Conceived in Liberty (188 page)

The determined opposition of the conservative patriots to Adams’ campaign proved to be the peevish expression of a small minority of the people of Massachusetts. The 300 members of the Boston Town Meeting of November 20 voted unanimously to approve and disseminate these Resolves. What is more, the resolutions had immediate success in other towns throughout Massachusetts, and spread like wildfire, along with the idea of permanent committees
of correspondence. Massachusetts opinion was set ablaze, and even as cautious a liberal as John Adams was moved to declare that “there was no more justice left in Britain than there was in Hell; that I wished for war.” Town after town endorsed the Boston Resolves. Of the 240 towns in Massachusetts, eighty, including the major towns, quickly voted support, while most of the others prepared to follow. Along with this approval, each town appointed its own permanent committee of correspondence, led by Plymouth, then Cambridge, Marblehead, Charlestown, and Newburyport. And the town of Pembroke enthusiastically made the Adams resolutions even more explicit; the American people, it declared, “are warranted by the laws of God and nature, in the use of every rightful act and energy of
policy, stratagem,
and
force.”

In that era, being poor was deemed rather a disgrace than a badge of merit. Hence Tories (such as Thomas Hutchinson, whose interpretation of the history of Massachusetts has greatly influenced later historians) were wont to pillory the resistance movement as a collection of poor and lowly rabble. In reality, however, this was a true mass movement led by the bulk of the propertied in almost every town of Massachusetts, small or large. Only a few towns of varying size, such as Salem and Weston, failed to join the ranks.

Alarmed by the rapid spread of popular rebellious agitation, and seeing the implication of the Resolves for revolution and independence, Governor Hutchinson called together the General Court in early 1773, and tried to browbeat it into acknowledging absolute parliamentary authority. But this only succeeded in fanning higher the revolutionary flames; the General Court and the Boston Town Meeting flatly repulsed his efforts. To Hutchinson’s accusations of thoughts of revolution and independence, Sam Adams and Boston countered with the great and overriding natural law of self-preservation and liberty.

In the Massachusetts spring elections of 1773, the radicals swept all before them. No longer did Adams receive significantly fewer votes than his colleagues in the House; and the towns reaffirmed their instructions in behalf of liberty. In Andover, the wealthiest citizen, Councillor Samuel Phillips, led the popular movement for the Resolves, and even Hatfield replaced its Tory representative, Israel Williams, with an eminent liberal of the town. The popular liberals also ousted two Tories from the Council, asked to have Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Oliver recalled, and threatened to impeach the judges should they dare to accept salaries from the Crown. Hutchinson responded by dissolving the General Court.

The Boston Resolves and news of the creation of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, were spread to other colonies by the committee, and had immediate impact. Undoubtedly by this time Sam Adams and other farsighted radicals, realizing the implications of natural-rights theory, were toying with the idea of American independence. Samuel Parsons of Providence wrote to Adams, in March 1773, that the “idea of unalterable allegiance to any prince
or state is... inadmissible.” Our seventeenth-century ancestors, he added, were virtually independent of Great Britain; was this not a useful hint for the future?

Adams intended to urge the sending of a circular letter to all the other colonies, calling for committees of correspondence in all the provincial assemblies. But here he was anticipated by the radical leaders of Virginia, who were inspired by Boston’s committee to establish a committee of correspondence of the provincial House. Six years earlier, Richard Henry Lee had proposed intercolonial committees of correspondence. Now Lee, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson led the Virginia House of Burgesses, on March 12, 1773, to create the first standing committee of correspondence of a provincial Assembly. The Virginia committee was to concentrate naturally on the
Gaspée
inquiry rather than on Massachusetts judicial salaries.

The first Assembly to follow Virginia’s example was Rhode Island, which, in mid-May, chose a committee of leading merchants and politicians of the colony, including Stephen Hopkins, Moses Brown, and Henry Ward. Rhode Island was quickly followed by the lower houses of Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, led of course by Sam Adams. Thus, by June 1773, New England and Virginia had established Assembly committees of correspondence.

