Life of Johnson: Americans

Johnson bitterly hated America and was violent on the subject of the tax protests, even before the revolution. He wrote a long pamphlet against the tax protests, called Taxation No Tyranny, which Boswell, who favored the American complaints, said was largely bluster and sophistries. From my first read, it seems he had a theory of apostolic succession in government, so that once a proper government was formed, all subsequent alterations and branches derived their authority from the original, or else had no authority at all. I have never heard that before, so I want to think about it more.

Otherwise, he has not made many interesting arguments. He wastes time on the straw man that Americans were opposed to taxation itself, though he admits they granted the theoretical right of taxation. Much later he addresses the real question, of taxation without representation, making the expected argument that the colonists are included in parliamentary representation as much as all the other groups of people who have no direct vote. He does not appear to realize that those other groups might well deserve representation as well. He even uses the existence of rotten boroughs, unrepresented cities, and the small electorate as arguments against the idea that every region deserves representation. In a way, the thread of his thought does resemble what later happened, with America splitting away, then the formation of legislatures in Canada in 1791, the reform of rotten boroughs in 1831 and again in 1867, the grant of representation to cities founded in modern times in 1832, and the extension of suffrage in 1832.

He adds that the original colonists had the potential (though few the actual ability) to vote before they left England, so their departure was a voluntary abandonment of the right to vote. I suppose that is true, though it seems more likely that they abandoned voting on practical rather than theoretical grounds. In any case, why would that original choice to abandon the vote descend from those few original settlers to the three million Americans of 1778, in their large(ish) cities governed by assemblies? They had no practical ability to move to England, and the original condition of the settlers, of small armed camps in the wild, with little need for representation in England, did not resemble the young commercial states, with their frequent and complex interaction with England.

He did suggest that the "planters," which I hope does not mean only the Southern plantation owners whose slave-owning he elsewhere condemned, could have bought large estates in England, which would have given them the vote and potentially seats in parliament. That idea was not very practical, given the danger and distance that had prevented trans-Atlantic land holding for two centuries, and again revealed how little he cared whether representation was distributed unevenly. That method would have made a small group of self-selected wealthy men the sole representatives of the colonies, without recourse for the rest of the colonists.

He argues that royal charters to the colonies can be amended at will by the king or parliament, without appeal by the colonies, while the colonies are not allowed to point to long-standing usage to prove their rights. In a way, that grants the colonists' argument, that parliament and the king were beginning to strip the colonies of their traditional rights, and that to grant the power of taxation without representation was to put all freedoms at the whim of the king. He does not mention it, but the colonists were also greatly exercised by the thought that religious restrictions would follow on taxation, with the appointment of bishops from England and the enforcement of Anglicanism as the state religion.

The pamphlet was written in 1775; it is surprising how little Johnson mentions the war afterward, even in 1778. Since he and Boswell fight so bitterly on the subject that they stop seeing each other for a while, more than once, perhaps his lack of comment is only tact on his or Boswell's part. Still, he does not mention the war in letters to others. Only with Gen. Burgoyne's defeat does war news in the ordinary sense break in.