Associated with this but more important because more widespread in its effect was the extension and enforcement of the jurisdiction of the vice-admiralty courts — “prerogative” courts composed not of juries but of single judges whose posts were “political offices in the hands of the royal governors, to be bestowed upon deserving friends and supporters.” Since these courts had jurisdiction over the enforcement of all laws of trade and navigation as well as over ordinary marine matters, they had always been potentially threatening to the interests of the colonists. But in the past, by one means or another, they had been curtailed in their effect, and much of their business had been shunted off to common law courts dominated by juries. Suddenly in the 1760’s they acquired a great new importance, for it was into their hands that the burden of judicial enforcement of the new Parliamentary legislation fell. It was upon them, consequently, and upon the whole principle of “prerogative” courts that abuse was hurled as the effect of their enhanced power was felt. “What has America done,” victims of the decisions of these courts asked, “to be thus particularized, to be disfranchised and stripped of so invaluable a privilege as the trial by jury?” The operations of the vice-admiralty courts, it was felt, especially after their administrative reorganization in 1767, denied Americans a crucial measure of the protection of the British constitution. “However respectable the judge may be, it is however an hardship and severity which distinguishes [defendants before this court] from the rest of Englishmen.” The evils of such prerogative invasion of the judiciary could hardly be exaggerated: their “enormous created powers … threatens future generations in America with a curse tenfold worse than the Stamp Act.”13
The more one looked the more one found evidences of deliberate malevolence. In Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson’s elaborate patronage machine, long in existence but fully organized only after the arrival of Governor Francis Bernard in 1760, appeared to suspicious tribunes like Oxenbridge Thacher and John Adams to constitute a serious threat to liberty. The Hutchinsons and the Olivers and their ambitious allies, it was said (and the view was widely circulated through the colonies), had managed, by accumulating a massive plurality of offices, to engross the power of all branches of the Massachusetts government thereby building a “foundation sufficient on which to erect a tyranny.”
Bernard had all the executive, and a negative of the legislative; Hutchinson and Oliver, by their popular arts and secret intrigues, had elevated to the [Council] such a collection of crown officers and their own relations as to have too much influence there; and they had three of a family on the superior bench … This junto, therefore, had the legislative and executive in their control, and more natural influence over the judicial than is ever to be trusted to any set of men in the world.
With encouragement, no doubt, from England, they were stretching their power beyond all proper bounds, becoming “conspirators against the public liberty.”14
The same evil of plural officeholding, tending to destroy the protective mechanism of the separation of powers, was observed to be at work in South Carolina. In both cases the filiation between the engrossing of offices in England and in America could be said to be direct. The self-seeking monopolists of office in the colonies, advancing themselves and their faithful adherents “to the exclusion of much better men,” Adams wrote somewhat plaintively, were as cravenly obedient to their masters in power in England as their own despicable “creatures” were to them.15 How deep this issue ran, how powerful its threat, could be seen best when one noted the degree to which it paralleled cognate developments in England.
