Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  Matters were not helped in the summer of 1772 when the merchants (that is, the smugglers) of Newport, Rhode Island, captured and burned the revenue schooner HMS Gaspee, whose commander, it was alleged, had not only pressed men in the colony, but stolen sheep, hogs and poultry, and cut down fruit-trees for firewood. He had also been inconveniently diligent in enforcing the Navigation Acts. This outrage compelled some imperial reaction, since the local officials made not the slightest attempt to bring the criminals to justice. When it came, the reaction was significantly feeble, showing that the British had learned a few lessons. They had learned, for example, to keep out of quarrels between, or within, colonies, and to move cautiously, one might say timidly, when involvement was inescapable. Their response to the Gaspee incident was to set up an investigatory commission consisting of the Governor of Rhode Island, the Chief Justices of Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, and the judge of the vice-admiralty court for the New England district. These men were all far too American and far too cautious to take any risks, so the commission was ineffective, as might have been foreseen. All in all, it was a pitiful way of dealing with what was, in one sense, a deadlier challenge than the Boston Tea Party itself was to be, since it involved the destruction of one of the King’s ships, not just of some private property. Such feebleness was another sign of abdication, even though the commission was too strong for radical stomachs and was treated everywhere by the Sons of Liberty as a tyrannical interference. For among its instructions was the fatal provision that persons arrested as a result of its findings were to be transported to England to stand trial. The alarm occasioned by this ‘court of inquisition, more horrid than that of Spain and Portugal’ (!) led the Virginian House of Burgesses in the spring of 1773 to propose the establishment of a chain of inter-colonial committees of correspondence, for the concerting of common measures against acts of oppression. This proposal was eagerly taken up by the other colonies.

  So failed the policy of feebleness. But its alternative, ‘vigour’, failed even worse when it was at length applied to the most mutinous of the colonies, Massachusetts Bay.

  There, months before Virginia acted, Sam Adams had recaptured the initiative. Using as his pretext the new policy by which the proceeds of the American customs were used for the salaries of government officials, including judges, he painted a frightful picture of liberty and justice in America being subverted by ‘pensioners, placemen and other jobbers, for an abandon’d and shameless ministry; hirelings, pimps, parasites, panders, prostitutes and whores’ (this use of extravagant sexual abuse was common with Adams and his associates).12 He was able, by much hysteria and not a little trickery, to induce Boston town-meeting to start a chain of committees of correspondence within Massachusetts, each township to have one. These committees were eventually to usurp the government of the province. By 1774,300 towns had been drawn into the network. Each committee reported directly to Boston; and at Boston a connection was established with the committees of the other colonies.

  Working for the imperial government was men’s natural desire for a quiet life and a return of prosperity. In Virginia, George Washington, forgetting his talk of armed resistance, was devoting himself entirely to the management of his plantations and the pursuit of rich land-grants in the new country opening up across the Allegheny mountains. There were many like him in every colony. But on the whole conditions for British policy were getting slowly, imperceptibly, but definitely worse.

  Lord North did not notice: Parliament did not discuss America for two years. He had other problems on his mind, the foremost being India. Like everything else it was connected with the difficulties of government finance.

  The East India Company was another victim of the decaying mercantilist system. Chatham, it will be remembered, had hoped to pay for the Empire not by taxing the West but by squeezing the East: the Company was saddled with the requirement to pay an annual £400,000 to the government. It was also burdened with rising administrative costs in India, with competition in the tea-trade from English and American smugglers, and with the consequences of a great famine in Bengal. Its purely business affairs were being badly managed, the price of its shares had collapsed, and a financial panic, followed by a twelve-month trade depression, which made the collection of money owed to the Company very difficult, started early in 1772. By September in that year, with debts amounting to more than £1,300,000, it was nearing bankruptcy, and the government had to intervene.

