The Eve of the Revolution; A Chronicle of the Breach with England
by Carl L. Becker · English · Gutenberg #3093 · 361,667 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Eve of the Revolution; A Chronicle of the Breach with England
Author: Carl L. Becker
Editor: Allen Johnson
Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3093]
Most recently updated: February 24, 2021
Language: English
Original publication: S.l.: s.n., 1918
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3093
Credits: The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's University, Alev Akman, David Widger, and Robert Homa
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION; A CHRONICLE OF THE BREACH WITH ENGLAND ***
The Eve of the Revolution By Carl Becker A Chronicle of the Breach with
England
Volume 11 of the Chronicles of America Series ? Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors Gerhard R. Lomer Charles W. Jefferys
Abraham Lincoln Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. London:
Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press 1918
Copyright, 1918 by Yale University Press
PREFACE
In this brief sketch I have chiefly endeavored to convey to the reader,
not a record of what men did, but a sense of how they thought and felt
about what they did. To give the quality and texture of the state of
mind and feeling of an individual or class, to create for the reader the
illusion (not delusion, O able Critic!) of the intellectual atmosphere
of past times, I have as a matter of course introduced many quotations;
but I have also ventured to resort frequently to the literary device
(this, I know, gives the whole thing away) of telling the story by
means of a rather free paraphrase of what some imagined spectator or
participant might have thought or said about the matter in hand. If
the critic says that the product of such methods is not history, I am
willing to call it by any name that is better; the point of greatest
relevance being the truth and effectiveness of the illusion aimed
at--the extent to which it reproduces the quality of the thought and
feeling of those days, the extent to which it enables the reader to
enter into such states of mind and feeling. The truth of such history
(or whatever the critic wishes to call it) cannot of course be
determined by a mere verification of references.
To one of my colleagues, who has read the entire manuscript, I am under
obligations for many suggestions and corrections in matters of detail;
and I would gladly mention his name if it could be supposed that an
historian of established reputation would wish to be associated, even in
any slight way, with an enterprise of questionable orthodoxy.
Carl Becker.
Ithaca, New York, January 6, 1918.
Contents
The Eve of the Revolution Chapter Chapter Title Page Preface vii
I. A Patriot of 1763 1 II. The Burden of Empire 12 III. The Rights of a
Nation 50 IV. Defining the Issue 98 V. A Little Discreet Conduct 150 VI.
Testing the issue 200 Bibliographical Note 257
Index 261
THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I A PATRIOT OF 1763
His Majesty's reign ... I predict will be happy and truly
glorious.--Benjamin Franklin.
The 29th of January, 1757, was a notable day in the life of Ben Franklin
of Philadelphia, well known in the metropolis of America as printer and
politician, and famous abroad as a scientist and Friend of the Human
Race. It was on that day that the Assembly of Pennsylvania commissioned
him as its agent to repair to London in support of its petition
against the Proprietors of the Province, who were charged with having
"obstinately persisted in manacling their deputies [the Governors
of Pennsylvania] with instructions inconsistent not only with the
privileges of the people, but with the service of the Crown." We may,
therefore, if we choose, imagine the philosopher on that day, being then
in his fifty-first year, walking through the streets of this metropolis
of America (a town of something less than twenty thousand inhabitants)
to his modest home, and there informing his "Dear Debby" that her
husband, now apparently become a great man in a small world, was ordered
immediately "home to England."
In those leisurely days, going home to England was no slight
undertaking; and immediately, when there was any question of a great
journey, meant as soon as the gods might bring it to pass. "I had agreed
with Captain Morris, of the Pacquet at New York, for my passage," he
writes in the Autobiography, "and my stores were put on board, when Lord
Loudoun arrived at Philadelphia, expressly, as he told me, to endeavor
an accommodation between the Governor and the Assembly, that his
Majesty's service might not be obstructed by their dissentions."
Franklin was the very man to effect an accommodation, when he set his
mind to it, as he did on this occasion; but "in the mean time," he
relates, "the Pacquet had sailed with my sea stores, which was some loss
to me, and my only recompence was his Lordship's thanks for my service,
all the credit for obtaining the accommodation falling to his share."
It was now war time, and the packets were at the disposal of Lord
Loudoun, commander of the forces in America. The General was good enough
to inform his accommodating friend that of the two packets then at New
York, one was given out to sail on Saturday, the 12th of April--"but,"
the great man added very confidentially, "I may let you know, entre
nous, that if you are there by Monday morning, you will be in time, but
do not delay longer." As early as the 4th of April, accordingly, the
provincial printer and Friend of the Human Race, accompanied by many
neighbors "to see him out of the province," left Philadelphia. He
arrived at Trenton "well before night," and expected, in case "the roads
were no worse," to reach Woodbridge by the night following. In crossing
over to New York on the Monday, some accident at the ferry delayed him,
so that he did not reach the city till nearly noon, and he feared
that he might miss the packet after all--Lord Loudoun had so precisely
mentioned Monday morning. Happily, no such thing! The packet was still
there. It did not sail that day, or the next either; and as late as the
29th of April Franklin was still hanging about waiting to be off. For it
was war time and the packets waited the orders of General Loudoun, who,
ready in promises but slow in execution, was said to be "like St. George
on the signs, always on horseback but never rides on."
Franklin himself was a deliberate man, and at the last moment he
decided, for some reason or other, not to take the first packet. Behold
him, therefore, waiting for the second through the month of May and
the greater part of June! "This tedious state of uncertainty and long
waiting," during which the agent of the Province of Pennsylvania,
running back and forth from New York to Woodbridge, spent his time more
uselessly than ever he remembered, was duly credited to the perversity
of the British General. But at last they were off, and on the 26th
of July, three and a half months after leaving Philadelphia, Franklin
arrived in London to take up the work of his mission; and there he
remained, always expecting to return shortly, but always delayed, for
something more than five years.
These were glorious days in the history of Old England, the most heroic
since the reign of Good Queen Bess. When the provincial printer arrived
in London, the King and the politicians had already been forced, through
multiplied reverses in every part of the world, to confer power upon
William Pitt, a disagreeable man indeed, but still a great genius and
War Lord, who soon turned defeat into victory. It was the privilege of
Franklin, here in the capital of the Empire, to share the exaltation
engendered by those successive conquests that gave India and America
to the little island kingdom, and made Englishmen, in Horace Walpole's
phrase, "heirs apparent of the Romans." No Briton rejoiced more
sincerely than this provincial American in the extension of the Empire.
He labored with good will and good humor, and doubtless with good
effect, to remove popular prejudice against his countrymen; and he wrote
a masterly pamphlet to prove the wisdom of retaining Canada rather than
Guadaloupe at the close of the war, confidently assuring his readers
that the colonies would never, even when once the French danger was
removed, "unite against their own nation, which protects and encourages
them, with which they have so many connections and ties of blood,
interest, and affection, and which 'tis well known they all love much
more than they love one another."
Franklin, at least, loved Old England, and it might well be maintained
that these were the happiest years of his life. He was mentally so
cosmopolitan, so much at ease in the world, that here in London he
readily found himself at home indeed. The business of his particular
mission, strictly attended to, occupied no great part of his time. He
devoted long days to his beloved scientific experiments, and carried
on a voluminous correspondence with David Hume and Lord Kames, and with
many other men of note in England, France, and Italy. He made journeys,
to Holland, to Cambridge, to ancestral places and the homes of surviving
relatives; but mostly, one may imagine, he gave himself to a steady flow
of that "agreeable and instructive conversation" of which he was so much
the master and the devotee. He was more famous than he knew, and the
reception that everywhere awaited him was flattering, and as agreeable
to his unwarped and emancipated mind as it was flattering. "The regard
and friendship I meet with," he confesses, "and the conversation of
ingenious men, give me no small pleasure"; and at Cambridge, "my vanity
was not a little gratified by the particular regard shown me by the
Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor of the University, and the Heads of the
Colleges." As the years passed, the sense of being at ease among friends
grew stronger; the serene and placid letters to "Dear Debby" became
rather less frequent; the desire to return to America was much
attenuated.
How delightful, indeed, was this Old England! "Of all the enviable
things England has," he writes, "I envy it most its people.... Why
should this little island enjoy in almost every neighborhood more
sensible, virtuous, and elegant minds, than we can collect in ranging
one hundred leagues of our vast forests?" What a proper place for a
philosopher to spin out the remnant of his days! The idea had occurred
to him; he was persistently urged by his friend William Strahan to carry
it into effect; and his other friend, David Hume, made him a pretty
compliment on the same theme: "America has sent us many good things,
gold, silver, sugar, tobacco; but you are the first philosopher for whom
we are beholden to her. It is our own fault that we have not kept him;
whence it appears that we do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is
above gold; for we take good care never to send back an ounce of the
latter, which we once lay our fingers upon." The philosopher was willing
enough to remain; and of the two objections which he mentioned to
Strahan, the rooted aversion of his wife to embarking on the ocean and
his love for Philadelphia, the latter for the moment clearly gave him
less difficulty than the former. "I cannot leave this happy island and
my friends in it without extreme regret," he writes at the moment of
departure. "I am going from the old world to the new; and I fancy I
feel like those who are leaving this world for the next; grief at the
parting; fear of the passage; hope for the future."
When, on the 1st of November, 1762, Franklin quietly slipped into
Philadelphia, he found that the new world had not forgotten him. For
many days his house was filled from morning till night with a succession
of friends, old and new, come to congratulate him on his return;
excellent people all, no doubt, and yet presenting, one may suppose, a
rather sharp contrast to the "virtuous and elegant minds" from whom
he had recently parted in England. The letters he wrote, immediately
following his return to America, to his friends William Strahan and Mary
Stevenson lack something of the cheerful and contented good humor which
is Franklin's most characteristic tone. His thoughts, like those of a
homesick man, are ever dwelling on his English friends, and he still
nourishes the fond hope of returning, bag and baggage, to England for
good and all. The very letter which he begins by relating the cordiality
of his reception in Philadelphia he closes by assuring Strahan that "in
two years at fartherest I hope to settle all my affairs in such manner
as that I may then conveniently remove to England--provided," he adds as
an afterthought, "we can persuade the good woman to cross the sea. That
will be the great difficulty."
It is not known whether it was this difficulty that prevented the
eminent doctor, revered in two continents for his wisdom, from changing
the place of his residence. Dear Debby, as docile as a child in most
respects, very likely had her settled prejudices, of which the desire to
remain on dry land may have been one, and one of the most obstinate.
Or it may be that Franklin found himself too much occupied, too much
involved in affairs after his long absence, to make even a beginning in
his cherished plan; or else, as the months passed and he settled once
more to the familiar, humdrum life of the American metropolis, sober
second thought may have revealed to him what was doubtless a higher
wisdom. "Business, public and private, devours my time," he writes in
March, 1764. "I must return to England for repose. With such thoughts I
flatter myself, and need some kind friend to put me often in mind that
old trees cannot safely be transplanted." Perhaps, after all, Dear Debby
was this kind friend; in which case Americans must all, to this day, be
much indebted to the good woman.
At least it was no apprehension of difficulties arising between England
and the colonies that induced Franklin to remain in America. The Peace
of Paris he regarded as "the most advantageous" of any recorded in
British annals, very fitting to mark the close of a successful war, and
well suited to usher in the long period of prosperous felicity which
should properly distinguish the reign of a virtuous prince. Never
before, in Franklin's opinion, were the relations between Britain and
her colonies more happy; and there could be, he thought, no good reason
to fear that the excellent young King would be distressed, or his
prerogative diminished, by factitious parliamentary opposition.
You now fear for our virtuous young King, that the faction forming will
overpower him and render his reign uncomfortable [he writes to Strahan].
On the contrary, I am of opinion that his virtue and the consciousness
of his sincere intentions to make his people happy will give him
firmness and steadiness in his measures and in the support of the honest
friends he has chosen to serve him; and when that firmness is fully
perceived, faction will dissolve and be dissipated like a morning fog
before the rising sun, leaving the rest of the day clear with a sky
serene and cloudless. Such after a few of the first years will be the
future course of his Majesty's reign, which I predict will be happy
and truly glorious. A new war I cannot yet see reason to apprehend. The
peace will I think long continue, and your nation be as happy as they
deserve to be.
CHAPTER II THE BURDEN OF EMPIRE
Nothing of note in Parliament, except one slight day on the American
taxes.--Horace Walpole.
There were plenty of men in England, any time before 1763, who found
that an excellent arrangement which permitted them to hold office in the
colonies while continuing to reside in London. They were thereby enabled
to make debts, and sometimes even to pay them, without troubling much
about their duties; and one may easily think of them, over their claret,
as Mr. Trevelyan says, lamenting the cruelty of a secretary of state
who hinted that, for form's sake at least, they had best show themselves
once in a while in America. They might have replied with Junius: "It was
not Virginia that wanted a governor, but a court favorite that wanted a
salary." Certainly Virginia could do with a minimum of royal officials;
but most court favorites wanted salaries, for without salaries unendowed
gentlemen could not conveniently live in London.
One of these gentlemen, in the year 1763, was Mr. Grosvenor Bedford.
He was not, to be sure, a court favorite, but a man, now well along in
years, who had long ago been appointed to be Collector of the Customs
at the port of Philadelphia. The appointment had been made by the great
minister, Robert Walpole, for whom Mr. Bedford had unquestionably
done some service or other, and of whose son, Horace Walpole, the
letter-writer, he had continued from that day to be a kind of dependent
or protégé, being precisely the sort of unobtrusive factotum which that
fastidious eccentric needed to manage his mundane affairs. But now,
after this long time, when the King's business was placed in the hands
of George Grenville, who entertained the odd notion that a Collector of
the Customs should reside at the port of entry where the customs were
collected rather than in London where he drew his salary, it was being
noised about, and was presently reported at Strawberry Hill, that Mr.
Bedford, along with many other estimable gentlemen, was forthwith to be
turned out of his office.
To Horace Walpole it was a point of more than academic importance to
know whether gentlemen were to be unceremoniously turned out of their
offices. As far back as 1738, while still a lad, he had himself been
appointed to be Usher of the Exchequer; and as soon as he came of age,
he says, "I took possession of two other little patent places in
the Exchequer, called Comptroller of the Pipe, and Clerk of the
Estreats"--all these places having been procured for him through the
generosity of his father. The duties of these offices, one may suppose,
were not arduous, for it seems that they were competently administered
by Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, in addition to his duties as Collector of the
Customs at the port of Philadelphia; so well administered, indeed, that
Horace Walpole's income from them, which in 1740 was perhaps not more
than £1500 a year, nearly doubled in the course of a generation. And
this income, together with another thousand which he had annually from
the Collector's place in the Custom House, added to the interest of
£20,000 which he had inherited, enabled him to live very well, with
immense leisure for writing odd books, and letters full of extremely
interesting comment on the levity and low aims of his contemporaries.
And so Horace Walpole, good patron that he was and competent
letter-writer, very naturally, hearing that Mr. Bedford was to lose an
office to which in the course of years he had become much accustomed,
sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. George Grenville in behalf of his
friend and servant. "Though I am sensible I have no pretensions for
asking you a favour, ... yet I flatter myself I shall not be thought
quite impertinent in interceding for a person, who I can answer has
neither been to blame nor any way deserved punishment, and therefore I
think you, Sir, will be ready to save him from prejudice. The person
I mean is my deputy, Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, who, above five and twenty
years ago, was appointed Collector of the Customs in Philadelphia by my
father. I hear he is threatened to be turned out. If the least fault can
be laid to his charge, I do not desire to have him protected. If there
cannot, I am too well persuaded, Sir, of your justice not to be sure you
will be pleased to protect him."
George Grenville, a dry, precise man of great knowledge and industry,
almost always right in little matters and very patient of the
misapprehensions of less exact people, wrote in reply a letter which
many would think entirely adequate to the matter in hand:
I have never heard [he began] of any complaint against Mr. Grosvenor
Bedford, or of any desire to turn him out; but by the office which you
tell me he holds in North America, I believe I know the state of the
case, which I will inform you of, that you may be enabled to judge of
it yourself. Heavy complaints were last year made in Parliament of the
state of our revenues in North America which amount to between £1,000
and £2,000 a year, the collecting of which costs upon the establishment
of the Customs in Great Britain between £7,000 and £8,000 a year. This,
it was urged, arose from the making all these offices sinecures in
England. When I came to the Treasury ¹ I directed the Commissioners of
the Customs to be written to, that they might inform us how the revenue
might be improved, and to what causes they attributed the present
diminished state of it.... The principal cause which they assigned
was the absence of the officers who lived in England by leave of the
Treasury, which they proposed should be recalled. This we complied with,
and ordered them all to their duty, and the Commissioners of the Customs
to present others in the room of such as should not obey. I take it for
granted that this is Mr. Bedford's case. If it is, it will be attended
with difficulty to make an exception, as they are every one of them
applying to be excepted out of the orders.... If it is not so, or if
Mr. Bedford can suggest to me any proper means of obviating it without
overturning the whole regulation, he will do me a sensible pleasure.
¹ On the resignation of Lord Bute in April, 1763, Grenville formed a
ministry, himself taking the two offices of First Lord of the Treasury
and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
There is no evidence to show that Mr. Bedford was able to do Mr.
Grenville this "sensible pleasure." The incident, apparently closed, was
one of many indications that a new policy for dealing with America was
about to be inaugurated; and although Grenville had been made minister
for reasons that were remote enough from any question of efficiency
in government, no better man could have been chosen for applying to
colonial administration the principles of good business management. His
connection with the Treasury, as well as the natural bent of his mind,
had made him "confessedly the ablest man of business in the House of
Commons." The Governors of the Bank of England, very efficient men
certainly, held it a great point in the minister's favor that they
"could never do business with any man with the same ease they had done
it with him." Undoubtedly the first axiom of business is that one's
accounts should be kept straight, one's books nicely balanced;
the second, that one's assets should exceed one's liabilities. Mr.
Grenville, accordingly, "had studied the revenues with professional
assiduity, and something of professional ideas seemed to mingle in all
his regulations concerning them." He "felt the weight of debt, amounting
at this time to one hundred and fifty-eight millions, which oppressed
his country, and he looked to the amelioration of the revenue as the
only mode of relieving it."
It is true there were some untouched sources of revenue still available
in England. As sinecures went in that day, Mr. Grosvenor Bedford's was
not of the best; and on any consideration of the matter from the point
of view of revenue only, Grenville might well have turned his attention
to a different class of officials; for example, to the Master of the
Rolls in Ireland, Mr. Rigby, who was also Paymaster of the Forces, and
to whose credit there stood at the Bank of England, as Mr. Trevelyan
assures us, a million pounds of the public money, the interest of which
was paid to him "or to his creditors." This was a much better thing than
Grosvenor Bedford had with his paltry collectorship at Philadelphia;
and the interest on a million pounds, more or less, had it been diverted
from Mr. Rigby's pocket to the public treasury, would perhaps have
equaled the entire increase in the revenue to be expected from even
the most efficient administration of the customs in all the ports of
America. In addition, it should perhaps be said that Mr. Rigby, although
excelled by none, was by no means the only man in high place with a good
degree of talent for exploiting the common chest.