John Wilkes’s career was crucial to the colonists’ understanding of what was happening to them; his fate, the colonists came to believe, was intimately involved with their own.16 Not only was he associated in their minds with general opposition to the government that passed the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties, that was flooding the colonies with parasitic placemen, and that appeared to be making inroads into the constitution by weakening the judiciary and bestowing monopolies of public offices on pliant puppets — not only was he believed to be a national leader of opposition to such a government, but he had entered the public arena first as a victim and then as the successful antagonist of general warrants, which, in the form of writs of assistance, the colonists too had fought in heroic episodes known throughout the land. He had, moreover, defended the sanctity of private property against confiscation by the government. His cause was their cause. His Number 45 North Briton was as celebrated in the colonies at it was in England, and more generally approved of; its symbolism became part of the iconography of liberty in the colonies. His return from exile in 1768 and subsequent election to Parliament were major events to Americans. Toasts were offered to him throughout the colonies, and substantial contributions to his cause as well as adulatory letters were sent by Sons of Liberty in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. A stalwart, independent opponent of encroaching government power and a believer in the true principles of the constitution, he was expected to do much in Parliament for the good of all: so the Bostonians wrote him in June 1768 “your perseverance in the good old cause may still prevent the great system from dashing to pieces. ’Tis from your endeavors we hope for a royal ‘Pascite, ut ante, boves,’ and from our attachment to ‘peace and good order’ we wait for a constitutional redress: being determined that the King of Great Britain shall have subjects but not slaves in these remote parts of his dominions.”17
By February 1769 it was well known that “the fate of Wilkes and America must stand or fall together.”18 The news, therefore, that by the maneuvers of the court party Wilkes had been denied the seat in Parliament to which he had been duly elected came as a profound shock to Americans. It shattered the hopes of many that the evils they saw around them had been the result not of design but of inadvertence, and it portended darker days ahead. When again, and then for a second, a third, and a fourth time Wilkes was re-elected to Parliament and still denied his seat, Americans could only watch with horror and agree with him that the rights of the Commons, like those of the colonial Houses, were being denied by a power-hungry government that assumed to itself the privilege of deciding who should speak for the people in their own branch of the legislature. Power had reached directly and brutally into the main agency of liberty. Surely Wilkes was right: the constitution was being deliberately, not inadvertently, torn up by its roots.
Meanwhile an event even more sinister in its implications had taken place in the colonies themselves. On October 1, 1768, two regiments of regular infantry, with artillery, disembarked in Boston. For many months the harassed Governor Bernard had sought some legal means or excuse for summoning military help in his vain efforts to maintain if not an effective administration then at least order in the face of Stamp Act riots, circular letters, tumultuous town meetings, and assaults on customs officials. But the arrival of troops in Boston increased rather than decreased his troubles. For to a populace steeped in the literature of eighteenth-century English politics the presence of troops in a peaceful town had such portentous meaning that resistance instantly stiffened. It was not so much the physical threat of the troops that affected the attitudes of the Bostonians; it was the bearing their arrival had on the likely tendency of events. Viewed in the perspective of Trenchard’s famous tracts on standing armies and of the vast derivative literature on the subject that flowed from the English debates of the 1690’s, these were not simply soldiers assembled for police duties; they were precisely what history had proved over and over again to be prime movers of the process by which unwary nations lose “that precious jewel liberty.” The mere rumor of possible troop arrivals had evoked the age-old apprehensions. “The raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with the consent of Parliament, is against the law,” the alarmed Boston Town Meeting had resolved. It is, they said,
the indefeasible right of [British] subjects to be consulted and to give their free consent in person or by representat
ives of their own free election to the raising and keeping a standing army among them; and the inhabitants of this town, being free subjects, have the same right derived from nature and confirmed by the British constitution as well as the said royal charter; and therefore the raising or keeping a standing army without their consent in person or by representatives of their own free election would be an infringement of their natural, constitutional, and charter rights; and the employing such army for the enforcing of laws made without the consent of the people, in person or by their representatives, would be a grievance.19
But the troops arrived, four regiments in all: in bold, stark actuality a standing army — just such a standing army as had snuffed out freedom in Denmark, classically, and elsewhere throughout the world. True, British regulars had been introduced into the colonies on a permanent basis at the end of the Seven Years’ War; that in itself had been disquieting. But it had then been argued that troops were needed to police the newly acquired territories, and that they were not in any case to be regularly garrisoned in peaceful, populous towns.20 No such defense could be made of the troops sent to Boston in 1768. No simple, ingenuous explanation would suffice. The true motive was only too apparent for those with eyes to see. One of the classic stages in the process of destroying free constitutions of government had been reached.
