by John Ferling
Though little had been said of it, the colonists were also all too aware that London alone had always made crucial decisions that impinged on life in the colonies. The British government enacted trade regulations, prohibited certain kinds of manufacturing, negotiated treaties with the Indians, made policy regarding the African slave trade, and sometimes sentenced criminals to exile in America. Without consulting the colonists, London decided when to go to war, dragging their colonial subjects after them and usually ordering them not only to raise their own armies to help with the fight but also to provision and house the British soldiers who were sent to America. London alone negotiated the peace treaties that ended the imperial wars. The colonists were never brought into the peace deliberations. At times, the Americans were convinced that London agreed to treaties that ran counter to the interests of the provincials.
There is little evidence that many colonists were riled by these facts of imperial life before 1765. The Stamp Act changed that. The year 1765 was a “most remarkable Year,” thought thirty-year-old John Adams. Reflecting in December on the parliamentary legislation and the colonists’ response to it, Adams described the Stamp Act as an “enormous Engine … for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America.” It had caused the colonists to reconsider their place in the British Empire, he said. “The People, even to the lowest Ranks, have become more attentive to their Liberties, more inquisitive about them, more determined to defend them.”21 Furthermore, Adams was amazed to learn that it was not just his brethren in Massachusetts who shared his thinking about Parliament’s tax and the colonists’ inferior status but also colonists who lived far from New England. Half a century later, he would reflect that the American Revolution had its beginnings in the 1765 transformation in the way the colonists saw themselves and their relationship with the far-off imperial government.22 Though no one in the colonies uttered the word “independence” during the Stamp Act upheaval, the embryo of the idea of American independence was in being by the end of that pivotal year.
Once London realized that the warnings had been correct about the colonists taking exception to parliamentary taxation, those who ruled Great Britain found themselves on the horns of an ugly dilemma. The American uprising against the Stamp Act appeared to confirm the necessity for Great Britain to tighten its control over the colonies. The merest sign of weakness or retreat, many feared, would hasten America’s march toward independence. Furthermore, Great Britain continued to need revenue. However, if Parliament stuck to its guns, or responded with punitive measures, colonial resistance might be inflamed into a full-blown revolution for independence. The quandary that the government had brought on itself when it turned to the Stamp Act would bedevil every ministry from 1766 through to 1776.23
The Stamp Act was greeted by mob violence in several colonies, especially in New England. Property damage occurred and on occasion tax collectors faced the threat of violence, including tarring and feathering. This British cartoon is titled “The Bostonians paying the exciseman, or tarring and feathering.” Published by Sayer and Bennett, London, 1774. (National Archives)
In 1766 Britain’s government readily understood that the Stamp Act was untenable. It covertly decided to repeal the troublesome measure and replace it with an alternative form of taxation. The first step would be to convince the public that a stamp tax had been a mistake. The best way to do this, the ministry concluded, would be to conduct sham hearings in the House of Commons. Its star witness was Benjamin Franklin.
The world has seen few men more ambitious than Franklin, and only a handful who may have worked more assiduously at achieving success. Born in Boston in 1706 to a large working-class family, Franklin was mostly self-educated. As he grew into adolescence, Franklin meditated over how to get ahead. He calculated how to get along with others, worked diligently, lived frugally, and cagily kept his eyes open for every edge that might facilitate his upward mobility, including taking bold risks. Franklin’s most daring move came at age seventeen. Leaving home, he traveled alone to Philadelphia, where he did not know a soul. He was drawn to this new, vibrant city on the Delaware River on the assumption that it offered greater opportunities than Boston, which at the time was larger and about twice as old. The following year he sailed for London, gambling that there were even greener pastures in the great metropolis, though he knew no one there either. When things did not pan out in England, he borrowed money for a return voyage to Philadelphia in 1726, and it was there that his amazing arc of ascent really commenced. Franklin started as a clerk in a store. Within two years he and a partner owned a printing press. After two more years he was the sole owner and publisher of a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. Twenty-one years after his return to Philadelphia, Franklin, with income pouring in from a variety of shrewd investments, retired. He was forty-two years old.
