Read. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.