Chapter II: The Parting of the Ways (2)

There were other causes of irritation which touched the colonists almost as nearly. In 1740 the Massachusetts assembly had set up a Land Bank authorized to issue notes based upon nothing but mortgages on land and personal bonds, with surety, given by those who subscribed to its support, and Parliament, at the solicitation of Boston men who knew what certain disaster such a bank would bring upon the business of the colony, had thrust in its hand and suppressed it. The scheme had been in great favor among the men of the country districts, and its suppression by direct act of Parliament had stirred them to a deep resentment. “The Act to destroy the Land Bank scheme,” John Adams declared, had “raised a greater ferment in the province than the Stamp Act did”; and it made the men who had resented it all the readier to take fire at the imposition of the stamp duties. The churches of the province had been deeply alarmed, too, by the effort of English churchmen to establish bishops in America, as if in preparation for a full Establishment; and the clergy were, almost to a man, suspicious of the government. The lumbermen of the forests felt the constant irritation of the crown’s claim to all their best sticks of timber for the royal navy, and were themselves fit fuel for agitation. Each class seemed to have its special reason for looking askance at everything that savored of control from over sea. The measures taken against the trade with the Indies were but the latest item in a growing account.

Massachusetts and the greater trading ports of the south felt the burden of the new policy more than the rest of the country felt it; but thoughtful men everywhere saw what it portended that Parliament should thus lay its hand directly upon the colonies to tax, and in some sort to govern, them. Quite as many men could tell you of the “parson’s case,” tried in quiet Hanover Court House in rural Virginia, as could tell you of Mr. Otis’s speech against the writs of assistance. It meant that the authorities in London were thrusting their hands into the affairs of Virginia just as they were thrusting them into the affairs of Massachusetts. Parson Maury had in that case set up an Order in Council by the ministers at home against an act of the Virginian House of Burgesses determining the value of the currency in which his salary was to be paid, and young Patrick Henry had sprung into sudden fame by declaring to the court very boldly against him that the crown had no right to override the self-government of Virginia.

The eloquence of that famous speech carried the young advocate to the House of Burgesses itself; and it was he who showed the colonies how to speak of the Stamp Act. The burgesses were in session when the news of that hateful law’s enactment reached Virginia. The young member waited patiently for the older members of the House to show the way in the new crisis,—Randolph and Pendleton and Nicholas, Richard Bland and George Wythe,—the men who had framed so weighty a protest and warning and sent so strong a remonstrance over sea only last year against this very measure. But when he saw that they would not lead, he sprang to the task himself, plain, country-bred though he was, and unschooled in that leadership; scribbled his resolutions on the fly-leaf of an old law-book, and carried them with a rush of eloquence that startled and swept the House, and set the tone for all the country.

His resolutions not only declared the right of the colonies to tax themselves to be exclusive, and established beyond recall; they also declared that Virginians were not bound to obey the Parliament when it acted thus against established privilege, and that any one who should advocate obedience was an enemy to the colony. The sober second thought of the burgesses cut that defiant conclusion out at last,—after Mr. Henry had gone home; but the resolutions had already been sent post-haste through the colonies in their first form, unrevised and unsoftened, and had touched the feeling of every one who read them like a flame of fire. They were the first word of revolution; and no man ever thought just the same again after he had read them.

It seemed a strange defiance, no doubt, to come from loyal Virginia. The Stamp Act was not, in fact, oppressive or unreasonable. Why should it so kindle the anger of the colonies that the sovereign Parliament, which had for many a day levied indirect charges upon them by means of the many acts concerning trade and manufactures, now laid a moderate direct tax upon them, the proceeds of which were to be spent upon their own protection and administration? Because, though it might be the sovereign legislature of the empire, Parliament was not in their view the direct sovereign legislature of America. No one could truly say that Parliament had been the sovereign power even of England before 1688, that notable year in which it had, by a revolution, changed the succession to the throne and begun the making and unmaking of governments. The colonies had most of them been set up before that momentous year of change, while the Parliament was still only a body of representatives associated with the crown, with the right to criticise and restrain it, but with no right to usurp its prerogatives; entitled to be consulted, but not licensed to rule. The King, not the Parliament, had chartered the colonies; and they conceived their assemblies to be associated with him as Parliament itself had been in the older days before the Revolution of 1688: to vote him grants, assent to taxation, and with his consent make the laws they were to live under. He stood, they thought, in the same relation to all the legislatures of his realm: to the Parliament in England and to the assemblies in America. It was the fundamental principle of the English constitution, as all agreed, that the King’s subjects should be associated with him in government by representation; and, since the Americans could not be represented in Parliament, and were, by his own authority, represented in local assemblies, he must deal with them, not through Parliament, but through those assemblies.