  The resulting legislation took the first step on the road that led eventually to supersession of the Company in India by the Crown. North also adopted an ingenious idea, put forward by Company officials, for aiding it commercially. He prepared an Act of Parliament (the so-called Tea Act) by which all mercantilist burdens on the export of the Company’s tea to America were lifted. Company tea would thereby be able to compete effectively with the smuggled sort, which at the time was selling in the colonies at 2s. 7d. per pound. The appearance on the market of fine East Indian teas at 2s. per pound would force the smugglers’ prices down in a rush (though they would still enjoy a 6 per cent profit). Furthermore, under North’s arrangements the Company would be allowed to act as its own retailer, selling direct to the colonial consumer, not, as previously, through middlemen. This was manna to the East Indiamen. They expected to accumulate, in 1773–4, a surplus of thirty-one million pounds of tea, and before the Tea Act (which became law on 10 May 1773) they had not expected to sell more than thirteen million pounds. Now they were free to dump as much as they could on the American market, being required only to keep back ten million pounds in case of some national emergency (a very British piece of foresight). No wonder Lord North spoke of the Act as ‘prodigiously to the advantage of the Company’.

  He had not consulted any of the American merchants or colonial agents in London before legislating. To judge by his later statements, he had assumed that the Americans would rush to buy cheap tea and given the matter no further thought. It certainly never occurred to him that the ordinary American tea-drinker would make common cause with the smugglers and legal importers to protest against a measure which substantially lowered the price of the stuff, just because it did not abolish a duty which had been accepted in practice, at any rate in New England, for the previous five years. He took no warning from the fact that the colonies south of Connecticut had never accepted the duty. In 1770 the amount of dutied tea imported to New York was only 147 pounds; Philadelphia took only sixty-five. Both cities drank enormous quantities of contraband tea instead. The plantation colonies showed a similar pattern. The duty was never accepted in principle anywhere, of course: the colonies had continuously petitioned against it. North’s blindness to all this demonstrated, as had Grenville and Townshend, how little fitted British ministers were to govern the Empire. The Tea Act would, unless nullified or repealed, gravely injure American smugglers, a not inconsiderable force in colonial life, as the Gaspee incident had proved; by eliminating the middlemen it would also injure merchants in the legitimate tea-trade; and as the Townshend tea-duty of 3d. a pound was to continue, the revenue of the Crown in America would be greatly enhanced while the great principle of no taxation without representation went by default. North should have known, or should have found out, that the colonials would be most unlikely to accept the Act: to barter the principles of their liberty for cheap tea. He did not, and thereby missed a great opportunity. Benjamin Franklin had suggested, vainly as usual, that merely by repealing the duty North would enable the American market to absorb four million pounds’ worth of the surplus tea in the East India Company’s warehouses. Such a repeal, combined with the Tea Act, would have been a masterstroke of policy. North would have greatly aided the East India Company and removed an American grievance, the latter quite without compulsion or agitation. He might have won the government some much-needed popularity, as well as the political initiative. Such a move would have angered the mercantile but not the consuming interest in the colonies. It would have opened the way to rep
lacing mercantilism by free trade, the most pressing of necessary imperial reforms. But these grand ideas never crossed North’s mind. Muddled and complacent, he rejected the Rockinghamite suggestion that the Townshend duty, not the British duty on exports, should be abolished, for he saw no need to gratify the Americans, whose temper, he said, was ‘little deserving favour from hence’. He refused to listen to William Dowdeswell’s warning, made in the debate on the Tea Act, that ‘if he don’t take off the duty they won’t take the tea’. The East India merchants were equally obtuse and sanguine. In vain John Norton, an American trader in London, warned them ‘not to think of sending their tea till Government took off the duty, as they might be well assured it would not be received on any other terms’. Bright visions of immediately exporting 600,000 lb. of tea to America danced before their eyes. More could follow… they pressed ahead.

  Dr Franklin, writing to the Speaker of Massachusetts Bay, sounded the alarm. It was, he thought, a plot to bribe the Americans to acquiesce in the tea-duty and thus submit to the principle of Parliamentary taxation. Bitterly giving vent to a long-mounting disgust with the English, he commented

  They have no idea that any people act from any other principle but that of interest; and they believe, that 3d. in a lb. of tea… is sufficient to overcome all the patriotism of an American.

