Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  The question remains, what brought them out against the stamp tax? Being a charge on legal and commercial business, it could have little direct effect on the poorer classes; and the cry of ‘no taxation without representation’ could mean little to those who were not represented even in the colonial assemblies. But in the thirteen colonies in 1765 (and outside them too: several of the West Indian islands opposed the tax) all conditions worked to one end. The economy was still depressed, so unemployment was high. Sailors were cast on shore with the coming of peace: no more privateers, and a slump in maritime trade, cut the job-supply.18 During the war prices had risen; in the peace the money supply was cut back, but prices did not fall and the wage-earner was worse off than ever. The Sugar Act brought the fear that the price of rum would rise (and rum was a food as well as a drink to many poor people): a similar fear had touched off the riots against the cider tax in the apple-counties of England. Finally, it may be argued, someone lifted the lid. Never before had trouble spread so rapidly or so universally from colony to colony – not even in 1689, when the news of the Glorious Revolution had touched off rebellion against half-a-dozen unpopular governments. The English might well regret alienating the printers: through their newspapers and pamphlets they now helped to unite opinion, from top to bottom and north to south, in opposition to the Stamp Act. Even the conservatives in Massachusetts echoed James Otis’s language of natural rights in denouncing it. Radicals urged resistance. Secret groups met to concert plans, for it was generally felt that desperate measures were needed. These groups formed contacts with the leaders of the crowd.

  The storm broke in August, in Boston. Andrew Oliver had been appointed Distributor of Stamps for Massachusetts; so on 14 August the mob hanged him in effigy from a tree in Boston (known thereafter as the Liberty Tree); levelled a new brick building he had built as a speculation; broke the windows of his private house, which it later sacked; and burned the effigy at a great bonfire. The colonial government could do nothing but wring its hands; so the next day Oliver, impressed by this clear expression of public opinion, announced that he would resign his post. ‘Everyone agrees that this riot exceeds all others known here,’ the Governor reported, ‘… never had any mob so many abettors of consequence as this is supposed to have had.’ But it was quickly outdone. For twelve days later the crowd decided to vent its anger against all those involved in enforcing the trade laws. It destroyed the records of the vice-admiralty court and wrecked the houses of the register of the court, of the Comptroller of Customs and of Chief Justice Hutchinson – who, as he was too well aware, had done nothing to deserve this punishment.

  Yet the attack on Hutchinson is probably the most significant of these episodes. He was easily the most distinguished man in the colony: a descendant of Anne Hutchinson; a leading merchant; an excellent historian; Lieutenant Governor. More to the point, he had devoted himself to the public welfare as a leading official for twenty years or more, and had done great service, first, in the reform of Massachusetts’ currency immediately after the War of the Austrian Succession, a reform which had given the colony the soundest money in America;19 second, by his conduct of the colony’s finances during the Seven Years War; thirdly, by his administration of those finances since 1763. Unfortunately he was also something of a monopolist of government office. He was related by marriage to Andrew Oliver, and the families of the two men, closely intertwined, found few posts beneath their dignity. The rising tide of imperial ordinances and imperial enforcement led to an increase in the number of posts available to such collectors. Accordingly, when the mob attacked Hutchinson it was attacking the perfect symbol of Anglo-American imperial orthodoxy. It was attacking the economic policies which kept many of its members out of work; the political structure which involved them in war or the exigencies of war (especially impressment); and the aristocracy, part-mercantile, part-official, which was slowly forming (Governor Bernard of Massachusetts, a close ally of Hutchinson’s, dreamed of creating a colonial peerage, in which his friend would no doubt have enjoyed a place). So it is hard to believe that the crowd needed much incitement; but if it did, there was an action committee of middle-class tradesmen, known at first as the Loyal Nine and then as the Sons of Liberty, to egg it on through its leader, Ebenezer Macintosh, a shoemaker.20The Loyal Nine had been behind the riot of 14 August, and it is hard to doubt that they had a hand in that of the 26th. Yet it also seems clear that some of the men behind the second affair had little interest in stamps but a great one in destroying evidence that they were smugglers which, they feared, had come into Hutchinson’s hands. If so this completes the picture of an uprising against all aspects of the traditional order.

  The example thus given quickly spread to other colonies. It became a favourite pastime to burn the effigy of a stamp distributor (often, as in the Oliver incident, with a boot, to stand for Lord Bute, tied to its shoulder), to pull down houses and to terrorize the respectable.21 The New York distributor was driven to resign on the night of the Hutchinson riot; two days later, a mob at Newport, fortified by ‘strong drink in plenty with Cheshire cheese and other provocations to intemperance and riot’, forced the resignation of the Rhode Island distributor; September and October saw the distributors in most of the other colonies resigning too. The distributor in Connecticut was threatened with lynching if he didn’t; so was the distributor in the Bahamas; both took the hint.

