The second way to raise a colonial revenue was to impose new taxes. This would be trickier to manage than the suppression of smuggling: whereas tightening up on customs enforcement could be accomplished by executive action, to create a new tax, or to adjust an old one, required the House of Commons to pass the necessary legislation—and Grenville was by no means certain of his majority. Moreover, he knew that American colonists would react at least as unfavorably to new taxes as British cider producers. Any political issue as potentially explosive as taxation had to be approached cautiously, and only after thorough study. Accordingly, late in August, Grenville ordered a subordinate to investigate how revenues might be enhanced by adjusting the rate of an existing tax on molasses imported to the mainland from the West Indies. In early September he asked two other assistants to draft a bill for Parliament’s consideration, by which the colonists could be taxed directly through revenue stamps—a small levy of the sort that Englishmen paid, almost unwittingly, whenever they undertook legal processes or bought newspapers, playing cards, and other mundane items.9
Grenville had no intention of immediately introducing his revenue measures when the House of Commons began its winter session on November 15. He knew very well what challenges lay ahead, and he understood that two impending struggles—the opposition’s efforts to modify or repeal the cider tax, and the inevitable brouhaha over John Wilkes—would make it clear whether his ministry had the parliamentary majority and the royal support needed to enact colonial reforms. By spring either his ministry would have gone down to defeat, or the dust would have settled enough to allow him and his colleagues to proceed with vigor. In the meantime Grenville would be content to defer action on the revenue measures and allow his subordinates to refine proposals and draft the necessary legislation. More immediate concerns growing out of the war and the Indian rebellion, however, would not wait, and could at any rate be handled by executive action. To those urgent matters the new secretary of state for the South, Lord Halifax, turned his attention.
In a cabinet meeting on September 16, Halifax presented his plan for organizing the American conquests into four new colonies and a vast interior Indian preserve. The scheme he proposed, to be implemented by royal proclamation, incorporated suggestions from two drafts that dated from early 1763: one prepared at Egremont’s request by a former governor of Georgia named Henry Ellis, and the other written mainly by John Pownall on behalf of the Board of Trade. The cabinet had discussed both plans back in July, suggested modifications, and directed the board to combine them into a single document. The board proceeded in a characteristically leisurely way until August, when news of Pontiac’s Rebellion moved Pownall to urge the cabinet to issue the proclamation immediately and reassure the Indians that Britain had no designs on their lands. At that moment, of course, the intricate tasks of ministerial reorganization had to be addressed; but once Halifax presented the scheme on September 16, things moved quickly. By October 4 the earl of Hillsborough, the board’s new president, had touched up the draft, run the document by the attorney general for legal amendments, and returned it to Halifax. Three days later, after the Privy Council gave its pro forma approval, the king officially promulgated it. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 marked Britain’s first effort to impose institutional form on the conquests, and the Grenville ministry’s first attempt to outline a policy for the empire. Under the circumstances it was probably better than nothing. But that did not make it a good start for the organization of the postwar empire. 10
Essentially the ministry attacked the problem of organizing the conquests at the margins, deferring the central issues for later consideration. The map of the proclamation’s new civil governments made this peripheral approach clear. North of New England and New York the French settlements along the St. Lawrence, as high as the Montréal district, became the new province of Québec. To the south and west of Georgia the proclamation erected two new provinces: East Florida, consisting of the peninsula from the Atlantic to the Apalachicola River; and West Florida, from the Apalachicola to the Mississippi between 31° north latitude and the Gulf of Mexico. All three colonies were to operate under English law and to be organized as soon as possible according to the familiar model of royal provinces elsewhere, with appointed governors and elected assemblies.11
Everything else—from the Great Lakes basin to Florida, and from the Mississippi to the western slope of the Appalachians—was reserved for the use of the Indians. No colonial governments were to grant lands in this zone, no surveyors were to operate there, and no negotiations were to be undertaken for purchase of Indian titles within it except by the Crown’s designated representatives. Whites were forbidden to settle beyond the Appalachian ridge, and all those presently living there were “forthwith to remove themselves.” Although the proclamation decreed that “the trade with the said [western] Indians shall be free and open to all our subjects whatever,” it would not be unregulated. Traders could pass beyond the mountains only with “a license for carrying on such trade, from the Governor or commander in chief of any of our colonies respectively where such person shall reside.” The proclamation established no civil government for this vast inland realm. The only Crown representatives within it would be the commanders of whatever interior forts the king might choose to maintain and whatever representatives the two Indian superintendents would station there. Since British military officers could enforce the law over civilians only at the direction of civil magistrates, the proclamation required the commanders to arrest all fugitives from justice who fled to the Indian country, “and to send them under a proper guard to the colony where the crime was committed of which they shall stand accused, in order to take their trial for the same.”
