Conceived in Liberty (196 page)

Connecticut did little direct importing of its own; therefore, its problem was largely that of enforcing nonconsumption. The vigilant committees of inspection conducted their own private trials of people accused of violating the Association. These trials were almost always fair and impartial; they required full proof of violations according to the laws of evidence, and invited the defendant to appear voluntarily. This procedure began in Hartford County in late January and soon spread to New Haven, Fairfield, and Litchfield counties. The committee of the town of Norwich also adopted the idea of requiring dealers under pain of boycott to certify that their goods were not acquired in violation of the Association.

One problem that plagued Connecticut and many other colonies was introduced by the Continental Congress’s demand that merchants and traders not take advantage of scarcity and that they hold the prices of boycotted goods to the previous year’s levels. This absurd attempt at voluntary price-fixing betrayed a monumental ignorance of how the market price system operates. When goods become scarce (as under nonimportation agreements) the free market price rises to account for the greater scarcity. Putting the matter into such pseudo-moralistic terms as “taking unfair advantage” of the scarcity, completely ignores the “rationing” function of the price system. If prices do not rise to reflect increased scarcity, then the goods will soon disappear and not be available at all to those clamoring to buy. Consumers as well as producers are gravely injured by this form of price control.

In Connecticut, in late January, a joint meeting of committees of inspection of Hartford County attempted to impose fixed retail prices on imported goods, and this drive spread to the other counties as well.

New York was the great feeder port for New Jersey and Connecticut; hence its importance for enforcing nonimportation. Fortunately, the radicals on the Committee of Sixty soon took over the commercial affairs of the city, and the committee rigorously enforced the boycott. Great mobs prevented several English ships from landing. Happily, while enforcement of the boycott was rigorous, the committee showed instinctive economic sense by not insisting on prices remaining the same as the supposedly God-given prices of the previous year. In this way, the committee did not aggravate the substantial amount of Tory sentiment in New York, while allowing effective imposition of the boycott. Furthermore, the rigorous enforcement of nonimportation upon the city made unimportant the fact that nonconsumption could not begin to be enforced outside the city and Albany, Ulster, and Suffolk counties—the only areas where local inspection committees were available. Probably most of the infractions, again, occurred in the area of tea consumption. Like the Ruggles association in Massachusetts, Tory organizations did not get very far in New York. A group of Tories in ultraconservative and landlord-ridden Dutchess and Westchester counties attempted to form such associations but did not succeed.

The Association was also well enforced in New Jersey, where there were few ports. The Elizabethtown committee cooperated with their brethren in New York. Woodbridge Township and Gloucester County also enforced the boycott wholeheartedly, and a “tea party” was held by New Jersey “Indians” when East Indian tea almost landed secretly at Greenwich in Cumberland County. And in February, the committees of observation of Elizabethtown and Woodbridge decided on a complete boycott of trade with the Tory citizenry of Staten Island.

Tea drinking, a favorite pastime of Americans, again proved the most difficult part of the Association to enforce. When Silas Newcomb of Cumberland County announced rather rashly that he proposed to drink tea, all dealings were broken off with him by the Cumberland committee, and in two months he abjectly recanted.

Philadelphia, filled with conservative Quaker merchants, was the big problem area for the American rebels. Here was the weak link that threatened to collapse the entire boycott movement. In the late seventeenth century, the Quaker creed of nonviolence had been radically individualist and antistatist. But during the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania Quakers had become increasingly conservative, statist, and even warlike. Quaker nonviolence was now largely a thinly veiled camouflage for highly conservative, quasi-Tory views. The official Quaker Committee of Sufferings in Pennsylvania and New Jersey kept up a steady drumfire of agitation against the Association and other anti-British
measures, which agitation, despite its nonviolence, was supposedly in violation of Quaker religious views. A Quaker meeting for Pennsylvania and New Jersey in late January was quite explicitly Tory; it denounced “every usurpation of power and authority in opposition to the laws and government, and... all combinations, insurrections, conspiracies and illegal assemblages.” The official Quakers were not able to silence their pro-Association brethren.

