There is no general assertion which comes nearer to the truth on this subject than that, from the first colonization of America by the English, the spirit of independence was latent here, and was in a steady process of natural development. George Chalmers, with the opportunities of a clerk of the Board of Trade, made an inquisitive private study of State Papers, and reached the full conviction that the colonists from the start, not only quietly assumed, but really aimed at an independence. He quotes abundant warnings, and charges the successive crown officials here and at home with culpable negligence in not acting on these warnings when they might have done so.[661] The pages of Chalmers confirm and illustrate the fact that the colonists lived in the enjoyment of a more real autonomy, and a do-as-you-please enfranchisement, than was shared by home subjects. There went with this a sort of assumption, a bold conceit, a sturdy truculency, which could be easily trained into defiance.[662]
Large allowance also must be made on account of the fact that the colonies had mastered their most critical perils wholly from their own resources. English benevolence in private individuals had generously fostered some enterprises of learning and charity here. But government had left the exiles to fight their own battles against the savages and the earliest French enemies. Far back in colonial times Governor Winthrop records that, in some emergent strait of the exiles, a suggestion was made of turning to England for help. The suggestion was shrewdly put aside, lest, having asked such aid, they might incur obligations.
It was of course admitted that the colonists had come under some form of obligation to the home government during the exhausting campaigns of the French and Indian wars. A question, however, soon came under debate, as to what that obligation involved. Great Britain assumed that it justified a demand upon the colonists for revenue. The colonists roused themselves to repudiate any obligation to be enforced by the payment of a tax imposed by a Parliament in which they had no representation. It was just here that the latent spirit of independence led the colonists to examine to the root their relations of allegiance, and, on the other hand, their natural rights. The General Court of Massachusetts, in 1768, had admitted "that his Majesty's high court of Parliament is the supreme legislative power over the whole empire." It took less than ten years to bring it about that Massachusetts either had not understood what it said,—at least, had not meant to say exactly that,—or had come to think differently about it.