by Edward Cline
Tactless, bellicose, and crudely sly, almost from the beginning of his tenure Dunmore seemed to them a caricature of the Crown’s true motives. He was insensitive to that insinuative mockery; he did not care a fig for what his subjects thought of him. He was a Stuart, and he would govern. Most Virginians had heard that the Governor had advocated, in a letter to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, the employment of not only slaves, but Indians, as well, to terrify recalcitrant colonials into deference and obedience, should matters get out of hand. A few of them privately entertained the idea that the Governor’s “war” had a dual purpose: to cause a crisis requiring Crown intervention to resolve the dispute between Virginia and Pennsylvania over western Pennsylvania, to better to enforce the Proclamation of 1763, and to resolve it in the land-hungry Governor’s favor; and to test the mettle of the Virginia militia, and to divert it from any possible action against himself.
John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, was not a model of benevolent despotism. In the course of his campaign, he prorogued the General Assembly three times, the last time to early February next year.
Jared Hunt approved of these actions. He did not regret his offer to accompany the Governor on the campaign, even though he was again obliged to wait two days before being granted an interview. His Excellency had accepted the offer with alacrity, but advised the extraordinary Customsman that he must bring his own weapon and that he would march and camp “at his own or the Customs’ expense.”
When the Governor pressed him for an explanation of his eagerness, to the neglect of his other Crown duties, Hunt had replied that, while he was investigating other venues of smuggling and impropriety, he returned to Williamsburg only to learn that his quarry had sailed for England, removing himself from the likelihood of making that journey in shackles to face trial in London for treason. “He is expected to return in the spring, your lordship,” he had told the Governor. “I will snare him then. As for my other duties, my commission does not oblige me to apply myself in that regard.” The Governor sympathized with such dedication. He advised his visitor to rejoin him in Williamsburg in late August or early September, when he planned to leave for the west.
Jared Hunt then returned to Hampton, and scoured that port’s shops for extra clothing, a musket, and other campaign necessities. He later returned to Williamsburg to join the Governor’s retinue. He did not mind following in the Governor’s footsteps on the arduous march west. The Governor spoke with him as his father, the Earl of Dunmore, did not. They were men of like mind, disposed to like action. He enjoyed lavish meals at the Governor’s field table, plentiful drink from the Governor’s private stock, and ribald conversation with the Governor and his staff about the fickle colonials.
For an aristocrat, thought Hunt, Dunmore was not such a bad fellow.
* * *
Nor was John Randolph, brother of Peyton and the king’s Attorney-General for Virginia, such a bad fellow. A graduate of London’s Middle Temple, he was clerk of the House of Burgesses when Patrick Henry introduced his Stamp Act Resolves in 1765. Originally elected burgess for Lunenburg County in 1769, he was later returned, through Governor Dunmore’s intercession, as burgess for the College of William and Mary, a much more convenient and preferable constituency. The College, like abandoned Jamestown with its single burgess, was the Virginian counterpart of a Parliamentary rotten borough. It was virtually a lifetime sinecure for whoever held it. Also, it kept him close to his brother, burgess for Williamsburg and Speaker of the House.
The Governor was pleased to assist John Randolph in changing his constituency because the Attorney-General was the epitome of moderation and a champion of Crown authority. Randolph abhorred the course his brother and the rest of the House were following. He was an apologist for the status quo. “We ought to declare, in the most public manner, that the act of the Bostonians in destroying the property of the East India Company, was illegal, and ought not to be countenanced.” The investment of British troops in Boston, he asserted in a tract written in July and published in the Purdie and Dixon Virginia Gazette while the convention was sitting, was but “a check to that growing disorder which appeared to be licentiousness instead of freedom, and which must endanger the peace of the British Empire in America, unless it was smothered in its infancy.”
He argued that the reparations expected by Parliament for the destroyed tea were only a matter of justice and civil government. Reconciliation between the mother country and her colonies was possible and a mutually profitable and amicable readjustment of their relationship could be arrived at “without noise” by rebellious rabble. The political mechanism of the Empire could be infinitely cobbled and caulked to the satisfaction of all parties. But, he warned, “Let us make every effort, exert every nerve, in order to terminate a dispute which is big with the fate of both of us,” before it was too late.
After all, he reasoned, if Great Britain and her colonies separated, the mother country would “fall into ruin; and America, that once hopeful and promising soil,” would “become subject to the will of some despotic prince, and be of less importance than it was whilst in the hands of the savages.” Moderation and accommodation were John Randolph’s watchwords. He believed that the status quo could be amended indefinitely to sustain everlasting imperial harmony.
A despotic prince, however, with the connivance of Parliament, was already attempting to subject the colonies to his will. Randolph, though, was unable to conceive of a greater vista of the crisis. He refused to ascribe to the Crown a shred of fault, culpability or villainous intent, and would concede only a tiny measure of thoughtless foolhardiness in some of its legislation. His disenchantment with the march of events was experienced by numerous other colonial gentlemen, whose world of genteel class distinctions, prestige, and Crown-blessed security came to an abrupt and embittering end. John Randolph eventually abandoned Virginia and his family and exiled himself to England, as did other “Tories.”
