OXONIANS DRAW U.S. BORDER | Oct. 18 – Mason-Dixon Line Set

Oct. 18, 2017 – This day 250 years ago, in 1767, the interstate border was settled that a century later became the key boundary of the American Civil War – the Mason-Dixon line.

The line was named after two British surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.

They were hired by two prominent families on either side of the border, both were originally headed by Oxford alumni: 

• Catholic Leonard Calvert, founder of slave-colony Maryland. Leonard's brother Cecil, the second Lord Baltimore, handled the British end of the formation of the colony. Leonard  and Cecil, as well as their father George–the first Lord Baltimore–were all alumni of Trinity College, Oxford. 
• Quaker William Penn, founder of free-colony Pennsylvania. William Penn was an alumnus of Christ Church, Oxford.

The Calvert and Penn families, to settle a dispute over the border between them, hired English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.

The essential element of their survey, which had been interrupted by skirmishes with Indians, was completed on this day.

It established the boundary not only between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland but for territories in the west that after the Revolution became the state of West Virginia and those in the east that became Delaware. The line was marked using stones, with Pennsylvania’s coat of arms on one side and Maryland’s on the other.

Why did this become the dividing line in the War Between the States? Because it was the North-South dividing line, between the slave states in the south and the free states in the north.

It is no puzzle why the South favored slavery–the earliest immigrants to the southern colonies like Virginia were loyalists to the British Crown and the Church of England and they were given generous grants of land that required huge numbers of workers. The cash crops such as tobacco and cotton that became the mainstay of the southern farms required workers to do strenuous repetitive tasks, and slavery provided a solution.

It is also no puzzle why New England did not favor slavery. They did not get large grants of land from the Crown because the earliest immigrants to New England were dissenting rebels from the Church of England. Most therefore became small farmers, traders or manufacturers.

Maryland and Pennsylvania were in-between colonies and states. Unlike most other southern states (Georgia's Wilberforce was another exception), Maryland was not founded by someone with allegiance to the Church of England. Even though Pennsylvania was not founded by a dissenting Quaker, its founder Penn had enough good will from the Crown to get some land to form a proprietary colony:

• In Maryland, the Crown carved a large piece of land out of northern Virginia to give to the Catholic Calverts. The Catholicism of the day was not aggressively opposed to slavery.
• In Pennsylvania (as it was to be called), lands were granted to Quaker William Penn because he had won favor with the Crown, even though leaders of his religion included many abolitionists who fought actively against slavery. It was easier in Pennsylvania than it was in Maryland to be opposed to slavery because of coal and iron reserves provided higher-paying jobs that did not have to rely on slavery to generate a competitive product.

To settle their border dispute, the land-rich Calvert and Penn families hired Messrs. Mason and Dixon to establish the borderline. The families were responding to a 1760 demand from the British Crown that colonial settlers cease their skirmishes and adhere to a 1732 border cease-fire. 

Both families claimed the land between the 39th and 40th parallels. Mason and Dixon established the border at 39º43'. If they believed that the rights on the two sides were equally balanced, they would have settled in the middle, at 39º30'. This suggests that Pennsylvania was the victor from the survey, getting 72 percent (43/60) of the disputed land area.

During the year 1767, the colonies were engaged in a dispute with the Parliament over the Townshend Acts, which sought–through taxes on tea and other imports–to pay for the British costs of troops sent by Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder (like the Calverts, an alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford) of establishing the continuing military presence that had driven the French and the Indians allied with them from the colonies.

However, the border dispute seemingly settled in 1767 was not over. The Mason-Dixon line held as a dividing line, but after the American Revolution, the states south of the Mason-Dixon line began lobbying the new U.S. Congress for the legal rights of slaveowners. The northern states argued that ownership of human beings was not acceptable in the "New Constellation" of states.

Although the arguments were temporarily ended by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which accepted the states south of the Mason-Dixon line as slave-holding and those north of the line as free, the attempted compromise–and its successors–failed and Pennsylvania became the site of many famous Civil War battles. The Gettysburg, Pennsylvania battle in 1863 was on the Mason-Dixon Line. It was  one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, made immortal by President Lincoln's speech at the site . The Quaker commitment to abolitionism trumped their commitment to peace.

In April 1865, the south capitulated. The ensuing 13th Amendment (1865) was immediately passed abolishing slavery and nullifying the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857). The bitterly fought 14th Amendment gave citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. It was ratified 101 years after the Mason-Dixon line was established. However, civil rights did not mean voting rights. It took many more debates and political battles, some more amendments, and another 100 years, for the United States to pass laws to ensure that all adult citizens be allowed to vote...

