Conceived in Liberty (156 page)

Historians have unfortunately woven around the Ward-Hopkins controversy the neo-Marxian myth that the two sides waged a class struggle, the Hopkins group representing the “radical farmers” and the Ward faction the “conservative merchants.” Actually both parties had similar liberal principles and both were equally democratic in a highly democratic colony—where nearly eighty percent of the adult males were eligible to vote. In addition to personal disputes, the two factions roughly represented sectional interests: the Hopkins forces represented Providence and the north, and the Wardites, Newport and the south. The controversy was
sectional
but not
class;
each group represented a similar economic congeries of agriculture, trade, and finance. This should not be surprising when we remember that
on the market,
farmers, merchants, and financiers are not in conflict or even competitive with each other; each occupational group is interdependent, and together they form a harmoniously integrated network of production and exchange, each benefiting from the others’ activities. Competition, not conflict, existed between two such commercial complexes as rising Providence and relatively declining Newport. Both factions, then, were interclass. Thus Hopkins was backed by the influential Brown brothers, leading merchants of Providence, and by the wealthy and aristocratic Wantons of Newport. Samuel Ward, on the other hand, was a farmer and small-town merchant who was no more wealthy than his rival, Hopkins. As Professor Lovejoy puts it: “Farmers and merchants
alike supported Ward or Hopkins for reasons not directly related to the position either candidate or voter held in society.”
*

What then did the Hopkins and Ward groups quarrel about? About the essentials of government in any era or any country: allocation of the privileges to be derived from government, and of the burdens to pay for these privileges. The essence of government is an exploitative rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul process, and the jockeying of factions is to become as much of the Paul and as little of the Peter as possible. The perquisites of government in the Rhode Island of that day were largely: public funds for bridges, lighthouses, schools, and public works; letters of marque to allow ships to be privateers upon the enemy (during wartime); grants of monopolies to businesses; and grants of permission to businesses to build dams, or to towns to hold lotteries.

Particularly important was the allocation of the tax burden. When the Hopkins faction came to power, the colony’s taxes fell more heavily upon the southern towns and more lightly on the northern; and the reverse was true when the Ward group was in the saddle. A general atmosphere of local rebellion against taxation then began to permeate the colony. The northern towns began to refuse tax payments during a Ward regime, and the southern towns became delinquent during a Hopkins period. Each set of towns could wait for an
ex post facto
vindication when political fortunes would change. Seeing this, the towns of the factions
in
power began to take advantage of the situation and quietly cease to pay. As a result, tax refusal and tax delinquency permeated Rhode Island. Here was a particularly strong reason for Rhode Island’s bitter resistance to the prospect of parliamentary taxation. The Rhode Islanders were paying very little colonial taxes at all, and neither the Ward nor the Hopkins faction had any wish to disturb this idyll by becoming subject to levies from England.

*
David S. Lovejoy,
Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution: 1760—1776
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1958), p. 14. See also Mack E. Thompson, “The Ward-Hopkins Controversy and the American Revolution in Rhode Island: An Interpretation,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(July 1959): 363–75.

Neither was New York laggard in protesting the molasses tax. The New York Assembly appointed a committee in September 1764 to draft a protest against infringing the right to be taxed only by consent. The Assembly approved the committee’s statement the following month and, unlike Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, made absolutely no concessions to a supposed expediency. The historian Bernhard Knollenberg justly called the New York Assembly’s addresses (one each to the Houses of Commons and Lords, and the king) “among the great state papers of the pre-revolutionary period.”
*
Thus the Assembly’s “Remonstrance and Petition” to the Commons took its stand against taxation without representation squarely on the
natural right
of private property. The exemption from such taxation was not simply a privilege but a “natural right of mankind... a Right... inseparable from the very idea of property, for who can call that his own which can be taken away at the pleasure of another?” The petition expressly repudiated the artificial distinction between internal and external taxation, since “all impositions, whether they be internal taxes, or duties paid for what we consume, equally diminish the estates upon which they are charged.”

