No Longer Subjects of the British King

BOOK REVIEW: No Longer Subjects of the British King: The Political Transformation of Royal Subjects to Republican Citizens, 1774-1776 by Shawn David McGhee (Yardley, PA: Journal of the American Revolution Books/Westholme Publishing, 2024. $34.95 cloth.)

As Continental Congresses go, the Second Continental Congress, which adopted the Declaration of Independence, is clearly the star, but Shawn David McGhee, in No Longer Subjects of the British King, makes a plausible case that the First Congress deserves more attention—and respect—than historians have traditionally given it. McGhee views the delegates who assembled in Philadelphia in September 1774 as a truly radical body, and he argues the economic sanctions they adopted against Great Britain helped forge a pan-colonial political movement.

In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament adopted the Coercive Acts, closing the port of Boston, empowering the royal governor to appoint certain local office-holders and to restrict town meetings, allowing trials of royal officials to he held outside Massachusetts, and providing for the quartering of British troops in vacant buildings. Colonial outrage at Parliament’s punitive measures produced the First Congress. Dinner parties and social events brought the disparate delegates together, but the radicals soon seized the initiative at the expense of more moderate delegates and what McGhee calls “imperial traditionalists.”

The choice of Carpenters’ Hall, the center of artisan radicalism, over the Pennsylvania State House, a symbol of the political establishment, represented the victory of the militant Charles Thomson, secretary of Philadelphia’s Committee of Correspondence, over the conservative House speaker Joseph Galloway. The radicals scored another win with Thomson’s election as Congress’s secretary, and Thomson used his record-keeping power to keep conservative dissent from the congressional minutes. His censorship, and Congress’s practice of meeting in secret, led a generally sympathetic press to present a false picture of congressional unity.

Advertisement

Meanwhile, the First Congress approved Articles of Association calling for a ban on the importation and consumption of English and Irish goods, effective December 1, 1774, and the end of exports to Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies, effective September 10, 1775. The delegates issued defiant appeals to the American and British people, pointedly ignoring Parliament, “a clear indication,” McGhee writes, “that a majority of delegates denied it held any authority over the colonies whatsoever” (page 59). They also endorsed the creation of local Committees of Inspection and Observation to enforce what came to be known as the Continental Association.

Critical to McGhee’s thesis are those provisions of the Association that sought to ban horse racing, gambling, cock-fighting, extravagant funerals, and all forms of lavish spending. Theater-going came in for scorn as well; the theater allegedly led the working poor to waste their money and corrupted the middle class with its vulgarity. Ironically, Whigs leaders drew inspiration from reading Cato: A Tragedy by England’s Joseph Addison and the works of Mercy Otis Warren and other American playwrights. Modern readers, moreover, may struggle to find a connection between live theater and colonial protests against taxation without representation, but eighteenth century Americans, drawing on a tradition of classical virtue and dissenting Protestantism, believed self-indulgence and moral laxity could sap a people’s capacity to sacrifice for the public good – and a boycott of British goods would require sacrifice.

It would also require a certain ruthlessness. Critics accused the radicals of promoting civil war and of exercising power illegally. In response, Committees of Inspection and Observation, according to McGhee, ostracized their conservative opponents and denied them freedom of speech, the right to trial by jury, and even the liberty to conduct normal business activities. Maintaining an appearance of comity, newspapers often portrayed the committees as amicably correcting misguided neighbors who had innocently run afoul the Continental Association.

Nevertheless, the surviving evidence suggests “a remarkable degree of compliance” (p. 105). Opposition to the Coercive Acts produced an “unexpected and remarkable spirit of unity” (p. 130). McGhee is careful not to exaggerate the extent of that consensus. Americans had not, by 1776, achieved a sense of national identity. What unity they enjoyed rested on a shared willingness to sacrifice in the defense of individual rights and the autonomy of their local institutions. And readers must wonder how much of the colonial consensus was coerced by a radical faction that reached a critical mass the pro-British minority never achieved.

Advertisement

McGhee’s assertion that “when looking for the moment American subjects transformed into citizens, all proverbial roads of historical inquiry lead back to Boston” (p. 1) may be an overstatement. He concedes that political protest in America long predated the Coercive Acts and that it escalated immediately after the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and again after the Townshend Acts of 1767, both of which triggered non-importation movements. Other events also tended to mobilize and unite white Americans, with the First Great Awakening being one example. Nor should the role of the rich body of Whig pamphlet literature, epitomized by Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, be underestimated. Yet whatever qualms one might have about his thesis, McGhee, a Philadelphia-area educator, has produced a concise, well-documented, and informative account of an often overlooked institution.

PLEASE CONSIDER PURCHASING THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON IN CLOTH  or KINDLE.

(As an Amazon Associate, JAR earns from qualifying purchases. This helps toward providing our content free of charge.)