Volume 3, Chapter 47, Wilkes and America
It was no accident that Alexander MacDougall tried to emulate Wilkes. Wilkes had indeed
been the hero and the inspiration of the libertarian movement on both sides of the Atlantic. This
was particularly true in the period since his incarceration in June 1768, an imprisonment
which continued until the spring of 1770.
During his term in jail, Wilkes' supporters ran him successfully four times for parliament
in Middlesex, but four times he was denied his seat by parliament itself.
After the third ripoff, a mob surrounded the royal palace shouting, Wilkes and no king!
and was dispersed by troops.
The connections between Wilkes and the American liberal movement enhanced each other's knowledge
of events in the other land. We have seen that the Boston Sons of Liberty struck up
an extensive correspondence with Wilkes in prison. On October 5, 1768, the Boston Sons
wrote admiringly to Wilkes that he was a martyr to universal liberty. Among the prominent
Bostonians who wrote to Wilkes were Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., John Adams, Sam Adams, Dr. Thomas
Young, Joseph Warren, William Palfrey, and Josiah Quincy, Jr. One Bostonian reported
that he had dined with Wilkes in jail and that they both had toasted to the King, to
Liberty, The Farmer, John Dickinson, and James Otis Esquire of Boston.
The closest connection between Wilkes and the American liberals was Arthur Lee, a Virginian
living in London.
Keeping in close touch with the Wilkite movement, through Lee were such leading Americans as
John Dickinson and Arthur's brother, Richard Henry Lee.
Dr. Lee was responsible for a clause in the Wilkite Middlesex Petition denouncing the
oppression of the colonies by Great Britain. Others who served as a liaison between Wilkes
and the American Libertarians were George Haley, Wilkes' brother-in-law, who was the
English commercial agent for John Hancock and William Palfrey, and Lord Sheriffs William
William Lee and Stephen Serrer, American-born merchants who were mercantile partners of
a prominent Bostonian. Wilkes then added oppression of the colonies to the catalog of oppressions
for which he habitually denounced the British government. In February 1769, the Boston Suns
wrote to Wilkes that, the fate of Wilkes and America must stand or fall together. Wilkes
Thomas replied at the end of March that Britain had imposed an Asiatic despotism on Boston
by sending in troops, and he pointed to a parallel between the actions of the soldiery
in Boston and those in London. Unlike the more timorous Whigs, the Wilkite radicals
attacked the Declaratory Act and favored far more liberty for the colonies. As the Wilkite
leader the Reverend John Horne eloquently declared, When the people of America are enslaved,
we cannot be free, and they can never be enslaved whilst we continue free. We are stones of
one arch and must stand or fall together. On February 20, 1769, the supporters of Wilkes
formed the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights to raise funds to finance the
and the Wilkite Cause. Many prominent American liberals, including Samuel and John Adams,
were members of this society. Organizing a mass petition campaign to protest Wilkes's
repeated expulsion from his rightfully won seat, the Wilkites went on to denounce the
entire parliament as unrepresentative and therefore corrupt, and this charge helped
to Radicalize Opinion in America. The petition campaign, organized by the Society of the
Supporters of the Bill of Rights, swept not only London, Westminster and Middlesex, but
also Essex, Surrey, Kent and the West Country, including Devon Cornwall in the town of Bristol.
The American Henry Krueger, head of the Independent Society of Bristol, organized a petition in
In mid-July, signed by half of the 5,000 eligible voters of Bristol, protesting both the cruelties
to Wilkes and the un-politic and un-constitutional taxations and regulations on Your Majesty's
Colonies.
Protest against oppression of the American Colonies was also made by the Middlesex and
London Petitions.
Most of the petitions were brief and did not mention America, but nonetheless drew the
In close association with the Wilkite Society, the Whigs, including Rockingham, Seville,
Daldswell and Edmund Burke, successfully organized petitions in the northern and western counties
of England. All in all, 60,000 people, over one quarter of the voters of England, signed
and the Wilkite Petitions, a true mass movement. Despite frantic attempts, the government was
only able to organize counter-petitions in support of a hard line toward Wilkes and the
Americans from the two controlled universities, four counties and two cities. The enthusiasm
of Americans for Wilkes and his cause was indeed enormous. This rhapsodic credo of one
An American pamphlet, widely circulated in Boston in 1769, was typical.
