by Hugh Brogan
Meanwhile the non-importation movement could not be said to be flourishing: New York had been ready to follow Boston’s lead, as had the minor towns of Massachusetts, but Philadelphia hung back, and without it nothing could be attempted. Fortunately for the cause the British again intervened with ill-advised decisions and (for them) disastrous results.
During the winter of 1767–8, as Massachusetts Bay tried to rally the colonies for common action, Samuel Adams had kept the Boston crowd on a short rein, so that the customs commissioners had been able to work comparatively unmolested, though their life was far from pleasant. A favourite trick of the ‘disorderly boys’ of the city was to lay night-time siege to the commissioners’ houses, with drum-beating, horn-blowing (through conches) and the ‘most hideous howlings as the Indians, when they attack an enemy’. This unnerved the commissioners, and the knowledge that the crowd went no further only because Adams had laid it down that for the time being there were to be ‘NO MOBS-NO CONFUSIONS-NO TUMULTS’ was scarcely comforting. Then on 10 June 1768 there was at last a real riot when the customs seized John Hancock’s sloop Liberty on the grounds that she was smuggling madeira. The mob stoned the commissioners and broke the windows of their houses, so that they had to flee to the protection of HMS Romney, a warship recently stationed in Boston harbour. On 30 September the British government rashly sent two regiments of regular soldiers to Boston, to restore and maintain order.
In part this was possible because Lord Hillsborough had abandoned all attempts to police the West, in view of what he called ‘the enormous and ruinous expense’ involved. Since it had so far proved impossible, on either side of the Atlantic, to raise a revenue for imperial purposes, the authorities had perforce fallen back on a policy of reckless penny-pinching. General Gage had launched economies that were to leave the army in a poor way to fight the War of the American Revolution. Now Hillsborough decided that the regulation of the fur-trade and the prevention of another Indian war were policies that no longer justified their cost, so most of the interior forts were abandoned. It was another British abdication; but this most significant fact was overlooked because it was immediately followed by the military occupation of Boston.
This development had a very bad effect on American opinion. For five years the government had insisted that the standing army was in America only for imperial defence, yet now it was declared to be for the purpose of enforcing obedience to Parliament, and was to police Boston. How could Crown or Parliament ever be trusted again? Sam Adams, who regarded a standing army in peacetime as a sure sign of impending tyranny, talked of organizing armed resistance, but there were no volunteers. However, he did persuade the House of Representatives to meet (unofficially, since Governor Bernard refused to summon it), calling itself a convention, on the favourite seventeenth-century English model. This convention gathered in the week before the troops landed, and did little, except to scuttle out of town ‘like a herd of scalded hogs’ on the day the troopships appeared off-shore: no one wanted to be the first martyr for liberty. Furthermore, during the convention it became plain for the first time that there was a solid opposition to Bostonian extremism in country Massachusetts, which sufficed for the moment to keep Adams in check. But it was sufficient for the grossly unconstitutional convention to have met: British law was thus again flouted, and in a new way.
