by Hugh Brogan
Pitt, as we have seen, began the proceedings, diverting the mercantilist system from its generally acceptable role as the more or less impartial regulator of imperial trade to the much more questionable one of determining the economic life of the Empire to suit the military and political designs of London. Grenville eagerly followed him, passing the Sugar Act at a time when his action was certain to be sharply resented in New England in general, and in the towns of Boston and Newport in particular; for each depended on an unimpeded trade with both French and British West Indies.
3. British North America, 1765
Dislike of the new strictness was in fact so general that the Bostonians seized the first opportunity of sabotaging the laws, which occurred long before the Sugar Act was passed. In 1761 the customs officers of Boston applied for writs of assistance to enable them to carry out the searches for contraband that were part of their job. The technicalities of these writs need not detain us: it is enough to record that the court found in favour of the officers, but the temper of Boston was such that the writs could never again be used in Massachusetts. In 1766 writs of assistance in the colonies were disallowed by the English Attorney-General.
The case has great symbolic importance, for not only did it, in the end, lead to a successful defiance by the colonists of an Act of Parliament (the 1696 Navigation Act authorized writs of assistance), but it made the lawyer James Otis (1725–83) famous as a radical leader. Otis appeared as counsel for the merchants of Massachusetts. Other lawyers in the case argued dry points of law; he passionately denounced the writs, which sanctioned the entry and search of private houses, as against natural law and therefore against the British Constitution and therefore illegal whatever Acts of Parliament said. His speech was in the anti-prerogative tradition of the common law, but it was perhaps more notable for its eloquence than its learning, and none the less effective for that. It was an extraordinary achievement, for in it Otis leapfrogged all the issues that were to perplex the British and Americans in the years to come and arrived at the simple appeal to natural law, right and justice which, in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was to use as the basic justification of the colonies’ rebellion. The speech electrified its hearers, one of whom, another radical Bostonian lawyer, young John Adams (1735–1826), was to date the Revolution from its utterance. ‘Otis was a flame of fire,’ he recollected in old age.‘… Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there, was the first scene of the first act of opposition, to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the child Independence was born.’
No doubt there is some exaggeration in this account, but there is no doubt that the speech was remarkable and carried James Otis to a position of radical leadership. A year after his emergence another legal orator in another colony rose to fame in the same way. Again a clash between colonial and British economico-political interests lay in the background, this time in the form of a debtor-creditor controversy about the currency. The planters of Virginia, confident in the marketability of their tobacco, had, as we have seen, felt free to finance a luxurious way of life by running up enormous debts. Unfortunately they had failed to reckon with the weather, and some bad harvests in the fifties plunged them into difficulties with their creditors, the Scottish and English merchants, who wanted to be paid, either interest or principal, in good currency – preferably in tobacco, which could be sold at a profit. In order to find tobacco to satisfy the merchants the planters passed a law at the expense of the Virginian clergy, whose stipends were supposed to be paid in tobacco, but who were now required to accept Virginian paper money instead. Again we need not follow the details of the dispute which ensued (it was compromised eventually), and the so-called ‘Parsons’ Case’ which arose out of it was only a side-issue; but Patrick Henry (1736–99), a Scottish Presbyterian lawyer from the back-country, made a constitutional drama out of it. The King, acting through the Privy Council, had disallowed the law forcing the parsons to accept paper money, had he? Then he had broken the compact between him and his people, degenerated into a tyrant and forfeited all right to his subjects’ obedience. Understandably, this provoked cries of ‘Treason!’ but Henry swept on to denounce the clergy as rapacious harpies and was carried shoulder-high from the court-room. The plaintiff (the Reverend James Maury) was awarded damages of one penny.
Nor was that the end of the controversy. The parsons dropped out, but the underlying difficulty was still there: the planters owed more than they could pay, and with considerable spirit and cunning contrived to evade their obligations, in spite of their creditors’ pressure. Yet while this pressure from Britain continued, feeling in Virginia grew more and more embittered. By the time of the Revolution, L. H. Gipson has pointed out, tempers were so high that none of the planters were loyalists and none of the merchants were rebels.9
What is striking about these incidents is that they occurred before the end of the Seven Years War (though not before victory was in sight). They show how dangerously easy it was to stir up anti-governmental feelings in the two leading colonies, even without undue provocation. But provocation, of course, was not long in coming. In 1764 Grenville pushed the Sugar Act through Parliament.
