‘The Americans,’ said Chatham a few years later, when describing this period, ‘had almost forgot, in their excess of gratitude for the repeal of the Stamp Act, any interest but that of the mother country; there seemed an emulation among the different provinces who should be most dutiful and forward in their expressions of loyalty.’ 2 The Rockingham Ministry had undoubtedly, under circumstances of very great difficulty, restored confidence to America, and concluded for the present a contest which would probably have ended in a war. In most of the provincial Assemblies and in many public meetings of citizens, addresses of thanks were carried to the King, to the Ministry, to Pitt, Camden, and Barré; and in more than one province statues were raised to the King and to Pitt. The shrewd Philadelphian Quakers passed a characteristic resolution, ‘that to demonstrate our zeal to Great Britain, and our gratitude for the repeal of the Stamp Act, each of us will on the 4th of June next, being the birthday of our gracious Sovereign, dress ourselves in a new suit of the manufactures of England, and give what homespun clothes we have to the poor.’ 1 A feeling of real and genuine loyalty to the mother-country appears to have at this time existed in the colonies, though it required much skill to maintain it.
The Americans had in truth won a great victory, which inspired them with unbounded confidence in their strength. They had gone through all the excitement of a violent and brilliantly successful political campaign; they had realised for a time the union which appeared formerly so chimerical; they had found their natural leaders in the struggle, and had discovered the weakness of the mother country. Many writers and speakers had arisen who had learnt the lesson that a defiance of English authority was one of the easiest and safest paths to popular favour, and the speeches of Pitt had kindled a fierce enthusiasm of liberty through the colonies. There was no want of men who regretted that the agitation had ceased, who would gladly have pressed on the struggle to new issues, and who were ready to take advantage of the first occasion for quarrel. It was not easy for an ambitious man in these distant colonies to make his name known to the world; but if events ever led to a collision, a great field of ambition would be suddenly opened. Besides this, principles of a far-reaching and revolutionary character had become familiar to the people. It is a dangerous thing when nations begin to scrutinise too closely the foundations of political authority, the possible results to which political principles may logically lead, the exact limits by which the different powers of a heterogeneous and prescriptive government must be confined. The theory of English lawyers that a Parliament in which the Americans were unrepresented might fetter their commerce in all its parts, and exact in taxation the last shilling of their fortunes, and that their whole representative system existed only by the indulgence of England, would, if fully acted on, have reduced the colonies to absolute slavery. On the other hand, Otis and other agitators were vehemently urging that the principles of Chatham and Camden would authorise the Americans to repudiate all parliamentary restrictions on American trade. No objection seems indeed to have been felt to the bounties which England conferred upon it, or to the protection of their coasts by English vessels; but in all other respects parliamentary interference was profoundly disliked. Lawyers had assumed during the late troubles a great prominence in colonial politics, and a litigious, captious, and defining spirit was abroad.
It was noticed that in the addresses to the King and to the Government thanking them for the repeal of the Stamp Act, as little as possible was said about the supremacy of Parliament, and in the most exuberant moments of colonial gratitude there were no signs of any disposition, in any province, to undertake, under proper guarantees and limitation, the task of supporting English troops stationed in America. Had the colonies after the Peace of Paris been willing to contribute this small service to the support of the Empire, the constitutional question might never have been raised; had they now offered to do so, it would probably never have been revived. The requisitions to the colonial Assemblies to compensate the sufferers in the late riots were very unpopular. In one or two provinces the money was, it is true, frankly and promptly voted; but in most cases there was much delay. Massachusetts, where the most scandalous riots took place, rebelled violently against the too peremptory terms of the requisition; refused at first to pass any vote of compensation; yielded at last, after a long delay, and by a small majority, but accompanied its grant by a clause indemnifying the rioters, which was afterwards annulled by the King.
Bernard, who since the beginning of 1760 had been Governor of Massachusetts, had of late become extremely unpopular, and his name has been pursued with untiring virulence to the present day. His letters are those of an honest and rather able, but injudicious and disputatious man, who was trying, under circumstances of extreme difficulty, to do his duty both to the Government and the people, but who was profoundly discontented with the constitution of the province. In 1763 and 1764 he exerted all his influence to procure the lowering or the abolition of the duties in the Sugar Act, and in general a larger amount of free trade for the colonies. In 1765 he opposed the Stamp Act as inexpedient, though he maintained that Parliament had the right of taxing the colonies, provided those taxes were exclusively applied for the benefit of those who paid them. Up to this time he appears to have been generally liked and esteemed; 1 but he was now called upon to take the most prominent part in maintaining the policy of the English Government, and his letters give a vivid picture of the difficulties he encountered. He describes himself as placed ‘in the midst of those who first stirred up these disturbances, without a force to protect my person, without a council to advise me, watched by every eye, and misrepresented or condemned for everything I do on the King's behalf.’ He laments that the governments of the colonies ‘were weak and impotent to an amazing degree,’ that ‘the governors and officers of the Crown were in several of the chief provinces entirely dependent upon the people for subsistence,’ that ‘the persons of the governors and Crown officers are quite defenceless and exposed to the violence of the people, without any possible resort for protection,’ and he continually urged that as long as the Council, which was the natural support of the Executive, was elected annually by the Assembly, and as long as almost all the civil officers were mainly dependent for their salaries on an annual vote of the Assembly, it would be impossible to enforce in Massachusetts any unpopular law or to punish any outrage which was supported by popular favour. It was his leading doctrine that if British rule was to be perpetuated in America, and if a period of complete anarchy was to be averted, it was necessary to put an end to the obscurity which rested upon the relations of the colonies to the Home Government; to establish finally and decisively the legislative ascendency of the British Parliament, and to remodel the constitutions of the colonies on a uniform type. He proposed that the Assemblies should, as at present, remain completely representative; but that the democratic element in the Constitution should be always balanced by a council consisting of a kind of life peers, appointed directly by the King, and that there should be a fixed civil list from which the King's officers should derive a certain provision. As such changes were wholly incompatible with the charters of the more democratic colonies, he proposed that American representatives should be temporarily summoned to the British Parliament, and that Parliament should then authoritatively settle the colonial system. 1
These views were of course at first only communicated confidentially to the Government, but in the open acts of Bernard there was much that was offensive to the people. His addresses were often very injudicious; he had a bad habit of entering into elaborate arguments with the Assembly, and he was accused of straining the small amount of prerogative which he possessed. The Assembly, shortly after the repeal of the Stamp Act, showed its gratitude by electing Otis, the most violent assailant of the whole legislative authority of England, as its Speaker, and Bernard negatived the choice. The Assembly, contrary to immemorial usage, refused to elect Hutchinson, the Lieutenant-Governor, Oliver, the Secretary of the Province, and the other chief officers of the Crown, members of the Council. Bernard remonstrated strongly against the exclusion; he himself negatived six ‘friends of the people’ who had been elected, and he countenanced a claim of Hutchinson to take his seat in his capacity of Lieutenant-Governor among the councillors. The relations between the Executive and the Assembly were thus extremely tense, while the inhabitants of Boston were very naturally and very pardonably intoxicated with the triumph they had obtained. The little town, which was probably hardly known even by name in Europe outside commercial circles, had bearded the Government of England, and it was deeply sensible of the heroism it had displayed. The rioters were never punished, but were, on the contrary, the objects of general sympathy, and the ‘sons of liberty’ resolved to meet annually to commemorate their resistance to the Stamp Act, and to express their admiration for one another. Attempts to enforce the revenue Acts were continually resisted. It was observed that the phrase, ‘No representation, no taxation!’ which had been the popular watch-cry, was beginning to be replaced by the phrase, ‘No representation, no legislation!’ and many ‘patriots’ whose names are emblazoned in American history, with unbounded applause and with the most perfect security were hurling highly rhetorical defiances at the British Government.
The clause in the Mutiny Act requiring the colonists to supply English troops with some of the first necessaries of life, was another grievance. Boston, as usual, disputed it at every point with the Governor; and New York positively refused to obey. In a very able book called ‘The Farmer's Letters,’ written by a lawyer named Dickinson, which appeared about this time, it was maintained that if the British Legislature has the right of ordering the colonies to provide a single article for British troops, it has a right to tax: ‘An Act of Parliament commanding to do a certain thing, if it has any validity, is a tax upon us for the expense that accrues in complying with it.’
It is evident that great wisdom, moderation, and tact were needed if healthy relations were to be established between England and her colonies, and unfortunately these qualities were conspicuously absent from English councils. The downfall of the Rockingham Ministry, and the formation of a ministry of which Grafton was the nominal and Pitt the real head, seemed on the whole a favourable event. The influence and popularity of Pitt were even greater in America than in England. His acceptance of the title of Earl of Chatham, which injured him so deeply in English opinion, was a matter of indifference to the colonists; and he possessed far beyond all other English statesmen the power of attracting or conciliating great bodies of men, and firing them with the enthusiasm of loyalty or patriotism. Camden, who next to Chatham was the chief English advocate of the colonial cause, was Chancellor. Conway, who moved the repeal of the Stamp Act, was one of the Secretaries of State; and Shelburne, who at the age of twenty-nine was placed over American affairs, had on the question of taxing America been on the side of Chatham and Camden. Illness, however, speedily withdrew Chatham from public affairs, and in the scene of anarchy which ensued it was left for the strongest man to seize the helm. Unfortunately, in the absence of Chatham, that man was unquestionably the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend.
From this time the English government of America is little more than a series of deplorable blunders. A feeling of great irritation against the colonies had begun to prevail in English political circles. The Court party continually repeated that England had been humiliated by the repeal of the Stamp Act. 1 Grenville maintained that if that Act had been enforced with common firmness, the stamp duties in America would soon have been collected with as little difficulty as the land tax in England; and he pointed to the recent news as a conclusive proof that the policy of conciliation had failed; and that through the vacillation or encouragement of English statesmen, the spirit of rebellion and of anarchy was steadily growing beyond the Atlantic. There was a general feeling that it was perfectly equitable that America should support an army for her own defence, and for that of the neighbouring islands; and also, that this had become a matter of vital and pressing importance to the British Empire. The political correspondence of the time teems with intimations of the incessant activity with which France and Spain were intriguing to regain the position they had lost in the late war. The dispute about the Manilla ransom and the annexation of Corsica were the most conspicuous, but they were not the most significant, signs of the attitude of those Powers. Plans for the invasion of England had been carefully elaborated. French spies had surveyed the English coast. In 1764 and 1765 an agent of Choiseul had minutely studied the American colonies, and had reported to his master that the English troops were so few and scattered that they could be of no real service, and that democratic and provincial jealousy had prevented the erection of a single citadel in all New England. 1 The King fully agreed with his wisest ministers that the army was wholly insufficient to protect the Empire, and the scheme of Chatham for averting the rapidly growing dangers from France by a new alliance with Prussia had signally failed. England was beginning to learn the lesson that in the crisis of her fate she could rely on herself alone, and that in political life gratitude is of all ties the frailest and the most precarious. At the same time, the country gentlemen who remembered the days of Walpole, when England was more prosperous though less great, murmured at the heavy land tax in time of peace, and had begun to complain bitterly that the whole expense of the defence of wealthy colonies was thrown on them. The factious vote, in which the partisans of Grenville and most of the partisans of Rockingham, with the notable exception of Burke, concurred, which reduced the land tax proposed by the Government from 4 s. to 3 s. in the pound, made it necessary to seek some other source of revenue. 1 Shelburne himself fully adopted the view that America should support her own army, and he imagined that if it were reduced to the smallest proportions the required sum might be gradually raised by enforcing strictly the quit rents of the Crown, which appear to have fallen into very general neglect, and by turning the grants of land to real benefit. 2 Townshend, however, had other schemes, and he lost little time in forcing them upon Parliament.
On January 26, 1767, in a debate on the army, George Grenville moved that America, like Ireland, should support an establishment of her own; and in the course of the discussion which followed, Townshend took occasion to declare himself a firm advocate of the principle of the Stamp Act. He described the distinction between external and internal taxes as ridiculous, in the opinion of every one except the Americans; and he pledged himself to find a revenue in America nearly sufficient for the purposes that were required. 3 His colleagues listened in blank astonishment to a pledge which was perfectly unauthorised by the Cabinet, and indeed contrary to the known decision of all its members; but, as the Duke of Grafton afterwards wrote, no one in the ministry had sufficient authority in the absence of Chatham to advise the dismissal of Towns-hend, and this measure alone could have arrested his policy. Shelburne, who was the official chief of the colonies, wrote to Chatham, who was then an almost helpless invalid, relating the circumstances and expressing his complete ignorance of the intentions of his colleague. The news had just arrived that New York had openly repudiated an Act of Parliament by refusing to furnish troops with the first necessaries of life; and it produced an indignation in Parliament which Chatham himself appears fully to have shared. ‘America,’ he wrote confidentially to Shelburne, ‘affords a gloomy prospect. A spirit of infatuation has taken possession of New York. Their disobedience to the Mutiny Act will justly create a great ferment here, open a fair field to the arraigners of America, and leave no room to any to say a word in their defence. I foresee confusion will ensue. The petition of the merchants of New York is highly improper;. … they are doing the work of their worst enemies themselves. The torrent of indignation in Parliament will, I apprehend, become irresistible.’ 1 In a letter written a few days later he says, ‘The advices from America afford unpleasing views. New York has drunk the deepest of the baneful cup of infatuation, but none seem to be quite sober and in full possession of reason. It is a literal truth to say that the Stamp Act of most unhappy memory has frightened those irritable and umbrageous people quite out of their senses.’ 2 Letters from colonial governors painted the state of feeling in the darkest colours. At every election, in the bestowal of every kind of popular favour, to have opposed parliamentary authority in America was now the first title to success; to have supported it, the most fatal of disqualifications. The pulpit, the press, the lawyers, the ‘sons of liberty’—all those classes who subsist or flourish by popularity—were busy in inflaming the jealousy against England, and in extending the field of conflict. There was a general concurrence of opinion among American officials that, even apart from the necessity of providing for the defence of the colonies, it was indispensable, if any Act of Parliament was henceforth to be obeyed, that a small army should be permanently established in America, and that the Executive should be strengthened by making at least the governor, who represented the English Crown, and the judges, who represented English law, independent of the favour of the Assemblies. It is remarkable that among the officials who advocated these views was the son of Benjamin Franklin, who had been appointed Crown Governor of New Jersey. It was urged, too, that the more democratic constitutions among the colonies must be remodelled; that, while the Assembly should always be the legitimate and unfettered representative of the people, the Council must always be chosen by the Governor.
Very strong arguments might be urged in favour of these changes; but there was one still stronger against them—that it was absolutely impossible to effect them. On May 13, 1767, however, when Chatham was completely incapacitated, and when all other statesmen had sunk before the ascendency of Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought in his measure. With that brilliancy of eloquence which never failed to charm the House, he dilated upon the spirit of insubordination that was growing up in all the colonies, upon the open defiance of an Act of Parliament by New York, and upon the absolute necessity of asserting with dignity and decision the legal ascendency of Parliament. The measures which he ultimately brought forward and carried were of three kinds: By one Act of Parliament the legislative functions of the New York Assembly were suspended, and the Governor was forbidden to give his sanction to any local law in that province till the terms of the Mutiny Act had been complied with. 1 By another Act a Board of Commissioners of the Customs with large powers was established in America for the purpose of superintending the execution of the laws relating to trade. 2 By a third Act the proposal of taxing America was resumed. Townshend explained that the distinction between internal and external taxation was in his eyes entirely worthless; but in the discussions on the Stamp Act the Americans had taken their stand upon it. They had represented it as transcendently important, and had professed to be quite willing that Parliament should regulate their trade by duties, provided it raised no internal revenue. This distinction Townshend said he would observe. He would raise a revenue, but he would do so only by a port duty imposed upon glass, red and white lead, painters' colours, paper, and tea, imported into the colonies. The charge on the last-named article was to be 3 d. in the pound. The whole annual revenue expected from these duties amounted to less than 40,000 l. , 3 and it was to be employed in giving a civil list to the Crown. Out of that civil list, salaries were to be paid to the governors and judges in America; and in the very improbable event of there being any surplus, it was to go towards defraying the expense of protecting the colonies. In order to assist in the enforcement of the law, writs of assistance were formally legalised. Coffee and cocoa exported from England to the colonies were at the same time freed from the duty which they had previously paid on importation into England. Tea exported to the colonies obtained a similar indulgence for five years, but the drawback on the export of china earthenware to America was withdrawn. 1
It is a strange instance of the fallibility of political foresight if Townshend imagined that America would acquiesce in these measures, that England possessed any adequate means of enforcing them, or that she could a second time recede from her demands and yet maintain her authority over the colonies. It is mournful to notice how the field of controversy had widened and deepened, and how a quarrel which might at one time have been appeased by slight mutual concessions was leading inevitably to the disruption of the Empire. England was originally quite right in her contention that it was the duty of the colonies to contribute something to the support of the army which defended the unity of the Empire. She was quite right in her belief that in some of the colonial constitutions the Executive was far too feeble, that the line which divides liberty from anarchy was often passed, and that the result was profoundly and permanently injurious to the American character. She was also, I think, quite right in ascribing a great part of the resistance of America to the disposition, so common and so natural in dependencies, to shrink as much as possible from any expense that could possibly be thrown on the mother country, and in forming a very low estimate of the character and motives of a large proportion of those ambitious lawyers, newspaper writers, preachers, and pamphleteers who, in New England at least, were labouring with untiring assiduity to win popular applause by sowing dissension between England and her colonies. But the Americans were only too well justified in asserting that the suppression of several of their industries and the monopoly by England of some of the chief branches of their trade, if they did not benefit the mother country, at least imposed sacrifices on her colonies fully equivalent to a considerable tax. 1 They were also quite justified in contending that the power of taxation was essential to the importance of their Assemblies, and that an extreme jealousy of any encroachment on this prerogative was in perfect accordance with the traditions of English liberty. They had before their eyes the hereditary revenue, the scandalous pension list, the monstrous abuses of patronage, in Ireland, and they were quite resolved not to suffer similar abuses in America. 2 The judges only held their seats during the royal pleasure. Ministerial patronage in the colonies, as elsewhere, was often grossly corrupt, 3 and in the eyes of the colonists the annual grant was the one efficient control upon maladministration.
