"The question is, perhaps more curious than profitable, that
relates to the source and occasion of the first of that series of
events which produced the war of the Revolution. Men have often
asked, what was its original cause, and who struck the first
blow? This inquiry was well answered by President Jefferson, in
a letter to Dr. Waterhouse of Cambridge, written March 3rd, 1818.
"'I suppose it would be difficult to trace our Revolution to its
first embryo. We do not know how long it was hatching in the
British cabinet, before they ventured to make the first of the
experiments which were to develop it in the end, and to produce
complete parliamentary supremacy.
"'Those you mention in Massachusetts as preceding the Stamp Act
might be the first visible symptoms of that design. The
proposition of that Act, in 1764, was the first here. Your
opposition, therefore, preceded ours, as occasion was sooner
given there than here, and the truth, I suppose, is, that the
opposition, in every colony, began whenever the encroachment was
presented to it.
"'This question of priority is as the inquiry would be, who first
of the three hundred Spartans offered his name to Leonidas. I
shall be happy to see justice done to the merits of all.'"
"In the primitive opposition made by Otis to the arbitrary acts
of Trade, aided by the Writs of Assistance, he announced two
maxims which lay at the foundation of all the subsequent war; one
was, that 'taxation without representation was tyranny,' the
other, 'that expenditures of public money without appropriations
by the representatives of the people, were arbitrary, and
therefore unconstitutional. '"
"This early and acute sagacity of our statesman, led Burke finely
to describe the political feeling in America as follows;
"'In other countries, the people, more simple, of a less
mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government, only by
an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of
the pressure of the grievance, by the badness of the principle.
"'They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach
of tyranny in every tainted breeze.'"--E. L. Magoon.