Conceived in Liberty (169 page)

Connecticut saw the earliest and most fiery public meetings held by the Sons of Liberty, which was quickly emerging from its initially secret status. A meeting at Pomfret soon followed, and the citizens of Wallingford on January 13 promised to oppose the Stamp Act “to the last extremity, even to take the field.” Sons of Liberty in other colonies were soon inspired to follow suit and similar meetings ensued during early 1766 in Providence; New York City, Oyster Bay, and Huntington in New York; New Brunswick, New Jersey; Cecil County, Maryland; Leedstown and Norfolk, Virginia; and Wilmington, North Carolina—all pledging resistance to the uttermost and “with our lives and fortunes.” The eminent liberal Congregationalist devine, the Reverend Charles Chauncy, thundered that regardless of cost the colonists will continue
the fight from the interior against any British army of repression until the invaders have been driven into the sea. “Daughters of Liberty” arose, who swore to marry no one who was not willing to resist the Stamp Act “to the last extremity.” Marylanders swore to “fight to the last drop of their blood,” and armed resistance was deemed inevitable even in Quaker Philadelphia.

Advanced strategists among the Sons of Liberty realized that revolutionary armed conflict against a British force would require coordination among the rebels in all the colonies. To this end, they moved toward a union of the various Sons of Liberty organizations. Mock funeral processions for liberty appeared on November 1, 1765, in Sons of Liberty demonstrations in Portsmouth, Newport, Baltimore, and Wilmington, perhaps by coordination. But the first formal step toward unity took place in a December 25 meeting at New London, Connecticut. There two delegates of the New York Sons met with the Connecticut Sons and ratified an agreement of mutual military aid against any British armed attack. They also pledged attempts to seek similar agreements from the Sons of Liberty in all of the colonies.

For the next few months, correspondence flew back and forth between Sons organizations throughout the colonies, pledging mutual assistance and proposing boycotts against any colony that might submit to the Stamp Act. Colonel John Durkee and Colonel Israel Putnam of the Connecticut militia promised the aid of ten thousand well-armed men should New York be attacked by the British. Massachusetts and New Hampshire were also able to command an armed force totaling forty thousand. The two New York agents, in the meanwhile, proceeded to Boston, where they procured the allegiance of the Boston Sons to the mutual aid association. Boston soon wrote to Portsmouth and all the towns in Massachusetts urging them to join the Sons of Liberty association. The Providence Sons of Liberty sent out circular letters to other Sons pledging aid to any other harassed colonies. The Providence Sons pledged three thousand men to the cause and eagerly approved a union of the various Sons organizations throughout the colonies.

In early February, the New York Sons appointed a committee headed by John Lamb to correspond with all other Sons of Liberty for mutual aid, and with a view to wielding united action against a possible British attack. The Lamb committee corresponded with Sons organizations as far away as South Carolina. The South Carolina Sons, furthermore, pledged five hundred men to assist Georgians if necessary to get rid of their stamped paper. Connecticut soon organized a unified colonywide Sons of Liberty in a convention at Hartford on March 25, which called for an intercolonial association. This was followed by unified colonywide Sons organizations in Maryland and New Jersey. The New Jersey organization of a unified Sons of Liberty was the most elaborate. Each town was to elect delegates to a county convention, which would in turn select delegates for a convention of the colony. On both county and provincial levels, the Sons appointed committees of correspondence.

Sons of Liberty organizations also expanded throughout New York, especially in Albany, Huntington (which appointed a correspondence committee), Oyster Bay, and Fishkill. By March, the New York City Sons were in command of a sizable armed militia. Local organizations were also stimulated in all the other colonies by active and urgent correspondence from the New York, Boston, and Connecticut Sons. Only in Pennsylvania were the Sons of Liberty relatively weak, with no correspondence committee established and no firm response to the growing intercolonial revolutionary movement. Governor Penn reported in late March that though attempts by the British to enforce the Stamp Act would probably meet with united armed resistance from all the Sons of Liberty, traveling agents of the Sons had met little response in Pennsylvania. The cause of this weakness was admittedly the strength of the Franklin-Galloway Tory faction in Philadelphia and environs.

From committees of correspondence and mutual associations of aid, the next obvious step was a unified central Sons of Liberty organization for all the colonies. The first concrete proposal for such a union came from the New York City Sons, which on April 2 urged a “Congress” of the Sons “to form a general plan to be pursued by the whole....” But there was no chance to weld such a unity, for soon the happy news arrived of the repeal of the Stamp Act.

