1775 (23 page)

One maritime scholar has summed up: “In any list of grievances drawn up by the colonies to explain the reasons for that ‘open rupture’ the operations of the customs service ranked high. An American reading that passage in the Declaration of Independence which denounces the king because he had ‘erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance’ would understand this reference to the customs officials.” He continued that “more specifically, the complaints in the Declaration that the colonists had been deprived ‘in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury’ and transported ‘beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses’ singled out the Admiralty court system, which was a major element in the customs apparatus. And the whole purpose, the basic function, of the customs service was protested in the Declaration when the colonists had complained that the king had ‘combined, with others, to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our
constitution…giving his Assent to their acts of pretended legislation…For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.’” These are the words of Thomas Barrow, author of
Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America.
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Once Parliament in 1762 and 1763 directed naval vessels into the business of suppressing colonial smugglers, argued another historian, “the British navy suddenly became a greater menace to ordinary colonial commerce than were French vessels.” This was because “the laws governing seizures at sea are based on where vessels are found and the papers they carry…British naval officers were unfamiliar with trade customs and applied the letter of the regulations given to them…As the crews received one half the net proceeds, it was profitable for them to seize colonial ships on purely technical grounds. Trials were in the Admiralty courts, the burden of proof of innocence was upon the owner of the seized vessel.”
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In any event, news of the plans for peacetime customs enforcement by the navy was said to have caused “greater alarm” in Massachusetts than the French capture of Fort William Henry in 1757.
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The Customs Act of 1763, in turn, led to North American governors being instructed to step up enforcement, and 20 ships of war, mostly sloops and brigs, took up positions off colonial seaports.
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Their principal target was molasses smuggling. The old Molasses Act of 1733, rarely enforced, was replaced in 1764 by the Sugar Act, which dropped the duty on a gallon of molasses from six pence to three pence. From New England’s standpoint, even three pence seemed prohibitive on a product priced at twelve pence a gallon, but now enforcement gained sharp teeth—and not just additional customs officers and the cannon of the Royal Navy. Besides the Sugar Act’s six sections on molasses and sugar taxes, another 40 additional sections were devoted to a flood of customs and commerce revisions adding up to “a constitutional revolution in the relations of the colonies to the home country.” Documents, clearances, and fees required, and penalties imposed for violations astounded shipowners and mariners.
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Until 1764, Parliament had only looked at North America’s oceangoing trade. Now it extended regulation—clearances, fees, and potential fines and seizures—to intercolony traffic. Much of this was coastal trade, including the small wood and lumber boats that operated along New England and Carolina coasts far from any customs house. Such was the harassment that a defendant was required to pay the costs of the suit brought even after being proved innocent of the underlying violation. Worse, before an owner
whose vessel had been charged could appear in (admiralty) court, he had to post a £60 bond to cover the costs of the suit.
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Nor did Parliament’s reach stop with applying one or two years’ worth of legislative minutiae and new bonding requirements to a lengthy list of cargoes, commodities, and destinations. The Stamp Act enacted in 1765, besides taxing court documents, land conveyances, and the like, took even broader aim at maritime transactions—it taxed all clearance papers, cockets (documents), transfer agreements, bonds for categories of goods, and so forth. When the main body of the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, substantial portions remained in effect. As for the Sugar Act, most of its customs and commerce provisions remained operative even when the per-gallon duty on molasses was reduced to a bearable single penny. This brief detail should be enough to explain why New Englanders, in particular, were so angry.

The last big clump of legislation—the Townshend Acts passed in 1767—is best remembered for a further set of new taxes that were all withdrawn in 1770, save for the ill-fated one on tea. But in 1767, policy makers also mandated a new American Board of Customs Commissioners and unwisely located it in Boston. There the board became a favorite target of Samuel Adams, the waterfront mob, and eagle-eyed practitioners of tarring and feathering who sought out unpopular customs officials. Three times during the next seven years—in 1768, 1770, and 1774—the board was obliged to take hurried sanctuary at midharbor Castle William, safe under the guns of such naval vessels as were not pursuing suspect merchant ships for half shares in prize money.

