Conceived in Liberty (152 page)

A memorandum by Lord Shelburne’s secretary, Maurice Morgann, declared the need to confine colonists to the eastern seaboard in order to preserve the West as a source of furs and to keep it as “open and wild as possible for the purposes of hunting.” Thus the fur lobby was able to triumph over the interests of the settlers, as well as over the separate interests of the various speculative land companies, now dismayed to find themselves deprived of all the fruits of victory of a war they had helped to foment. Particularly distressed was the Mississippi Company, formed by the Washingtons, the Lees, and other leading Virginians of the old Ohio Company, who had petitioned the Crown for an enormous grant of land in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

Individual settlers, however, began steadily to defy Crown policy and quietly moved to settle west of the Proclamation Line. The British military succeeded in obtaining orders from Pennsylvania and Virginia to desist from settlement, but these laws and edicts could not be enforced.

If the speculators in western lands were thwarted by the Proclamation Line, the reverse was true for speculators in lands
east
of the Appalachians, which were now the only lands open to new settlement. A boom occurred in Nova Scotia, on lands seized from the unfortunate Acadians (Benjamin Franklin picked up one hundred thousand acres there), in Pennsylvania, and in Florida. Indeed, many highly important interests in England had speculated heavily in Florida lands, interests that included the prime minister George Grenville himself, the Earl of Egremont, Earl Temple, Charles Townshend, Henry Fox, and Sir Jeffery Amherst. This speculation undoubtedly strengthened their resolve during the war to seize North America rather than the sugar islands of the West Indies.

The British rulers, during and immediately after the French and Indian War, confronted the American colonies for the first time in four decades free of the restraints imposed by the liberal Whigs within the government. The Whigs were at last out of power and hence the remaining imperial and Tory factions were able to execute a Grand Design for cracking down on the American colonies. Spurred by the wise Whig (Walpole-Newcastle-Pelham) policy of salutary neglect, and by the right to levy its own taxes, America had been allowed to flourish with a good measure of independence.
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Vital checks had been maintained upon British imperial power. Not only were trade restrictions unenforced and taxation levied only by consent of the colonial assemblies, but funds for the colonial executives were supplied only by the assemblies and thus subject to their power. Moreover, virtually no British troops had been stationed in America in peacetime. Troops had been largely confined to colonial militia, raised and paid by the colonial legislatures themselves.

The imperial Grand Design, hatched during the French and Indian War and put into effect as soon as it ended, was a comprehensive many-sided move to subject America to the British power. The vast new domains captured from France and Spain were to be occupied and administered as befitted a mighty imperial power. The laxity of salutary neglect was to be no more; all the mercantilist laws were to be strengthened and, above all, vigorously enforced; the British army was to overawe the unruly colonials by being stationed in America in force. The British army was to keep the French suppressed, rule the
newly won western lands, and help a network of royal bureaucrats enforce mercantilist restrictions. To pay for all this the British rulers hit upon a cunning expedient: the Americans themselves were to be taxed for that purpose. Thus the fractious Americans were to be forced to pay for their own suffering; to supply the funds to finance soldiers and customs agents who would enforce restrictions and taxes upon them. And a vast increase in the royal bureaucracy and the peacetime military would thus be established without imposing new levies on the already war-burdened English taxpayer. The Americans would thus be caught in a vicious circle of tyranny: the British army was to be stationed in America, largely to enforce unwelcome regulations and taxes upon them, while the major excuse for the unpopular taxes was to pay for the selfsame army.

It was a clever scheme—for the English imperial power. But the American colonists were not as enchanted with the new dispensation. Somehow, the British argument—that it was no more than justice for Americans to support the army that liberated them from the French threat—failed to impress the Americans. On the contrary, Americans, especially after the first phase of the war for the Ohio Valley, tended to regard the French and Indian War as a war for Britain and not for themselves. The crushing of Canada wasted American resources, oppressed and conscripted Americans, and wrecked their trade with Canada—all to redound to British imperial glory and the profits of London merchants. Furthermore, Americans reasoned that with the French conquered and the Indians crushed, the postwar need for a British standing army was far less, not greater, than before. They could only regard the large new standing army of British regulars as a permanent instrument of oppression. And the events of the Pontiac Rebellion and the Proclamation Line only convinced the Americans of (1) the ineptitude of the British troops as “protectors,” and (2) the use of the army to prohibit American settlement of the tempting virgin lands of the Ohio Valley.

