Conceived in Liberty (191 page)

No other act could have been more calculated to arouse the fears and hostilities of the colonists than the fourth Coercive Act, the Quartering Act, which revived the troubles over quartering British troops on the colonists. This act applied to
all
the colonies and forced the provinces to supply unoccupied houses and dwellings to quarter British troops at the location desired by the latter, for example, to put up the troops in Boston proper rather than at government barracks at Castle William. The Quartering Act, introduced at the same time as the third Coercive Act, whipped through Commons without debate and was opposed in the House of Lords only by Chatham. The measure received royal approval on June 7.

The beleaguered Whigs heroically tried to counterattack during the passage of the Coercive Acts. In mid-April, Rose Fuller moved repeal of the Tea Act and was backed by Fox, Barré, and an eloquent and widely circulated speech by Edmund Burke. However, the motion was voted down by an overwhelming majority.

*
Charles Van, MP from Wales, was the most extreme proponent, calling for the destruction of Boston, “that nest of locusts”;
“delenda est Carthago.”
See Knollenberg,
Growth of the American Revolution,
p. 106; and Benjamin W. Labaree,
The Boston Tea Party
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 188, 207.

A fifth act passed concurrently in the same session was regarded by the colonists and by the Rockingham Whigs as part of the coercive series. The Quebec Act was introduced in early May and passed and approved by the king at the end of June, over the vigorous opposition of Barré, Fox, Burke, and Chatham. The bulk of present-day historians have chided Whigs and Americans for their opposition and “fantasies” about the bill and have praised the Quebec Act as a wise and “statesmanlike” measure. The Quebec Act had two basic parts: fastening a permanent frame of government on the people of Quebec, and aggressively expanding the province’s borders. The latter provision arbitrarily but provisionally extended the domain of Quebec to the French communities in the Ohio Valley and Illinois Country. Although such extension threatened to interfere with speculative claims to the western lands, the act’s rather vague clause occasioned little protest, because the land involved was a virtually unpopulated area concerning which the Crown, beset by conflicting speculative interests, had never been able to make up its mind on a proper land policy.

The really intense opposition to the Quebec Act, in both England and America, centered on its “domestic provisions”—its permanent frame of government for the hapless French who had been conquered in the French and Indian War and governed only in tentative, makeshift fashion since. The root premise of this supposedly statesmanlike measure was the ingrained English view that the French Canadians were an inferior race, unfit for self-government and fit only to be governed by an English ruling class. (There was at that time only a handful of English in Canada, mainly merchants and royal bureaucrats.) The Quebec Act deprived Quebec completely of any elected
Assembly (even the previously existing Assembly for the handful of English there) and of any right to trial by jury in civil cases. Full legislative authority was vested in a royally appointed Council, but even the acts of this creature of the Crown were subject to royal veto. Moreover, the power to levy all but purely local taxes upon the Canadians was vested in Parliament itself. Executive power was to accrue to a royally appointed military governor. Furthermore, a supplementary act levied duties on imports into Quebec to pay the salaries of the royally appointed officials.

The chill that this schema sent up the American colonists’ spine can well be imagined. For in this there seemed to be a model of the ultimate aim of Great Britain: to reduce
all
the American colonies to abject creatures totally ruled by instruments of Parliament and the Crown. English or natural liberties such as trial by jury, no taxation without consent by representation, and Assembly control over executive salaries were arrogantly swept away. And there was in the Quebec Act not even a hint of any future self-government for Canada.

The Quebec Act, to be sure, disestablished the Anglican church and removed the grievous disabilities under which the French Catholics had suffered since the British conquest. But instead of allowing simple religious liberty, the Quebec Act reimposed the Roman Catholic church as the established religious communion, thus restoring the feudal political privileges to the seigneurs and the church against which the poor
habitants
had been struggling for many years. The compulsory re-establishment of the Catholic church was no service either to the people of Quebec or to the church itself. For, as in so many cases in history, the
quid pro quo
exacted for special privilege was special
control.
Under the act, the Catholic church and its revenues were placed under Crown control and the Catholic church of Quebec was to be completely severed from the Roman See. As Lord North promised, “No bishop will be there under papal authority, because... Great Britain will not permit any papal authority whatever in the country.”