Halifax wanted to impose order on the chaotic interior of North America and intended the proclamation only as the start of a lengthy process. Yet the document’s improvised, impermanent character promised anything but a satisfactory beginning. The proclamation remained vague on too many critical points. It did not make it clear, for example, how the commandant of a fort in (say) the Illinois Country was supposed to know that a white man who appeared among the local Indians was a fugitive from justice in Pennsylvania—or how he would transport the suspect to Philadelphia to stand trial. Nor was it evident how the commanders of western posts were supposed to deal with the local French and métis inhabitants, whom the diplomats at Paris had rendered British subjects with a few deft strokes of the quill. Were they to remove themselves forthwith to Québec, which their ancestors had left two or three generations earlier? Suppose one of them murdered an Indian: how, where, and by whom would he or she be tried?
If these were not headaches enough, there was the difficulty of the French already living in Québec. The Treaty of Paris had guaranteed them security in their property and the right to practice their Catholic faith unmolested. But the proclamation stipulated that the new colonies were to be organized “agreeable to the laws of England,” and those laws forbade Catholics from voting and holding civil office. Halifax and his colleagues wanted the new colonies to attract English-speaking Protestant colonists, who preferred to settle where they enjoyed the protections of the common law and the right to tax themselves according to British tradition. But in 1763 Québec had only a handful of Anglophone inhabitants. Did His Majesty’s government actually intend to constitute a few hundred carpetbagging Anglo-Americans as the body politic of Québec and permanently disfranchise eighty thousand Québecois? Those Québecois had long experience with, and implicit faith in, a legal system based on Roman law traditions; did His Majesty’s ministers really intend to substitute wholesale a common law that the French neither understood nor trusted?
The problems of dealing with Anglo-American colonists beyond the Appalachians would be no easier to solve than any of those affecting the French. A boundary inscribed along the Appalachian crest did nothing to divide existing enclaves of white settlement—some of which were completely legitimate—from Indian hunting grounds. How was th
e army supposed to deal with settlers who refused to leave? Or with the white hunters who ranged across the mountains in search of game, but who were uninterested in settlement? If white interlopers refused to leave voluntarily, were the Indians entitled to deal with them according to Indian notions of justice? In what amounted to a state of nature, the Indians had as good a theoretical claim to jurisdiction as anyone else, and more real ability to exercise it. But even supposing that all trans-Appalachian whites could somehow be peaceably expelled, no proclamation could contravene the social forces that had propelled them westward in the first place. And that raised the related issue of land speculation. The proclamation forbade colonial governments to make land grants beyond the Appalachian crest, but it could not extinguish the claims of those colonies like Virginia and Connecticut, whose patents extended to the Pacific. Indeed, in a typically contradictory way, it opened a loophole that would allow them to apply for exemptions.
For among its several provisions, the proclamation also announced the king’s generous intention to grant lands to “such reduced officers as have served in North America during the late war, and to such private soldiers as have been or shall be disbanded in America, and are actually residing there and shall personally apply for the same” to any colonial governor. The amounts of land stipulated—five thousand acres for field officers, three thousand for captains, two thousand for subalterns and staff officers, two hundred for sergeants and corporals, and fifty for privates —added up to substantial amounts, more than enough to whet the appetite of speculators willing to buy up the warrants of men who wanted the rewards of their service but did not intend personally to take up land in the wilderness. Halifax intended that these grants should be made only within the bounds of the three new provinces or, in the case of the preexisting ones, within the limits of the Proclamation Line; and that they should go to veterans of the regular army. But the language of the passage was vague enough to admit the possibility that grants would be possible anywhere within the limits of the colonies and open to provincials as well as regulars. Given the enormous numbers of men who had served as provincials and the expansive patents of colonies like Virginia and Connecticut, provinces full of enthusiastic speculators, these provisions promised to create vast complications for a king whose stated wish was only “to testify our royal sense and approbation of the conduct and bravery of the officers and soldiers of our armies, and to reward the same.”12
Thus the issue of western land speculation lay like a trip wire ahead, waiting to trigger an explosion that could injure not grubby squatters and half-savage hunters, but elite figures: gentlemen whose political connections extended into the Privy Council itself. Partnerships of investors like the Ohio Company could hardly be expected to abandon their plans to profit from the west, and it was absolutely predictable that their shareholders in Britain (including, for example, the duke of Bedford) would seek to have the limits on western settlement lifted. The proclamation’s own provisions, in short, guaranteed that the line prohibiting settlement in the American west would be politicized—in Britain. If there was no way to predict the outcome of the struggles that would ensue, it did not take a prophet to foresee that so long as the line remained in place the stakes resting on its removal would rise; and that ministers committed to limiting white settlement would sooner or later be called to account.
These problems, while unforeseen, were hardly unforeseeable. Halifax, who proposed the document that would create so many difficulties for himself and his successors, was not only intelligent, conscientious, and politically sophisticated, but thoroughly versed in American affairs. Why the proclamation reads as it does cannot, therefore, be explained by the usual factors of ignorance, unconcern, and sloth. Rather the proclamation’s problematic elements arose from the earnest, urgent desire of Halifax and his colleagues to restore peace and create order in America, especially in relations with the Indians. Because Halifax, particularly, understood the proclamation as a first step toward placing Indian relations on a firm foundation, immediately after its promulgation he began to concentrate on reforming the Indian trade. The provisions of this plan reveal more of how he intended to restructure relations between the colonies, the Indians, and the metropolis.
