The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  News of the planned Act reached Rhode Island and elsewhere in North America in September 1763. In the same month, the Browns’ agent in Philadelphia, Tench Francis, wrote to Nicholas Brown, who ran the family’s distillery, ‘What are the people of England now going to do with us? Nothing but Ruine seems to hang over our heads’, and then listed the 27 men-of-war assigned to enforce the trade laws. The following month Elisha Brown, the four brothers’ uncle, wrote to Nicholas that the merchants of Providence should meet to plan ‘What method will be best for us to Take when any of our Vessils Arrives which is Liable to Pay Duties – So as wee may Stand by Each other.’ Others colonies were now doing the same thing, most notably New York and Massachusetts, where a memorial was prepared in December and circulated to merchants in other colonies – including two prominent traders in Newport – as well as to colonial agents in London. In the Boston Evening Post, it was suggested that the city ‘open a correspondence with the principal merchants in all our sister colonies, endeavouring to promote a union, and coalition of all their councils’. From Providence, Nicholas Brown wrote to a merchant in New York that the Governor of Rhode Island, Stephen Hopkins, had convened the colony’s assembly ‘in order to … Join with Those of the other Colonys … to prevent if Possible the Continuance of the Sugar Act’.

  This meeting produced the Rhode Island Remonstrance of 27 January 1764, making the colony the first to lodge an official protest against the Sugar Act. Up to 30 distilleries, ‘the main hinge upon which the trade of the colony turns’, faced ruin, it was alleged, if the duty on foreign molasses were to be enforced. Rhode Island imported £120,000 of British manufacture annually and only exported £5,000 of native products, the difference being made up by the molasses and rum trade. Of the 14,000 hogsheads of molasses imported annually, only 2,500 were British Caribbean in origin. Collecting the threepence a gallon on the rest would wreck the colony’s economy and make it unable to afford imported British goods. How could this be in Britain’s interest? Instead, Governor Hopkins argued in an article for the Providence Gazette, it only favoured the ‘rich, proud, and overbearing Planters of the West Indies’.

  Trouble had been expected from Rhode Island. In 1763, the London Customs Board had requested the Admiralty to station a ‘competent number ‘of ships to halt the ‘excessive contraband Trade carried on at Rhode Island’. The 20-gun Squirrel was ordered to winter at Newport, but for various reasons it did not arrive, and even if it had, one stationed ship could not possibly cover the three mouths of Narragansett Bay. In the meantime, the smugglers of Rhode Island made the most of it, with only about half of their imported molasses troubling the customs service. In the meantime, the Providence Gazette announced to the world that Rhode Island could handle her own affairs ‘without the concurrent Assistance of Swaggering Soldiers or insulting Captain Bashaws, I mean Captains of War Ships’. Laws cannot be ‘wholesome, or for the general Good’, the paper argued, if they could only be enforced by ‘Intimidation’.

  The Squirrel finally arrived in April 1764 and was made less than welcome. A rumour was started that it was about to impress men to replenish its crew, and provision boats that normally rowed out to sell their wares to seagoing vessels stayed away. Eventually the captain, Richard Smith, was forced to publish a disclaimer in the Newport Mercury.

  Because of the sugar and molasses duties, tensions between Rhode Islanders and the British military rose fast. In June 1764, a Royal Navy schooner, the St John, appeared in Narragansett Bay and captured a ship that was unloading by night a cargo of 93 hogsheads of sugar. But then three sailors from the St John allegedly stole some pigs and chickens. The local sheriff rowed out to make the arrests but was not allowed on board. Then a party from the ship, which had rowed ashore to recapture a deserter, was attacked, with the officer in charge seized and held hostage. Soon afterwards, a sloop was filled by a mob of angry locals to board the St John, but retired at the sight of the ship’s ready guns. The St John then anchored under the protection of the man-of-war, the Squirrel, but the sheriff meanwhile had contacted two members of the Governor’s council, who then signed an order to Aniel Vaughan, ceremonial gunner at Fort George on Goat Island, to sink the St John if she attempted to leave without giving up the three thieves. Vaughan almost fired the opening shot of the American Revolution, but instead kept a cool head and aimed wide. The Squirrel brought her broadside to bear on the Goat Island battery, but, to Captain Smith’s professed sorrow, ‘they ceased firing before we had convinced them of their error’.