Britain’s choice to repeal staved off what undoubtedly would have been an American revolution in 1766. It is idle to speculate on what the result of such a revolution would have been, but it is very likely that the colonies would have been more united against the universally hated Stamp Act than they would be a decade later. On the other hand, since the focus was on just a single tax grievance, it would be far easier, as events later proved, for Britain to end the revolutionary resistance by simply repealing the tax.

*
Lysander Spooner,
No Treason, No, 1
(Boston: privately printed, 1867), pp. 12–13.

Considering the tough ultraimperialist policy Britain had been pursuing toward the American colonies, we may well ask: How did it finally come to choose the alternative of appeasement and repeal? And when every imperialist instinct certainly called for a tough crackdown on the presumptuous, impertinent, and presumably traitorous colonists?

The chief clue to the answer was the fall of the arch-imperialist Grenville ministry in July 1765. King George had never liked Grenville personally, and Grenville’s attempt to exclude the king’s mother from being selected regent in case of the monarch’s incapacity from illness was just about the last straw. Grenville’s open insult to the king’s mother was caused by her long-time liaison with the generally hated Earl of Bute. Accordingly, King George removed Grenville and replaced him with an ultra-Whig ministry headed by the Whig leader, the Marquis of Rockingham, and including the venerable Duke of Newcastle as Lord Privy Seal. The bulk of the rest of the cabinet was new and young blood, headed by the fighting liberal General Conway as secretary of state for the Southern Department.

But the liberal millennium had scarcely arrived in Britain. The new ministry was held in general contempt. Clearly, Rockingham commanded nothing close to a majority in Parliament, and only the king’s whim kept him in office. Everyone expected Rockingham’s imminent fall. In this context, repeal of the Stamp Act was scarcely assured, but at least there was now a fighting chance.

Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham, was at this point a young man in his thirties and the political leader of the wool-raising district of Yorkshire, as well as of the Whig movement. From his early years, his mentor in Lockean ideas of liberty had been Sir George Savile. Under Savile’s
guidance, Rockingham had studied at a center of liberal thought, St. John’s College, Cambridge, under John Newcome and Bishop Samuel Squire, at one time secretary to the Duke of Newcastle. The young, shy, and gentle Marquis was not, however, cast in a heroic mold.

The Rockingham ministry, friendly to the Wilkite cause, quickly quashed general warrants and the persecution of the Wilkite press, and removed the persecutors from office, while the “massacred innocents” were restored to their public posts.

The chief test of the Rockingham ministry, however, would come in December when Parliament would meet. Newcastle, as usual, tried desperately and fawningly to get William Pitt to join the cabinet so as to ensure a parliamentary majority, while Pitt as usual scornfully refused to enter any cabinet where he did not enjoy absolute power. Grumbling about the lack of a warlike spirit among the Whigs, Pitt remained aloof—in effect aligned with Grenville and Temple in maintaining opposition to the Whig ministry.

Several factors joined to enlist the Rockingham ministry in a drive to repeal the Stamp Act. There was, in the first place, the liberal ideology of the Whigs, and, in particular, the long and honorable record of the Duke of Newcastle’s salutary neglect of the colonies. Second, the Whigs were close to many of the merchants of England, and the merchants who traded with America were especially eager to repeal the Stamp Act.

The English merchants trading with America had been hurt by the American Revenue Act and by the whole program to enforce mercantilism upon the colonies. They suffered directly as traders and indirectly in the loss of American markets caused by the British restrictions. Their devotion to repeal of the Stamp Act was further strengthened by the decision of the leading American merchants to boycott importation of English goods. The boycott was shrewdly designed to pressure the English merchants. It began shortly before November 1, when two hundred New York merchants and retailers signed an agreement to cease importing from Britain until the Stamp Act was repealed. They were followed by four hundred Philadelphia merchants and traders a week later, supported by Philadelphia retailers and then by two hundred and fifty merchants and traders of Boston. These agreements were joined by merchants in Albany, in rural Pennsylvania, and in Salem, Marblehead, Plymouth, and Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Compliance with the boycott was remarkably widespread. Only a few violations occurred. But in these cases, the radical merchants turned to violence to enforce their policy. The first breach occurred in late April in Philadelphia. There, the Committee of Merchants ordered imports from Liverpool seized and locked up until news of repeal should arrive. Shortly afterward, goods from Bristol arrived at New York and were seized by the Sons of Liberty, to be returned promptly to England.

