Conceived in Liberty (194 page)

Mass resistance in Massachusetts also extended to the body of the Coercive Acts. In August, Gage published a list of thirty-six new royally appointed “Mandamus Councillors,” who succeeded the old councillors in accordance with the Massachusetts Government Act. A meeting of delegates from the towns declared them unconstitutional and suggested a new revolutionary provincial congress to become the new government of Massachusetts. The knot of notorious Tories chosen for the new Council was subjected to intense mob pressure, which forced the councillors either to resign or to take refuge in the arms of British troops in Boston. Abijah Williams, Lieutenant Governor
Thomas Oliver, Justice Peter Oliver, Foster Hutchinson, and eleven others were forced to resign. So extensive was the use of Boston as a place of refuge for Tory officials that the Whig leader Edmund Burke caustically taunted the British in Parliament, saying, “He had often heard of such places for thieves, rogues, and female orphans; but it was the first time he ever heard of an asylum for magistrates.” General Gage contemplated sending troops into the countryside to protect councillors and judges from popular wrath, but threw up his hands at the universality of opposition to these appointees.

The royal courts were also subject to harassment now that judges were removable at pleasure rather than for ill behavior. The Pittsfield Town Meeting urged the people to resist the Coercive Acts “to the last extremity,” and resolved that no courts should sit until the Massachusetts Government Act was repealed. Indeed, all courts were stopped throughout Massachusetts by methods ranging from persuasion to outright coercion. In Boston, the chief justice and sheriffs were unable to find a juror who would be sworn so that the superior court could meet.

To settle its special problems as the center of conflict with Great Britain, Massachusetts, during the summer, was preparing for an extralegal provincial congress in the autumn. County conventions overwhelmingly protested the Coercive Acts and attacked the appointment of officials at royal pleasure, the destruction of trial by jury, and the payment of government salaries apart from any control by the representatives of the people. All implied that even armed resistance would be justified to prevent enforcement of the Coercive Acts and called for a provincial congress to organize the opposition. Town meetings did the same and ratified the county conventions, and Brookline voted to indemnify any town official for any penalty incurred from violating the Coercive Acts.

As Massachusetts’ resistance grew and deepened, and a wall of resistance—nonviolent at least in relation to the British army and navy—built up against the Coercive Acts, General Gage became increasingly frightened and trigger-happy. He was under increasing pressure by his superiors to reflect the chauvinist contempt of the British for the Americans. The British leaders held that a mere show of force, a mere cleaving to a hard line and eschewing the temptation to appeasement, would quickly drum the numerous but craven colonials into line. The military men were eager to crush the Americans, and believed, with the narrowness and vainglory of the military mind, that this could be accomplished easily. Gage began to follow the classic and fateful path of a minority in power that is faced with the determined and largely nonviolent resistance of the majority: recourse to aggressive use of state violence against the people. Thus Gage tried to use troops to prevent a Salem Town Meeting called to select delegates to a county convention of protest; his attempt failed. Later, on September 1, Gage sent troops into Charlestown and Cambridge to seize cannon and ammunition belonging to the province of
Massachusetts. Twenty thousand men of the western towns of Massachusetts quickly gathered in Cambridge to march on Boston, but were persuaded to turn back by cooler heads who realized that American unity had not yet been sufficiently forged to back up such a direct attack on the armed forces of Great Britain. But meanwhile, town meetings and county conventions in Massachusetts were calling for more military training for its militia, in preparation for possible armed resistance.

Despite General Gage’s increasing reliance on aggressiveness and bluster, he recognized that his concrete military situation was precarious. He urged Britain to send reinforcements and decided in early September to fortify Boston Neck. Reacting to the latter plan, Boston workers boycotted the project and refused to help build the fortifications. Learning that Gage would apply at New York, Boston’s Committee of Mechanics successfully warned the New Yorkers not to export carpenters to Boston.

