Penguin History of the United States of America (23 page)

It is plain, then, that there were many matters of controversy between the
colonies and the imperial government in the early sixties which were enough to keep everyone busy for a long time seeking mutually acceptable solutions, but which were unlikely to lead to a rupture between the two sides. The Board of Trade had become rather too set in the old ways, still seeing the colonies and colonists as ‘merely factors for the purposes of trade’; it was, after all, an instrument of the old order, wholeheartedly dedicated to the interests of the English merchants, pillars of that order; but the disagreements could have sputtered on for years in perfect safety until Whitehall mustered enough statesmanship to deal with them. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence of prudent and creative thought about the Empire’s future at this period: slowly, we may feel, the more manageable colonial grievances could have been attended to. They were only dangerous in the context of the highly unmanageable controversies developing in other parts of the forest.

These other issues all began in economics and ended in politics. This was so because, in every case, the two sides, without being fully aware of what they were doing, were seeking to modify the institutions and practices of the old colonial system – in itself an integral part of the European old order – seeking to adapt them to the needs of a new age, without being agreed on either the means or the ends of the exercise. British and Americans alike were struggling in a net of circumstances which they had not woven and could not escape; they could not fully understand what was happening to them, or to each other. C. M. Andrews suggested that the British Empire was already beginning to evolve towards its nineteenth-century pattern, while the thirteen colonies were moving towards what they eventually became, an independent, unitary North American nation. This is, perhaps, a view too dominated by hindsight to be wholly convincing; but it does at least catch the feeling which overwhelms the historian from time to time, that the economic, social, cultural and therefore political destinies of the two peoples were leading them inexorably apart; perhaps, in the end, to follow parallel paths, but, indubitably, to follow different ones. Something very deep, something quite central, was at issue between Great Britain and her colonies; it follows that to discover what it was we must look at the central problems of men’s lives, and at the metropolitan areas of the colonies – not at the wilderness, whether in New Hampshire or the Ohio valley or Georgia, but at Boston, Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia and Virginia. It was in these places that the great drama unfolded, enlightening the participants by its course as to its full importance and implications. We too can best understand it by watching it develop: can see how it grew before Mr Grenville’s unfortunate experiment, how that experiment proved to be the fatal turning-point, and why its failure did not bring the drama to an end, but merely to the opening of a new phase.

Pitt, as we have seen, began the proceedings, diverting the mercantilist system from its generally acceptable role as the more or less impartial regulator of imperial trade to the much more questionable one of determining the economic life of the Empire to suit the military and political designs of London. Grenville eagerly followed him, passing the Sugar Act at a time when his action was certain to be sharply resented in New England in general, and in the towns of Boston and Newport in particular; for each depended on an unimpeded trade with both French and British West Indies.

3. British North America, 1765

Dislike of the new strictness was in fact so general that the Bostonians seized the first opportunity of sabotaging the laws, which occurred long before the Sugar Act was passed. In 1761 the customs officers of Boston applied for writs of assistance to enable them to carry out the searches for contraband that were part of their job. The technicalities of these writs need not detain us: it is enough to record that the court found in favour of the
officers, but the temper of Boston was such that the writs could never again be used in Massachusetts. In 1766 writs of assistance in the colonies were disallowed by the English Attorney-General.

The case has great symbolic importance, for not only did it, in the end, lead to a successful defiance by the colonists of an Act of Parliament (the 1696 Navigation Act authorized writs of assistance), but it made the lawyer James Otis (1725–83) famous as a radical leader. Otis appeared as counsel for the merchants of Massachusetts. Other lawyers in the case argued dry points of law; he passionately denounced the writs, which sanctioned the entry and search of private houses, as against natural law and therefore against the British Constitution and therefore illegal whatever Acts of Parliament said. His speech was in the anti-prerogative tradition of the common law, but it was perhaps more notable for its eloquence than its learning, and none the less effective for that. It was an extraordinary achievement, for in it Otis leapfrogged all the issues that were to perplex the British and Americans in the years to come and arrived at the simple appeal to natural law, right and justice which, in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was to use as the basic justification of the colonies’ rebellion. The speech electrified its hearers, one of whom, another radical Bostonian lawyer, young John Adams (1735–1826), was to date the Revolution from its utterance. ‘Otis was a flame of fire,’ he recollected in old age.‘… Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there, was the first scene of the first act of opposition, to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the child Independence was born.’

