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Natural Rights Dissected and Rejected: John Lind's Counter to the Declaration of Independence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2017

Neil L. York
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Extract

James Oliver Robertson intended no sacrilege when he called the Declaration of Independence a sacred text, an essential component of what has become American “holy writ.” It is now venerated as a founding document of the national civil religion. The Declaration, Robertson emphasized, reflects an expectation that the new United States would become the nation among all nations. As celebrated now, independence then provided the political means to achieve a social end, that social end being a better life for Americans, their new nation acting as an exemplar for the larger world. Or, as Stephen E. Lucas put it, the Declaration of Independence went through an “apotheosis,” through which, over the years, Americans have come to “see its original purpose in universal terms almost wholly divorced from the events of 1776.”

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Law and History Review , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 563 - 593
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2017 

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Footnotes

He thanks the editor, the three anonymous readers that she selected, and Professor Philip Schofield of University College London for their help with this article.

References

1. Robertson, James Oliver, American Myth, American Reality (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980), 65–69 Google Scholar.

2. Lucas, Stephen E., “Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document,” in Benson, Thomas W., ed., American Rhetoric: Context and Composition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 67–130 Google Scholar; quotation at 68; and two subsequent essays: “The Rhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1(1998):143–84; and “The Declaration of Independence in the Rhetoric of American Politics,” in Eadie, William F. and Nelson, Paul E., eds., The Changing Conversation in America (Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publication, 2002), 39–59 Google Scholar. Also see Armitage, David, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Maier, Pauline, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)Google Scholar; Shain, Barry Alan, ed., The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Lynd, Staughton, The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [orig. ed., 1968])Google Scholar.

3. W. P. Courtney wrote the entry for John Lind in Stephen, Leslie and Lee, Sidney, eds., Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1885–1909), 11:1155–56Google Scholar. Clayton, M. E. worked within Courtney's outline while adding a bit for the updated entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 33:816Google Scholar. Neither analyzed or even mentioned all of Lind's writings. Avery, Margaret E., “Toryism in the Age of the American Revolution: John Lind and John Shebbeare,” Historical Studies 18 (1978):24–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers considerably more detail. The starting place for most writers looking into Lind's background has been Jeremy Bentham's letter to his close friend John Bowring of January 30, 1827, which is available in a number of sources. See Bowring, 's The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 [orig. ed., 1838–43]), 11:48–65 Google Scholar, which left out a passage about Lind's wife that appears in the more complete version presented in Sprigge, Timothy L. S., Fuller, Catherine, and O'Sullivan, Luke, eds., The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 12 vols. (London: Athlone Press, 1968–1981, vols. 1–5; and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–2006, vols. 6–12), 12:288–309 Google Scholar; and in Barker, E. H., ed., Parriana: Or Notices of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL.D., 2 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1828–29), 2:1–27 Google Scholar. Bentham erred on numerous facts. Given the many years that had passed since Lind's death, he ought to be forgiven for that. Whether he also erred in more impressionistic recollections, such as the degree to which he dominated Lind intellectually, influencing the nature, content, and form of Lind's writing, is another matter. F. Rosen offered an excellent overview of Bentham's life and ideas in his essay for the Oxford DNB 5:221–34.

4. There are some biographical details for Charles Lind and John Lind in Sir Douglas, Robert, The Genealogy of the Family of Lind, and The Montgomeries of Smithton (Windsor: n.p., 1795)Google Scholar, and George Rickwood, “Historical Notes on the Parish and Church, St. Giles, Colchester” (1931). John Lind's birth/christening record is in the St. James Church, Westminster, parish records, Baptisms, June 1723 to April 1741, bound manuscript volume (microfilm number 1042308 Family History Library, Salt Lake City, UT). For Lind's early schooling, ca. 1752–53, see the Biographical List of Boys Educated at King Edward VI Free Grammar School, Bury St.. Edmunds, from 1550–1900 (Bury St. Edmunds: Paul & Matthew, 1905), 235.

5. John Lind is listed in Foster, Joseph, ed., Alumni Oxoniensis: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1786 (Oxford: James Parker, 1891), 853Google Scholar.

