1775 (11 page)

The traits shared by the four vanguards clumped around the assertiveness of the early-chartered colonies, all of them established back in the seventeenth century by mainstream English “church” Protestants (as opposed to Catholics or Quaker and Baptist sectarians). These were the provinces grandly launched with pompous, permissive charters that extended their territory to the Pacific and made their early mindsets quasi-imperial. Likewise, the four could boast long continuous periods of something close to self-government. They gloried in their little parliaments (especially Virginia’s House of Burgesses and South Carolina’s Commons House of Assembly), their overseas military expeditions (to St. Augustine, Port Royal, Louisburg, and Quebec), and their proud New World identities. None of the four were about to accept disinheritance by a Parliament and British political milieu they disdained as corrupt.

Nationalism, territorial expansion, and early versions of manifest destiny highlighted a common drive. The grandiose charters were important psychological enablers. So, too, was each province’s 90-to-150-year history of substantial self-government, some of it usurped from royal governors. Such partial autonomy allowed unusual military adventuring and widespread firearms ownership and militia organization, as well as haughty transatlantic imitations of parliament and locally determined church establishments. These privileges and consciousness of charters and rights rule out any superficial political comparison with eighteenth-century British counties of
more or less similar size—English Sussex, Devon, or Yorkshire, or even Scottish Ayr or Irish Antrim.

These unusual colonial self-perceptions become still more relevant as the mid- and late-1760s emphasized Britain’s own strengthening imperial determination. In 1774 and 1775, the king and Parliament made entirely clear their commitment to reverse a half century of permissive or indecisive rule. This had begun with the more or less “salutary neglect” of 1720–1756, followed by the wartime preoccupations of 1756–1763 and thereafter by the erratic 1760s, during which ministerial provocation alternated with conciliation. For example, passage of the Stamp Act of 1765 was followed by its repeal in 1766; then passage of the Townshend Acts of 1767 was followed by their substantial withdrawal in 1770. London’s belated emphasis on imperial discipline had a certain logic. But alas for the king and Parliament, the colonies of 1774 had five times the population and ten times the self-confidence of the fledglings circa 1725.

As we have seen, the mother country’s new turn toward harsh restraint, crystallized by British outrage over the Boston Tea Party, reached critical mass through the Coercive Acts. Bluntly restated, the message from King, Privy Council, and Parliament to the other twelve colonies was unsparing: behave, do what we tell you, or you, too—speaking here to Connecticut and Rhode Island—may lose your precious charters and feel the prick of a sharp bayonet. That threat came too late; confrontation was spreading.

Leadership and Confrontation: Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina

In the early 1760s, as the Seven Years War in Europe ended in a surfeit of London self-confidence, all four provinces sought to protect their existing degrees of self-government. The principal tactic, unnecessary in self-governing Connecticut but conspicuous in Virginia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, required a determined lower house of the legislature. The Virginia House of Burgesses, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly each maneuvered against British-appointed governors, succeeding through tactics of insistence, provocation, and power grabbing. Eventually, these initial measures gave way to the displacement of established government by extralegal bodies and conventions. Royal executives, sometimes in near fury, usually
countered by dissolving or proroguing the offending house. When fighting began in 1775, it had a background of political confrontation going back at least several years.

As later chapters will amplify, the fighting that broke out in 1775 tended to come in provinces where politics had broken down. Initially, this meant New England, some parts of northern New York, and the plantation colonies—Virginia, South Carolina, and sections of North Carolina and Georgia adjacent to South Carolina. Even after Lexington and Concord, the king and his ministers chose not to send soldiers into the less offensive middle colonies. These were either holding back from flat-out confrontation—or in the case of New York, willing to placate the Crown by provisioning nearby warships like HMS
Asia.

The few violent episodes in the middle colonies were pretty much exceptions that proved the noncombative rule. The bloody beating of a local ship captain by a British naval boarding party off New Castle, Delaware, in March 1775 supposedly prompted the Assembly a week later to unanimously approve the autumn proceedings of the First Continental Congress. In July, with a rumor of British warships coming up the Delaware River, the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety and the New Jersey Provincial Congress cooperated in placing defensive obstacles along the waterway. New Yorkers were frightened on the night of August 23 when the 64-gun
Asia
briefly bombarded Manhattan to halt Patriots’ removal of cannon from a nearby fort. Only a handful of injuries resulted, but a large civilian exodus followed. A month later, marines from the
Asia
stopped New Jersey’s Perth Amboy stage boat and carried off a Connecticut officer, in American eyes committing a “felonious piratical outrage.”
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It was in the vanguard provinces that clashes were overt and growing. The 1774–1775 events in Massachusetts, the best chronicled, ranged from full-scale battles like Bunker Hill to island raids in Boston Harbor, British bombardment of coastal towns, and Patriot captures of small British naval vessels as far afield as present-day Machias, Maine. The backdrop to violence in Massachusetts is that Boston’s first occupation troops—two regiments—dated back to 1768, having been sent in response to tax- and customs-related riots. Some historians put the roots of 1775 conflict that far back—or even to 1761.
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In any case, the events in Massachusetts do not lack for historians.