The other colonies were slower to join in the campaign. First came South Carolina in July, and by the end of the year all colonial assemblies except New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had selected committees of correspondence. New York and New Jersey joined in the first two months of 1774, but Pennsylvania’s House, run by the Tory Speaker Joseph Galloway, failed completely to respond.

The provincial committees of correspondence, however, proved to be of little importance. Necessarily bureaucratic and slow-moving organizations tied to approval of their assemblies, and unable to meet when their governing body was not in session, the provincial committees proved too staid and cumbersome to be effective. Instead it was the local committees, begun in Boston by Sam Adams, that proved to be the important and efficient engines of agitation and revolution. These freewheeling local committees were the major instruments of revolution. For a successful revolution not only needs ideology, leadership, and mass support and enthusiasm; it needs also institutions and organization. That organization was now being supplied by the local committees of correspondence, in which the old Sons of Liberty were glad to submerge.

Meanwhile, the Royal Commission of Inquiry, whose menace had touched off such intense reaction, was mired in ignominious failure. The commission, denounced as an inquisition at every hand, could not haul convicts to England unless they were caught; and how could evidence of crime be gathered when virtually the entire colony approved the deed? Furthermore, the commission
was dependent on the local authorities for warrants for information and for enforcing arrests; but local authority was elected by the populace and in wholehearted sympathy with the alleged criminals in the
Gaspée
affair. Even if the authorities had cooperated, the Crown could have done little about the stubborn refusal of the people of Providence to point out the guilty parties in the burning of the
Gaspée.
Remarkably, not a single informer could be found. After holding meetings in January and May, the
Gaspée
commission acknowledged defeat and disbanded in June 1773.
*
As a corollary, Lieutenant Dudingston was successfully sued by some merchants for confiscating their rum and sugar. Customs officials throughout the colonies relaxed their enforcement, and seizures declined by nearly three-fifths.

In sum, by mid-1773, the American revolutionary movement had progressed far beyond where it was the year before. Massachusetts and South Carolina were embroiled in chronic problems with Great Britain. But more important, the British revenue ship
Gaspée
had been burned and its Royal Commission of Inquiry cleverly thwarted by the people of Rhode Island. And rising out of this victory was the rapid development of a crucial network of committees of correspondence that embraced towns, counties, and assemblies of the colonies. Spurred into being by the
Gaspée
affair, these committees remained as continuing expressions of public opinion and revolutionary pressure.

*
Edward D. Collins, “Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolution,” American Historical Association,
Annual Report
(1901), p. 247.

*
The disbanding of the commission was aided by Lord Dartmouth’s opposition to any trials in England. A Whig, Dartmouth had succeeded Lord Hillsborough as secretary of state for the colonies in the fall of 1772. See Knollenberg,
Growth of the American Revolution,
pp. 84–86.

The duty on tea—a modest levy of threepence per pound—was the only Townshend duty not repealed in 1770. The American boycott on British tea continued after 1770. Although the boycott was only partially observed in most of the ports, it
was
strictly maintained in the two major tea-buying ports of New York and Philadelphia, which shifted to buying smuggled tea from Holland and the Dutch West Indies. Here was a happy marriage of principle and economic self-interest, for the price of smuggled tea was considerably lower than that imported from Great Britain. During 1771 and 1772, the Americans imported 580,000 pounds of British tea, of which Boston imported 375,000 pounds and the southern ports most of the remainder. In contrast to this average annual import of dutiable tea of 290,000 pounds, total American consumption per year was estimated at six and a half million pounds. Even reducing the sum to half, British tea was not in these years able to capture over eight percent of the vast American tea market.

The British tea price could have been far more competitive with Dutch tea, even with the three-penny burden, because the Townshend Act had removed the shilling tax on imports of tea into England for all tea reexported to America. In 1769, however, the East India Company, to which Britain had granted a monopoly on the import of tea (the tea was imported from China), followed the typical path of monopoly and raised the upset price it charged at auction from about two shillings threepence a pound to three shillings. Since tea in Holland sold for less than two shillings, the uneconomic status of British tea in the colonies became evident.

