Independence (8 page)

Franklin was not the only American whose outlook was transformed in the late 1760s. For him and many others, the Townshend Duties proved to be more pivotal than the Stamp Act. That was the case with George Washington. Though a member of the Virginia assembly, Washington had been so untroubled by the Stamp Act that he had not been in attendance when the House of Burgesses took a stand against the parliamentary tax. While Patrick Henry was making history in Williamsburg, Washington, according to his diary, “sowed Turneps.… Seperated my Ewes & Rams.… Finished Sowing Wheat.… Began to Pull the Seed Hemp” at Mount Vernon.
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But in 1769, Washington, who had been an inconspicuous backbencher during the initial decade that he had sat in the assembly, took the lead in organizing Virginia’s embargo of British imports. Reading Dickinson’s
Letters from a Farmer
, which he had purchased in Williamsburg, may have contributed to his evolving radicalization. But more than anything, Washington on his own had come to see a menacing pattern in British actions. Like many other Americans, he had looked on the Stamp Act as an aberration. He thought it unconstitutional, but he believed the ministry had stumbled accidentally into the measure. The Townshend Duties convinced him that Parliament was bent on taxing the colonists. Moreover, if Parliament stripped away the Americans’ sacred right to be taxed only by their own representatives, other rights and liberties might be imperiled as well. By 1769, Washington was writing of “our lordly Masters in Great Britain,” venom dripping from his pen as he contemplated the second-class status of the colonists. That same year, he spoke in private of taking up arms against the mother country, if need be, to defend the rights of the American colonists. Washington, in fact, was one of the first colonists, if not the first, to suggest the possibility of going to war to resist the encroachments of the British government. He was inspired by “an Innate Spirit of Freedom,” he claimed, and though he could not “say where the Line between Great Britain and the Colonies should be drawn,” he believed that “one ought to be drawn; & our Rights clearly ascertained.”
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Around the time that Washington grew more militant, growing numbers of New Englanders were also coming to suspect British intentions. In the summer of 1768 royal authorities announced that two British army regiments were being redeployed from the frontier to Boston. It was not an unexpected turn of events. Boston’s newspapers had been predicting the soldiers’ arrival for three years, always saying that troops would be sent to enforce the imperial laws and usually characterizing their arrival as an “invasion” of the Bay Colony. To many Yankees the presence of the British army smacked of tyranny, and indeed, one newspaper essayist after another pointed out how despots throughout history had utilized armies to become all-powerful. Bolstered by armed might, one screed warned, rulers soon “begin to look upon themselves as the LORDS and not the SERVANTS of the people.” In no time, he continued, they “
make laws for themselves
, and enforce them by the
power of the sword
!” “Military power is forever
dangerous
to civil rights,” cautioned another writer. Not a few scribblers said the British army was being sent to Boston to enforce both an “unconstitutional” tax and harsh trade laws that would wreck the city’s economy. Francis Bernard, the royal governor of Massachusetts who had requested that troops be sent to Boston, was pilloried in the press as a “Great Bashaw,” as “freedom’s foe,” and as a “knave” who longed to run a “tyrant crew.”
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Some in Boston in 1768 spoke of raising an army of militiamen to resist the landing of the troops, or “lobster backs,” as the citizenry habitually referred to Britain’s red-clad soldiers. Some later recalled hearing Samuel Adams, the most visible leader of the resistance movement in Massachusetts, call for taking up arms, even for seizing and holding hostage all royal officials in the city. “If you are Men behave like Men … and be free,” Adams supposedly declared. Other radicals urged the seizure of Castle William, a royal fortress in Boston Harbor, and the use of its artillery to prevent troopships from docking. But cooler heads prevailed, if only because the groundwork had not been laid for uniting with other colonies, a prerequisite for armed resistance. The British army marched ashore peacefully, though all the while a small armada of British war vessels stood in the harbor, their guns trained on the city.
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The presence of British soldiers turned Boston, already a city on edge, into a tinderbox. Putting soldiers given to “common insolence” amid civilians who burned with “warm resentment” toward the presence of the army was akin, said Franklin, to “setting up a smith’s forge in a magazine of gunpowder.”
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There were repeated violent incidents, though somehow the friction was kept under control for eighteen months. Finally, on March 5, 1770, the long-anticipated explosion occurred.