A period of wild and feverish confusion followed. Counsels of the most violent kind were freely circulated, and for a time it seemed as if the appointment of the new Board of Commissioners would be resisted by force; but Otis and some of the other popular leaders held back from the conflict, and in several colonies a clear sense of the serious nature of the struggle that was impending exercised a sobering influence. Georgia, which had been inclined to follow the example of New York, was brought to reason by the prospect of being left without the protection of English troops in the midst of the negroes and the Indians. 1 The central and southern colonies hesitated for some time to follow the lead of New England. Hutchinson wrote to the Government at home that Boston would probably find no other town to follow her in her career of violence; and De Kalb, the secret agent of Choiseul, who was busily employed in fomenting rebellion in the colonies, appears for a time to have thought it would all end in words, and that England, by keeping her taxes within very moderate limits, would maintain her authority. 2 Massachusetts, however, had thrown herself with fierce energy into the conflict, and she soon carried the other provinces in her wake. Non-importation agreements binding all the inhabitants to abstain from English manufactures, and especially from every article on which duties were levied in England, spread from colony to colony, and the Assembly of Massachusetts issued a circular addressed to all the other colonial Assemblies denouncing the new laws as unconstitutional, and inviting the different Assemblies to take united measures for their repeal. The Assembly at the same time drew up a petition to the King and addresses to the leading English supporters of the American cause. 1 These addresses, which were intended to act upon English opinion, were composed with great ability and moderation; and while expressing the firm resolution of the Americans to resist every attempt at parliamentary taxation, they acknowledged fully the general legislative authority of Parliament, and disclaimed in the strongest language any wish for independence.
In America the language commonly used was less decorous. One of the Boston newspapers dilated furiously upon the ‘obstinate malice, diabolical thirst for mischief, effrontery, guileful treachery, and wickedness’ of the Governor 2 in such terms that the paper was brought before the Assembly, but that body would take no notice of it, and the grand jury refused to find a true bill against its publisher. The Commissioners of the revenue found that it was idle to attempt to enforce the Revenue Acts without the presence of British troops. Riots were absolutely unpunished, for no jury would convict the rioters. Bernard wrote that his position was one of utter and humiliating impotence, and that the first condition of the maintenance of English authority in Massachusetts was to quarter a powerful military force at Boston.
While these things were happening in America, the composition of the Ministry at home was rapidly changing. On September 4, 1767, after a short fever, Charles Townshend died, leaving to his successors the legacy of his disastrous policy in America, but having achieved absolutely nothing to justify the extraordinary reputation he possessed among his contemporaries. Nothing of the smallest value remains of an eloquence which some of the best judges placed above that of Burke and only second to that of Chatham, 1 and the two or three pamphlets which are ascribed to his pen hardly surpass the average of the political literature of the time. Exuberant animal spirits, a brilliant and ever ready wit, boundless facility of repartee, a clear, rapid, and spontaneous eloquence, a gift of mimicry which is said to have been not inferior to that of Garrick and of Foote, great charm of manner, and an unrivalled skill in adapting himself to the moods and tempers of those who were about him, had made him the delight of every circle in which he moved, the spoilt child of the House of Commons. He died when only forty-two, but he had already much experience of official life. He had been made a Lord of the Admiralty in 1754, Treasurer of the Chamber and member of the Privy Council in 1756, Secretary of War in 1761, President of the Board of Trade in 1763, Paymaster-General in 1765, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1766. The extraordinary quickness of apprehension which was his most remarkable intellectual gift, soon made him a perfect master of official business, and no man knew so well how to apply his knowledge to the exigencies of debate, and how to pursue every topic to the exact line which pleased and convinced without tiring the House. Had he possessed any earnestness of character, any settled convictions, any power of acting with fidelity to his colleagues, or any self-control, he might have won a great name in English politics. He sought, however, only to sparkle and to please, and was ever ready to sacrifice any principle or any connection for the excitement and the vanity of a momentary triumph. In the absence of Chatham, whom he disliked and feared, he had been rapidly rising to the foremost place. He had obtained a peerage for his wife, and the post of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for his brother; he had won the favour of the King, and was the idol of the House of Commons, and he had forced the Government into a line of policy which was wholly opposed to that of Camden, Grafton, and Shelburne. In a few months, or perhaps weeks, he would probably have been the head of a new ministry. Death called him away in the full flush of his triumph and his powers, and he obeyed the summons with the same good-humoured levity which he had shown in so many periods of his brief and agitated career. 1
He was replaced by Lord North, the favourite minister of the King, and one of the strongest advocates of American taxation, and in the course of the next few months nearly all those who were favourable to America disappeared from the Government. Conway, Shelburne, and Chatham successively resigned, and though Camden remained for a time in office he restricted himself exclusively to his judicial duties, and took no part in politics. Lord Hillsborough was entrusted as Secretary of State with the special care of the colonies, and the Bedford party, who now joined and in a great measure controlled the Government, were strenuous supporters of the policy of coercing America.
The circular of the Massachusetts Assembly calling the other provincial Assemblies to assist in obtaining the repeal of the recent Act was first adverted to Hillsborough, in an angry circular addressed to the governors of the different provinces, urged them to exert their influence to prevent the Assemblies of their respective provinces from taking any notice of it, and he characterised it in severe terms as ‘a flagitious attempt to disturb the public peace’ by ‘promoting an unwarrantable combination and exhibiting an open opposition to and denial of the authority of Parliament.’ He at the same time called on the Massachusetts Assembly to rescind its proceedings on the subject. After an animated debate the Assembly, in the summer of 1768, refused by 92 votes to 17. It was at once dissolved, and no new Chamber was summoned till the following year. The Assembly of Virginia was dissolved on account of resolutions condemning the whole recent policy of England, and in the course of a few months a similar step was taken in Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and New York. It was a useless measure, for the new Assemblies which were summoned in obedience to the charter were very similar to their predecessors. In the meantime, two regiments escorted by seven ships of war were sent to Boston to strengthen the Government. More energetic attempts were made to enforce the revenue laws, and several collisions took place. Thus the sloop ‘Liberty,’ belonging to Hancock, a leading merchant of the patriot party, arrived at Boston in June 1768, laden with wines from Madeira, and a Customhouse officer went on board to inspect the cargo. He was seized by the crew and detained for several hours while the cargo was landed, and a few pipes of wine were entered on oath at the Custom-house as if they had been the whole. On the liberation of the officer the vessel was seized for a false entry, and in order to prevent the possibility of a rescue it was removed from the wharf under the guns of a man-of-war. A great riot followed, and the Custom-house officers were obliged to fly to a ship of war, and afterwards to the barracks, for protection. 1 On another occasion a cargo of smuggled Madeira was ostentatiously carried through the streets of Boston with an escort of thirty or forty strong men armed with bludgeons, and the Custom-house officers were so intimidated that they did not dare to interfere. 2 At Newport an inhabitant of the town was killed in an affray with some midshipmen of a ship of war, 1 and a few months later a revenue cutter which was lying at the wharf was attacked and burnt. 2 At Providence, an active Custom-house officer was tarred and feathered. 3 Effigies of the new Commissioners were hung on the liberty tree at Boston. The Governor and other officials were insulted by the mob, and new non-importation engagements were largely subscribed.
The first troops from England arrived in Massachusetts between the dissolution of the old and the election of the new Assembly, but shortly before their arrival the inhabitants of Boston gathered together in an immense meeting and voted that a standing army could not be kept in the province without its consent. Much was said about Brutus, Cassius, Oliver Cromwell, and Paoli; the arms belonging to the town were brought out, and Otis declared that if an attempt was made against the liberties of the people they would be distributed. A day of prayer and fasting was appointed; a very significant resolution was carried by an immense majority, calling upon all the inhabitants to provide themselves with arms and ammunition, and no one was deceived by the transparent pretext that they might be wanted against the French. Open treason was freely talked, and many of the addresses to the Governor were models of grave and studied insolence.
These documents were chiefly composed by Samuel Adams, a very remarkable man who had now begun to exercise a dominant influence in Boston politics, and who was one of the chief authors of the American Revolution. He had an hereditary antipathy to the British Government, for his father seems to have been ruined by the restrictions the English Parliament imposed on the circulation of paper money, and a bank in which his father was largely concerned had been dissolved by Act of Parliament, leaving debts which seventeen years later were still unpaid. It appears that Hutchinson was a leading person in dissolving the bank. Samuel Adams had taken part in various occupations. He was at one time a small brewer and at another a tax-gatherer, but in the last capacity he entirely failed, for a large sum of money which ought to have passed into the Exchequer was not forthcoming. It seems, however, that no more serious charge could be substantiated against him than that of unbusiness-like habits and an insufficient stringency in levying the public dues; the best judges appear to have been fully convinced of his integrity in money matters, and it is strongly confirmed by the austere and simple tenor of his whole later life. 1
He early became one of the most active writers in the American Press, and was the soul of every agitation against the Government. It was noticed that he had a special skill in discovering young men of promise and brilliancy, and that, without himself possessing any dazzling qualities, he seldom failed by the force of his character and the intense energy of his convictions in obtaining an ascendency over their minds. It was only in 1765, when Adams was already forty-three, that he obtained a seat in the Assembly, where, with Otis and two or three others, he took a chief part in organising opposition to the Government. In the lax moral atmosphere of the eighteenth century he exhibited in perfection the fierce and sombre type of the seventeenth-century Covenanter. Poor, simple, ostentatiously austere and indomitably courageous, the blended influence of Calvinistic theology and of republican principles had permeated and indurated his whole character, and he carried into politics all the fervour of an apostle and all the narrowness of a sectarian. Hating with a fierce hatred, monarchy and the English Church, and all privileged classes and all who were invested with dignity and rank; utterly incapable of seeing any good thing in an opponent, or of accepting any form of political compromise, he advocated on all occasions the strongest measures, and appears to have been one of the first both to foresee and to desire an armed struggle. He had some literary talent, and his firm will and clearly defined principles gave him for a time a greater influence than abler men. He now maintained openly that any British troops which landed should be treated as enemies, attacked, and, if possible, destroyed. More moderate counsels prevailed; yet measures verging on revolution were adopted. As the Governor alone could summon or prorogue the Assembly, a convention was held at Boston when it was not sitting, to which almost every town and every district of the province sent its delegate, and it assumed all the semblance of a legislative body.
The Assembly itself, when it met, pronounced the establishment of a standing army in the colony in time of peace to be an invasion of natural rights and a violation of the Constitution, and it positively refused to provide quarters for the troops, on the ground that the barracks in an island three miles from the town, though within the municipal circle of Boston, were not yet full. The plea was ingenious and strictly legal, and the troops were accordingly quartered as well as paid at the expense of the Crown. The simple presence among the colonists of English soldiers was, however, now treated as an intolerable grievance; the regiments were absurdly called ‘an unlawful assembly,’ and they were invariably spoken of as if they were foreign invaders. The old distinction between internal and external taxation, the old acquiescence in commercial restrictions, and the old acknowledgment of the general legislative authority of Parliament, had completely disappeared from Boston politics. The treatise which, half a century earlier, Molyneux had written on the rights of the Irish Parliament now became a text-book in the colonies, and it was the received doctrine that they owed allegiance indeed to the King, but were wholly independent of the British Parliament. They scornfully repudiated at the same time the notion of maintaining like Ireland a military establishment for the general defence of the Empire. It is also remarkable that the project of a legislative union with Great Britain, which was at this time advocated by Pownall in England, was absolutely repudiated in America. Pownall wished the colonial Assemblies to continue, but to send representatives to the English Parliament, which would thus possess the right of taxing the colonists. But this scheme found no favour in America. It was pronounced impracticable and dangerous. It was said that the colonial representatives would speedily be corrupted, that the colonists could never hope to obtain a representation adequate to their importance, and that inadequate representation was even a greater grievance than taxation without representation. Bernard now strongly advocated the permanent admission of American representatives into the British Parliament as the only possible solution, but he acknowledged that the idea was unpopular, and he alleged that the true reason was that if the colonies were represented in Parliament they could have no pretext for disobeying it. 1 It was evident that every path of compromise was closing, and that disaffection was steadily rising to the height of revolution. Foreign observers saw that the catastrophe was fast approaching, and Choiseul noticed that the English had no cavalry and scarcely 10,000 infantry in America, while the colonial militia numbered 400,000 men, including several cavalry regiments. It was not difficult, he concluded, to predict that if America could only find a Cromwell she would speedily cease to form a part of the British Empire. 1
For the present, except a few revenue riots, resistance was purely passive. The Massachusetts Assembly petitioned for the removal of the troops and for the removal of the Governor. Acute lawyers contested every legal point that could possibly be raised against the Government. The grand juries being elected by the townships were wholly on the side of the people, and they systematically refused to present persons guilty of libel, riot, or sedition. Non-importation agreements spread rapidly from town to town, and had a serious effect upon English commerce. The troops had little to do as there was no open resistance, but they found themselves treated as pariahs and excluded from every kind of society, and they had even much difficulty in procuring the necessaries of life.
The English Parliament in December 1768 and January 1769 greatly aggravated the contest. Both Houses passed resolutions condemning the disloyal spirit of Massachusetts, the non-importation agreements, and the Boston convention; and addresses were carried thanking the Sovereign for the measures he had taken to maintain the authority of England; promising a full support to future measures taken with that end, and suggesting that the names of the most active agitators should be transmitted to one of the Secretaries of State, and that a long disused law of Henry VIII. which empowered the Governor to bring to England for trial, persons accused of treason outside England, should be put in force. 1 This last measure was due to the Duke of Bedford, and although it was certainly not unprovoked, it excited a fierce and legitimate indignation in America, and added a new and very serious item to the long list of colonial grievances. Already, the colonial advocates were accustomed to say, a Parliament in which the colonies were wholly unrepresented, claimed an absolute power of restricting their commerce, of taxing them, and even, as in the case of New York, or suspending their legislative assemblies. British troops were planted among them to coerce them. Their governors and judges were to be made independent of their Assemblies, and now the protection of a native jury, which alone remained, was to be destroyed. By virtue of an obsolete law, passed in one of the darkest periods of English history and at a time when England possessed not a single colony, any colonist who was designated by the Governor as a traitor might be carried three thousand miles from his home, from his witnesses, from the scene of his alleged crime, from all those who were acquainted with the general tenor of his life, to be tried by strangers of the very nation which he was supposed to have offended. Combine all these measures, it was said, and what trace of political freedom would be left in the colonies?
