Conceived in Liberty, Volume 3, Advanced to Revolution, 1760-1775, by Murray N. Rothbard
Part 1, The British Army and the Western Lands
Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer. Sir, we have done everything that
could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned, we have
have remonstrated, we have supplicated, we have prostrated ourselves before the throne
and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament.
Our petitions have been slighted, our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult,
Our supplications have been disregarded, and we have been spurned with contempt from the
foot of the throne.
In vain after these things may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation.
There is no longer any room for hope.
If we wish to be free, if we mean to preserve in violet those inestimable privileges for
for which we have been so long contending. If we mean not basely to abandon the noble
struggle in which we have been so long engaged, in which we have pledged ourselves never to
abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight. I repeat
Sir, we must fight. An appeal to arms and to the God of Host is all that is left us.
Patrick Henry. Preface. What? Another American history book? The reader may be pardoned for
wondering about the point of another addition to the seemingly inexhaustible flow of books
One problem, as pointed out in the bibliographical essay at the end of Volume 1, is that the survey studies of American history have squeezed out the actual stuff of history, the narrative facts of the important events of the past.
With the true data of history squeezed out, what we have left are compressed summaries
and the historians' interpretations and judgments of the data.
There is nothing wrong with the historians having such judgments.
Indeed, without them, history would be a meaningless and giant almanac, listing dates and events
with no causal links.
But without the narrative facts, the reader is deprived of the data from which he can
himself judge the historian's interpretations and evolve interpretations of his own.
A major point of this and the other volumes is to put back the historical narrative into
American history.
Judgments of course must be selected and ordered in accordance with judgments of importance,
and such judgments are necessarily tied into the historian's basic world outlook.
My own basic perspective on the history of man, and an a fortiori on the history of the
United States, is to place central importance on the great conflict, which is eternally
I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself, or with Lord Acton as the highest political good, but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes.
Moral Virtue, Civilization, The Arts and Sciences, Economic Prosperity
Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life.
But liberty has always been threatened by the encroachments of power,
power which seeks to suppress, control, cripple, tax, and exploit the fruits of liberty in production.
Power, then, the enemy of liberty, is consequently the enemy of all the other goods and fruits
of civilization that mankind holds dear, and power is almost always centered in and focused
on that central repository of power and violence, the state.
With Albert J. Nock, the 20th century American political philosopher, I see history as centrally
A Race in Conflict Between Social Power, The Productive Consequence of Voluntary Interactions
Among Men, and State Power.
In those eras of history when liberty, social power, has managed to race ahead of state
power and control, the country and even mankind have flourished.
In those eras when state power has managed to catch up with or surpass social power,
and Kind suffers and declines. For decades, American historians have quarreled about conflict
or consensus as the guiding leitmotif of the American past. Clearly, I belong in the conflict
rather than the consensus camp with the proviso that I see the central conflict as not between
between classes, social or economic, or between ideologies, but between power and liberty,
state and society.
The social or ideological conflicts have been ancillary to the central one, which concerns
who will control the state, and what power will the state exercise over the citizenry.
To take a common example from American history, there are, in my view, no inherent conflicts
between merchants and farmers in the free market.
On the contrary, in the market, the sphere of liberty, the interests of merchants and
farmers are harmonious, with each buying and selling the products of the other.
Conflicts arise only through the attempts of various groups of merchants or farmers
to seize control over the machinery of government and to use it to privilege themselves at the
expense of others. It is only through and by state action that class conflicts can ever arise.
This volume deals with the stormy and fateful period from the end of the French and Indian War
until the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord in 1775, the period that incubated
the American Revolution. With France driven from the North American continent and with
the classical liberal Whigs out of power, the British government moved quickly to impose
a system of imperial control over the fractious and hitherto virtually independent colonies.
These fifteen years are a record of mounting American resistance to such efforts by the
The Mother Country, a resistance that finally erupted into full-scale war at Lexington and
Concord.
Inspired by libertarian ideals, the colonists increasingly forged a unity that was to result
in the first successful national revolution against Western imperialism in the modern
world.
Although other largely unrelated armed rebellions also erupted in this period in North Carolina,
South Carolina, New York and Vermont, these years are essentially the story of the development
of the American Revolution up to the outbreak of actual armed conflict.