6. From Charles Lind's will, dated February 26, 1771 and proved on March 19. In the Archdeaconry Records, Essex Record Office, St. Botolph Parish D/ACW 33/1/5, misdated 1773. John Lind's older sister, Elizabeth, had died before. Mary and Laetita, his other sisters, were still alive, and what their father left behind went to them and to Elizabeth's two children. Lind's daughter, born out of wedlock in Poland, was apparently named for Laetitia.

7. Lind, John, Concerning the Present State of Poland, 2nd ed. (London: T. Payne, 1773)Google Scholar, followed the first edition by just a few months. For Lind's attempts to influence British policy makers see his letter to the Earl of Dartmouth of October 5, 1772, in the Dartmouth Papers, Staffordshire Record Office D(W)1778/V/281; and Jeremy Bentham's recollections in a letter to Prince Czartoryski of June 21, 1815 in Gielgud, Adam, ed., Memoir of Prince Adam Czartoryski , 2 vols. (Orono: Academic International, 1968 [orig. ed., 1865]), 2:298Google Scholar.

8. According to the Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn: Admissions from A.D. 1420 to A.D. 1799 (London: Lincoln's Inn, 1896), 473, Lind entered Lincoln's Inn on June 22, 1773, one of four to enter that month, and one of forty-four for the year. The Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn: The Black Books, 4 vols. (London: Lincoln's Inn, 1897–1902), 4:257, lists Lind as being sworn to the bar on June 24, 1776, along with seven others from Lincoln's Inn on that date. (Jeremy Bentham had been sworn to the bar on November 6, 1769; ibid., 3:400.)

9. For general observations, see Lemmings, David, Professors of the Law: Barristers and English Legal Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Sir Baker, John, Legal Education in London, 1250–1850 (London: Selden Society, 2007)Google Scholar.

10. In Browne's General Law–List; For the Year 1779, 3rd ed. (London, n. p., 1778) Lind is listed as residing at Lamb's Conduit Street, Holborn 65. His residence south of the Thames, in Ewell, Surrey, is listed in the estate sale of his property. See n. 73.

11. An Old Member of Parliament [Lee, Arthur], An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of Great Britain, in the Present Disputes in America (London: J. Almon, 1774)Google Scholar, “taxation and representation inseparable,” at 4; “eternal law of Nature,” at 4–5. My primer for the larger subject has been Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., 19 for “unalienable”; 42 for “ruined.”

13. Lind, John, Remarks on the Principal Acts of the Thirteenth Parliament of Great Britain (London: T. Payne, 1775)Google Scholar, vii for “applaud” and “censure.” Both Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1967), 226Google Scholar, and Reid, John Phillip, The Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 4 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986–92), 2:322Google Scholar, thought that Lind was the author of An Englishman's Answer, to the Address from the Delegates, to the People of Great-Britain (New York: James Rivington, 1775). Adams, Thomas R., American Independence: The Growth of an Idea (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965), 124–25Google Scholar thought otherwise, and he was right to do so.

14. Reid suggests this distinction in a number of his works, notably in his abridged edition of the Constitutional History of the American Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); and The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005).

15. Lind, Remarks, “change the constitution,” at 25; “constituent part,” at 27; “procuratorial capacity,” at 44; “discretionary power,” at 31.

16. Ibid., no “immutable laws of nature,” at 22; absurdity of relying on Bracton or Coke, xii–xiiin. Lind slipped into the constitutional and historical mire when he called Ireland a “colony,” at 12, but he was not alone there. See York, Neil L., Neither Kingdom Nor Nation: The Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698–1800 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

17. Lind, Remarks, 49.

18. Ibid., 321.

19. North presented his proposal to the House of Commons on February 20, 1775. See Simmons, R. C. and Thomas, P. D. G., eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains. NY: Kraus International Publications, 1982–87), 5:432–51Google Scholar, for the debates, and Donoghue, Bernard, British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773–75 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1964)Google Scholar and Thomas, Peter D. G., Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)Google Scholar for context. In his “Plan of Reconciliation” in the Remarks, 492, Lind tipped his hat to Francis Bernard—“a man deeply learned in American affairs”—and the ideas for imperial reform that he laid out in Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1774).

20. Lind, Remarks, “Plan of Reconciliation,” at 483–500; “accountable to the provincial legislatures,” at 495–96; “contribute their proportion,” at 497; “give up the colonies,” at 499.

