Justice & Law Quote by Christopher Gadsden

You can hear the fuse hiss in Gadsden's diction: parliamentary decorum ("Mr. Speaker") followed by a deliberately indecorous destination ("go to the devil"). The line is engineered as a public act of impatience. He isn't persuading the Governor and Council so much as stripping them of veto power by rhetorically walking away from them. "If they don't see fit to fall in with us" frames elite hesitation as a kind of moral obtuseness, not a legitimate difference of judgment. The implication is blunt: consent is preferable, but no longer required.

The specific target - "the general duty law" - matters. Duties and regulations were the bloodstream of imperial control, and colonial officials often defended them as necessary order. Gadsden converts that technocratic language into a prop for defiance. By pairing "the general duty law, and all" with "go about our business", he collapses policy complexity into a binary: submit to management or reclaim agency. The phrase "our business" is doing a lot of work; it codes collective self-government as practical, almost commercial common sense, while casting imperial oversight as meddling.

Contextually, this is the revolutionary mood before the shooting starts: legitimacy is shifting from formal institutions to the people willing to act. As a soldier-politician, Gadsden speaks like someone preparing an audience for rupture. The subtext isn't just anger at a rule; it's a warning that procedural politics is becoming optional. When officials won't "fall in", the crowd is invited to imagine an alternative authority - and to treat disobedience not as chaos, but as the only adult response.