Beyond composing the Braintree town meeting’s instructions to its representative in the General Court, however, Adams still refrained from outright engagement in politics. Unlike his cousin Samuel, he was by temperament and preference more observer than organizer. His comparative detachment, however, sharpened his appreciation of the extraordinary character of recent events. In December a three-day northeaster gave him leisure to reflect on the Stamp Act crisis as he sat by the fire on his Braintree farm, together with Abigail, his wife of just over a year, and their infant daughter, Nabby. “The Year 1765,” he mused, has been the most remarkable Year of my Life. That enormous Engine, fabricated by the british Parliament, for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread thro the whole Continent, a Spirit that will be recorded to our Honour, with all future Generations. In every Colony . . . the Stamp Distributors and Inspectors have been compelled, by the unconquerable Rage of the People, to renounce their offices. Such and so universal has been the Resentment of the People, that every Man who has dared to speak in favour of the Stamps, . . . how great soever his Abilities and Virtues had been esteemed before, or whatever his fortune, Connections and Influence had been, has been seen to sink into universal Contempt and Ignominy.
The People, even to the lowest Ranks, have become more attentive to their Liberties, more inquisitive about them, and more determined to defend them, than they were ever before known or had occasion to be. Innumerable have been the Monuments of Wit, Humour, Sense, Learning, Spirit, Patriotism, and Heroism, erected in the several Colonies and Provinces, in the Course of this Year. Our Presses have groaned, our Pulpits have thundered, our Legislatures have resolved, our Towns have voted[.] The Crown Officers have every where trembled, and all their little Tools and Creatures, been afraid to Speak and ashamed to be seen.12
Adams sensed, and over the next weeks frequently wrote, that a new kind of politics was emerging in the colonies. He found it astonishing that, “till the Stamp Act shall be repealed,” Americans had “resolved unanimously to hold in Utter Contempt and Abhorrence every Stamp Officer, and every Favourer of the Stamp Act, and to have no Communication with any such Person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his Baseness.—So tryumphant is the Spirit of Liberty, every where.—Such an Union was never before known in America. In the Wars that have been with the french and Indians, [such] a Union could never be effected.” The kind of politics at which Adams marveled involved, as no politics before had, practically everybody: not just elite figures, but “the People, even to the Lowest Ranks.” 13
Abigail, at the very least John’s intellectual equal, might well have added a category that did not occur to him: women. Women too had stood in the crowds that watched effigies being hanged, and if they did not join the men and boys who pulled down houses, it is inconceivable that they did not raise their voices in the chorus that demanded the stamp distributors’ resignations. The Sons of Liberty implicitly recognized the importance of women as they devised their strategies of resistance. Ostracism of royal officials would never work unless it could be made universal, something it could never be unless the women who furnished essential domestic services and foodstuffs agreed to participate. Similarly, nonimportation had no hope of succeeding as a movement unless women, the main consumers of British textiles and other manufactures, were willing to forgo them, and increase their own burdens by producing homespun yarn and cloth to replace the boycotted items. If the implications of those facts still eluded men like Adams, who did not know how to think of women in political terms, they were none the less important and would not long elude the women themselves.14
Indeed, as 1765 shuddered to its end, practically everyone knew that amazing changes were taking place, but no one yet understood their significance. That so much turmoil between colonies and metropolis should have come about because of Britain’s epochal victory in the recent war only made it more bewildering. American colonists had fought and sacrificed, as they understood it, for the good of their empire. How, they wondered, could any politician who was not a rogue deny that colonial contributions of men and money had enabled Britain to conquer Canada and the West Indies? How could anyone but a scoundrel demand that Americans pay for those conquests twice—once with their blood and sweat and treasure during the war, once more with their taxes, afterward?
Of course it was all a matter of perspective. A decade earlier, at the dismal beginning of the war, when British officers had tried to treat the colonists like subjects, they and their assemblies—fearing the loss of their prerogatives and the infringement of their constituents’ rights as Englishmen—had balked. William Pitt had broken the impasse by treating the provinces as if they were tiny Prussias to be subsidized in proportion to their contributions to the war effort. The colonists—thinking of themselves not as mercenaries but as patriots, voluntarily participating in the winning of a great empire—had understood these subsidies as no more than just, for they believed that in contributing lives and labor to the cause they were performing all the duties that they as subjects were contractually bound to render to their king. But at the end of the conflict George Grenville had had other obligations on his mind and other conceptions of the contract between the British state and its subjects. His duty as first lord of the Treasury was to honor His Majesty’s debt to the people and financial institutions that had lent the government the money it needed to carry on the war. Like Braddock and Loudoun, Grenville assumed that the colonists were neither more nor less than British subjects—and that the payment of taxes, not the bearing of arms, defined their responsibility to the state.
But colonists like John Adams failed to see how Americans could have been one kind of subject under Pitt’s war effort and another kind in the reformed postwar empire of George Grenville. The only reasonable explanation seemed to be that the coercive policies of 1755–57 had been revived, and they were being deprived of their rights as Englishmen. But the truth was that Grenville and his fellow reformers really were treating the colonists like Englishmen: as subjects, not allies, of a sovereign state. The colonists liked that just as little as they understood it.
In 1765 as in 1755, most Americans saw the treatment they were receiving at the hands of the British as mere abuse and resolved to resist it. But the fact that the great war was over had changed everything. No longer would military necessity make ministers hesitate to demand the subordination that was a sovereign’s due; nor would the colonists be able to stop short of articulating their reasons for resistance. But whereas in 1755–57 politicians in the assemblies had resisted by the traditional tactics of non-compliance and sullenness, in 1765 colonial politicians were no longer in effective control. Demonstrations and riots more fierce than any in living memory cracked open the shell of colonial politics, a carapace made brittle by war and depression and counterproductive efforts at imperial reform. The shape that stirred within—the inchoate form of a politics that called into question the colonies’ relationship to Great Britain, and which in so doing required the participation of ordinary men, and even women—remained as yet half seen, unknowable, frightening. Whether it would emerge and destroy the empire itself, or whether the men who had heretofore controlled colonial governments would somehow subdue it, rested entirely with a new and untried British ministry. As the New Year 1766 dawned, no one—in Westminster any more than in Braintree, Massachusetts—knew whether Grenville’s successors would resolve the crisis by repealing the Stamp Act, or try to preserve Parliament’s supremacy by sending troops to America, to enforce it.
JOHN ADAMS SPENT the mild last day of 1765 walking the fields of Braintree, looking over the stand of young maples that grew in his hemlock swamp. He was thinking of “what wretched Blunders” the British “do make in attempting to regulate” the colonies because “they know not the Character of Americans.” The next day the weather changed and he stayed home, defending himself against the sudden “Severe Cold” with tea, conversation, and r
eading. At evening he sat with his journal, contemplating the “Prospect of Snow,” and a New Year “of greater Expectation than any, that has passed before it. This Year,” he wrote, “brings Ruin or Salvation to the British Colonies. The Eyes of all America, are fixed on the B[ritish] Parliament. In short Britain and America are staring at each other.—And they will probably stare more and more for sometime.”
With lawyerly precision he laid out the central issues on the page. “1st. Whether in Equity or Policy America ought to refund any Part of the Expence of driving away the French in the last War? 2d. Whether it is necessary for the Defence of the B[ritish] Plantations, to keep up an Army there? 3d. Whether, in Equity, the Parliament can tax Us?” Turning over the evidence and the authorities, including Thomas Hutchinson’s History of the Colony and Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, he concluded that in fact “the Colonies were considered formerly both here and at Home, as Allies rather than Subjects. The first Settlement certainly was not a national Act, i.e., not an Act of the People nor the Parliament. Nor was it a national Expence. Neither the people of England, nor their Representatives contributed any thing towards it. Nor was the Settlement made on a Territory belonging to the People nor the Crown of England.” Historically, he concluded, the colonies had a strong case. But Adams also understood that such matters would never be decided by legal pleadings and historical argument, and he ended his entry on a darker note. “It is said at N. York, that private Letters inform, the great Men are exceedingly irritated at the Tumults in America, and are determined to inforce the Act. This irritable Race, however, will have good Luck to inforce it. They will find it a more obstinate War, than the Conquest of Canada and Louisiana.”15
PART X
EMPIRE PRESERVED?
1766
The duke of Cumberland takes his last turn on the stage of British politics, leaving his followers to puzzle out a solution to the crisis in imperial governance. The Rockingham administration finds a way to retreat without sacrificing Parliament’s claim to sovereignty: the Declaratory Act and the delicate politics of the Stamp Act’s repeal. Americans respond without fully understanding the extent to which repeal has only crystallized divergent understandings of the imperial relationship. The hollowness of the empire in North America, and the insufficiency of the army as an instrument of power.
CHAPTER 71
The Repeal of the Stamp Act
JANUARY-MARCH 1766
THE LEADERS OF His Majesty’s government reacted calmly enough when reports of the Virginia Resolves reached London in July 1765. The event that triggered such vast colonial opposition to the Stamp Act seemed, in Lieutenant Governor Fauquier’s account, inconsequential: a momentary majority in the House of Burgesses had responded to a hothead’s eloquence, and the damage had soon been undone. Such matters required nothing beyond the Board of Trade’s routine attention, and the cabinet merely took note of Fauquier’s report at a meeting on August 30. When more sinister news began arriving from New England in early October, however—stories of royal officials resigning in fear for their lives, of houses pillaged, records destroyed, and towns in the hands of mobs—the ministers could not react so casually.
Nor could they agree on what to do. Some favored an immediate hard-line response, while others found fault less with the colonists than the Stamp Act, but most were simply confused. Those with the most powerful offices, the first lord of the Treasury and the two secretaries of state, either had no particular views on the colonies or actively hoped to shift Britain’s imperial course into less confrontational channels. Only their patron, more sure of the issues at stake, entertained no doubts. The Victor of Culloden had never hesitated to apply military power in the service of the state and despised the thought that colonial hooliganism might be allowed to drive imperial policy. From the moment the first news of Boston’s violent demonstrations arrived, he left his colleagues no room to doubt his resolve.
The cabinet meeting that the duke of Cumberland chaired on October 13 thus stiffened the spine of even the most publicly pro-American minister, Secretary of State for the South Henry Seymour Conway. Conway had been one of the few M.P.s to side with Colonel Barré in the debates on the Stamp Act, yet following the meeting of the thirteenth he drafted a circular letter to the governors that would have satisfied even the cabinet’s most hawkish member, Lord Chancellor Robert Henley, first earl of Northington. The governors, Conway wrote, were to use all necessary means to enforce the laws; General Gage had orders to support them with whatever force they requested. When more distressing reports arrived from the colonies, Cumberland summoned the cabinet to meet at his house on the evening of October 31, to decide what further actions— presumably the dispatch of troops—would be necessary to uphold British authority in North America. He clearly intended to administer another dose of his bracing medicine to any minister who remained irresolute.1
But the stroke or heart attack that propelled the duke into eternity just after dinner on the thirty-first, before he could convene his meeting or even taste his port, changed everything. Suddenly a set of ministers whose sole previous distinction had been their attachment to Cumberland found themselves with no head, no direction, no credibility, and— worst of all—no assured support from the king. A death that would at any rate have required the cessation of policy-making until the relations of power and patronage could be sorted out therefore triggered a political crisis as the inexperienced ministers struggled to determine their own sense of precedence and define a plan of action that would restore peace in the colonies without simultaneously surrendering British sovereignty over them. Nothing about these processes would be easy or simple, and months would pass before they reached their fulfillment.
THE ASSEMBLAGE OF previously minor politicians whom Cumberland’s demise turned into the Rockingham ministry faced a formidable array of problems on November 1, 1765, the day the Stamp Act should have taken effect. The worst of these arose as much from British political conditions as from the chaos in the colonies. Some of the most imposing difficulties, indeed, derived from the character and personality of the marquess of Rockingham, the first lord of the Treasury and by default the administration’s leader. At thirty-five, Rockingham was an immensely wealthy and well-connected Yorkshire landlord whose riches, local prominence, and strong attachment to the Old Whig party had made him the man likeliest to inherit Newcastle’s political mantle. Two personal qualities also augured well for that prospect. Rockingham had a singular capacity for making allies or dependents of men more talented than himself: just as he came to office, for example, he engaged Edmund Burke, the subtlest political thinker of the eighteenth century, to be his private secretary and his party’s “man of business.” He also enjoyed a reputation for integrity, an asset made valuable by its comparative rarity.
Yet Rockingham—perhaps because wealth and honesty and an amiable disposition inoculated him against the ruder dictates of ambition— was also lazy, absentminded, and perennially late. He lacked confidence in his political judgment and avoided public speaking at almost any cost, two frightful handicaps in a parliamentary leader. And he could not (or did not care to) hide the fact that he loved his estates, his racing stable, and popular acclaim infinitely more than the grubby business of managing Parliament, strengthening his party, and wielding power. Preferences and habits like these, which made him a political curiosity when in opposition, fitted him so poorly to head a government that no one who knew him expected his ministry to endure more than a few months.2
No one realized Rockingham’s limitations more clearly than his secretaries of state. Both the duke of Grafton and Henry Conway worshiped the Great Commoner and longed to have him head the ministry; and Rockingham himself, at least at first, strongly agreed. But Pitt scorned their overtures—refusing, as always, to lead except on his own terms, which meant accepting office only at the direct request of the king, without obligation to any party. Weeks passed while the ministers waited for some sign that he had even heard their app
eals. When he finally deigned to respond, in January, his terms were calculatedly outrageous: the duke of Newcastle, the only distinguished personage currently holding a portfolio, would have to be dismissed from his office so that Pitt could take over as lord privy seal, and Rockingham would have to resign as first lord of the Treasury in favor of Pitt’s brother-in-law, the earl Temple. 3 Rockingham, affronted, broke off the negotiations, but Grafton and Conway went on hoping that Pitt could somehow be brought on board. Thus an administration that began weak soon became internally divided, as its principal executive officers took positions disloyal to the man who was supposed to be their leader.4
Significantly, while the ministers were trying to recruit the most idiosyncratic opposition politician in Britain, they neglected to make any overtures at all to the so-called King’s Friends—the parliamentary group that routinely furnished ministries with their most reliable support. These pensioners, churchmen, military officers, Scots, and placeholders accounted for perhaps 120 votes in the House of Commons and about 60 in the House of Lords, and under ordinary circumstances would back any position a ministry cared to adopt. But because many of the King’s Friends were also friends of the earl of Bute, who had given them positions from which he had ejected adherents of the duke of Newcastle in the “massacre of Pelhamite innocents” late in 1762, the new ministers refused to have anything to do with them.5
In part this reflected a reluctance to rehabilitate Bute, whom many still regarded as the most dangerous man in Britain, but at bottom the Rockingham ministry’s problem with the King’s Friends was purely psychological. The men now responsible for His Majesty’s government had known nothing but opposition before taking office, and once in office they found it impossible to think about influencing affairs of state except as opposition politicians. Instead of applying themselves to the levers of power and patronage, they sought support where they had always found it before: from middle-class popular opinion, the noisy press, the City of London, and the great merchants. In this way a weak, poorly led, internally divided ministry deprived itself of the single largest assured bloc of votes in Parliament and instead aligned its interests with forces antagonistic to the normal exercise of power; and it did so as it tried to resolve a crisis that seemed more likely with every passing week to drag the empire feetfirst into civil war. Small wonder, then, that virtually from the moment the feckless Rockingham inherited power, Charles Townshend and his fellow highfliers could be seen circling overhead, anticipating the feast.6
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