Conceived in Liberty (181 page)

*
Quoted in Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(July
1963
): 373.

*
By late 1771, Sam Adams was writing Arthur Lee that brute force seemed to have made the English people afraid to compel redress of their grievances, and that therefore with “no great expectation” of “some happy event from your side of the water... America herself, under God, must finally work out her own salvation” (Maier,
loc. cit.,
p. 394).

We have seen that British colonial policy took a sharp turn to the right when the cabinet was reshuffled in the autumn of 1767 upon the death of Charles Townshend. The arch-imperialist Bedford faction strengthened its posts in the cabinet and the Tories North and Hillsborough assumed critical positions in the ministry. Domination by the Tory right was confirmed and intensified with the departure of the erratic centrists Chatham (William Pitt) and Shelburne from the government in October 1768. The Bedfordites and other Tory factions now greatly consolidated their control under the nominal leadership of the weak Duke of Grafton. The Whigs staunchly attempted to delve into the causes of the American disorders, but Lord North succeeded in focusing Parliament’s attention on the resistance in Britain and on the supposed need to assert imperial power over the colonies. Hillsborough, North, and Bedford pushed through resolutions denouncing Boston, pledging Parliament’s support to all measures needed to impose supremacy on the Americans, and urging the transportation of James Otis and other American leaders to England to be tried for treason.

Lord Hillsborough, furthermore, had bolder plans for crushing the Americans. They especially included: imposing a royally appointed council on Massachusetts; and cancellation of the Massachusetts Charter if its Assembly should ever again question Parliament’s absolute authority over the colonies. In addition, the Mutiny Act was to be strengthened to allow quartering of troops in private houses.

The Tories were now in control. The only gain to the liberal opposition was the accession of the Chathamites, who always tended to be liberal when Chatham was out of power. (In contrast, Grenville’s opposition was characteristically
to attack the government for weakness and appeasement when dealing with the Americans.) In the cabinet only the liberals Camden and Conway opposed the harsh plans of Lord Hillsborough. So extreme were Hillsborough’s proposals, however, that even King George balked at imposing them.

Political-economic developments in Great Britain during early 1769 soon swung the ministry to decide on the repeal of the Townshend duties. There was, in the first place, the threatening Wilkite agitation and the mammoth Wilkite petition movement—joined in by the radicals, Whigs, and Chathamites—which challenged the government and which was at least partly linked with the American cause. Secondly, the war crisis with Spain and France over the Falkland Islands, coupled with troubles in unhappy Ireland, made the government anxious to find some peaceful solution to the troubles in America. Beset by conflict at home and abroad, Britain was now anxious to secure her colonial flank. Third, British merchants and manufacturers were beginning to complain bitterly as a result of the success of the spreading nonimportation boycott in America. Total American imports from Britain had fallen from over 2.15 million pounds in 1768 to under 1.35 million pounds the following year.

All of this was a potent combination. The result was a decision by the Grafton ministry in May 1769 to repeal all the Townshend taxes except the duty on tea. Repeal would be moved in the forthcoming 1770 session of Parliament. The crucial and fateful vote in the cabinet was how far to go. The liberals, led by Grafton, Camden, and Conway, advocated total repeal of the Townshend duties. The Tories, led by North, Hillsborough, and the Bedfordites, insisted on keeping the tax on tea, and they prevailed in the cabinet by a one-vote majority.

North’s arguments were shrewd enough. The other goods taxed were products of British manufacture, so that the duties lowered the sales of British manufacturers and merchants, and also dangerously stimulated the emergence of competing manufactures in the colonies. But tea was not of English manufacture and certainly could not be grown in America. Furthermore, tea furnished by far the major part of the revenue from the Townshend duties.

