Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  When Robinson died in May 1766 he was secretary of the province, treasurer, and speaker of the House of Burgesses, a combination that made him the most powerful politician, as well as one of the most beloved men, in Virginia. Beloved by many, that is, but not by Richard Henry Lee, whose ceaseless quest for profit and honor put him at odds with the speaker, who disliked him and thwarted his ambitions. In December 1764, Lee had insisted that the Burgesses audit Robinson’s accounts as treasurer. The audit endorsed Robinson’s stewardship—his friends saw to that—but Lee continued to question his practices. The following May he backed Patrick Henry’s attack on Robinson’s proposal to borrow £240,000 in London to finance a new currency and to erect a loan office from which needy gentlemen might borrow; and Lee was conspicuous by his absence among the eulogists when Robinson went to his reward. All this made him seem no more than the scapegrace that Robinson’s friends said he was—until the administrators of Robinson’s estate discovered two stunning facts. First, at the time Robinson died the Old Dominion’s most prominent men owed him approximately £130,000. Second, most of this fabulous sum had accrued because, instead of burning the paper money collected in payment of taxes as the law required, Treasurer Robinson had lent it to his friends.

  Affable old John Robinson had embezzled a fortune from the public accounts not principally for his own profit, but to save his fellow planters from financial embarrassment.25 Unsurprisingly, Robinson’s political allies had benefited most from his largesse, and his death exposed this group—which included Byrds, Burwells, Carters, Randolphs, and other tidewater grandees, but comparatively few from the Northern Neck and the new counties in the piedmont—not only to public censure, but to bankruptcy. The embezzled money had to be repaid to Robinson’s estate because Robinson’s estate owed it to the Treasury, which in turn was legally obligated to remove it (however belatedly) from circulation. But where were the improvident grandees in question going to find the tens of thousands of pounds that the law required as a burnt offering? And how could Virginia incinerate so much money without simultaneously lighting a funeral pyre for half of its First Families?

  These questions did not particularly trouble Richard Henry Lee (who owed Robinson’s estate twelve pounds) or Patrick Henry (who owed it eleven) as they demanded a full public accounting. In December the Burgesses’ investigating committee reported not only that a hundred thousand pounds was still due the province (much in huge sums— Colonel William Byrd III alone owed fifteen thousand pounds), but that Robinson had also allowed certain sheriffs to run far into arrears in tax receipts. Robinson had served his friends at the expense of his province, and Lee and Henry seized the opportunity to show how private indebtedness and extravagance led to abuse of trust and corruption that had imperiled the solvency, the honor, of Virginia. In this direct, ungentlemanly way, Lee and Henry dealt the province’s political establishment a staggering blow, making themselves the two most influential—and feared, and hated—younger politicians in the Old Dominion.

  Indeed, a wholesale repudiation of Virginia’s older leaders might have ensued, had not George Mercer’s letters begun arriving from London. Mercer had found a copy of Lee’s application for the post of stamp distributor, and now Mercer’s family lost no time in publishing the proof that only bad luck had saved the self-appointed scourge of Virginia’s corrupt elite from becoming a royally appointed scourge of every Virginian’s rights. Confronted with the evidence, Lee maintained that he had soon thought the better of his application and would not have accepted appointment, had it come his way. This rang false—Lee had condemned the Stamp Act only after he knew of Mercer’s appointment—but it gave Lee’s friends enough cover to counterattack in the Virginia Gazette, where the controversy dragged on, at the pot-and-kettle level, into 1767. Lee’s exposure also encouraged his supporters in the assembly to show restraint in settling the Robinson affair. The quality of mercy was such that in April the Burgesses voted to give the administrators of Robinson’s estate three years to settle accounts with the province. (In the end it took twenty-five.)