This measure was apparently intended only to intimidate the more violent agitators, and it was never put in action. The Cabinet were much divided about their American policy, and signs of weakness speedily appeared. Townshend's Act had brought America to the verge of revolution, and had entailed great expense on the country, but it had hitherto produced no appreciable revenue, and there was little or no prospect of improvement. It was stated that the total produce of the new taxes for the first year was less than 16,000 l ., that the net proceeds of the Crown revenue in America were only about 295 l ., and that extraordinary military expenses amounting to 170,000 l . had in the same period been incurred. 1 Pownall, who had preceded Bernard as Governor of Massachusetts, strongly urged in Parliament the repeal of the new duties, and a considerable section of the Cabinet supported his view. After much discussion it was resolved to adopt a policy of compromise 2 —to repeal the duties on glass, paper, and painters' colours, and to retain that on tea for the purpose of keeping up the right. Less than 300 l . had hitherto been obtained by this charge; but the King, the Bedford section of the Cabinet, and Lord North determined, in opposition to Grafton and Camden, to retain it, and they carried their point in the Cabinet by a majority of one vote. A circular intimating the intention of the Government was despatched in the course of 1769 to the governors of the different colonies, and in this circular Lord Hillsborough officially informed them that the Cabinet ‘entertained no design to propose to Parliament to lay any further taxes on America for the purpose of raising a revenue.’ 3 Governor Bernard, whose relations with the Assembly and Council of Massachusetts had long been as hostile as possible, was rewarded for his services to the Crown by a baronetcy, but in the August of 1769 he was recalled to England amid a storm of insult and rejoicing from the people he had governed; and after about a year, Hutchinson, who, though equally devoted to the Government, was somewhat less unpopular with the colonists, was promoted to the ungrateful post. Some slight signs of improvement were visible. New York submitted to the Mutiny Act, and its Assembly accordingly regained its normal powers. The non-importation agreements had for some time been very imperfectly observed, and it was soon noticed that a good deal of tea was imported in small quantities, and that the port duty was paid without difficulty. 1
Hitherto, though the townspeople of Boston had done everything in their power to provoke and irritate the soldiers who were quartered among them, there had been no serious collision. The condition of the town, however, was such that it was scarcely possible that any severity of discipline could long avert it. There was a perfect reign of terror directed against all who supported the revenue Acts and who sympathised with authority. Soldiers could scarcely appear in the streets without being the objects of the grossest insult. A Press eminently scurrilous and vindictive was ceaselessly employed in abusing them: they had become, as Samuel Adams boasted, ‘the objects of the contempt even of women and children.’ Every offence they committed was maliciously exaggerated and vindictively prosecuted, while in the absence of martial law they were obliged to look passively on the most flagrant insults to authority. At one time the ‘sons of liberty’ in a procession a mile and a half long marched round the State House to commemorate their riots against the Stamp Act, and met in the open fields to chant their liberty song and drink ‘strong halters, firm blocks, and sharp axes to such as deserve them.’ At another an informer who was found guilty of giving information to revenue officers was seized by a great multitude, tarred and feathered, and led through the streets of Boston, which were illuminated in honour of the achievement. A printer who had dared to caricature the champions of freedom was obliged to fly from his house, to take refuge among the soldiers, and ultimately to escape from Boston in disguise. Merchants who had ventured to import goods from England were compelled by mob violence to give them up to be destroyed or to be re-embarked. A shopkeeper who sold some English goods found a post planted in the ground with a hand pointing to his door, and when a friend tried to remove it he was stoned by a fierce mob through the streets. A popular minister delighted his congregation by publicly praying that the Almighty would remove from Boston the English soldiers. It was said that they corrupted the morals of the town, that their drums and fifes were heard upon the Sabbath-day, that their language was often violent, threatening, or profane, that on several occasions they had struck citizens who insulted them. 1 On March 2, 1770, there was a scuffle at a ropewalk between some soldiers and the rope-makers, and on the night of the 5th there occurred the tragedy which, in the somewhat grandiloquent phrase of John Adams, ‘laid the foundation of American independence.’ A false alarm of fire had called a crowd into the streets, and a mob of boys and men amused themselves by surrounding and insulting a solitary sentinel who was on guard before one of the public buildings. He called for rescue, and a party consisting of a corporal and six common soldiers, under the command of Captain Preston, appeared with loaded muskets upon the scene. The mob, however, refused to give way. Some forty or fifty men—many of them armed with sticks—surrounded the little band of soldiers, shouting, ‘Rascals, lobsters, bloody backs!’ 1 and defying them to use their arms. They soon proceeded to violence. Snowballs and, according to some testimony, stones were thrown. The crowd pressed violently on the soldiers, and it was afterwards alleged that one of the soldiers was struck by a club. Whether it was panic or resentment, or the mere necessity of self-defence, was never clearly established, but a soldier fired, and in another moment seven muskets, each loaded with two balls, were discharged with deadly effect into the crowd. Five men fell dead or dying, and six others were wounded.
There are many dreadful massacres recorded in the page of history—the massacre of the Danes by the Saxons, the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, the massacre of St. Bartholomew—but it may be questioned whether any of them had produced such torrents of indignant eloquence as the affray which I have described. The ‘Boston massacre,’ or, as the Americans, desiring to distinguish it from the minor tragedies of history, loved to call it, ‘The bloody massacre,’ at once kindled the colonies into a flame. The terrible tale of how the bloody and brutal myrmidons of England had shot down the inoffensive citizens in the streets of Boston raised an indignation which was never suffered to flag. In Boston, as soon as the tidings of the tragedy were spread abroad, the church bells rang, the drums beat to call the people to arms, and next day an immense meeting of the citizens resolved that the soldiers must no longer remain in the town. Samuel Adams and the other leading agitators, as the representatives of the people, rushed into the presence of Hutchinson, and rather commanded than asked for their removal. Hutchinson hesitated much. He was not yet governor. Bernard was in England. Hutchinson had himself asked for the troops to be sent to Boston. He knew that their removal would, under the circumstances, be a great humiliation to the Government and a great encouragement to the mob, and that if once removed it would be extremely difficult to recall them. On the other hand, if they remained it was only too probable that in a few hours the streets of Boston would run with blood. He consulted the council, and found it as usual an echo of the public voice. He yielded at last, and the troops were removed to Fort William, on an island three miles from Boston, and the wish of the townsmen was thus at last accomplished. An immense crowd accompanied the bodies of the ‘martyred’ citizens to their last resting-place. An annual celebration was at once resolved upon, and for several years the citizens were accustomed on every anniversary to meet in the chief towns of America in chapels hung with crape, while the most popular orators described the horrors of the Boston massacre, the tyranny of England, and the ferocious character of standing armies. 1
Few things contributed more to the American Revolution than this unfortunate affray. Skilful agitators perceived the advantage it gave them, and the most fantastic exaggerations were dexterously diffused. The incident had, however, a sequel which is extremely creditable to the American people. It was determined to try the soldiers for their fives, and public feeling ran so fiercely against them that it seemed as if their fate was sealed. The trial, however, was delayed for seven months, till the excitement had in some degree subsided. Captain Preston very judiciously appealed to John Adams, who was rapidly rising to the first place both among the lawyers and the popular patriots of Boston, to undertake his defence. Adams knew well how much he was risking by espousing so unpopular a cause, but he knew also his professional duty, and, though violently opposed to the British Government, he was an eminently honest, brave, and humane man. In conjunction with Josiah Quincy, a young lawyer who was also of the patriotic party, he undertook the invidious task, and he discharged it with consummate ability. It was clearly shown that the popular account which had been printed in Boston and circulated assiduously through the colonies, representing the affair as a deliberate and premeditated massacre of unoffending citizens, was grossly untrue. As was natural in the case of a confused scuffle in the dark, there was much conflict of testimony about the exact circumstances of the affair, but there was no sufficient evidence that Captain Preston had given an order to fire; and although no soldier was seriously injured, there was abundant evidence that the soldiers had endured gross provocation and some violence. If the trial had been the prosecution of a smuggler or a seditious writer, the jury would probably have decided against evidence, but they had no disposition to shed innocent blood. Judges, counsel, and jurymen acted bravely and honourably. All the soldiers were acquitted, except two, who were found guilty of manslaughter, and who escaped with very slight punishment.
It is very remarkable that after Adams had accepted the task of defending the incriminated soldiers, he was elected by the people of Boston as their representative in the Assembly, and the public opinion of the province appears to have fully acquiesced in the verdict. 1 In truth, although no people have indulged more largely than the Americans in violent, reckless, and unscrupulous language, no people have at every period of their history been more signally free from the thirst for blood, which in moments of great political excitement has been often shown both in England and France. It is a characteristic fact that one of the first protests against the excessive multiplication of capital offences in the English legislation of the eighteenth century was made by the Assembly of Massachusetts, which in 1762 objected to death as a punishment for forgery on the ground that ‘the House are very averse to capital punishment in any case where the interest of the Government does not absolutely require it,’ and where some other punishment will be sufficiently deterrent. 2 In the long period of anarchy, riot, and excitement which preceded the American Revolution there was scarcely any bloodshed and no political assassination, and the essential humanity of American public opinion which was shown so conspicuously during the trial of the soldiers at Boston, was afterwards displayed on a far wider field and in still more trying circumstances during the fierce passions of the revolutionary war, and still more remarkably in the triumph of the North in the War of Secession.
While these things were taking place in America, Lord North carried through Parliament his measure repealing all the duties imposed by Townshend's Act, with the exception of that on tea, 1 which he maintained in spite of a very able opposition led by Pownall. His defence of the distinction was by no means destitute of plausibility or even of real force. The other duties, he said, were imposed on articles of English manufacture imported into America, and such duties were both unprecedented and economically inexpedient, as calculated to injure English industry. The duty on tea, however, was of another kind, and it was in perfect accordance with commercial precedents. The Americans had themselves drawn a broad distinction between external and internal taxation. No less than thirty-two Acts binding their trade had been imposed and submitted to, and the power of Parliament to impose port duties had, till the last two years, been unquestioned. 2 Whatever might be said of the Stamp Act, the tea duty was certainly not a grievance to America, for Parliament had relieved the colonies of a duty of nearly 12 d , in the pound, which had hitherto been levied in England, and the colonists were only asked in compensation to pay a duty of 3 d . in the pound on the arrival of the tea in America. The measure was, therefore, not an act of oppression but of relief, making the price of tea in the colonies positively cheaper than it had been before. 1 It was coupled with the circular of Lord Hillsborough pledging the English Government to raise no further revenue from America. At the same time the quartering Act, which had been so much objected to, was allowed silently to expire. 2
It will probably strike the reader that every argument which showed that the tea duty was not a grievance to the colonies, was equally powerful to show that it was perfectly useless as a means of obtaining a revenue from them. It would be difficult, indeed, to find a more curious instance of legislative incapacity than the whole transaction displayed. The repeal of the greater part of Townshend's Act had given the agitators in America a signal triumph; the maintenance of the tea duty for the avowed purpose of obtaining a colonial revenue left them their old pretext for agitation, and at the same time that duty could not possibly attain the end for which it was ostensibly intended, and the Government by the circular of Lord Hillsborough had precluded themselves from increasing it. Hutchinson, whose judgment of American opinion is entitled to the highest respect, has expressed his firm conviction that the Government might have raised the whole revenue they expected from Townshend's Act without the smallest difficulty, if they had simply adopted the expedient of levying the duty on goods exported to America in England instead of in the colonies. 3
The object of maintaining the tea duty was, of course, to assert the right of Parliament to impose port duties, and this assertion was thought necessary on account of the recent conduct and language of the Americans. 1 At the same time North, like Grenville, continually maintained that the plan of obliging America to pay for her own army might have been easily and peaceably carried out had the condition of English parties rendered possible any steady, systematic, and united policy. It was the changes, vacillation, divisions, and weaknesses of English ministries, the utter disintegration of English parties, the rapid alternations of severity and indulgence, the existence in Parliament of a powerful section who had at every step of the struggle actively supported the Americans and encouraged them to resist, the existence outside Parliament of a still more democratic party mainly occupied with political agitation—it was these things which had chiefly lured the colonies to their present state of anarchy, had rendered all resistance to authority a popular thing, and had introduced the habit of questioning the validity of Acts of Parliament. The evil, however, was accomplished. The plan of making America pay for her defence was virtually abandoned, and the ministers were only trying feebly and ineffectively to uphold the doctrine of the Declaratory Act, that Parliament had a right to draw a revenue from America, by maintaining a duty which was in full accordance with American precedents and which was a positive boon to the American people.
The policy was not quite unsuccessful. The nonimportation agreements had lately been so formidable that the English exports to America, which amounted to 2,378,000 l . in 1768, amounted only to 1,634,000 l . in 1769; 1 but the merchants in the colonies, after some hesitation, now resolved to abandon these agreements, and commerce with England resumed its old activity. An exception, however, was still made in the case of tea, and associations were formed binding all classes to abstain from that beverage, or at least to drink only what was smuggled. The next two or three years of colonial history were somewhat less eventful, though it was evident that the spirit of insubordination and anarchy was extending. In North Carolina, in 1771, some 1,500 men, complaining of extortions and oppressions of their local courts, rose to arms, and refused to pay taxes, and the colony was rapidly dividing into a civil war. The Governor, however, at the head of rather more than 1,000 militia, completely defeated the insurgents in a pitched battle. Some hundreds were killed or wounded, and six were afterwards hanged for high treason. In Massachusetts the troops were not again brought into Boston, but Castle William, which commanded the harbour, and to which the Boston patriots had once been so anxious to relegate them, was placed under martial law, and the provincial garrison was withdrawn. There were long and acrimonious disputes between Hutchinson and the Massachusetts Assembly about the right of the former to convene the Assembly at Cambridge instead of Boston; about the extent to which the salaries of Crown officers should be exempted from taxation; about the refusal of the Governor to ratify the grant of certain sums of money to the colonial agents in England. In 1772, Hutchinson, to the great indignation of the colony, informed the Assembly that, as his salary would henceforth be paid by the Crown, no appropriation would be required for that purpose. Otis, who had long been the most fiery of the Boston demagogues, had now nearly lost his intellect as well as his influence; and John Adams, who was a far abler man, had for a time retired from agitation, and devoted himself to his profession. Samuel Adams, however, still retained his influence in the Assembly, and he was unwearied in his efforts to excite ill feeling against England, and to push the colony into rebellion.
In Rhode Island a revenue outrage of more than common daring took place. A ship of war, called the ‘Gaspee,’ commanded by Lieutenant Duddingston, and carrying eight guns, was employed under the royal commission in enforcing the revenue Acts along the coast, and the commander is said to have discharged his duty with a zeal that often outran both discretion and law. He stopped and searched every ship that entered Narraganset Bay; compelled all ships to salute his flag; sent a captured cargo of smuggled rum, contrary to law, out of the colony to Boston on the ground that it could not be safely detained in Newport; seized more than one vessel upon insufficient evidence; searched for smuggled goods with what was considered unnecessary violence, and made himself extremely obnoxious to the colony, in which smuggling was one of the most flourishing and most popular of trades. The Chief Justice gave an opinion that the commander of one of his Majesty's ships could exercise no authority in the colony without having previously applied to the Governor, and shown him his warrant. Duddingston appealed to the Admiral at Boston, who fully justified his conduct, and an angry altercation ensued between the civil and naval authorities. On June 9, 1772, the ‘Gaspee,’ when chasing a suspected vessel, ran aground on a shoal in the river some miles from Providence, and the ship which had escaped brought the news to that town. Soon after a drum was beat through the streets, and all persons who were disposed to assist in the destruction of the King's ship were summoned to meet at the house of a prominent citizen. There appears to have been no concealment or disguise, and shortly after ten at night eight boats, full of armed men, started with muffled oars on the expedition. They reached the stranded vessel in the deep darkness of the early morning. Twice the sentinel on board vainly hailed them, when Duddingston himself appeared in his shirt upon the gunwale and asked who it was that approached. The leader of the party answered with a profusion of oaths that he was the sheriff of the county come to arrest him, and while he was speaking one of his men deliberately shot the lieutenant, who fell badly wounded on the deck. In another minute the ‘Gaspee’ was boarded. The crew were soon overpowered, bound, and placed upon the shore. Duddingston, his wounds having been dressed, was landed at a neighbouring house; the party then set fire to the ‘Gaspee’ and while its flames announced to the whole country the success of their expedition, they returned in the broad daylight to Providence. Large rewards were offered by the British Government for their detection; but, though they were universally known, no evidence could be obtained, and the outrage was entirely unpunished. 1 An American historian complains that this event, though due to a mere ‘sudden impulse,’ inspired at least one English statesman with a deep hostility to the charter of the colony, according to which Governor, Assembly, and Council were all elected directly by the people. 1
It is a curious coincidence that, just before this outrage took place, the British Parliament had passed an Act for the protection of his Majesty's ships, dockyards, and naval stores, by which their destruction was made a felony, and the ministry were empowered, if they pleased, to try those who were accused of such acts in England. 2 This law, though it applied to the colonies, was not made with any special reference to them, but it became one of their great grievances. Perhaps the state of feeling disclosed in the town of Providence at the time of the destruction of the ‘Gaspee,’ may be regarded as the strongest argument in its defence.
A considerable step towards uniting the colonies was taken in this year and in 1773 by the appointment in Massachusetts, Virginia, and some other colonies of committees specially charged with the task of collecting and publishing colonial grievances, maintaining a correspondence between the different provinces, and procuring authentic intelligence of all the acts of the British Parliament or Ministry relating to them. In England they were already represented by agents of great ability, the most prominent being Benjamin Franklin, who at this time possessed a greater reputation than any other living American.