Here it is useful to note the different impact of customs militancy within the thirteen individual colonies. “New England and Charleston, South Carolina, were the areas of the most intense [customs] warfare against American trade,” according to Oliver Dickerson. “North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland were scarcely molested. There were relatively few complaints from Pennsylvania, New Jersey or New York.” The relative quiet in the tobacco provinces reflected the tie-in of the largely Scottish merchants there to the ministry back home. The prominent Patriots singled out in New England and South Carolina—John Hancock and Henry Laurens—had commercial ties to English merchants allied with opposition forces in Parliament.
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On the other hand, this customs celebrity helped both Hancock and Laurens wind up as presidents of the Continental Congress.

The Crown’s provocative agenda may also have had a little-discussed ulterior motive. Serious concern was being expressed in the early 1760s that
unless the fast-growing American colonies were quickly reined in, they never could be. Timely coercion was already an issue in 1760 when George III became king. By 1763, senior customs and Board of Trade officials were circulating memoranda like one approved by the king’s favorite, the Earl of Bute, that said “His Majesties possessions in North America are so many more times extensive than the Islands of Great Britain, that if they were equally well-inhabited, Great Britain could no longer maintain her dominion over them. It is therefore evidently her Policy, to set bounds to the increment of People, and to the extent of the settlement in that Country.”
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Keeping population near the seacoast and controllable was essential. Nathaniel Ware, the comptroller of customs, opined in 1763 that never could there be a “more favorable opportunity than the present” to achieve the colonies’ proper subordination before wartime troops were withdrawn. Otherwise, the northern colonies were within “a very few more years to maturity” and departure.
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In 1763, the Treasury reported to the king that the colonies’ “vast increase in Territory and Population makes the Proper Regulation of their Trade of immediate Necessity, lest the continuance and extent of the dangerous Evils…may render all Attempts to remedy them hereafter infinitely more difficult, if not utterly impracticable.”
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Arguably, this objective of demographic, economic, and commercial constraint can be seen in not just one but a series of actions: the Proclamation Line of 1763, the Customs Revenue Act of 1763, the Currency Act of 1764, the Sugar Act of 1764, and the Stamp Act of 1765. These controversies involved much more than mere constitutional disagreement.

Although this punitive dimension gets little attention, it could consume a chapter, not just a few paragraphs. Sometimes the evidence has a tie to a particular province. One local account, for example, quoted a British secretary of state confiding to a South Carolinian: “We must clip your canvas. You increase too fast in shipping. You will soon be too powerful on the water to be governed by the mother country.”
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What tobacco was to Chesapeake sensitivities, sugar—or rather molasses, its principal by-product—was to coastal New England. Each year hundreds of ships from Salem, Boston, Newport, Providence, New London, and elsewhere carried fish, cheese, barreled beef and pork, lumber, and horses to the French West Indies at considerable profit, returning with great quantities of molasses, from which Yankee factories would distill ordinary rum, that famous elixir of English-speaking seamen. British sugar colonies
like Barbados, Jamaica, and St. Kitts also produced molasses, but much less, and because they used it to produce high-quality rum, little was left for New England. Growers in the French West Indies, however, produced greater quantities of sugar and also a larger output of molasses. On top of which, they had little permissible use for it because the home government in Paris prohibited rum making to protect French brandy producers. Massachusetts and Rhode Island found temptation irresistible.

These were the two provinces most intensely involved in smuggling and rum distilling. Most of their ships were locally owned, not British owned. The Bay Colony housed over 100 rum distilleries, tiny Rhode Island fully 30. Molasses was the cornerstone of its provincial economy.
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Massachusetts was more diversified, albeit particularly committed to its symbolic fisheries. Coastal and West Indies ship carriage, lumber cutting and milling, shipbuilding, fishing, and rum production were the province’s major enterprises. All five priorities converged in trading with—and smuggling molasses back from—the French West Indies.

Two thousand miles to the south, the French islands craved New England’s lumber, cheap codfish, cheese, beef, and other provisions, less costly than shipments from Bordeaux or Nantes. On the trip back, Yankee captains took mostly molasses. The British West Indies, as indicated, were a much poorer fit for Salem, Boston, Newport, and Providence. The Rhode Island Assembly explained all of this in a 1764 remonstrance to the Crown. Of the 14,000 hogsheads of molasses the colony imported each year, only 2,500 came from the British Caribbean. In fact, all the molasses in the British islands, provincial legislators showed, wouldn’t be enough to support Rhode Island alone for a single year.
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The new British customs policy, they contended, would put Rhode Island half out of business. Rum production was less vital to Massachusetts, but vessels could not profitably sail to the West Indies without a return cargo. This meant that the Bay Colony would lose by far the largest—and essential—market for its lower grades of codfish.

The New England provinces were an uncomfortable fit in the British imperial economy. Masts aside, they produced no strategic crop—by 1775, even naval stores came mostly from the Carolinas. Indeed, New England essentially reiterated Britain’s own dominant portrait: maritime carriage, fishing, livestock, grain, and (after independence) manufacturing. Some 30 percent of the British Empire’s merchant fleet was built in America, the largest portion of it in New England. Much like Old England, New
England lived by the sea, on the sea, and from the sea. In fairness, the authorities in London had been well aware of this, trying (unsuccessfully) to nurture a New England naval stores industry between 1690 and 1720. By the 1760s and 1770s, they were losing patience.

By the mid-1760s, in short, the effect of the Sugar Act and the heavy-handed new customs practices was to challenge the viability of the New England economy and with it the region’s ability to buy large quantities of British manufactures. But if British policy makers were losing patience, so were Boston radicals.

The analogy to the Chesapeake has merit. New England, too, had a vital commerce in which policy resentments mingled with cost pressures to instill a pre-Revolutionary dislike of British practices. Instead of tobacco, currency, and debt being the catalyst, maritime New England’s ire involved trade, the mishandled duty on molasses, and malevolent customs enforcement. In the early 1770s, Rhode Island had been the hot spot of Yankee customs conflict. But by 1774, Massachusetts had become the epicenter of a broader crisis.

As with the belated partial liberalization of London’s currency regulation, a less intrusive customs enforcement in 1772–1773 was too little too late.
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In any event, New England and South Carolina ships would soon be bound away for old, familiar West Indian ports to smuggle back the ultimate in prohibited French goods: gunpowder, ordnance, and stands of arms fresh from King Louis’s arsenals.

This is not to ignore New England’s secondary interest in manufacturing, or for that matter the considerable attention paid by New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to British crimping of the fledgling American iron industry. Nor is it to pass over the clash of British land policy and Patriot speculation. These, too, were objects of colonial demand for economic self-determination. But they did not rank with the two great complaints that motivated New England and the tobacco provinces.

The Economic Constituencies and Opponents of Revolution

As the Revolution gathered momentum in 1775, frustrated Loyalists singled out two religious denominations—Congregationalists and Presbyterians—for being rebels and republicans almost by doctrine. They likewise identified three particular groups of economic malcontents: smugglers, evasion-minded debtors, and speculators in western lands.

The religious finger-pointing was logical enough. Across the thirteen colonies, some 70 to 80 percent of Presbyterians took the Patriot side, and New England Congregationalists might have been even more stalwart. The broad economic stereotypes require more clarification. Merchants with a smuggling avocation during the prewar decade took the rebel side overwhelmingly in Massachusetts. Native-born speculators in western lands lopsidedly favored the Revolution, excepting men whose opportunity came from positions under the Crown. As for debtors, although widespread inflammation against creditors helped to breed a
climate
of Revolution, gauging Patriot-versus-Loyalist ratios in so large a group would be guesswork. That being said, economic circumstances, commitments, and vocations were important in guiding loyalties. The bigger the stake or vulnerability, the more heavily it usually weighed—and the more likely economics was to counter religious or ethnic ties.