It is scarcely surprising that the talk in London, even among the Rocking-ham Whigs, began to be about isolating and punishing Massachusetts, that ‘ringleading province’. However, this was easier to will than to do, and in the upshot this frustrated feeling grew into an obsession that was to prove very harmful. In the winter of 1768–9 it issued in new provocations – or, as American conservatives would have argued, in mere gestures which annoyed without disciplining the patriots. In August 1768 New York joined the non-importation movement, and in March 1769 Pennsylvania at last did likewise, all its attempts to extract concessions or redress from the British government having failed. What came over instead was a report of eight Parliamentary resolutions. Sponsored by Hillsborough, they were all sound and fury, denouncing all the proceedings – riots, circular letter, convention – of Massachusetts and Boston, and asking the King to take what steps he could to prosecute any treason or misprision of treason that had occurred, if necessary by carrying the culprits to England for trial. No more was done or attempted, but the colonies were greatly provoked, and both the Virginia and South Carolina assemblies prepared counter-resolutions stoutly supporting Massachusetts. The plantation colonies (those lying south of Pennsylvania) had not previously been much touched by the agitation of the commercial colonies: Boston was too mobbish for them; but now they took alarm. For instance, George Washington of Mount Vernon, Virginia (1732–99), a prosperous (for a wonder) planter, a retired militia colonel who had seen much service in the Seven Years War, was convinced by the Hillsborough Resolutions that ‘our lordly masters in Great Britain will be content with nothing less than the deprication [sic] of American freedom’, and that a resort to arms might prove necessary, if only as a last defence. In the meantime he advocated Virginia’s entry into the non-importation movement, and enough of his countrymen agreed with him for Virginia to do just that, though only after a year of painful negotiation. All the other Southern colonies had done the same by the end of 1769 (the agreement was but ill-observed in Georgia) and by the spring of 1770, of the leading English provinces, only New Hampshire was holding aloof.
By that time sense was returning to Whitehall. It was, indeed, a perfectly pointless quarrel, and as early as May 1769 the Cabinet decided, in view of American hostility, to repeal the Townshend duties, except for the one on tea. This was to be retained for the principle of the thing, as the Declaratory Act had sweetened the pill of Stamp Act repeal. The about-turn took time to arrange, for the Westminster winter (1769–70) was preoccupied with the retirement of the Duke of Grafton, the notional Prime Minister. He was replaced by Frederick, Lord North (1732–92), the son and heir of the Earl of Guilford, and the sort of chief minister that George III had been looking for since the beginning of his reign. Not for North the abrasive policies of a Grenville, the abrasive personality of a Pitt, the weakness of a Bute, the factiousness of a Rockingham. Like his king, whom he resembled, physically, so closely that the story got around that they had the same father6 – they both looked like bullfrogs, only in North the frog was more apparent than the bull – his strengths and weaknesses were those of the old order at its best. Hence his failure, for, except in matters of public finance, he was incapable of creative innovation, however necessary. He fumbled from expedient to expedient, which has its points in quiet times, but is a quite inadequate response to great emergencies. Yet if the old order could have responded to the challenge, North might well have been the instrument. For one thing he was utterly devoted to it, especially to the rights, powers and prestige of the old, unreformed Parliament, in which he would never find any flaw. He was ‘the complete House of Commons man’,7 bland, humorous and occasionally eloquent in debate, a masterly political tactician, a competent administrator and personally more than acceptable to George III, whom he served loyally. He was steadfast in emergency, and if he was irresolute when great decisions were to be made, the King was always there to stiffen his nerve. He put together a stable ministry and a permanent Parliamentary majority, and was successful for years: only gradually did his weaknesses cripple him. To begin with, all went well. On 5 March 1770, in the first great measure of his administration, he moved the repeal of the Townshend duties, arguing that they were commercially nonsensical. He said nothing about the crucial fact that they had stirred up more trouble than they were worth.
They were still doing so. Across the Atlantic, on the very day of North’s speech, Boston erupted again.