  The Sugar Act was passed in April 1764, sparking vigorous protests from the legislative bodies of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania. There was a certain amount of exaggeration, but the North American distillers were indeed hit hard by the Act’s enforcement (of the 15,000 gallons of molasses imported by Massachusetts for its 60 distilleries, all but 500 came from foreign colonies in 1763). Traders suffered as well. A Rhode Island newspaper lamented that a great empire had been delivered to a ‘few dirty specks, the sugar islands’. Certainly, the Sugar Act benefited the West Indies at the expense of the wider empire. John Adams would write that ‘There was not a man on the continent of America who does not consider the Sugar Act, as far as it regards molasses, as a sacrifice made of the northern colonies to the superior interest in Parliament of the West Indians.’

  For the wider empire, the Sugar Act was a disaster. In July 1764, Tench Francis wrote to the Browns from Philadelphia: ‘every one is convinced of the Necessity of a Unanimity amongst the Colonies, to ward off any Burden that may be intended for Us’. Thanks to the Sugar Act, intercolonial cooperation had been launched in North America. By the summer of 1764, committees of protest had been formed, and soon they were in touch with each other. On their foundations were erected the later and better-known Committees of Correspondence.

  The implementation of the Act caused huge friction. Benjamin Franklin complained that English captains ‘executed their Commissions with great Rudeness and Insolence’. ‘All Trade and Commerce, even the most legal … was harass’d, vex’d & Interrupted, by perpetual Stoppings of Boats, Rummagings and Searchings, Unladings & Detainings.’ In Philadelphia, a British captain reported receiving ‘the most violent abuse and Insults, which is now so common, that neither myself nor any of my Officers can walk the streets without being affronted’.

  In Rhode Island was heard for the first time criticism of the term ‘mother country’. Ten years ahead of their time, people were beginning to advocate non-importation of British goods, and to talk about the issues of internal and external taxation.

  Thus the Sugar Act, although short-lived, to an extent unified the northern colonies, and marked the beginning of a period of strained relations with Britain. The power of the West India lobby in London had put the New England colonies on a collision course with Britain, and set the stage for the revolt the following year and the subsequent rebellion and war.

  In 1766, the Sugar Act was replaced by a new Act that reduced the duty on molasses to a penny a gallon (the sugar interest, led in London by William Beckford and Rose Fuller, was compensated with attached measures to their benefit). This deterred smuggling and would become the single most important source of revenue collected in America. But by then, events had moved on, with the passing of the Stamp Act in March 1765, which firmly united all of the Thirteen Colonies against the ‘mother country’ and led to violent protests all over British North America.

  The North Americans wanted from the West Indians a united colonial front against the Stamp Act. In fact, the measure, which tried to raise further revenue by insisting that all wills, pamphlets, newspapers and playing cards in the American colonies carry a tax stamp, affected the islands worse than the mainland, and was unsuccessfully campaigned against by Beckford and Fuller. But to the fury of the North American ‘Patriots’, the West Indians in the islands largely complied, producing nearly 80 per cent of Stamp Act revenue before the measure’s repeal in February 1766. Only in t
he Leewards, threatened with an embargo by North American merchants, were there protests.

