Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Moreover, as Bernard reported to the secretary of state, Otis now carried to new extremes his doctrine that “the distinction between inland taxes and port duties was without foundation.” Asserting that the Declaratory Act had nothing to do with taxes because it did not mention them specifically, Otis maintained that when Parliament gave up its claim to levy a direct tax on the colonists by repealing the Stamp Act, it necessarily also renounced its claim to tax them through the customs. Therefore “the merchants were great fools if they submitted any longer to the laws restraining their trade which ought to be free.” In Bernard’s view, Otis had infected the mercantile community with principles that mocked Parliament, defied the king, and justified smuggling. The Malcolm episode proved the extent of his influence.10

  Bernard analyzed events in ways simultaneously cogent, flawed, and deeply revealing. There was substantial opposition among Boston’s merchants to parliamentary restrictions on trade, but Otis was by no means its author. Ever since the American Duties Act rigorized customs collections, merchants had complained that restrictions on commerce served only to hinder trade and prolong the depression; some had even justified smuggling as a reasonable response to severe and unwarranted regulation. Otis only articulated, in provocative ways, free-trading notions that merchants, not he, had originated.11 And this, in turn, pointed to the second characteristic that the affair of Malcolm’s wine cellar illuminated: the extraordinary mutual suspicions of the people involved.

  By making Otis the author, not the reflector, of views widely shared among Boston’s merchants, Bernard cast his nemesis as an archconspirator and the merchants of Boston as his dupes. In fact the merchants’ views on trade and the counterproductive nature of mercantilism were becoming widespread—Adam Smith would put them, in a more sophisticated form, at the heart of The Wealth of Nations—and Boston merchants were by no means revolutionaries. 12 If Otis and the country party politicians found support among the smuggling part of the community, it was because they gave the smugglers’ views a plausible political justification, not because they seduced honest merchants into smuggling by clever arguments. But Bernard believed that Otis was the author and contriver of the merchants’ opposition, and thus could ascribe to Otis (and by extension to the entire country party) a diabolical influence that existed only in his imagination. By the same token, the country party’s rhetoric ascribed to the governor, lieutenant governor, and their supporters a set of intentions and actions that made them sworn enemies to liberty, property, and colonial rights.

  Thus what began as a routine customs search spiraled out of control because Bernard believed that Otis and his minions were conspiring to subvert the laws of trade and navigation, and because Otis and his supporters thought that Bernard, Hutchinson, and their lackeys were plotting to destroy the liberties of Bostonians and rule the town by military force. That neither side was engaged in these conspiracies did not matter. The internal dynamism of conspiratorial thinking absorbed the available evidence into patterns that seemed to prove the existence of plots, subterfuge, and malevolent design.13

  A SIMILARLY DISORDERED situation materialized in New York almost before the rubble of the November riots had been cleared from the streets. Thanks largely to the personality of its lieutenant governor, New York early in the crisis had been a colony even more hagridden by conspiratorial reasoning than Massachusetts Bay, but the tensions that arose at the end of 1765 did not grow directly from Cadwallader Colden’s clashes with the assembly. In fact, a new governor, Sir Henry Moore, arrived in November, blamed much of what he saw on Colden, and set out to restore peace by accommodation. It was neither Colden nor Moore, then, but General Gage, who started the trouble, and only because he was trying to do his duty. 14

  Before the Stamp Act crisis, Gage had mere handfuls of troops in and near the urban centers of the old colonies: a hundred redcoats in New York City, fifty at Albany, perhaps twenty at Charleston. When the riots started, he began to march men down from Canada—a sizable relocation that, by late spring 1766 would position more than a battalion in New York City, most of a second battalion in Philadelphia, a third between them in New Jersey, and augmented detachments in Albany and Charleston. Gage intended to bring these new troops south along Lake Champlain and the Hudson, which meant that they had to be billeted along the march in New York. At the beginning of December, therefore, he sent a copy of the Quartering Act to Governor Moore and asked that the assembly appropriate the funds that the law required.