I believe in Wilkes, the firm patriot, maker of number 45, who was born for our good, suffered
under arbitrary power, was banished and imprisoned.
He ascended into purgatory and returned some time after.
I believe in the spirit of his abilities that they will prove to the good of our country
in the resurrection of liberty and the life of universal freedom forever. Amen.
The Americans were wont to compare Wilkes to their 17th century libertarian heroes Milton
and Sidney and their 17th century republican view was enlivened by the resurgence in Britain
of such embodiments of tyranny as standing armies, arbitrary judicial procedures such
as general warrants and burdensome taxation.
This harking back to the highly relevant 17th century struggles was fueled by the publication
of the multi-volume History of England by the noted libertarian Catherine Macaulay.
The work of Mrs. Macaulay, a correspondent of James Otis and an admirer of Dickinson,
was well known and eagerly read in America, as was Wilkes's own published introduction
to his projected history of England at the turn of the 18th century. Mrs. Macaulay was
the sister of the prominent London Wilkite alderman John Solbridge. As 1769 wore on,
The identification of American radicals with Wilkes intensified as the network of interwoven
grievances expanded in Britain and in America. The Boston merchant William Palfrey wrote
Wilkes in the fall of 1769 of the unremitted order of the Sons of Liberty for his cause
and their sympathy in the distress brought by arbitrary ministers upon Great Britain
and her dependencies. The petition movement of late 1769 drew great support in America.
The South Carolina House showed its solidarity with the Wilkite cause in December by sending
to the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights 1,500 pounds sterling in behalf
On behalf of the just and constitutional rights and liberties of the people of Great Britain and America, a group of Maryland liberals sent Wilkes a symbolic 45 hugs heads of tobacco. And a similar action took place in Virginia. These fellow feeling deepened among the Wilkites too. The London public advertiser argued cogently that the cause of liberty in England and America
America is one common cause, because the attacks on both have been made by the same set of
men with the same views and with the same illegal violence.
Furthermore, the Wilkites began to make use of American arguments against Parliament,
and many middle-sex freeholders refused to pay their taxes on the ground that since their
The American non-importation movement, aided by the continuing encouragement given to American non-importation in the Virginia Press by author Lee.
The Americans were particularly interested in the petitions of Middlesex in London, which championed the colonial revolution in the United States.
and which also came from the heart of English radicalism and from the city with which the American liberals most closely identified.
King George's brusque dismissal of the London Petitions in March 1770 had a sharp and chilling impact on opinion in America.
Until then, the king had always been deemed sacrosanct, and only his ministers or politicians
in parliament were held blameworthy for the regime of oppression.
Now, for the first time, the king himself began to be a butt of libertarian attack in
America.
The great radical organs, the Boston Gazette and Peter Timothy's South Carolina Gazette,
were particular harbingers of this new point of view.
The South Carolina radicals were certainly the leaders of this new and vital turn.
Wilksism had particularly flourished in South Carolina.
As we have seen, only the South Carolina Assembly voted funds for the Wilkite cause.
Christopher Gadsden had formed an active Wilkes Club, consisting largely of Charleston artisans,
and had led the successful Wilkes Fund Drive. The Wilkes Fund movement was led by some of
the most prominent men in the province, large planters Thomas Lynch and Thomas Ferguson's,
wealthy lawyers Peter Manigault, James Parson and John Rutledge, and the merchant Benjamin
and Dart. Of the prominent South Carolinians, only William Henry Drayton and the timorous
Henry Lawrence opposed the Wilkes appropriation. South Carolina's Council and Governor as
well as the Crown were indignant at the Assembly's courageous action and denied the right of
the Assembly to appropriate money without their consent. The Assembly retorted, proclaiming
In April 18, 1770, John Wilkes was finally released from prison to take up his duties
as alderman of the City of London.
