Conceived in Liberty (187 page)

Indeed, just as the liberal movement was being forced into partial retreat, the seeds of the next great advance were being sown. It soon became clear that the British were laying plans. Following the wedge in the door achieved by their payment of Hutchinson’s salary, the British would proceed to the far more serious step of paying the Massachusetts judges’ salaries as well. In short, Great Britain claimed the right not merely to tax the people of Massachusetts without their consent, but also to make judges independent of the colonists by means of the very taxes extracted from them. This move by the Crown was also a reward for the judges’ tenderness toward the British troops in the Boston Massacre cases. The British move was particularly unpopular because Hutchinson had filled the principal posts of the Massachusetts judiciary
with his own Tory-minded relatives: Lyndes, Cottons, and Olivers. With Hancock and Adams now reconciled, the Boston Town Meeting promptly denounced this plan. The issue next went to the Massachusetts Assembly, which affirmed that such a proposal infringed the constitutional rights of the Assembly, and, at the end of June 1772, passed this resolution by a vote of 85 to 19. Typically, Hutchinson dissolved the General Court.

Although Massachusetts found itself in a period of troubled quiet, the resentment against Britain remained alive in that other radical colony: South Carolina. A long-continuing dispute arose over the appropriation by the House at the end of 1769 of a gift of 1,500 pounds sterling to the English radical leader John Wilkes. The enraged Crown ordered the governor of South Carolina to veto any further revenue bills that did not expressly delimit the uses of appropriated money and that failed to penalize the colony’s treasurer if he should spend treasury funds without consent of the governor and Council as well as of the House. In short, the House was ordered to agree to stripping itself of its vital power over all appropriations in the colony. This the House, led by Thomas Lynch, Christopher Gadsden, and John Rutledge, flatly refused to do.

This impasse with the Crown, and with the royally appointed governor and Council pitted against the House, continued beyond the end of the Townshend Act crisis. The South Carolina House steadfastly refused to pass any revenue bill complying with the royal instructions, that is, any bill inconsistent with “the proper rights of the people.” So radicalized was the South Carolina oligarchy by this bitter struggle that even a cautious trimmer like Henry Laurens wrote at the end of 1771 that he would rather have “no tax bill for seven years” and even “forfeit [his] whole estate” than surrender, for the issue involved was “nothing less than the very essence of true liberty.” The royal instruction to South Carolina was, to Laurens, a threat equal to the hated Stamp tax.
*

Lord Hillsborough, typically, was, determined to grant no concession to South Carolina, and the South Carolina House was repeatedly dissolved. Notwithstanding, the South Carolina House would not yield. The latter’s resistance, in fact, was stiffened by a vote of confidence by the electorate in the spring 1772 elections.

*
See Jack P. Greene, “Bridge to Revolution: The Wilkes Fund Controversy in South Carolina,
1769–1775,” Journal of Southern History
(February 1963): 32–33.

During the period of relative calm, trouble had not only been stirred by British aggressiveness against Massachusetts and South Carolina. The restrictive trade and Navigation Acts, to which were now added the sugar and tea duties, were always in danger of being enforced now that the era of salutary neglect was gone forever. Underneath the seeming calm there remained the inner contradictions of potential conflict over enforcement. Only a spark, only a minor incident, was needed to bring this potential to the surface.

Customs enforcement had intensified since late 1771. Already in November two incidents of resistance against the officials had occurred. The controller of customs at Falmouth, Massachusetts, had been forced by a mob to tell them the name of an informer. And off Philadelphia, thirty armed men captured the crew of a customs schooner and rescued a confiscated merchant vessel.

It is not surprising, however, that the culminating crisis should have burst forth in prickly, steadfastly independent little Rhode Island. Here was a colony that valued its trade so much as to have proved a poor security risk during the days of nonimportation. But this very spirit led the Rhode Islanders to resent with particular bitterness British customs collectors’ trespassing upon their freedom of trade. Rhode Island had had a stirring recent history of conflict with customs officials. We have already seen its struggles with the hated John Robinson. After Robinson became one of Boston’s customs commissioners in late 1767, he was replaced as Rhode Island collector of customs by Charles Dudley, Jr., and the Rhode Island resistance continued. In May 1769, the customs commissioners sent to Newport the
Liberty,
which had been converted to a naval sloop after being seized from John Hancock. The
Liberty,
commanded by the zealous captain William Reid, promptly began to seize merchant vessels right and left.