North’s arguments were also cunningly strategic. Retention of the tea tax would continue to assert Parliament’s sovereign right to impose such taxation; and the removal of all the duties except that on tea would split the American resistance movement, weaken its resolve, and wreck the boycott without yielding the principle or the major Townshend tax. The policy would thus deprive the radical American leadership of its mass base. The tactlessness of the proposed repeal was accentuated by Hillsborough’s letter to the colonial assemblies, announcing the cabinet decision. Stress was laid on a provocative assertion of the power of Parliament rather than on a desire for conciliation with the colonies.

When Parliament opened again, in early January 1770, the debate over repeal became part and parcel of a determined liberal opposition mounted against the ministry. The opposition was also based on taking up the cause against Wilkes’ expulsion from Parliament. The Whigs and the Chathamites launched the attack, and the ensuing polarization of opinion led to the resignation of the liberal-oriented cabinet members, beginning with Camden and ending with the Duke of Grafton, the prime minister himself. The determined opposition push failed and precipitated the backlash of a counterrevolution, with all the Tory forces in England banding together in a new unity born of fear for their entrenched positions against the American cause abroad, as well as against liberalism and radicalism at home. Lord North added the prime ministerial post to his own offices at the end of January, and this cemented Tory rule by coalescing the Tory factions. Unity was completed some months later by the death of Grenville, which permitted the old personal feud to end and the Grenvillite followers to join the cabinet. This outcome also served to discourage American faith in the English political outlook.
*

On March 5, coincidentally the day of the Boston Massacre, Lord North moved the repeal of all the Townshend taxes except the tea tax. He scorned the idea of repealing the tea duty as appeasement of the colonies. America must fall at the feet of Britain before any further conciliation would be made. Parliament agreed to the repeal the same day and final action was taken in mid-April.

The liberals, however, had not given up in their defense of Americans against Great Britain. The Whigs, led by Barlow Trecothick and especially Edmund Burke, moved to censure British colonial policy when news of the Boston Massacre arrived in Britain. Burke charged that American rebelliousness was brought about precisely because of British severity and intransigence. Burke’s and Chatham’s censure resolutions, however, failed by a wide margin and provoked threats of impeachment or treason trials against Savile, Rockingham, Richmond, and other Whig leaders.

During June and July 1770, the North ministry consolidated its hard line against the colonies. The center of the British navy in America was deliberately shifted from Halifax to Boston harbor. The fort at Castle William was permanently garrisoned with British instead of American troops (although no troops were moved back into Boston itself). The Mutiny Act, however, was allowed to lapse without being renewed.

*
See Charles R. Ritcheson,
British Politics and the American Revolution
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), pp. 133–38.

The Americans were now confronted with a fateful choice: Should they be courageous, cleave to principle, and honor solemn pledges by continuing their boycott of British imports until all the Townshend duties were removed and perhaps the other Townshend Acts as well? Or should they cave in to the fact of repeal of the minor duties?

News of repeal came to the colonies in early May, although of course there were previous indications that the move was in the offing. First to react was the powerful multiclass, radically controlled General Committee of South Carolina. On April 25, the General Committee sent a circular letter to the other provinces urging every colony to strengthen its resolve and to maintain the general boycott until repeal of all the Townshend Acts, including the customs board and the vice admiralty courts. This general plea was repeated two months later.

Most of the colonies, however, lacked the iron determination of South Carolina and became mired in indecision. First to break the united front of the colonies against imports were the merchants of Albany, who on May 10 decided to confine their boycott henceforth to
tea
alone. In a few weeks, learning that they were alone, the same merchants rescinded the change and resumed nonimportation. The first breach had been healed.