POETS: Oct. 21–Birthday, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This day in 1772 was born the Romantic poet-critic-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England. Like many others, he learned to be a dissenter at Cambridge.

His father was a C of E parish vicar and master of a grammar school who struggled to take care of 14 children from two marriages. Samuel Coleridge was child #14. He liked reading - his favorite book was The Arabian Nights - and was a good student in his father's school. But papa was done in by his multiple responsibilities and died when Samuel was only ten.

Samuel was packed off to board at Christ’s Hospital in London, the "blue-coat school," where the boys wore a blue gown and cap with yellow stockings. Coleridge hated it, but thrived under an English teacher who introduced him to great poetry. He also met Charles Lamb, who became a lifelong friend, and Tom Evans, who had an older sister (Mary) with whom Samuel fell in love.

Since Samuel's late father had wanted his son to be a clergyman, in 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge to study for holy orders in the C of E. However, during his first year he came under the influence of William Frend, a Fellow at Jesus with Unitarian beliefs and Coleridge's life goals came into question. Perhaps not coincidentally, Coleridge accumulated debt for his brothers to pay off - by no means the last time that Coleridge relied on others to pay off his debts (nobody's perfect).

In June 1794, traveling to Wales, Coleridge met another student, Robert Southey. He  broke his trip to spend time with his new friend talking about implementing Plato’s aristocracy-free Republic. They envisioned joining with ten other families to form a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania in the newly independent colonies, sharing work and beliefs in a free-thinking environment, supported by a great library. (With hindsight, an ideal location would have been Berwick, Pa. - safely above the river and right between rich veins of coal and iron.)

Coleridge dropped out of Cambridge to join the army. He called himself Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. But he wasn't much of a soldier.

Instead of going to war, or to Pennsylvania, Coleridge married Sara Fricker and in 1797 moved to a small house in the country with a vegetable garden. That year he made friends with William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The three went walking in nearby hills called the Quantocks. As the sun went down and the moon rose over the sea. Coleridge came up with the idea for a poem about a sailor who kills an albatross and brings a curse upon his ship. It became The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in a 1798 collection of ballads he published with Wordsworth that was to be the starting gun in the Romantic era of poetry.

Coleridge was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated with laudanum, which fostered a recurring opium addiction, anxiety and periods of depression.  In today's language he may have had bipolar disorder. He quarreled with his wife and fell in love with Wordsworth's sister-in-law. He wrote a poem, Dejection: An Ode, and sailed to Malta to improve his health. Coleridge said:

I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book - let him relate the events of his own Life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.

Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Frost at Midnight and a prose tome Biographia Literaria. His critical work on Shakespeare and German idealist philosophy was influential. He coined the idea of "suspension of disbelief" in drama. He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.

OXFORD-USA: Oct. 18–Oxons Create Mason-Dixon Line (Updated Oct. 29, 2016)

This day in 1767 the border was settled that a century later became the boundary of the American Civil War–the Mason-Dixon line.

The line was named after two surveyors, Mason and Dixon. They were hired by two prominent families on either side of the border. Both were originally headed by Oxonians:

• Catholic Leonard Calvert, founder of slave-colony Maryland. Leonard's brother Cecil, the second Lord Baltimore, handled the British end of the formation of the colony. Leonard  and Cecil, as well as their father George–the first Lord Baltimore–were alumni of Trinity College, Oxford. 
• Quaker William Penn, founder of free-colony Pennsylvania. William Penn was an alumnus of Christ Church, Oxford.

The Calvert and Penn families, to settle a dispute over the border between them, hired English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.

The essential element of their survey, which had been interrupted by skirmishes with Indians, was completed on this day.

It established the boundary not only between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland but for territories in the west that after the Revolution became the state of West Virginia and those in the east that became Delaware.

Why did this become the dividing line in the War Between the States?

It is no puzzle why the South favored slavery–the earliest immigrants to the southern colonies like Virginia were loyalists to the British Crown and the C of E and they were given generous grants of land that required huge numbers of workers. The cash crops such as tobacco and cotton that became the mainstay of the southern farms required workers to do strenuous repetitive tasks, and slavery provided a solution.

It is also no puzzle why New England did not favor slavery. They did not get large grants of land from the Crown because the earliest immigrants to New England were dissenting rebels from the Church of England. Most therefore became small farmers, traders or manufacturers.

