Reasons arising from local self-interest and local politics led legislators in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to protest against the prospect of a stamp tax while remaining silent on the reality of the American Duties Act. All four assemblies sent petitions or instructed their agents to oppose the stamp bill when Grenville introduced it, as he had promised he would, in 1765. Their petitions and instructions, like those of Massachusetts and New York, were strongly inflected by local circumstances and thereby clouded in argument. But all agreed that the House of Commons could not justly vote taxes out of the pockets of unrepresented Americans. The jumble in colonial thinking about the imperial reforms, therefore, did not originate in any lack of clarity about the acceptability of taxation by a sovereign Parliament. Rather, as the colonists’ divided reactions showed, it came from the extreme difficulty Americans had in seeing themselves as a political community—a group with enough in common that a threat to any of them could actually be a threat to them all.
In Rhode Island the legislators mildly requested that the king confirm colonial rights, and they came no closer to asserting a universal principle than to state their belief that “colonists may not be taxed but by the consent of their own representatives, as your Majesty’s other free subjects are.” Connecticut’s assemblymen contented themselves with commissioning a pamphlet that articulated their opposition to a stamp tax, entitled Reasons Why the British Colonies, in America, should not be charged with Internal Taxes by Authority of Parliament, and sending its author, Jared Ingersoll, to London as their agent. Elected officials in both colonies cared most about preserving their charters—perhaps the only issue that could unite all factions in either legislature—and out of their fear of offending Parliament, which possessed the power to annul the charters, chose to mute their protests. Anxiety over maintaining corporate privileges also produced Connecticut’s unique effort to argue against “internal” taxation while accepting Parliament’s authority to raise revenue by the “external” means of customs exactions. A stamp tax would operate directly on the population, effectively flattening the institutional barriers that had until now preserved the colonies’ autonomy within the empire. Customs duties might be unpleasant but would not diminish local control. So long as the new duties were not so high as to put the local merchants out of business, Rhode Island and Connecticut could live with them.9
In Pennsylvania, circumstances tempered reactions to the impending Stamp Act in a different way. Pennsylvania’s assemblymen learned of the imperial reforms in the midst of a battle between the antiproprietary party and the resurgent proprietary faction: a political dispute blown white-hot by a series of appalling incidents spawned by the Indian insurrection of the previous winter. On December 14, 1763, about fifty disguised frontiersmen had marched on the Indian town at Conestoga Creek and murdered twenty Christian Indians. The vigilantes, calling themselves Paxton Boys after the Scotch-Irish settlement on Paxtang (Paxton) Creek, justified the massacre on grounds of self-defense. The Conestogas, they maintained, covertly aided Delaware war parties, while the assembly, dominated by the antiproprietary party, left frontier farmers exposed to attack. Two weeks later they renewed their protest by breaking open the Lancaster jail and butchering fourteen Conestogas whom the sheriff had placed in protective custody. As word spread that the vigilantes intended to kill all the Indians in Pennsylvania, their popularity and their numbers mounted fast. Soon they believed they could intimidate the province government directly. Thus early in February, some 500 Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia, announcing that they would kill both the 140 or so Indian converts who had taken shelter there, and Israel Pemberton, whom they regarded as the province’s leading Indian-lover. Benjamin Franklin and other government leaders intercepted them at Germantown, listened to their complaints, promised not to prosecute them for the previous murders if they went home, and thus defused the threat to Philadelphia.10
There was no further violence, but the incident alarmed everyone in eastern Pennsylvania, further polarized politics, and raised the stakes in the campaign for control of the legislature. In the fall elections both Franklin and his lieutenant, Joseph Galloway, lost their assembly seats: a stunning reversal for the antiproprietary faction, despite the fact that it retained a legislative majority. Under these circumstances, Grenville’s reforms went unmentioned, if not unnoticed, until the fall. When the legislature finally acted, it directed Richard Jackson, its agent in London, to make a formal protest to the ministry and to lobby against the stamp tax in the House of Commons.