  The countryside was as roused as the town – in Massachusetts, more so. ‘They talk of revolting from Great Britain in the most familiar manner,’ the Governor reported, ‘and declare that though the British forces should possess themselves of the coast and maritime towns, they will never subdue the inland.’ In Georgia it was the country people who forced the merchants of Savannah not to use the stamps.

  It was against this turbulent background that the Stamp Act Congress met at New York on 7 October. We must not exaggerate the significance of the meeting. Only nine of the continental colonies were represented, and of those New York, New Jersey and the Three Counties of Delaware sent only unofficial or irregularly chosen delegates.22 The resolutions passed by the Congress, though firm, indeed incontrovertible, statements of the American case, were all moderately, even conservatively, couched, and events rapidly outran its deliberations, as the Whig or patriot party which was forming evolved a programme, first, of refusal to use or allow the distribution of the stamps; second, of non-importation – that is to say, of cutting off all trade with Great Britain; third, of allowing legal and commercial life to go forward without stamps, though this risked heavy penalties at the hand of the authorities, especially the Royal Navy, which was standing by to intercept unwarranted cargoes. Nevertheless the Stamp Act Congress was important. It was no abortive Albany conference. Its members exercised for the first time on a continental scale those arts of organization, compromise and conciliation which were eventually to make a continental legislature possible. It had a national tinge: as one of the South Carolina delegates, Christopher Gadsden (1724–1805), remarked,

  we should all endeavour to stand upon the broad and common ground of those natural and inherent rights that we all feel and know, as men and as descendants of Englishmen, we have a right to… There ought to be no New England men, no New Yorker &c; known on the continent, but all of us Americans.

  For the first time an inter-colonial body met whose authority was accepted, not rejected, by all the colonies.

  The events of the winter confirmed the drift of events. It was of no account to be opposed to the Stamp Act, as Thomas Hutchinson had been from the beginning: the question was, what was a man prepared to do about it? The moderates were hopelessly overtaken by events and passions. It was well for Dr Franklin that he was in England at the time. He had opposed the passage of the Act, but had seen no harm in acquiescing afterwards, and had secured the post of distributor in Pennsylvania for his friend John Hughes, who was soon forced to resign it and eventually to leave the colony. Franklin was at first opposed to ‘the madness of the
populace’ and ‘acts of rebellious tendency’; but his foreign residence gave him time to change his tune and emerge as a leader of the opposition: his representations to the House of Commons were to be influential in persuading Parliament to repeal the Act. Moderates in America were less fortunate: they lost political control to the radicals and could only count themselves lucky if they were left in peace.

  By the New Year, then, the imperial government was confronted with an acute problem. The Stamp Act had been effectively nullified, to use a term with a long future.23 Except in Georgia, and there not for long, no stamps had been distributed; the Sons of Liberty in the various colonies (for the name had spread with the agitation) had effectively superseded the regular administrations; life was otherwise proceeding in its normal, unstamped channels;24 and there was simply not force enough available to compel obedience to the law. (We can now see that to have tried would merely have precipitated the War for Independence nine years earlier.) Common sense suggested that the Grenville programme must be abandoned: Whitehall and Westminster would have to climb down. It was easier for them since George III had got rid of Grenville in July.

  The new ministry, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham and composed of men sympathetic to the colonies, soon came to the view that there was nothing for it but repeal.

  Unhappily there was no way of disguising the fact that this was a humiliation for Britain: one much resented in the proud Parliament. Many were the warnings that to give way on the Stamp Act was to necessitate giving way on everything else; the scarecrow of a colonial bid for independence, which had been alarming ministers since the beginning of the century, flapped again. And for once the prophets of doom were right. The choice, in all ugliness, was between war and abdication: there was no room for compromise. To such a pass had Grenville’s statesmanship reduced the great Empire. The Act was repealed, on 18 March 1766, and London church bells rang out in joy; but first a Declaratory Act was passed, stating that nothing had changed, that Parliament had an absolute right and power to do what it liked with the colonies whenever it chose. This was of course a face-saver, and, it may be thought, an unconvincing one; but the Rockinghams could not have persuaded Parliament to swallow repeal without it. Ministers’ chief fear seems to have been that war with the colonies would necessarily involve a renewal of war with France and Spain (again, an accurate foreboding); they also encouraged the merchants of England to petition Parliament for repeal, on the grounds that trade was being ruined by American non-importation (and it was in fact in a parlous condition). Thus the English were furnished with two good practical excuses for climbing down, and the question of principle was side-stepped; but as the Declaratory Act showed, the matter was not as simple as men of good will wanted it to seem.