The law of their view was not very sound or clear; but the common-sense of it was unassailable; and it rested upon unquestionable and long-standing practice, that best foundation of institutions. Their governments were no doubt, in law, subject to the government of Great Britain. Whoever ruled there had the legal right to rule in the colonies also, whether it were the King independent of Parliament, or the ministers dependent upon Parliament. The revolution of 1688 had radically altered the character of the whole structure, and perhaps the colonies could not, in strict constitutional theory, decline their logical part in the change. But no man in America had ever seen that revolution cross the seas. English statesmen might have changed their views, but the colonies had not changed theirs, nor the practice of their governments either. Their governments were from of old, and they meant to keep them intact and uncorrupted. They did not object to the amount or to the form of the tax; they objected only that they had not themselves imposed it. They dissented utterly from the opinion that Parliament had the right to tax them at all. It was that principle, and not the tax itself, which moved them so deeply.

English statesmen claimed that the colonists were as much represented in Parliament as the thousands of Englishmen in England who did not have the right to vote for members of the Commons; and no doubt they were. The franchise was narrow in England, and not the whole population but only a few out of some classes of the people were actually represented in the Houses. Were not the interests represented there which America stood for? Perhaps so. But why govern the colonies through these remote and theoretical representatives when they had, and had always had, immediate and actual representatives of their own in their assemblies,—as ready and accessible an instrument of government as the House of Commons itself? The colonists were accustomed to actual representation, had for a century and more been dealt with by means of it, and were not willing now to reverse their history and become, instead of veritable states, merely detached and dependent pieces of England. This was the fire of principle which the Stamp Act kindled.

And, once kindled, it burned with an increasing flame. Within ten years it had been blown to the full blaze of revolution. Mr. Grenville had not lost his power because he had set the colonies aflame by his hated Stamp Act, but merely because the King intensely disliked his tedious manners, and resented the dictatorial tone used by the ministers in all their dealings with himself. The Marquis of Rockingham and the group of moderate Whigs who stood with him in the new ministry of July, 1765, had repealed the stamp tax, not because they deemed it wrong in legal principle, but because it had bred resistance, had made the colonists resolve not to buy goods of English merchants, or even pay the debts of £4,000,000 sterling already incurred in their business with them,—because they deemed it wise to yield, and so quiet disorders over sea. Their power lasted only a single year. The King liked their liberal principles as little as he liked Grenville’s offensive manners, and in August, 1766, dismissed them, to substitute a ministry under William Pitt, now made Earl of Chatham. Had Pitt retained his mastery, all might have gone well; but his health failed, his leadership became a mere form, real power fell to other men with no wide, perceiving vision like his own, and America was presently put once again in revolutionary mood.

Pitt had said that the colonists were right when they resisted the Stamp Act: that Parliament could lawfully impose duties on commerce, and keep, if it would, an absolute monopoly of trade for the English merchants, because such matters were of the empire and not merely of America; but that the Americans were justified in resisting measures of internal taxation and government, their charters and accustomed liberties no doubt giving them in such matters constitutions of their own. Mr. Burke, whose genius made him the spokesman of the Rockingham Whigs, whether they would or no, had said very vehemently, and with that singular eloquence of his of which only his own words know the tone, that he cared not at all what legal rights might be involved; it was a question of government and of good-will between a king and his subjects; and he would not support any measure, upon whatever right it might be founded, which led to irritation and not to obedience. The new ministry of the Earl of Chatham acted upon its chief’s principles, and not upon Mr. Burke’s,—though they acted rashly because that consummate chief did not lead them. They proceeded (June, 1767), after the great earl’s illness had laid him by, to put upon the statute book two acts for the regulation of colonial trade and the government of the colonies which Charles Townshend, their Chancellor of the Exchequer, had drawn. The first provided for the more effectual enforcement of the acts of trade already in existence; the second imposed duties on wine, oil, lead, glass, paper, painters’ colors, and tea carried to the colonies, and explicitly legalized the use of the hated general search-warrants known as “writs of assistance.” The revenues raised by these duties were to be applied, as the stamp tax would have been had it been collected, to the support of the courts of justice and of the civil establishments of the several colonies, and to the expenses connected with their military defence. Evasions of the revenue acts were to be tried by the admiralty courts without juries.