  Moore found the assembly in a balky mood. Instead of appropriating money (which, the representatives maintained, would have amounted to taxation without representation because Parliament had mandated it without New York’s consent) the assembly passed resolutions. These pointed out that when troops were in barracks the Crown paid for their quartering; that barracks were available at Albany and New York; and that the assembly would consider reimbursing the army for marching expenses, but only “after the expense is incurred.” Rummaging through the Treasury accounts, the representatives discovered funds appropriated in 1762—money from taxes voted before the Quartering Act went into effect—and directed that four hundred pounds be released to purchase firewood and other necessities for troops housed at New York. Otherwise, they simply refused to comply. As Gage reported to Conway, he and Moore did their best to explain the terms of the Quartering Act to the assemblymen, only to have them “Set the Demand aside by Evasions.” Gage expected that the issue would come to a head the next spring, by which time there would be more troops in the colony than the existing barracks could accommodate. 15

  When spring came, however, Gage thought that the assembly might prove more tractable, for during the winter several of the great Hudson Valley landlords, who dominated the legislature, could no longer keep order on their estates. For fifteen years these “patroons,” whose title to their “manors” dated to the period of Dutch control, had found the eastern edges of their lands increasingly infested with squatters: people from mountainous western New England who maintained they had freehold title to their farms on the basis of grants from Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Yankee claims were hard to refute, for land ownership east of the Hudson River was muddled by unextinguished Indian titles and the failure of New York and the New England provinces to fix a definitive line between themselves. With the end of the Seven Years’ War, more New Englanders than ever descended on the inviting expanses of the Hudson Valley. By 1766 thousands of Yankees lived in a stretch of territory perhaps 150 miles long and 10 miles wide, from Long Island Sound to the Hoosic River, defending themselves against the manor lords’ writs of trespass with countersuits in New England courts, but also organizing themselves into militia companies—just in case.16

  The Yankees’ resistance turned violent in the winter of 1765–66. Beginning in Dutchess County, and then with the spring spreading southward into Westchester and north into Albany Counties, armed bands of squatters and disaffected tenants broke out in open rebellion, intimidating landlords, harassing justices of the peace and sheriffs, and breaking open jails that held men imprisoned for rent debts. These disorders were similar in rhetoric to the Stamp Act riots but differed in that the rural “mobs” tended to be disciplined, quasi-military bodies made up of farmers who aimed to protect their land titles, rather than the comparatively unstable urban crowds of seamen, laborers, and artisans resisting imperial authority in the name of Englishmen’s rights. Moreover, several of the patroons were among New York’s most prominent Sons of Liberty and found it deeply unsettling to hear rioters on their estates claiming to be Sons of Liberty themselves. As Captain John Montrésor wryly observed in May, when five hundred Westchester County squatters threatened to march on New York and pull down the house of John Van Cortlandt (a leading Son of Liberty in the city) unless he recognized their titles, the “Sons of Liberty [are] great opposers of the Rioters as they are of opinion no one is entitled to Riot but themselves.” 17

  Against this backdrop of social unrest and rising vi
olence, the manor lords appealed to Governor Moore, who asked Gage to restore order. The commander in chief complied, ordering the 28th Regiment into Dutchess County’s Philipse Patent in mid-June and later sending a detachment of the 46th Foot up to Albany County to be used against rioters on Livingston Manor. Gage did not sympathize with the manor lords. Far from it: “They certainly deserve any Losses they may sustain, for it is the work of their own Hands,” he wrote to Conway. “Th[e]y first Sowed the Seeds of Sedition amongst the People and taught them to rise in Opposition to the Laws.” Still, the law obliged Gage to provide troops when responsible civil authorities requested them, and he could also see potential benefits in offering military aid. First, he could show the army’s strength as he had been unable to do during the Stamp Act disturbances. Second, by protecting the property of “the Rich[est] and most Powerfull People of the Province” he might win back their allegiance. Once the regulars had restored order, how could the assembly possibly deny them quarters? Thus the commander in chief could use his troops both to brandish the stick and to dangle the carrot, and he expected results. He got them—although hardly in the form he hoped to see.18