On September 5, 1774, there met at Philadelphia the most fateful and momentous assemblage ever gathered in the colonies: the Continental Congress. Brilliant and distinguished, the colonial leaders had come to decide the course of the colonies. They were, besides being eminent, young and vigorous, the average age of the delegates being only forty-five.

It soon became evident that there were two polar groups at the Congress: the radicals, determined on resistance to the British; and the conservatives, bent on more securely fastening the British yoke upon the colonies. It was sensibly determined that with the number of delegates varying greatly from each colony, the colonies would vote as separate units. Leading the radical forces were Massachusetts, headed by the brilliant father of the revolution Sam Adams and graced by his rising young distant cousin John Adams, and Virginia, whose delegation included the eminent young leaders Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Richard Henry Lee. North Carolina and the rest of New England dependably followed the radical lead, but Rhode Island’s inherent split between Hopkins and Ward served to cancel each other’s votes, and the blunder of the South Carolina radicals in selecting their delegates made matters difficult for the revolutionaries. Heading the Tory forces was the wily, shrewd Joseph Galloway of Philadelphia, seconded by the New York delegation, especially the young lawyer James Duane.

The Congress conducted its deliberations in secret. It began in committee by debating two vital questions: the philosophical groundwork of the American stand, and how far it would deny the authority of Parliament. The radicals on the committee, led by John Adams and Richard Henry Lee, insisted on grounding the American case on the ultimacy of natural law and natural
rights. The conservatives, on the other hand, were most anxious to ignore natural law and its profoundly radical implications and to confine the American statement of grievances to legalistic discussions of the British constitution. Joseph Galloway, James Duane, and Edward Rutledge led this attempt, but the radicals prevailed in cleaving to natural law.

During this early formative period of the Congress, Sam Adams engineered a masterstroke that electrified the meeting. Adams had the radicals of Suffolk County (including Boston) meet to draw up county resolves such as Middlesex and other counties had done. Prevented by the British authorities from meeting in Boston, the radicals met at a village outside the metropolis on September 9 and adopted a set of resolves drawn up by Dr. Joseph Warren. Known as the Suffolk Resolves, they were sped down to Philadelphia by Paul Revere, reaching there on September 16. The Resolves bitterly opposed the recent acts of Parliament and called ringingly for mass civil disobedience. “No obedience is due from this province to either or any part” of the Coercive Acts, they asserted. Furthermore, no taxes would be paid to the constituted government until it became truly valid. In short, the Resolves implicitly called upon the people of Massachusetts to set up a dual government that would cease to obey, and indeed ignore, the British-appointed authorities. In addition, the resistance would use violence only defensively, and only if the British attempted to enforce the Coercive Acts upon the people. Besides the specific civil disobedience in Massachusetts, the Suffolk Resolves urged the Continental Congress to organize a general voluntary boycott of all trade relations with Britain.

The Suffolk Resolves struck the Congress with overwhelming force. The day after they were received, the Congress voted to endorse them enthusiastically. Adams’ brilliant strategy had thus gotten the Congress committed to civil disobedience in Massachusetts and to the principle of an absolute boycott of Great Britain. John Adams, deeply moved, wrote in his diary that “this was one of the happiest days of my life.” Now he
knew
that “America will support Massachusetts or perish with her.” Sam Adams supported that judgment. Five days later, on September 22, the Congress specifically endorsed the Suffolk clause for a boycott of Great Britain.

But, it soon became clear, the radicals had not yet won the day. The Congress was not ready to endorse dual courts or legislatures to be set up by the people in Massachusetts, much less to think of absolute independence. Indeed, Joseph Galloway was now ready to play his last Tory trump. The wily Galloway introduced to the Congress his “Plan of the Proposed Union Between Great Britain and the Colonies.” Galloway’s plan pursued the old Tory dream, proposed since the late seventeenth century, of a centralized government for all the colonies. Under the tempting facade of colonial unity, Great Britain was finally to unite the colonies under one imperial yoke. Each colony was to retain its present form of rule over its local affairs. The central
government for the several colonies was to consist of a president-general appointed by the king, subject to the king’s veto, and holding office at the king’s pleasure, and of a grand council chosen by the assembly of each province. The grand council’s actions were to be subject to the president-general’s veto. This central organ of president and Council was, furthermore, to constitute an inferior branch of the British legislature, and measures dealing with America could originate either with this body or with the rest of Parliament, each of which would have to agree with the measure.

