1775 (19 page)

British ministers and parliamentarians had evidence close at hand. Along the western coast, from Bristol north to Glasgow, a half dozen cities owed their mushrooming growth to trade with the North American colonies. So did industries from textiles to ironware and copperware, as well as Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery, Nottingham’s stockings, and Sheffield’s gleaming steel. By 1774, roughly 40 percent of British manufactured exports went to the American colonies. The many implications were grist for the mills of politicians, publicists, philosophes, and emigration agents alike.

Sounding much the same from Britain or Sweden to the Mediterranean,
the word
America
evoked promise. Religious liberty was a beacon for many; economic opportunity, for even more. Enthusiasts ranged from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to preacher John Wesley. Most of the emigration came from Protestant northern Europe, largely British allied. Poor tenants on Scotland’s Isle of Skye even had a dance called “America”—couples whirled in a circle till all were in motion, showing how emigration sentiment caught hold.

Between 1700 and 1750, the population of the thirteen contiguous mainland colonies quintupled from 250,000 to 1.2 million. Then between 1750 and 1775, it doubled to between 2.5 and 3 million, exceeding Holland, Denmark, Portugal, or Switzerland. Even Prussia, its population reduced to 4 million in 1763 by wartime devastation, was not far ahead.

Officials in London, by this point, had begun to worry about regional population losses in parts of Britain. Heavy Scotch-Irish emigration from Ulster was seen as ending any chance of a Protestant majority in Ireland; in the Scottish Highlands, clan chieftains gloomed over the depopulation of their islands and glens. In 1763, the British government acted to prohibit British and American settlement west of a line drawn along the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains. Several motivations were at work: to reduce Indian wars and curb military outlays; to discourage further emigration from Britain; and to keep Americans weak enough to be dependent. Mercantile theory applauded population, and the British government didn’t want to lose any more of it.

Even English and British identities were in flux. The British historian Linda Colley has written convincingly about how eighteenth-century psychologies knit together English, Welsh, Scots, and some Irish as “Britons.”
¹
Three thousand miles away, by contrast, diverging interests and a sense of the apartness bred by that great distance were remaking English-speaking colonials into Americans.

Most New Englanders and Virginians, proudly British in 1744, felt less so by 1764. A further decade saw many edging toward open enmity. The term
colonist
was picking up negative connotations, as in “mere colonial.” Even future Loyalists, who would shrink back from full independence, typically favored greater self-determination—seeking a separate American parliament or London’s pledge not to tax the American colonies without consent. Popular commitment to self-determination had a powerful economic content—concern not only over tax policy but over provincial authority to issue local currency, elimination of customs abuses, the
opportunity to manufacture, freer trade among the various colonies, and much more. In the religious sphere, comparable assertiveness opposed Anglican bishops for America and demanded colonial disestablishment of the Church of England. As we have seen, many Dutch and German Reformed congregations sought local, not Old Country, supervision of their churches and preferred American-born or English-speaking pastors.

Few historians would dispute colonial support for greater self-determination. The confusion is over how to label that demand. Politics and constitutional change were necessary means. However, much of the underlying dissatisfaction involved religion, as we have just seen, and economics, to which we now turn.

Many Economic Roads to Revolution

This chapter will identify a dozen serious bones of pre-Revolutionary economic motivation and contention. That there were so many is important in itself. By 1774 and 1775, little about the colonial economy had not been drawn into debate.

It is best to begin at its heart—a money supply kept small, primitive, and usually inadequate by British mercantilist thinking and administrative practice. Much of this was intentional. It was a founding seventeenth-century principle of mercantilism that specie—gold and silver—be drawn back to the mother country. This was accepted subordination: colonies were to
serve,
not to be guided toward maturity and self-fulfillment. Change was beginning, but slowly.

Among the mainland thirteen, with currency often scarce, levels of indebtedness had soared since the 1740s. If money was the first problem, debt was the second. Debt-related lawsuits clogged the colonial courts. In New England and the plantation colonies, debt matters were everyday conversation. An insufficient money supply was tied to another imperial fundamental: that valuable colonial export commodities had to be routed through Britain to profit middlemen there. Return payment often came in overpriced goods.

This reflected a third hinge of friction: the statutory mandate that colonists sell specified commodities only to British merchants. Those affected were spelled out in the mid-seventeenth-century Navigation Acts’ “enumerated list,” which had further expanded in the eighteenth century and especially since the 1750s. In practical terms, each addition
made more American producers British commercial captives, even though enumeration had started out a century earlier by guaranteeing mar kets. If enumeration, money supply, and debt appear related, they clearly were.

During the 1760s, some restive Americans began to complain that proceeds lost by tobacco growers in particular, because their great crop had to be sent to Britain—and only from there resold profitably all over Europe—amounted to a massive de facto tax. This diversion alone, the critics said, more than compensated the mother country for its protective umbrella. Sometimes overstated but hardly specious, this contention tied into a fourth point of frustration. Parliament, in which the colonies had no representation, therefore had no right—or so some Americans insisted—to impose transatlantic taxes.

London had not directly taxed before the 1760s, but it acted during that decade with a sequence of controversial levies, notably the 1765 stamp tax and the 1767 Townshend taxes (on glass, paints, paper, and tea). Townshend’s were repealed in 1770, save for the levy on tea. That was reiterated in 1773, setting Boston’s famous tea party in motion. However, after the Coercive Acts took center stage in 1774, the tax issue per se receded.

Here a point should be made. The dozen economic issues, although interrelated, were not constant. They varied in importance. The colonists’ contention that unfair enumeration was actually a thinly disguised tax—and therefore constituted a good argument against additional levies—intensified amid the tumult of imperial relations in 1774–1775. Trade moved to the fore.

A sixth altercation of the pre-Revolutionary period involved what several twentieth-century historians labeled “customs racketeering.” Much stricter enforcement commenced in the early 1760s with a major strengthening of a British Customs Service that had been locally ineffective. Multiple tightenings between 1762 and 1767 imposed new duties, established an American Board of Customs, specified elaborate and near-punitive loading and bonding requirements, provided for removal of customs-related trials to juryless admiralty courts, and instructed Royal Navy ships and officers to collaborate in aggressive, by-the-book customs enforcement.

People in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and eastern Connecticut were especially irate. In 1764 British aggressiveness in pursuing molasses smugglers—generally ignored until the sixties—prompted provincial gunners manning Fort George in Newport, Rhode Island, to fire shots at
the
St. John,
a naval schooner seizing molasses-carrying vessels in Narragansett Bay. An enthusiastic crowd quickly gathered. When cannoneer Daniel Vaughn, having acted under orders, later reported back to the Council, “they wanted only to know why he had not sunk the schooner.”
²
In more or less self-governing Rhode Island, intrusive British warships were becoming enemies.

The limitations that Britain had imposed on colonial manufactures—principally through the Hat Act of 1732, the Woolens Act of 1699, and the Iron Act of 1750—at first drew little complaint. The tax and trade-boycott controversies of the 1760s and 1770s, however, made curbs on what the colonies could produce a more heated topic. With each boycott, Americans devoted more rhetoric to the need to produce or manufacture locally more of what was being imported. We can describe the boycotts of 1765–1766 and 1767–1770 as a seventh confrontation. Rising tensions over manufacturing became arena number eight.

In 1774, when the First Continental Congress called for a strong response to Britain’s Coercive Acts, delegates embraced a much bolder trade stoppage, which displaced tax policy as the fulcrum of Patriot strategy. Instead of relying on uncooperative merchants to stop importing specified British goods, Congress put forward a new brand of association: all twelve participating provincial delegations pledged to prohibit
popular consumption
of British goods, commencing that very autumn. Nonexportation of American commodities to Britain, until then never ventured, would follow in the autumn of 1775. This was to allow Virginians the time needed to cure, pack, and ship their 1774 tobacco crop, essential to gaining cash and credits.