  The redcoats of the 28th and the 46th did indeed suppress the rioting, but not with ease. Major Arthur Brown led the whole effective strength of the 28th Regiment, 330 men, into what amounted to battle with the squatters on the Philipse Patent. He succeeded in rounding up sixty “Miserable, harden’d Wretches,” at a cost of three casualties, one of whom died of his wounds. When the 28th marched for New York City at the end of June, the situation was still unsettled enough that Brown left two companies behind to guard the Dutchess County jail. Captain John Clarke and his hundred men from the 46th Foot encountered even more frustration in operations against Robert Noble and his followers at “Nobletown,” on the Livingston Manor. Noble’s men confronted the regulars as guerrillas, and for nearly a month in July and August ducked in and out of refuges across the Massachusetts border, leading Clarke’s troops on a wild chase around eastern Albany County. “They advance and retire at pleasure,” the irritated captain reported, “playing a Game by no means Satisfactory.” He pulled down their houses and stationed guards on their fields, hoping to provoke retaliation or at least to catch men returning to bring in their harvests. Nothing worked.19

  Finally, in mid-August, Clarke positioned his men on the eastern slope of a mountain, a quarter mile west of the town line of Egremont, Massachusetts, hoping to catch Noble’s raiders on their way into (or perhaps out of) New York. But misestimating one’s position was easy enough in a place where no one agreed on boundaries, and Clarke soon found himself facing three Massachusetts justices of the peace and a battalion of militiamen who believed that he was about to attack Egremont. No one wanted a battle, however, and Clarke—after asserting his right to execute the king’s commission—pulled his men back to what the Massachusetts men informed him was New York’s side of the mountain.20

  And there, uneasily, matters rested. Now that push had come to shove, the governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut proved unwilling to back the claims of their settlers with force, and the squatters had little choice but to abandon their farms or sign leases. The army, deployed on behalf of New York landlords, had effectively destroyed the New England claims. Yet this outcome, which went well beyond Gage’s intention, also had adverse effects when the evicted Yankees published their side of the story in Boston. Within weeks, accounts of redcoats who “burnt and destroyed . . . houses, pillaged and plundered others, stove in their cyder barrels, turned their provisions out . . . into the open streets, [and] Ript open their feather beds” appeared in newspapers as far south as Virginia. That would perhaps have been bad enough; but the ministry first heard of the episode not from Gage, but from the Massachusetts agent, and reprimanded both commander in chief and governor for allowing the army to be used to settle a dispute between colonies. This “Affair,” wrote the secretary of state, “has not been transacted with the Temper and Prudence requisite on such an Occasion. . . . It is to be hoped that the Right of the Parties were very well ascertained before the Military Power was called in to the aid of the Civil, for few Exigencies can justify such a kind of Decision.” Thus Gage, making himself agreeable and his troops useful to the civil authorities of New York and hoping to make the assembly amenable to supporting the army, found himself blamed for exacerbating intercolonial tensions. But what must have astonished him most was that the New York Assembly responded to his gestures of goodwill by summarily rejecting the Quartering Act—and denying Parliament’s authority.21