But Franklin was hardly the sort to fancy a carefree and indolent retirement. He devoted considerable time to science, winning fame in America and Europe for his electrical experiments and numerous inventions. He loved Philadelphia, and it is likely that never before, or since, has a city benefited so much from the presence of a single resident. Franklin organized a lending library, a fire company, a militia, a philosophical society, an academy, and a hospital for the city’s inhabitants. In addition, he taught his neighbors how to make their homes safer and more comfortable, and he worked indefatigably—and successfully—to convince Philadelphians of the wisdom of inoculation against smallpox.
In midlife Franklin turned to politics. Given his penchant for structure and organization, he wasted little time cobbling together one of America’s first political parties. It was called the Assembly Party, and it soon dominated the Pennsylvania legislature. To achieve this, Franklin allied with Joseph Galloway, a wealthy twenty-six-year-old who practiced law and moved in silk-stocking circles. There can be no doubt that it was Franklin who took the initiative in forming the partnership. Already the best-known Philadelphian, and perhaps the preeminent American in the mid-1750s, Franklin was old enough to have been young Galloway’s father. Franklin brought to the team his notability and skills as a writer and organizer. As a tradesman himself, Franklin also had useful contacts with those in the city who worked with their hands. However, whereas Franklin thought himself a “bad Speaker, never eloquent, subject to much Hesitation in my choice of Words, hardly correct in Language,” Galloway was acclaimed as orator.24 Furthermore, Galloway was well connected in the legal community and with Philadelphia’s most affluent merchants.
The Assembly Party stood for reducing the authority of the proprietary Penn family. In 1681 the Crown had given William Penn and his heirs much of the land between New York and Maryland, some forty-seven million acres. The proprietors had been vested with numerous privileges, which in time wore thin with many Pennsylvanians, as did the Penn family’s refusal to permit the assembly to tax their lands. Not a few Pennsylvanians were also convinced that the proprietors had chronically mishandled Indian relations. Political activists, moreover, disliked other aspects of proprietary governance. Pennsylvania’s governors—the appointed agents of the proprietors—had a vicelike hold on patronage, and judges served at their pleasure, leading many to charge that the judiciary was insufficiently independent. In addition, the governors not only intruded on the assembly’s affairs, but they were obligated by their instructions from the proprietors to veto certain types of legislation, making compromise between the executive and legislative branches impossible. In the midst of the French and Indian War, the assembly sent Franklin to London to lobby authorities to “elicit a removal of the grievances we labor under by reason of proprietary instructions.”25 Franklin sailed for London in 1757 and lived there for five years.
Franklin got nowhere on this mission. This prompted the Assembly Party to change its strategy. In 1764 the assembly approved sending Franklin back to London, this time to seek the end of proprietary government. If he succeeded, Pennsylvania, like most other American provinces, would become
a royal colony, with a charter granted by the Crown and a chief executive appointed by the king. Rumor had it that if royalization occurred, Franklin stood an excellent chance of becoming the first royal governor of Pennsylvania and Galloway its first chief justice. Franklin, who had been home for only a few months, crossed the Atlantic again in 1764. This time he remained in London for a decade, until the eve of the Revolutionary War.26
Franklin had just resumed his residence in London when the ministry first considered a stamp tax for America, and he was one of several colonists consulted about the wisdom of the step. Most of the other Americans had predicted without reservation that parliamentary taxation would lead Britain into a thicket of troubles. Franklin’s response was the least in touch with sentiments in America, perhaps because he had spent so little time there of late. While he warned that a stamp tax might arouse opposition because it would be inescapable, Franklin touted alternate forms of taxation. He appears to have been the only colonist in London to have done so. An indirect tax, something like a sales tax, would almost certainly be accepted by the colonists, he said. He also endorsed a requisition system, under which the Crown would determine the amount owed by each colony but the provincial assemblies would decide how to raise the revenue. He specifically espoused a “General Land-Office” plan, a complicated scheme through which the colonies might issue a paper currency at interest, an option that in reality would have been tantamount to a stamp tax on money.27 Whatever form Parliament chose, Franklin added, the Americans would not be “much alarm’d about your Schemes of raising Money on us. You will take care … not to lay greater Burthens on us than we can bear.”28
None of his recommendations were appealing to the ministry, which, Franklin declared in private, was “besotted” with the desire to impose a direct and visible tax.29 The ministers, of course, chose the Stamp Act. Though Franklin anticipated some dissatisfaction with the levy, he never imagined that such widespread American protest would occur. Indeed, he nonchalantly secured the post of stamp agent for Philadelphia—the same sort of position that the unwary Richard Henry Lee had sought in Virginia—for a close friend and political ally, John Hughes.
