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America’s First Constitutions and Declarations of Rights
ers, and other Americans who had hoped that British victory in the recent
Seven Years’ War (French and Indian) would result in the subjugation and
possible suppression of Catholicism in Canada. Eleven years later, when
Parliament passed the generous Quebec Act, patriots in America denounced the legislation as one of the ‘‘Intolerable Acts’’ because it guaranteed religious freedom to the Quebec Catholics. Sometimes the more
ardent advocates of civil rights angrily draw the line at a proposal for the
civil rights of other people.
All in all, though, Americans enjoyed the benefits of religious
liberties—although some American leaders feared that fierce intolerance lay just beneath the surface of the religious calm. Nearly all Americans professed to be Christians, even if they sometimes were rather eccentric Christians. But not all Christians always observe the doctrine of
brotherly love. Had it not been for the British Toleration Act of 1689, religious minorities in several of the Thirteen Colonies might have been
driven away.
Second, what of ‘‘the freedom of speech, or of the press’’? By 1763, a
score of newspapers were published in the Thirteen Colonies, though
sometimes eleven of a paper’s twelve columns might be filled with advertisements. Two years after the British took Quebec from the French, there
was little controversy within British North America. The only alarming
news came from the region of the Great Lakes, where Chief Pontiac’s
Indians were attacking British garrisons. Freedom of the press and of
speech seemed well established.
This had not been the case earlier in the eighteenth century, when
printing and publication had required licenses from public authority in
both Britain and America. In the early years of newspaper publication,
before the average man had grown accustomed to newspapers, governments had feared (not without reason) the extent to which public opinion
might be misled by libels and false reports printed in newspapers. But
gradually controls upon the press on either side of the ocean had been
relaxed, in part by court decisions, and, although some government power
of licensing the press and of prior censorship remained in 1763, the American press was much freer than that of most of Europe. Freedom of speech
was also protected by British statutes and by common law—short of
speech that might encourage sedition, incite to riot, be slanderous, blas-