Conceived in Liberty (180 page)

It was no accident that Alexander McDougall tried to emulate Wilkes. Wilkes had indeed been the hero and the inspiration of the libertarian movement on both sides of the Atlantic. This was particularly true in the period since his incarceration in June 1768, an imprisonment which continued until the spring of 1770. During his term in jail, Wilkes’ supporters ran him successfully four times for Parliament in Middlesex; but four times he was denied his seat by Parliament itself. After the third rebuff, a mob surrounded the royal palace shouting, “Wilkes and no king,” and was dispersed by troops.

The connections between Wilkes and the American liberal movement enhanced each other’s knowledge of events in the other land. We have seen that the Boston Sons of Liberty struck up an extensive correspondence with Wilkes in prison. On October 5, 1768, the Boston Sons wrote admiringly to Wilkes that he was “a martyr to universal liberty.” Among the prominent Bostonians who wrote to Wilkes were Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., John Adams, Sam Adams, Dr. Thomas Young, Joseph Warren, William Palfrey, and Josiah Quincy, Jr. One Bostonian reported that he had dined with Wilkes in jail and that they both had toasted, “To the King, to Liberty, the
FARMER
[John Dickinson], and James Otis, Esq. of Boston....” The closest connection between Wilkes and the American liberals was Arthur Lee, a Virginian living in London. Keeping in close touch with the Wilkite movement through Lee were such leading Americans as John Dickinson and Arthur’s brother, Richard Henry Lee. Arthur Lee was responsible for a clause in the Wilkite Middlesex petition denouncing the oppression of the colonies by Great Britain. Others who served as a liaison between Wilkes and the American
libertarians were George Hayley, Wilkes’ brother-in-law, who was the English commercial agent for John Hancock and William Palfrey; and Lord Sheriffs William Lee and Stephen Sayre, American-born merchants who were mercantile partners of a prominent Bostonian.

Wilkes then added oppression of the colonies to the catalog of oppressions for which he habitually denounced the British government. In February 1769, the Boston Sons wrote to Wilkes that “the fate of Wilkes and America must stand or fall together.” Wilkes replied at the end of March that Britain had imposed an “Asiatic despotism” on Boston by sending in troops, and he pointed to a parallel between the actions of the soldiery in Boston and those in London.

Unlike the more timorous Whigs, the Wilkite radicals attacked the Declaratory Act and favored far more liberty for the colonies. As the Wilkite leader the Reverend John Home eloquently declared: “When the people of America are enslaved, we cannot be free; and they can never be enslaved whilst we continue free. We are stones of one arch, and must stand or fall together.”

On February 20, 1769, the supporters of Wilkes formed the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights to raise funds to finance the Wilkite cause. Many prominent American liberals, including Samuel and John Adams, were members of this society.

Organizing a mass petition campaign to protest Wilkes’ repeated expulsion from his rightfully won seat, the Wilkites went on to denounce the entire Parliament as unrepresentative and therefore corrupt, and this charge helped to radicalize opinion in America. The petition campaign, organized by the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, swept not only London, Westminster, and Middlesex, but also Essex, Surrey, Kent, and the West Country, including Devon, Cornwall, and the town of Bristol. The American Henry Cruger, head of the Independent Society of Bristol, organized a petition in mid-July, signed by half of the five thousand eligible voters of Bristol, protesting both the cruelties to Wilkes and the “unpolitic and unconstitutional taxations and regulations on Your Majesty’s colonies.” Protest against oppression of the American colonies was also made by the Middlesex and London petitions. Most of the petitions were brief and did not mention America, but nonetheless drew the hearty support of the colonists.

In close association with the Wilkite Society, the Whigs—including Rockingham, Savile, Dowdeswell, and Edmund Burke—successfully organized petitions in the northern and western counties of England. All in all, sixty thousand people, over one quarter of the voters of England, signed the Wilkite petitions—a true mass movement. Despite frantic attempts, the government was only able to organize counterpetitions in support of a hard line toward Wilkes and the Americans, from the two controlled universities, four counties, and two cities.