To the colonists this seemed simply a return to the policy of the Stamp Act. The tax was different, but the object was the same: to make their judges and their governors independent of them, and to compel them to pay for the maintenance of troops not of their own raising. These same ministers had suspended the legislative power of the New York assembly because it refused to make proper provision for the quartering of the King’s troops, as commanded by the act of 1765; and that assembly had felt itself obliged to yield and obey. Several companies of royal artillery had been sent to Boston in the autumn of 1766, and were quartered there at the colony’s expense by order of the governor and council.

The new taxes were laid upon trade, and they could not be attacked on the same grounds upon which the stamps had been objected to. But the trouble was that the new taxes, unlike the old restrictions, were to be enforced, evasion prevented. Mr. Townshend’s first act was to send commissioners to America specially charged and empowered to see to that. The ruinous acts of 1764 were to be carried out, and the West India trade, by which Boston merchants and ship owners lived, put a stop to. These were bitter things to endure. Some grounds must be found from which to fight them,—if not the arguments used against the Stamp Act, then others, if need be more radical. The ministers at home had set their far-away subjects to thinking with the eagerness and uneasiness of those who seek by some means to defend their liberties, and were fast making rebels of them.

Even in the midst of the universal rejoicings over the repeal of the Stamp Act the temper of several of the colonial assemblies had risen at reading the “Declaratory Act” which accompanied the repeal, and which asserted the absolute legal right of Parliament “to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.” They had declared very flatly then that Parliament had no legal authority whatever in America except such as it might exercise by the consent of the colonial assemblies,—so far had their thought and their defiant purpose advanced within the year. There were conservative men in the colonies as well as radical, men who hated revolution and loved the just and sober ways of law; and there was as strong a sentiment of loyalty on one side the sea as on the other. But even conservative men dreaded to see Parliament undertake to break down the independence of America. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, of Massachusetts, whose house the rioters in Boston had wantonly looted when they were mad against the Stamp Act, had been born and bred in the colony, and loved her welfare as honestly as any man; but he was lieutenant-governor, an officer of the crown, and would have deemed it dishonor not to uphold the authority he represented. Mr. Otis, on the other hand, had resigned his office as Advocate General under the crown to resist the writs of assistance. The public-spirited gentlemen who had opposed Mr. Henry’s fiery resolutions in the Virginian House of Burgesses did not fear usurpation or hate tyranny less than he; but they loved the slow processes of argument and protest and strictly legal opposition more than he did, and were patient enough to keep within bounds. They feared to shake an empire by pursuing a right too impetuously. Men of every temper and of every counsel made up the various people of the colonies, and there were men of equal patriotism on both sides of the rising quarrel.

And yet the most moderate and slow-tempered grew uneasy at Mr. Townshend’s measures. Mr. John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, wrote and published a series of letters,—_Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer_, he called them,—which stated as pointedly, as boldly, as earnestly as any man could wish, the constitutional rights of self-government which the colonists cherished and thought imperilled by the new acts of Parliament,—and yet Mr. Dickinson was as steady a loyalist as any man in America, as little likely to countenance rebellion, as well worth heeding by those who wished to compose matters by wise and moderate counsels. His firm-spoken protests were, in fact, read and pondered on both sides the water (1767), and no one could easily mistake their significance.

The action of the people gave only too grave an emphasis to what their more self-restrained and thoughtful leaders said. Mr. Townshend’s acts were as openly resisted as Mr. Grenville’s had been; and every art of evasion, every trick of infringement, upon occasion even open and forcible violation, set at naught other restrictions of trade as well. It was startling to see how rapidly affairs approached a crisis. Resistance centred, as trade itself did, at Boston. When Mr. Townshend’s commissioners of customs seized the sloop _Liberty_ in Boston harbor for evasion of the duties, rioters drove them to the fort for shelter, and they sent hastily to England for more troops. The Massachusetts assembly, under the masterful leadership of Mr. Samuel Adams, protested that the measures of the new ministry were in violation of colonial rights, and protested in terms which, though dignified and respectful enough, were unmistakably imperative.