  What happened in Virginia after the repeal of the Stamp Act ran deeper than scandal and political realignment. The gentry of the province divided, for the first time since the seventeenth century, into openly hostile camps. Even planters like George Washington, who had not taken Robinson’s money and who refused to join in the assault on those who had, could hardly avert their eyes from the fray or fail to see how it altered Virginia’s political landscape. Nor indeed could they escape a public atmosphere that grew ever more rank with animosity and distrust. Great planters had always frowned on suits for debt among themselves, but such suits now became increasingly common not only out of necessity, but as political weapons. Few could miss the threat implicit in the announcement George Mercer’s father placed in the December 25, 1766, Virginia Gazette, lecturing “his fellow planters . . . for their failure to behave like gentlemen” and serving notice that unless he received prompt payment he would “bring Suits, immediately after next April General Court, against all persons indebted” to him.26

  Nor could anyone ignore the unedifying spectacle of great planters holding lotteries to raise the money they needed to pay off their debts. Several such desperate attempts to regain solvency followed the Stamp Act crisis, some directly stimulated by the need to settle the Robinson estate. Typically they involved the sale of drawing tickets, for five pounds each, entitling the lucky winners to take possession of hundreds or thousands of pounds’ worth of slaves or land, and in some cases of whole functioning plantations. Perhaps the saddest of them all was the lottery William Byrd III held to raise (he hoped) fifty thousand pounds. In the end, he complained, “I disposed of a fine estate in order to settle my affairs . . . but to my very great disappointment, I have not received a third part of the money the tickets sold for.”27 Byrd had made the mistake of selling the tickets on credit.

  These developments worried the gentlemen of Virginia because they drew a frightening but perfectly reasonable inference from them. Many of the greatest planters in the province, men who had advertised their status in magnificent houses, clothes, coaches, lands, and slaves, were in fact bankrupts. A once-unified social elite, overborne by debt, had fallen into public quarrels and divided into factions. Honor, the gentleman’s most prized possession, seemed suddenly to have grown even scarcer than money. It was not clear that the lower social orders in Virginia were so deferential as to accept indefinitely the leadership of planters such as these. But what would restore the gentry’s solvency, and its credibility? If ambitious men like Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry demanded their answers in a public forum, most planters could only look sharp for whatever opportunities appeared, tighten their belts, and dream of deliverance.

  Meanwhile the colony’s economic life stagnated, and politics and culture alike seemed to drift toward some unspecifiable disaster. At the end of 1766 a writer in the Virginia Gazette caught the character of the gentry’s discontents when he asserted “That this colony is in a declining State, or, I may rather say on the Brink of Destruction, I fear is too evident to the most superficial Observer, to need any arguments to prove.” 28 If the repeal of the Stamp Act removed an immediate threat to rights and property, the events that followed awakened in the minds of Virginia’s leaders fears that gnawed all the more deeply because they had no tangible object, and indeed no definable form: no form, that is, except the nightmare image of a ruling class that, having lost control of its appetites, had pawned its sacred honor.

  CHAPTER 74

  The Future of Empire

  1766-1767

  IN MASSACHUSETTS, a seismic shift in the balance of political power; in New York, a standoff between governor and assembly; in Virginia, a divided elite. All of these followed the Stamp Act, and the controversies surrounding it intensified them all, yet the Stamp Act caused none of them. The country party’s triumph in the Bay Colony culminated a campaign against Thomas Hutchinson’s court party that had been in progress
since before the end of the war and followed factional patterns that could be traced to Governor Shirley’s day. New York’s reactions against the Quartering Act emerged from encounters with the army that went back to 1756, when Lord Loudoun had seized quarters in Albany and threatened to station battalions in New York as if it were a conquered city. The Robinson scandal in Virginia arose from the interplay of planter indebtedness, depression, and the Currency Act’s restriction on paper money issues. In every case, local competition, tensions, and anxieties defined the conflicts that the Stamp Act had aggravated and magnified. While factionalism, infighting, and deadlock had long been common features of the colonial political scene, there was something new in the ferocity of the post–Stamp Act disputes: something novel about the seeming ease with which the participants lost perspective on the issues that were in fact at stake. Far from restoring prosperity, peace, and harmony to the empire, the repeal of the Stamp Act seemed in some perverse way to have loosed devils into the colonial political arena, or perhaps into the colonists’ minds.

