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Patriots of the American Revolution
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11361 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1986 |
2,950 Words |
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Gordon L. Anderson
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THE TREE OF LIBERTY: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF REBELLION
AND POLITICAL CRIME IN AMERICA
Nicholas N. Kittrie and Eldon D. Wedlock, Jr.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986
715 pp., $39.50
The title of the book is taken from a passage by one of the first patriots of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson: I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing…. It is medicine necessary for the sound health of government…. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion….. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
The authors believe that Americans have been loyal to Jefferson's admonition and, thus, that the tree of liberty has flourished. Through the presentation of a documentary history of "political crime" in America, Kittrie and Wedlock have sought to show that the liberty enjoyed in American life is indebted to the turbulent pursuit of liberty, equality, and happiness. It is both an attempt to debunk what historian Richard E. Rubenstein has called "the myth of peaceful progress" in the United States and an attempt to understand "revolution" in a realistic and constructive light, rather than in the popular destructive form of Marxist Leninist revolutions.
This analysis of the history of the United States is oriented around the concept of "political crime," a term which is given an open-ended definition by the authors. It is quite fitting that this is the nail on which their thesis is hung, for Kittrie, of American University, and Wedlock, of the University of South Carolina, are both scholars of criminal and constitutional law. They believe that the myth of peaceful progress has caused the denial of the history of political crime by Americans. Because of this, the authors directly examine the unorthodox and extralegal activities of Americans and their confrontation with established legal authority. They argue that this can reveal clues to the progress of liberty in the United States. This provocative assertion poses a challenge to those who hold dear to the religious notion that America was designed by providence as a new Israel and all who entered its gates would live happily ever after. It is also a challenge to those relativists and skeptics who believe that violent and destructive forms of conflict resolution are necessary or inevitable.
The story of political authority and its opposition begins with the view of treason in force when the first settlers arrived on the shores of America. King Edward III's Treason Law of 1352 is the first codification of treason in English law. It defined acts of treason both to elaborate the nature of crimes against the monarch and to prevent arbitrary use of the concept of treason by him. Kittrie and Wedlock make clear that the established power of England, embodied in agents who first came to the new land, was oppressive in many ways. For example, the authority to subdue American Indians was granted by the king of England in 1496, four years after the new land was discovered by Columbus.
The reader is led to understand that the law was unjust by today's standards and could rightly be revoked by appeal to a higher
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