The first notice that Franklin had about how the colonists were responding to the Stamp Act came from Galloway, who wrote that parliamentary taxation had produced “a Spirit of Riot and Rebellion” that threatened to “alienate affections for the Mother Country.”30 Hughes soon wrote with news that his house had nearly been torn down by a mob. He feared for his life, he added.31 Hughes’s letter was followed by one from Franklin’s wife, Deborah, who had remained in Philadelphia. The city, she wrote, was bathed in the orange glow of fires set by rioters. The Franklins’ brand-new house on Market Street had faced the threat of mob attack. It had been targeted, Deborah said, because the leaders of the mob believed that he had played a key role in having “obtained the Stamp Act” and were also convinced that Franklin and his Assembly Party “were warm Advocates for the carrying it into Execution.” She related that friends had come with guns and powder—Franklin was not a gun owner—turning “one room into a Magazin” and proposing to “show a proper resentement” to any hostile crowd that gathered. While a band of friendly artisans that dubbed themselves the White Oaks Company stood guard around the residence, Deborah grabbed a musket and took up a post at an upstairs window.32 The attack on Franklin’s house never materialized, perhaps in part because of the defensive measures taken by Deborah and the White Oaks.33 But while the house was preserved, Franklin’s reputation fared less well. A friend in Philadelphia advised him that the “People is … violent against every One they think” supported the tax. He added that “they have imbibed the Notion, that you had a Hand, in the framing” of a parliamentary tax on America.34
The colonial riots and the damage to his stature led to Franklin’s transformation, though nearly two years passed before he was truly in step with popular opinion in America. Soon after hearing from his wife, Franklin openly denounced the Stamp Act and defended the colonists as having acted “from a strong sense of liberty” and “a determination to risque every thing rather than submit … to what they deem an unconstitutional exertion of power.”35 By then a new ministry was in power. Domestic problems had brought down the Grenville government even before the rioting in Boston. It was succeeded in the summer of 1765 by a cabinet cobbled together by Lord Rockingham, who listened to merchants and manufacturers eager for the repeal of the Stamp Act. Bent on jettisoning the troublesome act, Rockingham scheduled public hearings in the House of Commons for February 1766. Aware that Franklin not only was now critical of the Stamp Act but also was widely esteemed in England, Rockingham thought the Pennsylvanian might be useful. On the third and final day of the Commons’ inquiry, the sixty-year-old Franklin was called to testify. Overweight—he called himself “Dr. Fatsides”—with rapidly thinning hair and a heavily lined face, Franklin nevertheless impressed observers as robust and healthy. More than anything, however, he struck nearly everyone as sincere.36
On the stand for four long hours, Franklin sought to redeem himself at home while not burning his bridges in London. The result was testimony shot through with ambiguity and contradiction. He told the House of Commons that the Stamp Act was sowing a whirlwind through the colonies. Having by now read the various assembly resolutions denouncing the Stamp Act, he testified that Americans believed that parliamentary taxation was “unconstitutional, and unjust.” Where once the colonists had seen the British government as the “best in world,” they now had a “very much altered” outlook. Unless the Stamp Act was repealed, the “respect” and “admiration” that Britain had always enjoyed in the colonies would be forfeited and the mother country would henceforth be “detested and rejected.” Franklin might have stopped there. Instead, he advised that Americans could live with indirect taxes, which was precisely what Britain’s ministers wanted to hear. Franklin defined an indirect tax as “a duty laid on commodities.… If the people do not like it at that price, they refuse it; they are not obliged to pay it.” The Stamp Act, in contrast, was a tax “forced from the people without their consent.”37