The imperial Grand Design had been formulated as early as the wartime Pitt administration.
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For Pitt, conquest and retention of North America were to be logically accompanied by the imposition of imperial power, the ending of salutary neglect, and the stationing of an army in America. Bute, Bedford, and Grenville all had similar designs, and they envisioned Benjamin Franklin as the head of a new overall central government in America. Pitt ordered enforcement of the trade acts in 1760, and when Newcastle resigned in mid-1761,
the latter wisely wrote that “I shall certainly in and out of office oppose the continuation of the militia, in any shape, at least after the war is ended. I shall oppose any alteration that may be proposed of... received usage and practice, with regard to... our settlements in America.” Presumably Newcastle was referring to salutary neglect.

During the regime of Lord Bute, the imperial design made further strides. Bute and Parliament made a preliminary decision for a large peacetime standing army in America, which Bute planned to force the colonies to support. A new customs act pushed by Grenville, as first lord of the Admiralty, encouraged British sailors to harass smuggling by promising them shares of the booty from condemned vessels.

The final decision to station troops in America after the war was made by the imperialist Earl of Egremont, brother-in-law of George Grenville and secretary of state for the Southern Department, and by Welbore Ellis, secretary of war, and a follower of Henry Fox. Egremont and Ellis decided in December 1762 that twelve thousand troops would be stationed in America as a regular standing army, and that the Americans would be forced to pay for its support. The decision was based on the model of Ireland, where the Irish Parliament had been compelled by England to pay for the redcoat army that kept Ireland in subjection.

As liberals and opponents of strong imperial and royal power, Newcastle and the Whigs strongly opposed the large army. The crucial debate on the scheme took place in March 1763, when the army budget was submitted to Parliament (somewhat reduced to appease the instinctively liberal country gentry, who tended to oppose expansion of government power and of the budget). The Whigs argued for a huge slash in the army budget and for withdrawal of all troops from America. They thereby echoed American sentiment: the French were now conquered and the Indians controllable by the colonists themselves. Newcastle charged that “such an extensive plan of power, and military influence, was never thought of before in this country.” But the edge of Whig opposition was blunted, as so many times before, by the disruptive influence of Pitt, a maverick out of power whom the Whigs were anxious to bring into unified opposition against the ministry. Pitt, as usual the ultramilitarist and warmonger, attacked the government for not providing a bigger American army. Pitt called for bigger and better military budgets, attacked the “permanent” disarmament desired by Walpole and Newcastle, and looked forward with relish to imminent renewal of war with France, a country displaying the ill grace to continue in existence.

As a partial and immediate means to pay for this extra expense, Bute introduced a domestic excise tax on cider, along with his army budget. The cider tax extended the enforcement of the excise from retail shops to private English homes. Cider was produced by the West Country, the great center of an
instinctively liberal country gentry. Here was an issue of basic English liberties—both personal and economic—on which the Whigs could unite with the country gentry in powerful opposition.

William Pitt, though happy enough when in power to impose an excise on beer and general warrants against Dissenters, was now willing to join with the London merchants, Earl Temple, the Whigs, and the West Country gentry in bitter opposition to the tax on cider. The City of London was vehement in opposition, and the lord mayor, the aldermen, and the Common Council of London vigorously and repeatedly instructed their representatives in Parliament to oppose the tax. This pressure was characterized by a contemporary observer as “a proceeding which, though by no means illegal or blamable, has no precedent that we can recollect.”

