1775 (25 page)

Unfortunately, the New York or Philadelphia studies do not detail the
mercantile community by subcategories as in Boston. More broadly, Patriotic commitment in Boston was greatest (two to one) among the West Indian, southern European, and coastal traders, many of whom smuggled, as well as among rum distillers (who profited from smuggled cheap molasses). These findings do match the similar but looser conclusions for New York. Patriotic views in Boston were also high among the three dozen merchants whose primary activities were hard to define or unknown. Tyler surmised that “involvement with West Indian and southern European ports at the fringes of the mercantile system probably fed gradual realization of how much their interests lay beyond the empire.” Boston Loyalism, conversely, was highest among merchants in dry goods, invariably imported from Britain, and among factors (many Scottish) who represented British mercantile firms.
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For both Boston and Philadelphia, the experts agreed in emphasizing the role played by the various associations, nonimportation quarrels, and boycotts, especially in the heated climate of 1770. Many moderates who had supported nonimportation in 1765 balked at continuing in 1770, and many of these eventually wound up on the Loyalist side.
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The divisions of 1770 were prophetic.

Religious and ethnic factors were important enough in all three cities that the commercial cleavages generally illustrate the divisions stressed in
Chapter 3
. Congregationalist merchants in Boston were Patriots by three to one while Anglicans were Loyalist by more than two to one. In New York, the Loyalist majority of merchants was disproportionately Anglican. In Philadelphia, the Anglican third of the mercantile community tilted Loyalist in 1774 and 1775. In ethnic terms, Boston’s Scottish merchants, almost all of them foreign born or representatives of British firms, were overwhelmingly Loyalist.
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As a further nuance—an important one, to be sure—Scots, most of them representatives of British concerns, proved heavily Loyalist in every seaport. Philadelphia had relatively few in 1775. However, in 1777, after Virginia’s House of Delegates (the renamed House of Burgesses) expelled Scottish merchants unwilling to take a loyalty oath, they flocked to the now-British-held Quaker City. By one account, occupied Philadelphia soon held 115.
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Distinguishing between Scottish and Scotch-Irish ethnoreligious patterns is essential in four other southern mercantile centers—Baltimore, Maryland; Norfolk, Virginia; Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston,
South Carolina. Baltimore’s merchant community, little involved with tobacco, was led by Scotch-Irish of the Patriot faction with ties to their coreligionists in Philadelphia.
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Norfolk’s merchants, by contrast, were disproportionately Scots, mostly tobacco-connected, who represented British firms. Of these, many were expelled. Of Virginia’s wartime property confiscations, fully one third by value were imposed on the “hated Scotch merchants of Norfolk.”
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In North Carolina, a majority of merchants seem to have been Loyalist, many of them Scots who exported tobacco and lumber and imported British manufactures. In December 1774, one of them became the first North Carolinian charged for refusing to sign the Association. He was John Hamilton, the province’s most important merchant, who at his own expense later raised a Loyalist unit, the Royal North Carolina Regiment.
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Charleston’s merchant community was also significantly Scottish, although less so than Virginia’s. Most of the Scots were Loyalists. It is usually imperative to distinguish between Scottish Presbyterians and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.

Although nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century historians discussed these relationships openly, that is no longer true. The circa 1775 politics of Scottish tobacco merchants in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas—matched by four or five southern Loyalist regiments formed with substantially Scottish enlistments—is a neglected facet of the Revolution’s opening years. Hostility to tobacco traders, factors, and merchants in Virginia and adjacent northeastern Carolina seems to have crystallized around the prominence of Scots. This, however, echoed a similar controversy in England over the success Scots had achieved since the 1750s in commerce, imperial administration, and the British Army. Virginians and Carolinians of English descent, angry at perceived favoritism to Scots, simultaneously seethed over Parliament’s disinterest in colonists’ proud claims to the “rights of Englishmen.” In any event, these nuances may explain why merchants in Virginia and much of North and South Carolina were pushed or cast aside and Whig planters of English descent took control of the Revolution in these locales.

If farming per se was rarely a force in politics and loyalty, a significant personal or community involvement in the production of certain commodities (and manufactures) usually was. Tobacco planters were so lopsidedly on the Patriot side by spring 1776 that even would-be Loyalists like William Byrd III and Thomas, Lord Fairfax, Washington’s great early patron, quietly retired to their plantations. Parenthetically, one economic historian
concluded that “tobacco-growing regions tended to be more revolutionary than the wheat-growing regions in the same states.”
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South Carolina’s rice planters favored the Patriot side in 1775–1776 by at least two to one, but there was no real nose counting. Greater Loyalism probably prevailed among growers of indigo, the province’s second-ranking export behind rice. Indigo was the enumerated crop more dependent on British bounties, and its cultivation in the Carolina low country took off only in the 1740s, when wartime conditions interrupted the usual flow from French and Spanish colonies, indigo being a dyestuff vital to Britain’s all-important textile industry. The volume of southern indigo exports, mostly Carolinian, ballooned from 5,000 pounds in 1746 to nearly 1.5 million pounds in 1774.
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The effects on Carolina cultivator loyalties circa 1775 have received little attention, but concern over losing the British market would have mattered. Moses Kirkland, a Tory leader, had a major indigo plantation, and some fleeing Tories used indigo as currency.
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Naval stores—pitch, tar, and resin—principally came to Britain from North Carolina. Much less important than tobacco, rice, and indigo, they seem to have affected few loyalties, even in the Cape Fear section of North Carolina, where North Carolinians got the name “Tar Heels” from the sticky residue. Cape Fear patriots were so militant that in July 1775, when whale-hunting Nantucket tried to become neutral, the local association cut off any export of “all kinds of Provision” to the Massachusetts island.
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To the north, the Crown’s policy of reserving New England’s thickest and tallest white pines—“king’s trees”—for the Royal Navy stirred considerable resentment in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the District of Maine. Successive eighteenth-century White Pine Acts did not merely specify that marked mast trees (usually over 30 inches in diameter) were untouchable; they interdicted the cutting of
any
white pine tree, except under naval license.
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Full enforcement, one chronicler noted, could have prevented settlers from clearing land or using even small white pine logs to build a cabin.

Northern New Englanders fumed at the handful of contractors holding mast contracts, but widespread illicit logging and milling took place. The principal specialist concluded that price paid for mercantilism was in “the hardened opposition to British rule nurtured by the forest legislation on that first American frontier. When [former New Hampshire governor] John Wentworth, in 1778, told his superiors what were the shortcomings of the
forest legislation, he might have gone further and emphasized the folly of a policy which drove a wedge between the colonists and the Crown.”
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By contrast, whale oil—enumerated and bountied by Britain—tied its leading producers in coastal New England, the islanders of Nantucket, to their lucrative transatlantic market. Nantucket’s 1775 attempt at political neutrality infuriated both Massachusetts and the Continental Congress, but whaling in that era of spermaceti candles and oil lamps was a substantial and lucrative business. “From 1771 to 1775,” wrote one chronicler, “Nantucket accounted for 50 percent of colonial whaling ships, and 70 percent of the colonial catch…Nantucket whalemen annually sent out 150 ships, totalling 16,075 tons and employing over 2000 seamen.” By way of profit, “whale oil accounted for 52.5 percent of all sterling earned by direct exports to Great Britain from New England between 1768 and 1772.”
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Tiny Nantucket represented a prime example of mercantilist dependence.

Another British mandate—the 1764 requirement that pig and bar iron be shipped only to Britain—annoyed ironmasters from New York to Virginia but particularly offended Pennsylvania, the center of colonial iron making. By the mid-1770s, about one seventh of the world’s iron production was coming from North America, and two generations of British policy makers had discussed the mother country’s best approach. According to Pennsylvania iron historian Arthur Bining, as early as 1729, British forge owners had approached Parliament to draw up legislation “providing that all forges in the colonies should be destroyed, and no new ones set up.”
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However, the colonies’ agents in London blocked action. By 1735, British ironware producers followed up with a proposal to suppress all secondary iron manufacture in America. Fifteen years later Parliament hammered out a resolution. This was the Iron Act of 1750, which eliminated duties on colonial iron sent to London but required that after June 1750 the colonies could erect no additional slitting mills, plating forges, and steel furnaces (although existing ones could continue to operate). Provincial governors were instructed to monitor compliance, but Bining suggests much was never reported.
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Not a few large iron investors failed. However, those who carried on mostly took the Patriot side, especially in Pennsylvania. Ironmasters George Taylor, James Smith, George Ross, and James Wilson were all signers of the Declaration of Independence, and three other ironmasters were members of the Pennsylvania Constitution Convention.
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Much of Pennsylvania’s pre-Revolutionary iron output was shipped down the Susquehanna to the
port of Baltimore, where the Royal Navy kept watch. In 1765, right after iron was enumerated, one local merchant reported to a colleague that British men-of-war would “not suffer our vessels with iron to pass without a regular clearance the expense of which being so heavy the iron will not bear it.”
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Ironmasters, said Bining, stood for the American cause “almost without exception.”
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As for New York, Patriots had a lesser edge among that province’s iron makers: “Not all of them supported the Revolution, but few opposed it vehemently. Most ranged politically across a spectrum from passive loyalism and neutralism to Revolutionary commitment. Overall, neutrals predominated, outnumbering the patriots by two to one. The patriots, however, outnumbered the identifiable loyalists by five to three.”
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Economic constituencies in the American Revolution must weigh in any practical analysis. The very different responses to mercantilism between whale oil producers and irate pig and bar iron makers, for example, suggest less interest in imperial theory than attention to industry-by-industry economics. As for the role of economics in constituency formation, degrees of proof can be found in each of the dozen economic issues that stirred pre-Revolutionary unhappiness. The legal acrimony surrounding “taxation without representation” fell away quickly enough when nonimportation and nonexportation moved to the forefront in 1774; and whether these measures were constitutional seemed to matter hardly at all.

R
adicalism can just as easily be rural as urban, as we will see of the American backcountry in 1775. Frontier and tenant-farmer belligerence could match that of the waterfront. Nevertheless, the colonies’ principal cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—played unique pre-Revolutionary roles as the vortex of communications, opinion molding, ruling elites, political transformation, and incipient nation building. More than other locales, urban economies also reflected the radicalism of angry seamen, the rise of labor, and the increasing polarization within a great empire.

The forces radicalizing Philadelphia between 1774 and 1776 would exercise double influence, swaying not just one province but the climate in which the Continental Congress, meeting there, struggled toward independence and nationhood. Choosing the meetinghouse of the Company of Carpenters as the initial venue, not the grander colonial State House, itself augured a changing of the guard.