The enthusiasm of Americans for Wilkes and his cause was indeed enormous.
This rhapsodic credo of one American pamphlet, widely circulated in Boston in 1769, was typical:

I believe in Wilkes, the firm patriot, maker of number 45. Who was born for our good. Suffered under arbitrary power. Was banished and imprisoned. He ascended into purgatory, and returned sometime after.... I believe in the spirit of his abilities, that they will prove to the good of our country. In the resurrection of liberty, and the life of universal freedom forever. Amen.
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The Americans were wont to compare Wilkes to their seventeenth-century libertarian heroes Milton and Sidney; and their seventeenth-century Republican view was enlivened by the resurgence in Britain of such embodiments of tyranny as standing armies, arbitrary judicial procedures such as general warrants, and burdensome taxation. This harking back to the highly relevant seventeenth-century struggles was fueled by the publication of the multivolume
History of England
by the noted libertarian Catherine Macaulay. The work of Mrs. Macaulay, a correspondent of James Otis and an admirer of Dickinson, was well known and eagerly read in America, as was Wilkes’ own published introduction to his projected history of England at the turn of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Macaulay was the sister of the prominent London Wilkite alderman John Sawbridge.

As 1769 wore on, the identification of American radicals with Wilkes intensified as the network of interwoven grievances expanded in Britain and in America. The Boston merchant William Palfrey wrote Wilkes in the fall of 1769 of the “unremitted ardor” of the Sons of Liberty for his cause, and their sympathy “in the distress brought by arbitrary ministers upon Great Britain and her dependencies.” The petition movement of late 1769 drew great support in America. The South Carolina House showed its solidarity with the Wilkite cause in December by sending to the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights fifteen hundred pounds sterling in behalf of the “just and constitutional rights and liberties of the people of Great Britain and America.” A group of Maryland liberals sent Wilkes a symbolic “45” hogsheads of tobacco, and a similar action took place in Virginia.

This fellow-feeling deepened among the Wilkites too. The
London Public Advertiser
argued cogently that “the cause of Liberty in England and America is
ONE COMMON CAUSE,”
because “the attacks on both have been made by
the same set of men, with the same views,
and with the same illegal violence.” Furthermore, the Wilkites began to make use of American arguments against Parliament, and many Middlesex freeholders refused to pay their taxes on the ground that since their elected representative John Wilkes was excluded from Parliament they had not consented to the taxes. The Wilkites also endorsed
and spurred the American nonimportation movement, aided by the continuing encouragement given to American nonimportation in the Virginia press by Arthur Lee.

The Americans were particularly interested in the petitions of Middlesex and London, which championed the colonial cause and which also came from the heart of English radicalism and from the city with which the American liberals most closely identified. King George’s brusque dismissal of the London petitions in March 1770 had a sharp and chilling impact on opinion in America. Until then, the king had always been deemed sacrosanct and only his ministers or politicians in Parliament were held blameworthy for the regime of oppression. Now, for the first time, the king himself began to be a butt of libertarian attack in America. The great radical organs, the
Boston Gazette
and Peter Timothy’s
South Carolina Gazette,
were particular harbingers of this new point of view.

The South Carolina radicals were certainly the leaders of this new and vital turn. Wilkesism had particularly flourished in South Carolina. As we have seen, only the South Carolina Assembly voted funds for the Wilkite cause. Christopher Gadsden had formed an active “Wilkes Club” consisting largely of Charleston artisans, and had led the successful Wilkes fund drive. The Wilkes fund movement was led by some of the most prominent men in the province: large planters Thomas Lynch and Thomas Ferguson; wealthy lawyers Peter Manigault, James Parsons, and John Rutledge; and the merchant Benjamin Dart. Of the prominent South Carolinians, only William Henry Drayton and the timorous Henry Laurens opposed the Wilkes appropriation.

South Carolina’s Council and governor as well as the Crown were indignant at the Assembly’s courageous action, and denied the right of the Assembly to appropriate money without their consent. The Assembly retorted, proclaiming its full power as the representative body to appropriate money in the province. The Assembly also pointedly requested that the Council be a body of independent men rather than one packed with British placemen.