  It was in June, when Major Brown and the 28th Regiment were collaring squatters and dodging bullets on the Philipse Patent, that the assembly passed a set of resolutions and a bill intended to sidestep the Quartering Act. The bill, called the Barracks Act, released £3,200 from the Treasury—once more, from funds appropriated in 1762—to purchase beds, bedding, firewood, candles, and kitchen utensils for two battalions, for one year. The measure made no mention of the small beer, salt, and vinegar stipulated in the Quartering Act, or indeed of the Quartering Act itself. Governor Moore, indignant, wanted to veto it—funds already in the Treasury were presumably at his disposal anyway, and the assembly was infringing his power by restricting their use—but Gage, who needed the money sooner rather than later, argued otherwise. A bad act was better than none at all; it was possible that the other colonies would interpret it as a submission to the Quartering Act; and he still hoped that the patroons in the assembly would appreciate the army’s efforts enough to come around. So Moore unhappily assented to the Barracks Act, consoling himself with a letter to the secretary of state, warning him that the assembly would disregard every act of Parliament “not backed with a sufficient power to enforce it.”22

  Governor Moore tried one last time to extend his hand in conciliation, only to have it (as he thought) bitten again. In June he supported an assembly initiative to issue £260,000 in province currency by asking the Privy Council to make an exception to the Currency Act of 1764. Word arrived in November that the Privy Council would approve the currency issue, provided that the assembly include a suspending clause in the act. The same packet also brought the secretary of state’s response to Moore’s complaints about the assembly, and in it the secretary said, in no uncertain language, that the New York Assembly would have to accept the Quartering Act as passed and obey it to the letter, or face the consequences. The governor prudently made no mention of the secretary’s instruction when he told the assembly that the Privy Council had approved the money bill, on the condition that they append a suspending clause. The legislators refused. Unless the governor agreed to sign the act without this “unusual clause,” they replied, “we are prepared to bear our distresses as well as we are able.”23

  That did it. Moore—by now surely thinking the better of Cadwallader Colden—shot back with the secretary of state’s directive ordering the assembly to submit unconditionally to the Quartering Act. The assemblymen took stock of their position and then, on December 15, stood fast. The result, of course, was deadlock. For six months the assembly would refuse to comply, and before the matter would finally be settled Parliament itself would intervene in New York’s affairs.

  OTHER WORRIES HAUNTED Virginia, and other tensions vexed its leaders; but here too they loomed larger in the aftermath of the Stamp Act. Before the war, the gentry of the Old Dominion had been more unified than perhaps any other ruling class in the Atlantic world, but in the aftermath of the Stamp Act crisis they split into factions that would quarrel for a decade. The source of this fissure was personal in the sense that the intemperate words and actions of a Northern Neck planter, Richard Henry Lee, first opened it. Yet Lee did no more than allege that a social fault line, long present beneath the smooth surface of the Virginia elite, originated in the moral failings of some of the province’s greatest families. His accusations of self-interestedness—of conduct unbecoming to gentlemen—created irrevocable division because they exploded, within
the public arena, a long-standing but previously private mixture of indebtedness, narrowing opportunities, and self-doubt.

  No less than the rest of his class, Lee found it hard to support a family in the great planters’ accustomed style. Whereas his neighbor George Washington sought to make up the difference between expenses and income by engaging in land speculation, wheat farming, and plantation manufacturing, Lee stuck with tobacco and tried to use his political clout to gain access to profitable employment. Thus while only Patrick Henry was said to excel Lee as an orator, no one in Virginia surpassed him as a seeker after public office. Lee had in fact applied for the colony’s stamp distributorship, only to be disappointed when Grenville chose Colonel George Mercer, the agent of the Ohio Company who happened to be in London at the time. The proud, passionate Lee found the loss of income hard enough to bear, but the slight of being passed over was insupportable. In the Stamp Act agitation he led the attack on Mercer, organizing demonstrations in the Northern Neck and delivering a mock funeral oration at the burning of Mercer’s effigy. The unsuspecting colonel, arriving to find that he had become the most hated man in Virginia, blamed Lee. He returned to London intent not only on pursuing the Ohio Company’s land claims, but on finding his enemy’s letter of application. In the meantime, Lee’s political career prospered remarkably, for two reasons: he had violently opposed the Stamp Act, and he had been one of the few men ever to question the integrity of Virginia’s greatest statesman, John Robinson. 24