Maryland and Pennsylvania were in-between colonies and states. Unlike most other southern states (Georgia's Wilberforce was another exception), Maryland was not founded by someone with allegiance to the Church of England. Even though Pennsylvania was not founded by a dissenting Quaker, its founder Penn had enough good will from the Crown to get given some land:

• In Maryland, the Crown carved a large piece of land out of northern Virginia to give to the Catholic Calverts. The Catholicism of the day was not aggressively opposed to slavery.
• In Pennsylvania (as it was to be called), lands were granted to Quaker William Penn because he  had won favor with the Crown, even though leaders of his religion included many abolitionists who fought actively against slavery. It was easier in Pennsylvania than it was in Maryland to be opposed to slavery because of the coal and iron reserves that provided higher-paying jobs, and therefore without having to rely on slaves.

To settle their border dispute, the land-rich Calvert and Penn families hired Mason and Dixon to establish the borderline. The families were responding to a 1760 demand from the British Crown that colonial settlers cease their skirmishes and adhere to a 1732 border cease-fire. Both families claimed the land between the 39th and 40th parallels. On this day in 1867, Mason and Dixon established the border at 39º43'. If they believed that the rights on the two sides were equally balanced, they would have settled on 39º30', which suggests that Pennsylvania was the victor, getting 72 percent (43/60) of the disputed land area.

During the year 1767, the colonies were engaged in a dispute with the Parliament over the Townshend Acts, which sought–through taxes on tea and other imports–to pay for the British costs of troops sent by Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder (like the Calverts, an alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford) of establishing the continuing military presence that had driven the French and the Indians allied with them from the colonies.

However, the border dispute seemingly settled in 1767 was not over. The Mason-Dixon line held as a dividing line, but after the American Revolution, the states south of the Mason-Dixon line began lobbying the new U.S. Congress for the legal rights of slaveowners. The northern states argued that ownership of human beings was not acceptable in the "New Constellation" of states.

Although the arguments were temporarily ended by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which accepted the states south of the Mason-Dixon line as slave-holding and those north of the line as free, the attempted compromise–and its successors–failed and Pennsylvania became the site of many famous Civil War battles. Gettysburg, Pa., in 1863 was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. The Quaker commitment to abolitionism trumped their commitment to peace.

In April 1865, the south capitulated. The ensuing 13th Amendment (1865) was immediately passed abolishing slavery and nullifying the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857). The bitterly fought 14th Amendment gave citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. It was ratified 101 years after the Mason-Dixon line was established. However, civil rights did not mean voting rights. It took many more debates and political battles, some more amendments, and another 100 years, for the United States to pass laws to ensure that all adult citizens be allowed to vote...

YOUNG AMERICA: The American Universities at 1776 (Updated May 16, 2018)

John Harvard, Cambridge man,
dissenting minister.

When Harvard opened for students in 1642 (it was founded six years before), only 50,000 people lived in Britain's American  colonies.

Yet at the time of the American Revolution more than 130 years later, the colonies had a free population of about 2 million and a slave population of about 300,000, plus children of the slaves who were not at the time counted.

So the colonies grew more than 40-fold during these pre-Revolutionary years of Harvard's existence.

By the end of those 130 years of the colonial era, ten institutions of higher education were founded and nine were open for business, the very first plan for a university being still-born.

Using their modern names, and in order of foundation, the nine institutions that were opened by 1776 are:  Harvard (Massachusetts), William and Mary (Virginia), Yale (Connecticut), Princeton (New Jersey), U. Pennsylvania (Pa.), Columbia (New York), Brown (Rhode Island), Rutgers (New Jersey) and Dartmouth (New Hampshire):

• Four of the universities are in New England – Harvard, Yale, Brown and Dartmouth. 
• Two of the other five are in New Jersey, the only colony to have two universities – Princeton and Rutgers. 
• The remaining three are in New York (Columbia), Pennsylvania (U. Penn.) and Virginia (William & Mary).

Two of the universities – Rutgers and William & Mary – are now public research universities, i.e., they are operated by the states of New Jersey and Virginia. The others are the seven private Ivy League universities.

The Colonies vs. The Mother Country

Having nine institutions of higher education in eight of the thirteen colonies by the time of the Revolution was quite impressive, when one considers that as of 1832, more than half a century after the American Revolution, England still had only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

Scotland, however, had five universities in four locations–St Andrews (the first university, in Fife), Glasgow, Aberdeen, Marischal (also in Aberdeen) and Edinburgh.

