In June of 1787, James Madison addressed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on the dangers of a permanent army. “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” he argued. “The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” That Madison, one of the most vocal proponents of a strong centralized government—an author of the Federalist papers and the architect of the Constitution—could evince such strongly negative feelings against a standing army highlights the substantial differences in thinking about national security in America between the 18th century and the 21st.

While polls today generally indicate that Americans think of the military in glowing terms (rightly associating terms like “sacrifice,” “honor,” “valor,” and “bravery” with military service), Americans of the 18th century took a much dimmer view of the institution of a professional army. A near-universal assumption of the founding generation was the danger posed by a standing military force. Far from being composed of honorable citizens dutifully serving the interests of the nation, armies were held to be “nurseries of vice,” “dangerous,” and “the grand engine of despotism.” Samuel Adams wrote in 1776, such a professional army was, “always dangerous to the Liberties of the People.” Soldiers were likely to consider themselves separate from the populace, to become more attached to their officers than their government, and to be conditioned to obey commands unthinkingly. The power of a standing army, Adams counseled, “should be watched with a jealous Eye.”

Experiences in the decades before the Constitutional Convention in 1787 reinforced colonists’ negative ideas about standing armies. Colonials who fought victoriously alongside British redcoats in the Seven Years’ War concluded that the ranks of British redcoats were generally filled with coarse, profane drunkards; even the successful conclusion of that conflict served to confirm colonists’ starkly negative attitudes towards the institution of a standing army. The British Crown borrowed massively to finance the conflict (the war doubled British debt, and by the late 1760s, fully half of British tax pokiesaustralian.com revenue went solely to pay the interest on those liabilities); in an effort to boost its revenues, Parliament began to pursue other sources of income in the colonies more aggressively. In the decade before the Declaration of Independence, Parliament passed a series of acts intended to raise money within the colonies.

That legislation further aggravated colonists’ hostility towards the British Army. As tensions between the colonies and the crown escalated, many colonists came to view the British army as both a symbol and a cause of Parliament’s unpopular policies. Colonists viewed the various revenue-generating acts as necessitated by the staggering costs associated with maintaining a standing army. The Quartering Act, which required colonists to provide housing and provisions for troops in their own buildings, was another obnoxious symbol of the corrupting power represented by the army. Many colonists held the sentiment that the redcoats stationed in the colonies existed not to protect them but to enforce the king’s detestable policies at bayonet-point.

No event crystallized colonists’ antagonism towards the British army more clearly than what became known as the Boston Massacre. In March 1770, British regulars fired into a crowd of civilians, killing five. That event provided all the proof the colonists needed of the true nature of the redcoats’ mission in the colonies. Six years later, the final draft of the Declaration of Independence contained numerous references to King George’s militarism (particularly his attempts to render the army independent of civilian authority, his insistence on quartering the troops among the people, and his importation of mercenaries to “compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny”); by the end of the War of Independence, hatred of a standing army had become a powerful and near-universal tradition among the American people; the professional British army was nothing less than a “conspiracy against liberty.”

Colonists’ experiences with British troops, and the convictions that sprang from them, help explain Madison’s reference to armies having traditionally “enslaved” the people they were commissioned to defend. After winning their political independence, the victorious colonies faced the difficult task of providing for their own security in the context of a deep-seated distrust of a standing military.

Madison’s use of the imagery of slavery points to the multiple meanings of that term in the 18th century. In Madison’s statement to the Convention, it referred not to the literal notion of armies marching the citizenry through the streets in shackles but to a kind of metaphorical slavery. The immense costs necessary to raise and maintain a standing army (moneys required for pay, uniforms, rations, weapons, pensions, and so forth) would burden the populace with an immense and crippling tax burden that would require the government to confiscate more and more of the citizenry’s wealth in order to meet those massive expenses. Madison’s language reflected a common concern that the maintenance of a standing army in the new United States would place similar burdens on the young government; their experiences with the British army under Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s likewise led to concerns that the executive would use a standing army to force unpopular legislation on an unwilling public in similar fashion.

Other members of the founding generation worried that an armed, professional force represented an untenable threat to the liberty of the people generally. Throughout history, the threat of military coup—governments deposed from within by the very forces raised to protect them—has been a frequent concern. In 1783, Continental Army officers encamped at Newburgh circulated documents that leveled a vague threat against Congress if the government continued its refusal to pay the soldiers. Historians generally conclude that a full-blown coup d’etat was never a realistic possibility, but the incident did little to assuage contemporary concerns about the dangers posed by a standing army.

