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Respect for law was common ground in Revolution Another July 4th has come and gone. For most of us, the 4th means a day off work, perhaps with a snooze, a picnic with red- white-and-blue napkins, and a fireworks display at the park. Usually, we don't give much thought to why we got that holiday from work, or what exactly it is we're celebrating. Many young people don't even know that on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, establishing our independence from Great Britain. By 1999, we've had over 220 years to get used to the benefits of freedom. And in a way, perhaps, it's understandable that we can't muster too much excitement about our national project. It was so highly effective, and the institutions that undergird it were so well-crafted and resilient, that by now we take them for granted. The American project was about freedomfrom outside domination, but more importantly, from the ambitions and over- reaching of our fellow citizens. "Freedom" is a word that can still quicken our pulses. But our attention generally wanders when the talk turns to the question that most bedeviled the American founders: how to ensure its continuation. In civics class, the mechanics of preserving freedom draw yawnsthe rule of law, due process, checks and balances, habeas corpus, trial by jury. But these institutions are the very heart of the American project. At bottom, they all have one purpose: to ensure that might does not make right. Questions of legal procedure held center stage at the time of the American Revolution. In fact, that our revolution had a happy outcome was largely a result of the respect for the rule of law that both sides brought to the conflict. It is no coincidence that the other great revolutions of the modern agethe French and Russianhad loftier, more idealistic goals, but ended by devouring their own children. Great Britain's reverence for law and legal procedureremarkable by 18th century standards was evident throughout the tumultuous period leading up to the Revolution. Almost any other European power would have quelled the colonies' discontent with widespread arrests and strong-arm tactics. Britain, however, continued to allow American newspapers to print all manner of incendiary statements. In Boston, which seethed with revolutionary sentiment, British authorities permitted the ever-active Sons of Liberty to meet to stir up treason. On several occasions, Boston mobs ransacked the homes of British officials, drinking their wine, scattering their papers, destroying their property, andin the case of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinsonthreatening murder. Yet despite the escalating unrest, British authorities never molested or arrested the ringleaders of American resistance, like Sam Adams and John Hancock. For their part, the leaders of the rebellion demonstrated a laudable reverence for the rule of law. They, too, were prepared to make great sacrifices to safeguard legal rights, even those of their enemies, the British. Nothing illustrates this better than the events that followed the notorious Boston Massacre. On March 5, 1770, nine British soldiers fired on a belligerent crowd of Bostonians, killing five. The soldiers were immediately clapped in jail. Emotions ran high in the town, and a friend of Capt. Preston, who had commanded the redcoats, searched in vain for a lawyer to defend him and his men. None of Boston's prominent Tory lawyers would take the case. In desperation, the friend approached Josiah Quincy and John Adams, well-known patriot lawyers and outspoken opponents of the quartering of these very troops in Boston. Quincy and Adams agreed to take the case. Quincy's father, a patriot, was appalled. "Good God!" he wrote his son. "Is it possible that you should undertake the defense of those criminals charged with the murder of their fellow citizens?" John Adams, by nature a cautious man, had scraped his way up from poverty and built a flourishing practice. Adams was convinced that his decision to defend the soldiers would cost him his clientele, as well as his friends. The case, he wrote, "compelled me to differ in opinion from all my friends, to set at defiance all their advice .... their ridicule [and] their censure .... without acquiring one symptom of pity from my enemies." But, wrote Adams, "I had no hesitation in answering, that counsel ought to be the very last thing that an accused person should want in a free country, that the bar ought ... to be independent and impartial, at all times and in every circumstance, and that persons whose lives were at stake ought to have the counsel they prefer." Few had thought that British soldiers charged with murdering Americans could find an impartial jury in Boston. But thanks to Adams and Quincy, all but two of the British soldiers were acquitted, the jury determining that they had acted in self- defense. Our freedom today rests on ancient foundations, among them the British common law and its procedural safeguards. Our forebears bequeathed these to us, refusing to alter them to serve their personal preferences and animosities. Today, we can barbecue our chicken on July 4th, confident that our lives and property are protected by a legal system anchored in due process. We shouldn't let another 4th go by without remembering why. -- Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis. |