The reform of such practices, very likely, was work for a statesman
rather than for a man of business. A good man of business, called upon
to manage the King's affairs, was likely to find many obstacles in the
way of depriving the Paymaster of the Forces of his customary sources
of income, and Mr. Grenville, at least, never attempted anything so
hazardous. Scurrilous pamphleteers, in fact, had made it a charge
against the minister that he had increased rather than diminished the
evil of sinecures--"It had been written in pamphlets that £400,000 a
year was dealt out in pensions"; from which charge the able Chancellor,
on the occasion of opening his first budget in the House of Commons, the
9th of March, 1764, defended himself by denying that the sums were "so
great as alleged." It was scarcely an adequate defense; but the truth
is that Grenville was sure to be less distressed by a bad custom, no
law forbidding, than by a law, good or bad, not strictly enforced,
particularly if the law was intended to bring in a revenue.
Instinctively, therefore, the minister turned to America, where it was
a notorious fact that there were revenue laws that had not been enforced
these many years. Mr. Grenville, we may suppose, since it was charged
against him in a famous epigram, read the American dispatches with
considerable care, so that it is quite possible he may have chanced
to see and to shake his head over the sworn statement of Mr. Sampson
Toovey, a statement which throws much light upon colonial liberties and
the practices of English officials in those days:
I, Sampson Toovey [so the statement runs], Clerk to James Cockle, Esq.,
Collector of His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem, do declare on
oath, that ever since I have been in the office, it hath been customary
for said Cockle to receive of the masters of vessels entering from
Lisbon, casks of wine, boxes of fruit, etc., which was a gratuity for
suffering their vessels to be entered with salt or ballast only, and
passing over unnoticed such cargoes of wine, fruit, etc., which are
prohibited to be imported into His Majesty's plantations. Part of which
wine, fruit, etc., the said James Cockle used to share with Governor
Bernard. And I further declare that I used to be the negotiator of
this business, and receive the wine, fruit, etc., and dispose of them
agreeable to Mr. Cockle's orders. Witness my hand. Sampson Toovey.
The curious historian would like much to know, in case Mr. Grenville did
see the declaration of Sampson Toovey, whether he saw also a letter
in which Governor Bernard gave it as his opinion that if the colonial
governments were to be refashioned it should be on a new plan, since
"there is no system in North America fit to be made a module of."
Secretary Grenville, whether or not he ever saw this letter from
Governor Bernard, was familiar with the ideas which inspired it.
Most crown officials in America, and the governors above all, finding
themselves little more than executive agents of the colonial assemblies,
had long clamored for the remodeling of colonial governments: the
charters, they said, should be recalled; the functions of the assemblies
should be limited and more precisely defined; judges should be appointed
at the pleasure of the King; and judges and governors alike should be
paid out of a permanent civil list in England drawn from revenue raised
in America. In urging these changes, crown officials in America were
powerfully supported by men of influence in England; by Halifax since
the day, some fifteen years before, when he was appointed to the office
of Colonial Secretary; by the brilliant Charles Townshend who, in
the year 1763, as first Lord of the Treasury in Bute's ministry, had
formulated a bill which would have been highly pleasing to Governor
Bernard had it been passed into law. And now similar schemes were being
urged upon Grenville by his own colleagues, notably by the Earl of
Halifax, who is said to have become, in a formal interview with the
first minister, extremely heated and eager in the matter.
But all to no purpose. Mr. Grenville was well content with the form of
the colonial governments, being probably of Pope's opinion that "the
system that is best administered is best." In Grenville's opinion, the
Massachusetts government was good enough, and all the trouble arose from
the inattention of royal officials to their manifest duties and from
the pleasant custom of depositing at Governor Bernard's back door sundry
pipes of wine with the compliments of Mr. Cockle. Most men in England
agreed that such pleasant customs had been tolerated long enough.
To their suppression the first minister accordingly gave his best
attention; and while Mr. Rigby continued to enjoy great perquisites in
England, many obscure customs officials, such as Grosvenor Bedford,
were ordered to their posts to prevent small peculations in America. To
assist them, or their successors, in this business, ships of war were
stationed conveniently for the intercepting of smugglers, general writs
were authorized to facilitate the search for goods illegally entered,
and the governors, His Excellency Governor Bernard among the number,
were newly instructed to give their best efforts to the enforcement of
the trade acts.
All this was but an incident, to be sure, in the minister's general
scheme for "ameliorating the revenue." It was not until the 9th of
March, 1764, that Grenville, "not disguising how much he was hurt
by abuse," opened his first budget, "fully, for brevity was not his
failing," and still with great "art and ability." Although ministers
were to be congratulated, he thought, "on the revenue being managed with
more frugality than in the late reign," the House scarcely need be
told that the war had greatly increased the debt, an increase not to
be placed at a lower figure than some seventy odd millions; and so, on
account of this great increase in the debt, and in spite of gratifying
advances in the customs duties and the salutary cutting off of the
German subsidies, taxes were now, the House would easily understand,
necessarily much higher than formerly--"our taxes," he said, "exceeded
by three millions what they were in 1754." Much money, doubtless, could
still be raised on the land tax, if the House was at all disposed to put
on another half shilling in the pound. Ministers could take it quite for
granted, however, that country squires, sitting on the benches, would
not be disposed to increase the land tax, but would much prefer some
skillful manipulation of the colonial customs, provided only there was
some one who understood that art well enough to explain to the House
where such duties were meant to fall and how much they might reasonably
be expected to bring in. And there, in fact, was Mr. Grenville
explaining it all with "art and ability," for which task, indeed, there
could be none superior to his Majesty's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who
had so long "studied the revenue with professional assiduity."
The items of the budget, rather dull reading now and none too
illuminating, fell pleasantly upon the ears of country squires
sitting there on the benches; and the particular taxes no doubt seemed
reasonably clear to them, even if they had no perfect understanding of
the laws of incidence, inasmuch as sundry of the new duties apparently
fell upon the distant Americans, who were known to be rich and were
generally thought, on no less an authority than Jasper Mauduit, agent of
the Province of Massachusetts Bay, to be easily able and not unwilling
to pay considerable sums towards ameliorating the revenue. It was odd,
perhaps, that Americans should be willing to pay; but that was no great
matter, if they were able, since no one could deny their obligation. And
so country squires, and London merchants too, listened comfortably to
the reading of the budget so well designed to relieve the one of taxes
and swell the profits flowing into the coffers of the other.
"That a duty of £2 19s. 9d. per cwt. avoirdupois, be laid upon all
foreign coffee, imported from any place (except Great Britain) into
the British colonies and plantations in America. That a duty of 6d. per
pound weight be laid upon all foreign indico, imported into the said
colonies and plantations. That a duty of £7 per ton be laid upon all
wine of the growth of the Madeiras, or of any other island or place,
lawfully imported from the respective place of the growth of such wine,
into the said colonies and plantations. That a duty of 10s. per ton be
laid upon all Portugal, Spanish, or other wine (except French wine),
imported from Great Britain into the said colonies and plantations. That
a duty of 2s. per pound weight be laid upon all wrought silks, Bengals,
and stuffs mixed with silk or herba; of the manufacture of Persia,
China, or East India, imported from Great Britain into the said colonies
and plantations. That a duty of 2s. 6d. per piece be laid upon all
callicoes...."
The list no doubt was a long one; and quite right, too, thought country
squires, all of whom, to a man, were willing to pay no more land tax.
Other men besides country squires were interested in Mr. Grenville's
budget, notably the West Indian sugar planters, virtually and actually
represented in the House of Commons and voting there this day. Many of
them were rich men no doubt; but sugar planting, they would assure you
in confidence, was not what it had been; and if they were well off after
a fashion, they might have been much better off but for the shameless
frauds which for thirty years had made a dead letter of the Molasses Act
of 1733. It was notorious that the merchants of the northern and middle
colonies, regarding neither the Acts of Trade nor the dictates of
nature, had every year carried their provisions and fish to the foreign
islands, receiving in exchange molasses, cochineal, "medical druggs,"
and "gold and silver in bullion and coin." With molasses the thrifty New
Englanders made great quantities of inferior rum, the common drink of
that day, regarded as essential to the health of sailors engaged in
fishing off the Grand Banks, and by far the cheapest and most effective
instrument for procuring negroes in Africa or for inducing the western
Indians to surrender their valuable furs for some trumpery of colored
cloth or spangled bracelet. All this thriving traffic did not benefit
British planters, who had molasses of their own and a superior quality
of rum which they were not unwilling to sell.
Such traffic, since it did not benefit them, British planters were
disposed to think must be bad for England. They were therefore willing
to support Mr. Grenville's budget, which proposed that the importation
of foreign rum into any British colony be prohibited in future; and
which further proposed that the Act of 6 George II, c. 13, be continued,
with modifications to make it effective, the modifications of chief
importance being the additional duty of twenty-two shillings per
hundredweight upon all sugar and the reduction by one half of the
prohibitive duty of sixpence on all foreign molasses imported into the
British plantations. It was a matter of minor importance doubtless, but
one to which they had no objections since the minister made a point of
it, that the produce of all the duties which should be raised by virtue
of the said act, made in the sixth year of His late Majesty's reign, "be
paid into the receipt of His Majesty's Exchequer, and there reserved,
to be from time to time disposed of by Parliament, towards defraying the
necessary expences of defending, protecting, and securing the British
colonies and plantations in America."
With singularly little debate, honorable and right honorable members
were ready to vote this new Sugar Act, having the minister's word for
it that it would be enforced, the revenue thereby much improved, and a
sudden stop put to the long-established illicit traffic with the
foreign islands, a traffic so beneficial to the northern colonies, so
prejudicial to the Empire and the pockets of planters. Thus it was that
Mr. Grenville came opportunely to the aid of the Spanish authorities,
who for many years had employed their guarda costas in a vain effort to
suppress this very traffic, conceiving it, oddly enough, to be injurious
to Spain and highly advantageous to Britain.
It may be that the Spanish authorities regarded the West Indian trade
as a commercial system rather than as a means of revenue. This aspect of
the matter, the commercial effects of his measures, Mr. Grenville at all
events managed not to take sufficiently into account, which was rather
odd, seeing that he professed to hold the commercial system embodied in
the Navigation and Trade Acts in such high esteem, as a kind of
"English Palladium." No one could have wished less than Grenville to lay
sacrilegious hands on this Palladium, have less intended to throw sand
into the nicely adjusted bearings of the Empire's smoothly working
commercial system. If he managed nevertheless to do something of this
sort, it was doubtless by virtue of being such a "good man of business,"
by virtue of viewing the art of government too narrowly as a question of
revenue only. For the moment, preoccupied as they were with the quest of
revenue, the new measures seemed to Mr. Grenville and to the squires
and planters who voted them well adapted to raising a moderate sum, part
only of some £350,000, for the just and laudable purpose of "defraying
the necessary expences of defending, protecting, and securing the
British colonies and plantations in America."
The problem of colonial defense, so closely connected with the question
of revenue, was none of Grenville's making but was a legacy of the war
and of that Peace of Paris which had added an immense territory to the
Empire. When the diplomats of England and France at last discovered, in
some mysterious manner, that it had "pleased the Most High to diffuse
the spirit of union and concord among the Princes," the world was
informed that, as the price of "a Christian, universal, and perpetual
peace," France would cede to England what had remained to her of Nova
Scotia, Canada, and all the possessions of France on the left bank of
the Mississippi except the City of New Orleans and the island on which
it stands; that she would cede also the islands of Grenada and the
Grenadines, the islands of St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago, and the
River Senegal with all of its forts and factories; and that she would
for the future be content, so far as her activities in India were
concerned, with the five factories which she possessed there at the
beginning of the year 1749.
The average Briton, as well as honorable and right honorable members of
the House, had known that England possessed colonies and had understood
that colonies, as a matter of course, existed to supply him with sugar
and rice, indigo and tobacco, and in return to buy at a good price
whatever he might himself wish to sell. Beyond all this he had given
slight attention to the matter of colonies until the great Pitt had
somewhat stirred his slow imagination with talk of empire and destiny.
It was doubtless a liberalizing as well as a sobering revelation to
be told that he was the "heir apparent of the Romans," with the
responsibilities that are implied in having a high mission in the
world. Now that his attention was called to the matter, it seemed to the
average Briton that in meeting the obligation of this high mission and
in dealing with this far-flung empire, a policy of efficiency such as
that advocated by Mr. Grenville might well replace a policy of salutary
neglect; and if the national debt had doubled during the war, as he was
authoritatively assured, why indeed should not the Americans, grown rich
under the fostering care of England and lately freed from the menace of
France by the force of British arms, be expected to observe the Trade
Acts and to contribute their fair share to the defense of that new world
of which they were the chief beneficiaries?
If Americans were quite ready in their easy-going way to take chances in
the matter of defense, hoping that things would turn out for the best
in the future as they had in the past, British statesmen and right
honorable members of the House, viewing the question broadly and without
provincial illusions, understood that a policy of preparedness was the
only salvation; a policy of muddling through would no longer suffice
as it had done in the good old days before country squires and London
merchants realized that their country was a world power. In those days,
when the shrewd Robert Walpole refused to meddle with schemes for taxing
America, the accepted theory of defense was a simple one. If Britain
policed the sea and kept the Bourbons in their place, it was thought
that the colonies might be left to manage the Indians; fur traders,
whose lure the red man could not resist, and settlers occupying the
lands beyond the mountains, so it was said, would do the business. In
1749, five hundred thousand acres of land had been granted to the Ohio
Company "in the King's interest" and "to cultivate a friendship with
the nations of Indians inhabiting those parts"; and as late as 1754 the
Board of Trade was still encouraging the rapid settling of the West,
"inasmuch as nothing can more effectively tend to defeat the dangerous
designs of the French."
On the eve of the last French war it may well have seemed to the Board
of Trade that this policy was being attended with gratifying results.
In the year 1749, La Galissonière, the acting Governor of Canada,
commissioned Céloron de Blainville to take possession of the Ohio
Valley, which he did in form, descending the river to the Maumee, and so
to Lake Erie and home again, having at convenient points proclaimed
the sovereignty of Louis XV over that country, and having laid down,
as evidence of the accomplished fact, certain lead plates bearing
awe-inspiring inscriptions, some of which have been discovered and
are preserved to this day. It was none the less a dangerous junket.
Everywhere Blainville found the Indians of hostile mind; everywhere, in
every village almost, he found English traders plying their traffic and
"cultivating a friendship with the Indians"; so that upon his return
in 1750, in spite of the lead plates so securely buried, he must needs
write in his journal: "All I can say is that the nations of those
countries are ill disposed towards the French and devoted to the
English."
During the first years of the war all this devotion was nevertheless
seen to be of little worth. Like Providence, the Indians were sure to
side with the big battalions. For want of a few effective garrisons at
the beginning, the English found themselves deserted by their quondam
allies, and although they recovered this facile allegiance as soon as
the French garrisons were taken, it was evident enough in the late years
of the war that fear alone inspired the red man's loyalty. The Indian
apparently did not realize at this early date that his was an inferior
race destined to be supplanted. Of a primitive and uncultivated
intelligence, it was not possible for him to foresee the beneficent
designs of the Ohio Company or to observe with friendly curiosity the
surveyors who came to draw imaginary lines through the virgin forest.
And therefore, even in an age when the natural rights of man were being
loudly proclaimed, the "Nations of Indians inhabiting those parts" were
only too ready to believe what the Virginia traders told them of
the Pennsylvanians, what the Pennsylvania traders told them of the
Virginians--that the fair words of the English were but a kind of mask
to conceal the greed of men who had no other desire than to deprive the
red man of his beloved hunting grounds.
Thus it was that the industrious men with pedantic minds who day by day
read the dispatches that accumulated in the office of the Board of Trade
became aware, during the years from 1758 to 1761, that the old policy
of defense was not altogether adequate. "The granting of lands hitherto
unsettled," so the Board reported in 1761, "appears to be a measure of
the most dangerous tendency." In December of the same year all governors
were accordingly forbidden "to pass grants ... or encourage settlements
upon any lands within the said colonies which may interfere with the
Indians bordering upon them."
The policy thus initiated found final expression in the famous
Proclamation of 1763, in the early months of Grenville's ministry. By
the terms of the Proclamation no further grants were to be made within
lands "which, not having been ceded to, or purchased by us, are reserved
to the said Indians"--that is to say, "all the lands lying to the
westward of the sources of the rivers which fall into the sea from
the west or the northwest." All persons who had "either willfully or
inadvertently seated themselves" on the reserved lands were required
"forthwith to remove themselves"; and for the future no man was to
presume to trade with the Indians without first giving bond to observe
such regulations as "we shall at any time think fit to ... direct for
the benefit of the said trade." All these provisions were designed "to
the end that the Indians may be convinced of our justice and determined
resolution to remove all reasonable cause of discontent." By royal act
the territory west of the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, from Florida
to 50° north latitude, was thus closed to settlement "for the present"
and "reserved to the Indians."
Having thus taken measures to protect the Indians against the colonists,
the mother country was quite ready to protect the colonists against the
Indians. Rash Americans were apt to say the danger was over now that the
French were "expelled from Canada." This statement was childish
enough in view of the late Pontiac uprising which was with such
great difficulty suppressed--if indeed one could say that it was
suppressed--by a general as efficient even as Amherst, with seasoned
British troops at his command. The red man, even if he submitted
outwardly, harbored in his vengeful heart the rankling memory of many
griefs, real or imaginary; and he was still easily swayed by his ancient
but now humiliated French friends, who had been "expelled from Canada"
only indeed in a political sense but were still very much there as
promoters of trouble. What folly, therefore, to talk of withdrawing
the troops from America! No sane man but could see that, under the
circumstances, such a move was quite out of the question.
It would materially change the circumstances, undoubtedly, if Americans
could ever be induced to undertake, in any systematic and adequate
manner, to provide for their own defense in their own way. In that case
the mother country would be only too glad to withdraw her troops, of
which indeed she had none too many. But it was well known what the
colonists could be relied upon to do, or rather what they could be
relied upon not to do, in the way of coöperative effort. Ministers had
not forgotten that on the eve of the last war, at the very climax of the
danger, the colonial assemblies had rejected a Plan of Union prepared
by Benjamin Franklin, the one man, if any man there was, to bring the
colonies together. They had rejected the plan as involving too great
concentration of authority, and they were unwilling to barter the
veriest jot or tittle of their much prized provincial liberty for any
amount of protection. And if they rejected this plan--a very mild and
harmless plan, ministers were bound to think--it was not likely they
could be induced, in time of peace, to adopt any plan that might be
thought adequate in England. Such a plan, for example, was that prepared
by the Board of Trade, by which commissioners appointed by the governors
were empowered to determine the military establishment and to apportion
the expense of maintaining it among the several colonies on the basis
of wealth and population. Assemblies which for years past had
systematically deprived governors of all discretionary power to expend
money raised by the assemblies themselves would surely never surrender
to governors the power of determining how much assemblies should raise
for governors to expend.
Doubtless it might be said with truth that the colonies had voluntarily
contributed more than their fair share in the last war; but it was also
true that Pitt, and Pitt alone, could get them to do this. The King
could not always count on there being in England a great genius like
Pitt, and besides he did not always find it convenient, for reasons
which could be given, to employ a great genius like Pitt. A system
of defense had to be designed for normal times and normal men; and in
normal times with normal men at the helm, ministers were agreed,
the American attitude towards defense was very cleverly described by
Franklin: "Everyone cries, a Union is absolutely necessary, but when
it comes to the manner and form of the Union, their weak noddles are
perfectly distracted."
