[if] our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands, and every thing we possess, or use? This we conceive annihilates our charter rights to govern and tax ourselves. It strikes at our British privileges, which, as we have never forfeited, we hold in common with our fellow subjects, who are natives of Britain. If tastes are laid upon us in any shape, without our having a legal representation, where they are laid, we are reduced from the character of free subjects, to the state of tributary slaves. We, therefore, earnestly recommend it to you, to use your utmost endeavours to obtain from the general court, all necessary advice and instruction to our agent, at this most critical Juncture.
It is notable that at this point, Adams located his argument within the context of “British privileges” and used the language - that Thomas Jefferson would also deploy - of enslavement to describe the proposed new financial arrangements that the British sought to establish with regard to their North American colonies. Clearly, although later positioned historically as a radical who acted in defense of his “country,” Adams’s becoming American was, as for many revolutionaries, not a process that preceded but rather proceeded through the act of rebellion itself. In i765, Adams was elected as Boston’s representative on the general court of Massachusetts, from which position he argued consistently for colonial rights. In 1768, his circular letter in response to the Townshend Duties again proposed that taxation was unconstitutional because the colonies had no parliamentary representative - a position that so irritated the colonial governor, Francis Bernard, that he dissolved the assembly. This act, in part at least, fomented the civil unrest that led to the Boston Massacre of 1770. Two years after the confrontation between colonials and British troops, Adams was instrumental in the establishment of the Committee of Correspondence, a coordinated group of colonial leaders who in time became the leaders of organized resistance to British Crown control. Adams attended the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in i774, helping draft both the Articles of Confederation and the Massachusetts Constitution. By i776, he was fully convinced of the need to declare independence, a position he believed the only logical outcome of the colonial predicament. He retired from Congress in 1781, was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1789 and governor in 1794 until his final retirement in 1797. He died some six years later, in 1803, at eighty-two years of age. Historians have portrayed Adams either as a man committed to colonial rights or as a demagogue who inspired violence among the colonials in the cause of independence; in the end, Adams may be just one example of the maxim that one man’s radical is another’s freedom fighter, but in fact, within the context of his times, Adams was more moderate than extreme.
Jane Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era in the United States, the founder of the Hull House in Chicago and a women’s rights and suffrage activist. She was born in Illinois and attended the Women’s Medical College in Pennsylvania, but was unable to complete her studies due to ill health. It was when she visited England with Ellen Gates Starr and visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in Whitechapel, that she conceived the idea of establishing similar settlement houses in the United States. Her social reform efforts were only part of a broader progressive program that included sanitation and housing reform, workers’ and immigrants’ rights, the abolition of child labor, and children’s and women’s education. Her philosophy was perhaps summed up in her observation and question, proposed in 1929, that the “modern world is developing an almost mystic sense of the continuity and interdependence of mankind - how can we make this consciousness the unique contribution of our time to the small handful of incentives which really motivate human conduct? Addams really operated, both personally and professionally, at a time of sweeping changes in American society, when that society was moving from relative homogeneity to heterogeneity, from the country to the city, and from an albeit imperfect isolationism to a global involvement honed and hampered in equal measure through World War I. Her arguments for female suffrage were couched - as many were - in what can today seem very Victorian, traditionalist terms; the woman as the moral heart of the home and, by extrapolation, the nation (much the same argument used to challenge female suffrage then and, in the context of the Equal Rights Amendment [ERA] much later).
John C. Calhoun was one of the leading spokesmen for the South and regarded as instrumental in the refinement both of the defense of slavery and of states’ rights in the years leading up to the American Civil War. He was born in what was then Abbeville District, in upcountry South Carolina, graduated from Yale in 1807, and entered the legal profession in Abbeville at the same time as serving in the state house of representatives. He was elected on the Democratic-Republican ticket to Congress and served from i8ii to 1817. He was the Secretary of War under James Monroe, and then was elected vice president of the United States when John Quincy Adams became president - a post he retained when the presidency was held by Andrew Jackson. Although both came from the slave-owning southern ruling class, the relationship between Jackson (who was from Tennessee) and Calhoun was a stormy one, but Calhoun remained as vice president until 1832, when he resigned to join the Senate. Calhoun began his political career as a strong nationalist, a “War Hawk” during the War of 1812, arguing in favor of protective tariffs as the means to support American business and internal growth. Calhoun was a noted political theorist, and it was his analysis of republican theory, in particular the role of “minority rights” and the need for a “concurrent majority” to protect these, that instigated his move toward the belief in states’ rights, limited government, and, in particular, the right of states to nullify such acts of the federal government in which they did not concur -a position that paved the way for the eventual secession of the southern states from the Union in 1860-1861. Historian William Freehling described Calhoun as having “no small talk, only large principle.” It was perhaps unfortunate for his nation that the principle revolved around the right to retain chattel slavery, and that one of his most famous utterances (in the Senate in 1837) was to declare that slavery was “a positive good.” “We of the South,” Calhoun declared, “will not, cannot, surrender our institutions ... I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good - a positive good.” Calhoun increasingly came to perceive the South as a section more sinned against than sinning, and his move away from his earlier nationalist position was made clear in December 1828, when he penned the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest” in response to the so-called Tariff of Abominations passed that year and argued that under it the individual states risked “being reduced to a subordinate corporate condition” within the federal system. Although published anonymously, Calhoun was known to be its author, and his resignation in 1832 was largely as a result of the widening rift between himself and Jackson over the tariff question. Resigning enabled Calhoun to argue openly in favor of nullification, a position he maintained until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1850. Calhoun’s legacy, in the medium term, boosted the secessionist impulse, especially in South Carolina; in the longer term, and with the Civil War long in the past, his defense of minority rights - shorn of its association with the interests of slaveholders - within the federal system remains influential.