The New York petitions were prepared by three New York City lawyers, the liberal leaders of New York: John Morin Scott; William Smith, Jr., who wrote the drafts; and the eminent liberal William Livingston, the leading theoretician. As early as March, Livingston had written of his implacable hostility to the “deep-formed and steadily prosecuted plan of the British ministry... to reduce us by degrees
to
perfect vassalage.” A judiciary appointed by the Crown, “a standing army among us (a measure absolutely inconsistent
with civil liberty),” “and... now... the crushing the trade of North America in such essential articles, as must... [reduce] us to beggary. Should they also carry another favorite point... subjecting us to the payment of the national tax, we should certainly... envy the superior political happiness of the French....”

The boldness and daring of New York’s action was undoubtedly traced to the shock of a recent message by Governor Cadwallader Colden, ordered by the Board of Trade. Colden urged the unilateral annulment of a huge land grant of eight hundred thousand acres that had been given by Governor Cornbury to thirteen grantees in 1708. Underlying Colden’s urging was a threat of further parliamentary coercion to annul the grant. By 1764, ownership of this tract—the Kayaderosseras grant, between the Hudson and Mohawk rivers—was widely distributed through all the leading families of New York Province. The sudden suggestion for abrogation of the grant, almost a half-century later, came as a severe blow to New Yorkers, who also scented a precedent for other reevaluations of land titles. The questioning of the Kayaderosseras grant was ostensible altruism in behalf of the probably defrauded Mohawk “sellers” of the land. But the Assembly correctly suspected chicanery behind the altruistic mask. All the Crown officials involved stood to gain handsomely by the annulment. Governor Colden stood to earn ten thousand pounds, his fee for regranting the Kayaderosseras land; Colden’s son, Alexander, four thousand pounds in fees as surveyor general of land in New York for the regranting; the Crown itself would gain from an increased annual quitrent payment of over one thousand five hundred pounds for negotiating the lands; and Sir William Johnson, the Crown’s superintendent of the northern Indians who pushed the Mohawk claim, had received overlapping land grants—from the Crown and from the Mohawks—of over one hundred thousand acres in the same area. Colden agreed to back Johnson’s highly dubious Indian claim after Johnson offered him ten thousand acres from the tract. The New York Assembly swiftly and angrily rejected the whole scheme and no doubt its reaction radicalized the assemblymen into taking a firm, principled stand on the molasses tax.

*
Knollenberg,
Origin of the American Revolution,
p. 205.

Pennsylvania’s protests were among the most anemic in the colonies. A major reason was undoubtedly the restraining influence of Franklin and Jackson. The Pennsylvania Assembly, in September 1764, declared its opposition to taxation by Parliament, but was too timid to follow its sister colonies and send the protest to Parliament or the Crown. Instead the Assembly quickly, quietly, and privately sent its conclusions to Richard Jackson. For a while, it even promised to send Jackson an alternate plan for raising a colonial revenue, probably the scheme of the ever-helpful Franklin that would pay interest to the Crown on a new all-colonial paper currency.

Perhaps the major reason for Pennsylvania’s timidity as well as Franklin’s, was the scheming of the (nonpacifist) Quaker oligarchy of eastern Pennsylvania, with whom Franklin was allied, to perpetuate their control of the colony. As the Germans and the Ulster Scots poured into western Pennsylvania, the older Quaker settlers became a distinct minority of the population; yet their districts still commanded a majority representation in the Assembly. Thus, the three Quaker counties of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia (excluding the city of Philadelphia) had far less than half of Pennsylvania’s population in 1760; yet they sent twenty-four representatives to the Assembly out of thirty-six. Demands for correcting the increasing inequity of Pennsylvania representation were mounting, and the Quaker oligarchs calculated that if the province shifted from proprietary to royal government, they could manage to dominate a Crown-appointed Council and thereby keep control of the government. Hence, Benjamin Franklin, appointed as Pennsylvania’s agent in London in the fall of 1764 to press for a change to royal government, wrote from London that English Quakers would back the cause and thus prevent
“their friends in Pennsylvania falling totally under the domination of Presbyterians.”

