Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The Roman Catholic Church was centralized in Spain at that time, and Richelieu was anti-Spanish, so even though he was a Catholic cardinal, he became more and more allied with German and Dutch Protestants, and when the Protestant king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden went to war with Spain, Richelieu financed Sweden’s army. Gustavus Adolphus was killed in one of the battles, but more and more Scandinavians and Germans became Lutherans as a result of the war, and a large number of French people became separated from the Catholic Church as well.

  The move toward Protestantism in France had actually begun long before that, when the French theologian, John Calvin, born in 1509, rebelled against what he considered the too conservative teachings of the Catholic Church and began to preach a philosophy that became known as Calvinist Protestantism in 1533. By 1598, this movement had grown so strong that there were actually 200 French cities under Protestant control, and to keep peace in the country, King Henry IV issued a ruling that year, the famous Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed freedom of worship to the Protestants, royal subsidies of Protestant schools, courts made up of both Catholic and Protestant judges to deal with cases involving Protestants, and a lot of other fair-minded things. This held through his reign and the reign of his son, but then King Louis XIV came along, and he listened to the prejudiced mumblings of his anti-Protestant advisors and revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and began to persecute Protestants in increasingly ugly ways.

  One form of persecution was called the dragonnades because it involved billeting soldiers, usually the rowdy Dragoons, in Protestant homes without permission and then ignoring the outrages they committed, including rapes, robberies, and murders. Huge groups of French Protestants, the Huguenots - I can’t tell you where or why they got that name because nobody seems to know, and every encyclopedia and dictionary I’ve consulted just says “origin unknown” - began to leave the country, escaping to England, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and of course, to America in such large numbers that whole cities were depopulated. It was an act of massive stupidity on Louis XIV’s part, and reminiscent, in its way, of Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews and their loss thereby of many of the country’s leading scientists and other intellectuals. Most of France’s best-skilled artisans were Huguenots, and their departure caused severe damage to the country’s economy. After a while, the only sizable number of Huguenots remaining in France were in a barren and unapproachable mountain area in southern France called the Cévennes; eventually a later ruler, King Louis XVI, gave the remaining Huguenots a sort of limited return to religious freedom by granting, in 1785, what he called “tolerance” and ending persecution, but full equality for French Protestants wasn’t achieved until modern times, when church and state were separated in France in 1905. But meanwhile, of course, the wonderful Huguenot artisans who came to this country, and were typical of all the good but persecuted people who came here, did a lot to help our economy and growth.

  And that little tour of world history brings us right back to our own beginnings, the beginnings of the United States. Religious and racial persecution is moronic at all times, perhaps the most idiotic of human stupidities. As I’ve said, however, the acts of stupidity through the ages did us a kind of unintentional favor - by driving so many different kinds of good people to our shores and merging them together as Americans.

  This chapter has gotten to be a bit long. Let’s continue in the next one.

  I DON’T THINK that the people who made up the colonies at the time of the American Revolution really wanted to tear themselves loose from the mother country. I think the people really wanted to stay in the British hegemony17 if they had an opportunity to do so, and if they’d had a king who was a smart man, I don’t think there would have been any secession from the British Empire. But the British monarch, George III, who was born in 1738 and took over the throne when he was twenty-two, was a very tough and mean person, and not all that bright, either, and he caused the Revolution to take place. From the American point of view, of course, the Revolution was a blessing, because it enabled the colonists to establish the principle that is still very much the essence of American political philosophy: that government must be by the consent of the governed. But from the British point of view, a lot of people knew even then that it could have been avoided.

  There’s really no question about the fact that the colonists could have been controlled if there had been some common sense used in Britain. A number of the great political leaders of the time, Burke and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and Charles James Fox and Isaac Barré and others, tried their level best to get things in shape so that there’d be no reason for the colonists to do what they eventually did, but it couldn’t be managed. George III was an absolute monarch, and some of those absolute monarchs believed that God had given them all the knowledge in the world, and therefore, it wasn’t necessary to listen to the advice or ideas of anyone else even when it would have been smart to do so. But as I’ve said, King George III wasn’t smart, and he also began to show increasingly visible signs of mental illness, so he did a lot of stupid and unpopular things. (In fact, he became so unpopular that, even though he lived until 1820, he pretty much gave up running the government in 1783 and turned the reins over to his prime minister, the younger William Pitt, son of the Earl of Chatham. Then his periods of mental illness became more and more frequent, and in 1810, he was finally declared permanently insane and his son, George IV, took over as regent.)

  Before the thirteen colonies joined together and became a single nation, the British colonies were, I believe, the best run of all the colonies anywhere in the world. Most of the other countries, such as France and Spain, appointed colonial governments run by governors with absolute power under the Crown, and the people were not represented at all in those governments. In the British colonies, the people weren’t represented in the Parliament, but they had a definite say in local matters. Most of the British colonies had royal governors appointed by the British Crown, but they also had local legislatures, which acted on tax matters and things of that sort, and in the 150 years or so before the Revolution, they became very experienced in running local governments and did very good jobs in all of the colonies. I don’t know if this method of operation was an innovation or not on the part of the British government, but I think it was because I believe these were the first colonies the British ever had; I don’t think they had any elsewhere until much later. Anyway, even though some of the colonies in those days didn’t even have the population that some of our counties have now, I think the local operation of the colonies, far away from the homeland and the centuries-old belief that the king knew what was best for everybody, made a lot of people determined to have a stronger hand in their own lives and welfare.