Noddles of ministers, however, were in no way distracted but saw clearly
that, if Americans could not agree on any plan of defense, there was no
alternative but "an interposition of the authority of Parliament." Such
interposition, recommended by the Board of Trade and already proposed
by Charles Townshend in the last ministry, was now taken in hand by
Grenville. The troops were to remain in America; the Mutiny Act, which
required soldiers in barracks to be furnished with provisions and
utensils by local authorities, and which as a matter of course went
where the army went, was supplemented by the Quartering Act, which
made further provision for the billeting and supplying of the troops
in America. And for raising some part of the general maintenance fund
ministers could think of no tax more equitable, or easier to be levied
and collected, than a stamp tax. Some such tax, stamp tax or poll tax,
had often been recommended by colonial governors, as a means of bringing
the colonies "to a sense of their duty to the King, to awaken them to
take care of their lives and their fortunes." A crown officer in North
Carolina, Mr. M'Culloh, was good enough to assure Mr. Charles Jenkinson,
one of the Secretaries of the Treasury, backing up his assertion
with sundry statistical exhibits, that a stamp tax on the continental
colonies would easily yield £60,000, and twice that sum if extended to
the West Indies. As early as September 23, 1763, Mr. Jenkinson, acting
on an authorization of the Treasury Board, accordingly wrote to the
Commissioners of Stamped Duties, directing them "to prepare, for their
Lordships' consideration, a draft of an act for imposing proper stamp
duties on His Majesty's subjects in America and the West Indies."
Mr. Grenville, who was not in any case the man to do things in a hurry,
nevertheless proceeded very leisurely in the matter. He knew very well
that Pitt had refused to "burn his fingers" with any stamp tax; and some
men, such as his friend and secretary, Mr. Jackson, for example, and
the Earl of Hillsborough, advised him to abandon the project altogether,
while others urged delay at least, in order that Americans might have an
opportunity to present their objections, if they had any. It was decided
therefore to postpone the matter for a year; and in presenting the
budget on March 9, 1764, the first minister merely gave notice that "it
maybe proper to charge certain stamp duties in the said colonies and
plantations." Of all the plans for taxing America, he said, this one
seemed to him the best; yet he was not wedded to it, and would willingly
adopt any other preferred by the colonists, if they could suggest
any other of equal efficacy. Meanwhile, he wished only to call upon
honorable members of the House to say now, if any were so minded, that
Parliament had not the right to impose any tax, external or internal,
upon the colonies; to which solemn question, asked in full house, there
was not one negative, nor any reply except Alderman Beckford saying: "As
we are stout, I hope we shall be merciful."
It soon appeared that Americans did have objections to a stamp tax.
Whether it were equitable or not, they would rather it should not be
laid, really preferring not to be dished up in any sauce whatever,
however fine. The tax might, as ministers said, be easily collected, or
its collection might perhaps be attended with certain difficulties;
in either case it would remain, for reasons which they were ready to
advance, a most objectionable tax. Certain colonial agents then in
England accordingly sought an interview with the first minister in order
to convince him, if possible, of this fact. Grenville was very likely
more than ready to grant them an interview, relying upon the strength of
his position, on his "tenderness for the subjects in America," and
upon his well-known powers of persuasion, to bring them to his way
of thinking. To get from the colonial agents a kind of assent to his
measure would be to win a point of no slight strategic value, there
being at least a modicum of truth in the notion that just government
springs from the consent of the governed.
I have proposed the resolution [the minister explained to the agents]
from a real regard and tenderness for the subjects in the colonies. It
is highly reasonable they should contribute something towards the charge
of protecting themselves, and in aid of the great expense Great Britain
has put herself to on their account. No tax appears to me so easy and
equitable as a stamp duty. It will fall only upon property, will be
collected by the fewest officers, and will be equally spread over
America and the West Indies.... It does not require any number of
officers vested with extraordinary powers of entering houses, or extend
a sort of influence which I never wished to increase. The colonists
now have it in their power, by agreeing to this tax, to establish a
precedent for their being consulted before any tax is imposed upon them
by Parliament; for their approbation of it being signified to Parliament
next year ... will afford a forcible argument for the like proceeding
in all such cases. If they think of any other mode of taxation more
convenient to them, and make any proposition of equal efficacy with the
stamp duty, I will give it all due consideration.
The agents appear at least to have been silenced by this speech, which
was, one must admit, so fatherly and so very reasonable in tone; and
doubtless Grenville thought them convinced, too, since he always so
perfectly convinced himself. At all events, he found it possible, for
this or for some other reason, to put the whole matter out of his mind
until the next year. The patriotic American historian, well instructed
in the importance of the Stamp Act, has at first a difficulty in
understanding how it could occupy, among the things that interested
English statesmen at this time, a strictly subordinate place; and
he wonders greatly, as he runs with eager interest through the
correspondence of Grenville for the year 1764, to find it barely
mentioned there. Whether the King received him less coldly today than
the day before yesterday was apparently more on the minister's mind than
any possibility that the Stamp Act might be received rather warmly in
the colonies. The contemporaries of Grenville, even Pitt himself, have
almost as little to say about the coming great event; all of which
compels the historian, reviewing the matter judiciously, to reflect
sadly that Englishmen of that day were not as fully aware of the
importance of the measure before it was passed as good patriots have
since become.
There is much to confirm this notion in the circumstances attending the
passage of the bill through Parliament in the winter of 1765. Grenville
was perhaps further reassured, in spite of persistent rumors of much
high talk in America, by the results of a second interview which he had
with the colonial agents just before introducing the measure into
the House of Commons. "I take no pleasure," he again explained in his
reasonable way, "in bringing upon myself their resentments; it is my
duty to manage the revenue. I have really been made to believe that,
considering the whole circumstances of the mother country and the
colonies, the latter can and ought to pay something to the common cause.
I know of no better way than that now pursuing to lay such a tax. If you
can tell of a better, I will adopt it."
Franklin, who was present with the others on this occasion, ventured
to suggest that the "usual constitutional way" of obtaining colonial
support, through the King's requisition, would be better. "Can you
agree," asked Grenville, "on the proportions each colony should raise?"
No, they could not agree, as Franklin was bound to admit, knowing the
fact better than most men. And if no adequate answer was forthcoming
from Franklin, a man so ready in expedients and so practiced in the
subtleties of dialectic, it is no great wonder that Grenville thought
the agents now fully convinced by his reasoning, which after all was
only an impersonal formulation of the inexorable logic of the situation.
Proceeding thus leisurely, having taken so much pains to elicit
reasonable objection and none being forthcoming, Grenville, quite
sure of his ground, brought in from the Ways and Means Committee, in
February, 1765, the fifty-five resolutions which required that stamped
paper, printed by the government and sold by officers appointed for that
purpose, be used for nearly all legal documents, for all customs papers,
for appointments to all offices carrying a salary of £20 except military
and judicial offices, for all grants of privilege and franchises made
by the colonial assemblies, for licenses to retail liquors, for
all pamphlets, advertisements, handbills, newspapers, almanacs, and
calendars, and for the sale of packages containing playing cards and
dice. The expediency of the act was now explained to the House, as it
had been explained to the agents. That the act was legal, which few
people in fact denied, Grenville, doing everything thoroughly and with
system, proceeded to demonstrate also. The colonies claim, he said, "the
privilege of all British subjects of being taxed only with their own
consent." Well, for his part, he hoped they might always enjoy that
privilege. "May this sacred pledge of liberty," cried the minister with
unwonted eloquence, "be preserved inviolate to the utmost verge of our
dominions and to the latest pages of our history." But Americans were
clearly wrong in supposing the Stamp Act would deprive them of the
rights of Englishmen, for, upon any ground on which it could be said
that Englishmen were represented, it could be maintained, and he was
free to assert, that Americans were represented, in Parliament, which
was the common council of the whole Empire.
The measure was well received. Mr. Jackson supposed that Parliament
had a right to tax America, but he much doubted the expediency of the
present act. If it was necessary, as ministers claimed, to tax the
colonies, the latter should be permitted to elect some part of the
Parliament, "otherwise the liberties of America, I do not say will be
lost, but will be in danger." The one notable event of this "slight day"
was occasioned by a remark of Charles Townshend, who asked with
some asperity whether "these American children, planted by our care,
nourished up by our indulgence to a degree of strength and opulence,
and protected by our arms," would now be so unfilial as to "grudge to
contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy burden under which we
lie?" Upon which Colonel Isaac Barré sprang to his feet and delivered
an impassioned, unpremeditated reply which stirred the dull House for
perhaps three minutes:
They planted by your care! No; your oppression planted them in America.
They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated, inhospitable
country, where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to
which human nature is liable.... They nourished up by your indulgence!
They grew by your neglect of them. As soon as you began to care about
them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule them in one
department and another, who were, perhaps, the deputies of deputies
to some members of this house, sent to spy out their liberties, to
misrepresent their actions, and to prey upon them; men whose behaviour
on many occasions has caused the blood of these sons of liberty to
recoil within them.... They protected by your arms! They have nobly
taken up arms in your defense; have exerted a valor amidst their
constant and laborious industry, for the defense of a country whose
frontier was drenched in blood, while its interior parts yielded all its
little savings to your emolument.
A very warm speech, and a capital hit, too, thought the honorable
members of the House, as they settled comfortably back again to endure
the routine of a dull day. Towards midnight, after seven hours of
languid debate, an adjournment was carried, as everyone foresaw it would
be, by a great majority--205 to 49 in support of the ministry. On the
13th of February the Stamp Act bill was introduced and read for the
first time, without debate. It passed the House on the 27th; on the
8th of March it was approved by the Lords without protest, amendment,
debate, or division; and two weeks later, the King being then
temporarily out of his mind, the bill received the royal assent by
commission.
At a later day, when the fatal effects of the Act were but too apparent,
it was made a charge against the ministers that they had persisted in
passing the measure in the face of strong opposition. But it was not so.
"As to the fact of a strenuous opposition to the Stamp Act," said Burke,
in his famous speech on American taxation, "I sat as a stranger in your
gallery when it was under consideration. Far from anything inflammatory,
I never heard a more languid debate in this house.... In fact, the
affair passed with so very, very little noise, that in town they
scarcely knew the nature of what you were doing." So far as men
concerned themselves with the doings of Parliament, the colonial
measures of Grenville were greatly applauded; and that not alone by
men who were ignorant of America. Thomas Pownall, once Governor of
Massachusetts, well acquainted with the colonies and no bad friend
of their liberties, published in April, 1764, a pamphlet on the
Administration of the Colonies which he dedicated to George Grenville,
"the great minister," who he desired might live to see the "power,
prosperity, and honor that must be given to his country, by so great
and important an event as the interweaving the administration of the
colonies into the British administration."
CHAPTER III THE RIGHTS OF A NATION
British subjects, by removing to America, cultivating a wilderness,
extending the domain, and increasing the wealth, commerce, and power
of the mother country, at the hazard of their lives and fortunes, ought
not, and in fact do not thereby lose their native rights.--Benjamin
Franklin.
It was the misfortune of Grenville that this "interweaving," as Pownall
described it, should have been undertaken at a most inopportune time,
when the very conditions which made Englishmen conscious of the burden
of empire were giving to Americans a new and highly stimulating sense
of power and independence. The marvelous growth of the colonies in
population and wealth, much commented upon by all observers and asserted
by ministers as one principal reason why Americans should pay taxes,
was indeed well worth some consideration. A million and a half of people
spread over the Atlantic seaboard might be thought no great number; but
it was a new thing in the world, well worth noting--which had in fact
been carefully noted by Benjamin Franklin in a pamphlet on The Increase
of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.--that within three-quarters of
a century the population of the continental colonies had doubled every
twenty-five years, whereas the population of Old England during a
hundred years past had not doubled once and now stood at only some six
and a half millions. If this should go on--and, considering the immense
stretches of free land beyond the mountains, no one could suppose that
the present rate of increase would soon fall off--it was not unlikely
that in another century the center of empire, following the course of
the sun, would come to rest in the New World. With these facts in mind,
one might indeed say that a people with so much vitality and expansive
power was abundantly able to pay taxes; but perhaps it was also a fair
inference, if any one was disposed to press the matter, that, unless it
was so minded, such a people was already, or assuredly soon would be,
equally able not to pay them.
People in new countries, being called provincial, being often told in
effect that having made their bed they may lie in it, easily maintain
their self-respect if they are able to say that the bed is indeed a very
comfortable one. If, therefore, Americans had been given to boasting,
their growing wealth was not, any more than their increasing numbers, a
thing to be passed over in silence. In every colony the "starving time,"
even if it had ever existed, was now no more than an ancient tradition.
"Every man of industry has it in his power to live well," according to
William Smith of New York, "and many are the instances of persons who
came here distressed in their poverty who now enjoy easy and plentiful
fortunes." If Americans were not always aware that they were rich men
individually, they were at all events well instructed, by old-world
visitors who came to observe them with a certain air of condescension,
that collectively at least their material prosperity was a thing to be
envied even by more advanced and more civilized peoples. Therefore any
man called upon to pay a penny tax and finding his pocket bare might
take a decent pride in the fact, which none need doubt since foreigners
like Peter Kalm found it so, that "the English colonies in this part of
the world have increased so much in ... their riches, that they almost
vie with old England."
That the colonies might possibly "vie with old England," was a notion
which good Americans could contemplate with much equanimity; and even if
the Swedish traveler, according to a habit of travelers, had stretched
the facts a point or two, it was still abundantly clear that the
continental colonies were thought to be, even by Englishmen themselves,
of far greater importance to the mother country than they had formerly
been. Very old men could remember the time when English statesmen and
economists, viewing colonies as providentially designed to promote the
increase of trade, had regarded the northern colonies as little better
than heavy incumbrances on the Empire, and their commerce scarcely worth
the cost of protection. It was no longer so; it could no longer be said
that two-thirds of colonial commerce was with the tobacco and sugar
plantations, or that Jamaica took off more English exports than the
middle and northern colonies combined; but it could be said, and was now
being loudly proclaimed--when it was a point of debate whether to keep
Canada or Guadeloupe--that the northern colonies had already outstripped
the islands as consumers of English commodities.
Of this fact Americans themselves were well aware. The question whether
it was for the interest of England to keep Canada or Guadeloupe, which
was much discussed in 1760, called forth the notable pamphlet from
Franklin, entitled The Interest of Great Britain Considered, in which
he arranged in convenient form for the benefit of Englishmen certain
statistics of trade. From these statistics it appeared that, whereas
in 1748 English exports to the northern colonies and to the West Indies
stood at some £830,000 and £730,000 respectively, ten years later the
exports to the West Indies were still no more than £877,571 while those
to the northern colonies had advanced to nearly two millions. Nor was
it likely that this rate of increase would fall off in the future. "The
trade to our northern colonies," said Franklin, "is not only greater but
yearly increasing with the increase of the people.... The occasion for
English goods in North America, and the inclination to have and use
them, is and must be for ages to come, much greater than the ability
of the people to buy them." For English merchants the prospect was
therefore an inviting one; and if Canada rather than Guadeloupe was kept
at the close of the war, it was because statesmen and economists were
coming to estimate the value of colonies in terms of what they could
buy, and not merely, as of old, in terms of what they could sell. From
this point of view, the superiority of the continental over the
insular colonies was not to be doubted. Americans might well find great
satisfaction in this disposition of the mother country to regard her
continental colonies so highly and to think their trade of so much
moment to her; all of which, nevertheless, doubtless inclined them
sometimes to speculate on the delicate question whether, in case they
were so important to the mother country, they were not perhaps more
important to her than she was to them.
The consciousness of rapidly increasing material power, which was
greatly strengthened by the last French war, did nothing to dull the
sense of rights, but it was, on the contrary, a marked stimulus to
the mind in formulating a plausible, if theoretical, justification of
desired aims. Doubtless no American would say that being able to pay
taxes was a good reason for not paying them, or that obligations
might rightly be ignored as soon as one was in a position to do so
successfully; but that he should not "lose his native rights" any
American could more readily understand when he recalled that his
ancestors had without assistance from the mother country transformed a
wilderness into populous and thriving communities whose trade was now
becoming indispensable to Britain. Therefore, in the summer of 1764,
before the doctrine of colonial rights had been very clearly stated
or much refined, every American knew that the Sugar Act and also the
proposed Stamp Act were grievously burdensome, and that in some way or
other and for reasons which he might not be able to give with precision,
they involved an infringement of essential English liberties. Most men
in the colonies, at this early date, would doubtless have agreed with
the views expressed in a letter written to a friend in England by Thomas
Hutchinson of Boston, who was later so well hated by his compatriots for
not having changed his views with the progress of events.
The colonists [said Hutchinson] claim a power of making laws, and
a privilege of exemption from taxes, unless voted by their own
representatives.... Nor are the privileges of the people less affected
by duties laid for the sake of the money arising from them than by an
internal tax. Not one tenth part of the people of Great Britain have a
voice in the elections to Parliament; and, therefore, the colonies can
have no claim to it; but every man of property in England may have his
voice, if he will. Besides, acts of Parliament do not generally affect
individuals, and every interest is represented. But the colonies have
an interest distinct from the interest of the nation; and shall the
Parliament be at once party and judge? ...
The nation treats her colonies as a father who should sell the services
of his sons to reimburse him what they had cost him, but without the
same reason; for none of the colonies, except Georgia and Halifax,
occasioned any charge to the Crown or kingdom in the settlement of
them. The people of New England fled for the sake of civil and religious
liberty; multitudes flocked to America with this dependence, that their
liberties should be safe. They and their posterity have enjoyed them to
their content, and therefore have endured with greater cheerfulness all
the hardships of settling new countries. No ill use has been made
of these privileges; but the domain and wealth of Great Britain have
received amazing addition. Surely the services we have rendered the
nation have not subjected us to any forfeitures.
I know it is said the colonies are a charge to the nation, and they
should contribute to their own defense and protection. But during the
last war they annually contributed so largely that the Parliament was
convinced the burden would be insupportable; and from year to year made
them compensation; in several of the colonies for several years together
more men were raised, in proportion, than by the nation. In the trading
towns, one fourth part of the profit of trade, besides imposts and
excise, was annually paid to the support of the war and public charges;
in the country towns, a farm which would hardly rent for twenty pounds
a year, paid ten pounds in taxes. If the inhabitants of Britain had paid
in the same proportion, there would have been no great increase in the
national debt.
Nor is there occasion for any national expense in America. For one
hundred years together the New England colonies received no aid in their
wars with the Indians, assisted by the French. Those governments now
molested are as able to defend their respective frontiers; and had
rather do the whole of it by a tax of their own raising, than pay their
proportion in any other way. Moreover, it must be prejudicial to the
national interest to impose parliamentary taxes. The advantages promised
by an increase of the revenue are all fallacious and delusive. You will
lose more than you will gain. Britain already reaps the profit of all
their trade, and of the increase of their substance. By cherishing their
present turn of mind, you will serve your interest more than by your
present schemes.
Thomas Hutchinson, or any other man, might write a private letter
without committing his country, or, with due caution to his
correspondent, even himself; but for effective public and official
protest the colonial assemblies were the proper channels, and very
expert they were in the business, after having for half a century and
more devoted themselves with singleness of purpose to the guardianship
of colonial liberties. Until now, liberties had been chiefly threatened
by the insidious designs of colonial governors, who were for the most
part appointed by the Crown and very likely therefore to be infected
with the spirit of prerogative than which nothing could be more
dangerous, as everyone must know who recalled the great events of the
last century. With those great events, the eminent men who directed the
colonial assemblies--heads or scions or protégés of the best families in
America, men of wealth and not without reading--were entirely familiar;
they knew as well as any man that the liberties of Englishmen had been
vindicated against royal prerogative only by depriving one king of his
head and another of his crown; and they needed no instruction in the
significance of the "glorious revolution," the high justification of
which was to be found in the political gospel of John Locke, whose
book they had commonly bought and conveniently placed on their library
shelves.
