Conceived in Liberty (134 page)

By the sobering spring of 1746, the people of Massachusetts began to learn some of the costs of their famous victory. By the end of the winter fully nine hundred men, one-third of the victorious New England soldiery, had died at Louisbourg. This bitter pill was aggravated by the conduct of the returning British fleet. Many maltreated British seamen took the opportunity of being in Boston to jump ship, and the British officers aroused hostility by rounding up and killing two of their sailors, as well as press-ganging American seamen to replace the deserters. Assemblymen from Boston and other seaport towns reflected popular wrath against Eliakim Hutchinson, one of Shirley’s favorites who had been a leading contractor of supplies to Louisbourg, and was in charge of procuring seamen in the colony. In the 1747 election, the Massachusetts Assembly removed Hutchinson from the Council, and tried its best to have him dismissed from his judicial and military posts.

Shirley, however, remained undaunted and pressed on the plan for a massive attack on Quebec, the key to Canada. Pelham at first used a French offer of peace to veto such aggression, but Newcastle and Pelham were soon forced to agree, in order to appease the war-minded at home. However, resistance to the heavy taxes needed for the campaign grew rapidly in the Massachusetts legislature. Again, a heavily inflationary issue of paper money was put through. Voluntary enlistment dried up from the dread example of Louisbourg, but Shirley quickly drafted a frontier garrison, and other colonies supplied men: New York furnished 1,600 and Connecticut 1,000. The promised British troops never arrived, thus ending the prospective expedition, and unhappy soldiers and sailors began to desert en masse in the summer of 1746. When constables tried to arrest the deserters, they were assaulted by the local populace. And frontier posts, stripped by Shirley for the epic expedition, were overrun by the French and their Indian allies.

Shirley was still fanatically eager to press the attack in December, even without British aid, but was overruled by the good prudence of his associates and the other New England governors. Finally, Shirley’s dream of a great 1747 expedition was destroyed by Newcastle’s firm canceling of all British plans for the attack. Shirley would have pressed on regardless, but neither the other colonies nor Massachusetts would go along.

There was method in the madness of Shirley’s persistent and almost frenzied zeal for more and bigger wars. His ties of friendship and political alliance were held together only by the tenuous band of continuing mutual profit. The end or even the slackening of war meant lower government spending, diminished war contracts, lower patronage, slackened inflation, and tighter credit. And almost immediately, Shirley’s plundering friends—the Waldos, Hancocks and Kilbys—grew sullen and restive.

By November 17, 1747, the British fleet was ready to sail out of Boston for Jamaica; it still faced the problem of replacing its numerous deserters. A massive British press-gang swooped down upon the Boston docks, seized almost fifty laborers, and dragged them to the ships. An angry Boston crowd of several hundred quickly gathered and began looking for British officers. The sheriff and his deputies were severely beaten. The mob captured several British officers as hostages for the impressed Americans and then marched on Governor Shirley himself, who was harboring several other officers. The mob denounced Shirley for supporting the impressment. For a while, Shirley was able to cow the crowd into releasing a few officers but then the mob regained its courage and began to attack the governor’s house. A deputy sheriff was beaten and put into the stocks. The mob shifted their attack to the Council room and Shirley was particularly disturbed to find that the local militia refused to obey orders to assemble and put down the riot. The mob’s courage finally faltered, however, in attacking the Council and governor himself, but they did burn an oil barge and they
still held several British officers. Shirley finally found it best to flee to the safety of the island fortress of Castle William. The British naval commander Charles Knowles reacted as a true military man, threatening to shell Boston until his men were released, but the wiser Shirley finally prevailed upon him to agree to the mob’s demands and release the impressed colonists. The rioting was over, and the rebellious citizens of Boston had won their vital point.

Governor Shirley, considerably shaken, termed the riots an “insurrection.” The Assembly had given him no trouble, but he railed against various democratic town meetings and especially against the “mobbish factious spirit of Boston.” Shirley complained that Boston was being run by the “lower orders”—poverty and a low status in life being common charges to hurl against one’s political enemies.

