Speech on Conciliation with America

Burke argues that the dispute with America must be treated as a question of policy and expediency, not of abstract right. He rejects the dominant parliamentary position that asserting the right to tax the colonies—regardless of its practical consequences—was the proper response to colonial resistance. His alternative is a plan of concession: acknowledge the colonists' grievances, repeal the offending acts, and restore the confidence that had previously bound the colonies to Britain. The speech's core is the argument that the question is not what Parliament may legally do, but what it is in Britain's interest to do.

Burke treated the question of Parliament's abstract right to tax the colonies as a Serbonian bog—a quagmire where 'armies whole have sunk.' He acknowledged that authorities of equal weight stood on both sides and that no sure footing existed in the middle. His concern was narrow and practical: whether the exercise of that right would make the Americans happy or miserable, and whether coercion served the empire's interest. He put the right entirely out of consideration, insisting that he was determining a question of policy, not of law, and that the assertion of a title that loses the suit is worse than useless.

Burke moved a series of resolutions acknowledging that the colonies had not been represented in Parliament, that they had the constitutional right to grant their own taxes through their assemblies, and that the recent coercive acts should be repealed. He proposed repealing the taxation act of 1767, the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts judicature act, and the act altering the Massachusetts charter. His resolutions would have recognized the colonies' practical grievances without conceding the abstract declaratory right. The motion was defeated 270 to 78, with only about half the House present for the vote.

The speech reveals the consistent core of Burke's political method: attachment to inherited arrangements, suspicion of abstract rights, and preference for gradual adjustment over systematic demolition. In 1775, he applied this method to defend the colonists' inherited English liberties against parliamentary innovation; in 1790, he applied the same method to defend French institutions against revolutionary reconstruction. Critics have charged him with inconsistency—supporting American resistance but condemning French revolution—but Burke saw the distinction as principled: the Americans defended liberties they already possessed, while the French sought to construct society anew from theory.

The speech was delivered on March 22, 1775, and Burke's resolutions were decisively rejected. The House instead endorsed Lord North's policy of coercion, and within a month the battles of Lexington and Concord had begun. Burke's biographers note that he later remarked the speech was 'a good one, but I am not sorry that it had not the effect I wished, since if it had, America would have been retained in a dependent state, and would not have become the great nation she now is.' The speech was published and circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing Burke's reputation as the foremost advocate of conciliation.

Burke enumerated six 'capital sources' of the colonists' fierce spirit of liberty: their descent from Englishmen who emigrated when English freedom was most vigorous; their Protestant religion, which he called 'the dissidence of dissent' and a persuasion adverse to implicit submission; their extensive study of law, which made them 'acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense'; their representative assemblies; their slaveholding in the South, which made freedom 'a kind of rank and privilege'; and the three thousand miles of ocean that weakened government's practical authority. This spirit, he argued, could not be changed by force, making conciliation the only viable policy.