The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate: Vol. 1, 1764–1772

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Often seen as the beginning of the American story, the momentous decision taken in Philadelphia on July 2, 1776, also marked the endpoint of an extraordinary political debate that determined the fate of the first British empire. Largely carried on in pamphlets, the instant media of their day, this war of words fueled the escalation of tensions between Great Britain and her North American colonies in the period from 1773 to 1776. During these crucial years a political controversy that had earlier focused on questions of representation and consent deepened into a more fateful contest over the nature of sovereignty itself.

The pamphlets gathered in this second volume of a two-volume set were written both by Americans and Britons, though such distinctions can be misleading in light of the increasingly interconnected character of the empire in this period. Englishman Thomas Paine had been resident in the colonies for only fourteen months when he wrote Common Sense, the most influential expression of the “American” position during the debate, while Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, who in two pamphlets articulates the “British” position as forcefully as any writer collected here, had deep ancestral roots in the colonies. The fluidity of these categories shaped the debate traced in this volume, indeed it can be said to have been the central question to be resolved: were Americans and Britons one people, one nation, or not?

Here, in texts that vividly capture the mounting intensity of the imperial crisis, Thomas Jefferson presents a vision of a radically new kind of empire in the work that first made him famous; James Wilson boldly rejects Parliament’s authority over the colonies; Charles Lee, a British officer and future American general, offers words of encouragement for colonial militia; Joseph Galloway puts forward an ingenious but ill-fated plan for preserving union with Great Britain; Samuel Johnson, writing on behalf of the British government, gives vent to his deep animus for the Americans and their pretensions to liberty; and Edmund Burke, in a speech delivered in the House of Commons just a month before Lexington and Concord, makes an eloquent case for reconciliation before it’s too late.

Prepared by the nation’s leading historian of the American Revolution, this volume includes an introduction, headnotes, biographical notes about the writers, a chronology charting the rise and fall of the first British empire, a textual essay describing the reception and influence of each work, and detailed explanatory notes. As a special feature, it also presents typographic reproductions of the pamphlets’ original title pages.