The First American Colonial Universities - Harvard, William & Mary, Yale

Three threads sum up the religious orientation of the early universities in the American colonies:

1. One church, orthodoxy (Roman Catholicism).
2. An alternative orthodoxy (Church of England).
3. Rejection of both (Dissenters).

Harvard was founded by dissenting ministers, especially from Cambridge. William & Mary was created primarily for Anglicans. Yale was for created for dissenters from the new orthodoxy at Harvard.

Because Harvard was first in line, it tended to influence the universities that followed. Stephen Trachtenberg, former president of The George Washington University and a former Churchill Traveling Scholar at Nuffield College, Oxford, argues that John Dunster's having come to Harvard from Cambridge at a time when they had a four-year undergraduate program meant that Harvard and then other universities required four years for the B.A. degree.

Oxford and Cambridge later reduced the time for the B.A. to three years for most subjects (Greats is still a four-year program), but American universities were by then wedded to the four-year degree.

By and large, Oxford men were Roman Catholics or orthodox Anglicans.  Cambridge men were dissenters, including dissenters from the original dissenters. Among the exceptions was Alexander Whitaker, a Cambridge alumnus who was an Anglican and who paved the way for the first effort to create a university. Unfortunately, it failed.

Henricus College would have created the first university in the colonies. It was planned in Henrico (named after James I's son Henry) for Varina, Virginia, in 1618, 18 years before Harvard was created. Cambridge-born alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge (and son of much-admired William Whitaker, Protestant scholar and Master of St. John's College, Cambridge) Alexander Whitaker (1585–1616) paved the way for this plan through his active work in the Virginia Colony in 1611-1616. Coming from Anglican parishes in the north of England, he established two churches near Virginia's Jamestown colony. He baptized Pocahontas, creating the illusion that it would be easy to bring the native Americans into the church. James I was initially enthusiastic about the plan for a university at Henrico, Va. with the idea of providing a place to teach both Anglican and Puritan seminarians and to convert the local Indians to Christianity. An area of 10,000 acres on the side of a river was picked out for the campus. However, the idea was still-born. Before it had any students, the Indians targeted for conversion decided to fight back. They laid waste Henrico with a deadly attack in 1622. The king lost his enthusiasm. The colony of Virginia lost its charter. The university idea was ended in 1624.

Harvard was the first durable university, founded by a Cambridge alumnus (Emmanuel College), John Harvard, who donated his library and some money to create the first colonial college that still survives. John Harvard was born to a butcher (married to a woman from Stratford-upon-Avon) in Southwark, a borough of London. Many of John Harvard's family were wiped out by the plague. He emigrated to Boston and served as a dissenting minister. Harvard College was formed in 1636 and was at first called "New College". In 1638, John Harvard was on his deathbed with tuberculosis, he bequeathed his 320-volume library and half his estate to the college. The college was then gratefully renamed after him. It was envisioned as a place dedicated to educating dissenting (Puritan and other) ministers. It opened for teaching and degree-granting in 1642.

Rev. Dr. James Blair 

William & Mary was the second enduring university. It was named after the two co-regents, William III of Orange and his wife, James II's eldest daughter Mary II, who were brought in by Parliament in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to replace Catholic James II of England (last of the Stuart monarchs), and put an end to any plans for another Catholic resurgence in the monarchy. A new university in Virginia was again promoted, this time by Dr. James Blair, a Church of Scotland and subsequently a Church of England adherent, educated at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He founded the university at  Middle Plantation, later named Williamsburg in honor of the king. It was founded as planned in 1693 and Dr. Blair served as its president from 1693 to 1743, a 50-year term of office for a college president that one source says has been matched by only one other person in the history of the United States. William & Mary is now a public research university, operating under the oversight of the State of Virginia.