He was born in 1706, and was therefore now in the decline of life. A younger son in a large and poor family, ill treated by his elder brother, and little favoured by casual good fortune, he had risen by his own energies from a humble journeyman printer at Boston and Philadelphia to a foremost place among his countrymen; and he enjoyed a reputation which the lapse of a century has scarcely dimmed. Franklin is, indeed, one of the very small class of men who can be said to have added something of real value to the art of living. Very few writers have left so many profound and original observations on the causes of success in life, and on the best means of cultivating the intellect and the character. To extract from surrounding circumstances the largest possible amount of comfort and rational enjoyment, was the ideal he placed before himself and others, and he brought to its attainment one of the shrewdest and most inventive of human intellects, one of the calmest and best balanced of human characters. ‘It is hard,’ he once wrote, ‘for an empty sack to stand upright;’ and it was his leading principle that a certain amount of material prosperity is the almost indispensable condition as well as the chief reward of integrity of character. He had no religious fervour, and no sympathy with those who appeal to strong passions or heroic self-abnegation; but his busy and somewhat pedestrian intellect was ceaselessly employed in devising useful schemes for the benefit of mankind. He founded societies for mutual improvement, established the first circulating library in America, introduced new methods for extinguishing fires, warming rooms, paving and lighting the streets, gave a great impulse to education in Pennsylvania, took part in many schemes for strengthening the defences and improving the police of the colony, and was the soul of more than one enterprise of public charity. ‘Poor Richard's Almanac,’ which he began in 1732, and which he continued for twenty-five years, attained an annual circulation of near 10,000, and he made it a vehicle for diffusing through the colonies a vast amount of practical knowledge and homely wisdom.
His brother printed the fourth newspaper which ever appeared in America, and Franklin wrote in it when still a boy. He had afterwards a newspaper of his own, and there were few questions of local politics in which he did not take an active part. He was very ambitious of literary success, and within certain limits he has rarely been surpassed. How completely blind he was to the sublime and the poetical in literature, he indeed conclusively showed when he tried to improve the majestic language of the Book of Job or the Lord's Prayer by translating them into ordinary eighteenth-century phraseology; but on his own subjects no one wrote better. His style was always terse, luminous, simple, pregnant with meaning, eminently persuasive. There is scarcely an obscure or involved or superfluous sentence, scarcely an ambiguous term in his works, and not a trace of that false and inflated rhetoric which has spoilt much American writing, and from which the addresses of Washington himself are not quite free. He was a most skilful and plausible reasoner, abounding in ingenious illustration, and with a happy gift of carrying into difficult and intricate subjects that transparent simplicity of style which is, perhaps, the highest reach of art. At the same time his researches and writings on electricity gave him a wide reputation in the scientific world, and in 1752 his great discovery of the lightning conductor made his name universally known through Europe. It was indeed pre-eminently fitted to strike the imagination; and it was a strange freak of fortune that one of the most sublime and poetic of scientific discoveries should have fallen to the lot of one of the most prosaic of great men.
In every phase of the struggle with England he took a prominent part; and it may be safely asserted that if he had been able to guide American opinion, it would never have ended in revolution. During a great portion of the struggle he always professed a warm attachment for England and the English Constitution. In conversation with Burke he expressed the greatest concern at the impending separation of the two countries; predicted that ‘America would never again see such happy days as she had passed under the protection of England, and observed that ours was the only instance of a great empire in which the most distant parts and members had been as well governed as the metropolis and its vicinage.’ 1 A man so eminently wise and temperate must have clearly seen that colonies situated 3,000 miles from the mother country, doubling their population every twenty-five years, possessing representative institutions of the freest and most democratic type, and inhabited by a people who, from their circumstances and their religion, carried the sentiment of independence to the highest point, were never in any real danger of political servitude, and that there was no difference between America and England which reasonable men might not easily have compromised. Personally, no one had less sympathy than Franklin with anarchy, violence, and declamation, and in some respects his natural leaning was towards the Tories. It is remarkable that when he was in England at the time of the Middlesex election, his sympathies ran strongly against Wilkes, he spoke with indignation of the punishment that must await a people ‘who are ungratefully abusing the best Constitution and the best King any nation was ever blessed with;’ 2 and he fully adopted the Tory maxim that the whole political power of a nation belongs of right to the freeholders. 3 He held under the Government the position of Postmaster-General for America. He was once thought of as Under-Secretary of State for the colonies under Lord Hillsborough, and his son was royal Governor of New Jersey.
His writings are full of suggestions which, if they had been acted on, might have averted the disruption. As we have already seen, he had advocated an union of the colonies for defensive purposes as early as 1754, and in 1764 had regarded with great equanimity, and even approval, the possible establishment of an English army in America, paid for by duties imposed on the colonies. He opposed the Stamp Act; but it is quite evident, from his conduct, that he neither expected nor desired that it should be resisted. In one of his writings, he very wisely suggested that England should give up her trade monopoly, and that America should in return agree to pay a fixed annual sum for the military purposes of the Empire. In another, he advocated a legislative union, which would have enabled the English Parliament, without injustice, to tax America. He strongly maintained the reality of the distinction between internal and external taxation, and asserted with great truth that ‘the real grievance is not that Britain puts duties upon her own manufactures exported to us, but that she forbids us to buy like manufactures from any other country.’
He was Agent for Pennsylvania at the time of the Stamp Act, and, in his examination soon after, before the House of Commons, he defended the colonial cause with an ability, a presence of mind, and a moderation that produced a great impression upon Parliament. His many tracts in defence of their cause, though they are very far from a fair or candid statement even of the facts of the case, were undoubtedly the ablest and most plausible arguments advanced on the American side. In 1767 he mentioned the assiduity with which the French ambassador was courting him, and he added: ‘I fancy that intriguing nation would like very well to meddle on occasion and blow up the coals between Britain and her colonies; but I hope we shall give them no opportunity.’ 1 In his confidential correspondence with American politicians, he constantly advocated moderation and patience. ‘Our great security,’ he wrote in 1773, ‘lies in our growing strength both in numbers and wealth, that creates an increasing ability of assisting this nation in its wars, which will make us more respectable, our friendship more valued, and our enmity feared. … In confidence of this coming change in our favour, I think our prudence is, meanwhile, to be quiet, only holding up our rights and claims on all occasions … but bearing patiently the little present notice that is taken of them. They will all have their weight in time, and that time is at no great distance.’ 2 ‘There seems to be among us some violent spirits who are for an immediate rupture; but I trust the general prudence of our country will see that by our growing strength we advance fast to a situation in which our claims must be allowed; that by a premature struggle we may be crippled and kept down another age … that between governed and governing every mistake in government, every encroachment on right, is not worth a rebellion … remembering withal that this Protestant country (our mother, though lately an unkind one) is worth preserving, and that her weight in the scale of Europe, and her safety in a great degree, may depend on our union with her.’ 3
In addition to his position of Agent for Pennsylvania, he became Agent for New Jersey, for Georgia, and in 1770 for Massachusetts. His relations, however, with the latter colony were not always absolutely cordial. His religious scepticism, his known hatred of war, his personal relations to the British Government, his dislike to violent counsels, and to that exaggerated and declamatory rhetoric which was peculiarly popular at Boston, all placed him somewhat out of harmony with his constituents; and although they were justly proud of his European reputation, even this was sometimes a cause of suspicion. They felt that he, and he alone, of living Americans, by his own unassisted merit, had won a great position in England, and they doubted whether he could be as devoted to their cause as men whose reputation was purely provincial. In 1771, Arthur Lee, of Virginia, who was fully identified with the extreme party, was appointed his colleague, and there were several other symptoms that Franklin was looked on with some distrust. The suspicions of his sincerity were, however, wholly groundless. His heart was warmly in the American cause, and although he would have gladly moderated the policy of his countrymen, he was by no means disposed to suffer himself to be stranded and distanced. His views became more extensive, and his language more emphatic; he now maintained with great ability the position that the colonies, like Hanover, or like Scotland before the Union, though they were subject to the English king, were wholly independent of the British Legislature; and in 1773 he was concerned in a transaction which placed him at open war with English opinion.
It had been for a long time the habit of Hutchinson, the Governor-General of Massachusetts; of Oliver, who was now Lieutenant-Governor; and of some other politicians of the province who were attached to the Crown, to carry on a strictly private and confidential correspondence about the state of the colonies with Whately, who had formerly been private secretary to George Grenville. In June 1772 Whately died, and in December, by some person and some means that have never been certainly disclosed, the letters of his American correspondents were stolen and carried to Franklin. The letters of Hutchinson had, with one exception, been written before his appointment as Governor, but at a time when he held high office in the colony, and they were written with the perfect freedom of confidential intercourse. Whately, though peculiarly conversant with colonial matters, held at this time no office under the Crown, and was a simple member of the Opposition. Hutchinson, in writing to him, dilated upon the turbulent and rebellious disposition of Boston, the factious character of the local agitators, the weakness of the Executive, the necessity of a military force to support the Government, and the excessive predominance of the democratic element in the constitution of Massachusetts. ‘I never think,’ he wrote in the letter which was afterwards most violently attacked, ‘of the measures necessary for the peace and good order of the colonies without pain. There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. … I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3,000 miles distant from the parent State shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent State. … I wish the good of the colony when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connection with the parent State should be broken, for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.’ Oliver argued with more detail that the Council or Upper Chamber should consist exclusively of landed proprietors, that the Crown officers should have salaries independent of popular favour, that the popular election of grand juries should be abolished, and that there should be a colonial representation in the English Parliament. All this appears to have been most honestly written, but it was written without the reserve and the caution which would have been maintained in letters intended to be published. Both Hutchinson and Oliver impressed on their correspondent their desire that these letters should be deemed strictly confidential.xs 1 They were brought to Franklin as political information for his perusal. He at once perceived the advantage they would give to the popular party, and he asked and obtained permission to send them to Massachusetts on condition that they should not be printed or copied; that they should be shown only to a few of the leading people, that they should be eventually returned, and that the source from which they were obtained should be concealed.
The letters were accordingly sent to Thomas Cushing, the Speaker of the Assembly of Massachusetts, and, as might have been expected, they soon created a general ferment. As Franklin acutely wrote, ‘there was no restraint proposed to talking of them, but only to copying.’ They were shown to many of the leading agitators. John Adams was suffered to take them with him on his judicial circuit, and they were finally brought before the Assembly in a secret sitting. The Assembly at once carried resolutions censuring them as designed to sow discord and encourage the oppressive acts of the British Government, to introduce arbitrary power into the province and subvert its constitution, and with the concurrence of the Council it petitioned the King to remove Hutchinson and Oliver from the Government. The letters were soon generally known. The sole obstacle to their diffusion was the promise that they should not be copied or printed, and it was not likely that this would be observed. According to one account, 1 copies were produced which were falsely said to have come by the last mail from England, and which were therefore not included under the original promise. According to another account, 2 Hancock, one of the leading patriots, took ‘advantage of the implied permission of Hutchinson’ to have copies made. Hutchinson had indeed been challenged with the letters, and been asked for copies of them and of such others as he should think proper to communicate. After some delay, he answered evasively, ‘If you desire copies with a view to make them public, the originals are more proper for the purpose than the copies,’ and this sentence appears to have been considered a sufficient authorisation. The letters were accordingly printed and scattered broadcast over the colonies.
When the printed copies arrived in England, they excited great astonishment, and William Whately, the brother and executor of the late Secretary, was filled with a very natural consternation at a theft which was likely to have such important consequences, and for which public opinion was inclined to make him responsible. He, in his turn, suspected a certain Mr. Temple, who had been allowed to look through the papers of his deceased brother, for the purpose of perusing one relating to the colonies, and a duel ensued, in which Whately was wounded. Franklin then, for the first time, in a letter to a newspaper, disclosed the part he had taken. He stated that he, and he alone, had obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question, that they had never passed into the hands of William Whately, and that it was therefore impossible either that Whately could have communicated them or that Temple could have taken them from his papers. There is some reason to believe that the original owner had left them carelessly in a public office, from whence they had been abstracted, but the mystery was never decisively solved.
Franklin always maintained that in this matter he had simply done his duty, and that his conduct was perfectly honourable. The letters, he said, ‘were written by public officers to persons in public stations, on public affairs, and intended to procure public measures.’ They were brought to him as the Agent for Massachusetts, and it was his duty as such to communicate to his constituents intelligence that was of such vital importance to their affairs. He even urged, more ingeniously than plausibly, that he was animated by a virtuous desire to lessen the breach between England and the colonies. Like most Americans, he said, he had viewed with indignation the coercive measures which emanated, as he supposed, from the British Government, but his feelings were much changed when it was proved that their real origin might be traced to Americans holding high offices in their native country. It was to convince him of this truth that the letters had been originally brought to him. It was to spread a similar conviction among his countrymen that he had sent them across the Atlantic. With more force his apologists have urged that the sanctity of private correspondence was not then regarded as it is regarded now, and that the Government itself continually tampered with it for political purposes. 1 In 1766 the Duke of Bedford discovered, to his great indignation, that a letter which he had written to the Duke of Grafton had been opened; and among the items of secret-service money during the administration of Grenville was a sum to a Post Office official ‘for engraving the many seals we are obliged to make use of.’ 2 If Government was not ashamed to resort to such methods, was it reasonable to expect that an agent who was endeavouring in a hostile country and against overwhelming obstacles to maintain the interests of his colony would be more scrupulous? Letters of Franklin himself, written to the colony, had been opened, and their contents had been employed for political purposes. Hutchinson had been concerned in this proceeding, and could therefore hardly complain that his own weapons were turned against himself. 1
These considerations, no doubt, palliate the conduct of Franklin. Whether they do more than palliate it, must be left to the judgment of the reader. In England that conduct was judged with the utmost severity. For the purpose of ruining honourable officials, it was said, their most confidential letters, written several years before to a private Member of Parliament who had at that time no connection with the Government, had been deliberately stolen; and although the original thief was undiscovered, the full weight of the guilt and of the dishonour rested upon Franklin. He was perfectly aware that the letters had been written in the strictest confidence, that they had been dishonestly obtained without the knowledge either of the person who received them or of the persons who wrote them, and that their exposure would be a deadly injury to the writers. Under these circumstances he procured them. Under these circumstances he sent them to a small group of politicians whom he knew to be the bitterest enemies of the Governor, and one of the consequences of his conduct was a duel in which the brother of the man whose private papers had been stolen was nearly killed. Any man of high and sensitive honour, it was said, would sooner have put his hand in the fire than have been concerned in such a transaction. When the petition for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver arrived, the Government referred it to the Committee of the Privy Council, that the allegations might be publicly examined with counsel on either side, and the case excited an interest which had been rarely paralleled. No less than thirty-five Privy Councillors attended. Among the distinguished strangers who crowded the Bar were Burke, Priestley, and Jeremy Bentham. Dunning and Lee, who spoke for the petitioners, appear to have made no impression; while on the other side, Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General, made one of his most brilliant but most virulent speeches. After a brief but eloquent eulogy of the character and services of Hutchinson, he passed to the manner in which the letters were procured, and turning to Franklin, who stood before him, he delivered an invective which appears to have electrified his audience. ‘How the letters came into the possession of anyone but the right owners,’ he said, ‘is still a mystery for Dr. Franklin to explain. He was not the rightful owner, and they could not have come into his hands by fair means. Nothing will acquit Dr. Franklin of the charge of obtaining them by fraudulent or corrupt means for the most malignant of purposes, unless he stole them from the person who stole them. I hope, my Lords, you will brand this man for the honour of this country, of Europe, and of mankind. … Into what country will the fabricator of this iniquity hereafter go with unembarrassed face? Men will watch him with a jealous eye. They will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. Having hitherto aspired after fame by his writings, he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters— homo trium literarum. 1 But he not only took away those papers from one brother—he kept himself concealed till he nearly occasioned the murder of another. It is impossible to read his account, expressive of the coolest and most deliberate malice, without horror. Amid these tragical events, of one person nearly murdered, of another answerable for the issue, of a worthy Governor hurt in his dearest interests, the fate of America in suspense—here is a man who, with the utmost insensibility of remorse, stands up and avows himself the author of all. I can compare him only to Zanga in Dr. Young's “Revenge”:
I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed by poetic fiction only to the bloody African, is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy of the wily American?’
The scene was a very strange one, and it is well suited to the brush of an historical painter. Franklin was now an old man of sixty-seven, the greatest writer, the greatest philosopher America had produced, a member of some of the chief scientific societies in Europe, the accredited representative of the most important of the colonies of America, and for nearly an hour and in the midst of the most distinguished of living Englishmen he was compelled to hear himself denounced as a thief or the accomplice of thieves. He stood there conspicuous and erect, and without moving a muscle, amid the torrent of invective, but his apparent composure was shared by few who were about him. With the single exception of Lord North, the Privy Councillors who were present lost all dignity and all self-respect. They laughed aloud at each sarcastic sally of Wedderburn. ‘The indecency of their behaviour,’ in the words of Shelburne, ‘exceeded, as is agreed on all hands, that of any committee of elections;’ and Fox, in a speech which he made as late as 1803, reminded the House how on that memorable occasion ‘all men tossed up their hats and clapped their hands in boundless delight at Mr. Wedderburn's speech.’ The Committee at once voted that the petition of the Massachusetts Assembly was ‘false, groundless, and scandalous, and calculated only for the seditious purpose of keeping up a spirit of clamour and discontent in the province.’ The King in Council confirmed the report, and Franklin was ignominiously dismissed from his office of Postmaster. It was an office which had yielded no revenue before he had received it, but which his admirable organisation had made lucrative and important. The colonists accepted the insults directed against their great representative as directed against themselves, 1 and from this time the most sagacious of American leaders had a deep personal grudge against the British Government. 2
In the meantime a serious attempt was made to make the tea duty a reality. About seventeen million pounds of tea lay unsold in the warehouses of the East India Company. The Company was at this time in extreme financial embarrassment, almost amounting to bankruptcy, and in order to assist it the whole duty which had formerly been imposed on the exportation to America was remitted. 3 Hitherto the Company had been obliged to send their tea to England, where it was sold by public sale to merchants and dealers, and by them exported to the colonies. The Company were now permitted to export tea direct from their warehouses on their own account on obtaining a licence from the Treasury, 1 and they accordingly selected their own agents in the different colonies. As the East India Company had of late been brought to a great extent under the direction of the Government, the consignees were such as favoured the Administration, and in Boston they included the two sons of Hutchinson. Several ships freighted with tea were sent to the colonies, and the Government hoped, and the ‘sons of liberty’ feared, that if it were once landed it would probably find purchasers, for owing to the drawback of the duty on exportation it could be sold much cheaper than in England itself, and cheaper than tea imported from any other country. The colonies at once entered into a conspiracy to prevent the tea being landed, and a long series of violent measures were taken for the purpose of intimidating those who were concerned in receiving it.