Seeking important favors from the Crown, the Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Assembly felt that it could not press any opposition to a favorite measure of the Grenville administration. Principle yielded to the subservience of the courtier.

With Franklin, Jackson, and Franklin’s close ally Joseph Galloway committed to a pro-Crown position as against the proprietary, Pennsylvania politics were in danger of being sidetracked by a struggle over the proprietary system. In the midst of this trend, one great leader arose to take a determined libertarian position: against
both
Crown and proprietary. The lone voice was John Dickinson, a young lawyer, who in May 1764 warned of the “blaze of royal authority” that would follow replacement of the proprietary. Only Dickinson warned clearly of the impending aggrandizement of the imperial power and of the dangers of a British standing army. He also pointed out that the proprietors had cooperated closely with royal policies and therefore that the Crown could hardly serve as a relative paladin of liberty. While denouncing the exactions and evils of proprietary rule, Dickinson hailed Pennsylvania’s unique liberties: complete religious freedom, absence of test oaths, a unicameral elected legislature unhampered by an appointed Council, absolute Assembly control over its own meetings, and
annual
elections. In contrast, Joseph Galloway sought the blessings of “royal liberty,” and Ben Franklin proudly and accurately proclaimed that he had constantly and uniformly “advanced the measures of the Crown, ever since I had any influence in the province.”

John Dickinson’s emergence as head of the liberal opposition to the tyrannical moves of the British Crown occasioned a new political lineup in Pennsylvania. On one side was an antiroyal coalition of western Ulster Scot Presbyterians, urban Philadelphians, and a handful of proprietary men; on the other was a conservative party headed by Galloway and Franklin based on the (nonpacifist) Quakers of the eastern counties surrounding Philadelphia. Professor Jacobson concludes: “For John Dickinson 1764 marked the beginning of his important political leadership.... His arguments in 1764 showed not essential conservatism, as historians have so frequently charged, but a belief in the more radical idea that fundamental rights could not be altered without the consent of the governed, an idea that clearly foreshadowed the American position in the Revolutionary crisis of succeeding years. Dickinson’s early and perceptive analysis... supports his own later claim that his stand against royal government marked the beginning of the Revolutionary struggles in Pennsylvania.”
*

*
David L. Jacobson, “John Dickinson’s Fight Against Royal Government, 1764,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(January 1962): 85.

New Jersey sent no official protest whatever to England. Robert Ogden, Speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, was, during August, inspired by the June 1764 circular letter of the Massachusetts Assembly urging “all the colonies to unite and exert themselves to the utmost to keep off the threatening blow of imposing taxes, duties, etc. so destructive to the liberties the colonies hitherto enjoyed....” Ogden pressed for a special session of the legislature, but none was called, perhaps because of the recalcitrance of New Jersey Governor William Franklin, son of Benjamin. However, in September, two members of the New Jersey Council, Samuel Smith and Charles Reade, and a member of the Assembly, Jacob Spicer, formed themselves into a “Committee of Correspondence for West Jersey” and sent off a protest to the colony’s London agent. The committee asserted that “we look upon all taxes laid upon us without our consent as a fundamental infringement of the rights and privileges secured to us as English subjects, and by charter.”

In a letter to the Governor of South Carolina, Attorney General Cortlandt Skinner of New Jersey riddled the defense argument used by Great Britain. The British troops in the Indian country, “far from protecting,... are the very cause of our Indian wars, and the monstrous expenses attending them.... All we want with [the Indians]... is their trade, which we can never enjoy... until we remove their [suspicion].” When that is done, Skinner pointed out, the colonies will enjoy the security of the days they knew before the war, when there were virtually no English troops stationed in America. Skinner also noted that the French and Indian threats were now removed and therefore even fewer troops were needed for “defense.”