Conceived in Liberty (171 page)

Having tried and failed to induce Pitt to join the cabinet, the Rockingham ministry met on January 17 to decide the strategy for repeal. Within the cabinet a fierce struggle raged, with Attorney General Yorke reluctant on repeal and insistent on the harshest possible declaratory act asserting the absolute sovereignty of Parliament over the colonies. Yorke pressed alone for a specific declaration of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, but was overruled by Rockingham and the final version of the Declaratory Act.

In the meantime, a flood of petitions for repeal by merchants and manufacturers was deluging Parliament. Their zeal was intensified by the sharp drop in exports to America caused by postwar depression, trade restrictions, and boycotts by American merchants. Exports to America had fallen by seven hundred thousand pounds from 1764, a drop of over twenty-five percent. Furthermore, unemployment was now severe in the export industries, especially in shipping, and fears grew of riots by the restless unemployed. Above all, Americans owed English merchants and financiers a mass of debt, and fears of default bestirred almost every merchant in England. Total American debt to England at this time has been estimated at nearly five million pounds. And all this to be sacrificed for the sake of a stamp tax designed to yield an annual revenue of only sixty thousand pounds! Skillfully timed, petitions for repeal poured into Parliament on January 17 from the merchants of Bristol, Lancaster, Liverpool, Leeds, and Halifax, from the manufacturers of Manchester, Leicester, and Bradford, and from the wool manufacturers of Yorkshire. Additional petitions soon came from Jamaica and from over twenty towns and cities, including Birmingham, Coventry, Nottingham, and Glasgow.

The Rockingham ministry’s almost exclusive stress on the
economic
reasons for repeal and its blurring and playing down of constitutional reasons, while perhaps effective in the short run, stored up great trouble for the future. William Pitt’s speech was generally misinterpreted as only denying Parliament’s power of
internal
taxation of the colonies; whereas Pitt, as well as the colonists, denied all taxation imposed by the mother country, and agreed only to the latter’s power to regulate the trade of the colonies. The Rockingham ministry, anxious to appease its vehement opposition, decided to stress the weaker limits, and to give the impression that the arbitrary internal-external distinction was that of the colonists also. Thus, when Pitt and his friend George Cooke tried to bring the petitions of the Stamp Act Congress—which clearly denied the right of
all
parliamentary taxation—before Parliament, the administration managed to suppress their hearing.

In keeping with this soft-sell strategy, of the forty or so administration witnesses appearing before the House on the Stamp Act, the featured American was none other than Benjamin Franklin.
*
The deft and witty Franklin pleased the administration, not only by stressing the economic consequences rather than moral or political rights, but also by raising and stressing the old arbitrary and flimsy distinction between internal and external taxation that he and his friend Richard Jackson had originated over two years before. Nor was that all. Franklin changed the terms of the debate by his mendacious assertion that his was the dominant American argument. A completely rejected and bizarre distinction of Franklin’s and of a few of his cronies was elevated by the wily Franklin to become in the eyes of the English the official stand of the American colonies.

On February 3, two weeks before introducing the motion for repeal, the Rockingham ministry introduced some sugarcoating for the forthcoming pill, the Declaratory Act. This bill asserted full parliamentary authority over the colonies. The crucial question of whether the power extended in full or in part to taxation was deliberately left ambiguous, as sop to all factions. Here Rockingham overrode the objections of the arch-conservative Whigs Attorney General Yorke and his brother, the Earl of Hardwicke, who urged that the right to tax the colonies be inserted into the bill. From the other side, Newcastle believed that the declaratory bill went too far. In Commons, Colonel Isaac Barré and William Pitt made a tactical error and tried to weaken the declaration; by losing they gave the impression to all England that the bill did include the power to tax the colonies. The Declaratory Act passed Parliament overwhelmingly, with only Pitt and a few hard-hitting liberals opposed in the Commons, and Lord Camden leading the handful of opponents in the Lords.