Some in New England who were given to thinking in terms of intrigue had from the beginning believed that the army had been sent to Boston to provoke a clash. Others—including British officials in Massachusetts and even some residents of the city who sympathized with the American resistance—thought that Boston’s popular leaders were no less interested in inciting some sort of confrontation. Rumors of depredations by the soldiers swirled through the city during February and early March 1770, stoking a white-hot atmosphere of suspicion and malevolence.

Around nine fifteen P.M. on March 5, an alarm bell tolled—no one was ever certain who rang it—summoning residents downtown. Some hurried from their homes, others from the grog shops that lined the waterfront, most thinking they were being called to fight a fire. In no time, a crowd of upwards of two hundred men and boys had gathered on snow-covered King Street in front of the Customs House. A squad of eight regulars and one officer stood guard before the building. Little time was required for the mood of the crowd to turn ugly. Men vented their long-standing hostility toward the soldiers, doubtless emboldened by the belief that the disciplined redcoats under an officer’s command would not retaliate.

Members of what in an instant had turned into an impassioned, unruly mob jeered and shouted curses at the soldiers. Some pelted the redcoats with snowballs and ice. Others recklessly dared the soldiers to open fire. “Come on you rascals, you bloody-backs, you Lobster Scoundrels; fire if you dare, God damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not,” hotheads shouted. Heavily outnumbered, the frightened soldiers were edgy. In such a belligerent, tension-packed atmosphere, the worst outcome was predictable.

It took only a few minutes for a catastrophe to occur. No one ever knew exactly what happened, but the best guess was that a soldier, hit with a heavy chunk of ice, was knocked off balance, causing him to accidentally fire his musket. In an instant, other overwrought soldiers fired too. Some soldiers who had not yet discharged their weapons now presumed that, in the bedlam, they had failed to hear their commander’s order to open fire. They, too, emptied their muskets into the crowd. There was also the possibility, based on subsequent eyewitness accounts and the number of casualties, that civilians on the second floor of the Customs Building fired into the crowd.

