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The Rights of the Colonists

© Brian Tubbs

Howard Zinn and other critics of the Founders maintain that colonial resistance to taxation was driven by the upper-class elite. According to this view, the American Revolution was little more than an exercise in tax evasion; and James Otis, the leading opponent of British taxation in the early 1760s, was basically a mouthpiece for the upper class seeking to channel class anger at the British.

This interpretation of Otis misses an important dimension. There was a consistent and underlying theme to Otis's opposition to British governance of the colonies. And Otis didn't hesitate to put that theme into writing. An honest assessment of that writing reveals something far deeper in his mind than a thirst for personal glory or a desire to increase his financial fortune.

In The Rights of the British Colonists Asserted and Proved, Otis lays out the fundamental position of the colonists in the 1760s - a position that formed the basis for the colonists taking up arms in the next decade. Otis's pamphlet was widely circulated and immensely popular at the time, but it has drifted off the radar screens of all but the most committed history buffs today. Its diminished familiarity is unfortunate, for that pamphlet was the true forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.

In Rights, Otis writes that society is based on the "balance of property," but not government. Government, he argues, is based on something else. "Is not government founded on grace? No. Nor on force? No. Nor on compact? Nor property? Not altogether on either," writes Otis. "Has it any solid foundation, any chief cornerstone but what accident, chance, or confusion may lay one moment and destroy the next?" Otis answers his own question, by declaring: "I think it has an everlasing foundation in the unchangeable will of GOD, the author of nature, whose laws never vary."

The prevailing view of today is that the Founders' conception of the "laws of nature" was either a product of John Locke's imagination or an ambiguous and vague product of their Deist theology. Locke indeed advanced the "state of nature" theory in his Second Treatise on Government, but the philosophical dependence on the "laws of nature" was an ideology that predated Locke by many, many years. As far as a belief in the "laws of nature" being rooted in Deism, one needs only to read the full text of Otis's pamphlet to see that, at least in his mind, this was not so.

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