At last, in December 1773, three ships laden with tea arrived at Boston, and on the 16th of that month forty or fifty men disguised as Mohawk Indians, and under the direct superintendence of Samuel Adams, Hancock, 2 and other leading patriots, boarded them, and posting sentinels to keep all agents of authority at a distance, they flung the whole cargo, consisting of 342 chests, into the sea. In the course of the violent proceedings at Boston in this year, the Council, the militia, the corps of cadets had been vainly asked to assist in maintaining the law. The sheriff of the town was grossly insulted. The magistrates would do nothing, and, as usual, the crowning outrage of the destruction of the tea was accomplished with perfect impunity, and not a single person engaged in it was in any way molested. At Charleston a ship arrived with tea, but the consignees were intimidated into resignation, and the tea was stored in cellars, where it ultimately perished. At New York and Philadelphia the inhabitants obliged the captains of the tea ships at once to sail back with their cargoes to the Thames.
While the law was thus openly defied, the popular party were inflexibly opposed to the project of granting the judges fixed salaries from the Crown, and thus making them in some degree independent of the Assemblies. In Massachusetts the Assembly declared all judges who received salaries from the Crown instead of the people unworthy of public confidence, and it threatened to impeach them before the Council and the Governor. In February 1774, proceedings of this kind were actually instituted against Oliver, the Chief Justice of the province, because he had accepted an annual stipend from the Crown. Out of 100 members who voted, no less than 92 supported the impeachment. Hutchinson of course refused to concur in the measure, and on March 30 he prorogued the House, and at the same time accused it of having been guilty of proceedings which ‘strike directly at the honour and authority of the King and Parliament.’
The news of these events convinced most intelligent Englishmen that war was imminent, and that the taxation of America could only be enforced by the sword. Several distinct lines of policy were during the next two or three years advocated in England. Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, a bitter Tory, but one of the best living writers on all questions of trade, maintained a theory which was then esteemed visionary and almost childish, but which will now be very differently regarded. He had no respect for the Americans; he dissected with unsparing severity the many weaknesses in their arguments, and the declamatory and rhetorical character of much of their patriotism; but he contended that matters had now come to such a point that the only real remedy was separation. Colonies which would do nothing for their own defence, which were in a condition of smothered rebellion, and which were continually waiting for the difficulties of the mother country in order to assert their power, were a source of political weakness and not of political strength, and the trade advantages which were supposed to spring from the connection were of the most delusive kind. Trade, as he showed, will always ultimately flow in the most lucrative channels. The most stringent laws had been unable to prevent the Americans from trading with foreign countries if they could do so with advantage, and in case of separation the Americans would still resort to England for most of their goods, for the simple reason that England could supply them more cheaply than any other nation. The supremacy of English industry did not rest upon political causes. ‘The trade of the world is carried on in a great measure by British capital. British capital is greater than that of any other country in the world, and as long as this superiority lasts it is morally impossible that the trade of the British nation can suffer any very great or alarming diminution.’ No single fact is more clearly established by history than that the bitterest political animosity is insufficient to prevent nations from ultimately resorting to the markets that are most advantageous to them, and as long as England maintained the conditions of her industrial supremacy unimpaired she was in this respect perfectly secure. But nothing impairs these conditions so much as war, which wastes capital unproductively and burdens industry with a great additional weight of debt, military establishments, and taxation. The war which began about the Spanish right of search had cost sixty millions, and had scarcely produced any benefit to England. The last war cost ninety millions, and its most important result had been, by securing the Americans from French aggression, to render possible their present rebellion. Let England, then, be wise in time, and before she draws the sword let her calculate what possible advantage she could derive commensurate with the permanent evils which would inevitably follow. The Americans have refused to submit to the authority and legislation of the Supreme Legislature, or to bear their part in supporting the burden of the Empire. Let them, then, cease to be fellow-members of that Empire. Let them go their way to form their own destinies. Let England free herself from the cost, the responsibility, and the danger of defending them, retaining, like other nations, the right of connecting herself with them by treaties of commerce or of alliance. 1
The views of Adam Smith, though less strongly expressed, are not very different from those of Tucker. The ‘Wealth of Nations’ was published in 1776, and although it had little political influence for at least a generation after its appearance, its publication has ultimately proved one of the most important events in the economical, and indeed in the intellectual, history of modern Europe. No part of it is more remarkable than the chapters devoted to the colonies. Adam Smith showed by an exhaustive examination that the liberty of commerce which England allowed to her colonies, though greatly and variously restricted, was at least more extensive than that which any other nation conceded to its dependencies, and that it was sufficient to give them a large and increasing measure of prosperity. The laws, however, preventing them from employing their industry in manufactures for themselves, he described as ‘a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind,’ and likely ‘in a more advanced state’ to prove ‘really oppressive and insupportable.’ Hitherto, however, these laws, though they were ‘badges of slavery imposed without any sufficient reason,’ had been of little practical importance; for, owing to the great cheapness of land and the great dearness of labour in the colonies, it was obviously the most economical course for the Americans to devote themselves to agriculture and fisheries, and to import manufactured goods. His chief contention, however, was that the system of trade monopoly which, with many exceptions and qualifications, was maintained in the colonies for the benefit of England, was essentially vicious; that the colonies were profoundly injured by the restrictions which confined them to the English market, and that these restrictions were not beneficial, but were indeed positively injurious to England herself. These positions were maintained in a long, complicated, but singularly luminous argument, and it followed that the very keystone of English colonial policy was a delusion. ‘The maintenance of this monopoly has hitherto been the principal, or, more properly, perhaps, the sole end and purpose of the dominion which Great Britain assumes over the colonies.’ The burden of a great peace establishment by land and sea, maintained almost exclusively from English revenue, two great wars which had arisen chiefly from colonial questions, and the risk and probability of many others, were all supposed to be counterbalanced by the great advantage which the mother country derived from the monopoly of the colonial trade. The truth, however, is that ‘the monopoly of the colony trade depresses the industry of all other countries, but chiefly that of the colonies, without in the least increasing, but, on the contrary, diminishing, that of the country in whose favour it is established.’ ‘Under the present system of management, therefore, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over the colonies.’
Like Tucker, Adam Smith would gladly have seen a peaceful separation. ‘Great Britain,’ he wrote, ‘would not only be immediately freed from the whole annual expense of the peace establishment of the colonies, but might settle with them such a treaty of commerce as would effectually secure to her a free trade more advantageous to the great body of the people, though less so to the merchants, than the monopoly which she at present enjoys.’ She would at the same time probably revive that good feeling between the two great branches of the English race which was now rapidly turning to hatred. Such a solution, however, though the best, must be put aside as manifestly impracticable. No serious politician would propose the voluntary and peaceful cession of the great dominion of England in America with any real hope of being listened to. ‘Such a measure never was and never will be adopted by any nation in the world.’
Dismissing this solution, then, Adam Smith agreed with Grenville that every part of the British Empire should be obliged to support its own civil and military establishments, and to pay its proper proportion of the expense of the general government or defence of the British Empire. He also agreed with Grenville that it naturally devolved upon the British Parliament to determine the amount of the colonial contributions, though the colonial Legislatures might decide in what way those contributions should be raised. It was practically impossible to induce the colonial Legislatures of themselves to levy such taxation, or to agree upon its proportionate distribution. Moreover, a colonial Assembly, though, like the vestry of a parish, it is an admirable judge of the affairs of its own district, can have no proper means of determining what is necessary for the defence and support of the whole Empire. This ‘can be judged of only by that Assembly which inspects and superintends the affairs of the whole nation.’ ‘The Parliament of England,’ he added, ‘has not upon any occasion shown the smallest disposition to overburden those parts of the Empire which are not represented in Parliament. The islands of Jersey and Guernsey … are more lightly taxed than any parts of Great Britain. Parliament … has never hitherto demanded of the colonies anything which even approached to a just proportion of what was paid by their fellow-subjects at home,’ and the fear of an excessive taxation might be easily met by making the colonial contribution bear a fixed proportion to the English land tax. The colonists, however, almost unanimously refused to submit to taxation by a Parliament in which they were not represented. The only solution, then, was to give them a representation in it, and at the same time to open to them all the prizes of English politics. The colonists should ultimately be subjected to the same taxes as Englishmen, and should be admitted, in compensation, to the same freedom of trade and manufacture.
If we pass from the political philosophers to active politicians, we find that Chatham and Burke were substantially agreed upon the line they recommended. Burke, who had long shown a knowledge and a zeal on American questions which no other politician could rival, had in the preceding year accepted, with very doubtful propriety, the position of paid agent of New York; and in 1774 he made his great speech on American taxation. In the same year Chatham reappeared in the House of Lords, and took a prominent part in the American debates. Burke and Chatham continued to differ on the question of the abstract right of Parliament to tax America, but they agreed in maintaining that the union to the British Crown of a vast, civilised and rapidly progressive country, evidently destined to take a foremost place in the history of the world, was a matter of vital importance to the future of the Empire. In the speeches and letters of Chatham especially, this doctrine is maintained in the most emphatic language. ‘I fear the bond between us and America,’ he wrote in 1774, ‘will be cut off for ever. Devoted England will then have seen her best days, which nothing can restore again.’ 1 ‘Although I love the Americans as men prizing and setting a just value upon that inestimable blessing, liberty, yet if I could once persuade myself that they entertain the most distant intention of throwing off the legislative supremacy and great constitutional superintending power and control of the British Legislature, I should myself be the very first person … to enforce that power by every exertion this country is capable of making.’ 2
In the speeches of Burke, no passages of equal emphasis will be found; but Burke, like Chatham, entirely refused at this time to contemplate the separation of the colonies from the Empire; and he maintained that the only good policy was a policy of conciliation, reverting to the condition of affairs which existed before the Stamp Act, and repealing all the coercive and aggressive laws which had since then been promulgated. This was what the Americans themselves asked. In presenting a petition from the Assembly of Massachusetts in August 1773, Franklin, their Agent, had written ‘that a sincere disposition prevails in the people there to be on good terms with the mother country; that the Assembly have declared their desire only to be put into the situation they were in before the Stamp Act. They aim at no revolution.’ 1 In this spirit Burke urged their claims. ‘Revert to your old principles … leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here going into a distinction of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it. … Let the memory of all actions in contradiction to that good old mode, on both sides be extinguished for ever. Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do not burthen them with taxes; you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this be your reason for not taxing. These are the arguments of states and kingdoms. Leave the rest to the schools; for there only they may be discussed with safety. If intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government by urging subtle deductions and consequences odious to those you govern, from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question.’
The duty on tea should especially be at once repealed. It was said that it was an external tax such as the Americans had always professed themselves ready to pay; that port duties had been imposed by Grenville as late as 1764 without exciting any protest, and that it was therefore evident that the claims of the Americans were extending. But the American distinction had always been that they would acknowledge external taxes, which were intended only to regulate trade; but not internal taxes, which were intended to raise revenue. Townshend, with unhappy ingenuity, proved that an external tax could be made to raise revenue like an internal tax, and this purpose was expressly stated in the preamble of the Act. ‘It was just and necessary,’ the preamble said, ‘that a revenue should be raised there;’ and again, the Commons ‘being desirous to make some provision in the present Session of Parliament towards raising the said revenue.
It would also be difficult to conceive a more absurd position than that of the ministry which retained the tea duty. It was an intelligible policy to force the Americans to support an army for the defence of the Empire; but it was calculated that the duty would at the utmost produce 16,000 l. a year, and the ministry had precluded themselves from the possibility of increasing the revenue. Townshend no doubt had meant to do so; but Lord North had authorised Lord Hillsborough to assure the colonial Governors, in his letter of May 1769,’ that his Majesty's present Administration have at no time entertained a design to propose to Parliament to lay any further taxes upon America for the purpose of raising a revenue.’ 16,000 l. a year was therefore the utmost the Ministers expected from a policy which had led England to the brink of an almost inevitable war. But even this was not all. In order to impose this unhappy port duty of 3 d. in the pound on the Americans, Parliament had actually withdrawn a duty of 1 s. in the pound which had hitherto been paid without question and without difficulty upon exportation from England, and which necessarily fell chiefly, if not wholly, upon those who purchased the tea. ‘Incredible as it may seem, you have deliberately thrown away a large duty which you held secure and quiet in your hands, for the vain hope of getting three-fourths less, through every hazard, through certain litigation, and possibly through war.’ 1 It was said that the duty was merely an assertion of right, like the Declaratory Act of 1766. The answer is to be found in the very preamble of the new Act, which asserted not merely the justice, but also the expediency, of taxing the colonies. A simple repeal was the one possible form of conciliation, for a legislative union between countries 3,000 miles apart was wholly impracticable, and the idea was absolutely repudiated by the colonies. On the subject of the restrictive trade laws, Burke wisely said as little as possible. He knew that the question could not be raised without dividing the friends of America, and probably without alienating the commercial classes, who were the chief English opponents of American taxation.
Whether the policy of Burke and Chatham would have succeeded is very doubtful. After so much agitation and violence, after the promulgation of so many subversive doctrines in America, and the exhibition of so much weakness and vacillation in England, it could scarcely be expected that the tempest would have been calmed, and that the race of active agitators would have retired peaceably into obscurity. Philosophers in their studies might draw out reasonable plans of conciliation, but pure reason plays but a small part in politics, and the difficulty of carrying these plans into execution was enormous. Party animosities, divisions, and subdivisions; the personal interests of statesmen who wanted to climb into office, and of agitators who wanted to retain or increase their power; the obstinacy of the Court, which was opposed to all concession to the colonies, and no less opposed to a consolidation of parties at home; the spirit of commercial monopoly, which made one class averse to all trade concessions; the heavy weight of the land tax, which made another class peculiarly indignant at the refusal of the colonists to bear the burden of their own defence; the natural pride of Parliament, which had been repeatedly insulted and defied; the anger, the jealousy, and the suspicion which recent events had created on both sides of the Atlantic; the doubts which existed in England about the extent to which the disloyal spirit of New England had permeated the other colonies; the doubts which existed in America about which of the many sections of English public opinion would ultimately obtain an ascendency; and, finally, the weak characters, the divided opinions, the imperfect information, and the extremely ordinary capacities of the English ministers, must all be taken into account. Had Chatham been at the head of affairs and in the full force of his powers, conciliation might have been possible; but such a policy required a firm hand, an eagle eye, a great personal ascendency.
Popular opinion in England, which had supported the repeal of the Stamp Act, and had acquiesced in the repeal of the greater part of Townshend's Act, was now opposed to further concession. England, it was said, had sufficiently humiliated herself. The claims and the language of the colonial agitators excited profound and not unnatural indignation, and every mail from America brought news that New England at least was in a condition of virtual rebellion; that Acts of Parliament were defied and disobeyed with the most perfect impunity; that the representatives of the British Government were habitually exposed to the grossest insult, and reduced to the most humiliating impotence. The utility of colonies to the mother country was becoming a doubtful question to some. Ministers, it was said, admitted in Parliament that ‘it might be a great question whether the colonies should not be given up.’ 1 England, indeed, was plainly staggering under the weight of her empire. In 1774, on the very eve of its gigantic struggle, Parliament resounded with complaints of the magnitude of the peace establishment, and there were loud cries for reduction. It was noticed that the land tax was 1 s. higher than in any previous peace establishment; that the Three per Cents, which some years ago were above 90, had now fallen to about 86; that the land and malt taxes were almost entirely absorbed by the increased expenditure required for the navy. 2 All this rendered the attitude of the colonies peculiarly irritating. The publication of the letters of Hutchinson produced great indignation among English politicians; and the burning of the ‘Gaspee,’ the destruction of tea in Boston harbour, and the manifest connivance of the whole population in the outrage, raised that indignation to the highest point. The time for temporising, it was said, was over. It was necessary to show that England possessed some real power of executing her laws and protecting her officers, and the ministers were probably supported by a large majority of the English people when they resolved to throw away the scabbard, and to exert all the powers of Parliament to reduce Massachusetts to obedience.