The British had been too ready to mock the city’s peaceful acquiescence in the arrival of the troops. Since that time relations between the townspeople and the soldiers, never good, had got worse and worse. The humaner sor
t of Bostonian was horrified at the brutal floggings by which officers tried to maintain discipline; everybody was inconvenienced by the challenging sentinels who were posted on Boston Neck to catch deserters; the presence of the army was widely resented as a check on liberty;8 and the soldiers and officers themselves, while not perhaps exceptionally brutal and licentious, were too much so for the staid manners of Boston.9 Harassment of the troops became a patriotic duty, to be combined if possible with those other duties, evading the trade laws and intimidating the merchants so that they dared not break the non-importation agreement (even Thomas Hutchinson’s sons were forced to comply). Sam Adams kept up a constant storm of inflammatory journalism. And the boys of Boston, reacting as children always do to prolonged periods of unrest, plunged headlong into the good work with all the recklessness of those who are still too young to know the difference between game and grim earnest. They took to rioting every Thursday – market day, when the schools were shut. On Thursday, 22 February 1770, some of them besieged a conservative in his house; he, in terror, fired into the crowd, wounding one boy and killing another, the eleven-year-old Christopher Snider, who was honoured with an enormous public burying. ‘My eyes never beheld such a funeral,’ wrote John Adams in his diary, ‘the procession extended further than can well be imagined.’ This was thrilling enough, but baiting soldiers was even better. There were several ugly incidents, and gangs had come to dominate the streets of Boston, before the assaults of a mob led by Crispus Attucks, a half-Negro working man, forced the guards of the Customs House to fire in self-defence, on 5 March. Five Bostonians were killed, including Attucks. This ‘massacre’ was quickly elevated into legend. It was used as evidence that the British would stick at nothing. It was held to vindicate a hundred times the traditional Whig belief that a standing army was necessarily a threat to civil peace and liberty, which the people should always be on guard against. The dead became martyrs, and, more prosaically, Sam Adams and the other radicals were able to use the incident to force the authorities to withdraw the troops from Boston to Castle William down the harbour. This, indeed, had probably been the purpose of the riot which had touched off the ‘Massacre’, for it was almost certainly instigated by the radical leaders. Next, New Hampshire was shocked into temporary acquiescence in the non-importation movement, and the rest of America resounded to cries of horror, especially after Adams’s grossly untrue accounts of the affair got round.
As tempers cooled again, however, it could be seen that the extremists had done themselves more harm than good. It was tolerably plain that they had provoked the ‘Massacre’, and the spectacle of seething Boston had little appeal to the respectable elsewhere. This was especially true of the richer merchants, who, on learning that the Townshend measures had been repealed, rushed to dissociate themselves from their dangerous allies. New York resumed importation in July, Philadelphia in September, Boston in October. The other ports did likewise, and once more an uneasy peace descended on the thirteen colonies.
Thomas Hutchinson was sworn in as Governor of Massachusetts in March 1771 and was welcomed with great warmth throughout the province. He was, after all, native-born and an ornament to the land he had served long and well. Normality of a different kind manifested itself at the same time in North Carolina, where the feud between the western and eastern areas culminated in the rebellion of the so-called Regulators,10 the men of the West, who after overturning the government in the back-countries in late 1770 were met and defeated in battle at the Alamance river by Governor Try on and the tidewater militia on 16 May 1771. It was not a very impressive battle: the Regulators, lacking effective military organization, were easily routed, many having been wounded though only nine were killed; amnesty was granted to the rest, on condition that they took an oath of allegiance to the King. Yet it was the most thrilling event between the collapse of non-importation and the summer of 1772 – a period of nearly two years.
This appearance of restored calm was deeply misleading. The period since the Stamp Act had transformed American attitudes to Great Britain. The slightest action of the mother country was now regarded with automatic suspicion: any major initiative might well re-open the volcano. Nor was that all. In eleven of the thirteen colonies – all, that is, except New Hampshire and Georgia – the Sons of Liberty retained power, and in Massachusetts, under the command of Sam Adams, they were organized to extend and exert it – if necessary by stirring up trouble instead of tamely waiting for it to arise.
There was for a moment a chance of driving Adams from the stage. In Governor Hutchinson he at last had a worthy foe. Hutchinson was in the end to be the one great tragic figure of the Revolution: a moderate, patriotic, able and devoted man, whose virtues as much as his limitations (he had no vices to speak of) would lead him to disaster; but during the first two years of his Governorship he had some appreciable successes. A reaction set in among the country people against the agitations of their long-distrusted capital. Even in Boston itself Sam Adams lost ground: he ran11 for Registrar of Suffolk County (which includes Boston) and lost. His vote at the elections for the House of Representatives sank to a dangerously low level. Hutchinson rejoiced to report to Lord Hillsborough that there was more ‘general appearance of contentment’ in Massachusetts at the beginning of 1772 than at any time since the Stamp Act. All the same, Adams’s control of the General Court was never seriously threatened, and he kept up his strategy of picking quarrels with authority on every occasion.