  Divisions between London and the Thirteen Colonies were now becoming entrenched. In February 1767, Abraham Redwood Jr, acting as agent in London, wrote to his father in Newport. ‘I was at the House of Commons yesterday … Mr Grenville got up & spoke very much against America & seemed in a great Confucion at their Disobedience as he called it & that they ort to have ten thousand men sent over directly & to Quarter them in the Principal Town of Every Province, his speech was received with great applause,’ the young Redwood reported, ‘nothing was heard but Hear hear, hear hear.’ Although in the sugar islands there was an entire absence of the petitions and pamplets emanating from the north, Beck-ford and Fuller, leading the West India lobby in London, both attacked the policy of taxation of America, and Beckford tried to present petitions from the agent from Massachusetts against the revenue-raising Townshend Acts of 1767. But as a British ‘patriot’ with only a confused and partial self-image as an ‘American’, Beckford was joining those hardening their view of the stand-off. ‘The Devil has possessed the minds of the North Americans’, Beckford wrote to Pitt in February 1767. ‘George Grenville and his Stamp Act raised the foul fiend: a prudent firmness will lay him, I hope, for ever.’ For his part, Rose Fuller, having previously supported the cause of the North Americans in Parliament, was so outraged by the Boston Tea Party in December 1773 that he suggested that Boston pay £20,000 compensation to the East India Company.

  In North America, the Caribbean colonies were seen as a continuous extension of the mainland colonies. Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania described the British West Indies as ‘natural appendages of North America as the Isle of Man and the Orkneys are to Britain’. North Americans wanted to put pressure on the West Indians to use their power in the House of Commons unequivocally on the colonials’ side. Through the summer and autumn of 1774, as measures against Britain were discussed, it was decided to include the West Indies in the threat of a trade embargo. On 1 December 1774, the First Continental Congress, a meeting in Philadelphia of delegates from 12 North American colonies, closed their ports to British Caribbean produce and threatened to ban the export of commodities starting in September 1775, if its demands were not met. It was time for the sugar barons to decide whose side they were on.

  27

  THE WAR AGAINST AMERICA

  ‘A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’

  Thomas Jefferson

  The threat of embargo caused huge alarm in the British West Indies; with the islands planted everywhere with sugar, they were dangerously dependent on provisions and plantation goods from the North American colonies: if they ‘withhold their supplies’, read a petition to London of March 1775, ‘nothing will save Barbados and the Leewards from the dreadful consequences of absolute famine’.

  In London, the West India lobby did everything it could to avert war, while trying to offend neither the Americans nor the British. There were warnings that outlawing trade with the rebellious colonies would bring ruin to the West Indies. ‘You will starve the islands’, one declared, ‘and uniting them in the same cause with North America, drive them into revolt also.’ But the likes of Beckford and Fuller never entertained the idea of revolt, and only warned of its possibility in order to try to jolt the British government into adopting a conciliatory policy.

  The West Indian assemblies had a long tradition of defying imperial control from London, and as early as 1652 Barbados had requested representation in Parliament. The Jamaican assembly had been one of the most vigorously assertive in British America. In 1757 it was the first to be censured by the House of Commons. In December 1774, the Jamaican assembly petitioned George III in words and sentiments that were almost indistinguishable from those of the patriots in North America, including repudiating parliamentary sovereignty over the internal affairs of a colony. It even repeated the mainland conspiracy theory that there was a ‘plan’ to ‘enslave’ the colonies.

  When fighting broke out at Lexington in April 1775, the Grenada assembly petitioned the King, deploring ‘the horrors of a Civil War already manifested in the effusion of blood on our countrymen and friends on both sides’. The Governor immediately dissolved the assembly, but its New England-born Speaker was already on his way to Britain with a copy of the petition.

  So, on the islands the sugar barons were at first divided. In St Kitts, planters fought duels over the imperial question, resulting in the deaths of two men. In March 1776, Admiral Gayton in Jamaica complained that it was impossible to persuade local courts to give judgements against North American ships, and that there were ‘too many friends of America in this island’. These tended to be those ‘closely connected by Relationship and trade with North America’; or to have ‘formerly lived in America, & imbibed no small portion of her levelling spirit’. Anglo-American Florentius Vassall told Thomas Thistlewood that he desired ‘the North Americans might beat the English else they will be enslaved and ruled with a rod of iron, and next us’. Vassall predicted a British defeat, as no army could ‘keep in awe … 2 thousand miles’ of American territory. But most Jamaicans Thistlewood knew backed Britain in the conflict, and toasted their victories.