To those most sensitive to the ideological currents of the day, the danger could scarcely have been greater. “To have a standing army!” Andrew Eliot wrote from Boston to Thomas Hollis in September, 1768, “Good God! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty! Things are come to an unhappy crisis; there will never be that harmony between Great Britain and her colonies that there hath been; all confidence is at an end; and the moment there is any blood shed all affection will cease.” He was convinced, he wrote, that if the English government “had not had their hands full at home they would have crushed the colonies.” As it was, England’s most recent actions tended only “to hasten that independency which at present the warmest among us deprecate.” “I fear for the nation,” he concluded, and his fears were shared not only by all liberty-minded Bostonians but also, through the stimulation of the “Journal of the Times,” a day-by-day account of Boston “under military rule” that was, in effect, syndicated throughout the colonies, it was shared by politically and ideologically sensitive Americans everywhere. Time did not ease these anxieties; it merely complicated them. Fear and hatred became edged with contempt. “Our people begin to despise a military force,” Eliot observed a year after the troops had first appeared; they coolly woo away the soldiers and drag offending officers before the courts — which, he grimly added, continue to function “notwithstanding all their efforts.” But “things cannot long remain in the state they are now in; they are hastening to a crisis. What will be the event, God knows.”21
And again significant corroboration for America’s fears could be found in developments in England, and support furnished for the belief that events in America were only part of a larger whole. On May 10, 1768, a mob, assembled in St. George’s Fields, London, in support of the imprisoned Wilkes, was fired upon by the regiment of Foot Guards that had been summoned by the nervous magistrates. Several deaths resulted, the most dramatic being that of a boy, wrongly identified as a leader of the mob, who was tracked down and shot to death on orders of the commander. The political capital made of this episode by the Wilkesites and other anti-government groups in London, who declared it to have been a deliberately planned “massacre,” was echoed loudly in the colonies, the more so when it appeared that convictions of the guilty soldiers by normal processes of law were being quashed by the government. Could it be believed to be a coincidence that in February 1770 an eleven-year-old boy was also shot to death in a Boston riot by a suspected customs informer? This was more than a parallel to what had happened in London: the two events were two effects of the same cause.22
And then, a few weeks later, came the Boston Massacre. Doubts that the troops in Boston constituted a standing army and that it was the purpose of standing armies to terrify a populace into compliance with tyrannical wills were silenced by that event, which, Eliot assured Hollis, had obviously been coming. It “serves to show the impossibility of our living in peace with a standing army. A free people will sometimes carry things too far, but this remedy will always be found worse than the disease. Trenchard’s History of Standing Armies, with which you formerly obliged me, is excellent … Unless there is some great alteration in the state of things the era of the independence of the colonies is much nearer than I once thought it, or now wish it.”23 The same response was generally broadcast in the narrative of the Massacre, written by James Bowdoin and others for the Boston Town Meeting, which was distributed everywhere in the English-speaking world. This famous pamphlet stressed the deliberateness of the shooting and the clarity of the design that lay behind the lurid event; nor was the parallel to the St. George’s Fields murders neglected. The acquittal of the indicted soldiers did not alter the conviction that the Massacre was the logical work of a standing army, for it accentuated the parallel with the English case which also had concluded with acquittal; and in Boston too there was suspicion of judicial irregularities. How the murderers managed to escape was known to some, it was said, but was “too dark to explain.”24
Unconstitutional taxing, the invasion of placemen, the weakening of the judiciary, plural officeholding, Wilkes, standing armies — these were major evidences of a deliberate assault of power upon liberty. Lesser testimonies were also accumulating at the same time: small episodes in themselves, they took on a large significance in the context in which they were received. Writs of assistance in support of customs officials were working their expected evil: “our houses, and even our bedchambers, are exposed to be ransacked, our boxes, trunks, and chests broke open, ravaged and plundered by wretches whom no prudent man would venture to employ even as menial servants.” Legally convened legislatures had been “adjourned … to a place highly inconvenient to the members and greatly disadvantageous to the interest of the province”; they had been prorogued and dissolved at executive whim. Even the boundaries of colonies had been tampered with, whereby “rights of soil” had been eliminated at a stroke. When in 1772 the Boston Town Meeting met to draw up a full catalogue of the “infringements and violations” of the “rights of the colonists, and of this province in particular, as men, as Christians, and as subjects,” it approved a list of twelve items, which took seventeen pamphlet pages to describe.25
But then, for a two-year period, there was a detente of sorts created by the repeal of the Townshend Duties, the withdrawal of troops from Boston, and the failure of other provocative measures to be taken. It ended abruptly, however, in the fall and winter of 1773, when, with a rush, the tendencies earlier noted were brought to fulfillment. In the space of a few weeks, all the dark, twisted roots of malevolence were finally revealed, plainly, for all to see.