At this point, however, the Tory opposition counterattacked with a resolution calling for armed enforcement of the Stamp Act in the colonies. On February 6, the Lords carried the resolution by three votes, and Bute’s vote in favor was a clear signal of the king’s true wishes. The vote, ominous to the administration, reflected an alliance of the Bedford, Grenville, and Bute forces. The next day, the elated Grenville introduced a similar enforcement resolution into the House of Commons. Grenville’s motion was roundly defeated by a vote of 274 to 134. Its defeat indicated a critical turning point in the entire parliamentary struggle. The leading arguments in opposition to Grenville varied from those of the cynical Townshend, who favored force but first wanted troops to be built up in America, and of Pitt, to those of the impassioned Whig generals Conway and Howard, who threatened to maim or kill themselves before killing fellow men who were, in the words of Howard, “contending for their liberty.”

The opposition had used poor tactics. The sight of their defeat on the enforcement issue staggered the politicians, and paved the way for the repeal of the Stamp Act. The motion for repeal was introduced on February 21 and passed early the next morning by a vote of 275 to 167. This was the decisive though not the final vote, and the people of England rejoiced throughout the land. The government had feared an insurrection at home if repeal had not passed; the industrial towns had threatened to send mobs to Westminster to enforce their demands for repeal. As it was, the throng of merchants outside Parliament cheered Conway and Pitt and hissed and threatened George Grenville. The bells of London’s churches rang all day at the happy news; ship captains broke their colors; manufacturers began to rehire their workers; and merchants put their ships to sea once more.

The debate in the Lords opened on March 11. The lead for repeal was taken by Whig Lords Dartmouth, Newcastle, Grafton, Richmond, and Camden, and against by Halifax, Temple, Bute, and Bedford. The repeal passed the Lords by 105 to 71, with thirty-three Lords issuing a special public protest against it as weakness and surrender. The repeal was officially signed on March 18, to the accompaniment of more celebrations throughout the country.

Despite this signal victory, as well as such other accomplishments for liberty as making general warrants illegal and repealing the hated cider tax, the Rockingham ministry was close to collapse. The king hated the repeal and during the Revolutionary War was to recall it as his only political regret. Most of the King’s Friends had voted against the repeal. Pitt was refusing to back the administration; by his grandstand play he had succeeded in making himself rather than the ministry the hero of the merchants and of the Americans.

*
The Whigs were not above using bribery. None other than Major Thomas James, the anti-American hard-line commander from New York, was bribed with a very large sum to testify in Commons in favor of repeal of the Stamp Act. See Bernhard Knollenberg,
Growth of the American Revolution, 1766–1775
(New York: Free Press, 1975), p. 23.

The glorious victory over the Stamp Act was of course celebrated throughout the American colonies. Houses were lit, songs composed, and toasts drunk to the English champions of repeal. Throughout the colonies, the Sons of Liberty triumphantly directed the celebrations, and in later years were to celebrate the anniversaries of this and such other great occasions of resistance as August 14. The victory was generally interpreted as a victory also for the right of the colonists to tax themselves. Moreover, the vague Declaratory Act was not thought to assert the right of taxation over and above the right to legislation and regulation. The various colonial assemblies drew up addresses of thanks to the king and Parliament for the repeal, but did not at all yield their constitutional stands.

But amidst their rejoicing, the more farsighted colonists saw the evils inherent in the Declaratory Act, harbinger of taxation to come. George Mason, a leading Virginia planter, replied sharply and trenchantly to a condescending letter by leading English merchants warning the colonists to behave themselves and not exult over their victory. The colonists, answered Mason, were tired of being treated as schoolboys, who are to “do what your papa and mama bid you.” The Americans have been fighting for their “birthright” as freemen, and have only gained common justice. Mason reminded the merchants that the stoppage of trade brought by resistance was a critical factor in repeal. He also detailed the infinite cost and trouble, perhaps including international war, that total military enforcement would have brought. Mason also warned of the suspect vagueness of the Declaratory Act, which failed to exclude taxation from the parliamentary domain.