The release was celebrated throughout the colonies, from Boston to Charleston, but American rejoicing
in Wilkite's successes was not to last long. The road of struggle against the imperial,
feudal and oligarchic structure of Great Britain was difficult enough in the best of circumstances,
and essential to that struggle was unity within the radical camp. But in the autumn and winter
In the year of 1770, a tragic and irreparable split occurred deep within the leadership
and cadres of the radical movement. The Wilkite Organization, the Society of the Supporters
of the Bill of Rights, split wide open with John Wilkes on one side and Parson, John Horn,
and John Sawbridge on the other. Historians have attributed the split to personal frictions
Spain had suffered British intrusion into the Falkland Islands, off the tip of the southwest coast of South America, since Pitt's aggressive occupation four years earlier. Now, in June 1770,
Spain moved to reoccupy the Falklands. Britain made ready for war with Spain, egged on by
the warmongering cries of Chatham and Shelburne, both out of power. Chatham had always yearned
for total victory over France and Spain, and now he saw another chance. Chatham denounced
any negotiations with the Spaniards as appeasement of an inferior and untrustworthy race. He
He called for immediate war against France to achieve the total triumph that his, Chatham's,
enemies had denied to England seven years earlier.
Since England, to Chatham, had the God-given right to rule all the islands of the world,
the Spanish occupation of the remote Falklands became a dagger poised at the heart of English
hegemony.
No concession to Spain, however minute, was tolerable.
Such would destroy the edifice of the British Empire by disgraceful expedience to avoid an
ultimately unavoidable final conflict. To maintain Chatham's grandiose claims, England
was supposedly duty-bound to build and support a navy larger than any other two world fleets
combined. Chatham's and Shelbourne's war hysteria had particularly unfortunate effects
on the Radical Movement. All of his political life, Chatham's erratic, charismatic and
ultra-imperialist role confused and weakened the liberal and radical forces in England,
when in opposition, and only then, Chatham characteristically made libertarian noises.
And the liberals felt that they could not ignore an opposition alliance against the
of Government with a man as popular and influential as Pitt.
Since the autumn of 1768, when Pitt left the cabinet, Chatham had strengthened his ties
with the London radicals and now he was in a position to split their movement.
Specifically in the autumn of 1770, the government, under the pressure of the War Party, frantically
began to build up its Navy and hence to press gang sailors for its ships. John Wilkes, as
an alderman of London, refused to sanction the use of press warrants in London and obstructed
Navy impressmen as an illegal action making slaves of free men. Thus, in a clash between
Liberty and the Supposed Requirements of Empire and State
John Wilkes chose liberty.
Not only did many other London magistrates follow Wilkes in refusing to honor press warrants,
but he led the London Common Council in calling for the prosecution of any magistrates or
constables who issued or executed such warrants for impressment.
The new Lord Mayor of London, Brass Crosby, a Wilkite selected with the help of John Wilkes,
refused to accept press warrants and thus prevented press ganging within the City of
London. To Chatham, all of this was treason. Wilkes and the radicals, he declared, were
laboring to cut off the right hand of the community and to shake the public safety and
should be tried before the House of Commons. It is surely no coincidence that in the split
that then developed within the radical movement, the radical leaders associated with Chatham
and Shelburne joined the anti-Wilkes camp, while Rockingham and the Whigs, who opposed
the war agitation, sided with Wilkes.
The government finally reached a settlement with Spain in early 1771, restoring the English
of the Spanish Port in the Falklands. But soon afterward, England quietly withdrew from
the port, therewith indicating a secret yielding to the Spanish claim. Wilkes, however, continued
his anti-militarist stand and warned, upon becoming sheriff of London in late 1771, that
he would no longer allow the army to interfere in civil functions in London. The sharp decline
in the Wilkite Movement in the years after 1770, as well as the strength of Tory rule
in Great Britain, served greatly to disillusion American liberals about the possibility of
radical success in the home country. From now on, they realized that Americans would
have to rely principally on themselves. If the libertarian ideals of most Americans and
By late 1771, Sam Adams was writing, authorly, that brute force seemed to have made the English people afraid to compel redress of their grievances, and that, therefore, with no great expectation of some happy event from your side of the water, Americans would have to be in America.
Erica herself, under God, must finally work out her own salvation.