  For questions had been raised on both sides of the Atlantic to which there were, in eighteenth-century terms, almost certainly no answers. The richer colonists, reared on the traditions of the Glorious Revolution, and indeed on the tradition of the Cromwellian Revolution before that, injured or annoyed by many misguided British policies and feeling themselves to belong to mature societies, with a limitless future, refused to be held in leading strings any more. ‘No taxation without representation’ was a cry that expressed more than it said: it was really an insistent refusal to be governed without proper consultation by a remote and frequently incompetent, if well-meaning, mother country. The poorer colonists were, we may hazard, sick of being oppressed in the name of an empire, citizenship and international trade which brought them little perceptible benefit. Both parties, though suspicious enough of each other, could unite over the good old sentiment that ‘Britons never never never shall be slaves’, and slavery, it seemed, was what the Britons’ government had in store for them. Day by day that government seemed more and more like the tyrannous regimes of Charles I and James II, and pamphlets poured from the presses to enforce the parallels. It would have taken, in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, some extraordinary gesture of generosity and reform to win back the confidence of the colonists in the British Parliament.

  Such a gesture was impossible. The statesmen of Westminster had no desire to tyrannize anybody, but equally they had no desire to upset the applecart in which they had ridden so happily for so long. Like the American upper and middle classes, they faced a challenge from below. The Wilkes affair, during the years leading up to the Revolution, was bringing political institutions under serious attack in England as well as in her colonies, and it was probably impossible to reform Parliament and the imperial government along lines equitable enough to satisfy the colonies without having to make similar concessions at home. This the oligarchs were in a position to refuse to do. They fought off reform as long as they could; some are fighting a rearguard action still.25 In the Declaratory Act they nailed their colours to the mast:

  The said colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain… the King’s majesty by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons of Great Britain, in parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.26

  No argument here; no appeal to Whig or Revolution principles; indeed, in one of the debates on repeal Lord Mansfield, the eminent lawyer, went so far as to deny that ‘no taxation without representation’ applied even in England itself.

  The peers and squires who governed the realm also feared that concessions to the colonies must ultimately lead to independence, independence to economic ruin, and economic ruin to the end of Britain’s greatness. They could not, in fact, abandon the logic of mercantilism, and in so doing threw themselves across the natural development of the times. Even Grenville, in his clerk’s way, had seen that the Empire must change and adapt to survive: his mistake was in the changes that he favoured. But after the Declaratory Act and the fall of the Rockingham ministry (which took place in June 1766) this salutary attitude was forgotten. The British people persuaded themselves that concessions to the Americans ultimately meant their own ruin; and on that ground, on the sole principle of self-defence, they took their public stand. Their attitude was pathetically unrealistic, as the Americans could see. In the end it made war inevitable.

  9 The Road to Ruin 1766–75

  What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.

  John Adams, 1815

  I know it is expected that the more determined the Colonies appear, the more likely it will be to bring the Government here to terms. I do not believe it.

  Thomas Hutchmson, London, 1774

  Governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.

  Declaration of Independence, 1776

  Repeal was even more welcome to the Americans than to the English. Dr Franklin sent his wife fourteen yards of pompadour satin in celebration. The Sons of Liberty in Boston resolved to display ‘such illuminations, bonfires, pyramids, obelisks, such grand exhibitions and such fireworks as were never before seen in America’. The New York assembly voted the erection of an equestrian statue of George III and a statue in brass of William Pitt. Countless ministers hurried into their pulpits to preach sermons of thanksgiving. And then everyone tried to get back to normal as fast as possible.

  Not that normality was synonymous with tranquillity. The vigour of colonial life had from the start led to contentious politics. Even if the imperial government had behaved with the utmost circumspection and wisdom, the increasing maturity of American society must have brought about de facto independence before the end of the century. It would simply not have been possible to keep
the colonies in tutelage indefinitely. Nor could the separation have been accomplished wholly without friction. The question before historians is only whether there also had to be violence and a complete break, and the answer tends to be no, in theory. Seen in this light, the Stamp Act crisis, like later ones, was merely a needlessly acute phase in a chronic disease. When it had passed, the patient was not healed, but she was more manageable.

  In New York, for example, a fresh controversy immediately took the stage, but was eventually compromised. Among Grenville’s measures had been the Quartering or Mutiny Act of 1765. This had been passed in response to the urgent pleas of General Thomas Gage (1721–87), the Commander-in-Chief in North America, who was plagued by problems of disciplining, quartering and transporting his troops in the existing defective state of the law. Peace having come, Americans who had been quite cooperative in wartime would, Gage thought, grow contumacious. ‘It will soon be difficult in the present Situation,’ he grumbled, ‘to keep Soldiers in the Service.’ He was probably an alarmist, but nevertheless an Act was passed providing that, where there were no barracks, the colonial governments were to quarter the soldiers in taverns, uninhabited houses, barns or other such buildings; provide them with bedding, fuel, pots and pans, candles, vinegar and salt, and with a ration of small beer, cider or rum. It was one of Grenville’s better laws, for he had had the sense to consult the colonial agents, including Franklin, and they had seen to it that the Act contained ample provision for preventing and correcting any abuses. As a result the law was quietly accepted in most of the colonies.