This intensification of customs enforcement in Rhode Island swelled the resentment of its citizens. In mid-June 1769, Dudley’s deputy collector, Jessie Saville, was seized as an informer by an angry mob and nearly beaten to death. Whereupon the fiery
Providence Gazette
trenchantly declared that Saville “was treated with more tenderness and lenity than is perhaps due an
Informer.”
In mid-July, Captain Reid called the attention of the townspeople of Newport to the depredations of his sloop. For, in the harbor, the
Liberty
fired brutally upon one of the ships it had seized, even firing upon the captain escaping in an open boat. The next night the angry people of Newport rose up; forcing Reid to remove his crew from the
Liberty,
they grounded, scuttled, and then burned the customs sloop to the ground. The seized vessels naturally took the opportunity to escape. True to Rhode Island tradition, nothing was done by the democratically elected government to apprehend the leaders of the mob. Finally, by the spring of 1771, Rhode Islanders were moved to proceed against Dudley himself; the highest representative of royal authority in Rhode Island was beaten almost to death.

Thus the stage was set in Rhode Island for the smashing of the relative lull of 1770–72. In March 1772, there sailed into Rhode Island waters the British naval schooner
Gaspée,
commanded by Lieutenant William Dudingston, known to Rhode Islanders for having savagely beaten up a defenseless fisherman in Pennsylvania three years before. Dudingston lost no time in impressing his personality upon the public. Without even notifying Governor Joseph Wanton, Dudingston illegally launched a systematic campaign of hounding local vessels. Soon Dudingston intensified the drive and arrogantly stopped, searched, or fired upon everything afloat on the pretext of rigorously enforcing the laws. Dudingston and his men also stole livestock from Rhode Island farms, and lumber from woodsmen. The public was understandably hard put to distinguish the British sailors from mere pirates. The Rhode Island merchants proposed to outfit an armed ship to rescue any vessels seized by the
Gaspée,
but Admiral John Montagu, based at Boston, scotched the plan by threatening to hang all concerned as pirates.

On June 9, 1772, the hated
Gaspée
ran aground off Warwick in the course of a fierce pursuit of a merchant vessel. When the people of Providence heard the good news, the town’s wealthiest merchant and a Son of Liberty, John Brown, organized a joyous party of citizens to finish the job begun by nature. Brown and his party, which included James Sabin and Captain Abraham Whipple, sailed to the
Gaspée,
shot and wounded Lieutenant Dudingston, removed the crew, and burned the
Gaspée
to the ground. A satisfactory night’s work done, the people of Providence then went about their business.

Ever since the attack on the British vessel
St. John
eight years earlier, Rhode Islanders had been steeped in the pleasant tradition of a lack of strenuous search by the government for the parties responsible for such incidents. But, in early September, the Crown suddenly decided to bypass Rhode Island authorities and to send the guilty parties to England for high treason. A
Royal Commission of Inquiry was appointed to find the culprits, deliver them to England via the Royal Navy, and to call on General Gage’s troops, if necessary, for support. Appointed to the commission was Governor Wanton of Rhode Island, who could be depended upon not to search too hard. But he was more than offset by the other members: four of the top royally appointed judges in the colonies—specifically, Robert Auchmuty, who was the vice admiralty judge at Boston, and the chief justices of New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York.

Now here, in the escalation of law enforcement into the hands of British authorities by setting up a star-chamber procedure and threatening trials for treason in England, was not only a dramatic incident of conflict, but also a serious threat to colonial liberties. The
Pennsylvania Journal,
representing American sentiment, warned that such a commission could make the lot of the colonists worse than the subjects of “the most despotic power on earth.”