The leadership of Samuel Adams was itself a sign of the times. He was a man of the people, passionate in his assertion of rights, and likely to stir and increase passion in those for whom he spoke. Subtle, a born politician; bold, a born leader of men, in assembly or in the street, he was the sort of man and orator whose ascendency may mean revolution almost when he chooses. The assembly, at his suggestion, went beyond the ordinary bounds of protest and sent a circular letter to the other colonies, as if to invite a comparison of views and a general acquiescence in the course of settled opposition it had itself adopted. When the ministers in London demanded a withdrawal of the letter, the assembly of course refused, and the other colonies were more than ever inclined to stand by the stout Bay Colony at whose capital port the fight centred. The ministers, in their desperate purpose to compel submission, declared their intention to remove to England for trial any one who should be charged with treason,—under an almost forgotten statute passed long before Jamestown was settled or English colonies dreamed of in America. That roused the Virginian House of Burgesses once more. They declared, with a sort of quiet passion, in their session of 1769, that no one but their own assemblies had a right to tax the colonies; that they had the inalienable right to petition the government at home upon any matter of grievance whatever, and to petition, if they pleased, jointly, as a body of colonies united in right and interest; and that any attempt to try a colonist for crime anywhere except in the courts of his own colony and by known course of law was “highly derogatory of the right of British subjects,” and not for a moment to be deemed within the lawful power of the crown. There was no need this time for Mr. Henry. All men were now of the same opinion in Virginia, and the action was unanimous.

The Virginian governor at once dissolved the Burgesses; but the members came together again almost immediately at a private house; and there Colonel Washington, whom all the English world had known since Braddock’s day, proposed a general agreement to import no goods at all upon which a tax was laid,—to see what effect it would have if the English tradesmen and manufacturers who looked to America for a market were starved into a true appreciation of the situation and of the state of opinion among their customers. Many of the other colonies followed suit. Trade with England for a few months almost stood still, and there was quick distress and panic among those interested over sea. They promptly demanded of Parliament that the new taxes be taken off and trade allowed to live again. The ministers yielded (April, 1770),—except with regard to the tax on tea. That was the least of the taxes, and the King himself positively commanded that it be retained, to save the principle of the bill and show that Parliament had not reconsidered its right to tax. The taxes had yielded nothing: the single tax on tea would serve to assert a right without the rest.

Meanwhile a very ominous thing had happened in Boston,—though the ministers had not yet heard of it when the bill passed to repeal the taxes. Upon an evening in March, 1770, a mob had attacked a squad of the King’s redcoats in King Street, pelting them with sharp pieces of ice and whatever else they could lay their hands on, and daring them derisively to fire; and the troops had fired, being hard pressed and maddened. Five of the mob were killed and six wounded, and a thrill of indignation and horror went through the excited town. The next day a great meeting in Faneuil Hall sent a committee to Mr. Hutchinson, the governor, to demand the instant withdrawal of the troops. Samuel Adams headed the committee, imperious and on fire; told the governor, in the council chamber where they met, that he spoke in the name of three thousand freemen who counted upon being heeded; and won his point. The troops were withdrawn to an island in the bay. The town had hated their “lobster backs” for all the year and a half they had been there, and rejoiced and was quiet when they withdrew.