The convention in Williamsburg, held in the Capitol instead of the Raleigh Tavern to seat over one hundred elected and reelected burgesses and delegates, began on August 1 and adjourned on August 6. Several rounds of voting chose the delegates who would travel to Philadelphia to attend a general congress unanimously endorsed by the convention: Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, and Edmund Pendleton. It was an unlikely but working union of men who in the past were hostile political antagonists.
Of the seven, Henry was the keystone. He had been the most consistent in his political convictions over the years; the others had been exemplars of caution and “moderation.”
The convention sired a new Association whose twelve resolutions reflected as near a declaration of independence as Virginians would then allow themselves: No purchases of British imports after November 1; no slave purchases after that date; no imports of British tea, nor any consumption of it, even in one’s own home; no tobacco or other colonial exports to Britain after August 10 of the following year; a more vigorous husbanding of sheep to fashion clothing, and a reduction in sheep slaughtering, to eliminate dependency on British-made apparel and textiles; no “price gouging” by traders and merchants for goods made scarce by the boycott; the social and commercial ostracizing of merchants and traders who refused to sign the Association after November 1; the publication of the names of any person who violated the Association’s resolves; an appeal for donations and contributions to relieve the distress of the citizens of Boston; and the naming of Robert Carter Nicholas, Treasurer and burgess for James City County, to replace Peyton Randolph as head of the ad hoc convention, in the event the latter died.
The instructions given to the delegates to the general congress underscored the Association’s resolutions. Aside from naming the delegates, they reiterated most the injustices committed by Parliament, with the king’s approval, since the Proclamation of 1763, and expressed a hope that the king’s ministers would see reason. They also expressed regret for
resorting to a boycott of British commerce. Further, they caustically criticized General Thomas Gage, the new governor of Massachusetts, and warned that if he attempted to enforce his edict — which he was empowered to issue under the coercive Massachusetts Governing Act — deeming it a treasonable offense to assemble to form associations or to express or discuss American grievances, such a “proclamation will justify resistance and reprisal.”
What was intended to be a prologue to the publication of the convention’s resolutions, was instead printed by the Rind Virginia Gazette as a separate epilogue, Jefferson’s anonymously penned “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” Jefferson, who had planned to present it to the convention for consideration, fell ill on his way back to Williamsburg, and forwarded it to Peyton Randolph, who in turn “tabled” it for anyone’s perusal. Most delegates found it too severe in its accusations and language, and nothing in it was adopted. Jefferson’s “Summary” expanded on the Crown’s offenses and the colonists’ grievances, traced the origins of liberty and the proper relationship between king and subject to pre-Norman Conquest times, and ended by appealing to His Majesty to check Parliament’s powers and revoke all its oppressive legislation, as most colonial charters required and expected him to do. “Let not the name of George the Third be a blot in the page of history,” wrote the thirty-one-year-old Virginian.
After tactfully blaming George the Third’s counselors for all the troublesome legislation, and not His Majesty himself, Jefferson appealed, “This, sire, is the advice of your great American council, on the observance of which may perhaps depend your felicity and future fame, and the preservation of that harmony which alone can continue both to Great Britain and America the reciprocal advantages of their connection. It is neither our wish, nor our interest, to separate from her. We are willing, on our part, to sacrifice every thing which reason can ask to the restoration of that tranquility for which all must wish.”
The “Summary” was the precursor of a monumental document its author was to compose two years later. Before the end of 1774, it was reprinted in Philadelphia and London.
The seven deputies, instructions in hand, returned home to their counties to prepare for the journey to Philadelphia, where the first Continental Congress was scheduled to convene on September 5. Georgia was the only colony that did not send delegates, and New York delegates attended ex officio. Henry traveled with Pendleton and Washington to Philadelphia, where they joined Peyton Randolph, Benjamin Harrison and Richard Bland. From a tavern they walked together to Carpenter’s Hall, the site of the congress. Richard Henry Lee arrived the next day.
In one of history’s ironies, Peyton Randolph, the man who had been willing to pay five hundred guineas for a single vote to defeat Henry’s fifth Crown-defying Stamp Act resolve nine years before, was subsequently chosen to be president of the first Continental Congress. Over time, the virtue of “moderation” had become to him less and less a practical answer to Crown encroachments.
And it was Henry who made real for the other delegates and for the rest of the colonies the enormity of their peril and the unique position in which they found themselves. On the first day, after all the delegates had presented their instructions, he spoke to a hushed congress:
“I go upon the supposition that government is at an end. All distinctions are thrown down. All America is thrown into one mass.…The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American!”
This was an expression of what many Crown ministers had known for a long time, and hoped in vain that no one in North America would ever grasp. It was an identification of the fact that America was indeed another kingdom, another country, and that its inhabitants were no longer Britons.
Few of the men who opposed Crown policies and impositions could imagine, let alone welcome, a complete political break with Britain. Many who could imagine it viewed the prospect with horror. John Randolph was one of these, asserting that the animosity engendered by dubious Parliamentary legislation did not justify violence, separation or independence. The preservation of the Empire was of paramount importance. Independence would lead, if not to military strife with the mother country, then to anarchy within each former colony or strife between some or all of them, if they were not first conquered by France or Spain.