The measures that were taken were very stringent. By one Act the harbour of Boston was legally closed. The Custom-house officers were removed to Salem. All landing, lading, and shipping of merchandise in Boston harbour was forbidden, and English men-of-war were appointed to maintain the blockade. The town, which owed its whole prosperity to its commercial activity, was debarred from all commerce by sea, and was to continue under this ban till it had made compensation to the East India Company for the tea which had been destroyed, and had satisfied the Crown that trade would for the future be safely carried on in Boston, property protected, laws obeyed, and duties regularly paid. 1
By another Act, Parliament exercised the power which, as the supreme legislative body of the Empire, Mansfield and other lawyers ascribed to it, of remodelling by its own authority the Charter of Massachusetts. The General Assembly, which was esteemed the legitimate representative of the democratic element in the Constitution, was left entirely untouched; but the Council, or Upper Chamber, which had been hitherto elected by the Assembly, was now to be appointed, as in most of the other colonies of America, by the Crown, and the whole executive power was to cease to emanate from the people. The judges and magistrates of all kinds, including the sheriffs, were to be appointed by the royal governor, and were to be revocable at pleasure. Jurymen, instead of being chosen by popular election, were to be summoned by the sheriffs. The right of public meeting, which had lately been much employed in inciting the populace against the Government, was seriously abridged. No meeting except election meetings might henceforth be held, and no subject discussed, without the permission of the governor. 2
It was more than probable that such grave changes would be resisted by force, that blood would be shed, and that English soldiers would again be tried for their lives before a civil tribunal. The conduct of the Boston judges and of the Boston jury at the trial of Captain Preston and his soldiers had redounded to their immortal honour; but Government was resolved that no such risk should be again incurred, and that soldiers who were brought to trial for enforcing the law against the inhabitants of Boston, should never again be tried by a Boston jury. To remove the trial of prisoners from a district where popular feeling was so violent that a fair trial was not likely to be obtained, was a practice not wholly unknown to English law. Scotch juries were not suffered to try rebels, or Sussex juries smugglers; and an Act was now passed ‘for the impartial administration of justice,’ which provided that if any person in the province of Massachusetts were indicted for murder or any other capital offence, and if it should appear to the governor that the incriminated act was committed in aiding the magistrates to suppress tumult and riot, and also that a fair trial cannot be had in the province, the prisoner should be sent for trial to any other colony, or to Great Britain. 1
These were the three great coercive measures of 1774. It is not necessary to dilate upon them, for their character is transparently evident, and the provocation that produced them has been sufficiently explained. The colonial estimate of them was tersely stated in the remonstrance of the province. ‘By the first,’ they say, ‘the property of unoffending thousands is arbitrarily taken away for the act of a few individuals; by the second our chartered liberties are annihilated, and by the third our lives may be destroyed with impunity.’ General Gage, who had for some years been commander-in-chief of the whole English army in America, was appointed Governor of Massachusetts, and entrusted with the task of carrying out the coercive policy of Parliament; and in order to assist him, an Act was carried, quartering soldiers on the inhabitants. 1
One other measure relating to the colonies was carried during this session, which met with great opposition, and which, though important in American history, is still more important in the history of religious liberty. It was the famous Quebec Act, for the purpose of ascertaining the limits and regulating the condition of the new province of Canada. 2 The great majority of the inhabitants of that province were French, who had been accustomed to live under an arbitrary government, and whose religious and social conditions differed widely from those of the English colonists. The Government resolved, as the event showed very wisely, that they would not subvert the ancient laws of the province, or introduce into them the democratic system which existed in New England. The English law with trial by jury was introduced in all criminal cases; but as all contracts and settlements had hitherto been made under French law, and as that law was most congenial to their tastes and habits and traditions, it was maintained. 3 In all civil cases, therefore, French law without trial by jury continued in force. A legislative Council, varying from seventeen to twenty-three members, open to men of both religions, and appointed by the Crown, managed all legislative business except taxation, which was expressly reserved. The territory of the province, determined by the proclamation of 1763, was enlarged so as to include some outlying districts, which were chiefly inhabited by French; and by a bold measure, which excited great indignation both among the Puritans of New England and among the Whigs at home, the Catholic religion, which was that of the great majority of the inhabitants, was virtually established. The Catholic clergy obtained a full parliamentary title to their old ecclesiastical estates, and to tithes paid by members of their own religion; but no Protestant was obliged to pay tithes.
The Quebec Act was little less distasteful to the colonists than the coercive measures that have been related. The existence upon their frontiers of an English state governed on a despotic principle was deemed a new danger to their liberties, while the establishment of Catholicism offended their deepest religious sentiment. Its toleration had indeed been provided for by the Peace of Paris, and on the death of the last French bishop the Government had agreed to recognise a resident Catholic bishop on the condition that he and his successors should be designated by itself, but the political position of the Catholics had been for some time undetermined. The Protestant grand jurors at Quebec had insisted that no Catholic should be admitted to grand or petty juries, and the party they represented would have gladly concentrated all civil and political power in the hands of an infinitesimal body of Protestant immigrants, degraded the Catholics into a servile caste, and reproduced in America in a greatly aggravated form the detestable social condition which existed in Ireland. At home the strength of the anti-Catholic feeling was a few years later abundantly shown, out, with the exception of some parts of Scotland, no portion of the British Islands was animated with the religious fervour of New England, and no sketch of the American Revolution is adequate which does not take this influence into account. In this as in many other respects these colonies presented a vivid image of an England which had long since passed away. Their democratic church government, according to which each congregation elected its own minister, their historical connection with those austere republicans who had abandoned their native country to worship Grod after their own fashion in a desert land, and the intensely Protestant type of their belief, had all conspired to strengthen the Puritan spirit, and in the absence of most forms of intellectual life the pulpit had acquired an almost unparalleled ascendency. The chief and almost the only popular celebration in Massachusetts before the struggle of the Revolution was that of the 5th of November. 1 In Boston, which was the chief centre of the political movement, the theological spirit was especially strong, for the population was unusually homogeneous both in race and in religion. The Congregationalists were three or four times as numerous as the Episcopalians, and other sects were as yet scarcely represented. 2
The spirit of American puritanism was indeed so fierce and jealous that the American Episcopalians who were connected with the English Church were never suffered in the colonial period to have a bishop among them, but remained under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. Berkeley, Butler, and Seeker had vainly represented how injurious this system was to the spiritual welfare of the American Episcopalians. Sherlock complained bitterly that he was made responsible for the religious welfare of a vast country which he had never seen, which he never would see, and over which he could exercise no real influence. Gibson tried to exercise some control over the colonial clergy, but found that he had no means of enforcing his will. Archbishop Tenison had even left a legacy for the endowment of two bishoprics in America. The Episcopalians themselves petitioned earnestly for a resident bishop, and stated in the clearest terms that they wished him to be only a spiritual functionary destitute of all temporal authority. ‘The powers exercised in the consistory courts in England,’ it was said, ‘are not desired for bishops residing in America.’ They were not to be supported by any tax; they were not to be placed either in New England or Pennsylvania, where non-episcopal forms of religion prevailed, or to be suffered in any colony to exercise any authority, except over the members of their own persuasion. 1 It was urged that those who were in communion with the Established Church of England were the only Christians in America who were deprived of what they believed to be the necessary means of religious discipline; that the rite of confirmation, which is so important in the Anglican system, was unknown among them; that it was an intolerable grievance and a fatal discouragement to their creed, that every candidate for ordination was obliged to travel 6,000 miles before he could become qualified to conduct public worship in his own village. By a very low computation, it was said, this necessity alone imposed on each candidate an expenditure of 100 l ., and out of fifty-two candidates who, in 1767, crossed the sea from the Northern colonies, no less than ten had died on the voyage or from its results. 1 More than once the propriety of sending out one or two bishops to the colonies had been discussed, but the notion always produced such a storm of indignation in New England that it was speedily abandoned. It was not indeed a question on which the Ministers at all cared to provoke American opinion; and it is a curiously significant illustration of the theological indifference of the English Government that the first Anglican colonial bishop was the Bishop of Nova Scotia, who was only appointed in 1787; and that the first Anglican Indian bishop was the Bishop of Calcutta, who was appointed by the influence of Wilberforce in 1814.
It is easy to conceive how fiercely a Protestantism as jealous and sensitive as that of New England must have resented the establishment of Catholicism in Canada; and in the New England colonies the political influence exercised by the clergy was very great. Public meetings were held in the churches. Proclamations were read from the pulpit. The Episcopalianism of a large proportion of the Government officers contributed perceptibly to their unpopularity; political preaching was almost universal, and the sermons of Mayhew, Chauncey, and Samuel Cooper had much influence in stimulating resistance. The few clergymen who abstained from introducing politics into the pulpit were looked upon with great suspicion or dislike. 1 The fast days which were held in every important crisis diffused, intensified, and consecrated the spirit of resistance, and gave a semi-religious tone to the whole movement. There were a few prominent leaders, indeed, who were of a different character. Otis lamented bitterly that the profession of a saintly piety was in New England the best means of obtaining political power. Franklin was intensely secular in the character of his mind, and his theology was confined to an admiration for the pure moral teaching of the Evangelists, while Jefferson sympathised with the freethinkers of France; but such ways of thinking were not common in America, and the fervid Puritanism of New England had a very important bearing upon the character of the struggle.
It was soon evident that the Americans were not intimidated by the Coercion Acts, and that the hope of the ministry that resistance would be confined to Massachusetts, and perhaps to Boston, was wholly deceptive. The closing of the port of Boston took place on the 1st of June, 1774, but before that time the sympathies of the other colonies had been clearly shown. The Assembly of Virginia, which was in session when the news of the intended measure arrived, of its own authority appointed the 1st of June to be set apart as a day of fasting, prayer, and humiliation, ‘to implore the divine interposition to avert the heavy calamity which threatened destruction to their civil rights, with the evils of civil war and to give one heart and one mind to the people firmly to oppose every injury to the American rights.’ The Governor at once dissolved the House, but its members reassembled, drew up a declaration expressing warm sympathy with Boston, and called upon all the colonies to support it.
The example was speedily followed. Subscriptions poured in for the relief of the Boston poor who were thrown out of employment by the closing of the port. Virginia, South Carolina, and Maryland sent great quantities of corn and rice. Salem and Marblehead, which were expected to grow rich by the ruin of Boston, offered the Boston merchants the free use of their harbours, wharfs, and warehouses. Provincial, town, and county meetings were held in every colony encouraging Boston to resist, and the 1st of June was generally observed throughout America as a day of fasting and prayer. The Assembly of Massachusetts was convoked by the new Governor, and soon after removed from Boston to Salem, and it showed its feelings by calling on him to appoint a day of general fasting and prayer, by recommending the assembly of a congress of representatives of all the colonies to take measures for the security of colonial liberty, by accusing the British Government of an evident design to destroy the free constitutions of America, and to erect in their place systems of tyranny and arbitrary sway, and by appealing to their constituents to give up every kind of intercourse with England till their wrongs were redressed. As was expected in Boston, the Assembly was at once dissolved, but the movement of resistance was unchecked. An attempt made by some loyalists to procure a resolution from a public meeting in favour of paying the East India Company for the tea which had been destroyed was defeated by a great majority. The system of committees charged in every district with organising resistance and keeping up correspondence between the colonies, which had been found so efficient in 1765 and 1767, was revived; the press and the pulpit all over America called on the people to unite; and a ‘solemn league and covenant’ was formed, binding the subscribers to abstain from all commercial intercourse with Great Britain till the obnoxious Acts were repealed. It was agreed that all delinquents should be held up in the newspapers to popular vengeance, and on the 5th of September, 1774, the delegates of the twelve States assembled in Congress at Philadelphia.
‘The die is now cast,’ wrote the King at this time; ‘the colonies must either submit or triumph.’ The war did not indeed yet break out, but both sides were rapidly preparing. Fresh ships of war and fresh troops were sent to Boston. General Gage fortified the neck of land which connected it with the continent; he took possession, amid fierce demonstrations of popular indignation, of the gunpowder in some of the arsenals of New England; he issued a proclamation describing the new ‘league and covenant’ as ‘an illegal and traitorous combination.’ but he was unable to obtain any prosecution. He tried to erect new barracks in Boston, but found it almost impossible to obtain builders. Most of the new councillors appointed by the Crown were obliged by mob violence to resign their posts, and the few who accepted the appointment were held up to execration as enemies of their country. Riots and outrages were of almost daily occurrence. Conspicuous Tories were tarred and feathered, or placed astride of rails, and carried in triumph through the streets of the chief towns. One man was fastened in the body of a dead ox which he had bought from an obnoxious loyalist, and thus carted for several miles between Plymouth and Kingston. Another was nearly suffocated by being confined in a room with a fire, while the chimney and all other apertures were carefully closed. Juries summoned under the new regulations refused to be sworn. Judges who accepted salaries from the Crown were prevented by armed mobs from going to their courts. Most of the courts of justice in Massachusetts were forcibly closed, and the judges of the Supreme Court informed General Gage that it was totally impossible for them to administer justice in the province, that no jurors could be obtained, and that the troops were altogether insufficient for their protection.
Conspicuous politicians, even members of the Congress, are said to have led the mobs. In Berkshire the mob actually forced the judges from the bench and shut up the court-house. At Worcester, about 5,000 persons, a large proportion of them being armed, having formed themselves in two files, compelled the judges, sheriffs, and gentlemen of the bar to pass between them with bare heads, and at least thirty times to read a paper promising to hold no courts under the new Acts of Parliament. At Springfield the judges and sheriffs were treated with the same ignominy. At Westminster, in the province of New York, the court-house and gaol were captured by the mob, and the judges, sheriffs, and many loyalist inhabitants were locked up in prison. A judge in the same province had the courage to commit to prison a man who was employed in disarming the loyalists. The prisoner was at once rescued, and the judge carried, tarred and feathered, five or six miles through the country. 1 Great numbers of loyalists were driven from their estates or their business; and except under the very guns of British soldiers, they could find no safety in New England. As the Crown possessed scarcely any patronage in the colonies to reward its friends, all but the most courageous and devoted were reduced to silence, or hastened to identify themselves with the popular cause. ‘Are not the bands of society,’ wrote a very able loyalist at this time, ‘cast asunder, and the sanctions that hold man to man trampled upon? Can any of us recover debts, or obtain compensation for an injury, by law? Are not many persons whom we once respected and revered driven from their homes and families, and forced to fly to the army for protection, for no other reason but their having accepted commissions under our King? Is not civil government dissolved? … What kind of offence is it for a number of men to assemble armed, and forcibly to obstruct the course of justice, even to prevent the King's courts from being held at their stated terms; to seize upon the King's provincial revenue, I mean the moneys collected by virtue of grants made to his Majesty for the support of his government within this province; to assemble without being called by authority, and to pass Governmental Acts; to take the militia out of the hands of the King's representative, or to form a new militia; to raise men and appoint officers for a public purpose without the order or permission of the King or his representative, or to take arms and march with a professed design of opposing the King's troops? ‘Committees not known in law … frequently elect themselves into a tribunal, where the same persons are at once legislators, accusers, witnesses, judges, and jurors, and the mob the executioners. The accused has no day in court, and the execution of the sentence is the first notice he receives. This is the channel through which liberty matters have been chiefly conducted the summer and fall past. … It is chiefly owing to these committees that so many respectable persons have been abused and forced to sign recantations and resignations; that so many persons, to avoid such reiterated insults as are more to be deprecated by a man of sentiment than death itself, have been obliged to quit their houses, families, and business, and fly to the army for protection; that husband has been separated from wife, father from son, brother from brother, the sweet intercourse of conjugal and natural affection interrupted, and the unfortunate refugee forced to abandon all the comforts of domestic life.’ 1 Even in cases which had little or no connection with politics, mob violence was almost uncontrolled. Thus a customhouse officer named Malcolm, who in a street riot had struck or threatened to strike with a cutlass a person who insulted him, was dragged out of his house by the mob, stripped, tarred and feathered, then carted for several hours during an intense frost, and finally scourged, with a halter round his neck, through the streets of Boston, and all this was done in the presence of thousands of spectators, and with the most absolute impunity. At Marblehead the mob, believing that an hospital erected for the purpose of inoculation was spreading contagion, burnt it to the ground, and for several days the whole town was in their undisputed possession. 2
Among many graver matters, an amusing indignation was about this time excited by a proclamation which General Gage, according to a usual custom, issued ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and the prevention of vice, profaneness, and immorality.’ The General knew that the Boston preachers made it a favourite theme that the presence of British soldiers was fatal to the purity of New England morals, and he now for the first time inserted ‘hypocrisy’ in the list of the vices against which the people were warned. The vehemence with which this was resented as a studied insult to the clergy, convinced many impartial persons that the insinuation was not wholly undeserved.