  The British government had made no such calculation, but should have known that this was how its actions would appear, even to an experienced man like Franklin. As the news of the Act and of the East India Company’s plans crossed the Atlantic, alarm spread and resistance mounted. The patriot party seized the opportunity to rally opinion on yet another great symbolic issue. In October, as inter-colonial committees of correspondence were set up in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, Philadelphia and New York passed resolutions denouncing the Tea Act. But as usual it was Massachusetts which took the lead.

  That summer Sam Adams had at last effected the political destruction of Thomas Hutchinson, for Dr Franklin had sent him ill-gotten copies of some letters that the Governor had written to England several years before, containing opinions that, with judicious twisting, could be made to prove that Hutchinson was an enemy to his country. The twisting was done, the letters, against Franklin’s wishes, published, and the Governor was condemned by all sections of Massachusetts. His popularity vanished for ever. He was thus helpless to check the tide of events now rushing to a climax.

  On 21 October the Massachusetts correspondence committee called for common action by all the colonies against the Company. Boston town-meeting (assembling unofficially) passed anti-Tea Act resolutions on 5 November. The first tea-ship arrived on 28 November, and the next day the town heard the first suggestion that her cargo should be dumped in the harbour. There followed nearly three weeks of bitter contention. Under the laws of trade the tea could not be sent back to England, as Sam Adams wanted, without a clearance from the Governor, and that clearance Hutchinson refused to give, since the re-exportation duty had not been paid and he would not let himself be forced into acquiescing in Adams’s scheme. Besides, he thought he had the upper hand: if the duty had not been paid by 17 December, the tea could legally be seized by the customs, landed and sold. At length, on 16 December, at a mass-meeting in Faneuil Hall, John Rowe, one of Sam Adams’s associates, asked pointedly, ‘Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?’ In the first gloom of a winter evening, after candles were lit, news came in that Hutchinson was still adamant, and cries for ‘A mob! A mob!’ went up. Adams came forward and announced that ‘This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.’ It was a signal, taken up with a war-whoop in the gallery, which in turn was answered from the door by a band of men roughly disguised as Indians. ‘Boston harbour a teapot tonight!’ they shouted, and a huge crowd rushed down to the waterfront, the ‘Indians’ in the lead. The harbour was now bathed in bright moonlight. The three tea-ships were boarded, the 342 or so tea-chests were hauled on deck and broken open, and the tea was poured into the dark waters, nearly choking them (it was low tide). No other damage was done, and the Tea Party ended with a triumphal march through Boston to fife and drum.

  It was the apotheosis of the Boston mob, and Sam Adams’s masterpiece. Many of the ‘Indians’ were his followers from the North End of Boston – sailors, shipwrights and other artisans. Others had come from the allied Massachusetts towns, summoned, no doubt, through his committees of correspondence. He was in ecstasies at his success. ‘You cannot imagine the height of joy that sparkles in the eyes and animates the countenances as well as the hearts of all we meet on this occasion,’ he wrote a few days later, ‘excepting the disappointed, disconsolated Hutchinson and his tools.’ The disconsolated Hutchinson, in his History of Massachusetts, was to call it the ‘boldest stroke which had yet been struck in America’; and the other Adams, who had been inexplicably absent from Boston during the culminating stage, exulted in his diary:

  This is the most magnificent moment of all. There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last effort of the patriots, that I greatly admire. The people should never rise, without doing something to be remembered – something notable and striking.

  The news flew through the colonies, rousing and uniting patriot Americans and establishing the unquestioned leadership of Massachusetts. Further resistance to the Tea Act was greatly encouraged. Ten days later Philadelphia returned its tea-ships to England; tea was landed at Charles Town but not distributed; on 9 March 1774 Boston destroyed thirty more chests; on 22 April New York city also had a tea party.

