Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  The debate in the Congress over the Quebec Act suggests that those who most stridently denounced it were motivated by a combination of anti-Catholic prejudice and a desire to find any excuse that they could to add to their list of grievances against the British. John Jay, joined by James Duane, pointed this out to some of their more radical opponents. Why, Jay asked, should Americans who had complained of British interference with their own legislatures feel compelled to pass judgment on “the police of other governments?” Indeed, the particular form of government proposed for the former French Canada was one to which the majority of residents of that province had given their consent. On the matter of the grant of toleration to Catholics, Jay noted that this was a principle explicitly guaranteed to the French in that province by the terms of the treaty of peace ending the Seven Years’ War eleven years earlier.

  Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, his anti-Catholic bias in full flower, would have none of it. Invoking the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Huguenot Protestants in Paris in 1572, he wanted no part of Catholicism in any British province. John Adams and Patrick Henry, as well as Thomas McKean of Delaware, shared Lee’s views. Adams’s speech in favor of including the Quebec Act among the American grievances was replete with references to “Romish Superstition, the Knights of Malta, the Orders of the military Monks” and, indeed, the “Goths and Vandals.” And Henry believed that the denunciation of the Quebec Act was an essential element in the Americans’ statement of grievances. Ethnocentrism won the day, and on October 17 the Congress affirmed by unanimous vote its intention of keeping the denunciation of the Quebec Act as one of the grievances.7 If the comprehensiveness of the American list of grievances made it highly unlikely that the British would receive the American Declaration of Rights and Grievances with any sympathy, the tone of the document—particularly the charge that the various measures enacted by Parliament since 1763 were intended to “enslave America”—made an open-minded reception of it even less likely.

  As the delegates moved toward a reluctant consensus on the content of the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, they continued to jostle for position on the specific contents of the non-exportation agreement. When it had first been voted on as a general statement of intent on September 30, the delegates from the southern colonies, whose economies were most dependent upon exports, had extracted a compromise from the Congress delaying implementation of the measure until September 1775. But as the Congress continued to debate the specifics of implementation, they pushed their northern colleagues even harder. On October 16 or 17, four of the five delegates from South Carolina—John and Edward Rutledge, Thomas Lynch and Henry Middleton—essentially brought debate on non-exportation to a halt by declaring that unless rice and indigo, the principal export crops of their colony, were exempted from the non-exportation agreement, they would leave the Congress altogether. John Rutledge, defending the exception, noted that only about five percent of New England’s exports were shipped to Great Britain, whereas in South Carolina’s case, sixty-five percent of the rice and one hundred percent of the indigo went there. According to Rutledge’s biographer, Richard Barry, Rutledge elaborated on these statistics in a speech that could have done little to ease the tensions in the hall that day. The statistics, Rutledge argued, “will reveal to you that if this association is perfected the northern colonies will suffer very little, for they can still carry on their trade with Europe and pay indirectly their debts in England, while if South Carolina enters into it her chief businesses are ruined. . . . I have not consulted my constituents, and am speaking only for myself, but I can never consent to the people of South Carolina becoming the dupes of the people of the North, or in the least, to yield to their unreasonable expectations.” Nor did the South Carolinians confine their opposition to the inclusion of rice and indigo to speech-making alone. Sometime around October 16 or 17, the two Rutledges, Lynch and Middleton walked out of the Congress altogether in protest.8

  The South Carolinians’ obstinacy paid off. Realizing that the defection of a colony so important to America’s export trade as South Carolina would have a disastrous impact on the effectiveness of the non-exportation agreement, Sam Adams reluctantly helped broker a compromise by which indigo was to be included in the embargoed items, but rice exempted. On October 18, Charles Thomson persuaded the four South Carolina delegates to return to Carpenters’ Hall, and the final details of the non-importation and non-exportation agreements, including the concession to the South Carolinians, were officially agreed to. Christopher Gadsden, the one South Carolinian who had been steadfast in desiring an embargo on all exported items, was dismayed by what he saw as the selfishness of his colleagues. “Take care,” he was reported to have said, “or your liberties will be traded away.”9

  At that moment on October 18 when the delegates grudgingly gave in to South Carolina’s demands and adopted what many considered an imperfect agreement on non-importation and non-exportation, many delegates were awakening to the reality of just how difficult it might be to achieve a genuinely united effort in their opposition to coercive British policies. It would provide an even more troubling glimpse of the greater challenges that lay ahead, as the “united colonies” began to consider the possibility of independence from their mother country.