But quiet could not last long. The flame was sure somewhere to burst out again whenever any incident for a moment stirred excitement. In North Carolina there was the next year a sudden blaze of open rebellion against the extravagant exactions of William Tryon, the adventurer who was royal governor there; and only blood extinguished it (1771). In Rhode Island, in June, 1772, his Majesty’s armed schooner _Gaspee_ was taken by assault and burned, upon a spit of land where she lay aground. It had been her business to watch against infringements of the navigation laws and the vexatious acts of trade; her commander had grown exceptionally insolent in his work; a sloop which he chased had led him on to the spit, where his schooner stuck fast; and the provincials took advantage of her helplessness to burn her. No one could be found who would inform on those who had done the bold thing; the courageous chief-justice of the little province flatly denied the right of the English authorities to order the perpetrators to England for trial; and the royal commission which was appointed to look into the whole affair stirred all the colonies once more to a deep irritation. The far-away House of Burgesses in Virginia very promptly spoke its mind again. It invited the several colonies to join Virginia in forming committees of correspondence, in order that all might be of one mind and ready for one action against the aggressions of the government in England. The ministers in London had meantime resolved to pay the provincial judges, at any rate in Massachusetts, out of the English treasury, taxes or no taxes; and the Massachusetts towns had formed committees of correspondence of their own, as Mr. Adams bade.

Such were the signs of the times when the final test came of the tax on tea. The East India company was in straits for money. It had to pay twelvepence into the royal treasury on every pound of tea it imported, whether it sold it in England or not; but the government there offered to relieve it of that tax on every pound it carried on to America, and exact only the threepence to be paid at the colonial ports under Mr. Townshend’s act: so willing were the King’s ministers to help the Company, and so anxious also to test the act and the submissiveness of the colonists. The test was soon made. The colonists had managed to smuggle in from Holland most of the tea they needed; and they wanted none, under the circumstances, from the East India ships,—even though it cost less, with the twelvepence tax off, than the smuggled tea obtained of the Dutch. The East India Company promptly sent tea-laden ships to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston; and in the autumn of 1773 they began to come in. In Boston a quiet mob, disguised as Indians, threw the chests overboard into the harbor. At New York and Philadelphia the ships were “permitted” to leave port again without landing their cargoes. At Charleston the tea was landed, but it was stored, not sold, and a public meeting saw to its secure bestowal. The experiment had failed. America was evidently of one mind, and had determined not to buy tea or anything else with a parliamentary tax on it. The colonists would no more submit to Mr. Townshend’s tax than to Mr. Grenville’s, whatever the legal difference between them might be, either in principle or in operation. The issue was squarely made up: the colonies would not obey the Parliament,—would be governed only through their own assemblies. If the ministers persisted, there must be revolution.

Here the leading general _authorities_ are the histories of
Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; but to these we now add David
Ramsay’s _History of the American Revolution_; the fourth
volume of James Grahame’s excellent _History of the Rise and
Progress of the United States of North America from their
Colonization till the Declaration of Independence_; Thomas
Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts_, one of the most
valuable of the contemporary authorities; John S. Barry’s
_History of Massachusetts_; John Fiske’s _American Revolution_;
Mellen Chamberlain’s _The Revolution Impending_, in the sixth
volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_;
the twelfth chapter of W. E. H. Lecky’s _History of England
in the Eighteenth Century_; Sir J. R. Seeley’s _Expansion
of England_; Richard Frothingham’s _Rise of the Republic of
the United States_; Mr. Edward Channing’s _United States of
America, 1765-1865_; Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge’s _Short History
of the English Colonies in America_; Mr. Horace E. Scudder’s
_Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago_; Moses Coit
Tyler’s _Life of Patrick Henry_; Mr. Horace Gray’s important
discussion of Otis’s speech against the writs of assistance,
in the _Appendix_ to Quincy’s _Reports of Massachusetts Bay,
1761-1772_; Moses Coit Tyler’s _Literary History of the
American Revolution_; F. B. Dexter’s _Estimates of Population_,
in the _Proceedings_ of the American Antiquarian Society; and
the _Lives_ of the leading American and English statesmen of
the time, notably the invaluable series of brief biographies
known as _The American Statesmen Series_.

Abundant _contemporary material_ may be found in the published
letters, papers, and speeches of American and English public
men of the time, especially in the pamphlets of such men as
James Otis, Richard Bland, Stephen Hopkins, John Adams, Samuel
Adams, John Dickinson, and their _confrères_; in Franklin’s
_Autobiography_; Andrew Burnaby’s _Travels through the Middle
Settlements in North America, in the Years 1759 and 1760_; Ann
Maury’s _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_; and Hezekiah Niles’s
_Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_.

_Lists of the authorities_ on the several colonies during these
years may be found in Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell
Hart’s very convenient and careful little _Guide to American
History_.