There was only a nod to the question of colonial rights in the assembly’s instructions to Jackson because the antiproprietary politicians, now that the elections were over, were concentrating on a campaign to turn Pennsylvania into a royal province. It was with this goal in mind, not protesting the reforms in imperial relations, that the assembly voted to send a second agent to London to “assist” Jackson as Pennsylvania’s representative. Over the objections of the proprietary minority, they named Benjamin Franklin, who had ambitions to become the province’s first royal governor. He left quickly to take up his new job, unaware that imperial, not provincial, issues would consume his attention once he arrived in London. In this respect he was less than prescient but thoroughly representative. No politician in Pennsylvania thought that there could be any question more compelling than who would control the province. Thus in Pennsylvania even more than in the New England colonies, domestic issues absorbed the attention of political leaders and moderated their response to imperial reforms.11
Virginia’s local concerns surfaced in the House of Burgesses’s three official protests—a petition to the king, an address to the House of Lords, and a remonstrance to the House of Commons. Through all three memorials ran mixed currents of principled and practical objection from planters who regarded themselves as put-upon and disadvantaged in relations with the metropolis. Provincial taxes, at the highest levels ever and committed to the retirement of the war debt, had lately been driven up further by the mobilization of militia units for frontier defense, but Lieutenant Governor Fauquier, and then the Currency Act, had prevented the Burgesses from easing the strain with paper money. Meanwhile tobacco prices continued to fall while exchange rates stayed stuck at the highest levels in their history. Planters’ debts had climbed to frightening levels, but the prohibition against selling tobacco outside the empire doomed the planters to trade with British merchants who, many believed, were trying to turn them into permanent dependents.
Thus the Burgesses humbly prayed the king’s protection, to preserve them “in their ancient and inestimable Right of being governed by such Laws respecting their internal Polity and Taxation as are derived from their own Consent . . .: A Right which as Men, and Descendents of Britons, they have ever quietly possessed. . . .” With almost equal humility and a hint of desperation they argued to those “fixed and hereditary Guardians of British Liberty,” the House of Lords, that they were the descendants of men who “brought with them every Right and Privilege they could with Justice claim in their Mother Kingdom”; that to tax them without their consent would make them “the Slaves of Britons, from whom they are descended”; and that insofar as they had always taxed themselves, “they cannot now be deprived of a Right they have so long enjoyed, and which they have never forfeited.” 12
The remonstrance to the House of Commons concentrated on practical concerns more than rights, and perhaps for that reason sounded surlier. The Burgesses could not, they said, “discern by what Distinction they can be deprived of that sacred Birthright and most valuable Inheritance [of Englishmen’s rights] by their Fellow Subjects, nor with what Propriety they can be taxed or affected in their Estates by the Parliament, wherein they are not, and indeed cannot, constitutionally be represented.” Even “if it were proper for Parliament to impose Taxes on the Colonies,” to do so “at this Time would be ruinous to Virginia, who exerted herself in the late War it is feared beyond her Strength,” and whose people �
��are very greatly distressed already from the Scarcity of circulating Cash amongst them, and from the little Value of their Staple at the British Markets.” Should Virginians be further burdened, the Burgesses observed, they would undoubtedly be forced to suspend importation and begin manufacturing substitutes for British consumer goods, to the great detriment of Bristol and London merchants. Thus no less because the stamp tax would “certainly be detrimental to [Britain’s] commerce” than because “British Patriots will never consent to the Exercise of anticonstitutional Power,” the House of Commons ought to be wise enough not to enact “a Measure . . . fitter for Exiles driven from their native Country . . . than for the Prosperity of Britons who have at all Times been forward to demonstrate all due Reverence to the Mother Kingdom, and are so instrumental in promoting her Glory and Felicity.” 13
What George Grenville and his ministerial colleagues inferred from this variety of American responses to the imperial reform program is easy enough to guess. All but two of the colonies had acquiesced uncomplainingly in the American Duties Act, and only one assembly objected that customs exactions were in fact taxes and therefore ought not to be levied on unrepresented subjects. The prospect of a stamp tax had elicited more widespread objections, but less than half of the colonial legislatures made even the minimal gestures of petitioning or instructing their agents to object. Compared to the resistance that the cider excise had evoked in England, the Americans’ befuddled, erratic, and (in more than half the colonies) apathetic responses to taxation and a new regime of imperial administration were most encouraging. There was nothing in them to deter Grenville from proceeding to the next stage of reform and imposing a stamp tax.