On April 18, 1770, John Wilkes was finally released from prison to take up his duties as alderman of the City of London. The release was celebrated throughout the colonies, from Boston to Charleston. But American rejoicing in Wilkite successes was not to last long. The road of struggle against the imperial, feudal, and oligarchic structure of Great Britain was difficult enough in the best of circumstances; and essential to that struggle was unity within the radical camp. But in the autumn and winter of 1770 a tragic and irreparable split occurred deep within the leadership and cadres of the radical movement. The Wilkite organization, the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, split wide open with John Wilkes on one side and “Parson” John Home and John Sawbridge on the other. Historians have attributed the split to personal frictions and petty quarrels over the disposition of Wilkite funds; but one important and neglected factor in the split was indeed of vital ideological significance.

Spain had suffered British intrusion into the Falkland Islands (off the tip of the southwest coast of South America) since Pitt’s aggressive occupation four years earlier. Now, in June 1770, Spain moved to reoccupy the Falklands. Britain made ready for war with Spain, egged on by the warmongering cries of Chatham and Shelburne (both out of power). Chatham had always yearned for total victory over France and Spain, and now he saw another chance. Chatham denounced any negotiations with the Spaniards as appeasement of an inferior and untrustworthy race. He called for immediate war against France to achieve the total triumph that his (Chatham’s) enemies had denied to England seven years earlier. Since England, to Chatham, had the God-given right to rule all the islands of the world, the Spanish occupation of the remote Falklands became a dagger poised at the heart of English hegemony. No concession to Spain, however minute, was tolerable; such would destroy the edifice of the British Empire by “disgraceful expedients” to avoid an ultimately unavoidable final conflict. To maintain Chatham’s grandiose claims, England was supposedly duty-bound to build and support a navy larger than any other two world fleets combined.

Chatham’s and Shelburne’s war hysteria had particularly unfortunate effects on the radical movement. All of his political life, Chatham’s erratic, charismatic, and ultraimperialist role confused and weakened the liberal and radical forces in England. When in opposition, and only then, Chatham characteristically made libertarian noises; and the liberals felt that they could not ignore an opposition alliance against the government with a man as popular and influential as Pitt. Since the autumn of 1768, when Pitt left the cabinet, Chatham had strengthened his ties with the London radicals, and now he was in a position to split their movement.

Specifically, in the autumn of 1770 the government, under the pressure of the war party, frantically began to build up its navy, and hence to press-gang sailors for its ships. John Wilkes, as an alderman of London, refused to sanction the use of press warrants in London, and obstructed navy impressment as an illegal action making slaves of free men. Thus, in a clash between liberty and the supposed requirements of empire and state, John Wilkes chose liberty. Not only did many other London magistrates follow Wilkes in refusing to honor press warrants; but he led the London Common Council in calling for the prosecution of any magistrates or constables who issued or executed such warrants for impressment. The new lord mayor of London, Brass Crosby, a Wilkite selected with the help of John Wilkes, refused to accept press warrants and thus prevented press-ganging within the City of London. To Chatham, all of this was treason; Wilkes and the radicals, he declared, were “laboring to cut off the right hand of the community” and to “shake the public safety,” and should be tried before the House of Commons.

It is surely no coincidence that in the split that then developed within the radical movement, the radical leaders associated with Chatham and Shelburne
joined the anti-Wilkes camp, while Rockingham and the Whigs, who opposed the war agitation, sided with Wilkes.

The government finally reached a settlement with Spain in early 1771, restoring the English port in the Falklands. But soon afterward, England quietly withdrew from the port, therewith indicating a secret yielding to the Spanish claim. Wilkes, however, continued his antimilitarist stand and warned, upon becoming sheriff of London in late 1771, that he would no longer allow the army to interfere in civil functions in London.

The sharp decline in the Wilkite movement in the years after 1770, as well as the strength of Tory rule in Great Britain, served greatly to disillusion American liberals about the possibility of radical success in the home country. From now on they realized that Americans would have to rely principally on themselves. If the libertarian ideals of most Americans and of the submerged masses in England were ever to be realized, that realization would have to be primarily in America.
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