hought themselves
one company with that "mighty line of heroes and confessors and martyrs
who since the beginning of history have done battle for the dignity and
happiness of human nature against the leagued assailants of both."

This lyric enthusiasm for liberty, and the radical political theories
which were its most formal expression, were all the more
incomprehensible to the average Briton inasmuch as they were the result
of a conflict of interests in America quite as much as of English
legislation. "The decree has gone forth," said John Adams, "that a more
equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be
established in America." Not for home rule alone was the Revolution
fought, but for the democratization of American society as well. The
quarrel with Great Britain would hardly have ended in war, had the
landed and commercial interests, those little aristocracies which had
hitherto controlled colonial politics, been free to conduct it in their
own fashion. At every stage in the controversy, the most uncompromising
opponents of Parliamentary taxation were those who felt themselves
inadequately represented in colonial assemblies. Fear of British tyranny
was most felt by those who had little influence in shaping colonial
laws. And half the bitter denunciation of corruption in England was
inspired by jealous dislike of those high-placed families in America
whose ostentatious lives and condescending manners were an offense to
the laborious poor, or to men of talent ambitious to rise from obscurity
to influence and power.

What Heaven-sent opportunity, then, was this quarrel with Britain for
all those who resented the genial complacence with which fortune's
favorites, "with vanity enough to call themselves the better sort,"
monopolized privilege in nearly every colony! The Virginia Stamp Act
Resolutions, which according to Governor Bernard of Massachusetts
sounded "an alarum bell to the disaffected," would assuredly never have
been passed by the Pendletons or the Blands, nor yet by Peyton Randolph,
who swore with an oath that he would have given L500 for a single vote
to defeat them. They were carried by the western counties under the
leadership of Patrick Henry, recently elected from the back country to
sit in sober home-spun garb with the modish aristocrats of the
tide-water. Product of the small farmer democracy beyond the "Fall
Line," uniting the implacable temper of the Calvinist with the
human