More often than not, it is true, colonial governors were but ordinary
Englishmen with neither the instinct nor the capacity for tyranny,
intent mainly upon getting their salaries paid and laying by a
competence against the day when they might return to England. But if
they were not kings, at least they had certain royal characteristics;
and a certain flavor of despotism, clinging as it were to their official
robes and reviving in sensitive provincial minds the memory of bygone
parliamentary battles, was an ever-present stimulus to the eternal
vigilance which was well known to be the price of liberty.
And so, throughout the eighteenth century, little colonial aristocracies
played their part, in imagination clothing their governors in the
decaying vesture of old-world tyrants and themselves assuming the
homespun garb, half Roman and half Puritan, of a virtuous republicanism.
Small matters were thus stamped with great character. To debate a point
of procedure in the Boston or Williamsburg assembly was not, to be sure,
as high a privilege as to obstruct legislation in Westminster; but men
of the best American families, fashioning their minds as well as their
houses on good English models, thought of themselves, in withholding a
governor's salary or limiting his executive power, as but reënacting
on a lesser stage the great parliamentary struggles of the seventeenth
century. It was the illusion of sharing in great events rather than any
low mercenary motive that made Americans guard with jealous care their
legislative independence; a certain hypersensitiveness in matters of
taxation they knew to be the virtue of men standing for liberties which
Englishmen had once won and might lose before they were aware.
As a matter of course, therefore, the colonial assemblies protested
against the measures of Grenville. The General Court of Massachusetts
instructed its agent to say that the Sugar Act would ruin the New
England fisheries upon which the industrial prosperity of the northern
colonies depended. What they would lose was set down with some care, in
precise figures: the fishing trade, "estimated at £164,000 per annum;
the vessels employed in it, which would be nearly useless, at £100,000;
the provisions used in it, the casks for packing fish, and other
articles, at £22,700 and upwards: to all which there was to be added the
loss of the advantage of sending lumber, horses, provisions, and other
commodities to the foreign plantations as cargoes, the vessels employed
to carry the fish to Spain and Portugal, the dismissing of 5,000 seamen
from their employment," besides many other losses, all arising from
the very simple fact that the British islands to which the trade of
the colonies was virtually confined by the Sugar Act could furnish no
sufficient market for the products of New England, to say nothing of the
middle colonies, nor a tithe of the molasses and other commodities now
imported from the foreign islands in exchange.
Of the things taken in exchange, silver, in coin and bullion, was not
the least important, since it was essential for the "remittances to
England for goods imported into the provinces," remittances which during
the last eighteen months, it was said, "had been made in specie to
the amount of £150,000 besides £90,000 in Treasurer's bills for the
reimbursement money." Any man must thus see, since even Governor Bernard
was convinced of it, that the new duties would drain the colony of all
its hard money, and so, as the Governor said, "There will be an end of
the specie currency in Massachusetts." And with her trade half gone and
her hard money entirely so, the old Bay colony would have to manufacture
for herself those very commodities which English merchants were so
desirous of selling in America.
The Sugar Act was thus made out to be, even from the point of view of
English merchants, an economic blunder; but in the eyes of vigilant
Bostonians it was something more, and much worse than an economic
blunder. Vigilant Bostonians assembled in Town Meeting in May, 1764, in
order to instruct their representatives how they ought to act in these
serious times; and knowing that they ought to protest but perhaps not
knowing precisely on what grounds, they committed the drafting of their
instructions to Samuel Adams, a middle-aged man who had given much time
to the consideration of political questions, and above all to this very
question of taxation, upon which he had wonderfully clarified his ideas
by much meditation and the writing of effective political pieces for the
newspapers.
Through the eyes of Samuel Adams, therefore, vigilant Bostonians saw
clearly that the Sugar Act, to say nothing of the Stamp Act, was not
only an economic blunder but a menace to political liberty as well. "If
our trade may be taxed," so the instructions ran, "why not our lands?
Why not the produce of our lands, and everything we possess or make use
of? This we apprehend annihilates our charter right to govern and tax
ourselves. It strikes at our British privileges which, as we have never
forfeited them, we hold in common with our fellow-subjects who are
natives of Great Britain. If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without
our having a legal representative where they are laid, are we not
reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of
tributary slaves?" Very formidable questions, couched in high-sounding
phrases, and representing well enough in form and in substance the state
of mind of colonial assemblies in the summer of 1764 in respect to the
Sugar Act and the proposed Stamp Act.
Yet these resounding phrases doubtless meant something less to Americans
of 1764 than one is apt to suppose. The rights of freemen had so often,
in the proceedings of colonial assemblies as well as in the newspaper
communications of many a Brutus and Cato, been made to depend upon
withholding a governor's salary or defining precisely how he should
expend a hundred pounds or so, that moderate terms could hardly be
trusted to cope with the serious business of parliamentary taxation.
"Reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state
of tributary slaves" was in fact hardly more than a conventional and
dignified way of expressing a firm but entirely respectful protest.
The truth is, therefore, that while everyone protested in such spirited
terms as might occur to him, few men in these early days supposed the
new laws would not take effect, and fewer still counseled the right
or believed in the practicability of forcible resistance. "We yield
obedience to the act granting duties," declared the Massachusetts
Assembly. "Let Parliament lay what duties they please on us," said James
Otis; "it is our duty to submit and patiently bear them till they be
pleased to relieve us." Franklin assured his friends that the passage
of the Stamp Act could not have been prevented any more easily than the
sun's setting, recommended that they endure the one mischance with the
same equanimity with which they faced the other necessity, and even saw
certain advantages in the way of self-discipline which might come of
it through the practice of a greater frugality. Not yet perceiving the
dishonor attaching to the function of distributing stamps, he did
his two friends, Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut and John Hughes of
Pennsylvania, the service of procuring for them the appointment to the
new office; and Richard Henry Lee, as good a patriot as any man and
therefore of necessity at some pains later to explain his motives in the
matter, applied for the position in Virginia.
Richard Henry Lee was no friend of tyrants, but an American freeman,
less distinguished as yet than his name, which was a famous one and not
without offense to be omitted from any list of the Old Dominion's "best
families." The best families of the Old Dominion, tide-water tobacco
planters of considerable estates, admirers and imitators of the minor
aristocracy of England, took it as a matter of course that the political
fortunes of the province were committed to their care and for many
generations had successfully maintained the public interest against the
double danger of executive tyranny and popular licentiousness. It
is therefore not surprising that the many obscure freeholders, minor
planters, and lesser men who filled the House of Burgesses had followed
the able leadership of that little coterie of interrelated families
comprising the Virginia aristocracy. John Robinson, Speaker of the House
and Treasurer of the colony, of good repute still in the spring of 1765,
was doubtless the head and front of this aristocracy, the inner circle
of which would also include Peyton Randolph, then King's Attorney, and
Edmund Pendleton, well known for his cool persuasiveness in debate, the
learned constitutional lawyer, Richard Bland, the sturdy and honest but
ungraceful Robert Carter Nicholas, and George Wythe, noblest Roman of
them all, steeped in classical lore, with the thin, sharp face of a
Cæsar and for virtuous integrity a very Cato. Conscious of their English
heritage, they were at once proud of their loyalty to Britain
and jealous of their well-won provincial liberties. As became
British-American freemen, they had already drawn a proper Memorial
against the Sugar Act and were now, as they leisurely gathered at
Williamsburg in the early weeks of May, 1765, unwilling to protest again
at present, for they had not as yet received any reply to their former
dignified and respectful petition.
To this assembly of the burgesses in 1765, there came from the
back-country beyond the first falls of the Virginia rivers, the frontier
of that day, many deputies who must have presented, in dress and manners
as well as in ideas, a sharp contrast to the eminent leaders of the
aristocracy. Among them was Thomas Marshall, father of a famous son, and
Patrick Henry, a young man of twenty-nine years, a heaven-born orator
and destined to be the leader and interpreter of the silent "simple
folk" of the Old Dominion. In Hanover County, in which this tribune of
the people was born and reared and which he now represented, there were,
as in all the back-country counties, few great estates and few slaves,
no notable country-seats with pretension to architectural excellence,
no modishly dressed aristocracy with leisure for reading and the
cultivation of manners becoming a gentleman. Beyond the tide-water, men
for the most part earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, lived
the life and esteemed the virtues of a primitive society, and braced
their minds with the tonic of Calvin's theology--a tonic somewhat
tempered in these late enlightened days by a more humane philosophy and
the friendly emotionalism of simple folk living close to nature.
Free burgesses from the back-country, set apart in dress and manners
from the great planters, less learned and less practiced in oratory and
the subtle art of condescension and patronage than the cultivated men
of the inner circle, were nevertheless staunch defenders of liberty and
American rights and were perhaps beginning to question, in these days of
popular discussion, whether liberty could very well flourish among men
whose wealth was derived from the labor of negro slaves, or be well
guarded under all circumstances by those who, regarding themselves as
superior to the general run of men, might be in danger of mistaking
their particular interests for the common welfare. And indeed it
now seemed that these great men who sent their sons to London to be
educated, who every year shipped their tobacco to England and bought
their clothes of English merchants with whom their credit was always
good, were grown something too timid, on account of their loyalty to
Britain, in the great question of asserting the rights of America.
Jean Jacques Rousseau would have well understood Patrick Henry, one of
those passionate temperaments whose reason functions not in the service
of knowledge but of good instincts and fine emotions; a nature to be
easily possessed of an exalted enthusiasm for popular rights and for
celebrating the virtues of the industrious poor. This enthusiasm in the
case of Patrick Henry was intensified by his own eloquence, which had
been so effectively exhibited in the famous Parson's Cause, and in
opposition to the shady scheme which the old leaders in the House of
Burgesses had contrived to protect John Robinson, the Treasurer, from
being exposed to a charge of embezzlement. Such courageous exploits,
widely noised abroad, had won for the young man great applause and had
got him a kind of party of devoted followers in the back-country and
among the yeomanry and young men throughout the province, so that to
take the lead and to stand boldly forth as the champion of liberty
and the submerged rights of mankind seemed to Patrick Henry a kind of
mission laid upon him, in virtue of his heavenly gift of speech, by that
Providence which shapes the destinies of men.
It was said that Mr. Henry was not learned in the law; but he had read
in Coke upon Littleton that an Act of Parliament against Magna Carta,
or common right, or reason, is void--which was clearly the case of the
Stamp Act. On the flyleaf of an old copy of that book this unlearned
lawyer accordingly wrote out some resolutions of protest which he showed
to his friends, George Johnston and John Fleming, for their approval.
Their approval once obtained, Mr. Johnston moved, with Mr. Henry as
second, that the House of Burgesses should go into committee of the
whole, "to consider the steps necessary to be taken in consequence of
the resolutions ... charging certain Stamp Duties in the colonies";
which was accordingly done on the 29th of May, upon which day Mr. Henry
presented his resolutions.
The 29th of May was late in that session of the Virginia House of
Burgesses; and most likely the resolutions would have been rejected if
some two-thirds of the members, who knew nothing of Mr. Henry's plans
and supposed the business of the Assembly finished, had not already gone
home. Among those who had thus departed, it is not likely that there
were many of Patrick Henry's followers. Yet even so there was much
opposition. The resolutions were apparently refashioned in committee of
the whole, for a preamble was omitted outright and four "Resolves"
were made over into five which were presented to the House on the day
following.
Young Mr. Jefferson, at that time a law student and naturally much
interested in the business of lawmaking, heard the whole of this day's
famous debate from the door of communication between the House and the
lobby. The five resolutions, he afterwards remembered, were "opposed by
Randolph, Bland, Pendleton, Nicholas, Wythe, and all the old members,
whose influence in the House had, till then, been unbroken; ... not from
any question of our rights, but on the ground that the same sentiments
had been, at their preceding session, expressed in a more conciliatory
form, to which the answers were not yet received. But torrents of
sublime eloquence from Mr. Henry, backed by the solid reasoning of
Johnston, prevailed." It was in connection with the fifth resolution,
upon which the debate was "most bloody," that Patrick Henry is said to
have declared that "Tarquin and Cæsar had each his Brutus, Charles
the First his Cromwell, and George the Third--"; upon which cries of
"Treason" were heard from every part of the House. Treason or not, the
resolution was carried, although by one vote only; and the young law
student standing at the door of the House heard Peyton Randolph say,
as he came hastily out into the lobby: "By God, I would have given 500
guineas for a single vote." And no doubt he would, at that moment, being
then much heated.
Next day Mr. Randolph was probably much cooler; and so apparently were
some others who, in the enthusiasm of debate and under the compelling
eye of Patrick Henry, had voted for the last defiant resolution.
Thinking the matter settled, Patrick Henry had already gone home "to
recommend himself to his constituents," as his enemies thought, "by
spreading treason."
But the matter was not yet settled. Early on that morning of the 31st,
before the House assembled, the young law student who was so curious
about the business of lawmaking saw Colonel Peter Randolph, of his
Majesty's Council, standing at the Clerk's table, "thumbing over the
volumes of journals to find a precedent for expunging a vote of the
House." Whether the precedent was found the young law student did not
afterwards recollect; but it is known that on motion of Peyton Randolph
the fifth resolution was that day erased from the record. Mr. Henry was
not then present. He had been seen, on the afternoon before, "passing
along the street, on his way to his home in Louisa, clad in a pair of
leather breeches, his saddle-bags on his arm, leading a lean horse."
The four resolutions thus adopted as the deliberate and formal protest
of the Old Dominion were as mild and harmless as could well be. They
asserted no more than that the first adventurers and settlers of
Virginia brought with them and transmitted to their posterity all the
privileges at any time enjoyed by the people of Great Britain; that
by two royal charters they had been formally declared to be as surely
possessed of these privileges as if they had been born and were then
abiding within the realm; that the taxation of the people by themselves
or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them "is the only
security against a burthensome taxation, and the distinguishing
characteristick of British freedom, without which the ancient
constitution cannot exist"; and that the loyal colony of Virginia had
in fact without interruption enjoyed this inestimable right, which had
never been forfeited or surrendered nor ever hitherto denied by the
kings or the people of Britain. No treason here, expressed or implied;
nor any occasion for 500 guineas passing from one hand to another to
prove that the province of Virginia was still the ancient and loyal Old
Dominion.
But Fate, or Providence, or whatever it is that presides at the
destinies of nations, has a way of setting aside with ironical smile the
most deliberate actions of men. And so, on this occasion, it turned out
that the hard-won victory of Messrs. Randolph, Bland, Pendleton, and
Wythe was of no avail. William Gordon tells us, without mentioning the
source of his information, that "a manuscript of the unrevised resolves
soon reached Philadelphia, having been sent off immediately upon their
passing, that the earliest information of what had been done might
be obtained by the Sons of Liberty." From Philadelphia a copy was
forwarded, on June 17, to New York, in which loyal city the resolutions
were thought "so treasonable that their possessors declined printing
them"; but an Irish gentleman from Connecticut, who was then in town,
inquired after them and was with great precaution permitted to take a
copy, which he straightway carried to New England. All this may be true
or not; but certain it is that six resolutions purporting to come from
Virginia were printed in the Newport Mercury on June 24, 1765, and
afterwards, on July 1, in many Boston papers.
The document thus printed did not indeed include the famous fifth
resolution upon which the debate in the House of Burgesses was "most
bloody" and which had been there adopted by a single vote and afterwards
erased from the record; but it included two others much stronger than
that eminently treasonable one: Resolved, That his Majesty's Liege
people, the inhabitants of this colony, are not bound to yield obedience
to any law or ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation
whatsoever upon them, other than the laws and ordinances of the General
Assembly aforesaid. Resolved, That any person who shall, by speaking or
writing, assert or maintain that any person or persons, other than the
General Assembly of this colony, have any right or power to impose any
taxation on the people here, shall be deemed an enemy to his Majesty's
colony.
These resolutions, which Governor Fauquier had not seen, and which were
perhaps never debated in the House of Burgesses, were now circulated far
and wide as part of the mature decision of the Virginia Assembly. On the
14th of September, Messrs. Randolph, Wythe, and Nicholas were appointed
a committee to apprise the Assembly's agent "of a spurious copy of the
resolves of the last Assembly ... being dispersed and printed in the
News Papers and to send him a true copy of the votes on that occasion."
In those days of slow and difficult communication, the truth, three
months late, could not easily overtake the falsehood or ever effectively
replace it.
In later years, when it was thought an honor to have begun the
Revolution, many men denied the decisive effect of the Virginia
Resolutions in convincing the colonists that the Stamp Act might be
successfully resisted. But contemporaries were agreed in according them
that glory or that infamy. "Two or three months ago," said Governor
Bernard, "I thought that this people would submit to the Stamp Act.
Murmurs were indeed continually heard, but they seemed to be such
as would die away. The publishing the Virginia Resolutions proved an
alarm-bell to the disaffected." We read the resolutions, said Jonathan
Sewell, "with wonder. They savored of independence; they flattered the
human passions; the reasoning was specious; we wished it conclusive.
The transition to believing it so was easy, and we, almost all America,
followed their example in resolving that the Parliament had no such
right." And the good patriot John Adams, who afterwards attributed the
honor to James Otis, said in 1776 that the "author of the first Virginia
Resolutions against the Stamp Act ... will have the glory with posterity
of beginning ... this great Revolution." ¹
¹ Upon the death of George II., 1760, the collectors of the customs at
Boston applied for new writs of assistance. The grant was opposed by the
merchants, and the question was argued before the Superior Court. It was
on this occasion that James Otis made a speech in favor of the rights
of the colonists as men and Englishmen. All that is known of it is
contained in some rough notes taken at the time by John Adams (Works of
John Adams, ii., 125). An elaboration of these notes was printed in the
Massachusetts Spy, April 29, 1773, and with corrections by Adams fifty
years after the event in William Tudor's Life of James Otis, chs. 5-7.
This is the speech to which Adams, at a later date, attributed the
beginning of the Revolution.
James Otis in 1765 declared the Virginia Resolutions to be treasonable.
It was precisely their treasonable flavor that electrified the country,
while the fact that they came from the Old Dominion made men think that
a union of the colonies, so essential to successful resistance, might be
achieved in spite of all. The Old Dominion, counted the most English of
the colonies in respect to her institutions and her sympathies, had a
character for loyalty that, in any matter of opposition to Britain,
gave double weight to her action. Easy-going tobacco-planters, Church of
England men all, were well known not to be great admirers of the precise
Puritans of New England, whose moral fervor and conscious rectitude
seemed to them a species of fanaticism savoring more of canting
hypocrisy than of that natural virtue affected by men of parts. Franklin
may well have had Virginia and Massachusetts in mind when he said, but
a few years earlier, no one need fear that the colonies "will unite
against their own nation ... which 'tis well known they all love much
more than they love one another." Nor could anyone have supposed that
the "Ancient and Loyal Colony of Virginia" would out-Boston Boston in
asserting the rights of America. Yet this was what had come to pass, the
evidence of which was the printed resolutions now circulating far and
wide and being read in this month of July when it was being noised about
that a Congress was proposed for the coming October. The proposal had
in fact come from Massachusetts Bay in the form of a circular letter
inviting all the colonies to send delegates to New York for the purpose
of preparing a loyal and humble "representation of their condition," and
of imploring relief from the King and Parliament of Great Britain.