A View of the House of Commons engraved by B. Cole. Benjamin Franklin testified against the Stamp Act in this chamber in 1766. It was the scene of numerous acrimonious debates on policy toward the colonies, including Edmund Burke’s major addresses on America. (Private Collection/ The Stapleton Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library)
Nine days later Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. Lest the colonists conclude that Parliament was conceding that its authority was limited, it simultaneously passed the Declaratory Act. This measure claimed Parliament’s power to legislate for America “in all cases whatsoever.” Parliament had never previously felt the need for such a declaration, but in the wake of the colonists’ questions about the constitutionality of the Stamp Act, it believed it had to affirm its sovereignty over the empire.38 A few months later, Parliament, unburdened by doubt and following the lead of a new ministry headed by William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, imposed new taxes on the colonists. It tried what Franklin had recommended. The Townshend Duties, passed in 1767, taxed commodities, including tea, paper, lead, glass, and paint. Parliament had adopted Franklin’s preference for indirect levies.
Little time passed before the ministry and Parliament discovered that Franklin had offered bad advice. Americans were opposed to taxes of any sort levied by Parliament. The colonists were unyielding in their belief that Parliament did not possess the constitutional authority to lay taxes on them, no matter what sort of spin was attached to the legislation.
The repeal of the Stamp Act had ended the protests as suddenly as they had begun. Repeal, said John Adams, “has hushed into silence” the insurgents and “composed every Wave of Popular Disorder into a smooth and peaceful Calm.”39 But before the end of 1767 the quiet had been shattered by protests against the Townshend Duties and, at least in the northern port cities, against the British government’s attempt to enforce the long-neglect
ed trade laws. For many in those cities, the prospect that the trade laws would be enforced was no less unsettling than parliamentary taxation. Urban merchants had made fortunes through illegal trade and the evasion of custom duties. These businessmen provided employment for countless sailors and dockhands, and the goods they brought into America kept many shopkeepers and craftsmen afloat. Enforcement threatened the livelihood of families in every economic class. As if to be certain that every toe imaginable was stepped on, Parliament accompanied the Townshend Duties and the implementation of the trade laws with a decree that New York’s assembly was to be dissolved and not permitted to meet until the colony complied with the Quartering Act. That law, passed a few years earlier, mandated that colonies must help meet the expenses incurred by the British army stationed within their borders. New York had ignored the law and was to be punished for having done so. Only two years after first learning of Britain’s new colonial policies, many colonists were alarmed at what seemed to be Parliament’s reckless intent to exercise its authority.
The colonial protest gained momentum in 1768. This time the popular leaders took pains to establish greater control over unruly mobs. The wild and frightening urban rampages in 1765 had served their purpose. They had alarmed officials in London, helping to convince them to repeal the Stamp Act. However, many American protest leaders feared that the mayhem had also been counterproductive, chasing away some in the colonies who otherwise might have joined in the protest against the tax. In 1768 crowds once more poured into the streets, venting their anger in noisy, assertive demonstrations. But the protests were largely peaceful. While protestors marched and rallied around Liberty Poles in the major cities, the assemblies in nearly every colony once again remonstrated against parliamentary taxation, beginning with Massachusetts, which in February sent a Circular Letter to the other provincial legislatures. It asked every assembly to appeal to the king to protect the colonists from Parliament’s illegal taxation. At the same moment, leaders in several colonies organized boycotts of British imports. Not only were more trade embargoes ginned up than had been the case in 1765, but they were also better planned and less porous, their organizers having learned a thing or two from the shortcomings of the previous boycotts.