Is it possible to reduce the message of Lexington and Concord to one that says we ought to be roused and prepared only for fights of the nonphysical sort? Only if history is a ratchet, with progress from actual fighting to more peaceful forms of political contention (or even progress away from political conflict in general) locked in.
Taking such progress for granted is perhaps one of the factors that make it harder to sustain. Given the historical tendency of the Whig view, we cease to think about better and worse in government, and instead think of “forward” or “backward” in history, a change which may, if we are not careful, lead us to embrace changes that undermine liberty but are presented as “forward” in history, or “necessary” in light of other changes. Changes that transform our structure of government, our understanding of the rights of men, or even our notion of the nature of human life and social order are presented as no less binding than previous generations’ view of right, so long as they are branded as “better.” But calling something “forward” can easily be a way of stealing a base.
If this is the case, we might ask, for example, what powers may the unelected parts of our government assume without becoming an aristocracy? In the 1760s, Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts argued that “the establishment of a certain, sufficient, and independent Civil List, is not only expedient, but necessary to the welfare of the American Colonies.” The colonists generally feared that the gentlemen appointed to such a civil list (duly credentialed gentlemen paid independently of the elected government would govern on their own behalf, threatening their liberties.) Is our administrative state too much like that? It has been presented as progress, rather than as a movement away from the principles and practices upon which our republic rests. But is it? How one answers that question turns, to a great degree, upon the question of how deep the continuities of history are.
That brings up the questions Ryerson explicitly addresses. To pick one central one: “how did many thousands of British North Americans come to believe that they had a right to stage an armed rebellion against a government that they had regarded as legitimate since their youth.” Ryerson notes that they were, in fact, defending the provincial and local governments they had long known, and they were defending longstanding laws as they understood them. As Ryerson, a student of Jack Greene, knows well, one key problem was that there was no consensus about the nature of the imperial constitution.