With the benefit of two centuries’ hindsight, of course, we can make inferences different from the ones Grenville and his colleagues could possibly have drawn. We can see that the political configurations of various American legislatures and the tendency of colonial leaders to be preoccupied with local concerns had inhibited the provinces from cooperating, even though the issues at stake were clear from the start and never, in fact, the subject of significant disagreement among colonists. Thomas Hutchinson himself detested the prospect of taxation without representation, and if not even James Otis could conclusively deny Parliament’s sovereignty over the colonies, no one (except perhaps Cadwallader Colden) applauded its untrammeled exercise of power. The absence of coordinated resistance to imperial reform did not reflect internal division on the issues so much as the rudimentary state of intercolonial relations and the undeveloped sense of common interest within America. During the previous half century, and particularly during the Seven Years’ War, the most important bonds in colonial America had been those that extended across the Atlantic. The most significant trends in political and economic integration had not drawn colony closer to colony, but the colonies as a group closer to the metropolis. The American provinces had thus been able to demonstrate unprecedented coordination during the war, but only as a result of direction from above, not as a consequence of consultations among themselves.
The Seven Years’ War had provided two unifying elements: a common enemy to animate agreement among colonies that were otherwise intensely localist; and a commander in chief to orchestrate colonial activities by issuing directives and transmitting requisitions through the governors to the legislatures. That only Maryland had sat out the war testified to the rude effectiveness of this system no less than to its limits, for only in Maryland did a governor and an opposition-dominated assembly fail to find enough common ground for the governor to become a conduit for the commander in chief’s instructions and requests.
The end of the war left the other colonies free, once more, to behave like Maryland. There was no longer a common enemy to fear or a common cause to serve; the commander in chief no longer issued instructions to the governors; governors lacked the resources to control or even persuade assemblies; and the intercolonial cooperation of the war years faded into memory. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that opposition factions within various assemblies, responding to local concerns as much as to Grenville’s reform initiatives, failed to coordinate their protests. Yet the memory of intercolonial cooperation clearly lingered on in the resolutions of assemblies like Massachusetts and Rhode Island to establish committees of correspondence, to communicate with other legislatures. Such committees reassured other assemblies that they were not alone in believing that Parliament had no right to tax unrepresented colonists. Given the fragmentation of postwar America, that was no insignificant accomplishment, but it could hardly have deterred George Grenville from proceeding with the Stamp Act.
Grenville and his fellow ministers also remembered the extent, and perceived the limits, of intercolonial coordination. They wanted to construct a system that would allow the colonies to respond to Whitehall’s directives even more efficiently (and much more economically) than in the last years of the war. Until well into 1765 they did not understand that their efforts had begun to precipitate opposition out of Americans’ inchoate, provincial disinclination to be governed from a distance and their widely held belief that taxes should not be levied without consent. The various colonists who opposed Grenville’s program, however, could not make common cause solely on the basis of localist biases and shared prejudices. In the first place, they could not agree that there was a common enemy: there was only the British state, which was much more the focus of patriotic devotion than a source of threat. Moreover, there was no agency with the backing of legitimate authority—no analog to a wartime commander in chief—capable of soliciting their cooperation. Thus local concerns, local interests, and local politics blocked the road to common action, even though most colonists feared and disliked the Grenville program.