No very encouraging response was immediately forthcoming. The Assembly
of New Jersey unanimously declined to send any delegates, although it
declared itself "not without a just sensibility respecting the late acts
of Parliament," and wished "such other colonies as think proper to be
active every success they can loyally and reasonably desire." For two
months there was no indication that any colony would think it "proper
to be active"; but during August and September the assemblies of six
colonies chose deputies to the congress, and when that body finally
assembled in October, less formally designated representatives from
three other colonies appeared upon the scene. The Assembly of New
Hampshire declined to take part. Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina
were also unrepresented, which was perhaps due to the fact that the
governors of those provinces refused to call the assemblies together to
consider the Massachusetts circular letter.
Of the 27 members of the Stamp Act Congress, few if any were inclined
to rash or venturesome measures. It is reported that Lord Melbourne,
as Prime Minister of England, once remarked to his Cabinet, "It doesn't
matter what we say, but we must all say the same thing." What the Stamp
Act Congress said was to be sure of some importance, but that it should
say something which all could agree to was of even greater importance.
"There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on the
continent," wrote Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, "but all of
us Americans." New Yorkers and New England men could not indeed be
so easily transformed over night; but the Stamp Act Congress was
significant as marking a kind of beginning in that slow and difficult
process. After eleven days of debate, in which sharp differences of
opinion were no doubt revealed, a declaration of rights and grievances
was at last adopted; a declaration which was so cautiously and loyally
phrased that all could subscribe to it, and which was perhaps for that
very reason not quite satisfactory to anyone.
His Majesty's subjects in the colonies, the declaration affirmed, are
entitled to those "inherent rights and liberties" which are enjoyed by
"his natural born subjects" in Great Britain; among which rights is that
most important one of "not being taxed without their own consent"; and
since the people of the colonies, "from local circumstances, cannot be
represented in the House of Commons," it follows that taxes cannot be
"imposed upon them, but by their respective legislatures." The Stamp
Act, being a direct tax, was therefore declared to have a "manifest
tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonies." Of the
Sugar Act, which was not a direct tax, so much could not be said; but
this act was at least "burthensome and grievous," being subversive of
trade if not of liberty. No one was likely to be profoundly stirred by
the declaration of the Stamp Act Congress, in this month of October when
the spirited Virginia Resolutions were everywhere well known.
"The frozen politicians of a more northern government," according to the
Boston Gazette, "say they [the people of Virginia] have spoken treason";
but the Boston Gazette, for its part, thought they had "spoken very
sensibly." With much reading of the resolutions and of the commendatory
remarks with which they were everywhere received, the treasonable flavor
of their boldest phrases no doubt grew less pronounced, and high talk
took on more and more the character of good sense. During the summer
of 1765 the happy phrase of Isaac Barré--"these sons of liberty"--was
everywhere repeated, and was put on as a kind of protective coloring by
strong patriots, who henceforth thought of themselves as Sons of Liberty
and no traitors at all. Rather were they traitors who would in any
way justify an act of tyranny; most of all those so-called Americans,
accepting the office of Stamp Master, who cunningly aspired to make
a farthing profit out of the hateful business of enslaving their own
countrymen.
Who these gentry might be was not certainly known until early August,
when Jared Ingersoll, himself as it turned out one of the miscreants,
brought the commissions over from London, whereupon the names were all
printed in the papers. It then appeared that the gentleman appointed
to distribute the stamps in Massachusetts was Andrew Oliver, a man very
well connected in that province and of great influence with the best
people, not infrequently entrusted with high office and perquisites, and
but recently elected by the unsuspecting Bostonians to represent them in
the council of Massachusetts Bay Colony. It seemed inconsistent that a
man so often honored by the people should meanwhile pledge himself to
destroy their liberties; and so on the morning of the 14th of August,
Mr. Oliver's effigy, together with a horned devil's head peeping out of
an old boot, was to be seen hanging from the Liberty Tree at the south
end of Boston, near the distillery of Thomas Chase, brewer and warm
Son of Liberty. During the day people stopped to make merry over the
spectacle; and in the evening, after work hours, a great crowd gathered
to see what would happen. When the effigy was cut down and carried away,
the crowd very naturally followed along through the streets and through
the Town House, justifying themselves--many respectable people were
in the crowd--for being there by calling out, "Liberty and Property
forever; no Stamp." And what with tramping and shouting in the warm
August evening, the whole crowd became much heated and ever more
enthusiastic, so that, the line of march by some chance lying past
the new stamp office and Mr. Oliver's house, the people were not to be
restrained from destroying the former and breaking in the windows of the
latter, in detestation of the hated Stamp Act and of the principle that
property might be taken without consent.
Mr. Oliver hastened to resign his office, which doubtless led many
people to think the methods taken to induce him to do so were very good
ones and such as might well be made further use of. It was in fact not
long afterwards, about dusk of the evening of the 26th of August, that
a mob of men, more deliberately organized than before, ransacked the
office of William Story, Deputy Registrar of the Court of Admiralty,
and, after burning the obnoxious records kept there, they forcibly
entered the house, and the cellar too, of Benjamin Hallowell,
Comptroller of the Customs. "Then the Monsters," says Deacon Tudor,
"being enflam'd with Rum & Wine which they got in sd. Hallowell's
cellar, proceeded with Shouts to the Dwelling House of the Hon-l. Thos.
Hutchinson, Esq., Lieut. Governor, & enter'd in a voyalent manner." At
that moment the Lieutenant-Governor was sitting comfortably at dinner
and had barely time to escape with his family before the massive front
door was broken in with axes. As young Mr. Hutchinson went out by the
back way he heard someone say: "Damn him, he's upstairs, we'll have him
yet." They did not indeed accomplish this purpose; but when the morning
broke the splendid house was seen to be completely gutted, the partition
walls broken in, the roof partly off, and the priceless possessions of
the owner ruined past repair: mahogany and walnut furniture finished
in morocco and crimson damask, tapestries and Turkey carpets, rare
paintings, cabinets of fine glass and old china, stores of immaculate
linen, India paduasoy gowns and red Genoa robes, a choice collection of
books richly bound in leather and many manuscript documents, the fruit
of thirty years' labor in collecting--all broken and cut and cast about
to make a rubbish heap and a bonfire. From the mire of the street there
was afterwards picked up a manuscript history of Massachusetts which is
preserved to this day, the soiled pages of which may still be seen in
the Boston library. Mr. Hutchinson was no friend of the Stamp Act;
but he was a rich man, Lieutenant-Governor of the province, and
brother-in-law of Andrew Oliver.
Government offered the usual rewards--which were never claimed--for
evidence leading to the detection of any persons concerned in the riots.
Men of repute, including the staunchest patriots such as Samuel Adams
and Jonathan Mayhew, expressed their abhorrence of mobs and of all
licentious proceedings in general; but many were nevertheless disposed
to think, with good Deacon Tudor, that in this particular instance
"the universal Obhorrance of the Stamp Act was the cause of the Mob's
riseing." It would be well to punish the mob, but punishing the mob
would not cure the evil which was the cause of the mob; for where there
was oppression the lower sort of people, as was well known, would
be sure to express opposition in the way commonly practiced by them
everywhere, in London as well as in Boston, by gathering in the streets
in crowds, in which event some deplorable excesses were bound to follow,
however much deprecated by men of substance and standing. If ministers
wished the people to be tranquil, let them repeal the Stamp Act; if
they were determined to persist in it, and should attempt to land and
distribute the stamps, loyal and law-abiding citizens, however much they
might regret the fact, could only say that similar disorders were very
likely to become even more frequent and more serious in the future than
they had been in the past.
As the first of November approached, that being the day set for the
levying of the tax, attention and discussion came naturally to center
on the stamps rather than on the Stamp Act. Crowds of curious people
gathered wherever there seemed a prospect of catching a glimpse of
the bundles of stamped papers. Upon their arrival the papers had to be
landed; they could therefore be seen; and the mere sight of them was
likely to be a sufficient challenge to action. It seemed a simple matter
to resist a law which could be of no effect without the existence
of certain papers, paper being a substance easily disposed of. And
everywhere in fact the stamps were disposed of--disposed of by mobs,
with the tacit consent and impalpable encouragement of many men who,
having a reputable position to maintain, would themselves by no means
endure to be seen in a common crowd; men of good estate whom no one
could think of as countenancers of violence, but who were, on this
occasion, as Mr. Livingston said, "not averse to a little rioting"
on condition that it be kept within bounds and well directed to the
attainment of their just rights.
A little rioting, so easy to be set on foot, was difficult to keep
within reasonable bounds, as Mr. Livingston and his friends in New York
soon discovered, somewhat to their chagrin. In New York, even after the
stamps were surrendered by Lieutenant-Governor Colden and safely lodged
in the Town House, there were many excesses wholly unnecessary to the
attainment of the original object. Mr. Colden's new chariot, certainly
never designed to carry the stamps, was burned; and on repeated
occasions windows were broken and "particulars" threatened that their
houses would presently be pulled down. Mr. Livingston was himself the
owner of houses, had an immense respect for property rights and for the
law that guaranteed them, and therefore wished very much that the lower
sort of people would give over their mobbish practices now that the
stamps had been disposed of. Since the law could not now operate without
stamps, what more was necessary except to wait in good order, patiently
denying themselves those activities that involved a violation of the
law, until the law should be repealed? The Stamp Act Congress had
protested in a proper and becoming manner; merchants had agreed not to
import British goods; the Governor had closed the courts. Stopping of
business would doubtless be annoying and might very likely produce
some distress. But it would be legal and it would be effective: the
government would get no revenue; British merchants no profit; and
Americans could not be charged with violating a law the failure of
which was primarily due to the fact that papers indispensable to its
application were, for one reason or another, not forthcoming.
Mr. Livingston, happily possessed of the conservative temperament, was
disposed to achieve desired ends with the least possible disturbance of
his own affairs and those of his country; and most men of independent
means, landowners and merchants of considerable estates, moneyed men and
high salaried officials whose incomes were not greatly affected by any
temporary business depression, were likely to be of Mr. Livingston's
opinion, particularly in this matter of the Stamp Act. Sitting
comfortably at dinner every day and well knowing where they could lay
hands on money to pay current bills, they enjoyed a high sense of
being defenders of liberty and at the same time eminently law-abiding
citizens. They professed a decided preference for nullifying the Stamp
Act without violating it. Sitting at dinner over their wine, they swore
that they would let ships lie in harbor and rot there if necessary, and
would let the courts close for a year or two years, rather than employ
taxed papers to collect their just debts; with a round oath they bound
themselves to it, sealing the pledge, very likely, by sipping another
glass of Madeira. In the defense of just rights, Mr. Livingston and his
conservative friends were willing to sacrifice much: they foresaw some
months of business stagnation, which they nevertheless contemplated with
equanimity, being prepared to tide over the dull time by living in a
diminished manner, if necessary even dispensing with customary bottles
of Madeira at dinner.
Men of radical temperament, having generally less regard for the status
quo, are quick to see ulterior motives back of conservative timidity and
solemn profession of respect for law and order. It was so in the case of
the Stamp Act. Small shopkeepers who were soon sold out and had no great
stock of "old moth-eaten goods" to offer at enhanced prices, rising
young lawyers whose fees ceased with the closing of the courts, artisans
and laborers who bought their dinners (no Madeira included) with their
daily wage--these, and indeed all the lower sort of people, contemplated
the stopping of business with much alarm. Mr. John Adams, a young lawyer
of Braintree and Boston, was greatly interested in the question of the
courts of justice. Were the courts to be closed on the ground that no
legal business could be done without stamped papers? Or were they to go
on trying cases, enforcing the collection of debts, and probating wills
precisely as if no Stamp Act had ever been heard of? The Boston superior
court was being adjourned continuously, for a fortnight at a time,
through the influence of Messrs. Hutchinson and Oliver, to the great
and steadily rising wrath of young Mr. Adams. The courts must soon be
opened, he said to himself; their inactivity "will make a large chasm
in my affairs, if it should not reduce me to distress." Young Mr. Adams,
who had, no less than Mr. Oliver, a family to support and children to
provide for, was just at the point of making a reputation and winning a
competence "when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as
well as that of America in general." And therefore Mr. Adams, and Mr.
Samuel Adams, and Mr. Otis, and Mr. Gridley, in order to avert the ruin
of America in general, were "very warm" to have the courts open and
very bitter against Messrs. Hutchinson and Oliver whose "insolence and
impudence and chicanery" in the matter were obvious, and whose secret
motives might easily be inferred. Little wonder if these men, who had
managed by hook or crook to get into their own hands or into the hands
of their families nearly all the lucrative offices in the province, now
sought to curry favor with ministers in order to maintain their amazing
ascendancy!
When the Stamp Act was passed, all men in America had professed
themselves, and were thought to be, Sons of Liberty. Even Mr. Hutchinson
had declared himself against ministerial measures. But scarce a month
had elapsed since the law was to have gone into effect before it was
clear to the discerning that, for all their professions, most of
the "better sort" were not genuine Sons of Liberty at all, but timid
sycophants, pliant instruments of despotism, far more intent upon the
ruin of Mr. Adams and of America in general than any minister could
be shown to be. For the policy of dispensing with activities requiring
stamped papers, much lauded by these gentry as an effective and
constitutional means of defeating the law, was after all nothing but "a
sort of admittance of the legality of the Stamp Act, and had a tendency
to enforce it, since there was just reason to apprehend that the
secret enemies of liberty had actually a design to introduce it by
the necessity to which the people would be reduced by the cessation of
business." It was well, therefore, in view of such insidious designs of
secret enemies, that the people, even to the lowest ranks, should become
"more attentive to their liberties, and more inquisitive about them, and
more determined to defend them, than they were ever before known or had
occasion to be."
To defend their liberties, not against ministers but against ministerial
tools, who were secret betrayers of America, true patriots accordingly
banded themselves in societies which took to themselves the name of Sons
of Liberty and of which the object was, by "putting business in motion
again, in the usual channels, without stamps," to prevent the Stamp Act
ever being enforced. Such a society composed mainly of the lower orders
of people and led by rising young lawyers, was formed in New York. On
January 7, at Mr. Howard's coffee house, abandoning the secrecy which
had hitherto veiled their activities, its members declared to the world
their principles and the motives that would determine their action in
the future:
Resolved: That we will go to the last extremity and venture our lives
and fortunes effectively to prevent the said Stamp Act from ever taking
place in this city and province; Resolved: That any person who shall
deliver out or receive any instrument of writing upon stamped paper ...
shall incur the highest resentment of this society, and be branded with
everlasting infamy; Resolved: That the people who carry on business as
formerly on unstamped Paper ... shall be protected to the utmost power
of this society.
Malicious men said that the Sons of Liberty were "much concerned that
the gentlemen of fortune don't publically join them," for which reason
the society "formed a committee of correspondence with the Liberty Boys
in the neighboring provinces." In February, the society did in fact
appoint such a committee, which sent out letters to all the counties of
New York and to all the colonies except Georgia, proposing the formation
of an intercolonial association of the true Sons of Liberty; to which
letters many replies were received, some of which are still preserved
among the papers of the secretary, Mr. John Lamb. The general sense
of these letters was that an intercolonial association and close
correspondence were highly necessary in view of the presence, in nearly
every colony, of many "secret and inveterate enemies of liberty," and of
the desirability of keeping "a watchful eye over all those who, from
the nature of their offices, vocations, or dispositions, may be the most
likely to introduce the use of stamped paper, to the total subversion of
the British constitution."
No doubt the society kept its watchful eye on every unusual activity and
all suspicious characters, but to what extent it succeeded in "putting
business in motion again, in the usual channels, without stamps," cannot
be said. Both before and after the society was founded, much business
was carried on in violation of the law: newspapers and pamphlets
continued to flourish in the land; the inferior courts at least were
sooner or later opened in nearly every colony; and not infrequently
unstamped clearance papers were issued to shipmasters willing to take
the risk of seizure in London or elsewhere. Mr. John Hancock, easily
persuading himself that there should be no risk, shipped a cargo of oil
with the Boston packet in December. "I am under no apprehensions," he
wrote his London agent. "Should there be any Difficulty in London as
to Marshall's clearance, You will please to represent the circumstances
that no stamps could be obtained, ... in which case I think I am to be
justified, & am not liable to a seizure, or even run any risque at all,
as I have taken the Step of the Law, and made application for clearance,
& can get no other."
Notwithstanding such practices, which were frequent enough, it was a
dull winter, with little profit flowing into the coffers of Mr. Hancock,
with low wages or none at all for worthy artisans and laborers; so that
it must often have seemed, as Governor Moore said, "morally impossible
that the people here can subsist any time under such inconveniences
as they have brought on themselves." Such inconveniences became more
irksome as time passed, with the result that, during the cold and
dreary months of February and March, it became every day a more pressing
question, particularly for the poor, to know whether the bad times would
end at last in the repeal or the admission of the tyrannical act.
Confronted with this difficult dilemma, the faithful Sons of Liberty
were preparing in April to assemble a continental congress as a last
resort, when rumors began to spread that Parliament was on the point
of carrying the repeal. The project of a congress was accordingly
abandoned, and everywhere recrimination gave place to rejoicing. On
April 21, 1766, the vigilant Boston Sons voted that when the rumors
should be confirmed they would celebrate the momentous event in a
befitting manner--would celebrate it "Under the deepest Sense of Duty
and Loyalty to our Most Gracious Sovereign King George, and in respect
and Gratitude to the Patriotic Ministry, Mr. Pitt, and the Glorious
Majority of both Houses of Parliament, by whose Influence, under Divine
Providence, against a most strenuous Opposition, a happy Repeal of the
Stamp Act, so unconstitutional as well as Grievous to His Majesty's good
Subjects of America, is attained; whereby our incontestible Right of
Internal Taxation remains to us inviolate."
CHAPTER IV DEFINING THE ISSUE
A pepper-corn, in acknowledgement of the right, is of more value than
millions without it.--George Grenville.
A perpetual jealousy respecting liberty, is absolutely requisite in all
free states.--John Dickinson.
Good Americans everywhere celebrated the repeal of the Stamp Act with
much festivity and joyful noises in the streets, and with "genteel
entertainments" in taverns, where innumerable toasts were drunk to
Liberty and to its English defenders. Before his house on Beacon Hill,
Mr. John Hancock, on occasion a generous man, erected a platform and
placed there a pipe of Madeira which was broached for all comers. At
Colonel Ingersoll's, where twenty-eight gentlemen attended to take
dinner, fifteen toasts were drunk, "and very loyal they were, and suited
to the occasion"; upon which occasion, we are told, Mr. Hancock again
"treated every person with cheerfulness." Throughout the land men with
literary gifts, or instincts, delivered themselves of vigorous free
verse, founded upon the antithesis of Freedom and Tyranny, and enforcing
the universal truth that "in the unequal war Oppressors fall, the hate,
contempt, and endless curse of all." In New York, on the occasion of the
King's birthday, an ox was roasted whole in the Fields, and twenty
kegs of beer were opened for a great dinner at the King's Arms; and
afterwards, through the generosity of the Assembly of that province,
there was erected on the Bowling Green a mounted statue--made of lead
but without present intention of being turned into bullets--representing
His Majesty King George the Third, of ever glorious memory, the Restorer
of Liberty.
The joyful Americans could not know how little King George aspired to
be thought the Restorer of Liberty. In reality he was extremely sulky
in his silent, stubborn way over the repeal of the Stamp Act, and vexed
most particularly at the part which he himself had been forced to
play in it. The idea of a Patriot King, conceived by Lord Bolingbroke
(one-time Jacobite exile) and instilled into the mind of the young
Hanoverian monarch by an ambitious mother, had little to do with
liberty, either British or colonial, but had much to do with authority.