21. Tucker, Josiah, Four Tracts, Together with Two Sermons, on Political and Commercial Subjects (Glocester: R. Raikes, 1774)Google Scholar; followed by Tract V: The Respective Pleas and Arguments of the Mother Country, and of the Colonies Distinctly Set Forth (Glocester: R. Raikes, 1775). For the various failed attempts at imperial reorganization suggested during these years—creating a new imperial parliament, giving Americans seats at Westminster, setting up an intercolonial American congress, or granting the American colonists legislative autonomy—see York, Neil L., “Federalism and the Failure of Imperial Reform” History 86 (2001):155–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of the various reformers, Cartwright, John, American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great-Britain (London: H. S. Woodfall, 1775)Google Scholar—independence meaning legislative autonomy––was most emphatic in turning to John Locke and natural rights arguments in making his case.

22. Adams, Thomas R., The American Controversy: A Bibliographical Study of the British Pamphlets About the American Disputes, 1764–1783, 2 vols. (Providence: Brown University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, provides the publishing history of Lee's Appeal (at 1:216–18, 295–96) and Lind's Remarks (at 1:303).

23. For the American press, see Schlesinger, Arthur M., Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957)Google Scholar; Davidson, Philip, Propaganda and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941)Google Scholar; and Castronovo, Russ, Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communication in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the British press at this same time, see Lutnick, Solomon, The American Revolution and the British Press, 1775–1783 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Hinkhouse, Fred Junkin, The Preliminaries of the American Revolution as seen in the English Press, 1763–1775 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926)Google Scholar; and Bickham, Troy, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

24. Price, Richard, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadell, 1776), 42nGoogle Scholar. After first appearing in February 1776, the Observations went through a dozen editions before the year ended, in London, with printings in Dublin, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, as well as being translated into French and Dutch. For the various print runs, see Adams, American Controversy, 1:433–40, and Adams, American Independence, 172–77. There is a chapter on Price in Toohey, Richard E., Liberty and Empire: British Radical Solutions to the American Problem, 1774–1776 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and he also figures prominently in Bonwick's, Colin English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

25. Three Letters to Dr. Price (London: T. Payne, 1776), 37. But Lind also stated (at 88) that government's primary job is to “produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number”—perhaps reflecting his continuing discussions with Jeremy Bentham? See n. 28.

26. Ibid., “ABSENCE of COERCION,” at 16; “restrain or constrain,” at 24; “sovereign without a subject,” at 37. Lind noted (at xi) that he had first responded to the Observations under the guise of “Attilius” in The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (beginning with the first “letter” on March 21, 1776, with a second letter the next day, a third on March 24, a fourth on March 27, a fifth on March 29, and a sixth and final on April 1; prompting a response by “Seneca” on April 2), but he had needed more space to make his arguments than a newspaper could provide. Gunn, J. A. W., Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal: Kingston and McGill University Press, 1983), 244–46Google Scholar alludes to the Price–Lind debate.

27. Price, Richard, Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (London: T. Cadell, 1777)Google Scholar. There is veiled allusion to Lind's identity at xv. The next year Price had the two pamphlets reprinted together under one cover. For that combined issue, with commentary, see Peach, Bernard, ed., Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

28. Lind, Three Letters, at 16–17n. See Bentham's letter to Lind of March 27–April 1, 1776 in Sprigge, et al., eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 1:309–11, which was prompted by the “Attilius” letters. Bentham chided Lind for using his definition of rights before he could make them public himself in his Fragment (see n. 36). Lind therefore added this note, which Bentham had made a point of honor–credit to be given where credit is due. Bentham worried that he might be considered a plagiarist, since Lind's Three Letters was coming out before his Fragment; see Bentham, Jeremy, A Fragment on Government (London: T. Payne, 1776)Google Scholar. Working on the same issues of rights and authority was obviously putting a strain on the friendship. Perhaps that, too, helps to explain why Lind abandoned his essay on Blackstone.

29. Lind to Jeremiah Bentham, from Balliol College, November 17, 1760, in Sprigge et al., eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 1:17. The Latin phrase “multum in parvo”was used to indicate, in effect, much in little.

30. The marriage between John Lind and Mary Welch is recorded in St. George the Martyr, Queen Square, London, parish church records, as filmed for the London Metropolitan Archives, London, England, Marriages and Banns, 1754–1821. Bentham mis-remembered the church as St. Andrews, Holborn, and spelled the name of the rector who performed the ceremony as “Eton” rather than “Eaton.” The rest he remembered correctly.

