The Convention’s rhetoric shifted from claiming constitutional rights to blaming the Crown
Evidence
Even Dunmore’s proclamation, issued two months earlier, had not initially stirred as much passion for independence as the burning of Norfolk, but now Virginians saw a common pattern. In December 1775, for example, the Fourth Virginia Convention responded to the proclamation with a declaration chiefly drafted by the aristocratic lawyer and senior officeholder Robert Carter Nicholas, a conservative patriot who revered his rights but feared republicanism. Reviling Dunmore (but not the king), it called for “resisting force by force, to maintain our just rights,” and denounced Dunmore’s proclamation as “in direct violation of the [British] Constitution” rather than as a cause for separation. Rights, not revolution, remained the refrain. … A month later, however, the Virginia Convention’s resolution condemning the burning of Norfolk struck a different note. “The British Ministry have at length engaged in an open and avowed war with the good people of this Colony,” the convention now stated, “by burning and destroying open and defenceless Towns, contrary to the practice of war among civilized nations, [and] by inciting insurrections among our slaves … and arming them against us.” Without using the word, the convention laid the foundation for revolution by placing blame for the burning of Norfolk and Dunmore’s proclamation directly on the British government, depicting those acts as contrary to the law of nations, and (in a final resolve) asking Congress to open the colonies to trade with foreign nations in defiance of imperial law. Revolutionary rhetoric had replaced a request for rights. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 24
Categorization
- XREF: This rights-to-revolution pivot is the legal-constitutional cousin of grievance escalation dynamics studied in conflict and state-formation literatures. — connects to: Jefferson argued four million Americans equal in worth to any British elector — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 40; Blaming the king rather than Parliament was a revolutionary act — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 167