A reader writes:
In your post on Josh Barro, you again claimed that Edmund Burke supported American Independence. This is simply not true. While he was opposed to British policies and sympathetic to the colonists’ grievances, he never supported either independence or full representation for the colonies in Parliament. His proposals for conciliation with the colonies were always premised on their embrace of a subordinate status.
My reader is technically right. Let’s not miss that. But the reader fails, in my view, to grasp how deeply Burke believed that it was Britain, not America, which was at fault here; that he saw the revolution as justified under the circumstances; that he opposed the new taxes; and wanted to find some way to give the Americans a constitutional stake in the mother country. These were not popular sentiments, to say the least and were cited to note how complicated a “conservative” can be. And in retrospect, he saw the American revolution as different in kind from the French because it was based on concrete grievances, spoke to a shared cultural and political tradition, and was, in his eyes, an attempt to conserve a way of life he treasured, rather than an attempt to change the path of humanity overnight.
And yes, he was frustratingly nuanced on the question. Whig Tories can be – and that’s a strength, Freddie, not a weakness. But the core sentiment is clear:
“I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity.”
To repeat a phrase we’ve been debating recently: A hero or a traitor? Or something in between?
The Dish 