  Although it’s usually taken for granted, it’s worth remembering that no important group of Englishmen, in the centuries before the Revolution, ever sought to settle themselves beyond and outside the influence of the chief executive of England - whether king, queen, or protector. Secession from the Empire waited for later generations and took place after there was so much provocation that things became unendurable.

  The biggest problem was, of course, the thing that eventually became the battle cry of the Revolution, taxation without representation - in other words, the fact that, since the colonists had no representatives in Parliament, the taxes levied on them, and the rules under which they lived and operated, were established by strangers living thousands of miles away across the ocean, and not by people, their own people, who understood their needs and their ways of thinking.

  The general British attitude was that Parliament acted for Virginia or Massachusetts in the same way it acted for Somerset or Kent; Virginia and Massachusetts had local legislatures to deal with minor local matters, but the king and his Parliament had the right without question to make all other decisions. They felt that Parliament exercised the same authority over the colonies as it did over local English towns and that the only difference between the two
places was distance; and they pointed out threateningly that the colonies were just “corporations” that could be limited or dissolved by the king and by Parliament at will. The colonists, however, felt that there was a far more basic and essential difference between the local English areas and themselves. Somerset and Kent had men in Parliament to represent them and express their views, and they didn’t. As Commager and Nevins put it in their book on the history of the United States, they felt that therefore “the English Parliament had no more right to pass laws for Massachusetts than the Massachusetts legislature had to pass laws for England. If the king wanted money from a colony, he could get it by asking for a grant, but Parliament had no authority to take it by passing a Stamp Act or other revenue law. In short, a British subject, whether in England or America, was to be taxed only by and through his own representatives.”

  Some historians have interpreted all this to mean that the colonists were saying that they’d pay taxes to England only if their local legislatures levied the taxes and said they should pay them, but I don’t think that’s what the colonists meant at all. They were realistic enough to realize a fact that political leaders have known practically since the beginning of time: that people will pay local taxes more or less willingly, but are very grudging about paying taxes for other than local needs, and pay these only because there are higher authorities who make it mandatory that they do. I think that what they were saying was simple enough: that they were just like all the other English people even though they lived on another continent, and just as good as all the other English people, and deserved representation in Parliament just like all the others.

  To put it another way, our Revolution was for the idea of representation in government, so that people could not be taxed except by their own consent. I think that what the colonists were saying, in effect, is that they were perfectly willing to pay the taxes if they had a chance to argue the question and find out whether the taxes were just or not, and I think they’d certainly have paid the taxes if they’d been given the representation they wanted. Most of the people who started talking revolution were the landowners and the small farmers and the small businessmen in the towns, and their objective, which was understandable enough, was a government in which they could have a voice. In a sense, the American Revolution was an attempted reorganization of the government approach to taxation and the ownership of property, a kind of capitalist revolution. It can’t really be called anything else because every fellow who owns property is a capitalist, doesn’t matter who he is. And capitalism shouldn’t be a dirty word. It’s abuse that’s caused the problem; the very rich have made it a dirty word.

  But mean old George III didn’t see matters the way the colonists did, and a lot of things began to happen, some of them just plain silly and some of them very serious indeed. There was a thing called The Battle of Golden Hill in New York in 1770, in which some townspeople and soldiers stationed there began to call each other a lot of foolish names and people on both sides picked up guns, but, fortunately, nobody on either side fired the guns. That was one of the silly events. In the same year, however, there was a far worse confrontation in Boston. The soldiers stationed there were in the habit of performing on fife and drum every time they changed the guard, including when they did this on Sundays, and some of the local residents felt that this violated the Sabbath and began to yell at the soldiers and call them names, too. Then, on March 5 of that year, two soldiers were beaten up, and when other soldiers rushed out, a mob gathered and began to taunt the soldiers and pretty much dared them to shoot. The soldiers held on to their tempers, but then the mob knocked down another soldier, and when he stood up, his musket went off accidentally. This caused a general free-for-all, and then some other soldiers began to fire, deliberately though without orders from their commanding officer. Five people were killed, and the event became known as the Boston Massacre and inflamed people in every colony.

  Then there was an incident that took place in Rhode Island when a British warship, the Gaspée, ran aground near Providence. It wasn’t a very menacing kind of warship; it was just a little thing on which only eight guns were mounted, but the people of Rhode Island hated it because its sole assignment was to catch smugglers, and a lot of people in Rhode Island were involved in smuggling. So a bunch of people jumped onto the Gaspée, forced the captain and the crew to get off, and set fire to the ship, reducing it to ashes.