No other incident in the making of the Revolution has been more widely misunderstood than this. The Sugar Act made the change in the imperial system apparent to all. Revenue, not trade regulation, was now to be the purpose of the Navigation Acts. A shout of indignation went up from the colonial merchants. The duty on molasses imported to the mainland colonies from the non-British West Indies was reduced from the notional 6d. to 3d., but Grenville made it plain that from now on the full duty would be collected. In other words, for reasons already given,10 he was really raising the duty by 2d. a gallon. So in a torrent of pamphlets, newspapers and letters the merchants predicted that they would be utterly ruined;11 and on the whole historians have taken them at their word. Only Gipson has pointed out that the molasses was required for making rum and that the entire history of taxation imposed on booze shows that, whatever the duty, drinkers will pay it. In other words, it is very easy for brewers and distillers to pass on their costs to their customers. Hence the sang froid with which modern Chancellors of the Exchequer raise the duty on Scotch from time to time. Grenville, in fact, had chosen an almost painless way of raising revenue; but the distillers of America shrieked as if they had been stabbed. The truth is that the prosperous days of war had, contrary to the colonists’ expectation, been followed, in America as in Europe, by a peacetime slump.12Times were bad for traders on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was impossible for the American merchants not to believe that the Sugar Act would make matters worse. Compared to this belief it was of less, but still great importance that the Act, loosely and inconsiderately drafted (as tended to be the case with Grenville’s measures), hampered the whole maritime trade, and especially coastal traffic, with a set of intensely irritating, because inconvenient and unfair, regulations, and created what looked like a patronage machine, ‘hordes of petty placemen’, to enforce them. Some, like Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts (1711–80), even saw that the sugar duty was essentially a tax on the people, and thus clashed with what Hutchinson called ‘the so much esteemed privilege of English subjects – the being taxed by their own representatives’. The uproar was enormous, and a vigorous movement was launched to boycott British goods until the government came to its senses. The row had not subsided when the Stamp Act was passed. It is small wonder that there was an unprecedented explosion, or that, because of the Sugar Act, solid merchants, the most influential and normally among the most conservative elements of colonial society, associated themselves with it. The decisive proof of Grenville’s massive frivolity is that he was so unfit for his post as to be unaware that to the colonists the Stamp Act really was the last straw – was really like a match to gunpowder.
In partial extenuation it can be pleaded that even the col
onial agents in London, even Benjamin Franklin, did not foresee the dimensions of the reaction; but it is the business of governments to be well informed and to know what they are about. To urge that Grenville could have done no better (though this is highly doubtful) is only to say that Britain was incapable of governing America; which was, of course, what the colonists came to think and to prove. But much had to happen first.
Scarcely a soul could be found in America to defend the Stamp Act; but nevertheless the colonists were far from united. On the contrary, they quickly split into moderate and radical factions, with the radicals carrying the day. This in itself indicates how much the movement of resistance to British prerogatives was to change America, for until 1765 well-connected and well-off conservatives had ruled the roost in every colony.
They were swept away in the Stamp Act crisis. Patrick Henry and his followers rushed the Virginian assembly into passing a set of anti-Stamp resolutions, the essence of which was their assertion of the principle of no taxation without representation. By an absurd accident,13 the idea got about in the other colonies that Virginia had gone much further, urging disobedience to the Act and proscribing, as an enemy, any man who supported it; and they were quick to follow the supposed example. Before the news arrived in Boston, the Massachusetts assembly, the General Court of the colony, had launched a proposal for a conference of delegates from all the colonies to discuss measures of resistance; and this meeting, the celebrated Stamp Act Congress, did in fact open on 7 October. By then matters had taken an even more dramatic turn. The mob had gone to work.
The crowd in the American Revolution badly needs a historian. The traditional picture, of a uniquely discriminating, moderate, politically motivated mob, led or manipulated by, if not consisting entirely of, members of the middle or even the upper classes (one hears repeatedly of workmen’s clothes and blackened faces serving as ineffective disguises), has been discredited, but as yet no complete substitute has been provided. There was considerable upper-class participation in some of the disturbances: a mill-owner and militia officer led a rising against the White Pine Acts in New Hampshire in 1754; ‘all the principal gentlemen’ in Norfolk, Virginia, were alleged to have assisted at the tarring and feathering of a customs official in 1766; other instances could be supplied. In the Revolutionary mobs, participation and a measure of direction by the ‘better sort’ were universal: English policy united the Americans and made it possible for the prosperous to sanction lawlessness which in other times horrified them. But the crowd existed independently of its leaders, sometimes (for example, in Rhode Island) getting out of their control, and we know that the comparative restraint and respect for legality of the American mob also characterized the mobs of London during the Wilkes and Gordon riots, and even the Parisian mob during the French Revolution: the eighteenth-century crowd knew what it was about, even its worst orgies of violence were not pointless, and its simultaneous impact on the history of France, England and America is one more piece of evidence showing how uniform was the history of the Atlantic world during this period. The very low death-rate in colonial disturbances was due less to the restraint of the crowd than to the weakness of the authorities, for in Europe it was usually they who did the killing, not the rioters.14 We can infer from all this that the American mob was like its European counterparts in other respects:15 above all that it was largely self-directing, most of the time.