The successful riot had brought home their power to the people of Boston, and brought to a head the mounting opposition to the Shirley regime. After the riot, the opposition became far more vocal than before. The
Boston Independent Advertiser
led a determined attack on Knowles and on Shirley’s war policies, including the inflation. Dr. William Douglass, the great hard-money economic theorist, denounced Knowles as a tyrant and a “monster of wickedness.” Shirley, smarting under the criticism of the
Independent Advertiser,
asked the General Court to censure the paper. The subservient Council agreed, but the Assembly rejected the proposal overwhelmingly.

Governor Shirley, longing for the good old days of all-out war, again projected a great intercolonial expedition for 1748, this time against the French fort of Crown Point at Lake Champlain. But Massachusetts had issued an enormous amount of paper money in the three years of war and the money was already depreciating rapidly. Tax monies were pledged far in advance for redemption of the paper. Shirley realized that the neighboring colonies would have to join the expedition, and he proposed quotas of aid from each colony. But the other governors—even in New York, which bordered on Crown Point—summoned no enthusiasm for the scheme. Furthermore, peace was nearing, at last, in Europe under the clever guidance of the Pelhams, and once more Shirley’s grandiose vision of aggression and conquest had to be abandoned.

In the meanwhile, sensing the approaching end of their joint bonanza, the faithful Waldo began to loot with might and main, deducting perquisites from the soldiers’ meager pay for deigning to supply them with arms and clothing. Waldo also pocketed the assets of dead soldiers and sold their muskets. At Shirley’s request for an accounting, Waldo flatly and indignantly refused. Shirley, fearful of breaking with the machine of Waldo’s friends and relatives that had been his political support, did nothing. But Waldo broke with Shirley for his slackening of enthusiasm for the former’s speculations.

At the same time, another disappointed contractor, James Allen, made himself a leading spokesman in the lower house on the impressment issue. Feeling in Boston and the seaport towns was continuing high. To all of this a special bitterness was added in Massachusetts when England handed Louisbourg back to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. To the colonists this seemed the final betrayal of American blood and tears by the mother country.

The people of Boston and Massachusetts had still more important grievances against the government. The threat of impressment especially affected New England seamen because their terms at sea were far shorter than those of the English sailors, who were used to very long voyages. The threat of impressment induced a considerable emigration of sailors from Boston to Newport. Even more damaging were the extremely heavy losses suffered by the cream of Massachusetts’ labor force in King George’s War. Boston’s and Massachusetts’ manpower suffered very heavy losses during the war: at sea, in Louisbourg, on numerous expeditions in the West Indies. One estimate holds that twenty percent of Boston’s manpower was killed in three years of King George’s War! This monstrous decimation, coupled with high taxes levied for public relief to widows, emigration, and the aftereffects of inflation, greatly depressed the economy of Boston—the only American city failing to expand in the years following until 1760.

During the wars of the 1740s, a halfhearted attempt was made by the Crown to enforce the trade regulations on the Americans, particularly prohibitions on trading with the enemy. After the war, Admiral Knowles complained to the newly energetic Board of Trade that Newcastle had ignored his complaints of colonial trading with the enemy, and that he had to proceed on his own to enforce the law. The military mind could not appreciate the mutual benefits of free exchange, even with a so-called enemy. But the colonial merchants
did
appreciate these benefits and happily continued the trade.

Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were important centers of this commerce, but the great emporium of trading with the enemy was Newport, where the deputy governor William Ellery allowed ships to clear the port without troublesome inspection. One method of evasion was through neutral Dutch middlemen in such West Indian territories as Surinam and St. Eustatius. Another was direct trade under cover of fake prisoner exchanges. Ships would be legally authorized, under official flags of truce, to exchange prisoners at the French West Indies. But apart from the few token prisoners, trade was happily carried on by these ships. Flags of truce were purchased from colonial governors and a market in these flags flourished in the colonies.

