by Jill Lepore
“There is more equality of rank and fortune in America than in any other country under the sun,” South Carolina governor Charles Pinckney declared. This was true so long as no one figured in that calculation—as Pinckney never would—people who were property, a number that included Pinckney’s forty-five slaves at Snee Farm, fifty-five people who constituted the source of his family’s wealth. Among them were Cyrus, a carpenter (valued by Pinckney at £120); Cyrus’s children, Charlotte (£80), Sam (£40), and Bella (£20); his granddaughter Cate (£70); and a very old woman named Joan, who might have been Cyrus’s mother. Pinckney placed the value of this great-grandmother at zero; she was, to him, worthless.19
In 1759, British and American forces defeated the French in Quebec, a stunning victory that led the Iroquois to abandon their longstanding position of neutrality and join with the English, which turned the tide of the war. In August 1760, the English captured Montreal, and the North American part of the war ended only six hundred miles from where it began, at the ragged western edge of the British Empire.
Weeks later, young George III was crowned king of Great Britain. Twenty-two and strangely shy, he was a boy of a man, dressed in gold, his white-buckled shoes tripping on a train of ermine. He presented himself to an uneasy world as a defender of the Protestant faith and of English liberties. He had declared, as Prince of Wales, “The pride, the glory of Britain, and the direct end of its constitution is political liberty.”20 But by now, while his subjects in North America welcomed the coronation of their new king, they might as easily have recalled the wisdom of a proverb that Franklin had printed twenty years earlier in Poor Richard’s Almanac: “The greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig’d to sit upon his own arse.”21
Mapmakers sharpened their quills to redraw the map of North America when peace was reached in 1763. Under its terms, France ceded Canada and all of New France east of the Mississippi to Britain; France granted all its land to the west of the Mississippi, territory known as Louisiana, to Spain; and Spain yielded Cuba and half of Florida to Britain. Britain’s skirt of settlement along the Atlantic looked now like bolts of fabric unfurled on the dressmaker’s floor.
London-printed maps commemorating the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763 marked out the importance of both the Caribbean and the continent. “We in America have certainly abundant reason to rejoice,” the leading Massachusetts lawyer James Otis Jr. wrote from Boston in 1763. “The British dominion and power may now be said, literally, to extend from sea to sea, and from the great river to the ends of the earth.” If the war had strained the colonists’ relationship to the empire, the peace had strengthened both the empire and the colonists’ attachment to it. Added Otis, “The true interests of Great Britain and her plantations are mutual, and what God in his providence has united, let no man dare attempt to pull asunder.”22
But the war had left Britain nearly bankrupt. The fighting had nearly doubled Britain’s debt, and Pitt’s promise began to waver. Then, too, the king’s ministers determined that defending the empire’s new North American borders would require ten thousand troops or more, especially after a confederation of Indians led by an Ottawa chief named Pontiac captured British forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. Pontiac, it was said, had been stirred to action by a prophecy of the creation on earth of a “Heaven where there was no White people.”23 Fearing the cost of suppressing more Indian uprisings, George III issued a proclamation decreeing that no colonists could settle west of the Appalachian Mountains, a line that many colonists had already crossed.
In 1764, to pay the war debt and fund the defense of the colonies, Parliament passed the American Revenue Act, also known as the Sugar Act. Up until 1764, the colonial assemblies had raised their own taxes; Parliament had regulated trade. When Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which chiefly required stricter enforcement of earlier measures, some colonists challenged it by arguing that, because the colonies had no representatives in Parliament, Parliament had no right to levy taxes on them. The Sugar Act wasn’t radical; the response to it was radical, a consequence of the growing power of colonial assemblies at a time when the idea of representation was gaining new force.
