Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Gadsden

Parole is supposed to be a gentleman's contract: you give your word, the other side treats it as binding, and the whole brutal machine of war gets a thin veneer of restraint. Gadsden detonates that fiction with a single grievance sharpened into doctrine. The line isn’t merely angry; it’s strategic. By framing the British as the party that “shamefully” violated parole, he turns a personal breach into an indictment of imperial authority itself: the Crown doesn’t just oppress, it cheats. That matters because 18th-century legitimacy ran on reputation as much as on gunpowder. If Britain can’t be trusted to honor a soldier’s word, then the colonists are free - even obligated - to stop playing by the old rules.

The subtext is about more than one broken agreement. “I shall not give another” is a refusal to participate in a moral economy that only works when both sides recognize each other as peers. His phrasing, “people on whom no faith can be reposed,” is deliberately formal, almost legalistic. It reads like a verdict, not a tantrum. That’s rhetorical judo: he adopts the language of honor and credibility, then uses it to strip those virtues from the British government.

Contextually, this is Revolutionary-era psychology in miniature. The Americans needed a story where rebellion wasn’t reckless ambition but compelled self-defense against a power that had forfeited the right to be obeyed. Gadsden supplies that story with the hardest currency available in his world: a man’s word, declared unspendable.