31. Bentham to Bowring, January 30, 1827, Sprigge, et al., eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 12:307.

32. Bentham to Lind, December 9,, in ibid., 1:289. Also see Bentham to Lind, September 11, 1775, and the awkwardness over whether Bentham owed Lind any rent for having lived with him that summer. Ibid., 1:248–50.

33. For background, see Prest, William, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Hanbury, Harold Greville, The Vinerian Chair and Legal Education (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958)Google Scholar.

34. From Blackstone, 's (anonymous) An Analysis of the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1756), 1Google Scholar (unnumbered), timed to complement his proposed lecture series at All Souls. He noted that the lectures would place him in a legal lineage traceable through Justinian to Bracton to Coke to Hale. An Analysis had gone through six editions by 1771, as it was gradually displaced by the now more famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–69), which went through even more editions, to the present.

35. Hart, H. L. A., “Bentham and the United States of America” Journal of Law and Economics 19 (1976):547–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “indefensible inconsistency,” at 555. Also see Lieberman, David, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 219–40Google Scholar; and the brief psychohistorical explanation of Bentham's problem with Blackstone in Prest, Blackstone, 295.

36. Bentham, Fragment, “expose the errors,” at lv; “expositor” and “creator,” at ix–x; “towards perfection,” at i; “greatest good,” at ii. The Fragment is most accessible in the text reproduced, with detailed, insightful editorial comments, in J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, eds , A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment of Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 391–501, a volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham project based at University College London. Blackstone did respond to critics, although not Bentham by name, in a later edition of his Commentaries. See the 9th edition printed in London by T. Cadell in 1783, at 1:iii (unnumbered). He had corrected obvious errors but “he hath left and shall leave the book to defend itself: being fully of opinion, that if his principles be false and his doctrines unwarrantable, no apology from himself can make them right; if found in truth and rectitude, no censure from others can make them wrong” The original is in italics. For Bentham on Blackstone see Lockmiller, David A., Sir William Blackstone (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), 161–62Google Scholar; Boorstin, Daniel J., The Mysterious Science of the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [orig. ed., 1941]), 190Google Scholar; and Burns and Hart, eds., Comment on the Commentaries, xxiii.

37. Bentham, Fragment, 148–49; or in Burns and Hart, eds., Comments on the Commentaries, 483.

38. Once again, from Bentham's letter to Bowring of January 30, 1827, in Sprigge et al., eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 12:307.

39. Everett, Charles Warren, The Education of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 37Google Scholar, quoting Bentham's later reminiscence (in Bowring, ed., Works, 10:45) states that Bentham had considered critiquing Blackstone when he first heard him lecture; thus Everett treats Lind as a decidedly junior companion in this enterprise, at 62, 71–76.

40. See Bentham's letter to Lind of October 5, 1774, in Sprigge, ed., Correspondence of Bentham, 1:204–8. Also see the observations offered by Burns and Hart, eds., Comments on the Commentary, xxv–xxvi; and Long, Douglas G., Bentham on Liberty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 51–55 Google Scholar. See, too, Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 75–81, for the Bentham–Lind partnership extending through Lind's Answer to the Declaration. Signing himself “A.B.” Lind would defend the Fragment in a “letter” to the Morning Chronicle, July 26, 1776, written in response to two other “letters” by “D.” published on July 6 and 10 in that same newspaper. Lind's basic purpose was to use his own light satire to top that of the other writer; neither commented at length on the actual content of the Fragment.

41. For the Remarks, see Jeremy Bentham to his brother Samuel, May 18, 1775, in Sprigge, et al. eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 1:235–36.

42. From Lind's untitled and theretofore unpublished critique of Blackstone's Commentaries, reproduced as Appendix G in Burns and Hart, eds., Comment on the Commentaries, 351–89; “deductions,” at 357; “unintelligible cant” and no “Law of Nature,” at 362. On xliv–xlv the editors explained that they were working from the only known copy, which ended up in Jeremy Bentham's papers, now at University College London. They identified Bentham's recommended changes, but they did not mark all of the changes that Lind made to the copyist's text. For those, see the scanned original pages, accompanied with transcriptions (which are not as reliable as the printed text produced by Burns and Hart), available online through the Transcribe Bentham website, (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham) a part of the larger Bentham Papers project, vol. XCVI, fos. 1–49 . Lind's many changes to his argument were essentially stylistic, substituting a different way of making the same point.