In Charleston, Christopher Gadsden and the Sons of Liberty—one of the
hardest-hitting and most-uncompromising Sons groups in the colonies—were not taken in by the general rejoicing. In a prophetic speech to the Sons at Charleston’s Liberty Tree, Gadsden warned of “the folly of relaxing their opposition and vigilance,” or of indulging the fallacious hope that Great Britain would relinquish “her designs and pretensions.” Gadsden noted the ominous implications of the Declaratory Act, and the Sons all joined hands and swore to eternal defense against tyranny. Furthermore, by mid-July, Silas Downer, a lawyer and secretary to the Providence Sons of Liberty, was writing to the New York Sons urging the need for maintaining the Sons’ effective intercolonial organization, as well as the intracolonial one, especially in view of the Declaratory Act and the consequent need for vigilance to preserve the rights of Americans.

But men like Downer, Mason, and Gadsden—as well as writers in such papers as the
Boston Gazette
—were voices crying in the wilderness. Americans were all too willing to relax and abandon themselves to the general rejoicing at victory. The Sons of Liberty organization largely evaporated, although the leaders continued to be active, especially on ceremonial occasions.

Despite the general lull among Americans, a strong residue of revolutionary radicalism remained from the Stamp Act crisis. People began to call into question more examples of existing British tyranny. For instance, in New York, some began to call for abolition of the customshouse and the royal post office as being unconstitutional and oppressive. And in Massachusetts the Whigs cemented their political hold on the province: the Council was purged of pro-Tories and a blacklist of thirty-two supporters of the Stamp Act in the Massachusetts House was drawn up—men whom John Adams scorned as “stamp men” and trimmers—and those thereon were largely purged in the elections of 1766. Sam Adams’ continuing popularity was shown by his receiving the largest vote of the four Boston representatives, and the radicals’ purge cleansed the Council of such Tories as Hutchinson, the Olivers, and Benjamin Lynde. The embittered Tories denounced the liberal victors as subverters and “scum,” while John Adams exulted at the total triumph. From this point on, the Council, dominated by the wealthy liberal merchant James Bowdoin, marched with the House on the side of American liberty.

In August 1766, trouble flared up with the British; the redcoats summarily cut down the Liberty Pole in New York City. Swiftly, the Sons, though largely disbanded, rose to the occasion and engaged in a protest meeting of several thousand people. During the meeting, British troops fired into the crowd, wounding several people. Finally, the Sons triumphed by building another pole and refusing to allow the soldiers to patrol the streets. A minor incident perhaps, but indicative of strong latent resistance beneath the new surface of imperial harmony.

For the moment, however, relations with Britain would continue to look rosy, and the Rockingham ministry, spurred on by Trecothick, Fuller, and the
English merchants, managed to lower the molasses duty from threepence to one penny a gallon—another great boon to American trade and prosperity. Export duties on British West Indian sugar were removed, lowering its price on the American mainland. Still, American trade was at the same time hobbled by requiring that all colonial products shipped to northern Europe had to clear through British ports. Free ports were opened to colonial trade in the West Indies. But here Alderman Beckford, the Fullers, and the West Indian merchants, backed as usual by Pitt, sharply opposed the end of their monopolistic privileges. Pitt’s maneuverings on this issue, indeed, helped to pull down the Rockingham administration. Pitt’s enmity was also fueled by his vehement opposition to Rockingham’s long-run plans for the repeal of the crippling restrictions on American trade embodied in the Navigation Acts.

The Whig idyll of peace and noninterference was indeed doomed to be only an interlude, though a highly important one. The king, more eager than ever to dump the Whigs but anxious to avoid the resurgence of Grenville, selected William Pitt to head the cabinet in August 1766. The king could now select Pitt as head of a Tory imperialist cabinet, while the deluded Americans would cheer the appointment of a supposed libertarian and champion of the colonies. Pitt’s maneuvering and intrigues had finally paid dividends. His appointment was in fact hailed by the misguided Americans, but the colonists were not to remain under illusions about William Pitt for very long.