Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  That done, history marched on. Young George was off to his lengthy reign, during which he at first was hampered by his reliance upon the politically inept Bute as prime minister. One result was a revolving door of ministries. In time, though, George III learned to leave most policy decisions to his ministers and even, in the case of the American Revolution, to defend Parliamentary authority over the American colonies, rather than his own monarchial authority. Indeed, after the Boston Tea Party defied Parliament’s authority over colonial affairs in no uncertain terms, George III described himself as “fighting the battle of the legislature.”

  In the war that soon followed, he was without doubt committed to stamping out the colonial insurrection. He followed the military events closely, he consulted often with his ministers and offered his advice, but his cabinet made the big decisions. Toward the end, he was obviously reluctant to admit the war was lost. But once it was over, he was perfectly willing to be friends with the new nation across the Atlantic.

  As he once told John Adams, he only had acted during the conflict by “what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed my people.” He said that he had been the “last to consent to the separation,” but now, “the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.”

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  Additional note: Despite the loss of the American colonies, George III actually became a popular king in England, but his years ahead would be troubled ones. In 1786, a woman tried to stab him at the garden gate of St. James palace in London. In 1788, his mental illness first made its presence known. A shaken Queen Charlotte told a confidante that he had foamed at the mouth; the king’s doctors sometimes restrained him in a straitjacket or tied him to his bed. He seemed to recover and was perfectly composed after another would-be assassin took a shot at him during an opera performance at the Drury Lane theater in London in 1800.

  His mental illness reasserted itself the very next year—the queen and his doctors conspired to isolate him at the White House in Kew, from which he signed Parliamentary acts into law, corresponded with his ministers, but objected strenuously to his status of near-imprisonment.

  As the nineteenth century succeeded the eighteenth, he went blind, he suffered a hostile relationship with his two eldest sons, and was stunned by the early death of Princess Amelia, his youngest and favorite daughter. He and Queen Charlotte had produced a total of fifteen children—nine of them sons once described by the Duke of Wellington as “the damnedest millstones about the necks of any government that can be imagined.”

  His madness erupted one final time in 1811, at which point his least favorite son, soon to be King George IV, took the royal reins as regent while George III was relegated to an empty life in Windsor Castle—“persuaded that he is always conversing with angels,” according to diarist Fanny Burney, a court intimate and Joint Keeper of the Queen’s Robes.

  When he died in 1820, wrote another diarist of the day, Mrs. John Arbuthnot, wife of a cabinet official, the man “sunk into an honoured grave” had been “the best man & the best King that ever adorned humanity.”

  She was consoled in her grief by the fact that “such a sovereign was followed to his last home by countless thousands of affectionate subjects.” The crowds, she also asserted, were “drawn to the spot by no idle curiosity to view the courtly pageant, but to pay a last tribute of respect & to shed the tear of affection & gratitude over the grave of him who, for sixty long years, had been the Father of his people!”

  To continue the story of England’s four sequential Georges, the next and final royal George in the string only held the crown until his own death in 1830, to be succeeded by his brother William IV for an even briefer reign of seven years, also ended by death. Next in line was William’s niece, an eighteen-year-old girl named Victoria…but there begins an entirely different story.

  To Pay the Bills

  ONE BOMBSHELL AFTER ANOTHER CAME FROM ACROSS THE ATLANTIC. JUST COUNT ’em up. Navigation Acts. The Stamp Act. The Townshend Acts. The Tea tax. The Coercive or Intolerable Acts. The Boston Port Act. The Quebec Act.

  Didn’t they, didn’t anybody back in England, realize?

  Applying one aggravation after another, the British hardly could have dreamed up a series of dictates and actions so punitive in appearance, so likely to stir up resentment, even revolution, among their American colonists. In actual fact, the Mother Country sometimes wanted to be punitive, but at other times simply didn’t realize the full ramifications of her actions.

  Occasionally, too, “Mother” England had her own crying needs to be taken care of.

  Consider the world situation in 1763 as the Treaty of Paris closed out the French and Indian War in North America (known worldwide as the Seven Years’ War). For Great Britain and her American colonies, the future looked rosy indeed. Great Britain had emerged the dominant power in Europe, the colonial master of India, the West Indies, and North America (even including Spanish Florida). In North America, not only were the French swept out of power in Canada and the Ohio Valley, but their more aggressive Indian allies, pushed westward, past the Appalachian Mountains, were left on their own.

  For Virginia, especially, 1763 seemed to herald a golden age similar to the boom times of 1720 to 1750, right before the just-concluded war. Virginia in 1763 was the largest and most populous of the American colonies—up from just 88,000 souls in 1720 to an amazing 350,000 (but 140,000 of them were slaves with little to no prospect of sharing in the next round of good times). Here, too, was the original font of tobacco and still a great center of trade in the golden leaf—so valuable a commodity that it had served for a time in Virginia as legal tender, as money.