No doubt there is some exaggeration in this account, but there is no doubt that the speech was remarkable and carried James Otis to a position of radical leadership. A year after his emergence another legal orator in another colony rose to fame in the same way. Again a clash between colonial and British economico-political interests lay in the background, this time in the form of a debtor-creditor controversy about the currency. The planters of Virginia, confident in the marketability of their tobacco, had, as we have seen, felt free to finance a luxurious way of life by running up enormous debts. Unfortunately they had failed to reckon with the weather, and some bad harvests in the fifties plunged them into difficulties with their creditors, the Scottish and English merchants, who wanted to be paid, either interest or principal, in good currency – preferably in tobacco, which could be sold at a profit. In order to find tobacco to satisfy the merchants the planters passed a law at the expense of the Virginian clergy, whose stipends were supposed to be paid in tobacco, but who were now required to accept Virginian paper money instead. Again we need not follow the details of the dispute which ensued (it was compromised eventually), and the so-called ‘Parsons’ Case’ which arose out of it was only a side-issue; but Patrick Henry (1736–99), a Scottish Presbyterian lawyer from the back-country, made a constitutional drama out of it. The King, acting through the Privy
Council, had disallowed the law forcing the parsons to accept paper money, had he? Then he had broken the compact between him and his people, degenerated into a tyrant and forfeited all right to his subjects’ obedience. Understandably, this provoked cries of ‘Treason!’ but Henry swept on to denounce the clergy as rapacious harpies and was carried shoulder-high from the court-room. The plaintiff (the Reverend James Maury) was awarded damages of one penny.

Nor was that the end of the controversy. The parsons dropped out, but the underlying difficulty was still there: the planters owed more than they could pay, and with considerable spirit and cunning contrived to evade their obligations, in spite of their creditors’ pressure. Yet while this pressure from Britain continued, feeling in Virginia grew more and more embittered. By the time of the Revolution, L. H. Gipson has pointed out, tempers were so high that none of the planters were loyalists and none of the merchants were rebels.
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What is striking about these incidents is that they occurred before the end of the Seven Years War (though not before victory was in sight). They show how dangerously easy it was to stir up anti-governmental feelings in the two leading colonies, even without undue provocation. But provocation, of course, was not long in coming. In 1764 Grenville pushed the Sugar Act through Parliament.

No other incident in the making of the Revolution has been more widely misunderstood than this. The Sugar Act made the change in the imperial system apparent to all. Revenue, not trade regulation, was now to be the purpose of the Navigation Acts. A shout of indignation went up from the colonial merchants. The duty on molasses imported to the mainland colonies from the non-British West Indies was reduced from the notional 6d. to 3d., but Grenville made it plain that from now on the full duty would be collected. In other words, for reasons already given,
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he was really raising the duty by 2d. a gallon. So in a torrent of pamphlets, newspapers and letters the merchants predicted that they would be utterly ruined;
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and on the whole historians have taken them at their word. Only Gipson has pointed out that the molasses was required for making rum and that the entire history of taxation imposed on booze shows that, whatever the duty, drinkers will pay it. In other words, it is very easy for brewers and distillers to pass on their costs to their customers. Hence the
sang froid
with which modern Chancellors of the Exchequer raise the duty on Scotch from time to time. Grenville, in fact, had chosen an almost painless way of raising revenue; but the distillers of America shrieked as if they had been stabbed.
The truth is that the prosperous days of war had, contrary to the colonists’ expectation, been followed, in America as in Europe, by a peacetime slump.
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Times were bad for traders on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was impossible for the American merchants not to believe that the Sugar Act would make matters worse. Compared to this belief it was of less, but still great importance that the Act, loosely and inconsiderately drafted (as tended to be the case with Grenville’s measures), hampered the whole maritime trade, and especially coastal traffic, with a set of intensely irritating, because inconvenient and unfair, regulations, and created what looked like a patronage machine, ‘hordes of petty placemen’, to enforce them. Some, like Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts (1711–80), even saw that the sugar duty was essentially a tax on the people, and thus clashed with what Hutchinson called ‘the so much esteemed privilege of English subjects – the being taxed by their own representatives’. The uproar was enormous, and a vigorous movement was launched to boycott British goods until the government came to its senses. The row had not subsided when the Stamp Act was passed. It is small wonder that there was an unprecedented explosion, or that, because of the Sugar Act, solid merchants, the most influential and normally among the most conservative elements of colonial society, associated themselves with it. The decisive proof of Grenville’s massive frivolity is that he was so unfit for his post as to be unaware that to the colonists the Stamp Act really was the last straw – was really like a match to gunpowder.