Current historians attribute the English and American horror at these provisions to simple anti-Catholic prejudice. Although this certainly played an ample role, the Whigs—the leading English opponents of the Quebec Act—were long-time champions of religious liberty for Quebec as well as Britain. They had fought valiantly for absolute toleration of the Catholic church in religious matters, including even permission for a resident bishop. Their objection to the religious provisions of the Quebec Act was the reimposition of an established church and of corollary feudalism. They realized that the North ministry was seeking to gain the political support of the Quebec clergy by granting them special political privileges.

The Whigs also denounced the Quebec Act’s limitation on rights of jury trial, and its replacing an elected Assembly with a royally appointed Council. And their main protest at the extension of Quebec to the western lands was the consequent extension of these evil and despotic principles to the vast areas
of the west. Edmund Burke did yeoman work in alerting New York to the nature and implications of the Quebec Act, as well as to its threat to New York’s own western land claims—a service that helped greatly in radicalizing opinion in that often conservative province.

One of the fruits, in fact, of Burke’s opposition to all the Coercive Acts was his election to Parliament in the autumn from Bristol, the second greatest port of England and the metropolis of west England, and the home of leading merchants in the American trade. Bristol bitterly opposed the coercive measures, and Wilkite radicalism grew rapidly there—in fact, the other newly elected representative from Bristol was the prominent New York merchant and ardent radical, Henry Cruger, Jr. Aside from Bristol, however, the fall election was a triumph for the government and a defeat for the Whigs; no check on British power would emanate from that quarter.

The four Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act—soon to be called by the colonists the Intolerable Acts—struck the Americans with the force of a thunderclap. The savage repression of Boston was to the American colonies the hurling down of the gauntlet. The embattled colonists, sharpened and increasingly unified by the years of struggle for liberty against Great Britain, hastened to accept that challenge.

The shocking news of the Boston Port Act—the first Coercive Act—reached Boston on May 11, 1774. It was immediately clear that the fate of Boston, and of the entire American resistance movement, of which Boston was the leader, now hinged on the all-important question: Would the other American towns and colonies come to the aid of Boston in this great crisis? On hearing the news, the Boston Town Meeting and neighboring committees of correspondence met to decide their course. The frightened conservatives attacked the Tea Party as being mob violence and urged submission by paying for the tea. The radicals, however, firmly declared that they would see Boston burned before paying a farthing to the East India Company. The May 13 Boston Town Meeting, led by Sam Adams, resolved to appeal to other Americans for united action against Great Britain. It urged a joint American boycott not only of all imports from Great Britain, but of exports as well, until the Port Act was repealed. The Boston Committee of Correspondence was instructed to inform the other colonies. The same day, May 13, the committee joined other committees of eight neighboring towns to urge upon all other colonies the total boycott of trade with Britain. The radical Boston engraver and courier Paul Revere was then sent to the critical ports of New York and Philadelphia with Boston’s appeal. Boston urgently impressed upon its correspondents
that it was the first line of defense of the liberty of all Americans, and that it was being singled out for punishment simply because it had long been the vanguard of that defense.

First to respond and rally to Boston’s support were the other towns of Massachusetts, including even the towns of Salem and Marblehead, which presumably would have benefited by the closing of Boston and the shifting of the site of government and customs officials. Liberal donations of food and money soon poured into suffering Boston from towns and provinces as far away as South Carolina. When the black day of June 1 dawned and the Port Act went into effect, angry demonstrations took place throughout the colonies. In Philadelphia, church bells tolled and shops closed. In New York, effigies of Lord North, Hutchinson, and the devil were paraded through the streets and burned. In Connecticut, the Port Act was publicly burned and executed. Newport, which had had its differences with Boston in the past, pledged its aid to the Bostonians, “who have so nobly stood as a barrier against slavery.” This unification was indeed spurred by the fact that the other leading ports knew they had treated the British tea as roughly, if not nearly as dramatically, as had Boston.