The experience with professional armies during the 40 years before the Constitutional Convention, and the values that sprang from those experiences, helps explain why the founders never seriously considered maintaining the Continental Army past the end of the War of Independence. The beliefs that grew organically from their experiences with the British also help explain Madison’s passionate anti-military rhetoric (he would later refer to the establishment of a standing army under the new Constitution as a “calamity,” albeit an inevitable one); together, they cast a long shadow over the debates surrounding the kind of military the new nation would provide for itself.

Soldiers had been brought to Boston in 1768 to help enforce the Townshend Acts and keep the peace in the restive city. They were under orders not to use their weapons against the citizenry. The soldiers found themselves the object of Boston's hatred. The workers on the docks and at the city's ropewalk were particularly belligerent. They taunted and insulted the soldiers and brawled with individuals or small groups of them, sometimes using cudgels.

On the evening of March 5, 1770, on King Street, a soldier guarding the Customs House sent word for reinforcements because he was being confronted by a group of rowdy men and boys, some of whom had armed themselves with staves. A small detachment of soldiers appeared as the crowd in the street also increased. Taunting and jeering led to physical fighting and some of the soldiers then fired into the crowd, killing five people.

The following day, a town meeting was held in Boston's Faneuil Hall and a committee of 15 men was formed, among them Samuel Adams. Adams had already addressed the crowd, although what he said was not recorded. Accounts of the events of the few days after the affair described Adams as the "controlling mind" of the committee, even though he was not always officially in its front rank. The committee immediately met with the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and demanded that the troops be removed from the city.

The town meeting did not dissolve, but instead adjourned, giving a warrant to a committee—formally consisting of James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton but also consisting of four others, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams—that they investigate the affair and report back to the reconvened meeting on March 12. The committee's warrant read, "What steps may be further necessary for obtaining a particular account of all proceedings relative to the massacre in King-street . . ." This is the first evidence of the mention of the word "massacre," but newspaper accounts a week after the incident said that on the day following the incident, as people in the surrounding regions heard news of the "massacre," they began streaming into Boston.

The committee's report, delivered to the reconvened meeting on the 12th, gave an account of the affair. It contained the sentence, "An inquiry is now making into this unhappy affair; and by some of the evidence, there is no reason to apprehend that the soldiers have been made use of by others as instruments in executing a settled plot to massacre the inhabitants." The members of the committee, including Samuel Adams, signed the report.

The committee may have admitted that there was no evidence that the affair was the result of a premeditated "plot to massacre the inhabitants," but it did not hesitate to characterize it as a "massacre." Newspaper and broadside accounts, dated from the day of the committee report, called it "this horrid Massacre." Paul Revere's well-known and somewhat inaccurate colored engraving of the affair, which was labeled, "The Bloody Massacre," was issued on the same day.

The town meeting's committee, of which Samuel Adams was a member, then wrote a longer account, called "A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre," and submitted it a week later under the signatures of the formal heads of the committee, Bowdoin, Pemberton, and Warren. The meeting accepted it and had it printed, and copies of it were immediately sent to England in order to give an account of the events that would help shape the reporting of the event there. Calling it a "massacre," rather than a "riot," a "tragedy," or a "disturbance," as the soldiers and colonial officials were inclined to do, went far toward absolving the residents of Boston of blame for the incident and indicting public opinion against the soldiers. In addition, calling it a "massacre," rather than a "murder," suggested that it might have been organized, and not a spontaneously unfolding event.

Aside from that, however, the word "massacre" had a particular resonance that was well understood on both sides of the Atlantic. Calling the event in Boston a "massacre" evoked an event that had occurred two years earlier, in 1768, in a section of London known as St. George's Fields. A crowd of almost 15,000 people gathered there to protest the imprisonment of John Wilkes, a radical member of the House of Commons convicted of libeling the King and his ministers. Soldiers had been guarding the prison, and under provocation, fired into the crowd, killing 7 people, including one young man mistaken for a rioter by several soldiers who pursued, cornered, and shot him in a stable. The St. George's Fields riot was quickly termed the St. George's Fields "massacre" by some of the London press.

From prison, Wilkes had corresponded with the Sons of Liberty in Boston, who were inspired by his radicalism. He had written them a letter referring to the "horrid Massacre," meaning the affair in St. George's Fields. In another letter, he suggested that the massacre had been planned in advance by the government, and that, for this reason, forces of a standing army were brought in to use against civilians. The members of the Boston Committee, in reporting that they found no evidence that the event in Boston had been premeditated by the government or the soldiers, may have been primed by Wilkes to consider that possibility.

