Conceived in Liberty (104 page)

The rebels were now faced with a situation all too common to revolutionary movements throughout history: they could easily defend themselves from their enemies, but not from their friends. Once again, a revolution confronted a betrayal by its supposed leaders. If the rebels were to submit to the amnesty, they would lose their essential revolutionary momentum. Two hundred rebels prepared to ask forgiveness before the Essex County court, but their leader, Amos Roberts, managed to persuade them by his eloquence to stand fast. As a result, only twenty-three rebels took advantage of the proffered pardon. The stunned leader of the proprietors, James Alexander, proposed that the Council alone, if necessary, pass a law declaring that all nonrepentant rebels be summarily convicted of all crimes for which they stood indicted. A fantastic breach indeed of Anglo-Saxon legal procedures!

Belcher blandly refrained from suppressing the rebels, who continued to chop down timber allegedly belonging to his proprietary. Finally, however, in the fall of 1748, the weak and uncertain Belcher allowed himself to be pressured into arresting the great rebel leader Amos Roberts for high treason. Here, indeed, was a direct challenge to the power of the revolution. The same evening a mob gathered at the Newark jail, shunted the deputy sheriff aside,
and freed the imprisoned Roberts. Belcher then asked the Assembly to curb this “sort of open rebellion” against the Crown.

The rebels increasingly justified themselves on the squatter-and-Indian grant theory, thus alienating the wealthier and more respectable Nicolls patentees, who, after all, depended for their theoretical argument on earlier, though less arbitrary, grants from the Crown. The great armed rebellion reached its height in the autumn of 1748 and spread into the proprietary timberlands of Pennsylvania. As one councillor of New Jersey exclaimed in horror: “All laws are laughed at and disregarded, and they with force cut, carry and transport timber in the face of the magistrates and defy them...”

Amos Roberts now headed a virtual people’s government in competition with the official one. He divided his domain into three wards, established courts to settle disputes, and elected militia officers. The oligarchy asserted that Roberts had also appointed assessors and collectors to obtain taxes, but the rebels themselves indignantly denied this claim—apparently they thought tax collecting a rather reprehensible act. The fervor and determination of the radical-liberal revolutionaries performed the function of pushing the vacillating Belcher and the Assembly into line. Headed by a leading rioter, Assemblyman John Low, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly to do nothing to suppress the rebels, and Belcher began to listen sympathetically to the arguments of the rebel John Bainbridge. Belcher was also helped to his new position by the threat of an Assembly leader that he would never receive a penny’s salary if he complained to the Crown against the rebels. The Council, stronghold of the proprietary oligarchs, then itself petitioned the king, which petition included a criticism of Belcher’s actions.

The timorous opportunist Belcher, ever ready to bow to the winds of pressure, now hastened to urge the Assembly to vote money to protect the jails, and threatened that, should there be any further riots, he would call in troops from another colony and set up a military dictatorship. The Assembly kept its head, even in response to his presumptuous demand, and declared the colony much too poor to afford more taxes to protect the jails. It blandly suggested an extension of the amnesty offer to the rebels. Belcher’s reaction was a letter to the king, but very weakly done and not sent in collaboration with the Council.

The British government, however, was coming into different hands, and by spring 1749 was beginning to pursue a much more energetically imperialistic policy toward the colonies. The Board of Trade was under new control; more important, the minister of foreign affairs in charge of the colonies was now no longer the Duke of Newcastle. Heading colonial policy as secretary of state for the Southern Department, from 1724 to 1748, Newcastle had been charmingly lax and had left the colonies more or less alone. But now Newcastle was succeeded by an energetic imperialist, the Duke of Bedford, who scorned Belcher and sided wholly with the feudal proprietors.