The turning point was the passage of the Tea Act26 and the resulting Tea Party in Boston in December 1773. Faced with this defiant resistance to intimidation, the powers at work in England, it was believed, gave up all pretense of legality — “threw off the mask,” John Adams said in a phrase that for a century had been used to describe just such climactic disclosures27 — and moved swiftly to complete their design. In a period of two months in the spring of 1774 Parliament took its revenge in a series of coercive actions no liberty-loving people could tolerate: the Boston Port Act, intended, it was believed, to snuff out the economic life of the Massachusetts metropolis; the Administration of Justice Act, aimed at crippling judicial processes once and for all by permitting trials to be held in England for offenses committed in Massachusetts; the Massachusetts Government Act, which stripped from the people of Massachusetts the protection of the British constitution by giving over all the “democratic” elements of the province’s government — even popularly elected juries and town meetings — into the hands of the executive power; the Qu
ebec Act, which, while not devised as a part of the coercive program, fitted it nicely, in the eyes of the colonists, by extending the boundaries of a “papist” province, and one governed wholly by prerogative, south into territory claimed by Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; finally, the Quartering Act, which permitted the seizure of unoccupied buildings for the use of troops on orders of the governors alone even in situations, such as Boston’s, where barracks were available in the vicinity.
Once these coercive acts were passed there could be little doubt that “the system of slavery fabricated against America … is the offspring of mature deliberation.” To the leaders of the Revolutionary movement there was, beyond question, “a settled, fixed plan for enslaving the colonies, or bringing them under arbitrary government, and indeed the nation too.” By 1774 the idea “that the British government — the King, Lords, and Commons — have laid a regular plan to enslave America, and that they are now deliberately putting it in execution” had been asserted, Samuel Seabury wrote wearily but accurately, “over, and over, and over again.” The less inhibited of the colonial orators were quick to point out that “the MONSTER of a standing ARMY” had sprung directly from “a PLAN … systematically laid, and pursued by the British ministry, near twelve years, for enslaving America”; the Boston Massacre, it was claimed, had been “planned by Hillsborough and a knot of treacherous knaves in Boston.” Careful analysts like Jefferson agreed on the major point; in one of the most closely reasoned of the pamphlets of 1774 the Virginian stated unambiguously that though “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day … a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” So too the fastidious and scholarly John Dickinson, though in 1774 he still clung to the hope that inadvertence, at least on the part of the King, was involved, believed that “a plan had been deliberately framed and pertinaciously adhered to, unchanged even by frequent changes of ministers, unchecked by any intervening gleam of humanity, to sacrifice to a passion for arbitrary dominion the universal property, liberty, safety, honor, happiness, and prosperity of us unoffending yet devoted Americans.” So too Washington, collaborating with George Mason in writing the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, agreed that the trouble had arisen from a “regular, systematic plan” of oppression, the English government “endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us”; he was convinced “beyond the smallest doubt,” he wrote privately, “that these measures are the result of deliberation … I am as fully convinced as I am of my own existence that there has been a regular, systematic plan formed to enforce them.” The more sensitive observers were to ideological issues — the more practiced in theoretical discourse — the more likely they were to find irrefutable evidence of what Richard Henry Lee called “designs for destroying our constitutional liberties.” In 1766 Andrew Eliot had been unsure; the Stamp Act, he wrote, had been “calculated (I do not say designed) to enslave the colonies.” By 1768 things had worsened, and the distinction between “calculation” and “design” disappeared from his correspondence. “We have everything to fear and scarce any room to hope,” he then wrote to Hollis; “I am sure this will put you in mind of 1641.” He was convinced that the English government “had a design to new-model our constitution, at least in this province,” and they would already have succeeded had they not been so occupied with other business at home. His friends in Boston concurred, and, beginning in 1770 wrote out in a series of town resolutions, instructions to representatives, and House declarations their conviction that
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 16