The Patriot King was to be a king indeed, seeking advice of all virtuous
men of whatever connections, without being bound by any man or faction
of men. It was not to restore liberty, nor yet to destroy it, but to
destroy factions, that the King was ambitious; and for this purpose he
desired a ministry that would do his bidding without too much question.
If Mr. Grenville did not satisfy His Majesty, it was not on account
of the Stamp Act, in respect to which the King was wholly of Mr.
Grenville's opinion that it was a just law and ought to be enforced. In
July, 1765, when Mr. Grenville was dismissed, there had indeed as yet
been no open resistance in America; and if the King had been somewhat
annoyed by the high talk of his loyal subjects in Virginia, he had been
annoyed much more by Mr. Grenville, who was disposed, in spite of his
outward air of humility and solemn protestations of respect, to be very
firm with His Majesty in the matter of ministerial prerogative, reading
him from time to time carefully prepared pedantic little curtain
lectures on the customs of the Constitution and the duties of kings
under particular circumstances.
Unable to endure Mr. Grenville longer, the King turned to Mr. Pitt. This
statesman, although extremely domineering in the House, was much subdued
in the presence of his sovereign, and along with many defects had one
great virtue in his Majesty's eyes, which was that he shared the King's
desire to destroy the factions. The King was accordingly ready to
receive the Great Commoner, even though he insisted on bringing "the
Constitution," and Earl Temple into the bargain, with him to St. James's
Palace. But when it appeared that Earl Temple was opposed to the repeal
of the Stamp Act, Mr. Pitt declined after all to come to St. James's on
any terms, even with his beloved Constitution; whereupon the harassed
young King, rather than submit again to Mr. Grenville's lectures,
surrendered himself, temporarily, to the old-line Whigs under the lead
of the Marquis of Rockingham. In all the negotiations which ended in
this unpromising arrangement of the King's business, the Stamp Act had
apparently not been once mentioned; except that Mr. Grenville, upon
retiring, had ventured to say to His Majesty, as a kind of abbreviated
parting homily, that if "any man ventured to defeat the regulations
laid down for the colonies, by a slackness in the execution, he [Mr.
Grenville] should look upon him as a criminal and the betrayer of his
country."
The Marquis of Rockingham and his friends had no intention of betraying
their country. They had, perhaps, when they were thus accidentally
lifted to power, no very definite intentions of any sort. Respecting the
Stamp Act, as most alarming reports began to come in from America,
His Majesty's Opposition, backed by the landed interest and led by
Mr. Grenville and the Duke of Bedford, knew its mind much sooner than
ministers knew theirs. America was in open rebellion, they said, and so
far from doing anything about it ministers were not even prepared, four
months after disturbances began, to lay necessary information before
the House. Under pressure of such talk, the Marquis of Rockingham had
to make up his mind. It would be odd and contrary to well-established
precedent for ministers to adopt a policy already outlined by
Opposition; and in view of the facts that good Whig tradition, even
if somewhat obscured in latter days, committed them to some kind of
liberalism, that the City and the mercantile interest thought Mr.
Grenville's measures disastrous to trade, and that they were much in
need of Mr. Pitt's eloquence to carry them through, ministers at last,
in January, 1766, declared for the repeal.
Now that it was a question of repealing Mr. Grenville's measures,
serious attention was given to them; and honorable members, in the
notable debate of 1766, learned much about America and the rights of
Englishmen which they had not known before. Lord Mansfield, the most
eminent legal authority in England, argued that the Stamp Act was
clearly within the power of Parliament, while Lord Camden, whose opinion
was by no means to be despised, staked his reputation that the law was
unconstitutional. Mr. Grenville, in his precise way, laid it down
as axiomatic that since "Great Britain protects America, America is
therefore bound to yield obedience"; if not; he desired to know when
Americans were emancipated. Whereupon Mr. Pitt, springing up, desired
to know when they were made slaves. The Great Commoner rejoiced that
America had resisted, and expressed the belief that three millions of
people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit
to be made slaves would be very fit instruments to make slaves of all
Englishmen.
Honorable members were more disposed to listen to Mr. Pitt than to vote
with him; and were doubtless less influenced by his hot eloquence than
by the representations of English merchants to the effect that trade was
being ruined by Mr. Grenville's measures. Sir George Seville, honorable
member for Yorkshire, spoke the practical mind of business men when he
wrote to Lord Rockingham: "Our trade is hurt; what the devil have you
been doing? For our part, we don't pretend to understand your politics
and American matters, but our trade is hurt: pray remedy it, and a
plague of you if you won't." This was not so eloquent as Mr. Pitt's
speech, but still very eloquent in its way and more easily followed
than Mr. Pitt's theory that "taxation is no part of the governing or
legislative power."
Constitutional arguments, evenly balanced pro and con, were not certain
to change many minds, while such brief statements as that of Sir George
Seville, although clearly revealing the opinion of that gentleman,
did little to enlighten the House on the merits of the question. That
members might have every opportunity to inform themselves about America,
the ministers thought it worth while to have Benjamin Franklin of
Philadelphia, printer and Friend of the Human Race, brought before the
bar of the House to make such statements of fact or opinion as might be
desired of him. The examination was a long one; the questions very much
to the point; the replies very ready and often more to the point than
the questions. With much exact information the provincial printer
maintained that the colonists, having taxed themselves heavily in
support of the last war, were not well able to pay more taxes, and that,
even if they were abundantly able, the sugar duties and the stamp
tax were improper measures. The stamps, in remote districts, would
frequently require more in postage to obtain than the value of the tax.
The sugar duties had already greatly diminished the volume of colonial
trade, while both the duties and the tax, having to be paid in silver,
were draining America of its specie and thus making it impossible for
merchants to import from England to the same extent as formerly. It
was well known that at the moment Americans were indebted to English
merchants to the amount of several million pounds sterling, which they
were indeed willing, as English merchants themselves said, but unable
to pay. Necessarily, therefore, Americans were beginning to manufacture
their own cloth, which they could very well do. Before their old clothes
were worn out they "would have new ones of their own making."
Against the Stamp Act, honorable members were reminded, there was a
special objection to be urged. It was thought with good reason to be
unconstitutional, which would make its application difficult, if not
impossible. Troops might no doubt be sent to enforce it, but troops
would find no enemy to contend with, no men in arms; they would find no
rebellion in America, although they might indeed create one. Pressed by
Mr. Townshend to say whether the colonies might not, on the ground of
Magna Carta, as well deny the validity of external as internal taxes,
the Doctor was not ready to commit himself on that point. It was true
many arguments had lately been used in England to show Americans that,
if Parliament has no right to tax them internally, it has none to tax
them externally, or to make any other law to bind them; in reply to
which, he could only say that "at present they do not reason so, but in
time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments."
Whether the Parliament was truly enlightened and resolved by statistical
information and lofty constitutional argument is not certainly known;
but it is known that the King, whose steady mind did not readily change,
was still opposed to the repeal, a fact supposed to be not without
influence in unsettling the opinions of some honorable members. Lord
Mansfield had discreetly advised His Majesty that although it was
contrary to the spirit of the constitution to "endeavour by His
Majesty's name to carry questions in Parliament, yet where the lawful
rights of the King and Parliament were to be asserted and maintained, he
thought the making His Majesty's opinion in support of those rights to
be known, was very fit and becoming."
The distinction was subtle, but perhaps not too subtle for a great
lawyer. It was apparently not too subtle for a Patriot King, since
certain noble lords who could be counted on to know the King's wishes
conveyed information to the proper persons that those who found it
against their conscience to vote for the repeal would not for that
reason be received coldly at St. James's Palace. In order to preserve
the constitution as well as to settle the question of the repeal on its
merits, Lord Rockingham and the Earl of Shelburne obtained an interview
with the King at which they pointed out to him the manifest irregularity
of such a procedure, and in addition expressed their conviction that, on
account of the high excitement in the City, failure to repeal the
Stamp Act would be attended with very serious consequences. Whether to
preserve the Constitution, or to allow the repeal to be determined on
its merits, or for some other reason, the King at last gave in writing
his consent to the ministers' measure. On February 22, by a vote of
275 to 167, Mr. Conway was given leave to bring in the bill for a total
repeal of the Stamp Act. The bill was accordingly brought in, passed by
both houses, and on March 18 assented to by the King.
In the colonies the repeal was thought to be a victory for true
principles of government, at least a tacit admission by the mother
country that the American interpretation of the Constitution was the
correct one. No Englishman denied that the repeal was an American
victory; and there were some, like Pitt and Camden, who preferred
the constitutional theories of Daniel Dulaney ¹ to those of George
Grenville. But most Englishmen who took the trouble to have any views on
such recondite matters, having in general a poor opinion of provincial
logic, easily dismissed the whole matter with the convincing phrase of
Charles Townshend that the distinction between internal and external
taxes was "perfect nonsense." The average Briton, taking it for granted
that all the subtle legal aspects of the question had been thoroughly
gone into by Lord Mansfield, was content to read Mr. Soame Jenyns, a
writer of verse and member of the Board of Trade, who in a leisure hour
had recently turned his versatile mind to the consideration of colonial
rights with the happiest results. In twenty-three very small pages
he had disposed of the "Objections to the Taxation of Our American
Colonies" in a manner highly satisfactory to himself and doubtless also
to the average reading Briton, who understood constitutional questions
best when they were "briefly considered," and when they were humorously
expounded in pamphlets that could be had for sixpence.
¹ Daniel Dulaney, of Maryland, was the author of a pamphlet entitled
Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes on the British
Colonies. Pitt, in his speech on the repeal of the Stamp Act, referred
to this pamphlet as a masterly performance.
Having a logical mind, Mr. Jenyns easily perceived that taxes could
be objected to on two grounds: the ground of right and the ground of
expediency. In his opinion the right of Parliament to lay taxes on
America and the expediency of doing so at the present moment were
propositions so clear that any man, in order not to bring his
intelligence in question, needed to apologize for undertaking to defend
them. Mr. Jenyns wished it known that he was not the man to carry owls
to Athens, and that he would never have thought it necessary to prove
either the right or the expediency of taxing our American colonies, "had
not many arguments been lately flung out ... which with insolence equal
to their absurdity deny them both." With this conciliatory preliminary
disclaimer of any lack of intelligence on his own part, Mr. Jenyns
proceeded to point out, in his most happy vein, how unsubstantial
American reasoning really appeared when, brushing aside befogging
irrelevancies, you once got to the heart of the question.
The heart of the question was the proposition that there should be no
taxation without representation; upon which principle it was necessary
to observe only that many individuals in England, such as copyholders
and leaseholders, and many communities, such as Manchester and
Birmingham, were taxed in Parliament without being represented there. If
Americans quoted you "Lock, Sidney, Selden, and many other great names
to prove that every Englishman ... is still represented in Parliament,"
he would only ask why, since Englishmen are all represented in
Parliament, are not all Americans represented in exactly the same way?
Either Manchester is not represented or Massachusetts is. "Are Americans
not British subjects? Are they not Englishmen? Or are they only
Englishmen when they solicit protection, but not Englishmen when taxes
are required to enable this country to protect them?" Americans said
they had Assemblies of their own to tax them, which was a privilege
granted them by charter, without which "that liberty which every
Englishman has a right to is torn from them, they are all slaves, and
all is lost." Colonial charters were, however, "undoubtedly no more than
those of all corporations, which empower them to make bye-laws." As for
"liberty," the word had so many meanings, "having within a few years
been used as a synonymous term for Blasphemy, Bawdy, Treason, Libels,
Strong Beer, and Cyder," that Mr. Jenyns could not presume to say what
it meant.
Against the expediency of the taxes, Mr. Jenyns found that two
objections had been raised: that the time was improper and the manner
wrong. As to the manner, the colonies themselves had in a way prescribed
it, since they had not been able at the request of ministers to suggest
any other. The time Mr. Jenyns thought most propitious, a point upon
which he grew warm and almost serious.
Can any time be more proper to require some assistance from our
colonies, to preserve to themselves their present safety, than when this
country is almost undone by procuring it? Can any time be more proper to
impose some tax upon their trade, than when they are enabled to rival us
in their manufactures by the encouragement and protection which we
have given them? Can any time be more proper to oblige them to settle
handsome incomes on their governors, than when we find them unable to
procure a subsistence on any other terms than those of breaking all
their instructions, and betraying the rights of their Sovereign? ... Can
there be a more proper time to force them to maintain an army at their
expence, than when that army is necessary for their own protection, and
we are utterly unable to support it? Lastly, can there be a more proper
time for this mother country to leave off feeding out of her own vitals
these children whom she has nursed up, than when they are arrived at
such strength and maturity as to be well able to provide for themselves,
and ought rather with filial duty to give some assistance to her
distresses?
Americans, after all, were not the only ones who might claim to have a
grievance!
It was upon a lighter note, not to end in anticlimax, that Mr. Jenyns
concluded his able pamphlet. He had heard it hinted that allowing the
colonies representation in Parliament would be a simple plan for making
taxes legal. The impracticability of this plan, he would not go into,
since the plan itself had nowhere been seriously pressed, but he would,
upon that head, offer the following consideration:
I have lately seen so many specimens of the great powers of speech of
which these American gentlemen are possessed, that I should be much
afraid that the sudden importation of so much eloquence at once would
greatly endanger the safety of the government of this country.... If we
can avail ourselves of these taxes on no other condition, I shall never
look upon it as a measure of frugality, being perfectly satisfied that
in the end, it will be much cheaper for us to pay their army than their
orators.
Mr. Jenyns's pamphlet, which could be had for sixpence, was widely read,
with much appreciation for its capital wit and extraordinary common
sense; more widely read in England than Mr. James Otis's Rights of the
British Colonies Asserted and Proved or Daniel Dulaney's Considerations
on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes on the British Colonies; and it
therefore did much more than these able pamphlets to clarify English
opinion on the rights of Parliament and the expediency of taxing
America. No one could deny that Government had yielded in the face of
noisy clamor and forcible resistance. To yield under the circumstances
may have been wise or not; but Government had not yielded on any ground
of right, but had on the contrary most expressly affirmed, in the
Declaratory Act, that "the King's Majesty, by and with the advice of
the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons of Great Britain, in
Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power
and authority to make such laws and statutes of sufficient force and
validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the
Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever." Government had not
even denied the expediency of taxing America, the total repeal of the
Stamp Act and the modification of the Sugar Act having been carried on a
consideration of the inexpediency of these particular taxes only. Taxes
not open to the same objection might in future be found, and doubtless
must be found, inasmuch as the troops were still retained in America and
the Quartering Act continued in force there. For new taxes, however, it
would doubtless be necessary to await the formation of a new ministry.
The formation of a new ministry was not an unusual occurrence in
the early years of King George the Third. No one supposed that Lord
Rockingham could hold on many months; and as early as July, 1766, all
London knew that Mr. Pitt had been sent for. The coming and going
of great men in times of ministerial crisis was always a matter of
interest; but the formation of that ministry of all the factions which
the Patriot King had long desired was something out of the ordinary, the
point of greatest speculation being how many irreconcilables Mr. Pitt
(the Earl of Chatham he was now) could manage to get seated about a
single table. From the point of view of irreconcilability, no one was
more eligible than Mr. Charles Townshend, at that moment Paymaster
of the Forces, a kind of enfant terrible of English politics, of whom
Horace Walpole could say, with every likelihood of being believed,
that "his speech of last Friday, made while half drunk, was all wit and
indiscretion; nobody but he could have made it, nobody but he would
have made it if he could. He beat Lord Chatham in language, Burke in
metaphors, Grenville in presumption, Rigby in impudence, himself in
folly, and everybody in good humour."
This gentleman, much to his astonishment, one day received the following
note from Lord Chatham: "Sir: You are too great a magnitude not to be
in a responsible place; I intend to propose you for Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and must desire to have your answer by nine o'clock tonight."
Mr. Townshend was dismayed as well as astonished, his dismay arising
from the fact that the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer was worth
but £2700, which was precisely £4300 less than he was then receiving as
Paymaster of the Forces. To be a great magnitude on small pay had its
disadvantages, and Mr. Townshend, after remaining home all day in great
distress of mind, begged Mr. Pitt to be allowed to retain the office
of Paymaster; which was no sooner granted than he changed his mind and
begged Mr. Pitt to be allowed to accept the Exchequer place, which Mr.
Pitt at first refused and was only persuaded to grant finally upon the
intercession of the Duke of Grafton. The day following, Mr. Townshend
accordingly informed the King that he had decided, in view of the
urgent representations of the Earl of Chatham, to accept the office of
Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Majesty's new ministry.
No one supposed, least of all himself, that this delightful man would
have any influence in formulating the policies of the Chatham ministry.
Lord Chatham's policies were likely to be his own; and in the present
case, so far as America was concerned, they were not such as could be
readily associated with Mr. Townshend's views, so far as those views
were known or were not inconsistent. For dealing with America, the
Earl of Shelburne, because of his sympathetic understanding of colonial
matters, had been brought into the ministry to formulate a comprehensive
and conciliatory plan; as for the revenue, always the least part of Lord
Chatham's difficulties as it was the chief of Mr. Grenville's, it was
thought that the possessions of the East India Company, if taken over by
the Government, would bring into the Treasury sums quite sufficient to
pay the debt as well as to relieve the people, in England and America
at least, of those heavy taxes which Mr. Grenville and his party had
thought necessarily involved in the extension of empire. It was a
curious chapter of accidents that brought all these well-laid plans
to nought. Scarcely was the ministry formed when the Earl of Chatham,
incapacitated by the gout, retired into a seclusion that soon became
impenetrable; and "even before this resplendent orb was entirely set,
and while the western horizon was in a blaze with his descending glory,
on the opposite quarter of the heavens arose another luminary, and, for
his hour, became lord of the ascendant." This luminary was Mr. Charles
Townshend.
Mr. Townshend was the "delight and ornament" of the House, as Edmund
Burke said. Never was a man in any country of "more pointed and finished
wit, or (where his passions were not concerned) of a more refined,
exquisite, and penetrating judgment"; never a man to excel him in
"luminous explanation and display of his subject," nor ever one less
tedious or better able to conform himself exactly to the temper of the
House which he seemed to guide because he was always sure to follow it.
In 1765 Mr. Townshend had voted for the Stamp Act, but in 1766, when the
Stamp Act began to be no favorite, he voted for the repeal, and would
have spoken for it too, if an illness had not prevented him. And now,
in 1767, Mr. Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as such
responsible for the revenue; a man without any of that temperamental
obstinacy which persists in opinions once formed, and without any fixed
opinions to persist in; but quite disposed, according to habit, to
"hit the House just between wind and water," and to win its applause by
speaking for the majority, or by "haranguing inimitably on both sides"
when the majority was somewhat uncertain.
In January, 1767, when Lord Chatham was absent and the majority was
very uncertain, Mr. Grenville took occasion, in the debate upon the
extraordinaries for the army in England and America, to move that
America, like Ireland, should support its own establishment. The
opportunity was one which Mr. Townshend could not let pass. Much to the
astonishment of every one and most of all to that of his colleagues in
the ministry, he supported Mr. Grenville's resolution, declaring himself
now in favor of the Stamp Act which he had voted to repeal, treating
"Lord Chatham's distinction between internal and external taxation as
contemptuously as Mr. Grenville had done," and pledging himself able, if
necessary, to find a revenue in America nearly adequate to the proposed
project. The Earl of Shelburne, in great distress of mind, at once wrote
to Lord Chatham, relating the strange if characteristic conduct of the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, and declaring himself entirely ignorant of
the intentions of his colleagues. It was indeed an anomalous situation.