Taxes are what people pay to a ruler to keep order and defend the realm. In the ancient world, landowners paid in crops or livestock, the landless with their labor. Levying taxes made medieval European monarchs rich; only in the seventeenth century did monarchs begin to cede the power to tax to legislatures.24 Taxation became tied to representation at the very time that England was founding colonies in North America and the Caribbean, which was also the moment at which the English had begun to dominate the slave trade. In the 1760s, the two became muddled rhetorically. Massachusetts assemblyman Samuel Adams asked, “If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?”25
Taxation without representation, men like Adams argued, is rule by force, and rule by force is slavery. This argument had to do, in part, with debt. “The Borrower is a slave to the Lender,” as Franklin once put it in Poor Richard’s Almanack.26 Debtors could be arrested and sent to debtors’ prison.27 Debtors’ prison was far more common in England than in the colonies, which were in many ways debtors’ asylums.28 But if there was an unusual tolerance for debt in the colonies, there was also an unusual amount of it, and in the 1760s there was, suddenly, rather a lot more of it. The governor of Massachusetts reported that “a Stop to all Credit was expected” and even “a general bankruptcy.”29 The end of the French and Indian War led to a contraction of credit, followed by a crippling depression and, especially in the South, several years of poor crops. Tobacco plantation owners in the Chesapeake found themselves heavily indebted to merchants in England, who, themselves strapped, were quite keen to collect those debts. These planters, in particular, found it politically useful to describe themselves as slaves to their creditors.30 During these same years, though, the sugar colonies in the Caribbean prospered, not least because the Sugar Act enforced a monopoly: under its terms, colonists on the mainland had to buy their sugar from the British West Indies.31 This difference did not pass unobserved. “Our Tobacco Colonies send us home no such wealthy planters as we see frequently arrive from our sugar islands,” Adam Smith would remark in The Wealth of Nations.32
Parliament’s next revenue act induced a still more strenuous response. A 1765 Stamp Act required placing government-issued paper stamps on all manner of printed paper, from bills of credit to playing cards. Stamps were required across the British Empire, and, by those standards, the tax levied in the colonies was cheap: colonists paid only two-thirds of what Britons paid. But in the credit-strained mainland colonies, this proved difficult to bear. Opponents of the act began styling themselves the Sons of Liberty (after the Sons of Liberty in 1750s Ireland) and describing themselves as rebelling against slavery. A creditor was “lord of another man’s purse”; hadn’t British creditors and Parliament itself swindled North American debtors of their purses, and their liberty, too? Was not Parliament making them slaves? John Adams, a twenty-nine-year-old Boston lawyer and leader of the Stamp Act opposition, wrote: “We won’t be their negroes.”33
The colonies were bound up in a growing credit crisis that would engulf the whole of the British Empire, from Virginia planters to Scottish bankers to East India Company tea exporters. But there were American particulars, too: with the Stamp Act, a tax on all printed paper, including newspapers, Parliament levied a tax that cost the most to the people best able to complain about it: the printers of newspapers. “It will affect Printers more than anybody,” Franklin warned, begging Parliament to reconsider.34 Printers from Boston to Charleston argued that Parliament was trying to reduce the colonists to a state of slavery by destroying the freedom of the press. The printers of the Boston Gazette refused to buy stamps and changed the paper’s motto to “A free press maintains the majesty of the people.�
�� In New Jersey, a printer named William Goddard issued a newspaper called the Constitutional Courant, with Franklin’s segmented snake on the masthead. This time, asked whether to join or die, the colonies decided to join.
In October, the month before the Stamp Act was to take effect, twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies met in a Stamp Act Congress in New York’s city hall, where John Peter Zenger had been tried in 1735 and Caesar in 1741. The Stamp Act Congress collectively declared “that it is inseparably essential to the Freedom of a People, and the undoubted Right of Englishmen, that no Taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their Representatives.”35 When they dined, they sent their leftovers to the debtors confined in a prison in the building’s garret, making common cause with men deprived of their liberty by creditors.36
The sovereignty of the people, the freedom of the press, the relationship between representation and taxation, debt as slavery: each of these ideas, with origins in England, found a place in the colonists’ opposition to the Stamp Act. Still, Parliament professed itself baffled. In 1766, Benjamin Franklin appeared before the House of Commons to explain the colonists’ refusal to pay the tax. At sixty, Franklin presented himself as at once a man of the world and an American provincial, wily and plainspoken, sophisticated and homespun.
