Tyrants and Rogues: New book explores the grievances at the heart of the American Revolution

Known for its high-minded ideals, it’s easy to forget that the Declaration of Independence was written not with stoicism but rage, the kind that pulled down houses and pelted neighbors’ doorways with buckets of pungent mud.

On the 250^th anniversary of the nation’s founding document, Binghamton University History Professor Robert Parkinson’s new book, Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence, provides that context. It’s the first book in more than a century to focus on the 27 grievances that comprise its core, he said.

The first dozen grievances deal with executive overreach — in those days, royalty — while 13 through 22 concern Parliament, the legislative branch; the last five cover the war itself. In a sense, the Declaration strove to be inclusive in its range, weaving in concerns from North Carolina, New York, Massachusetts and the rest of the colonies.

“There’s a timelessness to the first two paragraphs: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ There’s something eternal and sacred to it,” Parkinson said. “But it’s also extremely timely. A lot of the grievances were ripped from the headlines.”

In the book, Parkinson provides detailed profiles of the men behind those headlines, their lives and impact. He begins his exploration with King George III and the members of his cabinet: men such as Lord North, the prime minister, and Lord Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the American colonies. The latter was so hated that Bostonians created a punishment they referred to as “Hillsborough Paint”: buckets of mud and feces, which they threw on the homes of people they disagreed with.

Also featured were the royal governors, such as Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, who was accused of taking orders straight from the devil. But Parkinson also humanizes these historical figures, who have families and lives outside of government service.

Take Hutchinson, for example: Devoted to his wife, who died in childbirth, he names their daughter after her and never remarries. When his daughter dies in London at the age of 22, he is left heartbroken. Then there’s Thomas Gage, the military commander in Boston; he married an American woman and faced continual — and untrue — rumors that she was a spy, and that she leaked the British plan to march on Lexington and Concord to her countrymen.

Many of those individuals were forgotten over time, just as, long years from now, the public will likely forget political advisor Stephen Miller’s connection to immigration issues in the Trump White House. That may seem unimaginable today, just as forgetting Hillsborough or Hutchinson would have been unimaginable to people in the American Revolutionary War period.

“For people in 1776, the grievances had faces to them,” Parkinson said. “They weren’t an amorphous collection of words.”

Reliving history

As Parkinson wrote his book, he brought Binghamton undergraduates on the journey through Declaring Independence, an immersive course he taught for the Binghamton University Scholars program in the fall of 2025 and again this spring for the History Department. Students represented delegations to Congress, reading 18th-century newspapers and period correspondence, and discussing how Congressional business proceeded during the period in question.

The course’s final 10 weeks ran in “real time,” meaning that each week corresponds to a week in May, June and July 1776, giving students the opportunity to experience events as they unfolded. After all, Declaration author and future U.S. President Thomas Jefferson wasn’t sitting around mulling “self-evident truths,” but juggling a dizzying amount of business — as were the other figures from the period.

“My purpose for them to understand what goes into these kinds of monumental political decisions: all the contingencies, the things we’ve forgotten about, the hotspots and what they were really worried about,” Parkinson said. “The trick of being a historian is getting yourself back into that mindset.”

We know, of course, the end result of the American Revolution — but the people of that period did not. They made decisions as events unfolded, with imperfect knowledge and a surfeit of emotion. There were paths untaken that could have led us elsewhere, he reflected.

As his students learned more about the era, Parkinson learned from them in turn — and finally found evidence to prove something he had long suspected: grievances 26 and 27 had been swapped.

The 26th grievance deals with impressment or how Americans were taken captive on the high seas and forced to bear arms against their own country; the 27th excoriates the king for inciting domestic insurrections and his alliance with “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare was an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

“It’s about enslaved people and Native peoples joining the British forces to try to put down the rebellion,” Parkinson said. “I’ve always argued that it’s the climax.”

Seen in the context of the times, this last grievance should have come earlier; someone in Congress must have proposed the swap, he said. Proof didn’t come until his book was being copyedited with the discovery of tiny pencil marks on Jefferson’s rough draft, currently preserved at the Library of Congress.

“I realized in real time, in front of my class. I was like, ‘Look at this! This is not the way it’s supposed to go! I’ve been saying this for 20 years!’” he recounted.

He managed to insert this new information into his book and thanked his class in the acknowledgments.

Why swap the grievances? It turns out that impressment wasn’t a major issue during the first year of the war, and the grievance may be based on a single case publicized in Philadelphia newspapers on June 12, the day after Jefferson received the task of writing the Declaration. In the story, sailor William Berry claims that he was forced to fight against his friends in a sea battle outside the city.

On the other hand, the colonists paid sharp attention to stories about the British working with enslaved and Native peoples since the start of the Revolution.

The now-final grievance doesn’t exempt Native and Black individuals who fought on the side of the Revolution, instead lumping them together as enemies of the newborn country, aligned with a tyrant. By designating particular groups as a malignant other, this grievance helped shore up the fragile American union and later shaped the boundaries of citizenship.

“Then we don’t have to fight about religion, or all the stuff we disagree about, all the problems that keep happening,” Parkinson said. “They use fear and race to make a political decision, which has become an American tradition in the 250 years since the founding.”

Above all, the Declaration’s grievances highlight the deal breakers: the conditions colonists were no longer willing to tolerate, and for which they were willing to go to war. Their concerns would be familiar to us today: for example, the right to trial by jury, legislative representation, and whether a matter is decided by legislative process or executive order. Even immigration is represented; the colonists wanted to encourage immigration to America, while the British imposed limits.

“By the end, they’re saying, ‘Please don’t murder us and please don’t use other people to kill us,’” Parkinson said.

The cascade of crises that led to eight years of a bloody civil war is worthy of remembrance in its own right, especially given the tenor of today’s politics.

“What can we tolerate and what can’t we tolerate, and why?” Parkinson asked. “We are in perilous times where people are concerned how much further can this go before it breaks and snaps — and then, what happens?”