Despite these problems, the Philadelphia Committee of Sixty-six did an excellent job of enforcing nonimportation. The committee divided its membership into six districts, and one member from each district was delegated each morning to inspect all incoming vessels. This enforcement, as in New York, was greatly facilitated by a sensible laxity in fixing import prices. Despite the
de jure
pronunciamentos, for example, dry goods prices had increased by twenty-five to one hundred percent by March 1775.

Delaware, a small and agricultural, rather than commercial, province, was scarcely a center for nonimportation struggles and had little trouble in enforcing the boycott.

The southern colonies had particular problems in enforcing the boycott, especially where the merchants were Scots or factors of Scottish firms—Scottish zeal for the American cause was less than ardent. But with the planters heavily in debt to these merchants in the normal course of trade, the southerners had a powerful political weapon against the Tories: a threat to suspend the judicial collection of debts.

Maryland faced the problem of a score of navigable rivers where imports could enter the province, but keen vigilance by committees of radicals at the commercial centers of Baltimore and Annapolis ensured effective enforcement of the Association. In December a provincial convention resolved that all lawyers should refuse to prosecute any suits, especially collections of debt, for those who violated the boycott. In enforcing nonconsumption, tea was again the main problem. Sometimes a bit of violence was added, as in the case of the stubborn tea dealer John Parks. Parks was boycotted by the committee for Upper Frederick County, and to the boycott was added the breaking of his doors and windows by a mob. Unfortunately, the rigors of enforcement here extended to price-fixing as well, and the local and provincial committees tried, Canutelike, to hold back the tides, of which they knew nothing, by fixing precise but necessarily arbitrary markups of wholesale and retail prices over costs.

The opposition of Scottish merchants and factors was particularly strong in Virginia. That colony led in closing down collections of debts as a means of putting further pressure on British merchant-creditors for repeal of the Coercive Acts. A provincial convention in August, for that reason, closed up the county courts and successfully recommended boycott of the General Court by lawyers and witnesses in civil cases; this action was confirmed by the convention of the following March. Many historians have charged that the court
closings and indeed much of the revolutionary impetus in Virginia occurred primarily because of a desire to avoid paying debts to Great Britain. It seems clear, however, that the measure was rather a means of putting pressure on Britain to repeal the Intolerable Acts, just as similar pressure had been used against the Stamp Act a decade before. This is indicated by the fact that when some grasping planter-debtors urged a boycott of merchants not just for violating the Association but also for failing to extend credit, this attempt was immediately slapped down by the leadership. Indeed, Peyton Randolph, who had presided at the Continental Congress, sternly reminded the hotheads that the Association did not empower local committees to dictate to merchants how much credit they may give. And even for strictly political purposes against Britain, a good many of the more moderate of the Virginia leaders opposed the temporary nonpayment of debts as unjust; these included George Washington, Robert Beverley, Peyton Randolph, and Edmund Pendleton. Backing political nonpayment were the more radical George Mason, Patrick Henry, Landon Carter, and Richard Henry Lee. Both sides of the dispute, of course, were led by large tobacco planters.
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The Virginia rebels made enforcement of the boycott much more difficult than it had to be. In the first place they frenziedly tried to prevent any price increases, and the committees arrogantly insisted on inspecting the daybooks and invoices of the merchants to make sure that prices were not increasing. Indeed, price-fixing committees were actively harassing merchants in many Virginia counties. The other unnecessary task taken up by the radicals was the decision to require every individual citizen to sign the Continental Association. This went beyond all the other colonies and forced the radicals to boycott not only violators of the Association but also any of those who were not enthusiastic enough to endorse it. All this considerably multiplied the roster of supposed delinquents and those harassed by the popular forces. As in the other colonies, open Tories were of course held up to public obloquy.

As elsewhere, the difficult article of consumption to boycott was tea. This was the product requiring enforcement. Tea parties were held at the port of Yorktown to reinforce the boycott.