43. It appeared, without comment, on August 17, 1776, in London's General Evening Post, the London Evening Post and the St. James Chronicle. See Peckham, Howard's comments in “Independence: The View from Britain,” an essay reprinted (with Howard Mumford Jones's essay, cited at n. 51) in The Declaration of Independence: Two Essays (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1976), 21–37 Google Scholar.

44. See York, Neil L., “George III, Tyrant: The Crisis as Critic of Empire, 1775–1776,” History 94 (2009):434–60Google Scholar; and the full text of that weekly, which I subsequently edited as The Crisis: A British Defense of American Rights, 1775–1776 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2016).

45. Although there had been numerous newspaper pieces that criticized the Americans for pressing toward independence. See especially those by “Pacificus” that appeared in The Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, starting on August 8, 1776. For the Declaration as a “pompous Catalogue of Grievances” full of “impudent Fallacies” see article by “A Country Gentleman” in the Public Advertiser, October 23, 1776. Also see articles by “An Englishman,” in the St. James Chronicle, September 10, 1776, which condemned the idea of self-evident truths and unalienable rights; and by “A True Briton” in The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, September 14, 1776, who likened the rebellious Americans to those who had destroyed the Roman republic.

46. A notice for Lind's Answer ran in the Public Advertiser, November 5, 1776, stating that it had been published that same day. Also see the notice 2 days later in the London Chronicle.

47. William Knox noted the dispatch of those copies in a letter to William Howe of November 6 1776, in the National Archives, Kew, Public Record Office, Colonial Office 5/93, fo. 290.

48. Printing histories in Adams, ed. American Controversy, 1:397–98 (Hutchinson) and 1:407–410 (Lind).

49. Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress in Philadelphia (London, n. p., 1776), “absurd notions,” at 10 and “false hypothesis,” at 9; published anonymously; however, Hutchinson's authorship was argued effectively by Freiberg, Malcolm, Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress in Philadelphia (Boston: The Old South Association, 1958; Old South Leaflet no. 227)Google Scholar, and reiterated by Bailyn, Bernard, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), 357–60Google Scholar.

50. This was unlike most modern scholars, who are more intrigued by the philosophical assumptions underpinning the Declaration. See, still most famously, Becker, Carl, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948 [orig. ed., 1922])Google Scholar; also see Wright, Benjamin Fletcher Jr., , American Interpretations of Natural Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931)Google Scholar; Greene, Jack P., All Men Are Created Equal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)Google Scholar, which is now most accessible in the collection of Greene essays reissued as Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 236–67; White, Morton, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Wills, Garry, Inventing America (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978)Google Scholar; Shain, Barry Alan, The Myth of American Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Zuckert, Michael P., The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Jayne, Allen, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998)Google Scholar; and Eicholz, Hans L., Harmonizing Sentiments (New York: Peter Lang, 2001)Google Scholar. Pincus, Steve tips his hat to both Hutchinson and Lind in The Heart of the Declaration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

51. Lind's explication of the particulars was for partisan purposes. Various later scholars have examined the component parts less passionately. See, for example, Howard Mumford Jones, “The Declaration of Independence: A Critique” 3–20, reprinted in the same pamphlet with Howard Peckham's piece, identified at n. 43; Friedenwald, Herbert, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 208–58Google Scholar; and Dumbauld, Edward, The Declaration of Independence (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 87–147 Google Scholar.

52. Lind, John, An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (London: T. Cadell, 1776), 60Google Scholar, prompted by “Article XVIII,” condemning King George III “For depriving us, in many cases of the benefits of trial by Jury.”

53. Ibid.; all quotations from 29.

54. See the House's complaint to Bernard of May 31, 1769, Bernard's response that same day, a renewed House protest on June 13, again with Bernard's response the next day, in the Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 55 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1919–1990), 45:117–20, 130–32.

55. Francis Bernard to the Earl of Hillsborough, May 15 1769, in Nicolson, Colin, ed., The Papers of Francis Bernard, 5 vols. (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2007), 5:267–68Google Scholar.

56. Petition of June 27, 1769, in the Mass. House Journals, 45:197–99.

57. The best discussion of this episode remains Lord, Donald C. and Calhoon, Robert M.. “The Removal of the Massachusetts General Court from Boston, 1769–1772” Journal of American History 55 (1969):735–55Google Scholar.

