RALEIGH — Defending constitutional liberty and the ideas of the Founding Fathers is an enterprise that has its ups and downs. It’s exciting to learn what James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams thought about natural rights and liberty and to appreciate their dedication to preserving what they deemed just and later constitutional.
But sometimes it can be discouraging and outright disheartening discussing the Founders with people who dismiss their ideas as outdated or as roadblocks in the path toward progressive goals.
It’s at those times that we should remember James Iredell’s words in To The Inhabitants of Great Britain (1773): “The noblest of all causes [is] a struggle for freedom.”
James Iredell (1751-99) was from Edenton. In his early 20s, he was a leading Revolutionary-era pamphleteer and later a leader of the North Carolina Federalists during the state ratification debates of the U.S. Constitution. Following the document’s ratification, President Washington appointed the North Carolinian to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until his death in 1799. His best-known opinion is his dissent in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) that provided the basis for the subsequent adoption of the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Let’s examine further his illustrious career as a pamphleteer in America’s earliest years. Although a royal customs collector, he wrote To the Inhabitants of Great Britain and Principles of an American Whig (1775).
Inhabitants catapulted the 23-year-old Iredell into political fame. In it, he opposed what he described as Parliament’s attempt “to exercise a supreme authority” over the colonies. He expressed this opinion in great part because what began in 1773 as a debate between the governor and the Assembly regarding the establishment of civil courts had evolved into a larger issue: the constitutional relationship between Great Britain and her colonies.
In the tract, Iredell rejected William Blackstone’s “parliamentary sovereignty” argument in Commentaries. As historian and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Willis P. Whichard summarizes in James Iredell, Blackstone’s doctrine made the “American legal condition” one of “conquered subjects.”
Iredell put forth another principle: every person has the right of liberty and the purpose of all government is to allow individual happiness (as it was defined then). In addition, Iredell condemned discriminatory laws that benefited only a few and warned that Americans would not tolerate such laws.
Principles is similar to the Declaration of Independence — or rather, the Declaration of Independence bears consanguinity to Principles, for it was written after Iredell penned his work. Iredell argues, for example, “that government being only the means of securing freedom and happiness to the people, whenever it deviates from this end, and their freedom and happiness are in great danger of being irrevocably lost, the government is no longer entitled to their allegiance, the only consideration for which it could be justly claimed or honorably pledged being basely and tyrannically withheld.”
The aforementioned principle is echoed in the Declaration’s assertion that the purpose of government is to protect the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that people may alter or abolish a government if it becomes destructive to those ends.
Principles, however, did not mark Iredell’s political divorce from Great Britain. As late as Spring 1776, he considered himself to be an Englishman and even contemplated moving back to his native land. In the end, he identified with his friends and neighbors in what he called “the noblest of all causes, a struggle for freedom.”
For more information about James Iredell, and his roles in the Revolutionary War, ratification debates, and on the U.S. Supreme Court, please visit northcarolinahistory.org.
Dr. Troy Kickler is director of the North Carolina History Project (northcarolinahistory.org).