“Upon my coming in, they give three cheers, with a view, as I imagine, to intimidate me,” Van Schaack wrote. And in short order they let him know that their summons was not involved with well-wishing, better pay for firemen, or anything to do with department business whatsoever.
“I was soon made acquainted by Some of them that they had been informed I had apply’d for the Office of Distributor of Stamps,” Van Schaack related, and the “stamps” in this case had nothing to do with postage. The Stamp Act of 1765 had been recently foisted by the British Parliament on the colonies—and while it was only the latest in a hundred-year-long series of oppressive measures that had begun in 1660, when the Navigation Act had decreed that only British ships could transport imported goods to the Americas, this was the first attempt to impose a direct tax on colonists.
The act stipulated that all legal documents, permits, commercial contracts, newspapers, wills, pamphlets, and even playing cards produced or employed in the colonies would have to be stamped with the authority of the king, with a fee required for each. In the eyes of Parliament this was simply a just and fair means of recouping some of the enormous costs the British had incurred in carrying out the French and Indian War. Since it was the colonists who had benefited most from that expensive campaign, Parliament reasoned, why should they not help pay down the resultant British debt?
Furthermore, the British had used stamp taxes on at least three previous occasions to raise money within their own borders, and there had been no significant opposition from the country’s own citizens. They had no reason to suspect that the colonists would object strenuously, and when Benjamin Franklin, that most able American envoy to England, suggested that there was little to fear from the passage of such legislation, the Stamp Act became law.
Franklin, the fabled Pennsylvania inventor, philosopher, and politician, was one of the colonies’ most forceful spokespersons and, as a delegate to the Albany Congress of 1754, devised the so-called Albany Plan, espousing a central government to be headed by a president appointed by the Crown, overseeing a Grand Council of representatives appointed by the various assemblies in each of the colonies. It was the first serious proposal for a central government in the colonies and was put forward largely as a way of addressing concerns over mutual defense and the expense associated with the French and Indian War.
Being the first of its kind, and containing features that were designed to appeal to both the colonists and the British, the plan was almost certain to fail. The colonists were distrustful of any mechanism that centralized taxing authority outside local bounds, and the British were fearful that the creation of any unified government in the colonies would only distance their subjects further from control. To Franklin, the evenhanded rejection was a sign that he was onto something. “The different and contrary reasons of dislike to my plan made me suspect that it was the true medium,” he would later say.
Meanwhile, in 1757, he was sent to London by the Pennsylvania Assembly to try to resolve a dispute with the Penn family, the London-based proprietors of the colony, who blithely ignored legislation passed by the colony’s assemblymen when disregarding it suited them and routinely ignored requests to pay taxes on their vast landholdings. Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland differed in character from the other ten colonies in that their territories had essentially been given to the families that controlled them by the king. (New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina were “royal provinces,” under the direct control of the king. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut were “charter” colonies, far more liberally controlled. In fact, the latter two operated very nearly as independent countries, and both would use their original charters as their state constitutions for a number of years following the Revolution. The charter of Massachusetts was more restrictive and bore a greater resemblance to that of a royal colony than to those of its chartered neighbors.)
In any case, although the king remained the ultimate authority in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, as in all the colonies, in practice a near-feudal system was at work in the proprietorships: the noble families, or proprietors, to whom the lands had been granted appointed the governor and the various administrative officials. Any legislation adopted by the elected assemblies in any of the colonies was ultimately only advisory, but in the case of the proprietary colonies, it was decidedly so. It was a delicate landscape that Franklin had to maneuver through, then, and his chief powers were those of persuasion and attempts to convince the peers of the Penn family to listen to reason. While in London, Franklin naturally became increasingly interested in progressive politics and gradually came to align himself with Whigs, most of whom were sympathetic to the colonists’ interests.
Franklin returned to Pennsylvania for a time in 1762, only to become further embroiled in Penn-related disputes when a group of colonists known as the Paxton Boys slaughtered twenty peaceful Conestoga Indians as a form of protest over what they considered the Penn family’s preferential treatment of the natives. Though Franklin publicly condemned the massacre, he, as a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, was mindful of the widespread public discontent with the out-of-touch Penn family.
It is suspected that Franklin—a pragmatist at heart—actually helped the Paxtons lay out their complaints in a document titled “Declaration and Remonstrance,” which he proposed they circulate as an alternative to further violence and a more logical way of attracting support for their cause. Franklin then used the document in his own campaign, attempting to unseat the Penn family as proprietors of the Pennsylvania colony and replace them with a governor appointed by the king. It is a telling indicator that in 1764 even as astute a statesman as Franklin still considered the king of England benevolent. His support of a royal replacement for the Penns did not find favor among his constituency, however, and the miscalculation cost Franklin his seat in the Pennsylvania legislature.
His former peers in the Pennsylvania Assembly were undaunted by the results of the election and quickly voted among themselves to return Franklin as their emissary to London, where they hoped he would be successful once and for all in convincing Parliament to end the proprietary rule over their colony. Back in London in 1764, Franklin made his proposal to Parliament, which promptly declined it.
