The American Revolution: A History (5 page)
This resort to troops to quell disorder was the ultimate symptom of the ineffectiveness of the British government’s authority, and many Britons knew it. The use of force, it was argued in Parliament and in the administration itself, only destroyed the goodwill on which the colonists’ relation to the mother country must ultimately rest. Indeed, throughout the escalation of events in the 1760s, many British ministers remained confused and uncertain. “There is the most urgent reason to do what is right, and immediately,” wrote Secretary at War Lord Barrington to Governor Bernard in 1767, “but what is that right and who is to do it?” English officials advanced and retreated, pleaded and threatened, in ever more desperate efforts to enforce British authority without aggravating the colonists’ hostility. In the winter of 1767–68 the British responded to the disorder in Massachusetts with a series of parliamentary resolutions in which they condemned Massachusetts’s denial of parliamentary supremacy and threatened to bring the colonial offenders to England for trial. Yet strong minority opposition in the House of Commons and the ministry’s unwillingness to bring on further crises made these resolutions empty gestures: The government was now only waging what one Englishman called “a paper war with the colonies.”
By the end of the 1760s, British plans for reorganizing the empire were in shambles. Colonial legislatures and royal governors were at loggerheads. Colonial papers daily denounced Britain’s authority, and mobs were becoming increasingly common in the countryside as well as in city streets. Customs officials, under continual intimidation, quarreled with merchants, naval officers, and royal governors. The customs officials’ entanglement in local politics made efficient or evenhanded enforcement of the trade acts impossible. What enforcement there was thus appeared arbitrary and discriminatory, and drove many merchants, such as the wealthy South Carolinian Henry Laurens, who had earlier been contemptuous of the Sons of Liberty, into bitter opposition.
The financial returns to the British government from the customs reforms seemed in no way worth the costs. By 1770 less than £21,000 had been collected from the Townshend duties, while the loss to British business because of American nonimportation movements during the previous year was put at £700,000. It was therefore not surprising that the British government now abandoned the hope of securing revenue from the duties and labeled the Townshend program, in Lord Hillsborough’s words, “contrary to the true principles of commerce.” In 1770, after years of chaos in the British government, the reorganization of the king’s ministry under Lord North prepared the way for repeal of the Townshend duties. Only the duty on tea was retained, to serve, as Lord North said, “as a mark of the supremacy of Parliament, and an efficient declaration of their right to govern the colonies.”
Yet the stabilization of English politics that came with the formation of North’s ministry and the repeal of the Townshend duties could scarcely undo what had already been done. Whatever ties of affection had earlier existed between the colonists and Great Britain were fast being destroyed by irritation and suspicion. Many Americans were coming to believe that their interests and their hopes, their rights and their liberties, were threatened by British power. Although politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were by the early 1770s calling for a return to the conditions that had existed before 1763, going back was clearly no longer possible.
For two years there was a superficial tranquility. Then the struggle began again. In 1772, Rhode Islanders, angry at the heavy-handed enforcement of the navigation acts, boarded the British naval schooner
Gaspée,
which had run aground in Narragansett Bay, sank it, and wounded its captain. A royal commission, empowered to send all suspects to England for trial, was dispatched from England to inquire into the sinking. This authority seemed to fulfill earlier British threats to bypass regular judicial procedures, and it provoked Virginia into calling for the creation of intercolonial committees of correspondence, to which five assemblies responded.
Under Boston’s and particularly Samuel Adams’s leadership, Massachusetts towns had already begun organizing committees of correspondence. In the fall of 1772, Bostonians published a fiery document,
The Votes and Proceedings
of their town meeting, which listed all the British violations of American rights. These included taxing and legislating for the colonists without their consent, introducing standing armies in peacetime, extending the powers of vice-admiralty courts (which did not use jury trials), restricting colonial manufacturing, and threatening to establish Anglican bishops in America. The publication was sent to the 260 towns of Massachusetts, and more than half responded positively in the greatest outpouring of ordinary local opinion the resistance movement had yet seen. By the end of 1773, independence was being discussed freely in colonial newspapers. Since the North government was determined to uphold the sovereignty of Parliament, an eventual confrontation seemed unavoidable.
In 1773, Parliament provided the occasion for a confrontation by granting the East India Company the exclusive privilege of selling tea in America. Although the North government intended this Tea Act only to be a means of saving the East India Company from bankruptcy, it set off the final series of explosions. For the act not only allowed colonial radicals to draw attention once again to the unconstitutionality of the existing tax on tea, but it also permitted the company to grant monopolies for selling tea to favored colonial merchants—a provision that angered those American traders who were excluded. The Tea Act spread an alarm throughout the colonies. In several ports colonists stopped the ships from landing the company’s tea. When tea ships in Boston were prevented from unloading their cargoes, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, whose merchant family had been given the right to sell tea, refused to allow the ships to leave without landing the tea. In response, on December 16, 1773, a group of patriots disguised as Indians dumped about £10,000 worth of tea into Boston Harbor. “This is the most magnificent movement of all,” exulted John Adams, an ambitious young lawyer from Braintree, Massachusetts. “This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid, and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but consider it an epocha in history.”
Adams was right. To the British the Boston Tea Party was the ultimate outrage. Angry officials and many of the politically active people in Great Britain clamored for a punishment that would squarely confront America with the issue of Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies. “We are now to establish our authority,” Lord North told the House of Commons, “or give it up entirely.” In 1774, Parliament passed a succession of laws that came to be known as the Coercive Acts. The first of these closed the port of Boston until the destroyed tea was paid for. The second altered the Massachusetts charter and reorganized the government: Members of the Council, or upper house, were now to be appointed by the royal governor rather than elected by the legislature, town meetings were restricted, and the governor’s power of appointing judges and sheriffs was strengthened. The third act allowed royal officials who had been charged with capital offenses to be tried in England or in another colony to avoid hostile juries. The fourth gave the governor power to take over private buildings for the quartering of troops instead of using barracks. At the same time, Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the British army in America, was made governor of the colony of Massachusetts.