Yale was founded, like Cambridge University, as a refuge for teachers and students troubled by trends in the university they left. The initial step by the Colony of Connecticut to create an institution to train ministers, future politicians and others was passed in 1701, probably because Connecticut was subject to different laws and customs. The initial Yale Fellows, led by James Pierpoint, were all alumni of Harvard - ten Congregationalist ministers who jointly contributed books to create the first Yale library. The first diploma was granted in 1702. The major impetus for the endowment of Yale came from Harvard's sixth (and largely absentee) president Increase Mather, a staunch Puritan who alienated some by being involved in the Salem witch trials and others by then urging restraint. Mather was concerned that the clergy on the Harvard faculty were relaxing their Puritan standards and hoped that Yale would maintain Calvinist religious orthodoxy. In 1718, Increase's son Cotton Mather contacted a Welshman, Elihu Yale to ask him for financial help. Eli Yale had made a fortune while trading in India for the East India Company and gave the university 417 books, nine bales of goods sold for £560, and a portrait of King George I.  The university in return took Yale's name in the hope of further gifts that, alas in the end, did not ensue, in perhaps the first recorded Major Disappointment in a university's Major Gifts campaign.

The Next Three Universities, Founded in the 1740s

Princeton was the first university founded in New Jersey, originally as "the College of New Jersey", in 1746 (it was renamed in 1896). It started teaching a year later and gave its first degree a year after that. It was sponsored by Presbyterians but educated students for ministries in many religions. Its impetus was the Great Awakening, which can be said to have originated from the Oxford "Holy Club" of Charles Wesley and then John Wesley. George Whitefield arrived at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1732, a provincial youth with a West Country accent (for example, it is recorded that he pronounced “Christ” as “Chroist”). He described himself as coming from the tap-room of the family inn. Whitefield had heard of the “Holy Club” before he arrived, and open-hearted Charles Wesley included him. Charles became Whitefield's chief Oxford mentor. In 1736, steely John Wesley entrusted the newly ordained Whitefield with the oversight of the Oxford methodists, while he went with Charles to Georgia. (In 1739, Whitefield returned the favor.) Whitefield soon became as famed as the Wesleys and is given equal billing as the leading inspiration of the worldwide evangelical Great Awakening. This spirit took shape in Pennsylvania in Log College in Bucks County, founded by Presbyterian Minister William Tennent in 1726. The seven founders of the College of New Jersey were Log College participants, all Yale Presbyterians except for one who attended Harvard. They asked Governor Lewis Morris for a charter and he, being Anglican and a Loyalist, refused it.  When Governor Morris died, John Hamilton became Acting Governor, and he, being somewhat more liberal, provided the charter. Aaron Burr, Sr. turned the evangelical ideals of the College's founders into a reality during his presidency, from 1748 to 1757.

The University of Pennsylvania was founded as an Anglican institution in a state founded by an Oxford-educated Quaker, William Penn. It was originally called the "College of Philadelphia".

Columbia University, originally called "King's College" because it claims a royal charter, was founded in 1754. It was intended for Anglican ministers but was charged with a policy of religious liberty. The impetus for the creation of Columbia was in part that evangelicals across the river had formed the college that was later called Princeton. In 1746 an act was passed by the general assembly of New York to raise funds for the this purpose. In 1751, the assembly appointed ten New York residents, seven of whom were members of the Church of England, to direct state lottery proceeds towards the foundation of a college. Classes were initially held in July 1754 and were presided over by the college's first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was the only instructor of eight students.

The Final Three Universities, Founded in the 1760s

Brown University was founded by Baptists in 1764, but its trustees were required to come from a balanced portfolio of religions, including Anglicans. The Governor of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, was a Cambridge graduate. Rhode Island was a haven for dissenting ministers who were expelled by the Puritan leadership of Massachusetts for straying from Puritan dogma. In 1763, The Reverend James Manning, a Baptist minister, an alumnus of Princeton (as it would be called), was sent to Rhode Island by the Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches to found the college. At the same time, local Congregationalists were working toward a similar end. Former colonial governors of Rhode Island Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward were involved. The college's charter was granted in the form of an Act passed by Rhode Island's General Assembly. The college was called Brown after a a gift from Nicholas Brown, Jr. The charter required that the makeup of the board of 36 trustees include, 22 Baptists, five Friends, four Congregationalists, and five Church of England members.

Rutgers was created in 1766. Originally chartered as Queen's College, Rutgers was renamed in appreciation of Col. Henry Rutgers, a New York City landowner, whose gift allowed the college to reopen after financial insolvency. Rutgers was originally a private male-only liberal arts college affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church.  It was named as the state's sole land-grant college in 1864 under the Morrill Act.  It evolved into a coeducational public research university after being designated "The State University of New Jersey" by the New Jersey Legislature in 1945 and 1956. It is one of only two colonial colleges that later became public universities, the other being William & Mary.