Of more interest to the members of that body at the time than turning against their well-positioned landholding cronies was the question of where the country would come up with the funds necessary to pay off the considerable debt run up during the war against the French. The new prime minister, George Grenville, lamented that the Seven Years’ War had left the country with a national debt of more than £130 million (nearly double that of 1754), and as the previous chancellor of the Exchequer he was also aware that the cost of maintaining troops and administrative officials in the colonies had escalated from £70,000 in 1748 to more than £350,000 in 1763.
One of the problems in appreciating the magnitude of such sums vexes modern historians writing of any previous era: how much is that in current dollars? Some commentators feel that the question cannot be answered—in the colonies, for instance, since most people were self-employed, it is very difficult to talk about “wage scales.” And even if we know that a certain schoolmaster of the time might have earned £60 in a year or that a good saddle might have cost about £2, it is difficult to translate that information into twenty-first-century terms. One index calls for the comparison of such sums as saddles or schoolteachers’ wages with the gross national product of a country in a given era. Which would be fine, were there the slightest agreement as to what the GNP of the colonies might have been in 1760.
Still, historical economists do their best to provide answers. Estimates of the current value of the pound sterling of 1760 vary anywhere from $40 to $90 or more, so if it is enlightening to think that our schoolteacher might have made the equivalent of $4,000 or $5,000 in a given year, readers should feel secure with the assumption. Perhaps it would be more enlightening to ask
whether the young man would have spent £2 of his total of £60 to buy that saddle, though. Possibly he would have, but then again, since a good horse to put it on would have cost £15 to £20, very possibly not.
We can doubt that our teacher would have spent the £1.50 it would have cost him for a wig but not that he laid out 4 pence ($1.50) for a pound of butter or the 4 shillings ($18) it would have cost for a bushel of salt to preserve his foodstuffs. On and on it goes, but where schoolmasters were able to find employment at £60 per annum, they were clearly far more fortunate than a common laborer, who might command little more than £2 to £3 for his whole year’s work.
So when Grenville suggested that his country’s national debt stood now at the equivalent of $13 billion, it may not seem all that much to a modern reader accustomed to hearing that the U.S. debt surpassed that figure in trillions early in the new millennium. But certainly at a time when a common workingman earned the equivalent of $100 to $150 a year, such an announcement would have surely caught the attention of Parliament. Furthermore, with the British economy in a downward spiral and the populace restless, the prospect of raising taxes at home was out of the question. Turning to the colonies for help seemed expedient.
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Measures Illegal, Unconstitutional, and Oppressive
Though the mother country had never levied any tax directly on its American dependency, various trade duties had been applied over the years. Earlier in 1764, in fact, Grenville had pressed for passage of the Sugar Act, a modification of a piece of 1733 legislation imposing a duty on molasses imported into the colonies from Britain. The new Sugar Act actually reduced the levy on molasses from 6 pence to 3 pence per gallon, a tactical move that Grenville hoped would find favor among colonists who had responded to the original act by smuggling most of their molasses past British customs agents—those few they were unable to bribe, that is.
The “new” tax was roundly decried as onerous by the colonists, however, as their own economy suffered in direct proportion to the downturn in Great Britain. Trade with the distressed mother country was down, and with the war over and its associated free spending dried up, prospects were grim. Moreover, a theoretical objection was also raised by opponents to the measure when it was noted that the British Constitution excepted its subjects from “taxation without representation.” Previous revenue-producing measures imposed by the British had been cloaked in the rhetoric of “trade regulation,” but colonists argued that the Sugar Act was a bald-faced tax. And although the citizens of England might rightly be themselves taxed by the members of a Parliament that they themselves had elected, the colonists had no representatives in that body.
Each of the thirteen colonies employed a liaison to Parliament, an envoy—as was Franklin—sent across the Atlantic to lobby for its part of thirteen different sets of interests, but that was not the same thing as having a properly apportioned voting membership on the floor. “No taxation without representation” would of course become a rallying cry for the colonists, justifying a wide range of future actions. But whether it was the 3-penny sugar tax itself or the principle of the thing that sent the colonists inching down the road toward rebellion is an issue that has had historians wrangling ever since.
In any case, at the same time that Parliament approved the Sugar Act (which also added other duties and allocated funds for the upgrading of the British customs service), Grenville warned that there might be further measures proposed in the following session of Parliament, among them a tax for appending an official stamp on most legal documents, newspapers, and magazines used in the colonies. Such a tax, in Grenville’s eyes, was nonregressive and would affect no specific group unduly. Furthermore, a number of such taxes had been levied by Parliament upon its citizens to no particular uproar.
To Franklin and a number of his fellow colonial envoys, the prospect of some tax being levied seemed inescapable. After all, the recent rebellion of tribesmen led by Chief Pontiac in the just-acquired territories of New France had reminded most responsible officials on both sides of the divide that someone would need to pay for maintaining a peacekeeping force on the colonial frontier. One knotty question remained, however: who?