In this auspicious atmosphere for counterrevolution, Chief Justice Robert
Hunter Morris sailed to London to plead the proprietary cause. The Board of Trade’s report to the Privy Council was virtually copied from Morris’ account. But Belcher’s representations managed to mollify the board; its final recommendations in the summer of 1751 merely suggested an impartial investigating commission, a reprimand to the Assembly, and an extended amnesty. Belcher and the Assembly were greatly relieved, especially since the board had been on the point of doing something drastic: freeing the New Jersey governor from salary paid by the Assembly, or reuniting New Jersey with New York, or sending in British or New York troops to quell the rioters. Meanwhile, the riots themselves had died down as the leaders had fled the colony to escape the expected royal reprisals.

Governor Belcher, however, was getting into dire financial straits; continual conflict between Assembly and Council had blocked the legislature from voting him any salary. The Assembly shrewdly decided to gain Belcher’s support and strike a stunning blow at the proprietary at the same time, by voting to raise funds through a tax on unimproved lands. This, of course, would hit precisely at the arbitrary monopoly of unsettled lands in the hands of the proprietors. The Assembly tried to get Belcher to sign the bill and simply ignore defeat in the Council, but Belcher, though sympathetic, could not take such a revolutionary step.

By the 1752 session, no taxes had been paid in New Jersey for sixteen years and the treasury was empty and the government heavily in debt. The Assembly then decided to levy a tax on all land, including the unimproved, and on this more moderate bill the Council and Assembly compromised and agreed. The year 1752 also saw the resolution of New Jersey’s great land conflict. With the Crown out of the picture, the rebels began to take action again—and effected a jail rescue in April. The Crown having, in effect, decided against them, the proprietors decided to let well enough alone, to be content with their unsettled lands, and not to stir up revolutionary ferment. Furthermore, their Chancery suit would be decided by Belcher, who would undoubtedly find for the tenants. The proprietors then decided to drop the whole matter; the great counterrevolutionary attempt to impose feudal overlordship on settlers of the land in New Jersey had finally collapsed. The rebels and the Assembly by their determined pressure, combined with the partial assistance of the governor, had finally triumphed.

*
Morris was the first to be royal governor of New Jersey alone; before him the royal governors were only ancillary to their post as governors of New York.

*
The Reverend Daniel Taylor
of
Newark also wrote a
Brief Vindication of the Purchasers Against the Proprietors,
taking a similar view.

Pennsylvania, during the first half of the eighteenth century, was the focal center for a great wave of non-English immigration into the American colonies. The American colonies grew with great rapidity: the total population rising from 250,000 in 1700 to almost 1,200,000 in 1750, an almost fivefold increase. Of this rise, the bulk was caused by immigration, and the great part of this migration came from two non-English groups: the Ulster Scots (called the “Scotch-Irish”) and the Germans. The major part of them settled in Pennsylvania.

If the total population grew fivefold between 1700 and 1750, Massachusetts and New York populations rose scarcely more than three times, the latter’s meager growth reflecting its restrictive land policy. In contrast, the population of Pennsylvania, the newest colony in 1700, rose from 18,000 to 120,-000 in this period, a remarkable increase of nearly sevenfold. Pennsylvania was now more populous than Connecticut and considerably more than New York. This influx led to an accelerated swamping of the original Quaker element of Pennsylvania and to increasing tension between the newcomers and the Quakers. By the end of the colonial era, Pennsylvania was approximately one-third German and one-third Ulster Scot.

The Ulster Scots were the largest immigrant group in the eighteenth century. These men were, in the main, intense Presbyterians from lowland Scotland whose families had been settled in Ulster in northern Ireland during the seventeenth century. By the turn of the eighteenth century, England began to oppress the Ulstermen: a woolen act gravely crippled the export trade of Ulster weavers, a test act disenfranchised the Presbyterians, and tenants were especially oppressed and rackrented by absentee feudal English landlords.

The first great wave of Ulster Scot immigration came after the agricultural failures of 1716–17, and further great waves came in the late 1720s, the early 1740s, and the mid-1750s. By 1776, a quarter of a million Scots had come to America from Ulster.