  The affront to the royal government was staggering. The Tea Act had been nullified and the legitimate Governor spurned, but the matter went deeper than that. Said John Adams,

  The question is whether the destruction of this tea was necessary? I apprehend it was absolutely and indispensably so… To let it be landed, would be giving up the principle of taxation by Parliamentary authority, against which the Continent has struggled for 10 years.

  Another question was developing from the old one: not Parliamentary authority to tax, but Parliamentary authority at all was in question. Challenged by Hutchinson (‘I know of no line that can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies’) the Massachusetts House of Representatives had already claimed, less than a year before, that the American colonies, by virtue of their charters, were ‘distinct States from the mother country’, independent of Parliament though owing allegiance to the King. Even this theory could hardly justify the assault on the property of the King’s subjects in the East India Company.

  The news of the Tea Party was published in London on 20 January 1774, and the majority in Parliament instantly turned to the question of how to chastise, once and for all, the insurgent province and ‘secure the dependence of the colonies on the mother country’. It was not so much a calculated response as a loss of temper. For the desire to punish Massachusetts had been felt, probably with increasing power, at least since 1768, when Lord North had observed that some of Boston’s actions had approached treason, when Lord Hillsborough had proposed the alteration of the Massachusetts Charter, and when Lord Camden, a wise friend of the colonies, had held that the Townshend duties ought to be repealed everywhere, except perhaps in Massachusetts Bay, to bring that unruly province to heel. Nothing had since mitigated British hostility. The Tea Party was the last straw. The British now blamed themselves for having repealed the Stamp Act. In their own unphilosophical way they had come to see the full, fatal implication of that abdication. It had been, they decided, an act of weakness. They were now resolved on very different measures. It had become a duty to crush Boston. Lord North ranted,

  I would rather all the Hamilcars and all the Hannibals that Boston ever bred; all the Hancocks, and all the sad-Cocks, and sad dogs of Massachusetts Bay; all the heroes of tar and feathers, and the champions, maimers of unpatriotic horses, mares and mules, were led up to the altar, on to the Liberty Tree, there to be exalted and rewarded accordi
ng to their merit or demerit [he meant hanging] than that Britain should disgrace herself by receding from her just authority.

  So the Coercive Acts (to be known in America as the Intolerable Acts) began to make their way through Parliament. The first, the Boston Port Act (signed by the King on 31 March), provided that the port of Boston should be closed to trade until the townsmen had paid compensation for the tea to the East India Company. The next two Acts were processed more or less simultaneously, becoming law on 20 May. Of these, the Act for regulating the government of Massachusetts made the provincial council appointive, as it was in most of the other colonies,13 rather than elective; gave the Governor sole power to dismiss inferior judges, sheriffs and other lesser officers of the law; gave him powers to control and restrict the activities of the town-meetings; even the institution of the jury was tampered with. The Act for the impartial administration of justice tried to protect revenue officers and other servants of the crown in Massachusetts: it provided that if they were accused of capital crimes in the performance of their official duties, they might be tried in another colony or in Great Britain, at the discretion of the Governor. Next came the Quartering Act, signed by the King on 2 June. This attempted to settle an ancient controversy by empowering the Governor to quarter troops more or less wherever he saw fit. Finally, on 22 June, the King signed the Quebec Act. This measure, which was long overdue, was an honest attempt to settle the future status of the French-speaking inhabitants of Canada: its chief features were that it set up a non-elective legislative council to make laws; extended the authority of Quebec into the Ohio and Illinois regions, where there were already some French communities; and recognized the traditional rights of the Catholic Church in Canada. The Act was not designed to be one of the Intolerable Acts, but the accident of its timing and the unpopularity of its contents in the thirteen colonies14 made them lump it in with the rest. To enforce the new laws, Governor Hutchinson was to be replaced by General Gage, long an advocate of stricter measures towards the colonies. He had boasted that he could restore order in Massachusetts with four regiments. He was now given the chance to try, and landed at Boston on 17 May. A fortnight later Thomas Hutchinson left for an exile in England from which he was never to return.