  Loyalty to ‘home’ was a factor: the English in the West Indies never had the attachment to the place that those in North America developed. For them, ‘home’ remained Britain. In addition, more practical considerations would see the West India colonies fail to join the North Americans in their struggle for self-rule. In the Caribbean, the planters lived in constant fear of attack by the French (a threat removed in North America by the events of the Seven Years War), and of being overrun by their slaves, who, unlike in the north, were in a massive majority on the islands. Both threats required the support of Britain’s military. The planters were also dependent on the protected British market for their uncompetitively produced sugar.

  The war brought instant hardship to the islands. To find money for its military, the British government raised the import duty on sugar, leading London merchants to withdraw credit and recall debts from the West Indies. With supplies from North America cut off and trade disrupted, plantation profits fell to their lowest levels of the century as sugar production dropped by half. Prices for essential provisions doubled during 1775, meaning that many planters could no longer pay the interest on their debts.

  The greatest fear was that food shortages would lead to slave rebellion. By the end of 1775, thousands of slaves had died in Jamaica and the Leewards of malnutrition and its accompanying illnesses. The West Indians pleaded for more troops from home as a revolt broke out in Tobago in 1774, with another plot discovered in Jamaica the same year. Maroon raids on St Vincent the following year worsened the situation.

  In the meantime, American privateers had been pouring into the Caribbean. There were continual losses of cargo, leading to a sharp hike in shipping and insurance costs. Against this backdrop, the popularity of the American cause waned fast. By mid-1776, most islanders were hoping for ‘the total reduction of the colonies by the Administration’.

  American patriots were now being arrested. One man who ‘falsely imagining that he might declare his mind here as freely as he did in England, being a favourer of the Americans’ was executed in Antigua. Loyal petitions were sent to the King, and the inhabitants of Nevis presented British troops with 50 hogsheads of rum ‘to inspire [them] with courage to beat the Yankee Rebels’. There was a further hardening of attitudes after a slave revolt in Jamaica in 1776. For the first time on the island, skilled Creole slaves rebelled, inflamed, it was thought, by rhetoric coming out of North America, and armed by the Yankee rebels.

  All the time, the North American privateers, fitted out in French West Indian ports, became more successful and bold, even launching land raids, invading Nassau in the Bahamas in 1776 and twice attacking Tobago the following year. The British responded by arming their merchant ships and attacking American trade with the neutral islands, but by February
1777 American privateers had taken some 250 British West India merchant ships, contributing to the collapse of four major West India merchant companies in London.

  The situation worsened with the entry of Spain and France into the war against Britain. In September 1778, Dominica, lying between Martinique and Guadeloupe, and defended by only 46 regulars and a militia of 150 men with almost useless weapons, capitulated to a 2,000-strong expeditionary force from Martinique. The loss was compensated for by the capture by the British of St Lucia, with its matchless anchorage in what is now Rodney Bay, but in June 1779, St Vincent and then, nine days later, Grenada fell to the French.

  The planters could not understand it. They regarded themselves as the source of British power and expected their defence interests to be given absolute priority. But there were something like eight times more French troops than British in the theatre. Now, it was evident that Britain had lost control of the sea. A small fleet under Admiral George Rodney reached the Caribbean two days after the surrender of Grenada, but a fresh French squadron had also arrived to restore their overwhelming superiority. After an indecisive sea battle off Grenada, the shattered British ships left to refit in St Kitts. The fleet made a shocking sight when it landed the dead and wounded. The decks of the Grafton were ‘entirely covered with Blood’ and the Prince of Wales had ‘ninety-five Holes intirely through her Sides’. The French admiral, meanwhile, boasted that he did not intend to leave George III enough British sugar ‘to sweeten his tea for breakfast by Christmas’. Every sail on the horizon was cause for new alarms. ‘This island is in the utmost distress’, wrote a St Vincent planter from Barbados, having fled his own island shortly before its capture, ‘the necessaries of life scarce to be purchased, no credit or money, in expectation of being invaded every moment.’