The Ulster Scots flooded into Pennsylvania, where newcomers were particularly welcomed, and generally found their way to the western frontier, at that time in southeast Pennsylvania. The bulk of the Scots, being poor, came to America as indentured servants, and after their term of servitude had ended, received the customary allowance of land as an incongruous form of compensation. Most of the Ulster Scots thus became small farmers or squatters in such areas as the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys. Eventually, many filtered southward down the Shenandoah Valley to become backwoods frontiersmen in Virginia and Piedmont farmers in the Carolinas. Quite a few Scots, however—mainly those from Scotland itself—became businessmen and tobacco warehousemen in Virginia and Maryland. Some Jacobite Highlanders also came to America after the unsuccessful Stuart rebellions of 1715 and 1745, but these too were Presbyterians rather than Roman Catholics.

The brawling, hard-drinking Scot frontiersmen, though often fur traders with the Indians, adopted a violent, aggressive, and contemptuous course toward the natives, and tended to drive them out of their lands. This attitude brought them into sharp conflict with the pacific Quakers, concerned with justice toward the Indians. It must be recognized, however, that the bulk of Indian-claimed land was not settled and transformed by the Indians, and that, therefore, the Scots were at least justified in ignoring vague, abstract claims, whether by government or by Indian tribes, to the lands they knew that
they
were settling.

Many of the Ulster Scots were squatters on frontier land. Lacking money to pay the prices asked by the feudal proprietary, they reasoned that they were entitled to own virgin land that they themselves had cleared and tilled. They needed no acquaintance with John Locke to sense that such land was their rightful property. The Pennsylvania government tried for a long while to collect quitrents and purchase payments from the squatters, but to little avail. Several times, provincial secretary Richard Peters tried to dispossess squatters by arriving with a party of officials to burn down the cabins of the settlers, only to have the squatters rebuild the cabins and farm the land again after they had gone. At other times, the squatters fought back against government aggression.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Ulster Scots dominated the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and the upcountry Piedmont farm region of North Carolina and South Carolina. The valley settlers, remote at first from the seat of government authority at Williamsburg, developed their own customary law of settlement, which granted original property rights to land on the basis of certain marks of settlement. These marks conferring ownership included “corn
right” and “taking up land,” earned by planting crops and building a home; “tomahawk right,” earned by clearing a few trees; and “cabin right,” gained by building a log cabin. These were rough criteria usually overly generous to the individual settlers, but the system was an instructive example of rough justice emerging from customary law, developed solely by the voluntary actions of the people and without the imposition of statute or decree of the state.

It might have been expected that the Ulster Scots would choose to settle in Calvinist New England, which was closest to them in religious conviction. But subtle religious differences meant a great deal to the Puritans, and they made the Presbyterians decidedly unwelcome. Indeed, one of the first groups of Ulster immigrants, several hundred strong, arrived at Boston in 1718 to face a decidedly hostile reception. Most were shunted off to Maine and ended in New Hampshire. One group settled in the frontier town of Worcester, Massachusetts, but was promptly persecuted by the Puritans there. They were coerced into merging their Presbyterian church into the Puritan church and found themselves forced to pay tithes to support their persecutors. To the Presbyterians’ petition for relief from the tax, the Worcester township denied their right to independence from the established Puritan church. When the Scots began to build their own church, the Puritans destroyed the building. The hapless Scots were thus forced to move to the more remote western frontier and there founded settlements at Warren and Blandford.

Religious hatred was bolstered by ethnic feeling against the “foreign” Scotch-Irish and by the fear of economic competition. Bostonians also did not want their taxes to be raised to pay for expected welfare and poor relief for an influx of Ulstermen. This was understandable, but it was characteristic that the Bostonians blamed the Ulstermen instead of their own law, which provided for an escalating drain on the taxpayers for payments to any poor resident. All these factors caused a mob to form in 1729 to prevent a landing of Ulster Scots, and many migrants were prevented from landing or remaining during the next decade.

The story was the same in Connecticut. Of the original Boston group of Ulster Scots one part settled in Voluntown (now Sterling) in northeastern Connecticut. There the Scots were confronted by an official remonstrance of the town council when they obtained their first Presbyterian minister, “because he is a stranger, and we are informed that he came out of Ireland... and we are informed that the Irish are not wholesome inhabitants.”