North Carolina, as so often happened, largely followed the example of neighboring Virginia. Here the body of suspect Scottish merchants was compactly gathered at Wilmington. The merchants agreed to obey the boycott but understandably balked at price-fixing. The implacable committees persisted in carefully supervising prices, and committees in Pitt and Rowan counties and in Wilmington presumed to fix maximum prices for salt, dry goods, rum, and gunpowder. The Wilmington committee also followed the aggressive Virginia
lead of insisting that every individual sign the Association. When eleven Scottish merchants refused to sign, they were boycotted; eight recanted and signed. The most striking example of tormenting a nonsigner was the case of Thomas Macknight of Currituck County, in the extreme northeastern part of the colony. A member of the provincial convention in April, Macknight announced that he would abide by the Association but would not endorse it; a struggle now raged at the convention on whether to harass him further. The majority favored accepting Macknight’s course, but the fanatical minority threatened to withdraw from and split the convention, and thus forced through a boycott of the candid Macknight.

To put pressure on British merchants, the North Carolina liberals, again following Virginia, refused to allow the courts to operate, thus suspending collections of debts. There was little trouble, furthermore, in enforcing the nonconsumption agreement.

As could be expected, the radicals were active and zealous in South Carolina. Charleston’s radical-oriented General Committee led the enforcement, and advanced beyond the Continental Association by establishing its own association for nonconsumption of tea to begin on November 1. At committee direction, the schoolboys of Charleston collected all the tea in the city and burned it publicly on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5. Merchants of Charleston were induced by the committee to dump their English-imported tea into the river. Nonimportation was enforced with great efficiency and zeal. Sometimes, as in the Macknight case, enforcement degenerated into petty absurdities. Consider, for example, the case of Robert Smyth, who returned from London to Charleston bringing with him his furniture and two horses. Immediately the ultraradicals, led by Christopher Gadsden, denounced this act as an “import” in violation of the Association. After the General Committee had narrowly approved Smyth’s action, Gadsden and 250 radicals urged reconsideration; but led by Lynch and the Rutledges, the General Committee continued to endorse Smyth, but by one vote only.

As elsewhere in the South, action was taken against collection of debt by British or Tory creditors. South Carolina’s provincial congress in January decided that any judicial processes for debt had to be approved by local committees of observation. The absence of anticreditor animus
per se
is seen in the instruction to the local committees to permit prosecution for debt whenever debtors were trying to evade their obligations permanently or to defraud their creditors.

Georgia did not join in the nonimportation agreement until March, and even then there was no effective enforcement in that royal-bureaucrat-ridden colony. The colonies were then faced with the problem of boycotting this lone holdout of the thirteen American colonies. Accordingly, on February 8, the Charleston General Committee decreed a boycott of trade with all citizens of Georgia. The radical enclave of St. John’s Parish hastened to send delegates to
Charleston urging exemption for themselves, and the perplexed General Assembly agreed to turn the case over to the next meeting of the Continental Congress. In the meanwhile, however, the boycott of Georgia persisted, and the poor citizens of St. John’s were forced against their principles to engage in limited trade with the Tory merchants of Savannah.

Quebec had also been invited to join the Association. The English merchants of Quebec were willing to join, but the overwhelming French majority was understandably loath to join with either wing of its hated oppressors, and the English merchants understandably feared that they would simply lose their trade to their French rivals. Quebec, therefore, did not join the Association. By mid-April the Philadelphia committee began the colonial boycotts of the nonsigning colonies: Georgia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.

The task of checking and certifying the good faith of merchants within the several colonies was not unduly difficult; local committees in the seaports performed the major tasks. But how could the genuineness of goods and merchants be assured in the
coastal
trade when the merchants of two remote colonies traded with each other? Early in the Association movement, a Salem merchant trading with Virginia hit on a happy device that served also to cement and expand the scope of the network of revolutionary popular institutions in America. The merchant asked the Salem Committee of Correspondence to issue him a certificate vouching for his devotion to the cause of American liberty. The Boston Committee of Correspondence enthusiastically welcomed the idea, and the plan, spearheaded by Providence and the Virginia counties, was soon adopted in the other provinces.