Events in Britain also belied the appearance of calm. The great Wilkes affair is too long a subject to be detailed here. Suffice it to say that John Wilkes, prosecuted, banished, imprisoned and expelled from the House of Commons, had become by the late sixties a heroic symbol for all those forces which, in Britain as in America, were struggling, for all manner of reasons, against the ossification of the old order. Potentially Wilkes was for Britain what Patrick Henry and Sam Adams were for America. His weaknesses were twofold: he was a conservative, or at any rate not a revolutionary, at heart (else he could hardly have become Lord Mayor of London); and his personal character, that of a reckless, if attractive, gambler and rake, tended to alienate the Puritan element, then as now an essential part of any British reform movement. Franklin, that incarnation of late Puritanism (even though he was himself something of a rake on the sly), dismissed Wilkes as ‘an outlaw and an exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing’. More perceptive was somebody’s remark that if Wilkes had had the unblemished personal reputation of George III, he could have dethroned the King: it gives an exact idea of his importance.
Americans watched the drama, from their distance, with fascination. It seemed their own battle, as indeed to some extent it was. Wilkes’s fight against general warrants was the same as their fight against writs of assistance. They sympathized instinctively with his stand for freedom of the press, free elections, the rights of man, and some measure of Parliamentary reform (a cause, it is worth noting, that their other great English hero, Lord Chatham, would soon endorse). The Wilkite crowd was’much like the Bostonian one in composition, aims and behaviour: it too was led by sailors and pulled down houses, though it was much more good-humoured. It had the same enemies: the standing army shot down Londoners in the St George’s Fields Massacre as it shot down Bostonians. Accordingly American patriots toasted ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ at many a banquet and subscribed liberally to Wilkite funds. They mourned the hero’s defeats, cheered his victories, read his pamphlets. And thus a new poison entered the American bloodstream.
English radicals strongly sympathized with their American counterparts, and anyway found the American question a useful stick with which to beat the government. But being closer to the scene of action than the colonials, and being even more deeply impregnated with Whiggish notions deriving from the struggle between King and Parliament in the seventeenth century, they were much quicker to blame George III as well as his ministers for the plot against liberty that they detected in every act of the administration. In hi
s great philippic against the King of 19 December 1769, the pamphleteer ‘Junius’ assumed that the colonials had seen the point:
They were ready enough to distinguish between you and your ministers. They complained of an act of the legislature, but traced the origin of it no higher than to the servants of the crown: They pleased themselves with the hope that their sovereign, if not favourable to their cause, at least was impartial. The decisive, personal part you took against them, has effectually banished that first distinction from their minds. They consider you as united with your servants against America, and know how to distinguish the sovereign and a venal parliament on one side, from the real sentiments of the English people on the other… They left their native land in search of freedom, and found it in a desert. Divided as they are into a thousand forms of policy and religion, there is one point in which they all agree:– they equally detest the pageantry of a king, and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop. It is not then from the alienated affections of Ireland or America, that you can look for assistance…
This was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Americans read it, and others like it, and began to wonder if it was not true. Were their affections alienated? Was the King their real oppressor? They began to study his behaviour, and soon discovered the obvious, that George, far from being the victim of misleading and oppressive ministers, was their energetic and willing ally. He snubbed Wilkite petitions and led the battle against Wilkes himself. An American merchant in London wrote home that ‘the Best of Princes had taken care to offend all his English subjects by a uniform and studied inattention which irritable men like myself construe into more than neglect and downright insult…’. The image, once dear even to John Adams, of a patriot King, the benevolent scion of the House of Brunswick, the guarantor of the Protestant succession, began to crumble, and memories of the legendary Stuart tyrants to revive. One more link with Britain was snapping.