By October 19, Halifax had sketched the outlines of an Indian program, which he turned over to the Board of Trade to elaborate and refine. Although the board would work on a draft all winter and the ministry would approve it only in early July, the outlines were clear enough from the beginning. The essence of the plan was to exclude both the colonial governments and the commander in chief from participating in Indian affairs, and to turn their management over entirely to the northern and southern superintendents. Trade would be carried on at specified locations, either in forts (in the northern department) or in designated Indian towns (in the southern department), where representatives of the superintendents would insure fair treatment for the Indians, provide necessary services, and adjudicate disputes. The expense of operating this system would be covered entirely by taxes on the Indian trade. Like the revenue measures Grenville was preparing, these reforms would have to be enacted by Parliament, so planning proceeded on the assumption that they would be introduced after the ministry was sure of its majority, and of the king’s support.13
Halifax’s organizational measures and Grenville’s plans for raising revenue had evolved into a definable colonial policy in the fall of 1763. But no theory, no vision of empire, dictated that policy’s shape. Rather its pattern arose from the Seven Years’ War, which had created the problems the ministers were trying to solve and taught them the lessons that directed their attentions and limited their choices. The war had left behind in North America a large, dispersed army, no longer particularly effective, but voracious of funds nonetheless; a powerful (although no longer viceregal) commander in chief, whose misguided intervention in Indian affairs had precipitated a costly, embarrassing insurrection; and a set of troublesome commitments in the Easton Treaty of 1758, by which the British had promised to withdraw from the west and promote a vigorous trade among the region’s tribes. In light of these legacies, Halifax’s prohibition of western settlement under the Proclamation of 1763, the recall of Amherst as commander in chief, and the approval of a plan to give the Indian superintendents untrammeled authority over the Indian trade made perfect sense.14
The lessons of the war, similarly, directed Grenville’s attention to revenue measures that would leave as little as possible to the discretion of American assemblies—legislatures that had demonstrated the quality of their commitment to the empire when they eagerly opened their hands to Parliament’s subsidies in 1758, after years of tightfisted refusal to contribute to the common cause. The lessons of the war encouraged Grenville to concentrate on the elimination of smuggling, which he (like Pitt) believed had prolonged the conflict and which now denied income to his Treasury, even as the smugglers remained openly contemptuous of British authority. And the lessons of the war, finally, encouraged both Grenville and Halifax to conceive of the great new empire in strategic terms, as an entity to be directed from Whitehall according to British policy aims. To allow the colonies to return to their old, slovenly, parochial ways would in effect permit the colonists to define the relationship of the Indians to the empire, allowing Americans to benefit from Britain’s protection without contributing anything in return. All that, inevitably, would invite disasters like the current insurrection to recur, give the designing French carte blanche to stir up more revolts, and hamstring imperial officers when they tried to restore order and security. And those, surely, were outcomes that no responsible minister could tolerate.
CHAPTER 60
The American Duties Act (THE SUGAR ACT)
1764
AS EXPERIENCE rather than theory engendered its plans for reform, so the ministry implemented its program less systematically than opportunistically, as it became politic to do so. Just in the way Grenville expected, the opposition launched two major attacks during
the Commons’ winter session: one based on discontentment with the cider tax, the other arising from unease at the way the government had employed a general warrant against John Wilkes without regard for parliamentary privilege. That the ministry expected these to be its great tests was evident from the start of the session. The king’s opening speech, which Grenville wrote, emphasized the need for attending to “the heavy debts contracted in the course of the late war”; a royal message to the Commons, also Grenville’s handiwork, asked the M.P.s to determine if Wilkes ought to be deprived of his seat in the House, and hence of parliamentary privilege. To set the agenda, however, was not to control the debates, and William Pitt determined to seize what seemed a glittering opportunity to bring down Grenville’s ministry. Beside him stood Charles Townshend, whom some thought Pitt’s peer in eloquence, and who many believed would inherit his political mantle.1
Despite Pitt’s and Townshend’s success in shifting the debate from Wilkes’s rather nasty behavior to the abstract issues of liberty of the press and freedom from arbitrary arrest, the government retained comfortable margins in the early votes. Moreover, at Christmastime, Wilkes did Grenville the enormous favor of fleeing to France, and on January 19 the House, finding him in contempt, voted his expulsion. But the government’s majority waned in late January and early February when Grenville defended the cider tax, beating down a critical resolution to modify it by just twenty votes. The opposition, scenting blood, mounted an all-out effort to overthrow the ministry in mid-February, on the grounds that it had abused its power in the use of general warrants. Such drastic measures, smacking as they did of despotism, worried many independent M.P.s who had little regard for Wilkes but harbored enormous affection for Pitt. Yet in the end not even the Great Commoner’s speeches could carry the day, and a resolution that would have declared general warrants unconstitutional failed by ten votes. Having thus retained control despite an opposition challenge “beyond all example and belief,” Grenville could propose his own legislative program—and indeed could do so with great confidence, for at the height of the debates the king had finally assured him that he would support the ministry, come what might. The independents who had been following Pitt’s lead reassumed their accustomed posture of docility, and Grenville’s majority swelled to comfortable dimensions at last.2
Crucible of War Page 65