  The Association

  On October 20, the Congress made what would prove to be a momentous decision, approving the non-importation and non-exportation agreements, which had by then come to be known as the Association. It was a term that was probably inspired by an earlier Virginia Association, formed in that colony to resist enforcement of the Townshend Duties. This was the first act of the Congress that bound the people of the American colonies to specific actions—not only that of enforcing a trade boycott against the British, but also overseeing the actions of local merchants and public officials. With the endorsement of the Association, the Continental Congress truly became a governing body, rather than a mere debating society.10

  Although the Continental Congress’s adoption of the Association has been most closely linked to the efforts of Boston radicals like Sam Adams, the genteel and deliberative George Washington had earlier helped set in motion a similar plan in his home county of Fairfax, Virginia. In early July of 1774, Washington’s close friend and neighbor, George Mason, drafted a set of resolutions in response to the Coercive Acts. Not only did these resolutions deny the right of Parliament to tax or legislate for the colonies but they also warned that if Parliament persisted in its punitive treatment of the Bostonians, such behavior would “establish the most grievous and intolerable species of tyranny and oppression that was ever inflicted on mankind.” The resolutions were not a mere exercise in rhetoric. They issued a call to all the American colonies for a united ban on British imports.

  On July 17, Mason traveled to Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon where the two men polished the language of the twenty-four resolutions that Mason had carried with him. They agreed to present them to the Fairfax County Committee of Correspondence in nearby Alexandria, at the county courthouse, the following day. Washington felt honor-bound to share the content of the resolutions with his close friend and patron, Bryan Fairfax, a member of the powerful, proprietary family of the Northern Neck of Virginia and a loyal supporter of the king. Fairfax urged him to tone the language down, but Washington politely, but firmly, declined. On July 18 Washington chaired the meeting of the Fairfax County Committee of Correspondence, at which Mason’s resolutions were overwhelmingly adopted. In August of 1774, Washington carried the Fairfax County resolutions to the Virginia Convention in Williamsburg, which strongly endorsed a similar set of resolutions and then forwarded them to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.11

  The Association began with the customary assertion that the delegates considered themselves to be “his majesty’s most loyal subjects . . . , avowing our allegiance to his majesty, our affection and regard for our fellow subjects in Great Britain and elsewhere.” Following that obligatory nicety,
the Association, like the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, enumerated the grievances against Parliament and a “wicked ministry” that necessitated the action the Congress was about to take. The list was not as comprehensive as that contained in the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, but the very existence of that document made such an enumeration unnecessary. And the document creating the Association had a very different purpose; it was concerned primarily with action, not exhortation or verbal persuasion.

  The document then spelled out the specific terms of the non-importation and non-exportation provisions, stipulating the precise dates on which importation and exportation of items would cease and, in a nod to the South Carolinians, exempting rice from the list of items not to be exported. Although the debate on those specifics had revealed some important cleavages among the delegates with respect to the varying interests of the colonies they were representing, the fact that the agreement was as comprehensive as it was, and that, ultimately, the delegates were able to come together unanimously in their endorsement, was no small accomplishment.12

  The Association and Slavery

  One significant item not mentioned in previous drafts and resolutions appeared in the final draft of the Articles of Association. The delegates pledged to “neither import nor purchase any slave imported after the first day of December next; after which time we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither hire our vessels nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.” This was not primarily a humanitarian gesture. It was an economic one. That particular “commodity” provided a significant amount of income for merchants on both sides of the Atlantic; if the primary purpose of the embargo was to make British merchants feel some of the consequences of Parliament’s actions, then the ban on slave imports made perfect sense. But the emphatic language of the provision suggests that at least some of the delegates felt qualms about the slave trade in its own right. As Americans began to resort to language in which they described their condition as one of “enslavement” by an unjust Parliament, it was becoming more difficult for at least some to ignore the moral hypocrisy of continuing the traffic in human beings.13

  The unease that at least some delegates felt about the moral underpinnings of slavery was given particularly explicit expression in the resolutions of the July 18, 1774, Fairfax County meeting. There the delegates endorsed a resolution drafted by George Mason not only urging that the slave trade be suspended “during our present difficulties and distress,” but also going one step further, declaring that “We take this opportunity of declaring our most earnest wishes to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.”14

  We should not leap to the conclusion that the adoption of that particular article in the Association signaled anything resembling a more general assault on the institution of slavery. In 1774, slavery was legally protected in every one of the British North American colonies. Not surprisingly, its demographic, economic and social importance varied enormously across those colonies. In most of New England, slaves were a tiny portion of the total population, and the institution of slavery, as a means of mobilizing a labor force, was economically insignificant. The ownership of slaves was a modest “convenience,” not an economic necessity, for those few New Englanders who were willing to make the investment. The one exception was Rhode Island, where slaves constituted five percent of the overall population of about 60,000, a reflection of the fact that Rhode Island merchants were actively involved in the international slave trade. In the middle colonies slavery remained a reasonably significant, if not economically vital, institution. Slaves constituted ten percent and 7.5 percent, respectively, of the populations of New York and New Jersey; in Pennsylvania, where Quakers consistently voiced their opposition to slavery, slaves were only 2.4 percent of the population. Although Delaware may technically have been a southern colony, slave ownership there was similar to that of the middle colonies, at 6.6 percent. But as one moved south—Maryland had 32.8 percent, Virginia, 41 percent, North Carolina, 33.7 percent and South Carolina, 53.9 percent—the importance of slaves and slavery to the economies and social structures of those colonies rose dramatically.15