My intellectual debts for this volume are simply too numerous to mention, especially
Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Israel Kirzner, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Roger Garrison, Hans-Hermann Hoppe,
is much neglected volume, theory and history, and Lord Acton for his emphasis on the grievously
overlooked moral dimension, for his political philosophy and general outlook on American
history Albert J. Nock, particularly his Our Enemy the State.
As for my personal debts, I am happy to be more specific.
This series of volumes would never have been attempted, much less seen the light of day,
without the inspiration, encouragement and support provided by Kenneth S. Templeton Jr.,
now of the Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park, California. I hope that he won't be
overly disappointed with these volumes. I am grateful to the Foundation for Foreign
and Affairs Chicago for enabling me to work full-time on the volumes, and to Dr. David
S. Collier of the Foundation for his help and efficient administration.
Others who have helped with ideas and aid in various stages of the manuscript are Charles
G. Koch and George Pearson of Wichita, Kansas, and Robert D. Kephart of Libertarian Review,
Washington, D.C.
To my first mentor in the field of American history, Joseph Dorfman, now Professor Emeritus
at Columbia University, I owe in particular the rigorous training that is typical of that
keen and thorough scholar.
The last chapter in this volume was included at the suggestion of Roy A. Childs, Jr. of
New York City.
But my greatest debt is to Leonard P. Ligio of S.O.N.Y., old Westbury, whose truly phenomenal
breadth of knowledge and insight into numerous fields and areas of history are an inspiration
to all who know him. Ligio's help was indispensable in the writing of this volume, in particular
his knowledge of the European background. Over the years in which this manuscript took
I was fortunate in having several congenial typists, in particular, Willette Murphy Klausner of Los Angeles, and the now distinguished intellectual historian and social philosopher, Dr. Ronald Hammowy of the University of Alberta.
I would particularly like to thank Louise Williams of New York City for her heroic service of
typing the entire manuscript in its final form. The responsibility for the final product
is, of course, wholly my own. Murray N. Rothbard, February, 1976, Vol. 3, Chapter 1, The Stage
By 1760, the Great French and Indian War in America between Britain and France was over,
with Britain the absolute master of Canada and of all the land east of the Mississippi.
The peace treaty of 1763 between the belligerents in the World War, Britain, France and Spain,
Known in Europe as the Seven Years' War, completed the ouster of France from the North American
continent.
For Spain acquired France's domain in Louisiana, west of the Mississippi, in compensation for
Britain's acquisition of Florida from Spain.
The mighty British Empire now stood master of all it surveyed, in no place more so than
in North America.
Furthermore, the war had driven from power the peaceful Pelhamite Whigs, led by the Duke
of Newcastle, who along with his brother, Henry Pelham, and the previously ousted Robert
Walpole, had managed to keep England on a course of minimal government and international
peace, and of salutary neglect of the American colonies.
These men had accomplished this feat against the reluctant opposition of Crown and Parliament.
Salutary neglect had meant the conscience thwarting of Britain's grand mercantilist
design for controlling and restricting American commerce and industry for the benefit of British
merchants and manufacturers.
Furthermore, the wall-pole Newcastle policy of laissez-faire toward the colonies had allowed
It allowed the representative colonial assemblies to wrest effective power from royally appointed
governors by wielding the power of the purse over colonial taxes and appropriations, notably
including the governor's own salaries.
Thus, from 1720 through the 1750s, the American colonies were virtually de facto independent
of British Imperial Control, an independence bolstered by libertarian spirit and ideology
eagerly imbibed from the radical libertarian English writers and journalists of the period.
The hostility of these writers to government in general and to the existing English government
in particular, especially to its designs for power, keenly alerted the American colonists
to the slightest signs of aggression by the mother country against their liberties.
For its part, the British government, seemingly all-powerful, was now freed both of the distractions
of a two-decades-long conflict with France and of the salutary neglect policies of the
Pelhamite Whigs.
The British were now free to bring the fractious American colonists to heel, to impose a comprehensive
system of imperial British political and mercantilist control over the colonies.
To her surprise, the mother country was to find that the Americans would not sit still
while she imposed her grand design that would unleash her imperial power.