Status Updates From The Glorious Cause: The Ame...

The British presented a threat because they were corrupt as well as powerful. They had to be resisted with everything America had; if they were not, virtue, piety, and liberty would be lost. These convictions governed Adams's conduct throughout the Revolution.

Self-government, in this view, rested on virtue, on righteousness, and in the conflict the Americans confronted a government, as John Hancock pointed out, that was not "righteous."

In all the outrage and the proposals for getting things changed there was a sense that the Americans faced evil and corruption which would spread to their own shores if they failed to defend themselves. The sources of this conviction lay deeply within Protestant culture, especially the belief that most conflict involved questions of good and evil, and right and wrong.

Having to stomach a standing army in their midst, observe the redcoats daily, pass by troops stationed on Boston Neck who occupied a guardhouse on land illegally taken it was said from the town, and having to receive challenges by sentries on the streets, their own streets, affronted a people accustomed to personal liberty, fired their tempers, and gnawed away at their honor.

Protests against Britain marked a broadening of participation, a process encouraged by the atmosphere of urgency and crisis and by the fact that official bodies on all levels proved incapable of defending American interests with the effectiveness and passion a larger public demanded.

These petitions and similar ones elsewhere came out of small informal meetings, organized by men with no social standing and no offices but with their own interests and the public's in mind. For the next three years more and more such men took part in politics, or in those political activities directed against British policy.