On this day 250 years ago in New York City, Alexander Hamilton’s The Farmer Refuted was published. Hamilton made the following points in his pamphlet responding to a Loyalist pamphlet supporting Parliament’s authority over the American colonies:

there is a supreme intelligence, who rules the world, and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures . . . .

This is what is called the law of nature . . . Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind, the supreme being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He . . . invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety.

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To usurp dominion over a people, . . . or to grasp at a more extensive power than they are willing to entrust, is to violate that law of nature, which gives every man a right to his personal liberty; and can, therefore, confer no obligation to obedience.

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The constitution of Great Britain is very properly called a limitted monarchy, the people having reserved to themselves a share in the legislature, as a check upon the regal authority, to prevent its degenerating into despotism and tyranny.

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The experience of past ages may inform us, that when the circumstances of a people render them distressed, their rulers generally recur to severe, cruel and oppressive measures. Instead of endeavouring to establish their authority in the affection of their subjects, they think they have no security but in their fear. They do not aim at gaining their fidelity and obedience, by making them flourishing, prosperous and happy; but by rendering them abject and dispirited. They think it necessary to intimidate and awe them, to make every accession to their own power, and to impair the people’s as much as possible.

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We might soon expect the martial law, universally prevalent to the abolition of trials by juries, the Habeas Corpus act, and every other bulwark of personal safety, in order to overawe the honest assertors of their country’s cause. A numerous train of court dependents would be created and supported at our expence. 

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The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty, is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society.

Upon this principle, colonists as well as other men, have a right to civil liberty: For, if it be conducive to the happiness of society (and reason and experience testify that it is) it is evident, that every society, of whatsoever kind, has an absolute and perfect right to it, which can never be with-held without cruelty and injustice. 

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The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

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Judicial proceedings may be so ordered, as to render our lives and properties dependent on the will and caprice of court favourites and tools. A wide field for bribery and corruption, of every kind, would be opened; and the most enormous exactions would take shelter under the garb of law. It is unnecessary to enter into a particular detail of the different methods, in which all this might be effected; every man’s own imagination will suggest to him a multiplicity of instances.

Rigorous, oppressive and tyrannical laws may be thought expedient, as instruments to humble our rebellious tempers, and oblige us to submit to further exertions of authority, ’till the claim to bind us, in all cases whatsoever, be fully complied with. This no doubt would be a work of time. The steps would be gradual and perhaps imperceptible; but they would be sure and effectual.

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The resistance we are making . . . will be deemed virtuous and laudable, by every ingenuous mind.

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I am inviolably attached to the essential rights of mankind, and the true interests of society. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced, that the whole human race is intitled to it; and, that it can be wrested from no part of them, without the blackest and most aggravated guilt.

I verily believe also, that the best way to secure a permanent and happy union, between Great-Britain and the colonies, is to permit the latter to be as free, as they desire. To abridge their liberties, or to exercise any power over them, which they are unwilling to submit to, would be a perpetual source of discontent and animosity.

Source: “The Farmer Refuted, &c., [23 February] 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-0057. [Original source: The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 1, 1768–1778, ed. Harold C. Syrett. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 81–165.]