Adams
thought, "no answer, nor any attempt to answer the Governor's
legal and constitutional arguments, such as they were." And so,
being "very civilly requested" by the committee to make such
changes in the draft as seemed to him desirable, Mr. Adams "drew
a line over the most eloquent parts of the oration they had
before them, and introduced those legal and historical
authorities which appear on the record."
The reply, prepared in this way and finally adopted by the
Assembly, was longer and more erudite than Mr. Hutchinson's
address. To meet the Governor's major premise and thus undermine
his entire argument, legal precedents and the facts of history
were freely drawn upon to prove that the colonies were properly
"outside of the Realm," and therefore, although parts of the
Empire by virtue of being under the special jurisdiction of the
Crown, not subject in all matters to parliamentary legislation.
Law and history thus supported the contention, contrary to the
Governor's assertion, that a line not only could be but always
had been "drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and
the total independence of the colonies." Apart from any question
of law or fact, the Assembly thought it of high practical
importance that this line should be maintained in the future as
in the past; for, "if there be no such line," none could deny the
Governor's inference that "either the colonies are vassals of the
Parliament, or they are totally independent"; upon which the
Assembly would observe only that, "as it cannot be supposed to
have been the intention of the parties in the compact that we
should be reduced to a state of vassalage, the conclusion is that
it was their sense that we were thus independent.
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