The tax on cider was able to pass in Parliament despite the opposing coalition. But its lasting significance for America was the depth of the popular and ideological opposition that it engendered in England. Leading the opposition was John Wilkes’
North Briton,
which distributed widely and popularized the great slogan “Liberty, Property, and No Excise.” Throughout the West Country, the people rose in virtual rebellion, demonstrating, marching, resisting—and setting a welcome and instructive example eagerly observed by American colonists. Church bells were stilled, thousands marched in bereavement bearing symbols of freedom and mourning, and Lord Bute, throughout the West Country, was hung in effigy. Large bonfires consumed effigies of Bute, and freeholder meetings of protest were held in towns and counties. Above all, the people refused to pay the tax and set upon the hated tax collectors. The government proceeded to send an army to the West Country to subdue the people. But it was finally forced to repeal the provocative tax two years later.

With the West Country in virtual rebellion, Lord Bute was forced to resign as prime minister at the beginning of April 1763. Bute was succeeded by George Grenville. Grenville’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Egremont, continued as secretary of state, and Charles Jenkinson (secretary to Lord Bute), the Earl of Halifax, and the Earl of Shelburne took prominent roles in the new administration—the last as president of the Board of Trade.

The Crown did no better with the crucial part of the financing of the troops: the plan to tax the colonies. For the first time, a tax was to be imposed on the colonists in violation of the ancient English principle of taxation only when approved by representatives of the public. Sparkplug of the plan was Charles Townshend, a highly conservative Whig who had been secretary of war during 1761–62. In February 1763, Townshend was rewarded by the Crown for deserting the opposition Pelham “innocents” and Rockingham’s Whig Club, receiving appointment as president of the Board of Trade. Inspired by the devotion to royal prerogative by Halifax and Grenville, Townshend introduced a bill to tax the colonies, but even the king
attacked it as hasty and premature and Parliament rejected the plan at the end of March.

More important, in early March, the Crown, in a masterful piece of tactical management, drove the plan to station troops in America through Parliament with a minimum of opposition. The Crown had managed to defuse the oppostion by playing off the Newcastle Whigs against Pitt (his two major groups of opponents), and by confusing the potentially troublesome West Country gentry. Newcastle was muted by a threatened Parliamentary inquiry into the financial dealings of his previous administration; and the Crown counted correctly on William Pitt’s devotion to militarism to win Pitt’s charismatic support.

Despite the sometimes vehement opposition, the Crown managed to drive through Parliament the principle of a standing army in America, as well as a domestic tax on cider in partial payment thereof. The British decided to station approximately eight thousand troops permanently in North America. The disposition of these troops refutes the thesis of British apologists that the huge increase in the postwar army was needed to keep down the western Indians and to man the forts of the newly conquered interior. Of the existing force in America, the British deliberately dissolved
every one
of the units of rangers and others established during the war as specialists in Indian fighting. Rangers but not forts were useful in protecting settlers from Indians.
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There were many indications that the British intended to use their army to keep the American colonists in line and to enforce restrictions and taxes there. Maurice Morgann, secretary to Lord Shelburne, along with an associate wrote during 1763, “I have no idea that we want military establishments against the Indians” and “no danger is to be apprehended from the Canadians.” On the other hand, troops were needed “in order to awe the British colonies. The lines of forts so much talked of before the war will restrain the colonies at present as well as formerly. The pretenses for this regulation, must be the keeping of the Indians in subjection....” Another paper by Morgann succinctly summarized the Grand Design: “That the military force on that continent be increased... so that with the aid of a naval force, the whole of the provinces shall be surrounded.... That... under pretense of regulating the Indian trade, a... line be suddenly drawn on the back of the provinces and the country beyond that line thrown... under the dominion of the Indians.... The provinces being now surrounded by an army, a navy and by hostile tribes of Indians... it may be time to exact a due obedience to the just and equitable regulations of a British Parliament.” The use of the army to enforce trade restrictions and taxes in America was particularly stressed by the powerful Lord Halifax, who, after the death of Egremont in August 1763, had become secretary of state for both departments.