The people were in the meantime rapidly arming. Guns were collected from all sides, the militia was assiduously drilled, and its organisation was improved; bodies of volunteers called ‘minute men’ were formed, who were bound to rise to arms at the shortest notice, and New England had all the aspect of a country at war. A false alarm was spread abroad—possibly in order to ascertain the number who would rise in case of insurrection—that the British troops and vessels were firing upon Boston, and in a few hours no less than 30,000 men from Massachusetts and Connecticut are said to have been in arms. The collision was happily averted, but this incident gave the popular party new confidence in their strength, and over the greater part of New England their ascendency was undisputed. The new seat of government at Salem was abandoned; the new councillors, and all or nearly all the officers connected with the revenue, fled for safety to Boston, and although the troops were not openly resisted they experienced on every side the animosity of the people. Farmers refused to sell them provisions. Straw which they had purchased was burnt. Carts with wood were overturned, boats with bricks were sunk, when it was discovered that they were for the King's service, and at the same time colonial agents were industriously tempting individual soldiers to desert.
The Congress which met in Philadelphia, though it had no legal authority, was obeyed as the supreme power in America. It consisted of delegates selected by the Provincial Assemblies which then were sitting, and, in cases where the Governors had refused to convoke these Assemblies, by Provincial Congresses called together for that purpose. Except Georgia, all the colonies which existed before the peace of 1763 were represented. The number of delegates varied according to the magnitude of the States, but after much discussion it was determined that no colony should count for more than one in voting. The Congress in the first place expressed its full and unqualified approbation of the conduct of the inhabitants of Boston, exhorted them to continue unflinching in their opposition to the invasion of their Constitution, and invited the other colonies to contribute liberally to their assistance. It next drew up a series of extremely able State papers defining and enforcing the position of the Americans. After long debate and violent difference of opinion, it was resolved not to treat the commercial restrictions as a grievance, or to deny the general legislative authority of Parliament over America. Franklin, as we have seen, had recently contended that the colonies, though subject to the King, were by right wholly independent of the Parliament, and, this doctrine had been formally maintained by the Assembly of Massachusetts in its addresses of 1773, but it was not the contention of the original opponents of the Stamp Act, 1 and it was not generally accepted in the other colonies. 2 The Congress, therefore, while asserting in the strongest terms the exclusive right of the provincial legislatures in all cases of taxation and internal policy, at last consented to add these remarkable words in their declaration of rights: ‘From the necessity of the case and in regard to the mutual interests of both countries, we cheerfully consent to the operation of such Acts of the British Parliament as are bond fide restrained to the regulation of our external commerce for the purpose of securing the commercial advantages of the whole Empire to the mother country and the commercial benefits of its respective members.’ They enumerated, however, a long series of Acts carried during the present reign which were violations of their liberty, and which must be repealed if the two countries were to continue in amity. Among them were the Acts closing the harbour of Boston, changing the constitution of Massachusetts, establishing despotic government and the Popish religion in Canada, interfering with the right of public meeting, quartering British troops upon the colonists, and above all imposing taxation by Imperial authority.
They pronounced it unnecessary to maintain a standing army in the colonies in time of peace, and illegal to do so without the consent of the local legislatures. They complained also that their assemblies had been arbitrarily dissolved, that their governors had conspired against their liberty, and that in several cases they had been deprived of their constitutional right of trial by jury or at least by a ‘jury of the vicinage.’ The Court of Admiralty tried revenue cases without a jury, and the Governor had power to send for trial out of the colony those who were accused of treason, of destroying the King's ships or naval stores, or of homicide committed in suppressing riot or rebellion. All this mass of legislation Parliament must speedily and absolutely repeal. For the present, however, the Congress resolved to resort only to peaceful means, and their weapon was a rigid non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement, which was to be imposed by their authority upon all the colonies they represented and was to continue until their grievances had been fully redressed.
From December 1 following, the members of the Congress bound themselves and their constituents to import no goods from Great Britain, to purchase no slave imported after that date and no tea imported on account of the East India Company, and to extend the same prohibition to the chief products of the British plantations, to the wines of Madeira and the West India islands which were unloaded to pay duty in England, and to foreign indigo. On September 10, 1775, if the grievances were not yet redressed a new series of measures were to come into force, and no commodity whatever was to be exported from America to Great Britain, Ireland, or the West Indies, except rice to Europe; committees were to be appointed in every town and county to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association, and to publish in the ‘Gazette’ the name of anyone who had violated it; and all dealings with such persons and with any portion of the colonies which refused to join the association were forbidden. At the same time the Congress agreed for themselves and their constituents to do the utmost in their power to encourage frugality and promote manufactures, to suppress or suspend every form of gambling and expensive amusement, to abandon the custom of wearing any other mourning than a black ribbon or necklace for the dead, and to diminish the expenditure at funerals.
In addition to these measures, they issued very powerful addresses to the King and to the people of England professing their full loyalty to the Crown, but enumerating their grievances in emphatic terms. In the address to the people of England they skilfully appealed to the strong anti-Catholic feeling of the nation, denying the competence of the Legislature ‘to establish a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets,’ ‘a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world;’ and they predicted that if the ministers succeeded in their designs, ‘the taxes from America, the wealth and, we may add, the men, and particularly the Roman Catholics of this vast continent, will be in their power’ to enslave the people of Great Britain. Their own attachment to Great Britain they emphatically affirmed. ‘You have been told,’ they said, ‘that we are seditious, impatient of government, and desirous of independency. Be assured that these are not facts but calumnies. … Place us in the same situation that we were at the close of the last war, and our former harmony will be restored.’ At the same time, in an ingenious address to the Canadians they endeavoured to alienate them from England, to persuade them that they were both oppressed, deceived, and insulted by the present ministers, and to induce them to join with the other colonies in vindicating their common freedom. Difference of religion, they maintained, could be no bar to co-operation. ‘We are too well acquainted,’ they said, ‘with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation to imagine that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us,’ and they referred to the example of the Swiss cantons, where Protestant and Catholic combined with the utmost concord to vindicate and guard their political liberty. Having issued these addresses, the Congress dissolved itself in less than eight weeks; but it determined that unless grievances were first redressed, another Congress should meet at Philadelphia on May 10 following, and it recommended all the colonies to choose deputies as soon as possible. 1
Such were the proceedings of this memorable body, which laid the foundation of American independence. Perhaps the most perplexing question raised by its proceedings is the degree of sincerity that can be ascribed to the disclaimer of all wish for separation. That a considerable party in New England anticipated and desired an open breach with England appears to me undoubted, but it is equally certain that many of the leading agents in the Revolution expressed up to the last moment a strong desire to remain united to England. It was in August 1774, when the Americans were busily arming themselves for the struggle, that Franklin assured Chatham that there was no desire for independence in the colonies. 1 John Adams, who had not, like Franklin, the excuse of absence from his native country, wrote in March 1775, even of the people of Massachusetts, ‘that there are any that pant after independence is the greatest slander on the province.’ Jefferson declared that before the Declaration of Independence he had never heard a whisper of disposition to separate from Great Britain; and Washington himself, in the October of 1774, denied in the strongest terms that there was any wish for independence in any province in America. 2
The truth seems to be that the more distinguished Americans were quite resolved to appeal to the sword rather than submit to parliamentary taxation and to the other oppressive laws that were complained of, but if they could restore the relations to the mother country which subsisted before the Stamp Act, they had no desire whatever to sever the connection. In 1774 and during the greater part of 1775 very few Americans wished for independence, and long after this period many of those who took an active part in the Revolution would gladly have restored the connection if they could have done so on terms which they considered compatible with their freedom. The instructions of the chief colonies to their delegates in Congress are on this subject very unequivocal. Thus New Hampshire instructed its delegates to endeavour ‘to restore that peace, harmony, and mutual confidence which once happily subsisted between the parent country and her colonies.’ Massachusetts spoke of ‘the restoration of union and harmony between Great Britain and the colonies most ardently desired by all good men.’ Pennsylvania enjoined its representatives to aim not only at the redress of American grievances and the definition of American rights, but also at the establishment of ‘that union and harmony between Great Britain and her colonies which is indispensably necessary to the welfare and the happiness of both.’ Virginia aspired after ‘the return of that harmony and union so beneficial to the whole Empire and so ardently desired by all British America,’ and North and South Carolina adopted a similar language. 1 In 1775 the Convention of South Carolina assured their new governor that they adhered to the British Crown, though they had taken arms against British tyranny. The Virginian Convention in the same year declared ‘before God and the world’ that they bore their faith to the King, and would disband their forces whenever the liberties of America were restored; the Assembly of New Jersey, while their State was in open rebellion, rebuked their governor for supposing the Americans to be aiming at national independence; 2 and, lastly, the Provincial Congress of New York, when congratulating Washington on his appointment as commander-in-chief of the insurgent force, took care to add their assurance ‘that whenever this important contest shall be decided by that fondest wish of each American soul, an accommodation with our mother country, you will cheerfully resign the deposit committed into your hands.’ 1
Many other public documents might be cited showing that the Americans took up arms to redress grievances and not to establish independence, and that it was only very slowly and reluctantly that they became familiarised with the idea of a complete separation from England. Nor is there, I think, any reason to believe that this language was substantially untrue. In March 1776 General Reed, in confidential letters to Washington, lamented that the public mind in Virginia was violently opposed to the idea of independence. 2 Galloway, one of the ablest of the Pennsylvanian loyalists, afterwards expressed his belief before a committee of the House of Commons that at the time when the Americans took up arms less than a fifth part of them ‘had independence in view;’ 3 and John Adams when an old man related how, when he first went to the Congress at Philadelphia, the leading conspirators in that town said to him, ‘You must not utter the word independence or give the least hint or insinuation of the idea either in congress or any private conversation; if you do you are undone, for the idea of independence is as unpopular in Pennsylvania and in all the Middle and Southern States as the Stamp Act itself.’ 4 Adams tells how, when a letter which he had written in 1775 advocating independence was intercepted and published, he was ‘avoided like a man infected with the leprosy,’ and ‘walked the streets of Philadelphia in solitude, borne down by the weight of care and unpopularity.’ 5 Few men contributed more to hasten the separation between the two countries, yet he afterwards wrote these remarkable words: ‘For my own part there was not a moment during the Revolution when I would not have given everything I possessed for a restoration to the state of things before the contest began, provided we could have a sufficient security for its continuance.’ 1
In 1774 also, it is evident that a large proportion of the most ardent patriots imagined that redress could be obtained without actual fighting, and that the Legislature of the greatest country in the world would repeal no less than eleven recent Acts of Parliament in obedience to a mere threat of resistance. They knew that numerous urgent petitions in favour of conciliation had been presented by English merchants, and that many of the most conspicuous English politicians, including Chatham, Camden, Shelburne, Conway, Barré, and Burke, were on their side, and they overrated greatly the strength of their friends, and especially the effect of the non-importation agreements upon English prosperity. ‘England,’ it was argued in the Congress, ‘is already taxed as much as she can bear. She is compelled to raise ten millions in time of peace. Her whole foreign trade is but four and half millions, while the value of the importations to the colonies is probably little, if at all, less than three millions.’ ‘A total non-importation and non-exportation to Great Britain and the West Indies must produce a national bankruptcy in a very short space of time.’ 2 Richard Henry Lee, one of the most prominent Virginian politicians, was so confident in the effect of non-importation that he declared himself ‘absolutely certain that the same ship which carries home the resolution will bring back the redress.’ 1 Washington was more doubtful, but he expressed his opinion privately that by a non-importation and a non-exportation agreement combined, America would win the day, though one alone would be insufficient. John Adams, Hawley, and Patrick Henry, however, were of opinion that the proceedings of the Congress were very useful in uniting the colonies, but that they were quite insufficient to coerce Great Britain, and that the question must ultimately be decided by the sword. 2
In England, on the other hand, there was to the very last a great disbelief in the reality of a colonial union. Nearly all the rumours of violence and insubordination had come from two or three of the New England States and from Virginia, and it was supposed that in the moment of crisis the other States would hold aloof, and that even in the insurgent colonies a large party of active loyalists could be fully counted on. Provincial governors being surrounded by such men were naturally inclined to underrate the capacity or the sincerity of their opponents, and they thought that the wild talk of lawyers and demagogues and the demonstrations of mob violence would speedily collapse before firm action. Hutchinson, who lived in the centre of the disaffection, and who ought to have known the New England character as well as any man, predicted that the people of America would not attempt to resist a British army, and that if they did a few troops would be sufficient to quell them. 3 His opinion appears to have had considerable weight with George III., and it greatly strengthened him in his determination to coerce. 4 General Gage for some time took the same view. He assured the King in the beginning of 1774 that the Americans ‘will be lions while we are lambs, but if we take the resolute part they will undoubtedly prove very meek,’ and he thought that ‘four regiments, intended to relieve as many regiments in America, if sent to Boston’ would be ‘sufficient to prevent any disturbance.’ 1 It is true that Carleton, the Governor of Canada, and Tryon, the Governor of New York, though they had no doubt of the ability of England to crush insurrection, warned the Government that the task would be a very serious one, and would require much time and large armies, 2 but the prevailing English opinion was that any armed movement could be easily repressed. Soldiers spoke of the Americans with professional arrogance, as if volunteers and militias organised by skilful and experienced officers, consisting of men who were accustomed from childhood to the use of arms, and fighting with every advantage of numbers and situation, were likely to be as helpless before regular troops as a Middlesex mob. Unfortunately, this ignorant boasting was not confined to the mess-room, and Lord Sandwich, in March 1775, expressed the prevailing infatuation with reckless insolence in the House of Lords. He described the Americans as ‘raw, undisciplined, cowardly men.’ He said that the more they produced in the field, the easier would be their conquest. He accused them of having shown egregious cowardice at the siege of Louisburg, and he predicted that they would take to flight at the very sound of a cannon. 3 Whether, under the most favourable circumstances, the subjugation would produce any advantages commensurate with the cost; whether, assuming that England had conquered her colonies, she could permanently hold them contrary to their will; and whether other nations were likely to remain passive during the struggle, were questions which appear to have scarcely occurred to the ordinary English mind.
It was, however, quite true that in America there was much difference of opinion, and that large bodies were only dragged with extreme reluctance into war. In New York a powerful and wealthy party sympathised strongly with the Government, and they succeeded in June 1775 in inducing their Assembly to refuse its approbation to the proceedings of the Congress. 1 Even in New England a few meetings were held repudiating the proceedings at Philadelphia. 2 Three out of the four delegates of South Carolina in the Congress declined to sign the non-importation agreements until a provision had been made to permit the exportation of rice to Europe. 3 The Pennsylvanian Quakers recoiled with horror from the prospect of war, and the Convention of the province gave instructions to their delegates in the Congress, which were eminently marked by wisdom and moderation. They desired that England should repeal absolutely the obnoxious Acts; but, in order that such a measure should not be inconsistent with her dignity, they recommended an indemnity to the East India Company, promised obedience to the Act of Navigation, disowned with abhorrence all idea of independence, and declared their willingness of their own accord to settle an annual revenue on the King, subject to the approbation of Parliament. Virginia had been very prominent in hurrying the colonies into war, and its great orator, Patrick Henry, exerted all his powers in stimulating resistance; but even Virginia insisted, in opposition to John Adams and to other New Englanders, on limiting the list of grievances to Acts passed since 1763, in order that there might be some possibility of reconciliation. 1
Among the Episcopalians, and among the more wealthy and especially the older planters, the English party always predominated, and a large section of the mercantile class detested the measures which suspended their trade, and believed that America could not subsist without the molasses, sugar, and other products of the British dominions. There was a wide-spread dislike to the levelling principles of New England, to the arrogant, restless, and ambitious policy of its demagogues, to their manifest desire to invent or discover grievances, foment quarrels, and keep the wound open and festering. 2 There were brave and honest men in America who were proud of the great and free Empire to which they belonged, who had no desire to shrink from the burden of maintaining it, who remembered with gratitude all the English blood that had been shed around Quebec and Montreal, and who, with nothing to hope for from the Crown, were prepared to face the most brutal mob violence and the invectives of a scurrilous Press, to risk their fortunes, their reputations, and sometimes even their lives, in order to avert civil war and ultimate separation. Most of them ended their days in poverty and exile, and as the supporters of a beaten cause history has paid but a scanty tribute to their memory, but they comprised some of the best and ablest men America has ever produced, and they were contending for an ideal which was at least as worthy as that for which Washington fought. It was the maintenance of one free, industrial, and pacific empire, comprising the whole English race, holding the richest plains of Asia in subjection, blending all that was most venerable in an ancient civilisation with the redundant energies of a youthful society, and likely in a few generations to outstrip every competitor and acquire an indisputable ascendency on the globe. Such an ideal may have been a dream, but it was at least a noble one, and there were Americans who were prepared to make any personal sacrifices rather than assist in destroying it.