  And then, of course, there was the Boston Tea Party. This famous event was the result of the fact that a new cabinet took over in England in 1767, and their strongest platform promise was that they’d reduce domestic land taxes. But the new chancellor of the exchequer, a fellow named Charles Townshend, had to get money for the treasury from somewhere, and naturally he came up quickly with the idea of getting it from those unimportant people in the Colonies. It wasn’t the brightest idea in the world because the colonists had already shown how they felt about taxes - at least, how they felt about taxes imposed upon them without their approval and agreement - when a thing called the Stamp Act was passed two years earlier, in March 1765, for the alleged purpose of “defraying the expenses of defending, protecting and securing the British colonies and plantations in America.” That law required that stamps had to be bought, at a cost of anywhere from a few pennies to a few pounds, and placed on everything from college diplomas, playing cards, liquor licenses, deeds, and mortgages to calendars and almanacs. And what made it even worse was that stamps also had to be bought and placed on newspapers and printed advertisements and broadsheets and the like, raising the costs of those things substantially. And, of course, the colonial printers and publishers were often the best educated and most articulate men in the Colonies, and they did a lot, by way of their publications and local speeches, to anger the citizens about the law. There were so many riots in the streets, and so much boycotting of British products which required stamps, that the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766.

  Before it was repealed, however, there was also another heavy cost placed on the colonists without their consent, and on which they hadn’t even been consulted: the Quartering Act, which became a law of the land in 1765. This was a requirement that the colonists pick up one-third of the costs of quartering and feeding the 10,000 British soldiers stationed at that time in America - giving them lodging in inns, barns, taverns, and houses, supplying them with food, liquor, salt, candles, and other things, and furnishing wagons to haul their supplies. The cost to the Colonies came to about £360,000 a year, and the colonists felt it was adding insult to injury to have to pay this money because so many of the soldiers were strictly to keep them in line and make sure they obeyed unjust laws and paid unjust taxes. The Quartering Act was also soon repealed.

  There was still that necessity to bring in money, and so the Townshend Acts were passed, placing duties on tea, paint, glass, lead, and other products. Townshend and other officials argued that this was different from the Stamp Act because the Stamp Act imposed duties on many internal things, products created and consumed in the Colonies, whereas these duties were strictly external and placed only on things coming in from the outside.

  Well, the colonists agreed that the new duties were different, all right - different and worse. They pointed out that many of the products came in from the outside because they weren’t, and in some instances couldn’t be, manufactured or grown in the Colonies, but that didn’t make them any less desirable or necessary, and the new duties would in many cases put them out of reach for colonists with limited funds. This time there was an even greater uproar, and all of the duties were canceled with a single exception — the duty on tea. The boneheaded King George III and some of his advisors, particularly his prime minister, Lord North, insisted on continuing the tea duty, a tax of threepence on every pound of tea, saying it was necessary to leave one tax on the books as a “test of authority.”

  The colonists reacted exactly as might be expected. In New York and Philadelphia, ships carrying tea were sent back to England with
out being allowed to unload their cargo. In Charleston, a shipment of tea was seized by residents and locked up so that it couldn’t be sold or taken back. And in Boston, as every schoolchild knows, the citizenry made its feelings known in a more visible - or as one historian has described it, a “more theatrical” way, the Boston Tea Party.

  The leading firebrand in Boston was Samuel Adams, who had already done a lot to unify the Colonies in their anger over taxation without representation and other thoughtlessly imperious acts by the British by forming “Committees of Correspondence,” which circulated detailed descriptions of every unjust act to every colony. Adams, a second cousin of John Adams, and with John Hancock the organizer of a group called the Sons of Liberty, pledged to oppose “British tyranny,” got together a group of fifty men. He dressed up the others and himself as Indians, and on the night of December 16, 1773, they climbed aboard a number of ships in Boston Harbor, broke open 343 crates of tea, and dumped them into the water. Some conservative local merchants felt that was pretty silly stuff, too, or possibly worse than silly - just too damn dangerous; but most other people, including Samuel Adams’ more conservative cousin John, felt that the tea-dumping was a necessary and correct thing to do.

  King George and his friends, of course, were furious, and they, in turn, decided that it was necessary and correct to punish the Bostonians. They closed the Boston port and said it would remain closed until the East India Company, which owned the tea, was compensated for its loss. In addition, they changed Massachusetts’ charter, the document most dear to the hearts of the people in that colony, by removing practically all the personal liberties it granted; “royalized” the colony by replacing Thomas Hutchinson as governor of Massachusetts with General Thomas Gage, commander of the British troops in America; reactivated the Quartering Act; insulted all colonists by stating that English officers accused of capital crimes in America wouldn’t necessarily be tried by local courts but could elect to be sent back to England and tried by friendlier tribunals; and ordered the arrest of Sam Adams and John Hancock. All this was opposed by the more sensible British political leaders like Burke and Lord Chatham, who pleaded for gentler and more conciliatory action, but old George didn’t listen to them. And the new acts, which colonists labeled the Intolerable Acts, backfired quickly.