As the fateful day of June 1, 1774, drew near, the conservatives of Boston made a last-ditch attempt to reverse the tide. But the town meeting of May 30 resolved not to consume any British manufactures and to boycott any violators. As Hutchinson prepared to leave office, however, 124 Boston conservatives signed a petition praising the administration of Hutchinson (and another welcoming General Gage), and promised to pay their share of the damage for the destroyed East India tea. About a quarter of the signers were merchants, many of them wealthy.

The Boston merchants had been persuaded by the committee of correspondence to agree to a total boycott of Britain, provided that merchants of other American colonies would agree to join. In early June, the radicals were dismayed to find merchants of other towns refusing to agree, and the conservative merchants of Boston then hastened to abrogate their agreement. The eminent liberal Congregational minister, the Reverend Charles Chauncy of Boston, angrily denounced the defecting merchants: “So many of them are so mercenary as to find within themselves a readiness to become slaves themselves, as well as to be accessory to the slavery of others, if they imagine they may by this means serve their own private separate interest.”

Sam Adams and the radicals had learned better during the Townshend struggles than to rely on merchants to boycott for principle; now, the whole body
of
consumers was to
engage
in the boycott. Counterattacking, the Boston Committee of Correspondence adopted on June 5 the “Solemn League and Covenant,” drawn up by Dr. Joseph Warren and other radicals. The Solemn League urged
all
Americans to sign a pledge to boycott immediately all trade with Great Britain, and to bar all purchases and all consumption of British
products after October 1. It also pledged in turn to boycott forever any American who refused to sign such a covenant. Dependence on the merchants was bypassed for reliance on the voluntary actions of the masses of the people.

Conservative Boston merchants counterattacked vigorously and tried to challenge the committee. The Boston Town Meeting endorsed the Solemn League and Covenant on June 17, but a final battle between conservatives and liberals took place in the Boston Town Meeting of June 27–28. The meeting overwhelmingly defeated a motion of censure and voted approval of the actions of its committee of correspondence. In contrast, Governor Gage ordered magistrates to arrest any persons circulating the “traitorous” covenant. Defying this proclamation, nearly every Bostonian signed the pledge.

The Massachusetts towns were quick to rally to the Solemn League and Covenant. The town of Worcester, in fact, strengthened the covenant by advancing the date of nonimportation from October 1 to August 1. The covenant was adopted by fourteen other Massachusetts towns, among them Gloucester, Braintree, and Shrewsbury; towns outside the province announced their support, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, being one. Furthermore, special county conventions in Massachusetts endorsed the total boycott, including those of Berkshire, Suffolk, Plymouth, and Bristol.

Meanwhile, other towns were responding to Boston’s boycott appeal of May 13. The town meeting of Providence, Rhode Island, on May 17 introduced an important and creative new proposal: a congress of representatives from all the colonies to conduct and unite the American boycott and resistance. In addition, Providence expressed willingness to enter into a joint boycott, as did Newport and New Haven. The real problem was the reaction of Philadelphia and New York to Boston’s plea; hence the importance of Paul Revere’s speeding the transmission of Boston’s circular letter to those cities.

New York’s radicals in control of its committees of correspondence were as eager as Boston’s to join the boycott and pledge their support. But the radicals in New York faced far stronger conservative opposition in that oligarchy-ridden province, and they sadly lacked a revolutionary leader with the brilliance and dedication of Sam Adams. The radicals had called a series of meetings of merchants and mechanics on May 13. At the meeting a committee of twenty-five was set up that included conservatives but was dominated by the old committee of the Sons of Liberty. At a public meeting of merchants on May 16, however, radical leaders Isaac Sears and Alexander MacDougall saw to their dismay a successful vote to oust the existing committee of correspondence and to replace it with a new and larger committee that had enough conservatives to put it under right-wing control. Fully half the merchants on the new committee had been zealous in breaking the nonimportation agreement in 1770, and twenty of the fifty-one members were later to choose the Tory side in the Revolution.