If Lord Chatham's policies were still to be considered those of
the ministry, Mr. Townshend might be said to be in opposition, a
circumstance which made "many people think Lord Chatham ill at St.
James's" only.
Lord Chatham was not ill at St. James's. He was most likely very well
at St. James's, being unable to appear there, thus leaving the divided
ministry amenable to the King's management or helpless before a factious
Opposition. The opportunity of the Opposition came when the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, in February, proposed to continue the land tax at four
shillings for one year more, after which time, he thought, it might be
reduced to three shillings in view of additional revenues to be obtained
from the East India Company. But Opposition saw no reason why, in
view of the revenue which Mr. Townshend had pledged himself to find in
America, a shilling might not be taken from the land at once, a proposal
which Mr. Dowdeswell moved should be done, and which was accordingly
voted through the influence of Mr. Grenville and the Duke of Bedford,
who had formerly carried the Stamp Act, aided by the Rockingham Whigs
who had formerly repealed it. If Lord Chatham was ill at St. James's,
this was a proper time to resign. It was doubtless a proper time to
resign in any case. But Lord Chatham did not resign. In March he came
to London, endeavored to replace Mr. Townshend by Lord North, which he
failed to do, and then retired to Bath to be seen no more, leaving Mr.
Townshend more than ever "master of the revels."
Mr. Townshend did not resign either, but continued in office, quite
undisturbed by the fact that a cardinal measure of the ministry had been
decisively voted down. Mr. Townshend reasoned that if Opposition would
not support the ministry, all difficulties would be straightened out by
the ministry's supporting the Opposition. This was the more reasonable
since Opposition had perhaps been right after all, so far as the
colonies were concerned. Late reports from that quarter seemed to
indicate that the repeal of the Stamp Act, far from satisfying the
Americans, had only confirmed that umbrageous people in a spirit of
licentiousness, which was precisely what Opposition had predicted as
the sure result of any weak concession. The New York Assembly, it now
appeared, refused to make provision for the troops according to the
terms of the Quartering Act; New York merchants were petitioning for
a further modification of the trade acts; the precious Bostonians,
wrangling refined doctrinaire points with Governor Bernard, were making
interminable difficulties about compensating the sufferers from the
Stamp Act riots. If Lord Chatham, in February, 1767, could go so far
as to say that the colonies had "drunk deep of the baneful cup of
infatuation," Mr. Townshend, having voted for the Stamp Act and for its
repeal, might well think, in May, that the time was ripe for a return to
rigorous measures.
On May 13, in a speech which charmed the House, Mr. Townshend opened
his plan for settling the colonial question. The growing spirit of
insubordination, which must be patent to all, he thought could be most
effectively checked by making an example of New York, where defiance
was at present most open; for which purpose it was proposed that the
meetings of the Assembly of that province be totally suspended until
it should have complied with the terms of the Mutiny Act. As one chief
source of power in colonial assemblies which contributed greatly to make
them insubordinate was the dependence of executive officials upon them
for salaries, Mr. Townshend now renewed the proposal, which he had
formerly brought forward in 1763, to create an independent civil list
for the payment of governors and judges from England. The revenue for
such a civil list would naturally be raised in America. Mr. Townshend
would not, however, venture to renew the Stamp Act, which had been so
opposed on the ground of its being an internal tax. He was free to say
that the distinction between internal and external taxes was perfect
nonsense; but, since the logical Americans thought otherwise, he would
concede the point and would accordingly humor them by laying only
external duties, which he thought might well be on various kinds of
glass and paper, on red and white lead, and upon teas, the duties to be
collected in colonial ports upon the importation of these commodities
from England. It was estimated that the duties might altogether make
about £40,000, if the collection were properly attended to; and in order
that the collection might be properly attended to, and for the more
efficient administration of the American customs in general, Mr.
Townshend further recommended that a Board of Customs Commissioners be
created and established in Massachusetts Bay. With slight opposition,
all these recommendations were enacted into law; and the Commissioners
of the Customs, shortly afterward appointed by the King, arrived in
Boston in November, 1767.
At Boston, the Commissioners found much to be done in the way of
collecting the customs, particularly in the matter of Madeira wines.
Madeira wines were much drunk in the old Bay colony, being commonly
imported directly from the islands, without too much attention to the
duty of £7 per ton lawfully required in that case. Mr. John Hancock, a
popular Boston merchant, did a thriving business in this way; and his
sloop Liberty, in the ordinary course of trade, carrying six pipes of
"good saleable Madeira" for the coffee-house retailers, four pipes of
the "very best" for his own table, and "two pipes more of the best ...
for the Treasurer of the province," entered the harbor on May 9,
1768. In the evening Mr. Thomas Kirk, tide-waiter, acting for the
Commissioners, boarded the sloop, where he found the captain, Nat
Bernard, and also, by some chance, another of Mr. Hancock's skippers,
young James Marshall, together with half a dozen of his friends. They
sat with punch served by the captain all round until nine o'clock, when
young James Marshall casually asked if a few casks might not as well be
set on shore that evening. Mr. Kirk replied that it could not be done
with his leave; whereupon he found himself "hoved down" into the cabin
and confined there for three hours, from which point of disadvantage
he could distinctly hear overhead "a noise of many people at work,
a-hoisting out of goods." In due time Mr. Kirk was released, having
suffered no injury, except perhaps a little in his official character.
Next day Mr. Hancock's cargo was duly entered, no pipes of Madeira
listed; and to all appearance the only serious aspect of the affair
was that young James Marshall died before morning, it was thought from
overexertion and excitement.
Very likely few people in Boston knew anything about this interesting
episode; and a month later much excitement was accordingly raised by
the news that Mr. Hancock's sloop Liberty had been ordered seized
for non-payment of customs. A crowd watched the ship towed, for
safe-keeping, under the guns of the Romney in the harbor. When the
Commissioners, who had come down to see the thing done, left the wharf
they were roughly handled by the incensed people; and in the evening
windows of some of their houses were broken, and a boat belonging to a
collector was hauled on shore and burnt on the Common. Governor Bernard
at last informed the Commissioners that he could not protect them in
Boston, whereupon they retired with their families to the Romney, and
later to Castle William. There they continued, under difficulties, the
work of systematizing the American customs; and not without success,
inasmuch as the income from the duties during the years from 1768 to
1774 averaged about £30,000 sterling, at an annual cost to the revenue
of not more than £13,000. This saving was nevertheless not effected
without the establishment at Boston, on the recommendation of the
Commissioners, of two regiments of the line which arrived September
28, 1768, and were landed under the guns of eight men-of-war, without
opposition. The cost of maintaining the two regiments in Boston was
doubtless not included in the £13,000 charged to the revenue as the
annual expense of collecting £30,000 of customs.
In spite of the two regiments of the line, with artillery, Boston was
not quiet in this year 1768. The soldiers acted decently enough, no
doubt; but their manners were very British and their coats were red,
and "their simple presence," conveying every day the suggestion of
compulsion, was "an intolerable grievance." Every small matter was
magnified. The people, says Hutchinson, "had been used to answer to the
call of the town watch in the night, yet they did not like to answer
to the frequent calls of the centinels posted at the barracks; ... and
either a refusal to answer, or an answer accompanied with irritating
language, endangered the peace of the town." On Sundays, especially,
the Boston mind found something irreverent, something at the very least
irrelevant, in the presence of the bright colored and highly secular
coats; while the noise of fife and drum, so disturbing to the sabbath
calm, called forth from the Selectmen a respectful petition to the
general requesting him to "dispense with the band."
These were but slight matters; but as time passed little grievances
accumulated on both sides until the relation between the people and the
soldiers was one of settled hostility, and at last, after two years, the
tense situation culminated in the famous Boston Massacre. On the evening
of March 5, 1770, there was an alarm of fire, false as it turned out,
which brought many people into the streets, especially boys, whom one
may easily imagine catching up, as they ran, handfuls of damp snow to
make snowballs. For snowballs, there could be no better target than
red-coated sentinels standing erect and motionless at the post of duty;
and it chanced that one of these individuals, stationed before the
Customs House door, was pelted with the close-packed missiles. Being
several times struck, he called for aid, the guard turned out, and a
crowd gathered. One of the soldiers was presently knocked down, another
was hit by a club, and at last six or seven shots were fired, with or
without orders, the result of which was four citizens lying dead on the
snow-covered streets of Boston.
The Boston Massacre was not as serious as the Massacre of Saint
Bartholomew or the Sicilian Vespers; but it served to raise passion to
a white heat in the little provincial town. On the next day there was
assembled, under the skillful leadership of Samuel Adams, a great town
meeting which demanded in no uncertain terms the removal of the troops
from Boston. Under the circumstances, six hundred British soldiers would
have fared badly in Boston; and in order to prevent further bloodshed,
acting Governor Hutchinson finally gave the order. Within a fortnight,
the two small regiments retired to Castle William. Seven months later
Captain Preston and other soldiers implicated in the riot were tried
before a Boston jury. Ably defended by John Adams and Josiah Quincy,
they were all acquitted on the evidence, except two who were convicted
and lightly punished for manslaughter.
As it happened, the Boston Massacre occurred on the 5th of March, 1770,
which was the very day that Lord North rose in the House of Commons to
propose the partial repeal of the Townshend duties. This outcome was not
unconnected with events that had occurred in America during the eighteen
months since the landing of the troops in Boston in September, 1768. In
1768, John Adams could not have foretold the Boston Massacre, or have
foreseen that he would himself incur popular displeasure for having
defended the soldiers. But he could, even at that early date, divine the
motives of the British government in sending the troops to Boston. To
his mind, "the very appearance of the troops in Boston was a strong
proof ... that the determination of Great Britain to subjugate us was
too deep and inveterate to be altered." All the measures of ministry
seemed indeed to confirm that view. Mr. Townshend's condescension in
accepting the colonial distinction between internal and external taxes
was clearly only a subtle maneuver designed to conceal an attack upon
liberty far more dangerous than the former attempts of Mr. Grenville.
After all, Mr. Townshend was probably right in thinking the distinction
of no importance, the main point being whether, as Lord Chatham had
said, the Parliament could by any kind of taxes "take money out of their
pockets without their consent."
Duties on glass and tea certainly would take money out of their pockets
without their consent, and therefore it must be true that taxes could be
rightly laid only by colonial assemblies, in which alone Americans could
be represented. But of what value was it to preserve the abstract
right of taxation by colonial assemblies if meanwhile the assemblies
themselves might, by act of Parliament, be abolished? And had not the
New York Assembly been suspended by act of Parliament? And were not
the new duties to be used to pay governors and judges, thus by subtle
indirection undermining the very basis of legislative independence?
And now, in the year 1768, the Massachusetts Assembly, having sent a
circular letter to the other colonies requesting concerted action in
defense of their liberties, was directed by Lord Hillsborough, speaking
in his Majesty's name, "to rescind the resolution which gave birth
to the circular letter from the Speaker, and to declare their
disapprobation of, and dissent to, that rash and hasty proceeding."
Clearly, it was no mere question of taxation but the larger question of
legislative independence that now confronted Americans.
A more skillful dialectic was required to defend American rights against
the Townshend duties than against the Stamp Act. It was a somewhat
stubborn fact that Parliament had for more than a hundred years passed
laws effectively regulating colonial trade, and for regulating trade had
imposed duties, some of which had brought into the Exchequer a certain
revenue. Americans, wishing to be thought logical as well as loyal,
could not well say at this late date that Parliament had no right to lay
duties in regulation of trade. Must they then submit to the Townshend
duties? Or was it possible to draw a line, making a distinction, rather
more subtle than the old one between internal and external taxes,
between duties for regulation and duties for revenue? This latter feat
was undertaken by Mr. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, anonymously, under
the guise of a simple but intelligent and virtuous farmer whose arcadian
existence had confirmed in him an instinctive love of liberty and had
supplied him with the leisure to meditate at large upon human welfare
and the excellent British Constitution.
Mr. Dickinson readily granted America to be dependent upon Great
Britain, "as much dependent upon Great Britain as one perfectly
free people can be on another." But it appeared axiomatic to the
unsophisticated mind of a simple farmer that no people could be free if
taxed without its consent, and that Parliament had accordingly no right
to lay any taxes upon the colonies; from which it followed that the
sole question in respect to duties laid on trade was whether they were
intended for revenue or for regulation. Intention in such matters was
of primary importance, since all duties were likely to be regulative
to some extent. It might be objected that "it will be difficult for any
persons but the makers of the laws to determine which of them are made
for regulation of trade, and which for raising a revenue." This was
true enough but at present of academic importance only, inasmuch as the
makers of the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the Townshend duties had
conveniently and very clearly proclaimed their intention to be the
raising of a revenue. Yet this question, academic now, might soon become
extremely practical. The makers of laws might not always express their
intention so explicitly; they might, with intention to raise a revenue,
pass acts professing to be for regulation only; and therefore, since
"names will not change the nature of things," Americans ought "firmly
to believe ... that unless the most watchful attention be exerted, a
new servitude may be slipped upon us under the sanction of usual and
respectable terms." In such case the intention should be inferred from
the nature of the act; and the Farmer, for his part, sincerely hoped
that his countrymen "would never, to their latest existence, want
understanding sufficient to discover the intentions of those who rule
over them."
Mr. Dickinson's Farmer's Letters were widely read and highly commended.
The argument, subtle but clear, deriving the nature of an act from the
intention of its makers, and the intention of its makers from the nature
of the act, contributed more than any other exposition to convince
Americans that they "have the same right that all states have, of
judging when their privileges are invaded."
"As much dependent on Great Britain as one perfectly free people can be
on another," the Farmer said. Englishmen might be excused for desiring
a more precise delimitation of parliamentary jurisdiction than could
be found in this phrase, as well as for asking what clear legal ground
there was for making any delimitation at all. To the first point, Mr.
Dickinson said in effect that Parliament had not the right to tax the
colonies and that it had not the right to abolish their assemblies
through which they alone could tax themselves. The second point Mr.
Dickinson did not clearly answer, although it was undoubtedly most
fundamental. To this point Mr. Samuel Adams had given much thought;
and in letters which he drafted for the Massachusetts Assembly, in the
famous circular letter particularly, and in the letter of January 12,
1769, sent to the Assembly's agent in England, Mr. Dennys De Berdt,
Mr. Adams formulated a theory designed to show that the colonies
were "subordinate" but not subject to the British Parliament. The
delimitation of colonial and parliamentary jurisdictions Mr. Adams
achieved by subordinating all legislative authority to an authority
higher than any positive law, an authority deriving its sanction from
the fixed and universal law of nature. This higher authority, which no
legislature could "overleap without destroying its own foundation," was
the British Constitution.
Mr. Adams spoke of the British Constitution with immense confidence, as
something singularly definite and well known, the provisions of which
were clearly ascertainable; which singular effect doubtless came from
the fact that he thought of it, not indeed as something written down
on paper and deposited in archives of state, but as a series of
propositions which, as they were saying in France, were indelibly
"written in the hearts of all men." The British Constitution, he said,
like the constitution of every free state, "is fixed," having its
foundation not in positive law, which would indeed give Parliament an
ultimate and therefore a despotic authority, but in "the law of God
and nature." There were in the British Empire many legislatures, all
deriving their authority from, and all finding their limitations in,
the Constitution. Parliament had certainly a supreme or superintending
legislative authority in the Empire, as the colonial assemblies had
a "subordinate," in the sense of a local, legislative authority; but
neither the Parliament nor any colonial assembly could "overleap the
Constitution without destroying its own foundation." And therefore,
since the Constitution is founded "in the law of God and nature," and
since "it is an essential natural right that a man shall quietly enjoy
and have the sole disposal of his property," the Americans must enjoy
this right equally with Englishmen, and Parliament must be bound to
respect this right in the colonies as well as in England; from which it
followed irresistibly that the consent of the colonies to any taxation
must be sought exclusively in their own assemblies, it being manifestly
impossible for that consent to be "constitutionally had in Parliament."
It was commonly thought in America that Mr. Adams, although not a judge,
had a singular gift for constitutional interpretation. Far-sighted men
could nevertheless believe that a powerful party in England, inspired by
inveterate hatred of America and irretrievably bent upon her ruin, would
pronounce all his careful distinctions ridiculous and would still reply
to every argument by the mere assertion, as a fact behind which one
could not go, that Parliament had always had and must therefore still
have full power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. If Britain
would not budge from this position, Americans would soon be confronted
with the alternative of admitting Parliament to have full power or
denying it to have any.
With that sharp-set alternative in prospect, it would be well to keep in
mind the fact that arguments lost carrying power in proportion to their
subtlety; and in the opinion of so good a judge as Benjamin Franklin the
reasoning of Mr. Adams and Mr. Dickinson was perhaps not free from this
grave disadvantage.
I am not yet master [he was free to confess] of the idea these ...
writers have of the relation between Britain and her colonies. I know
not what the Boston people mean by the "subordination" they acknowledge
in their Assembly to Parliament, while they deny its power to make laws
for them, nor what bounds the Farmer sets to the power he acknowledges
in Parliament to "regulate the trade of the colonies," it being
difficult to draw lines between duties for regulation and those for
revenue; and, if the Parliament is to be the judge, it seems to me that
establishing such a principle of distinction will amount to little.
The more I have thought and read on the subject, the more I find myself
confirmed in opinion, that no middle ground can be well maintained, I
mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of
either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make all laws
for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us; and I think the
arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty, than those for the
former.
The good Doctor had apparently read and thought a great deal about the
matter since the day when Mr. Grenville had called him in to learn if
there were good objections to be urged against the Stamp Act.
Practical men were meanwhile willing to allow the argument to take
whatever direction the exigencies of the situation might require, being
ready to believe that Mr. Dickinson counseled well and that Mr. Franklin
counseled well; being nevertheless firmly convinced from past experience
that an Englishman's ability to see reason was never great except when
his pocket was touched. Practical men were therefore generally of the
opinion that they could best demonstrate their rights by exhibiting
their power. This happily, they could do by bringing pressure to bear
upon English merchants by taking money out of their pockets--without
their consent to be sure but in a manner strictly legal--by means of
non-importation agreements voluntarily entered into.
As early as October, 1767, the Boston merchants entered into such an
agreement, which was however not very drastic and proved to be of no
effect, as it was at first unsupported by the merchants in any other
colony. In April, 1768, the merchants of New York, seeing the necessity
of concerted action, agreed not to import "any goods [save a very few
enumerated articles] which shall be shipped from Great Britain after the
first of October next; provided Boston and Philadelphia adopt similar
measures by the first of June." Philadelphia merchants said they were
not opposed to the principle of non-importation, but greatly feared the
New York plan would serve to create a monopoly by enabling men of means
to lay in a large stock of goods before the agreement went into effect.
This was very true; but the objection, if it was an objection, proved
not to be an insurmountable one. Before the year was out, in the late
summer for the most part, the merchants in all the commercial towns had
subscribed to agreements, differing somewhat in detail, of which the
substance was that they would neither import from Great Britain any
commodities, nor buy or sell any which might inadvertently find their
way in, until the duties imposed by the Townshend act should have been
repealed.
The merchants' agreements were, for whatever reason, much better
observed in some places than in others. Imports from Great Britain to
New York fell during the year 1769 from about £482,000 to about £74,000.