After the St. George's Fields massacre, Dr. John Free, Chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford, preached a fiery sermon, denouncing the deaths as murders. The sermon was printed as a pamphlet and quickly found its way across the Atlantic. London broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets also rapidly appeared in the American colonies, where they were reprinted in local papers. Essentially, many Americans believed that they were one in a cause with Wilkes and other English radicals who were being oppressed by arbitrary laws and an oppressive "ministerial conspiracy."

Historian Pauline Maier points to the reporting in the Boston Gazette of March 12, 1770, which said, "A more dreadful Tragedy has been acted by the Soldiery in King-Street, Boston, New-England, than was sometime since exhibited in St. George's Field, London, in Old England, which may serve instead of Beacons for both Countries." Some London papers also linked the two events.

After the Boston Massacre, John Lathrop, Pastor of the Second Church in Boston, preached a sermon entitled "Innocent Blood Crying to God from the Streets of Boston," which very deliberately echoed Dr. Free's earlier sermon.

Bostonians interpreted the events in their city as an eerie repetition of the "St. George's Fields Massacre," and their labeling of the affray in Boston as a "massacre"—and even "this horrid Massacre," echoing Wilkes' description of St. George's Fields—cemented that connection.

After British victory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Parliament attempted to better organize the British Empire. Among other things, Parliament, led by the ministry of George Grenville, enacted the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, and so for the first time taxed the British North American colonies. The Sugar Act amended the Molasses Act of 1733 by lowering the duty on French West Indian molasses from 6d per gallon to 3d. Reducing the duty made purchase affordable and so encouraged what the higher duty had discouraged.

The colonists denounced the Sugar Act. They reasoned that British subjects had a sacrosanct right to have their property protected. The power to tax threatened property unless the taxing body was chosen by the tax payers and also had to pay the same taxes it required others to pay. The British House of Commons met neither requirement when it taxed the colonies, and so the colonists concluded that taxation without representation violated property rights.

The colonists made the same argument in response to the Stamp Act. But the Sugar Act was enforced primarily on the oceans and by the navy, meaning that the colonists could not physically prevent the tax from being assessed. The stamp tax required that to be legal most paper products—newspapers, court documents, marriage licenses, wills, even playing cards and dice—carry an official stamp. To work the tax depended on colonists within colonial communities selling the stamps, making suspected stamp distributors vulnerable to the pressure of their neighbors. The Grenville ministry announced the stamp tax in February 1765 to go into effect in November. In the intervening months the colonists protested, rioted, and intimidated anyone suspected of taking the office of stamp distributor. Led by the Sons of Liberty, the colonists made the Stamp Act unenforceable before it even began. In 1766 the new Rockingham ministry repealed the Stamp Act but only amended the Sugar Act lowering the duty to 1d per gallon. The experience showed that the colonists opposed all parliamentary taxation but that they could much more easily prevent internal taxes than external ones.

The Chatham ministry came to power in 1767 and enacted new taxes, the Townshend Acts, that year. These external taxes taxed lead, glass, paint, and especially tea. The Townshend Acts provoked the same ideological criticism and led colonists to have grave concerns that British liberty was not safe within the empire. Because the taxes were external they were much harder to prevent but by 1769 the colonists had organized a boycott movement. Growing tensions caused troops stationed on the western frontier to be reassigned to Boston, which led to the famous Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. The new first minister, Lord North, had already decided to repeal most of the Townshend Acts, which were threatening to tear apart the empire.

In 1770 North repealed all of the acts except for the tax on tea, the most lucrative of the taxes. The remaining tax kept relations tense and suspicious. Finally in 1773 North sought to resolve the impasse. He replaced the last Townshend Act with the Tea Act of 1773. The act was meant to bail out the East India Company, make clear Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies, and make the price of tea cheaper for colonists than it had been before. North reasoned that no colonists could fear an act that made them drink cheaper tea. He was wrong and the Boston Sons of Liberty threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. The Boston Tea Party destroyed tea worth £11,000 or about $1.5 million today. That was the last tax Parliament ever imposed in the colonies. The Tea Party caused the passage of the Coercive Acts of 1774, which were punitive laws meant to punish Massachusetts, but were not taxes. The Coercive Acts led to the first and second Continental Congresses and, ultimately, to the declaration of independence. So taxes did not cause the American Revolution, but taxation without representation did create a climate of suspicion and fear that provoked the events which did.