The structure of the English tea trade was as follows: the East India Company monopoly imported tea from Canton, China, using its full governmental
powers to rule India as the trading base for the lucrative China commerce. The company sold the tea at public auction, setting the minimum, or upset, price. English merchants bought it at auction and sold the tea to American importing merchants who in turn sold it to the retailers. American purchase of British tea was discouraged not only by the high price, but also by the irregular timing of the East India auctions, which did not permit proper advance planning by American merchants.

The price-raising by the East India Company was a reflection as much of its growing financial difficulties as of its privileged monopoly status. The East India Company did not enjoy prosperity during the widespread economic boom of 1769–72. Its high price, coupled with the American tea boycott, caused millions of pounds of tea to pile up unsold in East India warehouses. Moreover, a powerful clique of speculators in East India stock insisted on paying a high dividend, thus hazardously running up the stock far above what was justified by the actual operations of the company. They paid the high dividend even though this burdened the company further by legally obligating it to pay an annual sum of four hundred thousand pounds to the Crown. Furthermore, the company was legally liable for reimbursing the Crown for revenues forgone from exempting it from duties on tea reexported to America; the loss of the American market caused the unpaid liability to pile up, reaching over seven hundred thousand pounds by September 1772. The company’s dwindling sales, its overpurchase of tea in relation to the actual American market, and its heavy expenses in running the government of Bengal all contributed to making its position precarious.
*
An act of June 1772 eliminated any further need for company reimbursement of the government for loss of tax revenue; it also replaced two-fifths of the former import duty levied on the company’s reexported tea. But since little tea was being reexported to America anyway, this extra burden proved to be academic.

Finally, in mid-June, the great economic boom of 1770–72 followed the usual path of booms based upon credit expansion: financial crash and depression. A wave of failures of leading banks in London and Scotland brought about distress and a stock market crash (the stock boom had been fueled by bank credit expansion) in London, Amsterdam, and Paris. The general credit crash of mid-1772 hit particularly at the heavily overinflated East India shares, the price of which fell by sixty percent in the month of July alone. The crash of East India stock was also aggravated by attacks in Parliament upon the company in the spring of 1772, attacks because of its tyranny, plunder, and rapacity as a private monopoly vested with state power in India. Neither the Whig calls for vigorous reform of the monopoly nor the Crown’s drive for tight governmental control over its own creature was calculated to aid its financial fortunes. In September, the company passed its dividend and
also defaulted on customs payments to the Treasury. Since these payments were important to the Treasury, the British government itself was now in deep financial trouble.

The Crown then decided to effect a twofold plan: to relieve the affairs of the East India Company and save it from imminent bankruptcy, and to move as a kind of
quid pro quo
to take over control of its unruly creature. The best way to relieve the company, in addition to a large parliamentary loan, seemed to be to sell some of the seventeen-million-pound surplus inventory of East India tea to the long-lost American market. And what better way to dump the tea than by lowering its price and expanding East India Company operations to direct sales to the colonies? Hence the Tea Act of May 1773. The Tea Act, first, restored the full exemption (or “drawback”) of duties paid on tea imported into England and then reexported to America. Second, it continued the old threepence duty on American tea imports, despite the pleas of the East India Company, in order to gain some revenue and to preserve the principle of parliamentary taxation of American trade. But these provisions were relatively unimportant, as they merely continued policies that had prevailed since 1767 and had provoked little clamor. The radical innovation—the deed that alarmed and provoked the Americans—was to extend the hated and feared East Indian monopoly to American shores. For the Tea Act authorized the East India Company to obtain a license from the Treasury and to export tea to America on its own account and from its own warehouses. These sales, on all inventory of tea over ten million pounds, could be made either to merchants it designated or to branch houses of its own in America.