  For all these wonderful tidings, though, there was a price to pay…wars are expensive; armies and navies cost money to feed and equip. Somebody would have to pay. In England, taxes already were levied on imports and exports, on all kinds of specific items such as windows or carriages; on newspapers, cards, and dice; on services such as advertisements, and, that old bugaboo, on land. Just consider the sapping effect of a real estate tax of $20,000 for a land parcel worth $100,000! But that’s what the land tax was—20 percent of value.

  Rather than ask the English in England to take on even greater burdens, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assess the English colonies for a greater contribution to their own upkeep and protection in the future? Indeed, that was the thought in the Mother Country. It did seem reasonable to them. Especially with a national debt of many millions to retire.

  Now, quite true, there was little poverty to be found in the American colonies. True also that Englishmen visiting Virginia were startled to find “settler” after “settler” living in homes and enjoying fashions that mirrored the lifestyles of the country gentry and wealthy merchants of England. Except for those hardy souls hacking out new homesteads on the frontier to the west, these in fact were no settlers at all. In composite, they made up a contradiction—a mirror image of Mother England herself, and yet another country altogether.

  If it appeared they could well afford to pay a greater share of the Mother Country’s bills, however, it turns out they had a mind of their own. They had their own legislatures, their own laws, their own practices and needs. As summed up by a twentieth-century Virginia guide for history teachers: “They [the colonies] paid little attention to parliamentary laws and the Navigation Acts; they smuggled extensively and bribed customs officials; and they traded with the enemy in wartime.”

  More insidious yet: “Legislatures ignored the king’s instructions, often refused to support the [recent] war efforts until they had forced concessions from the governors, and had taken royal and executive prerogatives unto themselves.”

  In Virginia specifically, recent royal governors such as Robert Dinwiddie and Francis Fauquier had “yielded to the demands of the House of Burgesses and accepted laws explicitly contrar
y to their royal instructions.” Instead of the imperial colonial system “as set forth in the creation of the Board of Trade in 1696…in its place there had been substituted, quite unnoticed by British officials, the House of Burgesses, which thought of itself as a miniature House of Commons.”

  In sum, with the advent of peace in 1763, Mother England suddenly awoke to the liberties the American colonists had taken unto themselves. And as the next few years would demonstrate, the colonists had no intention of giving up a single one of their newfound freedoms.

  Another troublesome factor that came with the end of war was England’s own political upheaval. A once-solid and dominant Whig coalition in Parliament now split into quarreling factions. At the same time, a new and uninspired king (George III) would try out one set of ministers after another before finally settling upon the administration of Lord North and the Tories, destined to hold power from 1770 to 1782.

  Long before this point, however, the colonists had an old quarrel to settle in the form of the Mother Country’s widely ignored Navigation Acts, a series of laws that had been in effect since the previous century, to give English merchants and ship-owners dominance in trade with the colonies and to shut out their European rivals. The first (1651) of these acts, for instance, stated that only English ships could carry goods shipped from the colonies to the Mother Country. The last (1696), significantly enough, established English-supervised customs houses in America.

  But now, after the midway point of the eighteenth century, would come a series of ill-considered actions by the British that only hastened the separation of colonial America from England.

  In 1765 came the infamous Stamp Act, which called for payment of a tax on purchases of newspapers, magazines, commercial papers, legal and other documents. The act produced an immediate uproar in the colonies, marked by riots, a famous declaration of defiance by Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses and, meeting in New York, a Stamp Act Congress of twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies. This first American congress, gathering in September 1765 at the behest of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, adopted a statement of grievances and rights to send across the Atlantic to the attention of both the Crown and Parliament. The statement complained that the tax would “subvert the rights and liberties of the colonies.” The hated Stamp Act was then repealed…but too late to make full amends.

  Next, in 1767, came the punitive acts named for Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and intended to replace the Stamp Act revenues. The Townshend Acts imposed duties on tea, paper, lead, and paint colors but also were intended to demonstrate Parliament’s powers to tax the colonies as it saw fit. Again, the colonial response was strong opposition, resentment, and rebellious thinking—by early 1770 most of these laws would also be repealed.

  Now, in 1770, came an unplanned and accidental incident that played right into the hands of the more extreme propagandists critical of Mother England’s policies. It was the Boston “Massacre,” in which a group of British soldiers on sentry duty at the customs house fired into a rowdy and harassing crowd of four hundred or more. Pelted by snowballs and chunks of ice, the rioters pressing close and even knocking down one soldier with a club, the handful of troops finally let loose a scattering of shots into the unruly crowd. The result was five men killed and several others wounded. The thoughtful, widely respected Patriot leader John Adams led the legal defense for the eight soldiers and their commander, winning acquittal for all but two soldiers, who were found guilty of manslaughter.

  For some Americans, the incident only fanned the flames of resentment against Mother England. But it also gave pause to other Patriots who realized that mob actions were dangerous, wrong in principle, and likely in the long run to give their crusade for greater freedoms a bad name.