The similarities of Galloway’s plan to Franklin’s Albany Plan, at the Albany Congress of 1754, are obvious. Galloway, however, would have even more solidly cemented the ties between America and Britain. The central authority was to act as a transmission belt of rule between Britain and the separate colonies. And with the new central body inducted, as it were, into the British Parliament, the plea of no taxation without representation would no longer hold.

Joseph Galloway’s lethal but sugarcoated pill constituted the big conservative drive of the Congress. Galloway opined that every society “must” have one supreme legislature and executive as its authority, that every individual of a society “must be subordinate to [the] supreme will” of this authority, and that, in the present case, this authority was the British Parliament. Supporting the Galloway plan were Duane and the two youngest delegates to the Congress, Edward Rutledge (25) and New York’s John Jay (29). Leading the opposition were Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee. Galloway’s plan was just barely defeated by a vote of six to five (Rhode Island producing a tie between its two delegates). Although the vote was secret, it is safe to guess that Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Virginia, and North Carolina voted nay, while Pennsylvania, New York (dominated by the conservative New York City delegates), and South Carolina voted in favor. This means that one of the middle colonies—New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland—voted against the plan.

This vote was the high-water mark for conservatism at the Congress. The victorious radicals tried to eliminate all traces of the close balloting. On October 8 the Congress became still more explicit in support of Massachusetts’ resistance, specifically applauding that province’s moves and urging all America to come to the aid of Massachusetts should Britain try to impose upon it an enforcement of the Coercive Acts. Galloway and Duane tried unsuccessfully to have their opposition to this resolution recorded in the minutes of the Congress.

That the Congress should issue a declaration of grievances and petition Britain for redress was agreed upon by all, liberal and conservative alike. The philosophical groundwork of rights and the admitted scope of parliamentary authority had now to be determined. With Duane largely responsible for its writing, the Declaration of Rights, adopted on October 14, played down the
inalienable, natural rights of life, liberty, and property, and stressed instead the far more restricted rights of petition, assembly, and jury trial, as well as freedom from a standing army without consent of an Assembly. The position taken on Parliament was also rather backward for the dynamic situation of the time. The old orthodox and weak American position was simply reiterated: Parliament had the right to regulate American trade but not to tax the colonies internally or externally, or to govern their domestic affairs. The Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act were condemned, and repeal was urged of thirteen invasive parliamentary acts that had been in effect since 1763. The Congress also requested the termination of British standing armies occupying American towns, of the dissolutions of colonial assemblies, and of the aggrandizement of the vice admiralty courts. The Congress’s address to the king, drawn up by the moderate John Dickinson, carefully followed the customs of rendering obeisance to the king and pinning the blame on his advisers and underlings alone.

Having endorsed Massachusetts’ resistance, urged redress of grievances, and rejected Galloway’s plan for a central government, the Congress took up its final—and vital—matter of business: deciding the general American means of waging the struggle against Britain; specifically, the question of a continental boycott. On October 18, the Congress agreed to the Continental Association, closely patterned after the Virginia Association of early August. The colonies jointly pledged an absolute boycott of trade with Great Britain: nonimportation after December 1 (including no slave trade after that date); nonconsumption of British products after March 1, 1775; and no exports to Britain after September 1, 1775. Because of the threat of the South Carolina delegation (with the exception of the redoubtable Gadsden) not to sign, the Congress reluctantly agreed to exempt South Carolina’s staple, rice, from the ban on exports to Britain. Most ardent for total boycott were Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts, young Samuel Chase of Maryland, and Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut, who urged
immediate
nonimportation, nonconsumption, and nonexportation, but they were overruled by the necessity of gaining the support of Virginia’s tobacco planters.