went to war against
a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They saw in
the claim of the British Parliament a seminal principle of mischief,
the germ of unjust power."

The object of these men was liberty, not independence. Their feeling
was expressed by Jay in his address to the people of Great Britain:
"Permit us to be as free as yourselves, and we shall ever esteem a
union with you to be our greatest glory and our greatest happiness."
Before 1775 there was no question of separation. During all the
Revolution Adams declared that he would have given everything to
restore things as before with security; and both Jefferson and Madison
admitted in the presence of the English minister that a few seats in
both Houses would have set at rest the whole question.

In their appeal to the higher law the Americans professed the purest
Whiggism, and they claimed that their resistance to the House of
Commons and the jurisprudence of Westminster only carried forward the
eternal conflict between Whig and Tory. By their closer analysis, and
their fearlessness of logical consequences, they transformed the
doctrine and modified the party. The uprooted Whig, detached from his
parchments and precedents, his leading families and historic
conditions, exhibited new qualities; and the era of compromise made
way for an era of principle. Whilst French diplomacy traced the long
hand of the English opposition in the tea riots at Boston, Chatham and
Camden were feeling the influence of Dickinson and Otis, without
recognising the difference. It appears in a passage of one of
Chatham's speeches, in 1775: "This universal opposition to your
arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen. It was obvious
from the nature of things, and from the nature of man, and, above all,
from the confirmed habits of thinking, from the spirit of Whiggism
flourishing in America. The spirit which now pervades America is the
same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in
this country, is the same spirit which roused all England to action at
the Revolution, and which established at a remote era your liberties,
on the basis of that grand fundamental maxim of the Constitution, that
no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. To
maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other
side of the Atlantic, and on this. It is the alliance of God and
Nature, immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament