1775 (46 page)

Moderates grew more skeptical in January, and New York became the prominent naysayer when its Assembly rejected a Patriot-faction attempt to approve the Continental Congress and its trade agenda. The local Committee of Sixty, an extralegal maritime organization on the Patriot side, took the lead in calling a New York provincial convention, which launched a Provincial Congress. This congress then endorsed the Philadelphia agenda and the Continental Association in late April.
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Four of New York’s thirteen counties—Westchester, Dutchess, Richmond, and Kings—simply disregarded the Association, and others were hostile. Only two counties—Yankee Suffolk in eastern Long Island, and mid-Hudson Ulster, with its Yankee emigrants and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians—displayed enthusiasm and commitment. A third, Albany, endorsed, but with misgivings. This blend of apathy and disdain, however, made New York seem a voice of reason in London. Indeed, by March, views on the Association were fast becoming the operative measurement of colony-by-colony loyalty in the British calculus. Lord Dartmouth cherished any signs of empathy. In consequence, the only provinces to avoid March and April coverage under the Restraining Acts were the four (New York, Delaware, North Carolina, and Georgia) that had registered partial or substantial dissent over the Association.

To underscore the centrality of these issues, in mid-March, after Dartmouth had received a detailed report on the activity in Virginia from Lord Dunmore, he replied as follows: “The steps which have been pursued in the
different counties of Virginia to carry into execution the resolutions of the General Congress, are of so extraordinary a nature that I am at a loss to express the criminality of them.” He promised to read the letter to Parliament so that Virginia’s trade would be interdicted in the manner of Boston’s.
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The emergence of tobacco as a Patriot weapon particularly incensed Britain. In the summer of 1774, even before the Continental Congress met, the tobacco colonies, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, had led in promoting a new nonexportation policy. Once Congress’s deliberations turned to trade issues, Marylanders and Virginians focused on the date when nonexportation would begin. That reflected the drawn-out calendar of the 1774 tobacco crop, which would not be cured and readied for sale until 1775. Nonexportation, growers argued, had to be stretched out accordingly. A year’s proceeds were involved. Despite considerable impatience, the delegates had acquiesced. Virginia, being so important, had effective veto power.

Nonexportation, of course, represented the hitherto untried direct assault on Britain’s imperial system. We will examine several pages hence the decisions made in 1774 and 1775 with respect to all three major enumerated crops—principally Chesapeake tobacco but also South Carolina rice and indigo. The purpose, for the moment, is simply to place the southern colonies front and center in the great drama that unfolded first at the Congress and then between its adjournment in October and the convening of the new Congress in May 1775. These three enumerated crops, worth roughly £2 million in 1772, were the prime fruit of mercantilism in British North America.

Save for Georgia, the plantation colonies were quick to endorse the First Congress and the Association. With relatively radical Annapolis and Baltimore taking the lead, a Maryland Provincial Congress—not the Assembly, vulnerable to a veto—met in November to approve the Congress’s proceedings and to recommend “inviolable obedience” to the Association. Virginia, in turn, simply let the organization of its county committees continue apace, and its Second Provincial Convention in March voted its unanimous approval of what happened in Philadelphia.
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Internal divisions complicated matters in North Carolina, where tobacco was an eastern regional interest. In November a meeting of the Patriot-faction elite held in coastal Wilmington called a Provincial Congress for April. Its membership was virtually identical to that of the North
Carolina Assembly. The distinction was that Royal Governor Josiah Martin could not veto the Convention’s handiwork: a strong endorsement of both the First Congress and the Association. However, Martin had helped to arrange a counterpoint. Nine counties, most in the backcountry, where the antitidewater Regulator movement still had supporters, sent no delegates to the Convention. Four sent loyal addresses to Martin condemning the Association’s “lawless combinations and unwarrantable practices.”
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South Carolina, also dominated by a low-country Patriot elite, used a January Provincial Congress instead of the Assembly to endorse the Philadelphia proceedings and the Association, but all went smoothly. Circumstances and events in Georgia, slower to develop, were more complicated. Save for St. John’s Parish, Yankee-settled and pro-Congress, Georgia had paid little attention in 1774 and had sent no delegate to Philadelphia. By spring, it belatedly played catch-up and sent delegates to the Second Congress.

This is critical history. To underscore the political attention and pressure imposed by the Association and its relentless calendar, the following pages list the various deadlines and start-up dates specified by the First Continental Congress. This calendar ensured that enforcement committees, especially those in seaport towns, would be vitally engaged—their political credibility hanging in the balance—during the six months through May, when the new Congress was expected to convene. If Britain’s decision between war and retreat left little choice, the putative United Colonies had put their future on the line. Legal, procedural, and technical as the Association may seem, its significance between late 1774 and the spring of 1775 is hard to overstate.

The Calendar of the Continental Association, 1774–1775

Sources: Knollenberg, pp. 180–82; Schlesinger, pp. 607–13.

As we have seen, disparate political figures from Patriot John Dickinson to Tory Joseph Galloway looked beyond the pretense of unity at the First Continental Congress and saw autumn’s events as signaling, if not quite declaring, war. The Congress’s handiwork can fairly be taken as a triple ultimatum for Britain: to refrain from suppressing Boston militarily; to repeal the Coercive Acts and other parliamentary legislation reaching back into the 1760s that was unacceptable to the colonies; and to make this redress by May 1775 or Congress would implement the nonexportation portion of its trade agenda. In a way, the delegates in Philadelphia, consciously or not, had replied to what they called the Intolerable Acts by drawing up a set of demands that the British government, by its own legal and imperial yardsticks, would find equally intolerable. As early as September 1774, even before London had reports from the first Philadelphia Congress, Lord North began to focus on strategies for retaliation: “If they refused to trade with Great Britain, Great Britain would take care they should trade nowhere else.” By early January 1775, Dartmouth, as American secretary, had made some suggestions, and the Cabinet, in what one British historian called “a direct riposte to the Continental Association,” thereupon recommended “that a bill
be moved for in Parliament to prohibit for a limited time the associated colonies from trading to foreign ports and from carrying on fishing in the American seas.”
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On February 4, the Cabinet approved temporary legislation to prohibit American trade outside the empire and bar American access to the North Atlantic fisheries, but limited its initial application to the four New England colonies. On March 9, after the trade and fisheries bill—the New England Restraining Act—passed in the House of Commons and was sent on to the House of Lords, Lord North obtained leave in the Commons for a second act to restrain five more colonies—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina—for assenting to the Association. In the House of Lords, which passed the second bill on April 12, Lord Suffolk, a principal secretary of state, spoke bluntly of an underlying motivation that went beyond trade: “It was intended as a bill of coercion, to oblige the people of New England to submit to the legal and just power of the mother country.” Two months earlier, on February 2, Lord North had laid groundwork for the New England Act by saying that there was a rebellion in Massachusetts, countenanced by support elsewhere.
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This, in a nutshell, was the war-related sequence that preceded Lexington and Bunker Hill. It was premised on rebellion in Massachusetts or all of New England; and it equated membership in the Continental Association with disloyalty and criminal behavior (Dartmouth), although the Crown’s lawyers hesitated over an equation with treason. In 1775, the imperium-cum-mother country moved into a state of war through findings of local rebellion (Massachusetts and New England), imposition of commercial restraint (March–April), and royal declarations that all thirteen colonies were in a state of rebellion (August) and then outlawry (December). Being a colony was in many ways a commercial relationship and subordination.

It would be convoluted, but possible, to follow the calendar of the Continental Association on the previous pages with a calendar of British commercial and naval retaliation. It spans much the same time period, and indeed the captains of British warships patrolling along the Atlantic coast had to deal with almost as many deadlines, technicalities, and starting dates as the members of a Committee of Inspection in Salem, New London, or Annapolis. We will return to this subject matter.

The Remaking of Local Government

Implementation of the Association within the colonies was not uniform. The thirteen were permitted to differ in how they elected or selected their enforcement committees. Colonies also diverged in how many members their subdivisions chose to fill the new supervisory groups. The four vanguards, Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, and South Carolina, were among the most expansive, using oversize committee memberships to broaden and strengthen community support. These four together named roughly half of the participants in all thirteen colonies.

Local enforcement bodies had different names from colony to colony, although most were called committee of observation or committee of inspection. In some cases, previously established committees of correspondence piled these new commercial chores on top of their existing obligations. North Carolina, forming its own local Association in August right after Virginia, designated committees of safety to implement the new rules and kept to that.
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Tories who groused about government by associations, conventions, and committees had a point. By whatever names, their local activities and responsibilities soon ranged far beyond the initial subject matter—checking ship cargoes, tracking the origins of goods, watching prices charged by merchants, and monitoring local customs houses. Committees in inland areas, lacking any maritime duties, ranged widely in affairs ranging from regulating the practices of merchants to supervising militia organization, saltpeter procurement, and the administration of loyalty oaths.

Within each colony, these new supervisory bodies were usually elected through processes laid down by provincial congresses, conventions, or even committees of correspondence. However, the new committees did not routinely report to these higher authorities. They were
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“extralegal.” Even so, the extent to which residents in most colonies accepted the mandates of these organizations as having the force of law surprised royal governors—William Franklin in New Jersey, Josiah Martin in North Carolina, and Lord Dunmore in Virginia.
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By late 1774 and early 1775, these and other irritated governors cited the enforcement committees alongside the congresses and conventions in explaining to Lord Dartmouth that they had lost much or almost all of their ability to govern.
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New England’s committees were invariably elected by township,
counties being secondary in Yankee culture. This ensured a large head count, but that was already characteristic of elected assemblies in the four colonies. According to the principal chronicler of these organizations, historian David Ammerman, Massachusetts established at least 160 committees, typically with about ten members each, which suggests a province-wide roster in excess of 1,600. Connecticut, in turn, counted more than 650 committeemen, and New Hampshire at least 400.
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All three colonies had a town-based Congregational Church establishment, and the new inspectorates would have overlapped with both Congregational elders and existing town boards of selectmen. Rhode Island had no church establishment and fewer townships, but its committees probably included at least 135 persons. Across New England, 300-odd committees toiled amid a winter-spring drumbeat of powder alarms, secret meetings, and militia drills.