Many of the protests held on Saturday, June 14 flew the banner, “NO KINGS.”
Doesn’t sound very controversial – but why do we the people not want a king or his equivalent?
Everybody knows that in the American Revolution, the wrath of the protestors was focused on the person of the king, that being, of course, George III. The state of Georgia is named after his predecessor, his grandfather, George II. George III reigned from 1760 to 1820, although his late-life mental illness meant he was effectively off the throne in the last decade.
Those 18th century protesters, and after them the outright rebels, focused their anger on the king. Protests against British government actions had begun a decade before the Revolution. Many believed that colonists were being deprived of existing rights of Englishmen. But some went further. The Boston Tea Party (1773) involved the destruction of private property. In turn, the British government overreacted, imposing laws known as the Coercive or Intolerable Acts. Arming began, and soon the protestors became a violent force, at Lexington and Concord (April 1775).
But even at that point not all bridges had been burned. That changed in 1776. First, Thomas Paine, in his immensely influential pamphlet Common Sense, attacked the whole institution of monarchy. He argued that in a monarchy, the king is the law, while in a republic, the law is king. The Declaration of Independence charged the king with no less than 27 “injuries and usurpations.”
At the end of the war, America had no king – and to show how serious the Founding Fathers were about this matter, they had no chief executive at all! In our first constitution, known as the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the only “president” was the presiding officer of Congress – akin to the Speaker of the House. In addition, states remained sovereign, legally functioning almost as independent countries.
That certainly solved the problem of having too much centralized power – but it didn’t work. Within a few years, the Founding Fathers produced our current Constitution, which established a presidency (as well as abolishing state sovereignty). Over the next two centuries, the presidency gained enormously in power and prestige, becoming more and more like an elected monarchy.
One irony in the whole story was that George III was neither a bad king, nor responsible for most of the colonists’ complaints. The issues that inflamed most passions were the result of laws made by Parliament, the British legislature. There were no colonists there. In theory the British legislators were supposed to represent the interests of the colonies – a doctrine known as “virtual representation” – but in practice this meant little or nothing.
The British (who had never had an absolute monarchy) had a long history of taking care of kings who exceeded their powers. In the 17th century, they overthrew two kings, executing one in the process, and effectively had a constitutional monarchy with increasing limits on the powers of the monarch. Perhaps in a few years we will have a chance to discuss and debate what the power of the resident should be.
Hubert P. van Tuyll
Professor Emeritus of History
Augusta University
