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By Root 14608 0

1776 in her book From Resistance to Revolution, emphasizes the moderation of the leadership and, despite their desire for resistance, their “emphasis on order and restraint.” She notes: “The officers and committee members of the Sons of Liberty were drawn almost entirely from the middle and upper classes of colonial society.” In Newport, Rhode Island, for instance, the Sons of Liberty, according to a contemporary writer, “contained some Gentlemen of the First Figure in Town for Opulence, Sense and Politeness.” In North Carolina “one of the wealthiest of the gentlemen and freeholders” led the Sons of Liberty. Similarly in Virginia and South Carolina. And “New York’s leaders, too, were involved in small but respectable independent business ventures.” Their aim, however, was to broaden their organization, to develop a mass base of wage earners.

Many of the Sons of Liberty groups declared, as in Milford, Connecticut, their “greatest abhorrence” of lawlessness, or as in Annapolis, opposed “all riots or unlawful assemblies tending to the disturbance of the public tranquility.” John Adams expressed the same fears: “These tarrings and featherings, this breaking open Houses by rude and insolent Rabbles, in Resentment for private Wrongs or in pursuing of private Prejudices and Passions, must be discountenanced.”

In Virginia, it seemed clear to the educated gentry that something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England. One Virginian wrote in his diary in the spring of 1774: “The lower Class of People here are in tumult on account of Reports from Boston, many of them expect to be press’d & compell’d to go and fight the Britains!” Around the time of the Stamp Act, a Virginia orator addressed the poor: “Are not the gentlemen made of the same materials as the lowest and poorest among you? . . . Listen to no doctrines which may tend to divide us, but let us go hand in hand, as brothers. . . .”

It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He was, as Rhys Isaac puts it, “firmly attached to the world of the gentry,” but he spoke in words that the poorer whites of Virginia could understand. Henry’s fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph recalled his style as “simplicity and even carelessness. . . . His pauses, which for their length might sometimes be feared to dispell the attention, rivited it the more by raising the expectation.”

Patrick Henry’s oratory in Virginia pointed a way to relieve class tension between upper and lower classes and form a bond against the British. This was to find language inspiring to all classes, specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.

Tom Paine’s Common Sense, which appeared in early 1776 and became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies, did this. It made the first bold argument for independence, in words that any fairly literate person could understand: “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil. . . .”

Paine disposed of the idea of the divine right of kings by a pungent history of the British monarchy, going back to the Norman conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror came over from France to set himself on the British throne: “A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.”

Paine dealt with the practical advantages of sticking to England or being separated; he knew the importance of economics:

I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain. I repeat the challenge; not a single advantage is derived. Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods