Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Procedurally the ministry’s strategy was to convene a Committee of the Whole House to discuss the measures to be taken on America. Tactically, this depended upon making no effort to harness Pitt (a futile enterprise at any rate), but otherwise to maintain the closest possible control over the debates. Rockingham intended to direct the discussions first toward an assertion of Parliament’s sovereignty over the colonies, then to make an overwhelming case for the economic dysfunctions of the Stamp Act; only then would his administration move in favor of repeal, on purely pragmatic grounds. This solution in effect depended upon speaking the words that the M.P.s wanted to hear while taking the actions that the colonies demanded, and pretending that there was no contradiction between them. To achieve this end, the colonies’ own protests had to be squelched. Thus amid all the petitions submitted to Parliament, the memorial of the Stamp Act Congress was conspicuously absent, buried by a ministry that knew any document—even a mild one—that originated in the proceedings of “an illegal congress, calling the right of Parliament into question,” was too explosive to be read in open session. 16

  The House of Commons resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole on January 28, and for three long days sat listening to the clerk read aloud the official papers that detailed American reactions to the Stamp Act. On the thirty-first, with the readings complete, the House heard verbal testimony from four witnesses. These included Martin Howard of Newport, who described the riot that had destroyed his house and made him a refugee aboard H.M.S. Cygnet, and Major Thomas James, who testified that any effort to enforce the Stamp Act by military means in New York would have brought out twenty thousand rioters instead of the four thousand or so who had demolished his home, drained his wine cellar, and dared his troops to fire. The House of Lords, meeting separately, heard the same papers and testimony. In both Houses the ministry’s spokesmen took exquisite care to orchestrate the evidence and the questions asked of the witnesses. With the ground thus prepared, and after Rockingham had made sure that the king would assent to repeal, the administration introduced resolutions affirming Parliament’s supremacy over the colonies and denouncing colonial disorders.17

  The first resolution, which Conway and Grafton moved simultaneously in the Commons and the Lords on February 3, would later become the Declaratory Act. It held that the king in Parliament “had, hath, and of a right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever.” The Lords debated the resolution all day and passed it, 125 to 5, by nine o’clock; the Commons stayed in session until nearly three the next morning, when they too approved the resolution, without a division. In both Houses, argument centered on whether the words “in all cases whatsoever,” made explicit Parliament’s right to tax the colonists directly. Although Pitt and Colonel Barré prolonged the Commons debate by denying that Parliament had any such right to grant American taxes without American representatives in the House, the distinguishing fact about the discussion was that almost no one shared their view. Indeed, the two finest legal minds of the age—in the House of Lords, the Lord Chief Justice William Murray, Baron Mansfield, and in the House of Commons the eminent constitutional commentator William Blackstone—agreed that Parliament’s right to tax rested not on any principle of representation but on its sovereign power and denied that there was any distinction between tax laws and other kinds of legislation. If ever there had been doubts about the consensus of the Lords and the Commons on the unassailable, indivisible sovereignty of king in Parliament, the debates of February 3 should have extinguished them.18

  With the declaratory resolution safely in hand, the ministry proposed its remaining resolves. After prolonged but generally less intense debate, these were passed in a form that condemned America’s “Tumults and Insurrections,” as well as the “Votes and Resolutions, passed in several of the Assemblies,” which had “inflamed” the people; declared that those who had suffered as a result of the riots “ought to have full and ample Compensation made to them . . . by the respective Colonies”; assured His Majesty’s “dutiful and loyal Subjects” in America that they would henceforth “have the Protection” of the British government; and shielded from prosecution all loyal colonists who had unwillingly broken the law when the “Tumults and Outrages in North America” prevented them from obtaining stamped paper. These resolutions were all reasonably innocuous and indeed milder than British public opinion would have supported. Grenville indeed succeeded in modifying many of the drafts that the ministry proposed to strengthen their language: small successes that emboldened him to introduce a final resolution on February 7, a forthright challenge to the ministry’s plans. When Grenville moved “that an humble address be presented, in consequence of our [declaratory] resolution, expressing our indignation and concern at the proceedings in N[orth] America, and to assure the King that we will assist him in enforcing the laws of this Kingdom,” he was doing nothing less than calling for a vote of confidence on the Rockingham ministry and seeking to reverse the direction of policy. It was his supreme gambit to regain power, and he thought that “in the present unsettled state of men and things” he stood a reasonable chance of winning.19

  He guessed wrong. The debate that followed made it clear that however unimpressed many M.P.s were with the ministry, the depositions and oral testimony had convinced them that enforcement was impossible. Even Charles Townshend, watching as ever to see which way the winds blew, spoke in opposition to enforcement. Once Grenville’s resolution failed, by a vote of 274 to 134, the ministry’s way at last was clear. The opposition could no longer hope to see the act enforced, and that left only two options. It could try to delay the ministry’s motion to repeal, hoping that some new outrage in America would alter the balance; or it might seek to modify the law, retaining some part of it—perhaps “a Stamp on cards and dice only”—as a symbolic gesture, “to keep up the claim of right.” The administration thus was free to build its case for repeal on arguments from economic necessity, which meant convincing the majority of M.P.s that the Stamp Act was all that stood between Britain and prosperity. Beginning on February 11, that was what the ministry tried to do, by hearing the merchants’ and manufacturers’ petitions and carefully questioning expert witnesses on the content of each. 20

  Of the twenty-six witnesses examined before the House of Commons—the Lords opted to suspend their independent proceedings and resume deliberations after the Commons had finished taking testimony— the first, Barlow Trecothick, was by far the most important. Perhaps the richest merchant who traded to America and an important military contractor from the last war, Trecothick came armed with facts and figures that he laid before the House in a bravura four-hour performance. Britain’s trade with America, he affirmed, exceeded even the £2,000,000 annually that Pitt had named. Three million was nearer the mark, and its significance was all the greater because Britain’s trade with the rest of the world was falling off, while its American commerce—until the Stamp Act—had continually grown. Now all trade with the colonies was at a standstill, and the interruption of court proceedings made it impossible for any merchant to recover a penny of what his American debtors owed. And the sums in question, Trecothick claimed, were immense. His computations showed that London merchants held American debts amounting to almost £3,000,000 sterling, and if one included the merchants of the outports the total would reach approximately £4,450,000.

  Those figures added up to Trecothick’s most significant testimony, but he also helped the M.P.s better understand the colonists’ protests by explaining exactly how the Stamp Act would affect the colonial economies. It was true, he said, that no money collected was to leave America, since it would be paid out to maintain the troops stationed there; but America was a big place, and His Majesty’s forces were not spread evenly throughout it. Much of the revenue collected would come from New England, a cash-starved region suffering severe depression, and would be disbursed among
soldiers stationed in Canada and the Floridas, where infinitesimal sums could be collected. Of the colonies most inflamed against the Stamp Act, only New York and Pennsylvania were likely to recover, in army expenditures, the monies the stamp tax would remove from circulation. Colonial merchants thus were objecting to more than taxation without consent. They also feared the drain of precious metals from their specie-short economies, and they resented being forced in effect to promote the prosperity of territories mainly populated by former enemies. 21

  Trecothick’s testimony, masterful and thoroughly rehearsed, forecast the arguments of the merchants and colonial agents who followed him. The thrust of their accounts confirmed his contention that the Stamp Act was aggravating Britain’s depression by preventing the recovery of debts from the colonies and creating vast unemployment in Britain. From personal knowledge they told of thousands of workers already laid off and prophesied that as many as a hundred thousand might lose their jobs, with God knew what costs in poor relief and what risks of social unrest. The key to regaining British prosperity, they repeated in a kind of litany, was to resume American trade, and that was impossible without repeal. Only Benjamin Franklin, appearing as one of the ministry’s final witnesses, refused to chant with this choir. Pennsylvania’s agent went substantially beyond the earlier testimony to venture his judgments on a variety of topics—not all of which pleased the ministry.22

  More than anyone else of his day, Franklin symbolized America; as a scientist and public figure he was the most famous colonist in London, and indeed in the world. He also had more to lose than any other witness, for he had severely miscalculated the colonials’ reactions to the Stamp Act and damaged his political faction’s position in Pennsylvania by securing a distributorship for John Hughes. Franklin therefore spoke not only as America’s advocate, but as a man who desperately needed to repair his reputation at home. (In this light the presence of a stenographer in the gallery, and the immediate publication of his transcript in pamphlet form, can hardly have been coincidental.23) In choosing to depart from the ministry’s carefully prepared line the Pennsylvanian took huge risks, for he exposed himself to a grilling by opposition M.P.s, including a hostile Grenville. Yet he also, clearly, relished matching wits with them. America’s greatest celebrity may have come before Parliament as a sixty-year-old man with his political future on the line, but he danced through the interrogation like a cocky teenager waltzing down Philadelphia’s Market Street with a Dutch dollar in his pocket and a great puffy roll tucked under each arm.

  Why should Britain protect America, an opposition M.P. demanded, if America did not help pay the cost? Britain did not protect America, Franklin replied, Americans did: “The colonies raised, cloathed, and paid, during the last war, near 25000 men, and spent many millions.” But Parliament had generously reimbursed America, had it not? Not particularly, Franklin said. The reimbursement had been necessary, but “it was a very small part of what we spent.” Would the Americans accept a partial stamp tax? No. Another tax in its place? “They would not pay it.” So they would contribute nothing? “Their opinion is, that when aids to the Crown are wanted, they are to be asked of the several assemblies, according to the old established usage, who will as they have always done, grant them freely.” Suppose Parliament refused to repeal the Stamp Act and the dispute remained at impasse: how could Americans live without British manufactures? “I do not know a single article imported into the Northern Colonies, but what they can either do without, or make themselves.” In the space of three years, the colonists could produce wool enough to make all the clothes they needed; in the meantime, they would patch their old ones. Suppose then that the Stamp Act were repealed, would the Americans acquiesce in a declaration of parliamentary sovereignty? Yes, said Franklin, so long as Parliament made no more effort to enforce the claim than they did in Ireland.

  And so it went for perhaps four hours, as Franklin expanded upon the opportunities friendly questioners offered to explain the reasonableness of Americans, and parried the thrusts of the opposition. Always he stressed the Americans’ ability to provide for their own needs—in effect, to manage independently of the empire to which they were bound only by a rapidly eroding tie of affection. Always he stopped short of affirming that Americans intended to make themselves independent. Only Parliament, he implied, would determine whether the Americans moved from resistance to reconciliation or from resistance to something more final. Franklin made his clinching argument in response to an opposition demand to know if “any thing less than a military force” could achieve the submission of the colonies: “I do not see how a military force can be applied to that purpose.” When the interrogator, as convinced as Pitt that British force could crush America to atoms, shot back “Why may it not?” Franklin came coolly to the heart of the matter: “Suppose a military force sent into America, they will find nobody in arms; what are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”

  If Franklin’s testimony burnished his reputation at home, it also gave the opposition an opportunity to attack “the Ingratitude” of the Americans. “We have fought, bled, and Ruin’d ourselves, to conquer for them,” complained the Bristol M.P. Robert Nugent, soon to become president of the Board of Trade; “and now they come and tell us to our Noses, even at the Bar of this House, that they are not obliged to us!” Yet neither Franklin’s excessively clever performance nor Nugent’s outcry against it, nor the witnesses whom the opposition called in to examine thereafter, could overturn the impression the ministry had created. When, with the petitions heard and the expert testimony concluded, the Commons formally debated repeal on the evening of February 21, the opposition could not hope to reverse what had become a decisive majority against the Stamp Act. As usual, the speeches were long. But at 1:45 a.m. when the House divided, 275 M.P.s voted in favor of repeal against 167 Grenvillites, Bedford Whigs, and King’s Friends who still stood opposed.24

  Thereafter the ministry needed only to couch the relevant resolutions in the form of a Declaratory Bill and a Bill to Repeal the Stamp Act and set in motion the machinery to enact them. There were more debates, notable chiefly for Pitt’s insistence that the Stamp Act should be repealed on no grounds other than Grenville’s stupidity, but the outcome was never in doubt. On March 4 the Commons passed the Declaratory Act by acclamation and approved the Repeal Act by a majority of 250 to 122. After several more days of debate in the upper house—debate of an unusually high quality, it was said, for there the sentiment favored repeal less than enforcement—the Lords formally concurred on March 17. The king attended the House of Lords on the following day to give his assent to both acts in person, and he returned to the palace from Westminster as bells pealed and crowds cheered to the echo his passing coach.25

  CHAPTER 72

  The Hollowness of Empire

  1766

  THE POPULAR demonstrations that greeted the repeal of the Stamp Act, both in America and in Britain, were scarcely less exuberant than those that had accompanied the Peace of Paris. In London fifty coaches, full of merchants, paraded to Westminster on March 18, to salute the king and the Lords. All day long church bells rang, and “houses at night were illuminated all over the city.” Merchant vessels on the Thames broke out their colors and immediately prepared to sail for the colonies. When they reached America with the news two months later, colonists everywhere celebrated with memorial sermons and bonfires, banquets and loyal healths, draining “many Barrels of Beer” in a delirium of relief. Assemblies ordered broadsides printed and distributed free, announcing the news to anyone who might not have heard it by word of mouth; legislators made speeches and legislatures sent letters of gratitude to the ministry and the monarch. At Charleston the assemblymen were so transported with joy that they commissioned memorial portraits of several of themselves and ordered a marble statue of Pitt—in a toga—from England.1

  The common folk who belched ale and
approval by bonfire light, like the gentlemen who exhaled their more refined satisfaction in toasts to the king and Pitt and Rockingham, anticipated not only the restoration of harmony among true Britons but the revival of prosperity within the empire. Petitioners and experts by the dozen had assured the House of Commons that the Stamp Act had caused the depression, and the Rockingham ministry had deliberately fostered the belief that repeal would end it. That was, of course, nonsense. Both the depression and the Stamp Act grew from causes rooted in the Seven Years’ War and the manner of its ending. But the truth that repeal could neither restore prosperity nor close the fissure that divided colonies from metropolis remained to be revealed only later, when events would undeceive Americans and Britons of the ministry’s glib and hopeful assurances. For the time being everyone was content to rejoice in the faith that all would once again be well.