Conspicuous among these politicians was Galloway, one of the ablest delegates from Pennsylvania, who saw clearly that a change in the American Constitution was necessary if England was to remain united to her colonies. He proposed that a President-General appointed by the Crown should be placed over the whole group of American colonies; that a Grand Council, competent to tax the colonies and to legislate on all matters relating to more colonies than one, should be elected by the Provincial Assemblies; that Parliament should have the right of revising the Acts of this Grand Council, and that the Council should have the right of negative upon any parliamentary measure relating to the colonies. 1 The proposal at first met with considerable support in the Congress, and it was finally defeated by a majority of only one vote. Dickinson, whose ‘Farmer's Letters’ had been one of the ablest statements of the American case, shrank with horror from the idea of rebellion. He bitterly accused John Adams and the other New Englanders of opposing all measures of reconciliation, and declared that he and his friends would no longer co-operate with them, but would carry on the opposition in their own way. 1 The remarkable eloquence and the touching and manifest earnestness of the letters which appeared at Boston under the signature of ‘Massachusettensis,’ urging the people to shrink from the great calamity of civil war, had for a time some influence upon opinion. As usual, however, in such a crisis, the more energetic and determined men directed the movement, and the fierce spirit of New England substantially triumphed over all opposition. The Congress agreed, it is true, to profess its loyalty, to petition the King, and to limit its grievances to measures carried since 1763, but it offered no basis of compromise; it demanded only an unqualified submission, and it enumerated so long a list of laws that must be repealed that it was quite impossible that Parliament could comply. General Gage deemed the aspect of affairs so threatening that he suspended by proclamation the writs which he had issued summoning the Assembly of Massachusetts to meet at Salem in October 1774. But a provincial congress was at once convened. It was obeyed as if it had been a regular branch of the Legislature, and it proceeded to organise the revolution. Measures were taken for enlisting soldiers for the defence of the province; general officers were selected. It was resolved to enroll as speedily as possible an army of 12,000 men within the province, and Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut were asked to join to raise the number of men to 20,000. A committee was at the same time formed for corresponding with the people of Canada, and a circular was sent round to all the New England clergy asking them to use their influence in the cause. 2
Before the end of the year intelligence arrived that a proclamation had been issued in England forbidding the exportation of military stores, and it was at once responded to by open violence. In Rhode Island, by order of the Provincial Assembly, forty cannon with a large amount of ammunition were removed from Fort George, which defended the harbour, and placed under a colonial guard at Providence. The captain of a King's ship which was stationed off the province demanded an explanation. The Governor replied that the cannon had been removed lest the King's officers should seize them, and that they would be used against any enemy of the colony. In New Hampshire a small fort called William and Mary, garrisoned by one officer and five private soldiers, was surprised and captured by a large body of armed colonists, and the military stores which it contained were carried away. Mills for manufacturing gunpowder and arms were set up in several provinces, and immediate orders were given for casting sixty heavy cannon.
Though no blood had yet been shed, it is no exaggeration to say that the war had already begun, and in England the indignation rose fierce and high. Parliament had been unexpectedly dissolved, and the new Parliament met on November 30, 1774, but no serious measure relating to America was taken till January 1775, when the House reassembled after the Christmas vacation. The ministers had a large majority, and even apart from party interest the genuine feeling of both Houses ran strongly against the Americans. Yet at no previous period were they more powerfully defended. I have already noticed that Chatham, having returned to active politics after his long illness in 1774, had completely identified himself with the American cause, and had advocated with all his eloquence measures of conciliation. He reiterated on every occasion his old opinion that self-taxation is the essential condition of political freedom, described the conduct of the British Legislature in establishing Catholicism in Canada as not less outrageous than if it had repealed the Great Charter or the Bill of Rights, 1 and moved an address to the King praying that he would as soon as possible, ‘in order to open the way towards a happy settlement of the dangerous troubles in America.’ withdraw the British troops stationed in Boston. In the course of his speech he represented the question of American taxation as the root-cause of the whole division, and maintained that the only real basis of conciliation was to be found in a distinct recognition of the principle that ‘taxation is theirs, and commercial regulation ours;’ that England has a supreme right of regulating the commerce and navigation of America, and that the Americans have an inalienable right to their own property. He fully justified their resistance, predicted that all attempts to coerce them would fail, and eulogised the Congress at Philadelphia as worthy of the greatest periods of antiquity. Only eighteen peers voted for the address, while sixty-eight opposed it.
On February 1 he reappeared with an elaborate Bill for settling the troubles in America. It asserted in strong terms the right of Parliament to bind the colonies in all matters of imperial concern, and especially in all matters of commerce and navigation. It pronounced the new colonial doctrine that the Crown had no right to send British soldiers to the colonies without the assent of the Provincial Assemblies, dangerous and unconstitutional in the highest degree, but at the same time it recognised the sole right of the colonists to tax themselves, guaranteed the inviolability of their charters, and made the tenure of their judges the same as in England. It proposed to make the Congress which had met at Philadelphia an official and permanent body, and asked it to make a free grant for imperial purposes. England, in return, was to reduce the Admiralty Courts to their ancient limits, and to suspend for the present the different Acts complained of by the colonists. The Bill was not even admitted to a second reading.
Several other propositions tending towards conciliation were made in this session. On March 22, 1775, Burke, in one of his greatest speeches, moved a series of resolutions recommending a repeal of the recent Acts complained of in America, reforming the Admiralty Court and the position of the judges, and leaving American taxation to the American Assemblies, without touching upon any question of abstract right. A few days later, Hartley moved a resolution calling upon the Government to make requisitions to the colonial Assemblies to provide of their own authority for their own defence; and Lord Camden in the House of Lords and Sir G. Savile in the House of Commons endeavoured to obtain a repeal of the Quebec Act. All these attempts, however, were defeated by enormous majorities. The petition of Congress to the King was referred to Parliament, which refused to receive it, and Franklin, after vain efforts to effect a reconciliation, returned from England to America. The Legislature of New York, separating from the other colonies, made a supreme effort to heal the wound by a remonstrance which was presented by Burke on May 15. Though strongly asserting the sole right of the colonies to tax themselves, and complaining of the many recent Acts inconsistent with their freedom, it was drawn up in terms that were studiously moderate and respectful. It disclaimed ‘the most distant desire of independence of the parent kingdom.’ It acknowledged fully the general superintending power of the English Parliament, and its right ‘to regulate the trade of the colonies, so as to make it subservient to the interest of the mother country,’ and it expressed the readiness of New York to bear its ‘full proportion of aids to the Crown for the public service,’ though it made no allusion to the project of supporting an American army. The Government, however, induced the House of Commons to refuse to receive it, on the ground that it denied the complete legislative authority of Parliament in the colonies as it had been defined by the Declaratory Act.
Parliament at the same time took stringent measures to enforce obedience. It pronounced Massachusetts in a state of rebellion, and promised to lend the ministers every aid in subjugating it. It voted about 6,000 additional men for the land and sea service; it answered the non-importation and non-exportation agreements of the colonies by an Act restraining the New England States from all trade with Great Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies, and from all participation in the Newfoundland fisheries, and it soon after, on the arrival of fresh intelligence from America, extended the same disabilities to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. It was also resolved that the British force in Boston should be at once raised to 10,000 men, which it was vainly thought would be sufficient to enforce obedience.
At the same time North was careful to announce that these coercive measures would at once cease upon the submission of the colonies, and on February 20, 1775, he had, to the great surprise of Parliament, himself introduced a conciliatory resolution which was very unpalatable to many of his followers and very inconsistent with some of his own earlier speeches, but by which he hoped, if not to appease, at least to divide, the Americans. His proposition was, that if and as long as any colony thought fit of its own accord to make such a contribution to the common defence of the Empire, and such a fixed provision for the support of the civil government and administration of justice, as met the approbation of Parliament, it should be exempted from all imperial taxation for the purpose of revenue.
The reception of this conciliatory measure was very remarkable. Hitherto Lord North had guided the House with an almost absolute sway, and on American questions the Opposition seldom could count upon 90 votes, while the ministers had usually about 260. The disclosure, however, of the conciliatory resolution produced an immediate revolt in the ministerial ranks. Six times Lord North rose in vain efforts to appease the storm. The King's friends denounced him as betraying the cause. The Bedford faction was expected every moment to fly into open rebellion, and Chatham states that for about two hours it was the prevailing belief in the House of Commons that the minister would be left in a small minority. The storm, however, had a sudden and most significant ending. Sir Gilbert Elliot, who was known to be in the intimate confidence of the King, declared for the Bill, and the old majority speedily rallied around the minister. 1
At an earlier stage of the dispute this resolution might have been accepted as a reasonable compromise, but in the midst of the coercive measures that had been adopted it pleased no one. Burke and the Whig party denounced it as not stating what sum the colonists were expected to pay, leaving them to bid against one another, and to bargain with the mother country, and in the meantime holding them in duress with fleets and armies, like prisoners who had not yet paid their ransom. Barré assailed it with great bitterness, as intended for no other object than to excite divisions in America. The colonists themselves repudiated it as interfering with their absolute right of disposing of their own property as they pleased, and most later historians have treated it as wholly delusive. 1
With this view I am unable to concur. The proposition appears to me to have been a real and considerable step towards conciliation. It was accepted as such by Governor Pownall, who was one of the ablest and most moderate of the defenders of the colonies in Parliament, 2 and it was recommended to the Americans by Lord Dartmouth in language of much force and of evident sincerity. He argued that the colonies owed much of their greatness to English protection, that it was but justice that they should in their turn contribute according to their respective abilities to the common defence, and that their own welfare and interests demanded that their civil establishments should be supported with a becoming dignity. Parliament, he says, leaves each colony ‘to judge of the ways and means of making due provision for these purposes, reserving to itself a discretionary power of approving or disapproving what shall be offered.’ It determines nothing about the specific sum to be raised. The King trusts that adequate provision will be made by the colonies, and that it will be ‘proposed in such a way as to increase or diminish according as the public burthens of this kingdom are from time to time augmented or reduced, in so far as those burthens consist of taxes and duties which are not a security for the National Debt. By such a mode of contribution.’ he adds, ‘the colonies will have full security that they can never be required to tax themselves without Parliament taxing the subjects of this kingdom in a far greater proportion.’ He assured them that any proposal of this nature from any colony would be received with every possible indulgence, provided it was unaccompanied by declarations inconsistent with parliamentary authority. 1
The letter of Lord Dartmouth to the governors of the colonies was written in March. Little more than a month later the first blood was shed at Lexington. On the night of April 18, 1775, General Gage sent about 800 soldiers to capture a magazine of stores which had been collected for the use of the provincial army in the town of Concord, about eighteen miles from Boston. The road lay through the little village of Lexington, where, about five o'clock on the morning of the 19th, the advance guard of the British found a party of sixty or seventy armed volunteers drawn up to oppose them, on a green beside the road. They refused when summoned to disperse, and the English at once fired a volley, which killed or wounded sixteen of their number. The detachment then proceeded to Concord, where it succeeded in spiking two cannon, casting into the river five hundred pounds of ball and sixty barrels of powder, and destroying a large quantity of flour, and it then prepared to return. The alarm had, however, now been given; the whole country was roused. Great bodies of yeomen and militia flocked in to the assistance of the provincials. From farmhouses and hedges and from the shelter of stone walls bullets poured upon the tired retreating troops, and a complete disaster would probably have occurred had they not been reinforced at Lexington by 900 men and two cannon under Lord Percy. As it was the British lost 65 killed, 180 wounded, and 28 made prisoners, while the American loss was less than 90 men.
The whole province was now in arms. The Massachusetts Congress at once resolved that the New England army should be raised to 30,000 men, and thousands of brave and ardent yeomen were being rapidly drilled into good soldiers. The American camp at Cambridge contained many experienced soldiers who had learnt their profession in the great French war, and very many others who in the ranks of the militia had already acquired the rudiments of military knowledge, and even when they had no previous training, the recruits were widely different from the rude peasants who filled the armies of England. As an American military writer truly said, the middle and lower classes in England, owing to the operation of the game laws and to the circumstances of their lives, were in general almost as ignorant of the use of a musket as of the use of a catapult. The New England yeomen were accustomed to firearms from their childhood; they were invariably skilful in the use of spade, hatchet, and pickaxe, so important in military operations; and their great natural quickness and the high level of intelligence which their excellent schools had produced, made it certain that they would not be long in mastering their military duties. The whole country was practically at their disposal. All who were suspected of Toryism were ordered to surrender their weapons. General Gage was blockaded in Boston, and he remained strictly on the defensive, waiting for reinforcements from England, which only arrived at the end of May. Even then, he for some time took no active measures, but contented himself with offering pardon to all insurgents who laid down their arms, except Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and with proclaiming martial law in Massachusetts. He at length, however, determined to extend his lines, so as to include and fortify a very important post, which by a strange negligence had been left hitherto unoccupied.
On a narrow peninsula to the north of Boston, but separated from it by rather less than half a mile of water, lay the little town of Charleston, behind which rose two small connected hills, which commanded a great part both of the town and harbour of Boston. Breed's Hill, which was nearest to Charleston, was about seventy-five feet, Bunker's Hill was about one hundred and ten feet, in height. The peninsula, which was little more than a mile long, was connected with the mainland by a narrow causeway. Cambridge, the headquarters of the American forces, was by road about four miles from Bunker's Hill, but much of the intervening space was occupied by American outposts. The possession, under these circumstances, of Bunker's Hill, was a matter of great military importance, and Gage determined to fortify it. The Americans learnt his intention, and determined to defeat it.
On the night of June 16, an American force under the command of Colonel Prescott, and accompanied by some skilful engineers and by a few field-guns, silently occupied Breed's Hill and threw up a strong redoubt before daylight revealed their presence to the British. Next day, after much unnecessary delay, a detachment under General Howe was sent from Boston to dislodge them. The Americans had in the meantime received some reinforcements from their camp, but the whole force upon the hill is said not to have exceeded 1,500 men. Most of them were inexperienced volunteers. Many of them were weary with a long night's toil, and they had been exposed for hours to a harassing though ineffectual fire from the ships in the harbour; but they were now strongly entrenched behind a redoubt and a breastwork. The British engaged on this memorable day consisted in all of between 2,000 and 3,000 regular troops, fresh from the barracks, and supported by artillery. The town of Charleston, having been occupied by some American riflemen, who poured their fire upon the English from the shelter of the houses, was burnt by order of General Howe, and its flames cast a ghastly splendour upon the scene. The English were foolishly encumbered by heavy knapsacks with three days' provisions. Instead of endeavouring to cut off the Americans by occupying the neck of land to the rear of Breed's Hill, they climbed the steep and difficult ascent in front of the battery, struggling through the long tangled grass beneath a burning sun, and exposed at every step to the fire of a sheltered enemy. The Americans waited till their assailants were within a few rods of the entrenchment, when they greeted them with a fire so deadly and so sustained that the British line twice recoiled, broken, intimidated, and disordered. The third attack was more successful. The position was carried at the point of the bayonet. The Americans were put to flight, and five out of their six cannon were taken. But the victory was dearly purchased. On the British side 1,054 men, including 89 commissioned officers, fell. The Americans only admitted a loss of 449 men; and they contended that, if they had been properly reinforced, and if their ammunition had not begun to fail, they would have held the position. 1
The battle of Breed's, or, as it is commonly called, of Bunker's Hill, though extremely bloody in proportion to the number of men engaged, can hardly be said to present any very remarkable military character, and in a great European war it would have been almost unnoticed. Few battles, however, have had more important consequences. It roused at once the fierce instinct of combat in America, weakened seriously the only British army in New England, and dispelled for ever the almost superstitious belief in the impossibility of encountering regular troops with hastily levied volunteers. The ignoble taunts which had been directed against the Americans were for ever silenced. No one questioned the conspicuous gallantry with which the provincial troops had supported a long fire from the ships and awaited the charge of the enemy, and British soldiers had been twice driven back in disorder before their fire. From this time the best judges predicted the ultimate success of America.
On May 10 the new Continental Congress had met at Philadelphia, and it at once occupied itself, with an energy and an industry that few legislative bodies have ever equalled, in organising the war. 1 Like the former Congress, its debates were secret, and its decisions were ultimately unanimous. New York, which for a time had flinched, was now fully rallied to the cause, and before the close of the Congress, Georgia for the first time openly joined the twelve other colonies. The conciliatory offer of Lord North was emphatically rejected. The colonies, it was said, had the exclusive right, not only of granting their own money, but also of deliberating whether they will make any gift, for what purpose and to what amount; and ‘it is not just that they should be required to oblige themselves to other contributions, while Great Britain possesses a monopoly of their trade.’ Still professing to have no desire to separate from Great Britain, the Congress drew up another petition, expressing deep loyalty to the King, and addresses to the people of Great Britain, Ireland, and Canada, and to the Assembly of Jamaica, asserting that the British had been the aggressors at Lexington, and had destroyed every vestige of constitutional liberty in Massachusetts, and that America, in taking up arms, acted strictly in self-defence. It forbade the colonists to have any commercial intercourse with those ports of America which had not observed the non-importation agreement of the preceding year. It forbade them to furnish any provisions or other necessaries to British fishermen on their coast, or to anyone connected with the British army or navy. It at the same time ordered that ten companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, should be raised to reinforce the New England army at Cambridge; made rules for the regulation of the revolutionary army; determined upon an expedition to Canada; issued bills of credit to the amount of 3,000,000 Spanish dollars; established an American post-office with Franklin at its head; appointed a number of general officers, and, above all, selected George Washington as Commander-in-chief of the American army.