Events in Virginia are less well known. The colony’s records, copious and reasonably available, show cooperation between the governor, Lord Dunmore, and the House of Burgesses beginning souring in 1773. Dunmore, not surprisingly, dissolved the house after it set up an official Committee of Correspondence to keep in touch with the other colonies. He dissolved it again in May 1774, following the burgesses’ support for Boston and their recommendation for holding a Continental Congress later that year. That summer, Virginia Patriots embraced the extralegal provincial convention device. The first met in August to elect delegates to the imminent Philadelphia Congress. A Second Convention followed in March 1775 before Lexington and Concord, and a Third Convention sat during July and August, effectively taking over colonywide governmental authority as Dunmore transferred his headquarters to a British warship. May saw independent companies led by Patrick Henry march on Williamsburg, the capital, but they were persuaded to turn back.

Two more Conventions followed in 1775 and 1776. In the meantime, the House of Burgesses kept itself adjourned until finally shutting down in May 1776, when the colony switched over to its newly established government anticipating independence.
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Fighting in Virginia began in October 1775, and this chronology, punctuated by skirmishes, battles, and ship actions, warrants greater historical attention, if not quite equal place with, events in Massachusetts.

South Carolina’s Commons House of Assembly is the belligerent so widely neglected over the years by historians. Indeed, the state has a long tradition of fierce and aggressive politics, thrown into subsequent disrepute—as Massachusetts’s recurring combativeness was not—by South Carolina’s prominence in starting the Civil War of 1861–1865. The fire-eater spirit of 1860 secession and the 1861 attack on Fort Sumter were arguably previewed in the 1760s and 1770s, when South Carolina aided the United Colonies to become the United States. Confrontation with Britain began as far back as 1762, when Christopher Gadsden, by 1775 a principal leader of the province’s radical faction, won election to the Commons House. The royal governor refused to swear him in, meanwhile dissolving the House for violating the Elections Act (a statute that London wanted an excuse to rewrite). Although new elections were held, because the governor and the new Commons House remained at odds, the provincial government did no public business into 1763.

More altercations followed. In 1768, a new royal governor dissolved the Commons House for taking up the Massachusetts Circular Letter protesting
the Townshend Acts. Still another dissolution followed in 1769 after the Commons House—gratuitously, and probably unlawfully—ordered the payment of 1,500 pounds sterling to a London fund set up to aid John Wilkes, a British radical jailed for criticizing King George. Over an eighteen-month period, the royal governor, Lord Charles Greville Montagu, dissolved the Commons House four times, and the legislators replied in kind by asking London for Montagu’s recall.
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Candidly put, the South Carolina patriotic elite frequently delighted in out-Bostoning Massachusetts.

In the words of local historian Walter Edgar, “The Wilkes Fund Controversy was as important as parliamentary taxation in convincing the elite that if it wanted to control the political destiny of South Carolina, revolution was the only answer. Imperial officials underestimated the resolve of the South Carolinians. The colony’s elite was determined that it would not knuckle under to the ‘unjust and unconstitutional measures of an Arbitrary and Oppressive Ministry.’ For all practical purposes, royal government in South Carolina ceased in 1771 (the last year any legislation was passed), four years earlier than in other colonies.”
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Next came the extralegal stage of the province’s insurgency. This included the establishment of a mass-based committee in Charleston (1773), the creation of a “General Committee” or shadow government (1774), and the late 1774 action whereby the General Committee created a new body to better represent the backcountry and elect delegates to the Second Continental Congress. This was the Provincial Congress, which met in January 1775 as a formal, if not official assembly. On April 21, as we have seen, a Secret Committee was appointed to put the colony in a state of defense, which included measures to seize munitions and arms. Then on June 14, the Provincial Congress gave executive powers to a Council of Safety, which would work with the congress and act on its behalf during adjournment.
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By early 1775, South Carolina’s preparations were sufficiently advanced that war supplies were arriving from the West Indies. By autumn, the colony must have exceeded any other in forwarding gunpowder to Washington’s army in Massachusetts.
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Like Virginia, South Carolina saw skirmishes, small battles, and ship actions in 1775. An unsuccessful British southern expedition, planned in 1775, ended in a June 1776 disaster when the Patriot force defending a half-constructed Sullivan’s Fort near Charleston fought off—and sorely embarrassed—King George’s navy.

Connecticut was another hive of pre-Revolutionary activity. Military historians describe the province as slipping into its own eighteen-month
rage militaire
after the September 1774 powder alarm, with preparedness moving forward.
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Where Connecticut differed completely from Virginia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina was in the collaborative nature of executive-legislative relations. Because of a unique 1662 charter, all but sacrosanct across the province, the “freemen” of Connecticut elected their own governor and legislature and had since the prior century.
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So as 1774 lengthened into 1775, no bold or hurried usurpations were necessary—no extralegal assemblages, no huge, outdoor mass embodiments of “the people.” The radical, pro-independence governor, Jonathan Trumbull, first chosen in 1769, was returned to office at regular intervals through the war’s end in 1783. Sixty-five years old in 1775, he was called the “rebel governor” by the British because his readiness to act was unique. In next-door Rhode Island, Governor Joseph Wanton, although locally elected, had to be removed by the Patriot legislature in 1775 for ambivalent sympathies.
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