“In what light did the people of America use to consider the Parliament of Great Britain?” the ministers asked.
“They considered the Parliament as the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges, and always spoke of it with the utmost respect and veneration,” was Franklin’s reply.
“And have they not still the same respect for Parliament?”
“No; it is greatly lessened.”
If the colonists had lost respect for Parliament, why had this come to pass? On what grounds did they object to the Stamp Tax? There was nothing in Pennsylvania’s charter that forbade Parliament from exercising this authority.
It’s true, Franklin admitted, there was nothing specifically to that effect in the colony’s charter. He cited, instead, their understanding of “The common rights of Englishmen, as declared by Magna Charta,” as if the colonists were the barons of Runnymede, King George their King John, and Magna Carta their constitution.
“What used to be the pride of the Americans?” Parliament wanted to know.
“To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain.”
“What is now their pride?”
“To wear their old clothes over again till they can make new ones.”37
Here was Poor Richard, again with his proverbs.
And yet this defiance did not extend to Quebec, or to the sugar islands, where the burden of the Stamp Tax was actually heavier. Thirteen colonies eventually cast off British rule; some thirteen more did not. Colonists from the mainland staged protests, formed a congress, and refused to pay the stamp tax. But, except for some vague and halfhearted objections expressed on Nevis and St. Kitts, British planters in the West Indies barely uttered a complaint. (South Carolina, whose economy had more in common with the British West Indies than with the mainland colonies, wavered.) They were too worried about the possibility of inciting yet another slave rebellion.38
On the mainland, whites outnumbered blacks, four to one. On the islands, blacks outnumbered whites, eight to one. One-quarter of all British troops in British America were stationed in the West Indies, where they protected English colonists from the ever-present threat of slave rebellion. For this protection, West Indian planters were more than willing to pay a tax on stamps. Planters in Jamaica were still reeling from the latest insurrection, in 1760, when an Akan man named Tacky had led hundreds of armed men who burned plantations and killed some sixty slave owners before they were captured. The reprisals had been ferocious: Tacky’s head was impaled on a stake, and, as in New York in 1741, some of his followers were hung in chains while others were burned at the stake. And still the rebellions continued, for which island planters began to blame colonists on the mainland: Did the Sons of Liberty realize what they were saying? “Can you be surprised that the Negroes in Jamaica should endeavor to Recover their Freedom,” one merchant fumed, “when they dayly hear at the Tables of their Masters, how much the Americans are applauded for the stand they are making for theirs”?39
Unsurprisingly, the island planters’ unwillingness to join the protest against the Stamp Act greatly frustrated the Sons of Liberty. “Their Negroes seem to have more of the spirit of liberty than they,” John Adams complained, asking, “Can no punishment be devised for Barbados and Port Royal in Jamaica?” Adams was the rare man whose soaring ambition matched his talents. He would learn to restrain his passions better. But in the 1760s, his anger at those who refused to support the resistance was unchecked. The punishment the Sons of Liberty decided upon came in the form of a boycott of Caribbean goods. In language even more heated than Adams’s, patriot printers damned “the SLAVISH Islands of Barbados and Antigua—Poor, mean spirited, Cowardly, Dastardly Creoles,” for “their base desertion of the cause of liberty, their tame surrender of the rights of Britons, their mean, timid resignation to slavery.”40
People held in slavery in Jamaica rebelled throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century, leaving Jamaican slave owners reliant on British military protection and unwilling to join colonists on the continent in rebelling against British rule. Planters bridled at the attack and floundered under the effects of the boycott. “We are likely to be miserably off for want of lumber and northern provisions,” one Antigua planter wrote, “as the North Americans are determined not to submit to the Stamp Act.”41 But they did not yield. And some began to consider their northern neighbors to be mere blusterers. “I look on them as dogs that will bark but dare not stand,” complained one planter from Jamaica.42