58. A resolution passed by both houses of Parliament, printed in the The Journals of the House of Commons, 32 (1803):185–86; quote from 185 (for February 8, 1769; approved by the Lords the next day).

59. From resolutions passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives, February 11, 1768, printed in the Mass. House Journals, 44:236–39.

60. Resolutions passed on June 29, 1769, printed in ibid., 45:168–72.

61. A message sent from the House to Lieut. Gov. Hutchinson of July 31, 1770, in response to his speech on the twenty-fifth opening the legislative session, in Mass. House Journals, 47:63–65; quotation from 64.

62. For the difficulty—even the impossibility—of London trying to control a recalcitrant Massachusetts, a contest in which local authority could dominate imperial authority, see Reid, John Phillip's In a Defiant Stance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977)Google Scholar and In a Rebellious Spirit (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).

63. Lind, An Answer, 36–39, in response to the allegations in “Article X” about “swarms of officers” being sent “to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

64. Ibid., 39, in Lind's counter to “Article XI,” where “he has kept among us in times of peace standing armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.” Pitt's (the Earl of Chatham's) “Provisional Act for settling the Troubles of America,” introduced in the House of Lords on February 1, 1775, in which the sending of troops is condemned, is printed in Cobbett, William, ed., Parliamentary History of England from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London: T. C. Hansard, 1806–20), 18:199–203 Google Scholar.

65. Ibid., “ungrateful people,” at 52, in response to “Article XVII” protesting taxes “imposed on us without our consent;” and “selfish Demagogues,” at 67, in response to the complaints lodged about the Quebec Act in “Article XX.”

66. Bentham to Bowring, January 30, 1827, in Barker, ed., Parriana, 2:11; also in O'Sullivan and Fuller, eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 12:293. For the incomplete surviving text of what Bentham sent to Lind, which Lind reworked for the “Short Review” in An Answer, 107–19, with helpful editorial comments to serve as a guide, see Sprigge, et al., eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 1:341–44.

67. Ibid., from Lind's “Short Review of the Declaration,” 107–19, with all the quotations from 107, except for “hypocrisy,” at 118. The first edition included “Outlines of a Counter-Declaration,” 121–37, which was not in subsequent printings. There, Lind wrote thirty-five “Articles” of his own to mock the Americans. The Articles took the form of allegations that the king could make against those who rebelled against him if he chose to, all of which went to prove the revolutionaries' selfishness and ingratitude, these “artful men” who had deceived the gullible into rising against a good king and just empire, at 121. Eliminating the “Outlines” most likely meant that the ministry decided that Lind had already been harsh enough; no need to overdo the sarcasm and show of disdain. Whitehall and Westminster would be looking for ways to bring the revolutionaries back into the imperial fold, negotiation and coercion being awkwardly combined through much of the war.

68. Although, according to Jeremy Bentham, Lind had thought that success with An Answer might actually help get him a seat in the House of Commons. See Bentham's letter to his brother Samuel of January 19, 1777, in Sprigge, et al., eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 2:11–13.

69. Lind, John, A Letter to the Right Honourable Willoughby Bertie, dy Descent Earl of Abingdon, by Descent Lord Norreys (London: T. Payne, 1778)Google Scholar; and Lind, John, Defence of Lord Pigot (London, n. p., 1777)Google Scholar.

70. There were brief notices on Lind's passing in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, January 15, 1781; the London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, January16, 1781; the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, January 17, 1781; and, as a mark of his national prominence, in the Gentleman's Magazine (January 1781):47, although the Annual Register did not comment on his death.

71. Samuel Bentham to Jeremy Bentham, February 26, 1771, in Sprigge, et al., eds., Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 3:15.

72. Thomas Knollys to William Port Gillies, March 8, 1781, Knollys family papers, IM44/67, folder 47, Hampshire Record Office.

73. Lind's will, dated January 8, 1781 and proved on January 16, can be found in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills, PCC 11/1073/194. It named his wife Mary and friend Herbert Croft as executors. There are no details about his estate there; however, a good sense of that can come from reviewing the announcements for the public auctions to sell his personal property, as reported in the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, February 3, 1781 (personal effects at his residence in Lamb's Conduit Street); the Morning Chronicle and Daily Advertiser, February 12, 1781 (for what he left behind in his chambers at Lincoln's Inn); and the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, May 5, 1781 (personal property at his rented house in Ewell, Surrey). Creditors were to lay their claims before Herbert Croft in a London tavern near the end of May. See the London Gazette, April 17, 1781.