There was, finally, one more factor that inhibited expressions of discontentment with an imperial program expressly designed to promote colonial defense: the Indian insurrection that was still in progress on frontiers from New York to North Carolina. It would have been hard enough for American politicians to question Parliament’s authority if issues of sovereignty and representation could be debated at the level of abstraction. For them to question Parliament’s authority when the issues at stake already had been stained by blood, and particularly when the blood was that of British soldiers spilled in defense of American colonists: that was another matter, entirely.
CHAPTER 64
Pontiac’s Progress
1764-1765
ALTHOUGH NO ONE at army headquarters in New York quite grasped the fact, it was less Indian recalcitrance than British policy that sustained the insurrection beyond the end of 1763. Pontiac offered Major Gladwin peace when he suspended the siege of Detroit in October. Gladwin accepted a truce but could not negotiate because he lacked the proper authority; all Indian diplomacy lay in the province of Sir William Johnson, whom Amherst in turn had instructed to make no treaty until the rebellious Indians had been properly “chastised.” When the sieges of 1763 petered out in cease-fires, a commander without Amherst’s visceral need to put the Indians in their place might well have seized the opportunity to make peace. Having not suffered Amherst’s reversals and lacking his thirst for revenge, Major General Thomas Gage should have been able to put a prompt end to the bloodshed. But for reasons both technical and psychological Gage adhered to Amherst’s plans for the campaigns of 1764, and that, together with the predictable array of unpredictable misfortunes, postponed the return of peace for more than a year.
Because Egremont had cloaked Amherst’s dismissal in the pretext that the king needed his opinions on America, Gage became commander in chief ad interim only. Until the ministry decided to make his appointment a permanent one, Gage remained technically Amherst’s subordinate, and bound by his orders. In practice, of course, Gage could alter campaign plans as he needed, and did indeed make a few changes. That he chose to adhere to the bulk of Amherst’s instructions in 1764 had less to do with the requirements of military subordination than with a propensity for in
decision. Gage had been in America since 1755 and in that time had shown a variety of admirable personal qualities, but not one of them outweighed a deep innate caution, born above all of a lack of imagination. He had proven his physical courage as the lieutenant colonel of the 44th Regiment at the Monongahela, and his capacities as a disciplinarian when he rebuilt the battalion in the months following the disaster. He had shown ambition in campaigning for a regiment of his own and perseverance in enduring repeated disappointments before receiving his colonelcy in 1758. And he had demonstrated initiative: his superiors finally decided to create his new regiment, the 80th Light Infantry, because he convinced them that it could replace the army’s expensive, ill-disciplined ranger companies. But while soldiers from the 80th entered the abatis at Ticonderoga alongside the rangers and fought as bravely as they in that impossible situation, the regiment never did supplant them. Gage simply lacked the expertise and imagination to train his troops as anything but conventional infantrymen.
In 1759 Amherst took more account of Gage’s seniority than his temperament and assigned him the command of a small expedition against the fort that guarded the upper St. Lawrence, La Galette. But instead of striking downriver from Lake Ontario to divert pressure from Wolfe at Québec, Gage fretted over the lack of intelligence concerning French troop strength, hesitated, and finally sat tight at Oswego. Amherst could not forgive this failure of nerve. Assigning Gage the ignominious station of rear guard commander in the invasion year of 1760, Amherst immured him at Montréal as governor thereafter. At Montréal, however, Gage finally found his forte, administering the region with patience, honesty, good humor, and careful attention to detail. By the time he inherited the office of commander in chief and the major generalship that went with it, he had demonstrated high competency as a bureaucrat and earned a reputation for personal decency. Yet as the pattern of his career suggested, he was always more lucky than insightful, more stolid than bold, more cautious than creative. At forty-three, Thomas Gage was too old to love risk. It probably never occurred to him to depart from the course his angry, confident predecessor had charted.1
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