By 1748, then, the American colonies, prospering under the liberal Walpole-Newcastle policy of salutary neglect, stood as almost self-governing colonies, in fact though scarcely in name. In each colony, the lower house,
or Assembly, took the lead in this self-government with increasing effect. Although Robert Walpole had been ousted as prime minister in 1742, his policy of salutary neglect was substantially continued by Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham, who succeeded as prime minister the following year. But, in the absence of the political might of Walpole, the shades of night were beginning to close on the relations between Britain and the American colonies. Newcastle, while still powerful in the government, was succeeded in the post of secretary of state for the South by the aggressive imperialist John Russell, the Duke of Bedford. But Bedford could do little harm in the colonies so long as the liberal Lord Monson continued as president of the Board of Trade. The death of Monson in 1748, coinciding with the end of the war in Europe, gave Bedford his chance to try to move toward an end of salutary neglect, and to end the flourishing smuggling in the American trade. Newcastle attempted to replace Monson by the latter’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Leeds, who, in Newcastle’s words, needed “some office which required little attendance and less application.” Bedford, however, managed to overrule Newcastle, and to install at the Board of Trade his follower George Dunk, the Earl of Halifax.

Halifax now set about in a determined attempt to bring the American colonies to heel. For several years, the Board of Trade pressured the higher authorities with a series of reports deploring the lack of enforcement of the mercantilist regulations in the colonies, and calling for the replacement of salutary neglect by enforcement of the laws. Failing to convince Pelham and Newcastle to change their ways, Halifax tried a power play to have himself appointed to a new post that he proposed—a separate secretary of state for the colonies. He failed to achieve this goal, but did manage to obtain, as sop, slightly enlarged powers over the colonies for the Board of Trade in 1752. Promptly the board began a persistent campaign to require the colonial governors to obey its instructions, and to try to wrest from the Assemblies a permanent revenue for the royal governors and their administration.

The Board of Trade could do little on its own, however, particularly in the face of determined opposition by the colonial Assemblies. In 1756, the outbreak of a new war with France forced Halifax to suspend his imperial activities for the duration. At that point, imperial control over the colonies was scarcely greater than eight years before, when Halifax had begun his efforts. But this very failure set the stage for a new and far greater push for restoration of control over the colonies when the war was over, a push inspired by increasing fears by the nonliberal forces in Britain that colonial independence had nearly gotten out of hand.
*

One example of the failure of Halifax to crack down on smuggling in the colonies was the case of the Philadelphia firm of William Allen and Company, which had become prominent in the smuggling trade from the French West Indies, and was thus able to undersell the “legitimate” importers. By a happy arrangement, the royal collector of customs, whose task it was to enforce the laws, was Abraham Taylor, who happened to be a member of the Allen firm. Taylor’s pursuit of the policy of salutary neglect is hardly surprising.

*
John A. Schutz,
William Shirley
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 84.

*
On Halifax’s efforts after 1748, see Jack P. Greene, “An Uneasy Connection,” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds.,
Essays on the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 68–74.

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle left unresolved the main force for war in European relations: the insensate desire of the English war party for imperial expansion and aggression. The powerful war party was headed by the Duke of Cumberland, the favorite son of King George II, a military leader who had well earned the title “butcher” in suppressing the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland in 1745; Cumberland’s protégé Henry Fox; the Duke of Bedford, at the powerful post of secretary of state for the Southern Department; and, above all, William Pitt. The half-insane Pitt was the prototype of a modern politician: possessed of a charismatic personality, Pitt’s oratory could sway the masses for ever more grandiose war programs. Yet there was method in his madness. Pitt was consistently the spokesman for the imperial clique of London merchants and financiers. Underneath the cloud of patrioteering verbiage that could mobilize the masses, a hard core of vested economic interests was being effectively pursued.