  Even areas untouched by the Stamp Act agitations seemed more unsettled than before in 1765–66. In West Florida, bizarre disputes over rank and precedence arose between Governor George Johnstone, a half-pay naval captain with a famously bad temper, and the colony’s army officers. In the absence of a clear and consistent policy stipulating who was entitled to command the troops within a province, Johnstone had asserted his authority over the 21st and 31st Regiments. When the commanding officer of the 31st, at Pensacola, refused to obey Johnstone’s orders, Johnstone ordered the 21st Regiment out from Mobile—to besiege the 31st! Eventually the governor arrested the regimental commandant and charged him with treason. Gage thought to resolve the mess by appointing a colonel from the St. Augustine garrison in East Florida as acting brigadier general and regional commander, and sending him to take command at Pensacola. When that unfortunate brigadier arrived, however, Johnstone refused to recognize his commission and challenged him to a duel. Had all this not taken place while the province was on the brink of war with the Creek nation, the governor’s behavior might have seemed merely ludicrous; but under the circumstances it was no laughing matter. Johnstone tried summoning a popularly elected assembly to support his wish to declare war on the Creeks. This might have gained him the backers he needed, for many West Floridians lusted after Creek lands, but it came too late. Gage demanded Johnstone’s recall; and on February 19, 1767, the Southern secretary summoned him home, disgraced, from a province verging on anarchy.1

  Something oddly similar was happening in Canada at about the same time. Since becoming royal governor there in August 1764, James Murray—Wolfe’s junior brigadier on the Plains of Abraham—had contrived to alienate not only the English-speaking merchants (mainly New Englanders) who had taken up residence after the war, but most of his colony’s senior army officers. In petitions to the Board of Trade and appeals to their correspondents in London the merchants loudly demanded punishment for his high-handedness and partiality to the Canadians. Murray had refused to summon an assembly, they pointed out, and governed like a frog-eating tyrant, imposing taxes by decree and enforcing customs regulations without observing the forms of law. He had nullified the provisions of the Proclamation of 1763 that established English law in Québec by permitting inferior courts to continue using French law codes and allowing Catholics to serve on juries—even juries that decided suits to which Englishmen were party. Meanwhile, Murray had fallen out with the commandants of Canada’s principal regiments over issues relating to quartering and troop discipline, but most of all because he, although now a half-pay officer, insisted on giving them orders. They resisted; public disputes erupted as Murray issued directives that the officers ignored; finally Gage had to intervene. In the spring of 1766 the ministry summoned Murray home to answer the complaints that had been leveled against him. Although he, unlike Johnstone, was never cashiered, he was never allowed to return to Québec. Even if Murray had broken no laws, he too had lost control of his province.2

  In two new colonies out of the four carved from the North American conquests, then, government ground to a halt at the same time as in the older provinces, for reasons that had nothing to do with the Stamp Act. The cases of West Florida and Canada were superficially similar— headstrong governors, jealous of their authority, had meddled in military administration—but the roots of the conflicts in fact ran deep into the organization of the postwar empire. The problem was partly institutional, for civil and military authority overlapped so haphazardly as to make conflict almost inevitable wherever military units were stationed within the limits of colonial governments. Yet even outside the bounds of established colonies, in areas where their authority was undisputed, military officers were failing as colonial administrators in 1765–67. Events in trans-Appalachia showed that, at its heart, the problem was the army itself. However effective the redcoats had once been as conquerors, they were utterly unsuited to controlling the conquests. Nothing could have made this clearer than their inability to halt, or even diminish, migration beyond the Allegheny crest.