Dartmouth College was created as a Puritan (Congregational) college in 1769 by Eleasar Wheelock, a Congregational minister. New Hampshire itself was founded in part by Cambridge alumnus John Wheelwright, whose dissenting religious views forced him to leave Massachusetts.  Dartmouth went through a long period of difficulties and found its feet in the early 20th century.

U.S. FOUNDERS | The Mid-Atlantic Conservatives

David Lefer. Photo by JT Marlin.

I shared views recently with David Lefer, who has written The Founding Conservatives (New York: Penguin, Sentinel Books, 2013), about voices of conservatism that helped ensure that the American Revolution was sustainable–i.e., resulted in a constitution for the new nation that was  balanced–with respect for the rule of law, property rights, and the rights of minorities.

Some of the strongest advocates of independence had agendas that would have made life difficult for many minority groups–i.e., those of different religious views or degrees of wealth.

He champions these conservatives on the basis that (1) they are neglected by historians, and (2) they helped ensure that the United States of America became a country that was not hostile to capitalism.

As the revolution progressed, the popular program shifted. Initially, the external enemy–George III and his Prime Minister Lord North were the targets.

Then it became clear there was also an internal enemy.

Dickinson

John Dickinson, for example, was a conservative hero for Lefer. Dickinson began in 1774 as an advocate for resistance to George III, but by 1776 he was as much concerned about the rule of the mob as oppression by royalty. (The French Revolution could have used someone like Dickinson.) His views had not changed - the agenda had changed. But his popularity waned as he preached the rule of law.

Lefer - a Harvard graduate who also studied at Oxford - starts in his Introduction making his point about the tendency of the Revolution to get out of hand. His first chapter goes on to describe violent incidents that create the context for the rest of the book.

In Lefer's Introduction we are introduced to a riot in Philadelphia. A mob reacts to rising bread prices in 1779 by parading four merchants to the home of a prosperous lawyer, James Wilson. The mob brings with them a cannon.  Its leaders are ready to storm the building. Wilson's allies, barricaded inside, shoot back.  Five men are killed, and 14 wounded, before the crowd disperses.

One takeaway from the story might be that Wilson was right to stand his ground. But Lefer says that the mob's attack on the home of a leading lawyer had a larger message - it was a huge shock to wealthier people who had focused their antagonism on George III:

The street fight had a seismic impact on public perception... Within a year, fear of the mob would lead to the decline of radical power. (Lefer, p. 1.)

In Chapter 1 Lefer brings us back to the beheading of Charles I in 1649. Charles went to his death bravely, convinced that he had the Divine Right to rule and was being martyred. He had dissolved Parliament years earlier. Oliver Cromwell was no less convinced that Parliament had a right to exist and even the Divine Right to chop off the king's head.

The fact that Cromwell prevailed was not lost on subsequent monarchs, who tended to show more respect for Parliament. The "Glorious Revolution" later in the century was bloodless because one would-be king decided to let Parliament install another less tainted by sympathies to Roman Catholicism, i.e., William of Orange.

The theme of Lefer's book is that the New England Puritans tended to go overboard along with the tea they dumped on December 16, 1773. They might have allowed mobs to take over as they did in witch-hunting sessions in Salem and elsewhere.

The mid-Atlantic moderates saw that in their single-minded opposition to the exercise of power by George III, the radicals from New England were running the risk of replacing one repressive regime by another.

My Comments

James Wilson has been somewhat neglected by history. He was one of six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He was greatly respected by his peers. Fellow Scotsman Lord Bryce singled Wilson out as a major thinker of the American Revolution, who influenced first the Pennsylvania Constitution and then the American one.

The conservative leaders tended to be from the mid-Atlantic states - New York and Pennsylvania in particular - and served as a moderating influence on the radicals from New England. They were less likely to be Puritans, and more likely to be orthodox, either as members of the Church of England, as Roman Catholics, or as children of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This reflected the position of the Middle Atlantic states in the history of the colonies. The New Englanders tended to be refugees from regimes they disagreed with - they were dissenters, more likely to be from Cambridge than Oxford. New England had four universities by the time of the Revolution, all of them emanating from dissenting Protestant movements - Puritans or Evangelicals.

Those to the south often went to the New World with land granted by the Crown. They were in search of prosperity. They were more likely to be, like George Washington's ancestors or the Calverts, Oxonians. Since there were no universities at the time of the American Revolution south of William & Mary in Virginia, the leading thinkers outside New England were likely to be from the four mid-Atlantic states of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, which had five universities among them, primarily Anglican or ecumenical in origin.