In partial extenuation it can be pleaded that even the colonial agents in London, even Benjamin Franklin, did not foresee the dimensions of the reaction; but it is the business of governments to be well informed and to know what they are about. To urge that Grenville could have done no better (though this is highly doubtful) is only to say that Britain was incapable of governing America; which was, of course, what the colonists came to think and to prove. But much had to happen first.

Scarcely a soul could be found in America to defend the Stamp Act; but nevertheless the colonists were far from united. On the contrary, they quickly split into moderate and radical factions, with the radicals carrying the day. This in itself indicates how much the movement of resistance to British prerogatives was to change America, for until 1765 well-connected and well-off conservatives had ruled the roost in every colony.

They were swept away in the Stamp Act crisis. Patrick Henry and his followers rushed the Virginian assembly into passing a set of anti-Stamp resolutions, the essence of which was their assertion of the principle of no taxation without representation. By an absurd accident,
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the idea got
about in the other colonies that Virginia had gone much further, urging disobedience to the Act and proscribing, as an enemy, any man who supported it; and they were quick to follow the supposed example. Before the news arrived in Boston, the Massachusetts assembly, the General Court of the colony, had launched a proposal for a conference of delegates from all the colonies to discuss measures of resistance; and this meeting, the celebrated Stamp Act Congress, did in fact open on 7 October. By then matters had taken an even more dramatic turn. The mob had gone to work.

The crowd in the American Revolution badly needs a historian. The traditional picture, of a uniquely discriminating, moderate, politically motivated mob, led or manipulated by, if not consisting entirely of, members of the middle or even the upper classes (one hears repeatedly of workmen’s clothes and blackened faces serving as ineffective disguises), has been discredited, but as yet no complete substitute has been provided. There was considerable upper-class participation in some of the disturbances: a mill-owner and militia officer led a rising against the White Pine Acts in New Hampshire in 1754; ‘all the principal gentlemen’ in Norfolk, Virginia, were alleged to have assisted at the tarring and feathering of a customs official in 1766; other instances could be supplied. In the Revolutionary mobs, participation and a measure of direction by the ‘better sort’ were universal: English policy united the Americans and made it possible for the prosperous to sanction lawlessness which in other times horrified them. But the crowd existed independently of its leaders, sometimes (for example, in Rhode Island) getting out of their control, and we know that the comparative restraint and respect for legality of the American mob also characterized the mobs of London during the Wilkes and Gordon riots, and even the Parisian mob during the French Revolution: the eighteenth-century crowd knew what it was about, even its worst orgies of violence were not pointless, and its simultaneous impact on the history of France, England and America is one more piece of evidence showing how uniform was the history of the Atlantic world during this period. The very low death-rate in colonial disturbances was due less to the restraint of the crowd than to the weakness of the authorities, for in Europe it was usually they who did the killing, not the rioters.
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We can infer from all this that the American mob was like its European counterparts in other respects:
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above all that it was largely self-directing, most of the time.