  As the Indian war receded into the Illinois Country, illegal settlements began cropping up beyond the Proclamation Line. Hunters and farmers built cabins within sight of forts despite the protests of Indians and the formal prohibitions of post commanders. By June 1766 more than five hundred families, mainly from Virginia, were living in the valley of the Monongahela and its tributaries. In September, Gage ordered the commandant of Fort Pitt to warn them off, and to threaten them with force if they ignored his orders. Nothing happened. The following spring the squatters squatted in larger numbers than ever, and Gage was trying to excuse himself to the secretary of state. The settlements lay on land claimed by Virginia, he wrote, and the Virginians had lately been touchy about “the exertion of Military Power without their Authority.” Only in May 1767, he explained, had he felt justified in ordering the commandant of Fort Pitt to burn out the illegals along Red Stone Creek and the Cheat River. Yet even that effort would prove futile. Within six months the squatters were back, in “double the Number . . . that ever was before.”3

  Gage knew that burning down a few accessible settlements was only a symbolic gesture, although he hoped it would scare off the other unauthorized inhabitants of the region. As he understood only too well, three regular companies at Fort Pitt could never locate all the squatters in the upper Ohio Valley, let alone chase them out of thousands of square miles of woods. But he also realized that if they did not evacuate the region, a new war would in all likelihood break out, and soon. For the backwoodsmen had not only been encroaching on the Indians’ lands, poaching their game, and promiscuously selling them liquor; they had also been killing Indians in appalling numbers since late 1765.4

  A decade of warfare had left frontier whites with innumerable scores to settle and a rage that eroded their willingness to make distinctions among potential victims. In the first half of 1766 alone British subjects in the old pays d’en haut murdered more than twenty Indians, mostly in the Ohio Country and especially around Pittsburgh. George Croghan, working to keep open the communication links between Fort Pitt and the Illinois Country, temporarily defused tensions with condolence ceremonies and gifts: a brilliant if expensive diplomatic feat that Croghan said “cost him more trouble than he had ever had in his life.” But the pace of blood-letting did not slacken and tensions soon mounted higher than ever. By the middle of May 1767, the commander at Fort Pitt informed Gage, the settlers in the area were “under no Laws”; the Delawares and Shawnees were threatening to take revenge on the squatters and seemed likely to start a general war. Gage could only hope that the burning of the Red Stone and Cheat River settlements would reassure the Indians that the empire was on their side, for he was under no illusion that Fort Pitt’s paltry garrison could maintain the peace. He privately advised the officer in charge to have his men keep their heads down: so long as the Indians retaliated only against “those who have injured them,” His Majesty�
�s troops were not to intervene in quarrels between squatters and natives.5

  That a new Indian war did not erupt in the Ohio Country in 1767 had less to do with anything Gage or the garrison at Fort Pitt did than with three other factors: George Croghan’s willingness to spend the king’s money freely in practicing his own virtuoso diplomacy, the unprecedented quantities of alcohol flooding into trans-Appalachia, and the difficulty the Shawnees encountered in organizing a defensive coalition with the peoples of the lower valley. Croghan met with the Ohio chiefs at Pittsburgh in June, assuring them of British goodwill and asking them to control their young men until he and Sir William Johnson could set things right; then, in the fall, he traveled along the Ohio River, up the Muskingum through the Delaware towns, to Lake Erie and Detroit, condoling the Indians for their losses, covering the dead with presents, and promising punishments for white murderers. Croghan’s ceremonial negotiations consumed huge quantities of time and money, but they helped preserve the peace. The Shawnees found that they had to postpone from the fall to the spring, and finally until 1769, a congress that would create an alliance between themselves, the Delawares, and other western nations, including their traditional enemies from the lands south of the Ohio River.6

  If Croghan’s diplomacy had something to do with forestalling this alliance, so did the essentially unlimited trade in rum at the western forts. Traders brought an estimated 13,000 gallons to Fort Pitt and 24,000 gallons to Detroit in 1767—quantities that Sir William Johnson himself sanctioned both for their utility in stimulating trade and for their debilitating effects. But Croghan’s condolences and gifts could only cover past murders, and the binge drinking of young men, however it inhibited collective action in the short term, could also feed a rage that would make retaliation more devastating when it finally came. Meanwhile the western settlers went on murdering Indians and appropriating land. On the basis of Croghan’s trip both he and Gage concluded that unless some more permanent solution to the problems of settlement could be found, a new Indian war would be inevitable.7