Thus, in June 1772, the people of Rhode Island burned the British schooner
Gaspée,
and the British reacted ominously by appointing a Royal Commission of Inquiry in early September. The latter move was followed later in the month by a step long feared by the citizens of Massachusetts: the announcement of a decision by the Crown to pay judicial salaries in Massachusetts out of customs revenue. No longer would judges be paid by and, therefore, subject to the control of the colonial Assembly. Specifically, the salaries to be paid permanently and securely by the Crown were those of the attorney general and the solicitor general of Massachusetts and the five judges of the superior court of the colony—a reward to precisely those officials who had shown their tenderness for the British troops responsible for the Boston Massacre. It is not surprising that these deeds—especially the appointing of the
Gaspée
commission—should have aroused the dormant radical movement in America, or that the first sign of revival should have come in Massachusetts, or that its first spokesman should have been Samuel Adams.

As soon as the judges’ salary decision became known, Sam Adams mounted a campaign of pressure for a Boston Town Meeting on the issue. Writing in the
Boston Gazette,
Adams asked whether it was “not high time for the people of this country explictly to declare, whether they would be freemen or slaves.” He concluded: “Let associations and combinations be everywhere set up to consult and recover our just rights.” But Adams’ campaign faced once again the opposition of his conservative colleagues, led now by John Hancock and other Boston selectmen. Finally, by October 28, the determined Adams had pushed through a town meeting. At a final meeting on November 2, and after great difficulty, Adams won support for his plan for a permanent committee of correspondence.

As a standing committee of Boston, it was to expound the rights of the colonists and to communicate its declarations to other towns and colonies. There had been several other committees of correspondence, especially as standing committees of colonial assemblies in America, but those had been
ad hoc,
for specific tasks of protest. Adams was the first to propose and secure a committee of correspondence on a permanent footing. Its purpose, as Edward Collins wrote, was “to organize, in such a way that it could be utilized, that spirit of suspicion, discontent, and rebellion which he had long been fomenting in Massachusetts.”
*

Election to the twenty-one man Committee of Correspondence was spurned by the conservative leaders of the American resistance—Hancock, Speaker Thomas Cushing, and several selectmen and wealthy merchants. As a result,
the leadership of the committee devolved upon determined radical spirits: Sam Adams, the returned Dr. Thomas Young, and William Cooper. Eighteen of the committee members were Sons of Liberty. James Otis, as front man, was made original chairman, but Otis’s insanity soon forced Adams to take up the chairmanship. Assurances of support for Boston’s militant leadership were secured by Adams from such eminent friends and allies as Elbridge Gerry of the town of Marblehead and James Warren of Plymouth.

Sam Adams was now in his element, and on November 20 this driving libertarian leader presented, from the committee to the Boston Town Meeting, the Boston Resolves. The Resolves consisted essentially of a “State of the Rights of the Colonists,” written by Adams himself, and a “List of Infringements and Violation of Those Rights,” drawn up by young Dr. Joseph Warren. Adams stunned the Tories by going beyond mere positive law to rest his case for liberty squarely upon that old clarion call to revolution, natural rights. For if rights were derived by man from his nature, then any body of positive law violating those rights can be and indeed must be challenged. Adams asserted man’s natural rights bluntly and lucidly:

Among the natural rights of the colonies are these: First, a right to
life;
secondly to
liberty;
thirdly to
property;
together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can—Those are evident branches of, rather than deductions from the duty of self preservation, commonly called the first law of nature—

All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another....

Every natural right not explicitly given up or from the nature of a social compact necessarily ceded remains....

The list of infringements summed up the specific grievances of the colonists against the British for violations of their rights: assumption by Parliament of the power to legislate for the Americans without their consent, and to tax them without their consent; the appointment of a corps of royal customs officials, supported by fleets, and by troops quartered in Boston and New York without their consent; payment from taxes of gubernatorial and judicial salaries by Britain rather than by the assemblies; extension of the powers of vice admiralty courts; restriction of American iron and hat manufacturing; and attempts to impose an Anglican episcopate in America.