74. Surrey, England, Births, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1812, Register for Long Ditton, Burials, 1758–1810. Lind was buried on January 17, 1781.

75. As recorded in Brayley, Edward Westlake, A Topographical History of Surrey, 5 vols. (London: G. Willis, 1850), 3:139Google Scholar. According to St. Mary's churchwarden Peter Topp, the present church dates from 1881 and there is very little left standing from the previous structures on that site.

76. Instructions from the Massachusetts General Court on June 14, 1762 to its agent in London, Jasper Mauduit, in the Massachusetts Archives, Letters, 1756–1774, 56:386–87 (film copy).

77. Instructions from the Massachusetts House to Mauduit of June 13, 1764, in the Mass. House Journals, 41:77.

78. See, notably, the Earl of Camden in the House of Lords, on March 7, 1766; John Dunning and Constantine Phipps in the Commons on May 4, 1774 (with Phipps dismissing Blackstone as “no authority at all” on the rights enjoyed by Americans); Temple Luttrell in the Commons on February 27, 1775; and John Sawbridge, also in the Commons on April 5, 1775, all in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings, 2:322, 4:385 and 390–91, 5:469–70, and 6:8, respectively.

79. Sir Fortescue, John (Lockwood, Shelley, ed.), On the Laws and Governance of England . (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 25–26 Google Scholar. A new edition of John Selden's highly regarded translated text of Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae was reprinted in London by T. Evans in 1775, following reprints in 1737 and 1741.

80. York, Neil L., “Defining and Defending Colonial American Rights: William Bollan, Agent,” American Political Thought 3 (2014):197–227 Google Scholar.

81. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:120 (Book I, Ch. 2).

82. Ibid., 1:157 (Book I, Ch. 2).

83. Ibid., “no validity” and “common reason,” at 1:91 (Introduction, Section 3); “absolute and without control,” at 1:157 (Book II, Ch. 2).

84. For Blackstone's caution in ever turning to natural law or natural rights as a basis for legal arguments see Hart, H. L. A., “Blackstone's Use of the Law of Nature,” Butterworth's South African Law Review (1956):169–74Google Scholar; and Lieberman, Province of Legislation, 39–41.

85. As seen with what the distinguished historian Morgan, Edmund S. called, in his book Inventing the People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988)Google Scholar, the “fiction” of popular sovereignty, which required a suspension of disbelief to be sustained.

86. As Reid, John Phillip asserted in The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 8Google Scholar, in “the eighteenth century, the constitution was not the measure of what was lawful but the standard of what law should be. The British constitution was whatever could be plausibly argued and forcibly maintained.”

87. The classic study remains Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, revised ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 [orig. ed., 1957])Google Scholar; also see Burgess, Glenn, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)Google Scholar; and, for an excellent example of American Revolutionary Era thinking on the subject, An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London, Edward and Charles Dilly, 1771). British defenders of the ancient constitution did not necessarily side with revolutionary Americans.

88. Reid, Ancient Constitution, 84.

89. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:156 (Book I, Ch. 2), citing Sir Edward Coke. For the larger issue of whether Blackstone's thinking represented a fundamental change from Coke's, moving from a constitution of “custom” to a constitution of “command,” with implications for Anglo-American relations in the Revolutionary Era, see Dickinson, H. T., “The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the Sovereignty of Parliament” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976):189–210 Google Scholar; the abridged edition of John Phillip Reid's Constitutional History of the American Revolution, passim, which ought to be contrasted with Goldsworthy, Jeffrey, The Sovereignty of Parliament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);Google Scholar and Greene, Jack P.'s The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, which summarizes some of the arguments that Greene first made in Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

90. For an emphasis on the revolutionary aspects of the Glorious Revolution, see Schwoerer, Lois G., The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Pincus, Steve, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; as well as Kyvig, David, Explicit & Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776–1995 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 10–11 Google Scholar, for the implications of that revolutionary tradition in the new United States.

91. Lind, Answer, 6.

92. Lind, Remarks, 427.

93. Ibid., 22.