Imports into New England and into Pennsylvania declined a little more
than one half; whereas in the southern colonies there was no decline at
all, but on the contrary an increase, slight in the case of Maryland
and Virginia and rather marked in the Carolinas. In spite of these
defections, the experiment was not without effect upon English
merchants. English merchants, but little interested in the decline or
increase of trade to particular colonies, were chiefly aware that the
total exportation to America was nearly a million pounds less in 1769
than in 1768. Understanding little about colonial rights, but knowing
only, as in 1766, that their "trade was hurt," they accordingly applied
once more to Parliament for relief. The commerce with America which was
"so essential to afford employment and subsistence to the manufactures
of these kingdoms, to augment the public revenue, to serve as a nursery
for seamen, and to increase our navigation and maritime strength"--this
commerce, said the Merchants and Traders of the City of London Trading
to America, "is at present in an alarming state of suspension"; and
the Merchants and Traders of the City of London therefore humbly
prayed Parliament to repeal the duties which were the occasion of their
inconveniences.
The petition of the London merchants came before the House on March 5,
1770, that being the day fixed by Lord North for proposing, on behalf
of the ministry, certain measures for America. No one, said the first
minister, could be more free than himself to recognize the importance
of American trade or more disposed to meet the wishes of the London
merchants as far as possible. The inconveniences under which that trade
now labored were manifest, but he could not think, with the petitioners,
that these inconveniences arose from "the nature of the duties" so much
as "through the medium of the dissatisfaction of the Americans,
and those combinations and associations of which we have
heard"--associations and combinations which had been called, in an
address to the House, "unwarrantable," but which he for his part would
go so far as to call illegal. These illegal combinations in America
were obviously what caused the inconveniences of which the merchants
complained. To the pressure of illegal combinations alone Parliament
ought never to yield; and ministers wished it clearly understood that,
if they were about to propose a repeal of some of the duties, they were
not led to take this step from any consideration of the disturbances in
the colonies.
On the contrary, the duties which it was now proposed to repeal--the
duties on lead, glass, and paper--were to be repealed strictly on
the ground that they ought never to have been laid, because duties on
British manufactures were contrary to true commercial principles. Last
year, when ministers had expressed, in a letter of Lord Hillsborough to
the governors, their intention to repeal these duties, some members had
been in favor of repealing all the duties and some were still in favor
of doing so. As to that, the first minister could only say that he had
not formerly been opposed to it and would not now be opposed to it,
had the Americans, in response to the Earl of Hillsborough's letter,
exhibited any disposition to cease their illegal disturbances or
renounce their combinations. But the fact was that conditions in America
had grown steadily worse since the Earl of Hillsborough's letter, and
never had been so bad as now; in view of which fact ministers could not
but think it wise to maintain some tax as a matter of principle purely.
They would therefore recommend that the tax on tea, no burden certainly
on anyone, be continued as a concrete application of the right of
Parliament to tax the colonies.
In so far as they were designed to bring pressure to bear upon the
mother country, the merchants' agreements were clearly not without a
measure of success, having helped perhaps to bring Parliament to the
point of repealing the duties on lead, glass, and paper, as well as
to bring ministers to the point of keeping the duty on tea. Americans
generally were doubtless well pleased with this effect; but not all
Americans were able to regard the experiment in non-importation with
unqualified approval in other respects. Non-importation, by diminishing
the quantity and increasing the price of commodities, involved a certain
amount of personal sacrifice. This sacrifice, however, fell chiefly on
the consumers, the non-importation not being under certain circumstances
altogether without advantage to merchants who faithfully observed their
pledges as well as to those who observed them only occasionally. So long
as their warehouses, well stocked in advance, contained anything that
could be sold at a higher price than formerly, non-importation was no
bad thing even for those merchants who observed the agreement. For those
who did not observe the agreement, as well as for those who engaged in
the smuggling trade from Holland, it was no bad thing at any time,
and it promised to become an increasingly excellent thing in exact
proportion to the exhaustion of the fair trader's stock and the
consequent advance in prices. As time passed, therefore, the fair
trader became aware that the non-importation experiment, practically
considered, was open to certain objections; whereas the unfair trader
was more in favor of the experiment the longer it endured, being every
day more convinced that the non-importation agreement ought to be
continued and strictly adhered to as essential to the maintenance of
American liberties.
The practical defects of non-importation were likely to be understood,
by those who could ever understand them, in proportion to the decay of
business; and in the spring of 1770 they were nowhere better understood
than in New York, where the decay of business was most marked. This
decrease was greatest in New York, so the merchants maintained, because
that city had been most faithful in observing the agreement, importation
having there fallen from £482,000 to £74,000 during the year. It is
possible, however, that the decay of business in New York was due in
part and perhaps primarily to the retirement, in November, 1768, of the
last issues of the old Bills of Credit, according to the terms of
the Paper Currency Act passed by Parliament during Mr. Grenville's
administration. As a result of this retirement of all the paper money in
the province, money of any sort was exceedingly scarce during the
years 1769 and 1770. Lyon dollars were rarely seen; and the quantity
of Spanish silver brought into the colony through the trade with the
foreign islands, formerly considerable but now greatly diminished by the
stricter enforcement of the Townshend Trade Acts, was hardly sufficient
for local exchange alone, to say nothing of settling heavy balances in
London, although, fortunately perhaps, there were in the year 1769
no heavy London balances to be settled on account of the faithful
observance of the non-importation agreement by the merchants. The lack
of money was therefore doubtless a chief cause of the great decay
of business in New York; and some there were who maintained that the
faithful observance of the non-importation agreement by the merchants
was due to the decay of trade rather than the decay of trade being due
to the faithful observance of the non-importation agreement.
Whatever the true explanation of this academic point might be, it was an
undoubted fact that business was more nearly at a standstill in New
York than elsewhere. Accordingly, in the spring of 1770, when money was
rarely to be seen and debtors were selling their property at one-half
or one-third of its former value in order to discharge obligations long
overdue, the fair trading merchants of New York were not disposed to
continue an experiment of which, as they said, they had borne the chief
burden to the advantage of others and to their own impending ruin.
Zealous Sons of Liberty, such as Alexander MacDougall and John Lamb,
popular leaders of the "Inhabitants" of the city, were on the other
hand determined that the non-importation agreement should be maintained
unimpaired. The hard times, they said, were due chiefly to the monopoly
prices exacted by the wealthy merchants, who were not ruined at all, who
had on the contrary made a good thing out of the non-importation as long
as they had anything to sell, and whose patriotism (God save the mark!)
had now suddenly grown lukewarm only because they had disposed of all
their goods, including "old moth-eaten clothes that had been rotting in
the shops for years."
These aspersions the merchants knew how to ignore. Their determination
not to continue the non-importation was nevertheless sufficiently
indicated in connection with the annual celebration, in March, of the
repeal of the Stamp Act. On this occasion the merchants refused to meet
as formerly with the Sons of Liberty, but made provision for a dinner of
their own at another place, where all the Friends of Liberty and Trade
were invited to be present. Both dinners were well attended, and at both
the repeal of the Stamp Act was celebrated with patriotic enthusiasm,
the main difference being that whereas the Sons of Liberty drank a toast
to Mr. MacDougall and to "a continuance of the non-importation agreement
until the revenue acts are repealed," the Friends of Liberty and Trade
ignored Mr. MacDougall and drank to "trade and navigation and a speedy
removal of their embarrassments."
In the determination not to continue the old agreement, the Friends of
Liberty and Trade were meanwhile strongly confirmed when it was learned
that Britain was willing on her part to make concessions. By the middle
of May it was known that the Townshend duties (except the duty on tea)
had been repealed; and in June it was learned that Parliament had at
last, after many representations from the Assembly, passed a special act
permitting New York to issue £120,000 in Bills of Credit receivable
at the Treasury. It was thought that concession on the part of Great
Britain ought in justice to meet with concession on the part of America.
Accordingly, on the ground that other towns, and Boston in particular,
were more active "in resolving what they ought to do than in doing what
they had resolved," and on the ground that the present non-importation
agreement no longer served "any other purpose than tying the hands of
honest men, to let rogues, smugglers, and men of no character plunder
their country," the New York merchants, on July 9, 1770, resolved
that for the future they would import from Great Britain all kinds
of commodities except such as might be subject to duties imposed by
Parliament.
The New York merchants were on every hand loudly denounced for having
betrayed the cause of liberty; but before the year was out the old
agreement was everywhere set aside. Yet everywhere, as at New York, the
merchants bound themselves not to import any British teas. The duty
on British teas was slight. Americans might have paid the duty without
increasing the price of their much prized luxury; ministers might have
collected the same duty in England to the advantage of the Exchequer.
That Britain should have insisted on this peppercorn in acknowledgement
of her right, that America should have refused it in vindication of her
liberty, may be taken as a high tribute from two eminently practical
peoples to the power of abstract ideas.
CHAPTER V A LITTLE DISCREET CONDUCT
It has been his [Thomas Hutchinson's] principle from a boy that mankind
are to be governed by the discerning few, and it has been ever since his
ambition to be the hero of the few.--Samuel Adams.
We have not been so quiet these five years.... If it were not for two or
three Adamses, we should do well enough.--Thomas Hutchinson.
In December, 1771, Horace Walpole, a persistent if not an infallible
political prophet, was of opinion that all the storms that for a decade
had distressed the Empire were at last happily blown over; among which
storms he included, as relatively of minor importance, the disputes with
the colonies. During two years following, this prediction might well
have appeared to moderate minded men entirely justified. American
affairs were barely mentioned in Parliament, and a few paragraphs in the
Annual Register were thought sufficient to chronicle for English readers
events of interest occurring across the Atlantic. In the colonies
themselves an unwonted tranquillity prevailed. Rioting, as an
established social custom, disappeared in most of the places where it
had formerly been so much practised. The Sons of Liberty, retaining the
semblance of an organization, were rarely in the public eye save at
the annual celebrations of the repeal of the Stamp Act, quite harmless
occasions devoted to the expression of patriotic sentiments. Merchants
and landowners, again prosperous, were content to fall back into
accustomed habits of life, conscious of duty done without too much
stress, readily believing their liberties finally vindicated against
encroachments from abroad and their privileges secure against
unwarranted and dangerous pretensions at home. "The people appear to be
weary of their altercations with the mother country," Mr. Johnson, the
Connecticut agent, wrote to Wedderburn, in October, 1771; "a little
discreet conduct on both sides would perfectly reëstablish that warm
affection and respect towards Great Britain for which this country was
once remarkable."
Discreet conduct was nowhere more necessary than in Massachusetts, where
the people, perhaps because they were much accustomed to them, grew
weary of altercations less easily than in most colonies. Yet even in
Massachusetts there was a marked waning of enthusiasm after the high
excitement occasioned by the Boston Massacre, a certain disintegration
of the patriot party. James Otis recovered from a temporary fit of
insanity only to grow strangely suspicious of Samuel Adams. Mr. Hancock,
discreetly holding his peace, attended to his many thriving and very
profitable business ventures. John Adams, somewhat unpopular for having
defended and procured the acquittal of the soldiers implicated in the
Massacre, retired in high dudgeon from public affairs to the practice
of his profession; in high dudgeon with everyone concerned--with himself
first of all, and with the people who so easily forgot their interests
and those who had served them, and with the British Government and all
fawning tools of ministers, of whom Mr. Thomas Hutchinson was chief.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hutchinson, so roughly handled in the secret diary of the
rising young lawyer, was the recipient of new honors, having been made
Governor of the province to succeed Francis Bernard. For once finding
himself almost popular, he thought he perceived a disposition in all
the colonies, and even in Massachusetts, to let the controversy subside.
"Though there are a small majority sour enough, yet when they seek
matter for protests, remonstrances, they are puzzled where to charge
the grievances which they look for." The new Governor looked forward to
happier days and an easy administration. "Hancock and most of the party
are quiet," he said, "and all of them, except Adams, abate of their
virulence. Adams would push the Continent into a rebellion tomorrow, if
it was in his power."
No one, in the year 1770, was better fitted than Samuel Adams, either by
talent and temperament or the circumstances of his position, to push the
continent into a rebellion. Unlike most of his patriot friends, he had
neither private business nor private profession to fall back upon when
public affairs grew tame, his only business being, as one might say,
the public business, his only profession the definition and defense of
popular rights. In this profession, by dint of single-minded devotion
to it through a course of years, he had indeed become wonderfully expert
and had already achieved for himself the enviable position of known and
named leader in every movement of opposition to royal or magisterial
prerogative. In this connection no exploit had brought him so much
distinction as his skillful management of the popular uprising which had
recently forced Governor Hutchinson to withdraw the troops from Boston.
The event was no by-play in the life of Samuel Adams, no amateur
achievement accomplished on the side, but the serious business of a man
who during ten years had abandoned all private pursuits and had embraced
poverty to become a tribune of the people.
Samuel Adams had not inherited poverty nor had he, after all, exactly
embraced it, but had as it were naturally drifted into it through
indifference to worldly gain, the indifference which men of single and
fixed purpose have for all irrelevant matters. The elder Samuel Adams
was a merchant of substance and of such consequence in the town of
Boston that in Harvard College, where students were named according to
the prominence of their families, his son's name was fifth in a class
of twenty-two. In 1748, upon the death of his father, Samuel Junior
accordingly inherited a very decent property, considered so at least
in that day--a spacious old house in Purchase Street together with a
well-established malt business. For business, however, the young man,
and not so young either, was without any aptitude whatever, being
entirely devoid of the acquisitive instinct and neither possessing nor
ever being able to acquire any skill in the fine art of inducing people
to give for things more than it cost to make them. These deficiencies
the younger Adams had already exhibited before the death of his father,
from whom he received on one occasion a thousand pounds, half of which
he promptly loaned to an impecunious friend, and which he would in any
case doubtless have lost, as he soon did the other half, on his own
account. In such incompetent hands the malt business soon fell to be a
liability rather than an asset. Other liabilities accumulated, notably
one incurred by the tax collectors of the town of Boston, of whom Samuel
Adams was one during the years from 1756 to 1764. For one reason or
another, on Adams's part certainly on account of his humane feelings and
general business inefficiency, the collectors fell every year a little
behind in the collections, and one day found themselves declared on the
official records to be indebted to the town in the sum of £9,878.
This indebtedness Mr. Hutchinson and other gentlemen not well disposed
towards Samuel Adams conveniently and frequently referred to in later
years as a "defalcation."
In this year of 1764, when he had lost his entire patrimony except the
old house in Purchase Street, now somewhat rusty for want of repair,
Samuel Adams was married to Elizabeth Wells. It was his second marriage,
the first having taken place in 1749, of which the fruit was a son and
a daughter. Samuel Adams was then--it was the year of the Sugar
Act--forty-two years old; that is to say, at the age when a man's hair
begins to turn gray, when his character is fixed, when his powers, such
as they are, are fully matured; well known as a "poor provider," an
improvident man who had lost a fair estate, had failed in business, and
was barely able, and sometimes not able, to support his small family.
These mundane matters concerned Samuel Adams but little. To John Adams
he said on one occasion that "he never looked forward in life; never
planned, laid a scheme, or formed a design for laying up anything for
himself or others after him." This was the truth, inexplicable as it
must have seemed to his more provident cousin. It was even less than
the truth: during the years following 1764, Samuel Adams renounced all
pretense of private business, giving himself wholly to public affairs,
while his good wife, with excellent management, made his stipend
as clerk of the Assembly serve for food, and obtained, through the
generosity of friends or her own ingenious labors, indispensable clothes
for the family. Frugality, that much lauded virtue in the eighteenth
century, needed not to be preached in the old Purchase Street home;
but life went on there, somehow or other, decently enough, not without
geniality yet with evident piety. The old Bible is still preserved from
which each evening some member of the family read a chapter, and at
every meal the head of the house said grace, returning thanks for God's
benefits.
If Samuel Adams at the age of forty-two was known for a man who could
not successfully manage his own affairs, he was also known, and very
well known, for a man with a singular talent for managing the affairs of
the community; he could manage successfully, for example, town meetings
and every sort of business, great or small, incidental to local
politics. This talent he may have inherited from his father, who was
himself a notable of the neighborhood--one of the organizers of the "New
South" church, and prominent about 1724 in a club popularly known as
the "Caulkers' Club," formed for the purpose of laying "plans for
introducing certain persons into places of trust and power," and was
himself from time to time introduced into such places of trust and power
as justice of the peace, deacon, selectman, and member of the provincial
assembly. From an early age, the younger Samuel exhibited a marked
aptitude for this sort of activity, and was less likely to be found
"in his counting-house a-counting of his money" than in some hospitable
tavern or back shop discussing town topics with local worthies. Samuel
Adams was born to serve on committees. He had the innate slant of
mind that properly belongs to a moderator of mass meetings called to
aggravate a crisis. With the soul of a Jacobin, he was most at home in
clubs, secret clubs of which everyone had heard and few were members,
designed at best to accomplish some particular good for the people, at
all events meeting regularly to sniff the approach of tyranny in the
abstract, academically safeguarding the commonwealth by discussing the
first principles of government.
From the days of Anne Hutchinson, Boston never lacked clubs; and the
Caulkers' Club was the prototype of many, rather more secular and
political than religious or transcendental, which flourished in the
years preceding the Revolution. John Adams, in that Diary which tells us
so much that we wish to know, gives us a peep inside one of these clubs,
the "Caucus Club," which met regularly at one period in the garret of
Tom Dawes's house. "There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from
one end of the garret to the other. There they drink flip, I suppose,
and there they choose a moderator who puts questions to the vote
regularly; and selectmen, assessors, collectors, wardens, fire-wards,
and representatives are regularly chosen before they are chosen in
the town. Uncle Fairfield, Story, Ruddock, Adams, Cooper, and a rudis
indigestaque moles of others are members. They send committees to wait
on the merchants' club, and to propose and join in the choice of men
and measures." The artist Copley, in the familiar portrait by which
posterity knows Samuel Adams, chose to represent him in conventional
garb, on a public and dramatic occasion, standing erect, eyes flashing
and mouth firm-set, pointing with admonitory finger to the Charter of
Massachusetts Bay--a portrait well suited to hang in the Art Museum or
in the meeting place of the Daughters of the Revolution. A different
effect would have been produced if the man had been placed in Tom
Dawes's garret, dimly seen through tobacco smoke, sitting, with coat
off, drinking flip, in the midst of Uncle Fairfield, Story, Cooper, and
a rudis indigestaque moles. This was his native habitat, an environment
precisely suited to his peculiar talent.
Samuel Adams had a peculiar talent, that indispensable combination of
qualities possessed by all great revolutionists of the crusading type,
such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Brown, or Mazzini. When a man
abandons his business or job and complacently leaves the clothing of his
children to wife or neighbors in order to drink flip and talk politics,
ordinary folk are content to call him a lazy lout, ne'er-do-well,
worthless fellow, or scamp. Samuel Adams was not a scamp. He might have
been no more than a ne'er-do-well, perhaps, if cosmic forces had not
opportunely provided him with an occupation which his contemporaries and
posterity could regard as a high service to humanity. In his own eyes,
this was the view of the situation which justified his conduct. When
he was about to depart for the first Continental Congress, a number of
friends contributed funds to furnish him forthwith presentable apparel:
a suit of clothes, new wig, new hat, "six pair of the best silk hose,
six pair of fine thread ditto, ... six pair of shoes"; and, it being
"modestly inquired of him whether his finances were not rather low than
otherwise, he replied it was true that was the case, but he was very
indifferent about these matters, so that his poor abilities were of any
service to the public; upon which the gentleman obliged him to accept
a purse containing about fifteen or twenty Johannes." To accep
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