True Loyalty vs Sedition and Treason
“It is a very great mistake to imagine that the Object of Loyalty is the Authority and Interest of one individual Man.”
Decades before the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Adams understood the foundation of what became the American Revolution. It was a complete rejection of the ancient mode of humanity – allegiance to a person, or even a group of people.
But here’s the trick that’s been played for centuries: those in power flip the script. They make criminals out of anyone who stands on principle, and saints out of those who bow to tyranny.
Adams and the founders saw this scam clearly. They knew exactly how tyrants use language to enslave people, how they twist words like “loyalty” and “sedition” into weapons against liberty itself.
THE DEFINITION OF LOYALTY
Before we can define true loyalty, we have to start at the source of all political manipulation: Language. In 1748, a 26-year-old Samuel Adams opened his essay on Loyalty and Sedition by exposing how those in power had corrupted the language itself.
“Perhaps no Words have been more misunderstood or perverted, than the Words Loyalty and Sedition.”
To clear up any confusion, Adams gave us a proper definition of loyalty by tying it to the Constitution.
“The former I take to signify a firm and inviolable attachment to a legal Constitution.”
With moral duty as his foundation, Adams laid out exactly what this attachment requires: the people must know the Constitution thoroughly, defend it relentlessly, and be ready to support laws that preserve it.
“True Loyalty in the Sense just now Explain’d … includes in it a thorough Knowledge of our Constitution, its Inconveniences and Defects, as well as its real Advantages; a becoming Jealousy of our Immunities, and a steadfast Resolution to maintain them. A habitual Readiness to support and strengthen the Execution of those Laws which flow from the Constitution, and tend to preserve it.”
Adams drew this definition from other writers such as Thomas Gordon, whose Cato’s Letters had a huge influence on the founders and old revolutionaries. Gordon anchored loyalty to law and constitutional government.
“In an honest sense, indeed in common sense, it means no more than the squaring our actions by the rules of good laws, and an attachment to a constitution supported by such.”
For Adams, loyalty doesn’t exist in a government that doesn’t follow the constitution – one that wields arbitrary power.
“It cannot indeed subsist in an arbitrary Government, because it is founded in the Love and Possession of Liberty.”
THE DEFINITION OF SEDITION
Adams next turned to sedition, and he described it like a deadly disease.
“But Sedition is founded on the deprav’d and inordinate Passions of the Mind: It is a weak, feverish, sickly thing, a boisterous and unnatural Vigour, which cannot support it self long, and oftentimes destroys the unhappy Patient.”
With this as the foundation, Adams defined sedition as virtually anything aimed at destroying the constitution.
“the latter, all Tendencies, Machinations, and Attempts to overset a legal Constitution.”
Adams made the principle concrete. Restricting liberty and any power outside the constitution means you’re disloyal and verging on treason.
“But as the Love of Liberty is the very Soul of Loyalty, and the Lust of Preeminence and Money the Main Spring of Sedition, so all Attempts to curtail and destroy our Liberties, or to introduce selfish and arbitrary Measures, are equally a Deviation from true Loyalty, and an Approach to Sedition.”
THE REAL REBELS
Adams left no room for compromise. He didn’t limit disloyalty to those breaking the constitution. Merely suggesting violations of the constitution, or tolerating any such attempts, means you’re disloyal.
“Whosoever therefore insinuates Notions of Government contrary to the Constitution or in any degree winks at any Measures to suppress or even to weaken it is not a loyal Man.”
Adams went further. Those who actively work to defend and spread unconstitutional power are the worst offenders.
“He that leaves no Stone unturn’d to defend and propagate the Schemes of illegal Power, cannot be esteem’d a Loyal Man.”
Thomas Gordon gave us the hard truth. People who exercise power that violates the constitution? They’re not just misguided – they’re real insurrectionists.
“Every lawless prince is a rebel.”
Gordon didn’t just limit this to people in government. The people who obey a rebel are a rebel right along with him.
“To obey one who obeys no law, is a departure from all loyalty, and an outrage committed upon it; and that both he who commands, and he who obeys, are outlaws and disloyalists.”
THE TACTIC
There are always plenty of tools for tyrants, and they cheerlead everything their leader does. Gordon exposed this as a deliberate strategy used throughout history.
“Whoever is lawless, is disloyal; and to boast of loyalty to disloyalty, is strange nonsense; a paradox first invented by solemn and pernicious pedants, whose trade it is to pervert the use of words and the meaning of things, to abuse and confound the human understanding, and to mislead the world into misery and darkness.”
Samuel Adams understood the tactic: People who seek to expand and support unconstitutional power flip the meanings of words upside down.
“But we oftentimes perceive such Signification assum’d by those who find the wrong Use of these Words conducive to the Support and Increase of Power and Gain, that it is difficult to tell whether Loyalty be really commendable, or Sedition blameworthy.”
The result? As Gordon explained, the good guys are called the bad guys and vice versa.
“In short, that all the instruments and partners of his crying crimes are loyalists; and all who defend law, virtue, and mankind, against such monsters, are rebels, and assuredly damned, for preventing or resisting actions which deserve damnation.”
TRUE LOYALTY
Gordon understood this perversion of language as deliberate scam. They want to make loyalty all about the person with power. Support him – you’re great. But don’t oppose their leader.
“It is indeed a trick, more than a mistake; I mean of those who would assert or rather create a sort of loyalty to ministers, and make every thing which they do not like an offence against their master.”
Algernon Sidney understood the irony. The people demanding blind loyalty to one man? They not only turn him into a monster, they put him in danger too.
“Those who boast of their loyalty, and think they give testimonies of it, when they addict themselves to the will of one man, tho contrary to the law from whence that quality is derived, may consider, that by putting their masters upon illegal courses they certainly make them the worst of men, and bring them into danger of being also the most miserable.”
For Samuel Adams, it all came down to one key point. Loyalty to a person rather than to the constitution and liberty? He condemned that as a fatal error.
“It is a very great mistake to imagine that the Object of Loyalty is the Authority and Interest of one individual Man, however dignified by the Applause or enriched by the Success of Popular Actions.”
Twenty-seven years later, on July 6, 1775, this was no longer theory. Authored by Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson, the Second Continental Congress unanimously passed the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms with the same message. This was the American Revolution’s foundation: true loyalty belongs to liberty.
“Our Attachment to no Nation upon Earth should supplant our Attachment to Liberty.”
The founders understood what Americans have forgotten. Those who demand loyalty to people rather than principles aren’t patriots – they’re the enemies of the America the founders sacrificed so much to create.
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