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self—that is, if he embraced Viscount Bolingbroke’s notion of the patriot king.35 Remembering what George III himself had stated over the years about his commitment to serving his subjects, Shaw and his compatriots dismissed their flesh and blood monarch as a perversion of Bolingbroke’s ideal of the people’s king who would selflessly protect them and uphold the principles of the Glorious Revolution.36 Asking, rhetorically, “are we not Descendants” of those patriots who overthrew James II and restored balanced government, The Crisis urged its readers to denounce Tyranny “in the Name of those Ancestors.”37
Although the authors associated with The Crisis stood by the idea of mixed and balanced government within a monarchical system, they reflected the republican tendencies of what historian Caroline Robbins called the “commonwealth” tradition.38 There lay an inherent tension between their own brand of libertarianism and their desire to preserve, even strengthen, constitutional government. Like so many of their generation, including those whose politics may have differed from theirs, the authors who wrote for The Crisis took it as a given that fundamental
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rights came from God and through nature, that all legitimate government depended on the consent of the governed, and that even though the king-in-parliament reigned supreme, no one stood above the law and no power short of God’s could be unlimited. The Glorious Revolution had restored principles going back to the ancient constitution of Britain, historically difficult to reconstruct but no less real because of it, disappearing into a foggy Saxon past for some and back to even earlier Gothic antecedents for others.39
Where modern scholars have attempted to separate intellectual threads, The Crisis was typical of the age in weaving them all into its own ideological fabric. For example, one issue alluded approvingly to the great medieval jurists Henry de Bracton and Sir John Fortescue. “The king must not be under man but under God and under law, because law makes the king,” de Bracton had written, adding that there “is no rex where will rules rather than lex”—a position on limited government not so different from what The Crisis would champion five hundred years later.40 That so many of the pen names of the authors in its pages—Junius, Brutus, Casca—were drawn from the history of republican Rome was indicative of the tendency to run ancient and modern together, to
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deal in archetypes when advising those living in the present on how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Americans had been right, insisted The Crisis, to resist the foolish policies pursued by Lord North and, before him, the unconstitutional connivings of George Grenville. Virtual representation arguments had been a canard; Americans should have been allowed to tax themselves, which better and worthier men like Lord Camden and the Earl of Chatham—when Chatham was true to his principles, that is—understood.41 Oppressed by crown and parliament, Americans had the right, even the duty, to resist, as indeed did all people who suffered from tyranny.42 The Crisis hinted broadly that any conflict between mother country and colonies would eventually draw in France and Spain, a geopolitical awareness shared by dissident colonists across the Atlantic.43
When The Crisis first went to press it had not been difficult to draw analogies between British and American conditions, to speak of the common cause, a transatlantic association of the aggrieved. To those who defended government and contended that protesting Americans would not be satisfied with anything less than full independence, The Crisis countered that discontented colonists only wanted those rights guaranteed them as Englishmen: they would not leave the empire unless driven from it. Early on, Shaw and his associates seemed to believe that reconciliation was still possible, that the empire could serve the needs and meet the aspirations of Americans as well as Britons.
After the shooting started, The Crisis joined a chorus of those calling for commissioners to be sent out from London to negotiate a
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peaceful settlement.44 When, after more than a year of bloodshed, it became evident that no accommodation could be reached, that Americans who had once argued they only wanted their rights within the empire now insisted they could only secure them outside it, The Crisis did not denounce them as disingenuous or as traitors to the common cause. It printed the Declaration of Independence, though basically without comment. Only seven more issues appeared thereafter, essentially to reaffirm traditional Whig principles as exemplified by the texts from which its authors drew.45 It accepted, however reluctantly, a different future, where America could become a haven for the oppressed, separated from Britain, not united with it.46 Indeed, the final issue closed with the men behind The Crisis stating that they themselves had decided to sail for more hospitable American shores.47
Some of the earlier issues of The Crisis garnered American notice and were reprinted in New York, Newport, Philadelphia, and a few other places.48 For modern readers unaware of the transatlantic nature of imperial protest, that by itself may well seem impressive; for those seeking
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a more coordinated, systematic sharing of ideas, its circulation around the empire probably appears fairly hit-or-miss. To be sure, The Crisis did not enjoy the reprint success of Paine’s Common Sense or, earlier, of John Dickinson’s Pennsylvania Farmer Letters. But then the actual influence of writers on readers, appealing as it is among historians to try and prove, is inherently elusive.
Even though The Crisis stood as a publication apart in its acerbic language and combative tone, it should also be considered alongside others that made their rights arguments less intemperately. They were all products of the same philosophical and political traditions. In the world that The Crisis shared with other defenders of English freedoms, fundamental law was real and basic human rights were antecedent to those bestowed by any government. Moreover, all legitimate government was a compact between ruler and ruled, the duties of the ruler being as great as the responsibilities of the ruled. In the British empire the rights of Englishmen extended fully to the colonies, with nothing lost through transatlantic migration. Charters, for colonists, were constitutions, just as they claimed, not mere contracts, revocable by crown decree.49 If British-Americans were obliged, because of British tyranny, to rise in rebellion and eventually turn to revolution, The Crisis accepted that they did what men of conscience had always had the right to do. Ultimately the former colonists would point to their successful revolution as evidence of their exceptionalism, even as proof of their peculiar destiny in the larger world. It is curious if not ironic that a weekly British paper dedicated to saving the empire from itself promoted that very-American state of mind.
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The printed source for this edition of The Crisis comes from the copy that is found in the Bodleian Library. We were able to access an electronic version of the source from the online Eighteenth Century Journals Portal of Adam Matthew Digital, a London-based company that makes many primary-source collections available digitally for the first time. The texts were then converted into a digital manuscript that was used as the basis for typesetting.
Following Liberty Fund practice, we have not altered the texts: we have retained original spelling and punctuation with a few exceptions (we have modernized long esses to s and removed repeated quotation