1775 (45 page)

I
n considering America’s place in the transatlantic economy, the colonial leaders of 1775 suffered from an unfortunate but understandable self-importance and overconfidence. Not only did the mainland colonies boast a fast-expanding population and a large agricultural surplus, but their growth and seemingly vital importance to the future of the British Empire was a topic of conversation across the European continent from Paris to Potsdam.

Twice during the decade before 1775, the British government had backed down on taxing the colonies after the latter moved to boycott British manufactured goods. The rising dependence of some British industries on colonial North America was a matter of statistics. Transatlantic buyers took
over half of a growing list of exports—wrought iron and copper, beaver hats, cordage, nails, wrought silk, printed cotton and linen. Flannels and worsteds were not far behind. Politically, goods makers from Manchester, Birmingham, and dozens of other towns were ready to petition Parliament at the drop of a colonial order book.

As a result, boycott advocates in North America became convinced of their ability to force Westminster to retreat on unpopular policies. Then in late 1774, push came to shove over Congress’s Continental Association and its unprecedented trade ultimatum. Colonial pressures had counted in the retreats of 1766 and 1770. In the former year, the hated Stamp Act had been retracted after colonial buyers’ tactics appeared to cause a 15 percent decline in exports to America. In 1770 Parliament scrapped its Townshend levies of 1767—except for the one on tea—after a second display of boycott damage. British exports to the colonies had fallen 38 percent between 1768 and 1769, a shrinkage that Lord North, the first minister, acknowledged in presenting the government’s repeal program to the House of Commons. But he downplayed responding to colonial pressure, crediting instead the weight of petitions from British manufacturers and merchants.
¹

The Patriots of 1774, too ready to consider both pullbacks as proof of the colonies’ new stature and commercial muscle, would have done better to pay close attention to the March 1770 parliamentary debates. North had emphasized the need to end a seven-year pattern of inconsistent policy tied to ever-changing ministries and policy makers: “Our conduct has already varied greatly with respect to America. These variations have been the greatest cause of difficulty.” George Grenville, the architect of the ill-fated Stamp Act, agreed: officeholders, he thought, had “given way from one step to another, from one idea to another, till we know not upon what ground we stand.” To Wedderburn, the solicitor general, even the partial repeal bill they were debating was “a step further in that repeated contradiction which has obtained with America.” Such “fluctuations of administration,” agreed another Cabinet member, Henry Conway, had sapped government credibility.
²
That was certainly true.

The incessant politics of faction had also contributed. The Whig rivals who had displaced Grenville and come to power in 1766 were younger and inexperienced, as well as relatively pro-American. They had repealed the Stamp Act more readily on both counts. The 15 percent decline in exports to North America was only one factor.

In the 1770 debate, North freely acknowledged that the 1767 Townshend
Act levies, the brainchild of an earlier ministry, had been commercially misconceived. Proponents had naïvely sought “American” revenue by placing duties on certain products—paper, lead paints, and glass, for example—principally manufactured in
Britain.
Besides, as some repeal-minded petitions pointed out, such added levies only encouraged the colonists to think about making these items themselves. North’s new regime was rectifying another ministry’s mistake.
³

What too few in Boston or Philadelphia appreciated was that although prior colonial boycotts and nonimportation measures had influenced both retractions, by 1770 British domestic politics and a wariness of confusion and inconstancy counted more. Trade boycotts and nonconsumption were not necessarily a proven or reliable weapon. Moreover, with so many British policy makers fuming over previous retreats and conciliation, no softness would be allowed a third time.

As for the far-reaching demands made by the American Congress in 1774 through the Continental Association, the Cabinet could be expected to rule out concessions to any such extralegal body. The Americans who assumed another British retreat were naïfs or worse. Overconfidence is the best explanation of why so many were willing to rely on the Association, to all but declare commercial war, and to wait expectantly for four or five months for word to come back of British acquiescence.

Naïfs of a different sort were plentiful in Whitehall and Westminster. After almost a decade of British vacillation, by early 1774 many policy makers apparently believed that when Britain, the world’s greatest empire, did belatedly crack down on its presumptuous colonials, the latter would turn craven. Silly boasts in this vein by generals and colonels have already been recounted. If the Boston Tea Party was a provocation that Parliament could not be expected to bear, the harshness of the Coercive Acts, enacted between three and six months later, may have reflected a bravado akin to the colonists’ own.

Simply put, no modern British precedent existed for such a sweeping punishment of a major English-speaking city as the Boston Port Act imposed. The £2,000 fine the Crown had imposed in 1736 on Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, because of the lynching of a town guard captain (who had fired on and killed members of a crowd of customs rioters), bore no parallel. That punishment, cited as an analogy by parliamentary supporters, was piddling alongside the Coercive Acts.
⁴
Lord Chatham and other opponents called the Port Act “too severe.”
⁵

In America, as news of Parliament’s multiple coercions arrived ship by ship, jolt by jolt, disillusionment by disillusionment, budding rebels coined their own irate description: the
Intolerable
Acts. By late May, several provinces were consulting about responding through unprecedented trade embargoes. By midsummer a Continental Congress had been agreed to for early September. True, the other colonies had put aside Massachusetts’s initial plea to retaliate with an
immediate
nonimportation and nonexportation measure. Even so, a half dozen had indicated willingness to support that approach in the near future should a congress endorse it. In England, meanwhile, Parliament had been prorogued on June 22. Many if not most of its members went home for the summer confident that tough measures would now prevail. That belief was misplaced; economic warfare was about to begin.

The Politics of Winter Delay

Before the First Continental Congress left Philadelphia on October 26, 1774, tired delegates had determined that, absent the redress demanded from Britain, a successor should assemble seven months thence on May 10. That delay was expected to allow Parliament and the king time to review Congress’s decisions and then respond. As the chronology on
pages 228
–
229
has shown, warlike words were already flowing, and as October ended, elements of mobilization were visible on both sides: Massachusetts arming, Gage fortifying Boston Neck, the king issuing Orders in Council to stop unauthorized westbound shipments of arms and munitions. With faster communications between Britain and America, fighting might well have begun more quickly.

London had no text of Congress’s ultimatums until December, but strong hints began arriving in August. To prepare for a crisis, on September 30 the king and Lord North called an October 1774 general election, hoping for an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons ready to support a firm American policy. This they achieved, winning a Gibraltar-like 321 seats. On November 18, King George wrote to Lord North that “the New England Governments were in a State of Rebellion,” and “blows must decide.” Crown officials discussed prosecutions for treason. But before long, holiday lassitude took over. As one bemused participant noted, “Lord North is gone to Banbury, Ld. Rochford to his seat, and there is the appearance of all the tranquility which might be expected if America was perfectly quiet.”
⁶
On January 25, when the Cabinet finalized a decision to risk war through
aggressive action in Massachusetts, dispatches were much delayed in London, and adverse winds slowed passage to America. Gage in Boston, who back in September had urged the government to start hiring mercenaries, did not receive January’s actual march-and-subdue instructions until April 14. It was a notable delay even in a winter of notable delays.

October’s Patriot guesswork that a British response would take five to seven months proved out. Patriot organizers had most of winter and spring to embody their newly elected and appointed committees and train their reconstituted militias. Members of Congress who had expected even in September to face war—Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Patrick Henry, to name three—clearly understood that a countdown was beginning. When the Congress returned in May, the United Colonies would already have in place a four-to-eight-month-old network of committees of correspondence, observation, and safety. During 1774 eight colonies—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina—had also inaugurated extralegal provincial congresses or conventions. Royal governors tried to block these initiatives, but without success. South Carolina had set up a comparable General Committee, which turned into a Provincial Congress. Connecticut and Rhode Island were already effectively self-governing. The principal laggards were New York and Georgia.

In these provincial and local organizations, we can identify the first framework of local government elected under congressional auspices. The hundreds of county, city, or town committees that Congress had recommended to be elected under the Association—as well as the local ones set up earlier by Virginia and North Carolina—soon widened their supervision of commerce and local economies into an assumption of political and police power. Trade supervision had become a framework for redistributing political authority.

The wintertime North Atlantic would keep uncertain moderates and impatient radicals on edge again a year later in 1775–1776. Loyalists hoped, during those months, for reassurance from the mother country; committed radicals bet on further events to intensify popular disenchantment. But the waitful winter hiatus most critical to the future United States was that first one, in 1774–1775.

The New Calendar of Economic Mobilization

Boycotts and local implementing committees were familiar enough. Non
importation
had been tested in the 1760s; it was nonexportation that had
barely gone beyond conversation. The bolder commitment reflected how many Patriot leaders had been discouraged by experiences with merchants and soured by problems of intercolony collaboration. Stalwarts now relied on two new components. First, an unprecedented mandatory boycott of British imports by American
consumers.
A bigger bet would then be placed on the non
exportation
to Britain of the thirteen colonies’ most valuable enumerated commodities: tobacco, rice, and indigo. These new strategies would be implemented by Patriot-led enforcement committees able to orchestrate—foes said
coerce
—public compliance and acceptance.

In contrast to the previous boycotts, the Association of 1774 would be much less dependent on the economic interests and uncertain politics of merchants. Many of them had soured on Patriot politics during disagreements over nonimportation policy in 1769 and 1770. Burdensome costs had been part of merchant disillusionment. By 1774, artisans, mechanics, and yeomen itched to play a much greater part, especially in promoting local manufactures. They would be enlisted for more prominent roles. Stunned British officials and American Loyalists who called Congress’s measures revolutionary were absolutely right.
⁷
However, the implications for social as well as economic upheaval took awhile to sink in because the Continental Congress initially projected an image of unity and moderation.

The first colony-level associations, put forward in August by Virginia and North Carolina, had called for local nonimportation to begin in November 1774. In October Congress scheduled commencement in December. However, counties in the Old Dominion, beginning their committee elections in August, had some already in place before the congressional delegates had headed home. Starting dates were adjusted. Eventually, at least 51 of Virginia’s 61 counties selected committees.
⁸

New England was just as enthusiastic. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress endorsed the proposed Association in December 1774. It tacked on local regulations aimed at Boston’s Tory merchants, who were distrusted for allegedly cheating during nonimportation five years earlier and for refusing to support nonimportation in May as a response to the Boston Port Act.
⁹
The Connecticut Assembly had acted earlier, unanimously approving the proceedings of Congress, including the Association, in November. By year’s end, 28 town committees had been appointed.
¹⁰
The Rhode Island Assembly approved in December. New Hampshire sidestepped a veto-wielding royal governor, using a Provincial Convention to approve the
Association unanimously in January.
¹¹
In New England, committees and boycotts, like military preparation, were on a fast track.

The near-unanimity that surrounded the Congress’s authorship of the Association in October was an extraordinary coup, although it weakened as the measure’s implications sank in. It provided several months of vital comity and reassurance, especially helpful in the middle colonies. The New Jersey Assembly approved the Congress’s actions and endorsed the Continental Association in January, in the process neatly outmaneuvering Royal Governor William Franklin. Legislators in Delaware agreed in March 1775, despite considerable opposition in the southern part of the colony. Surprisingly, the conservative Pennsylvania Assembly had acted in December to endorse the Congress and ratify the Continental Association.
¹²
Pennsylvania was especially interested in encouraging American manufactures, which the Association had endorsed in glowing terms.