It had taken only an instant for these events to unfold, but in their wake, six in the crowd of agitators were wounded and five lay dead or dying in the bloody, trodden slush. Bostonians immediately called the incident a “massacre.” Some, like John Adams, ever after referred to what had occurred as the “slaughter in King Street.”
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Long before it learned of the Boston Massacre, London was feeling the bite of the colonists’ trade embargo. British imports into America were sliced in half in 1769. The boycott in New York City, the second-busiest port in the colonies, shut out 80 percent of the goods normally imported into that colony. Eighteen months after the Townshend Duties became law, the American secretary confessed that the legislation could not be enforced. By early 1770 most members of the ministry had reached a similar conclusion. Though the colonists would not learn of the ministry’s action for another six weeks, three days before the Boston Massacre the cabinet voted to repeal the Townshend Duties, save for the tax on tea. Given the Americans’ thirst for the beverage, the tea tax was expected to raise twenty thousand pounds annually for the British treasury. Retaining that tax, Franklin reported, also afforded the government the means “for keeping up the claim of Parliamentary sovereignty.”
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The government that rescinded most of the Townshend Duties had just come to power. The repeal, in fact, was very nearly the first step that it took. It was the government of Lord North. On March 2, six weeks after its formation, North’s ministry agreed to repeal the bulk of the Townshend Duties. Parliament rubber-stamped the decision within a few days. There is no evidence that North, who longed for reconciliation with America, ever planned to levy further taxes on the colonists. However, lest he send a signal of weakness, North rapidly purged those in his ministry who had favored the revocation of all American taxes, surrounding himself almost entirely with ministers who had strongly advocated both the Stamp Act and Townshend Duties. Given the composition of his ministry, and the fact that it had sought only a partial repeal of Parliament’s taxes, many in America feared that North’s government was solidly committed to taxing the colonists. Those concerns were disseminated by Americans in London, including the deputy governor of Maryland, who observed that everything pointed toward North “laying [additional] duties in America on some future occasion.”
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Whatever North’s government stood for, there was no disputing that the American protest had, for the second time in forty months, compelled the British government to back down. In addition, as had happened during the Stamp Act crisis, those in American politics who were coming to be called Tories—because they had either defended British actions or opposed a hard-line resistance to London’s policies—paid a price. The faction in New York that had championed compliance with the Quartering Act and opposed the commercial boycott was swept from power in the elections of 1769. In Pennsylvania, the Assembly Party suffered staggering losses in the elections in 1770—retribution for its lukewarm support for the boycott and its long campaign for royal government, which few in the colony any longer found attractive. The evidence was overwhelming that there was widespread popular support in America for resisting parliamentary taxation and maintaining whatever slivers of autonomy the colonists had won.
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North’s ministry largely ignored its American problem during the next three years. North may have been biding his time, waiting for the colonists’ boycott of tea to disintegrate, although such an explanation probably gives him more credit for system and savvy than he deserves. He was preoccupied by a crisis with Spain over the Falkland Islands during a portion of this time, a dustup that was successfully resolved, boosting North’s self-confidence. Much of his remaining time was consumed by the debt problem, and after a few years on the job, North was able to report that he was making headway toward getting Britain’s financial house in order, thanks in large measure to a new lottery he had introduced. Although London was not procuring much tax-based revenue from the colonies—the ongoing embargo had by 1772 reduced imports of tea by some 60 percent throughout the colonies and by nearly 99 percent in both New York City and Philadelphia—the ministry still showed no inclination to rekindle the troublesome matter of colonial taxation.
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In the end, North inadvertently stumbled back into the American problem. By 1773 mismanagement had pushed the mammoth East India Company to the cusp of bankruptcy, a calamity that threatened to plunge Great Britain into a ruinous depression. North’s government chose to bail out the beleaguered company, loaning it 1 million pounds. To help the company meet its debt obligation, North’s government also secured passage of the Tea Act, a measure that vested the East India Company with a monopoly on tea sales in America and reduced the existing tax on tea. North’s thinking was that the cost of the company’s tea would be so cheap that no smuggler could compete.
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North found what he had done to be distasteful, though only because he loathed the government’s intrusion into the affairs of a private enterprise. He appears to have never imagined that an American rebellion could blow up out of the Tea Act, especially because he saw the origins of the legislation as distinct from that which had produced the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties. But Franklin saw what North could not see. Before the colonists learned of the Tea Act, Franklin published in a London newspaper what may have been his most brilliant satire, a piece he titled “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.” To ensure the ruination of an empire, Franklin wrote, the mother country should send as governors to the colonies men who were “Prodigals who have ruined their Fortunes, broken Gamesters or Stock-Jobbers,” and when they have completed their “Mal-administration, Oppression, or Injustice,” they should be brought home and “
reward
[ed] … with Pensions.” That alone would not do, however. The parent state should additionally quarter troops among the Americans so that mobs might be provoked, restrict the colonists’ manufacturing and commercial abilities, and “harass them with novel Taxes.” Remember, too, he further advised, “to make your arbitrary Tax more grievous … by public Declarations importing that your Power of taxing them has
no limit
.” Finally, be sure to ignore the colonists’ entreaties for redress. Instead, “Suppose all
their
Complaints be invented and promoted by a few factious Demagogues, whom if you could catch and hang” it “shall
work Miracles
in favour” of your getting “rid of the Trouble of governing them … for ever.”
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