Strict enforcement now merged with patriotism. Congress recommended establishing provincial, county, and local committees to monitor compliance, publicize violators, and seize goods and cargoes where necessary.
³
The sweeping extralegal authority and potentially treasonable nature of these organizations quickly became a ninth adversarial dimension. Merchants still played a part, but hard-line activists were coming to the fore.

Throwing down this gauntlet moved the colonies to the brink of economic war. However, before picking up that combat in
Chapter 9
, these pages will also amplify several other controversial dimensions of how British imperial prescriptions limited American opportunity.

Of course, many imperial constraints barred American economic self-determination. No one pretended otherwise. Yet by the 1770s, British rules and favoritism struck more and more colonials as unacceptable. For
example, the right to sell American tobacco in France, made lawful for Scots after the Act of Union in 1707, remained prohibited to Americans. Thomas Jefferson, not a particular admirer of “North Britons,” liked to argue that
English
Americans ought to be on an imperial par with
non-English
Scots. Such arguments resonated in tobacco country, where Scottish traders were greatly resented.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763, in turn, barred British subjects from settling beyond the Appalachian Mountains on western lands earlier fulsomely described and conveyed in several seventeenth-century royal charters. Westward vistas had tantalized generations of explorers, surveyors, and investors. However, by the 1770s, British forts in places like Ohio and Illinois had been shut down to uphold a new linkage: no settlers were wanted, and little expensive protection from the Indians would be furnished. A related goal voiced in 1763 and 1764 was to bottle up the thirteen colonies along the East Coast, channeling expansion northward to Nova Scotia and southward into now-British Florida, with its supposed opportunities for tropical agriculture. Westward flow would be blocked. As late as 1767, George Washington dismissed the Proclamation Line as nothing more than “a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians.” But as we will see, contemporary British explanations and policy pronouncements suggested otherwise.
⁴
Perceived British hostility to American westward movement became a tenth friction.

While settlers could squat illegally, investors and speculators in the western lands were often stymied. In most colonies, not least Virginia, investors preoccupied with western lands were prominent in supporting the Revolution. After the Proclamation Line had been received angrily, a few adjustments were made. The Quebec Act of 1774, however, stunned British America by placing the lands that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin within the political boundaries and French-sprung legal system of Quebec. Virginians already contemplating their trans-Ohio acreage were told to go fly a fleur-de-lis-shaped kite. The western-lands aspect of the Quebec Act became another grudge.

Last but hardly least, the unfolding events of 1775 made it essential to purchase arms, ammunition, sulfur, and saltpeter in the West Indies or from complicit European merchants. Congress soon modified its nonexportation provisions, and shipping food and tobacco for powder, hitherto encouraged, now became official policy.
⁵
It marked a transition to open war.

Colonial insistence on economic self-determination, in short, became confrontational well before Lexington and Concord. Within a few months,
economic war led to shooting war. But before going on to describe the loyalties and constituencies that emerged in 1775, more must be said about the principal economic conflicts and insoluble disagreements. Matches were being put to a surprisingly short fuse.

The 1764–1774 Economy: Too Little Money, Too Much Debt

Of the various economic roads to revolution, several were more extended pothole than surface. Currency mismanagement, our first focus, may not seem innately war provoking. However, in many provinces, the lack of a regular colonial coinage or reasonably sound, officially authorized paper money was periodically crippling. In the late twentieth century, as monetary historians reevaluated the importance of currency—or of its lack—in pre-Revolutionary America, British neglect of local money supplies drew overdue attention.

Simply put, despite affluence by global standards, British North Americans had to make do with a relative shambles of a currency system and money supply. The credos of eighteenth-century mercantilism—accumulating gold at the seat of power ranked high—encouraged London’s offhanded behavior. Consider this candor from the Oxford-based
Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution:
“The monetary system of the colonies was based on the use of Spanish coins from the mines in Latin America, since Parliament had refused to allow the export of English coins. The colonies supplemented the coinage with paper monies which the 13 assemblies issued independently at various times.”
⁶
Or
didn’t
issue, as was often the case, because of the limitations set forth in Britain’s Currency Acts of 1751 and 1764. Even royal governors were sometimes appalled by the monetary dearth.