The next attempted breach came in Rhode Island a few days later, when the merchants of Newport and Providence ended their agreement and discharged their Committees of Inspection. Nearly the last to join the movement and even then pressured by intercolonial boycotts, Rhode Island’s merchants were eager to resume trade and to ignore the larger principles at stake. Newport proved especially eager to resume full trade. Rhode Island’s action incensed the merchants and citizens of the other colonies, and these determined
that if Rhode Island valued trade above all, its trade would suffer more from rescinding the boycott than from maintaining it. Within a week, mass meetings at Philadelphia and New York, and a meeting of Boston merchants pledged an absolute boycott against the merchants of Rhode Island. Providence quickly rescinded its action and joined the boycott against the importers of Newport. Providence merchants were kept in line by its town meeting, which repeatedly voted overwhelmingly to continue the general boycott. By the end of June, ports in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the Carolinas, as well as Chester, Wilmington, New Castle, and Baltimore, had enthusiastically joined the boycott against Newport. Sloops from Newport were turned back from ports from one end of the coast to the other. Finally, under this pressure, Newport merchants, on August 20, resumed nonimportation and appointed a Committee of Inspection. The boycotts by other colonies were rescinded, but many were still reluctant to trade with Rhode Island and especially with Newport.

Newport was the center of mercantile defections in the colonies, and the blame devolved principally upon the leading Jewish merchants of that city. Jewish violators in Newport were apparently more significant than were Tories. Of particular importance was Aaron Lopez, one of the wealthiest merchants in the colonies. As a noncooperator in the boycott, Lopez received lavish favors from the royal customs officials: his captains, for example, were exempted from swearing their cargoes, and when Lopez violated customs regulations, the officials looked the other way.
*

The first permanent break in nonimportation came in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, another late-comer to the boycott that needed colonial pressure. When it became known that Portsmouth merchants were merrily importing British goods, Boston merchants instituted a boycott in mid-June, and were followed by Connecticut towns and even unanimously by the inhabitants of neighboring little Rye, New Hampshire. But pressure proved vain. A Boston radical visiting Portsmouth was driven out of town for fear of tar and feathers. The Portsmouth Town Meeting voted overwhelmingly against a boycott.

Not Portsmouth, however, but the great port towns—especially Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—would be the decisive force for or against continuing the boycott movement. In Boston, the reaction was never in much doubt. The formidable Sam Adams saw clearly that the partial repeal was essentially a device to split and destroy the colonial resistance movement, and he urged continuing nonimportation until all British taxes were removed and the customs board and admiralty courts eliminated, and even until the Sugar Act, the Declaratory Act, and the other oppressive measures since the Seven Years’ War were removed. The tea tax was rejected not only on principle, but also as by far the major revenue-earner of all the Townshend duties.

The May elections in Boston returned nearly all of the radical leaders, and the Boston Town Meeting manfully denounced English attempts to destroy colonial liberty. It scoffed at any asserted prerogative of the king to violate natural or constitutional rights, or to impose his will upon the fundamental laws of the land. Some Boston merchants tried to abandon the boycott and restrict nonimportation to tea only, but the town overwhelmingly refused to grant its approval.

Governor Hutchinson, under instructions from Lord Hillsborough, tried to split the resistance movement during May by shifting the Massachusetts legislature from radical Boston to Cambridge. But in this attempt he failed, as town after town voted to support the boycott and the “patriotic” merchants of Boston. Hutchinson lamented that the resistance of the boycott was supported by “the whole body of the people” as well as by the elected government officials. Thus in Marblehead, Robert Jameson, a teacher, lost all his pupils for refusing to abide by the boycott, and his house was threatened late at night by mobs “calling out with a loud voice to kill that dog Jameson... a governor’s man and a bastard of liberty.”

Hutchinson asked for a strengthened riot act to punish a mob that had tarred and feathered a customs officer at Gloucester. The Assembly told the governor that he had better investigate the cause of the riots: grievances against oppression. Moreover, it incisively pointed out that far worse than isolated, uncoordinated acts of violence was violence committed systematically, and unpunished, against the people by the standing army of Great Britain. Penetrating sharply beneath the “righteous” veil that the existence of a state apparatus casts over
its
organized violence, the Massachusetts Assembly denounced the army as a continuing unlawful body that committed continuing assaults and massacres. To this flagrant subversion of royal and military supremacy, the governor replied by dissolving the General Court.