These Coercive Acts were the last straw. They convinced Americans once and for all that Parliament had no more right to make laws for them than to tax them.
THE IMPERIAL DEBATE
The colonists had been groping toward this denial of Parliament’s power from the beginning of the controversy. For a decade they had engaged in a remarkable constitutional debate with the British over the nature of public power, representation, and the empire. This debate exposed for the first time just how divergent America’s previous political experience had been from that of the mother country.
With the passage of the Stamp Act, Parliament’s first unmistakable tax levy on Americans, American intellectual resistance was immediately raised to the highest plane of principle. “It is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted rights of Englishmen,” the Stamp Act Congress declared in 1765, “that no taxes should be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.” And since “the people of these colonies are not, and from their local circumstances, cannot be represented in the House of Commons in Great Britain,” the colonists would be represented and taxed only by persons who were known and chosen by themselves and who served in their respective legislatures. This statement defined the American position at the outset of the controversy, and despite subsequent confusion and stumbling, the colonists never abandoned this essential point.
Once the British ministry sensed a stirring of colonial opposition to the Stamp Act, a number of English government pamphleteers set out to explain and justify Parliament’s taxation of the colonies. Although the arguments of these writers differed, they all eventually agreed that Americans, like Englishmen everywhere, were subject to acts of Parliament through a system of “virtual” representation. These writers argued that it was this concept of virtual representation, as distinct from actual representation, that gave Parliament its supreme authority—its sovereignty. One government pamphleteer wrote that even though the colonists, like “nine-tenths of the people of Britain,” did not in fact choose any representative to the House of Commons, they were undoubtedly “a part, and an important part of the Commons of Great Britain: they are represented in Parliament in the same manner as those inhabitants of Britain are who have not voices in elections.”
During the eighteenth century the British electorate made up only a tiny proportion of the nation; probably only one in six British adult males had the right to vote, compared with two out of three in America. In addition, Britain’s electoral districts were a confusing mixture of sizes and shapes left over from centuries of history. Some of the constituencies were large, with thousands of voters, but others were small and more or less in the pocket of a single great landowner. Many of the electoral districts had few voters, and some so-called rotten boroughs had no inhabitants at all. One town, Dunwich, continued to send representatives to Parliament even though it had long since slipped into the North Sea. At the same time, some of England’s largest cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, which had grown suddenly in the mid eighteenth century, sent no representatives to Parliament. Although radical reformers, among them John Wilkes, increasingly criticized this jumbled political structure, parliamentary reform was slow in coming and would not begin until 1832. Many Englishmen, as did Edmund Burke in 1774, justified this hodgepodge of representation by claiming that each member of Parliament represented the whole British nation, and not just the particular locality he came from. According to this view, people were represented in England not by the process of election, which was considered incidental to representation, but rather by the mutual interests that members of Parliament were presumed to share with all Englishmen for whom they spoke—including those, like the colonists, who did not actually vote for them.
The Americans immediately and strongly rejected these British claims that they were “virtually” represented in the same way that the nonvoters of cities like Manchester and Birmingham were. In the most notable colonial pamphlet written in opposition to the Stamp Act,
Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes
(1765), Daniel Dulany of Maryland admitted the relevance in England of virtual representation, but he denied its applicability to America. For America, he wrote, was a distinct community from England and thus could hardly be represented by members of Parliament with whom it had no common interests. Others pushed beyond Dulany’s argument, however, and challenged the very idea of virtual representation. If the people were to be properly represented in a legislature, many colonists said, not only did they have to vote directly for the members of the legislature, but they also had to be represented by members whose numbers were proportionate to the size of the population they spoke for. What purpose is served, asked James Otis of Massachusetts in 1765, by the continual attempts of Englishmen to justify the lack of American representation in Parliament by citing the examples of Manchester and Birmingham, which returned no members to the House of Commons? “If those now so considerable places are not represented, they ought to be.”
In the New World, electoral districts were not the products of history that stretched back centuries, but rather were recent and regular creations that were related to changes in population. When new towns in Massachusetts and new counties in Virginia were formed, new representatives customarily were sent to the respective colonial legislatures. As a consequence, many Americans had come to believe in a very different kind of representation from that of the English. Their belief in “actual” representation made the process of election not incidental but central to representation. Actual representation stressed the closest possible connection between the local electors and their representatives. For Americans it was only proper that representatives be residents of the localities they spoke for and that people of the locality have the right to instruct their representatives. Americans thought it only fair that localities be represented more or less in proportion to their population. In short, the American belief in actual representation pointed toward the fullest and most equal participation of the people in the process of government that the modern world had ever seen.
Yet while Americans were denying Parliament’s right to tax them because they were not represented in the House of Commons, they knew that Parliament had exercised some authority over their affairs during the previous century. They therefore tried to explain what that authority should be. What was the “due subordination” that the Stamp Act Congress admitted Americans owed Parliament? Could the colonists accept parliamentary legislation but not taxation? Could they accept “external” customs duties for the purpose of regulating trade, but not “internal” stamp taxes for the purpose of raising revenue? In his famous
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,
John Dickinson rejected the idea that Parliament could rightly impose “external” or “internal” taxes and made clear that the colonists opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation. But Dickinson recognized that the empire required some sort of central regulatory authority, particularly for commerce, and conceded Parliament’s supervisory legislative power so far as it preserved “the connection between the several parts of the British empire.” The empire, it seemed to many colonists, was a unified body for some affairs but not for others.
