24 pages • 48 minutes read
Samuel AdamsThe Rights of the Colonists
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1772A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Influence of the Enlightenment on Colonial Revolutionaries
At the time Adams wrote this essay, leaders among the colonists were not yet committed to full independence from Britain. Instead, wanted to improve the status of the colonies within the British Empire. Still, central ideals of the Enlightenment shaped the colonists’ perspective and goals as tensions between the colonies and Great Britain intensified throughout the 1760s and 1770s. These ideals would eventually lead many colonists to advocate independence.
The Enlightenment was a broad intellectual movement. Many of the best-known philosophers of the period were concerned with questions of rights, liberties, and government. Enlightenment thinkers distilled what they considered the most essential rules of nature and society. John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher who most directly influenced the thinking of the British colonists, asserted that mankind has natural rights that no government should infringe upon without legitimate reason. These include life, liberty, and property. The opening lines of Adams’s essay reiterate these three categories as the most sacred and essential realms of a person’s life. Adams does not defend or offer an argument to support this statement. He presents it as fact, which indicates his underlying adoption of Enlightenment thinking and the assumption that his audience would likewise accept the Lockean theory.
Locke and others discussed the balance of power in a just society, asking questions about the need for government and what form it should take. Many of these questions were central to the circumstances of pre-Revolutionary “America.” For example, Adams says that as “Englishmen” the colonists possess “absolute rights” to “personal security, personal liberty, and private property” (Paragraph 17). “Security” indicates the duty of society to defend its members. To be a just nation (and a just empire), England needs to guarantee these rights to its subjects. Adams’s essay (and other colonial documents) challenged the extent to which the British Crown was upholding that bargain.
Adams applies the theories of the Enlightenment to the circumstances of Britain and the colonies in the early 1770s. While that moment could not have been predicted by early Enlightenment thinkers, their ideas and ideals were significant, comprehensive, and persuasive enough to provide the theoretical bedrock for different eras of political revolution.
The Centrality of Englishness in American Patriotism
Scholars debate the extent to which the American Revolution was inevitable. The direct call for independence did not come until 1776 when the colonists sent the Declaration of Independence to King George. But tensions since 1760 escalated and raised questions among colonial leaders about the right way to resist the Crown and assert—in their view—a proper level of control over their communities. While the colonists eventually drove a wedge between American society and British society, Adams’s essay and others like it make it clear how British the colonists were.
“Patriots” like Adams were well versed in British political philosophy and policy, a fact reflected in the third section of “The Rights of the Colonists.” Adams based his idea of just government on Enlightenment political philosophies and the ways these philosophies had been applied to the British government in the years prior to the Revolution. For example, Adams references acts passed by Parliament as well as the representative nature of the House of Commons, the chamber of Parliament elected by the people.
Adams also reflects a commitment to English traditions older than the Enlightenment. He references Magna Carta, a royal charter from the year 1215 that outlined the rights of the British monarch and subjects. It was both a policy document and a symbol of a balance of power—preventing despotism and seeking to ensure basic liberties for all Englishmen.
The colonists also adhered to British dress and culture, although they adapted some habits to suit their circumstances in North America. British history and politics influenced the construction of American revolutionary ideology, which had started to take shape by the time Adams wrote “The Rights of the Colonists.” The essay asserts the rights of the colonists as (among other categories) Englishmen. Even as they challenged the king (and later when they officially separated from him), colonial leaders asserted an ideology that was less focused on being distinct from Britain and more on upholding the values and principles of their British upbringing.
Inclusion and Exclusion in Colonial (and British) Society
Adams opens the essay with an appeal to the theory of natural rights. He seeks to uphold every man’s claim to freedom and the application of just, equal law to all in British society. He expressly references “freedom,” “tolerance,” and “liberty,” and yet there are tensions and contradictions surrounding these terms in Adams’s text.
Adams makes a reference to slavery in the first section of his essay, defining slaves as people without freedom. He invokes the term to represent the colonists as slaves to the English Crown because of their lack of proper liberty and representation outlined. There is no acknowledgment of the international trade that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas or the difference between symbolic slavery and the literal bondage of forced labor. While Adams was not a slave owner or a participant in the slave trade (he would even become an abolitionist after the Revolution), he did not challenge the full scope of systemic slavery in British or American society.
Another notable exclusion in “The Rights of the Colonists” concerns “Papists” or Catholics. Adams does not support their right to practice religion freely. This prejudice stems directly from British history, as Britain officially rejected the Roman Catholic Church in favor of the Church of England in 1534. English Protestant critiques of Catholicism typically centered on Catholic obedience to the Pope, a figure who was believed to threaten the authority of civil government in England.