Nor were the West Indian planters wrong to worry that one kind of rebellion would incite another. In Charleston, the Sons of Liberty marched through the streets, chanting, “Liberty and No Stamps!” only to be followed by slaves crying, “Liberty! Liberty!” And not a few Sons of Liberty made this same leap, from fighting for their own liberty to fighting to end slavery. “The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black,” James Otis Jr. insisted, in a searing tract called Rights of the British Colonists, Asserted, published in 1764, only months after he had rejoiced about the growth of Britain’s empire. Brilliant and unstable, Otis would later lose his mind (before his death in 1783, when he was struck by lightning, he had taken to running naked through the streets). But in the 1760s, he, better than any of his contemporaries, saw the logical extension of arguments about natural rights. He found it absurd to suggest that it could be “right to enslave a man because he is black” or because he has “short curl’d hair like wool.” Slavery, Otis insisted, “is the most shocking violation of the law of nature,” and a source of political contamination, too. “Those who every day barter away other men’s liberty, will soon care little for their own,” he warned.43
Otis’s readers picked and chose which parts of his treatise to hold close and which parts to shed. But something had been set loose in the world, a set of unruly ideas about liberty, equality, and sovereignty. In 1763, when Benjamin Franklin visited a school for black children, he admitted that his mind had changed. “I . . . have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained,” he wrote a friend. In Virginia, George Mason began to have doubts about slavery, sending to George Washington, in December of 1765, an essay in which he argued that slavery was “the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed”—the Roman republic—and warning that it might be the destruction of the British Empire, too.44
Debt, taxes, and slavery weren’t the only issues raised in the political debates of the 1760s. The intensity of the debate strengthened new ideas about equality, too. “Male and female are all one in Christ the Truth,” Benjamin L
ay had argued, expressing an idea that drew on a wealth of seventeenth-century Quaker writings about spiritual equality. “Are not women born as free as men?” Otis asked.45 Even Benjamin Franklin’s long-suffering sister Jane began to entertain this notion. In 1765, Jane Franklin lost her husband, a saddler and ne’er-do-well named Edward Mecom, who had sickened while in debtors’ prison, and she’d begun taking in, as boarders, members of the Massachusetts Assembly. “I do not Pretend to writ about Politics,” she once wrote to her brother, “tho I Love to hear them.”46 This was false modesty, a “fishing for commendation” about which her brother so often chided her. At her table, there was a lot for her to listen to, when, in 1766, Otis was elected as Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly but the royally appointed governor refused to accept the results of the election. If Jane Franklin wasn’t, as yet, willing to write about politics, she had heard much worth pondering. Not long after the governor overturned the results of the election, she wrote to her brother to ask that he send her “all the Pamphlets & Papers that have been Printed of yr writing.”47 She decided to make a study of politics.
In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. The repeal “has hushed into silence almost every popular Clamour, and composed every Wave of Popular Disorder into a smooth and peaceful Calm,” John Adams wrote in his diary.48 “I congratulate you & my Countrymen on the Repeal,” Franklin wrote to his sister.49 The week after the news reached Boston, its town meeting voted in favor of “the total abolishing of slavery from among us.”50 Pamphleteers began arguing for a colony-wide antislavery law; others counseled waiting until the end of the battle with Parliament, because, even as it repealed the Stamp Act, Parliament had passed the Declaratory Act, asserting its authority to make laws “in all cases whatsoever.” The next year, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, taxes on lead, paper, paint, glass, and tea. When this, too, led to riots and boycotts, the prime minister sent to Boston two regiments of the British army to enforce the law.