Still others devoted their imagination to a closer, more intimate political union of the colonies and Britain, as did delegate Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania, speaker of its legislature. At the Philadelphia congress he proposed that a central, elective colonial legislature could work with Parliament, headed by a president-general appointed by the king.
The “grand council” of legislators would be “inferior” to Parliament but exercise veto power over Parliamentary acts and even originate legislation for Crown approval. It would embody a mandated share of genuine power with Parliament and act under a special colonial constitution that complemented the British constitution. If the colonies could not be literally or even virtually represented in Parliament — he certainly agreed with many “intemperate” radicals on those points — Galloway’s answer was simple: Create a truly representative government that was nearly Parliament’s equal in legislative authority.
The idea of governing the colonies in such a fashion was questioned by many delegates, most notably by Patrick Henry, who, having observed corruption of his own General Assembly, argued that while such a “grand council” would insulate the colonies from direct Parliamentary influence, such an association would surely infect it as well and create new opportunities for oppressive skullduggery of a greater magnitude. Bribery and subornation of the grand council by Parliament and the king’s ministers were guaranteed by the connection. A royally appointed president-general who served at the king’s pleasure — and served the king’s purposes — was by itself a malodorous aspect of the scheme. Where would his allegiance sit: With St. James’s Palace, or with the colonies?
But, without even admitting that likelihood, many at the congress dismissed such a scheme as mere “virtual” independence, as contemptibly specious a notion as “virtual” representation in Parliament. Others saw in Galloway’s plan of union salvation of themselves and of the Empire.
Galloway’s plan was narrowly rejected as untenable. Instead, the congress adopted the Suffolk Resolves, brought hastily to Philadelphia by courier Paul Revere from Massachusetts. These were more in the spirit of Henry’s position. They declared the Coercive Acts unconstitutional, called for the citizens of Massachusetts to form their own government, advised all the colonies to form and arm their militias, and endorsed stringent trade sanctions against Britain. On October 14 the congress issued its own Declaration and set of resolves. These ten resolves condemned the Coercive Acts as well as the Quebec Act, all the legislation passed by Parliament since 1763, asserted the right to life, liberty and property, and the right to self-government without Crown interference.
On October 18 the congress created a continental association, modeled on the Virginia Association. When it adjourned on October 22, the congress resolved to meet again in May of 1775 if by that time the Crown had not acted to address American grievances. The Declaration and resolves were sent to London. The delegates packed their bags and journeyed home to await a reply.
Galloway rode back to his farm in Pennsylvania to pout. Later, he volunteered to assist General Howe in governing Philadelphia when that general occupied the city. In 1778 he joined the growing number of American loyalists in England, and became their spokesman. He nurtured a special animus for Samuel Adams, the intransigent radical of Boston, whom he blamed, in an unintended compliment, for the defeat of his plan of union by intriguing with factions at the congress. “He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects.”
The Declaration and resolves of the First Continental Congress were to be the last major appeal to reason that Americans woul
d make.
* * *
In the meantime, Governor Dunmore completed a successful campaign to pacify the Indians. He saw no action himself. That was seen by General Andrew Lewis, of Botetourt County and a veteran of the French and Indian War, whose column of Virginia militia, over 1,000 strong, was supposed to have rendezvoused on September 30 with the Governor and his column of equal strength at Point Pleasant in the Ohio territory, at the juncture of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. Lewis arrived there on schedule, after a grueling march through unmapped wilderness, and encamped to await Dunmore, who took the wagon roads cleared by Braddock nearly two decades before to Fort Pitt. There Dunmore met with some apprehensive Delawares and concluded a minor treaty with them. Impressed with his own obvious gift for peace-making, he decided to march further west to an Indian town called Chillicothe to parley with its natives. He sent orders to Lewis a hundred miles down river to join him there.
While Lewis’s militia was preparing to obey, it was attacked on October 10 by Cornstalk and an army, “five acres” shoulder to shoulder of them, of Shawnees, Mingos, Iowas, Delawares, Wyandots, and Cayugas. After a fierce all-day battle, Lewis sent Cornstalk fleeing across the Ohio River with what was left of his warriors. The Virginians lost 75 men in the battle, including Lewis’s brother, Colonel Charles Lewis.
The general then marched with part of his force to join Dunmore at Chillicothe, only to receive word from Dunmore to return to Point Pleasant and await orders. He marched on, however, with the bitter certainty that had His Excellency kept to the original plan, their combined armies could have dealt Cornstalk and his allies an even greater blow. When he faced the Governor, he tactfully proposed that this could still be done. Dunmore instead ordered him and his militia back home and his troops mustered out. Lewis contained his anger and obeyed. Dunmore remained near Chillicothe on the Scioto River for two more months, concocting treaties, he thought, with as much skill as any Indian commissioner, moved by expectations of lavish Crown gratitude in the form of exclusive land patents and other royal rewards.