  The pattern of slaveholdings among the delegates themselves mirrored the overall patterns of slave ownership within the colonies, but the delegates, drawn from the upper ranks of their societies, tended to own even larger numbers of slaves. Although the records on slave ownership among the delegates to the First Continental Congress are incomplete, it seems likely that every delegate from South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland owned slaves. Indeed, most of those individuals owned large numbers. The slaveholdings of each of the South Carolina delegates except for Christopher Gadsden numbered in the hundreds, with Henry Middleton topping the list with his 800 slaves. Among the Virginians, Peyton Randolph, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Henry Lee and George Washington each owned at least 200 slaves. Even the upstart lawyer Patrick Henry had acquired upwards of thirty slaves by 1774, a number that would grow to nearly 100 over the course of his life. Whereas slaves served as a vital component of the economic interests and well-being of the delegates from the South, those northern delegates who owned slaves tended to own only a few, using them primarily as house servants. Among the delegates from the middle colonies, John Dickinson had a substantial number of slaves working on his multiple property holdings, although by 1774 he had gone on record opposing the institution and was in the process of freeing his slaves. Among the New Yorkers, James Duane owned at least three house slaves, and Philip Livingston most likely had at least a few slaves living on his upstate manor. William Livingston, being a Livingston, no doubt also had a few slaves working on his substantial properties in New Jersey. There is no evidence that any of the New England delegates owned slaves, including the two delegates from Rhode Island, even though merchants in that colony had played an active role in the international slave trade.16

  It is difficult to disentangle the American colonists’ occasionally moralistic pronouncements against the slave trade from their more pragmatic aim of inflicting economic punishment on Great Britain, but it seems likely that the primary motivation behind the suspension of the slave trade was political, not moral. However, if the delegates could cloak the resolution temporarily suspending the slave trade with a high-sounding moralism, all the better.

  Enforcing the Association

  The Association was not the first American attempt to use a boycott to persuade Parliament to change its policies. But unlike the boycotts in opposition to the Stamp Act in 1765–1766 and the resistance to the Townshend Duties during the period from 1768 to 1770, the Association committed all of the people of the “united colonies,” not just a small group of merchants in a few seaport cities, to abide by the terms of the embargo. In the case of the Townshend Duties in particular, merchants in New York, Boston and Philadelphia had fallen to bickering over who was or was not faithfully adhering to the terms of the agreement. By contrast, Articles Five and Six of the Association made it clear that all American merchants were responsible for adhering to the terms of the embargo, and that anyone found to be in violation was to be held accountable to the public. Similarly, any owner of a vessel or captain of a ship who was caught with any of the prohibited goods on his ship would face “immediate dismission from their service.” By the terms of Article Nine, any merchant or vendor who took advantage of any scarcity of goods by selling an item at a higher-than-usual price was to be dealt with severely—“no person ought, nor will any of us deal with any such person . . . at any time thereafter, for any commodity whatever.”17

  Whereas enforcement of the boycotts during the protest over the Townshend duties was left in the hands of the merchants themselves, Article Eleven of the Association stipulated that every county, city and town elect committees “to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association,” and, in the case of violations, to publish the names of the offenders, in order that “all such foes of th
e rights of British America may be publicly known, and universally condemned as the enemies of American liberty.” The decision to lodge enforcement of the Association in the hands of local committees was a clear sign of distrust toward at least some American merchants (particularly those in New York and Philadelphia who were suspected of violating previous non-importation agreements), but, equally important, it signified the extent to which America’s resistance to British policies was becoming a broadly based, grassroots movement—a feature that would prove essential to any ultimate revolution against British rule.18

  Although the primary aim of the Association was punitive and coercive—aimed at effecting a change in British policy toward America—it also served as an exhortation to all American colonists to live more virtuous lives, reflecting some of the Puritan moralism that infused the rhetoric of its most enthusiastic New England advocates. Article Seven spoke of the need to “use our utmost endeavours to improve the breed of sheep, and increase their number to the greatest extent; and to that end, we will kill them as seldom as may be.” Moreover, those who found themselves “overstocked” with sheep were encouraged, rather than killing them, to give them “to our neighbours, especially to the poorer sort, on moderate terms.” Article Eight encouraged “frugality, economy, and industry” and discouraged “every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” It went so far as to recommend that, “on the death of any relation or friend, none of us . . . will go into any further mourning-dress, than a black crape or ribbon on the arm or hat for gentlemen, and a black ribbon and necklace for ladies, and we will discontinue the giving of gloves and scarves at funerals.” Clearly, this part of the Association went far beyond resistance to England laws. It suggested that America’s cause was no longer merely economic or constitutional, it was in some important senses a reformation of manners and morals.19