The principle of the secondary boycott was also applied against any exports
to American ports where the stamp tax was being observed. Thus, for the short while that Georgia was using stamped paper, the Charleston Fire Company, consisting of small businessmen-artisans, organized a boycott of all exports to Georgia. In late February, the Charleston Sons of Liberty, growing out of the fire company, threatened destruction of a ship about to export rice to Georgia, as well as murder of the exporters. The offending merchants thought it wiser to submit. The people of Newburyport, Massachusetts, after threats had failed, informed customs officials of violations in order to stop a schooner from sailing to Halifax, a port using stamped paper.

Joined to the slackening of imports due to the restrictions and taxes, the boycott helped to cement and intensify the clamor of British merchants to repeal the Stamp Act. Another aid, as we have seen, was the stoppage of some of the civil courts that enforced debt payments to English creditors. The clamor was joined by the newly burgeoning English manufacturers, who were in danger of losing their American markets, and the merchant-planters in the West Indies, who, in contrast to their vested interests in restricting the molasses trade, wanted the incubus of the stamp tax on their markets removed. This was the first time in English history that manufacturers were mobilized for a political cause.

The Duke of Newcastle had long been one of the best-informed Englishmen on American affairs, and he was always in close touch with merchants in the American trade, especially their leader, the radical alderman Sir William Baker. As early as May 1765, the London merchants in the American trade had chosen a Select Committee to battle oppressive legislation and taxation of the colonies. During August and September, the merchants of Liverpool petitioned the government to repeal Grenville’s oppressive acts in order to relieve the depressed state of trade, and they were followed by the manufacturers of Manchester and of the Yorkshire cities.

All this pressure had particular meaning for Rockingham. The Marquis was the political leader of Yorkshire and close to the wool manufacturers there. He was also a relative of the powerful Wentworth family of New Hampshire, and was therefore very likely to favor their presentation of the American point of view. One of the joint agents for New Hampshire in arguing against the stamp tax was John Wentworth, nephew and future successor of Governor Benning Wentworth, and John exerted considerable influence upon Rockingham. Also close to Rockingham was former Boston merchant and now MP John Huske, who had been born in New Hampshire. Other influential New Hampshire agents were the John Thomlinsons, senior and junior, who were close associates of Newcastle.

The Rockingham ministry was inclined not only for reasons ideological, social, and economic to work for the repeal of the Stamp Act and other repressive restrictions on the colonies, but for compelling political reasons as well. For one thing, the merchants and manufacturers, joined to the London
radicals, could provide the Whigs with a mass base for influence upon Parliament. For another, the focus could then be on discrediting Grenville by highlighting the evil consequences of the actions of his administration.

The British press kept the public well informed of the developing opposition to stamps in America. Patrick Henry’s resolves received full publicity in England. When news of the numerous American riots and actions of the Sons of Liberty began to be published in mid-October, Newcastle made a swift decision: to drive for outright repeal of the Stamp Act, a decision backed by Sir George Savile.

In early December, the London merchants, led by Barlow Trecothick, an eminent merchant born in Boston, organized a committee to mobilize mercantile and manufacturing sentiment and to pressure Parliament, then in the process of opening, for repeal of the Stamp Act. Trecothick was selected for this task by Rockingham, Newcastle, and the Whig ministry. Trecothick was another joint agent of New Hampshire, as well as a partner of the Thomlinsons in the American trade. He was also a radical alderman from London and an important adviser of Rockingham. Trecothick sent a crucially important circular letter, inspired by Rockingham and William Burke, to thirty of the leading trading and manufacturing towns in Great Britain. Letters were also sent to individual Whig leaders in the various towns, urging them to take the lead in organizing the various petitions to the government. This letter, which has been called “The Principal Instrument in the Happy Repeal of the Stamp Act,” soon bore fruit in a deluge of petitions to Parliament for repeal of the Stamp Act, from over twenty towns and cities including Bristol, Liverpool, and Manchester. The petitions, of course, stressed not the moral or political rights of colonies, but the grievous economic effects of the measure for trade in the colonies and at home.