Part of the colonists’ antipathy to the revenue-boosting measures was attributable to a growing distrust of those who were sent from England to handle their principal affairs. As one American who had been living in London for a time wrote in a 1758 letter, “most of the places in the gift of the Crown have been filled out with broken Members of Parliament, of bad if any principles, pimps, valets de chambre, electioneering scoundrels, and even livery servants. In one word, America has been for many years made the hospital of Great Britain for her decayed courtiers, and abandoned, worn-out dependents.” Paying for necessary services was bad enough, but the prospect of turning over one’s hard-earned pennies to schemers and incompetents was to most colonists simply beyond the pale.
Likewise, the concept of paying for a permanent garrison of 10,000 British troops on the borders of Canada and the bayous of New France raised hackles among many. The prevailing sentiment was that colonial militiamen, among them a certain George Washington, had proved themselves to be as able as, if not more able than, the king’s troops in the sort of irregular actions that had characterized much of the fighting on the frontier during the French and Indian War. Yet for all the ability of the colonial fighters, it was nearly impossible for a colonial militiaman to obtain a commission in the king’s army.
From the opposite standpoint, few Britons gave the colonies much thought at all. The primary political concern of the nation was outmaneuvering its traditional rivals: Holland, France, Spain, Prussia, Germany, and Russia. Where the colonies registered at all, it was primarily among the merchant class. There was a fair amount of profitable trade with the colonies, though the perception was that the colonies were certainly on the receiving end, there only to be profited from. In short, in the minds of most Britons, the colonies existed primarily for the benefit of the mother country, and the colonists who went there should be pleased at whatever benefits they might accrue from association with the most powerful nation in the world.
As for the notion of providing the colonists with representation in Britain’s Parliament, most on the eastern side of the Atlantic found the idea downright comical. One commentator described American colonists as a “crabbed race not very unlike their half-brothers, the Indians, for unsociable principles and an unrelenting cruelty.” And others scoffed that any benighted New Englanders elected to Parliament would soon be spending their time outside the halls, building pyres for witches and scaffolds for the correction of Quakers.
Of course, some more thoughtful commentators opined that such patronizing attitudes would come back to haunt the British. Without the participation of Ireland and the colonies and a move toward free trade, the empire would ultimately collapse, an argument that Adam Smith would repeat in his influential Wealth of Nations (1776). In comparing the British colonies with those of Greece and Rome, Smith pointed out that those earlier empires had taken a more enlightened approach: “The mother city, though she considered the colony as a child, at all times entitled to great favour and assistance, and owing in return much gratitude and respect, yet considered it as an emancipated child over whom she pretended to claim no direct authority or jurisdiction. The colony settled its own form of government, enacted its own laws, elected its own magistrates, and made peace or war with its neighbours as an independent state, which had no occasion to wait for the approbation or consent of the mother city. Nothing can be more plain and distinct than the interest which directed every such establishment.”
And Edmund Burke spoke of the idea of colonists participating in Parliament as a “visionary” one, though he worried that the enterprising new members might seek to align themselves with the king at the expense of the elected representatives of Britons. William Pitt, the “Great Commoner” and brilliant tactician who had guided his country to success against the French, was also am
ong the more farsighted Britons who rose in Parliament to warn against climbing up the backs of the colonists: “I will be bold to affirm, that the profits to Great Britain from the trade of the colonies, through all its branches, is two millions a year. This is the fund that carried you triumphantly through the last war. . . . And shall a miserable financier come with a boast, that he can bring a pepper-corn into the exchequer, to the loss of millions to the nation?”
Such liberal thinking held little sway in practical British politics of the mid-1760s, however. Money was needed, and although no member of Parliament was willing to risk rioting in the streets of England by taxing his constituents, most were convinced that the colonies would cave in or pitch in when the matter was pressed. After all, Franklin’s failure to convince the disparate colonies to unite at Albany in 1754 augured that there would be no concerted resistance to whatever measures were enacted—the colonies were simply too divided, geographically and politically. Grenville presented his ultimate argument for the Stamp Act this way: “If the Americans dislike it, and prefer any other method of raising the money themselves, I shall be content.”
At a meeting with Franklin and a number of other American agents just prior to his introduction of the bill on February 2, 1765, Grenville repeated his challenge that this esteemed group of Americans propose a better idea for coming up with the necessary funds. Franklin, fifty-nine at the time, was wise enough to understand that there would be no dodging Grenville’s insistence that the colonies pay for what he considered valuable and necessary services rendered. But Franklin was also a seasoned politician, and even 250 years ago any politician understood the impact of the ultimate three-letter word upon a constituency. Echoing the sentiments of the Pennsylvania Assembly and eager for anything other than a “tax” to be proposed, he suggested that Grenville simply draft a requisition to each colony in a specified amount.
Desperate Sons Page 2