  Next, with outright rebellion already brewing, Parliament gave the East India Company exclusive rights to ship tea into the American colonies, a fresh action taken against colonial will. This resulted, late in 1773, in the Boston Tea Party—staged by a group of Boston rebels disguised as Indians. To prevent delivery of freshly imported tea, they boarded the arriving ships and dumped the contents from 342 chests of tea, a cargo worth $90,000, into the harbor waters. Other symbolic “tea parties” were staged elsewhere in the American colonies.

  Outraged at such colonial intemperance, Parliament now, in 1774, passed the collection of punitive laws known in America as the Intolerable Acts. One, the Quebec Act, extended the boundaries of Quebec Province in Canada to the Ohio River, thus seeming to snatch away the frontier gains the American Colonials had helped to win from the French in the recent French and Indian War.

  Another, even more galling measure in this decidedly punitive package was the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston, shifted its customhouse to Salem, Massachusetts, and placed British warships in Boston Harbor as an obvious counter to possible disorder or insurrection. This blockade of Boston would be removed only when the colonists paid for the tea destroyed in the recent “Tea Party”…and when it became clear the colonists would pay future duty fees as ordered by the Crown.

  This measure provoked a flurry of sympathetic actions by the other colonies in support of Boston and Massachusetts. By far the most significant and—for Great Britain, ominous—development was the call echoing through all the colonies to send delegates to a Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia to develop concerted plans and actions on behalf of all the colonies.

  Take This Job And…

  TO BE A STAMP ACT COMMISSIONER IN THE COLONIES TURNED OUT TO BE dangerous work. It wasn’t thought so initially, since even the colonial agents lobbying in London for their respective colonies anticipated little objection to Prime Minister George Grenville’s latest revenue-raiser.

  Parliament had gone along with him by lopsided vote. To be sure, the colonial agents, Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin among them, had objected to imposition of the stamp tax on all sorts of documents, but once the deed was done, few in London, English or American, expected to hear more than a murmur of protest.

  So mesmerized on this one issue were the agents that they happily complied with the PM’s proposal that they, themselves, should name the American-based commissioners who would distribute the stamps and collect the tax fees, while keeping a handsome percentage for themselves. Franklin, for one, appointed old Philadelphia friend John Hughes.

  Imagine Franklin’s surprise to hear from Hughes just weeks later that he was holed up in his house with an angry mob outside demonstrating its abhorrence of the Stamp Act levies.

  In Boston, protestors hanged, beheaded, and burned in effigy stamp commissioner Andrew Oliver. A mob broke into his house and sacked its interior. A few days later, angry Bostonians broke into the home of Oliver’s brother-in-law, Chief Justice Thomas Hutchison, and completely wrecked it as well. His furniture, books, clothing, and chinaware all carried off, the mob left him nothing but an empty shell.

  Governor Francis Bernard, retreating to the island fortress of Castle William in the harbor, complained that he had “no force to oppose” such rioters.

  Royal officials in New York hardly fared any better—not even the commander of the 130 redcoats garrisoned at Fort George in Manhattan. Major Thomas Jones probably should have known better than to threaten dire action to make the colonists adhere to the Stamp levy. What he got in return was a mob of two thousand sacking his house and the burning in effigy of Acting Governor Cadwallader Colden—who not long after quietly turned over his colony’s supply of stamps to the Sons of Liberty.

  So it went, up and down the eastern seaboard of North America—nobody but a few royal officials was willing simply to grumble, yet put up with the Stamp Act tax. In Virginia, a calm but concerned George Washington called it an “unconstitutional method of taxation.” He predicted it would force many of his fellow Americans to do without English luxury goods and thus prove painful to British merchants.

  Far more passionately, fellow Virginian Patrick Henry, re
cently elected as a member of the House of Burgesses, denounced the Stamp Act in fiery terms while proposing his incendiary Stamp Act Resolves (also known as the Virginia Resolves), which asserted that only the General Assembly of Virginia had the right to tax Virginians.

  Oddly, while it adopted Henry’s defiant resolves, Virginia would not be represented in the Stamp Act Congress that soon met in New York at the behest of Massachusetts—the Virginia House of Burgesses was not in session at the right moment to name delegates. In any case, Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Resolves, widely circulated (and often even intemperately amended by other firebrands) had already made Virginia’s position clear.

  In the Virginia capital of Williamsburg that same May of 1765, an onlooking college student with an interest in political philosophy had watched newcomer Henry’s performance and realized: “By these resolutions Mr. Henry took the lead out of the hands of those [who] had heretofore guided the proceedings of the House.…These were honest and able men, who had begun the opposition on the same grounds, but with a moderation more adapted to their age and experience. Subsequent events favored the bolder spirits…”

  Bolder spirits, that is, such as Henry and his future allies, among them the onlooking student from the College of William and Mary, one Thomas Jefferson.

  By the time the new Stamp Act took effect on November 1, 1765, most, if not all, of the would-be stamp commissioners in the colonies had heard the message of their fellow colonists loud and clear—and found other ways to occupy their time.