However, there is much that we do not yet know about the crowd, much that we need to know that at present we can only guess. There had always been riots in the American towns and countryside, but what touched them off?’ What was the relation of the economic to the political in a crowd’s sense of grievance? Above all, who and what were the rioters?
Some valuable work has been done on this last topic16 which throws some light on the others as well. Apart from a group of carpenters who formed part of a New York mob in 1765, the chief identifiable components of the urban crowd were ‘armed seamen, servants, Negroes…’; ‘seamen, boys, and Negroes’; ‘saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tars’ – this last being John Adams’s account of the mob that rampaged through Boston after the Massacre in 1770. We need to be on our guard here – Adams was describing one incident only, in a speech, furthermore, as defending counsel. Studies of French popular history suggest that the well-off were very prone to exaggerate the importance of ungrateful servants in revolutionary movements, though the likelihood that, here, indentured servants are meant makes the analysis more acceptable. No doubt many of the ‘Negroes’ were whites with blackened faces (it was certainly a respectable mob – it Puritanically refused to riot on Sundays). Nevertheless there is no need to be entirely sceptical, since there is ample confirmatory evidence that sailors formed a large element in these mobs, and since the lists present a consistent picture of a crowd formed of the severely disadvantaged, little attached to their communities and their rulers. The population of the colonial cities and towns was highly mobile at the lowest level: if a man could not earn a decent living in, say, Boston, he went elsewhere. Many ‘saucy boys’ chafed, like the young Franklin, at the restraints of the apprenticeship system and ran away from their native places, like him, to try their luck in another colony – or in England – or at sea. Africans, whether free or enslaved, were profoundly disadvantaged, in the North as in the South, in the cities as in the countryside; but they were least amenable to coercion and control in the towns. As to the seamen, the largest element in the urban working class, they had a host of grievances and a long experience of rioting. Every colony with seaboard traffic knew what a press-riot was; every sailorman went in dread of the press-gang.
We tend to look back on impressment as a picturesque necessity of the Age of Hornblower. Actually it was a savage practice of a savage service: legalized kidnapping. Not until the mutinies (more properly, strikes) at the Nore and Spithead during the French Revolutionary wars did the working conditions of the Royal Navy begin to improve. In mid-century they were horrible. Life on the ocean blue was no picnic in the merchant fleets: whaling was a particularly bitter and dangerous occupation. Life in the Royal Navy was far worse. Discipline was harsh and irrational; cruel punishments far from unusual (merciless flogging was the rule); the pay was bad, and, apart from the dangers of war, a man’s health was constantly imperilled by scurvy, fever and the wet and filthy living conditions of the lower deck. On one point Doctors Johnson and Franklin were agreed: the sea was no life for a man. Dr Johnson rescued his black servant from it, Dr Franklin his son. Dr Johnson remarked that ‘no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned’. Dr Franklin observed that illness was even commoner in the Royal Navy than in the merchant marine, and more frequently fatal at that. Death from drink, madness or disease was indeed so common that we cannot wonder that the navy was incessantly plagued by the problems of desertion and undermanning. Some captains tried to avert desertion by withholding their crews’ pay for years, calculating that a man would hang on to collect, eventually, what was owed him, rather than lose all hope of his pay by taking to flight; but this only added one more evil to a life already too full of them, and was ineffective. So, rather than treat sailors decently, impressment was constantly resorted to.
It was of very uncertain legality in America between 1708 and 1775, but that could not stop the navy. Its ships haunted the coast, its gangs regularly went ashore or boarded merchant vessels in search of deserters or of extra hands. The people of the colonies reacted to the quest for deserters and men to press much as their descendants in the North were to react to the quest for fugitive slaves in the mid-nineteenth century; and indeed sailors were no better off than slaves in all too many respects, being totally at the mercy of their employers: there is even a tale of one of the too-numerous corrupt captains pressing men and then selling them to other ships. Wives feared for their husbands, parents for their sons, parsons for
their flocks, merchants and skippers for the crews of their trading vessels. Even the argument that the Royal Navy protected the Empire and the trade routes lost force: Franklin commented, at the height of the war in 1759, that ‘New York and Boston have so often found the inconvenience of… station ships that they are very indifferent about having them: the pressing of their men and thereby disappointing voyages, often hurting their trade more than the enemy hurts it.’
It is not surprising, therefore, that men were often so desperate to avoid impressment that they preferred to fight rather than come quietly. Consequently press-riots, in which deaths occurred on both sides, were regular occurrences. Nor would it be surprising if, as may have happened, sailors and the poorer inhabitants of the ports conceived a sense of the rights that were denied them, a hatred of the navy17 and a scepticism about the claims of the authorities. Like the poor of London and Paris, they had suffered too much to be natural supporters of the status quo. When they rioted they wanted justice, or, if that was unattainable, revenge. Plunder, even alcoholic plunder, seems to have been a minor inducement: they were not soldiers.