The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (18 page)

They nourished up by your indulgence? they grew by your neglect of Em: as soon as you began to care about Em, that Care was Exercised in sending persons to rule over Em, in one Department and another, who were perhaps the Deputies of Deputies to some Member of this house -- sent to Spy out their Lyberty, to misrepresent their Actions and to prey upon Em; men whose behaviour on many Occasions has caused the Blood of those Sons of Liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest Seats of Justice, some, who to my knowledge were glad by going to a foreign Country to Escape being brought to the Bar of a Court of Justice in their own.

They protected by your Arms? they have nobly taken up Arms in your Defence, have Exerted a Valour amidst their constant and Laborious industry for the defence of a Country, whose frontier, while drench'd in blood, its interior Parts have yielded all its little Savings to your Emolument. And believe me, remember I this Day told you so, that same Spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany them still. -- But prudence forbids me to explain myself further. God knows I do not at this Time speak from motives of party Heat, what I deliver are the Genuine Sentiment of my heart. 12

An American who listened to Colonel Barré thought the speech was "noble" and relished the House's initial reaction: it sat there "awhile as Amazed," unable or unwilling to speak even a word. 13 But the House soon recovered its voice and, when Barré and his friends moved to adjourn in order to avoid a vote on the proposed tax, voted 245 to 49 against. Such maneuvers were not going to stop Grenville with the Commons at his back; the stamp bill received its first reading on February 13

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¹¹
Morgan, ed.,
Prologue
, 32.

¹²
Ibid.

and two days later the second was passed without even a division. On this day, February 15, the opposition assisted by the colonial agents did its best and failed pathetically. Charles Garth offered a petition, framed from South Carolinian protests, which carefully skirted the questions of Parliament's right to tax the colonies. Sir William Meredith, a London merchant, handed in a petition from Virginia, and Richard Jackson presented several from Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Commons refused even to receive the petitions, holding that the House of Commons simply did not hear petitions against money bills, and in any case it was not going to indulge questioners of its authority. This ruling prompted General Henry Conway to point out the paradox in the Commons' decision in 1764 to give the colonies time to prepare objections to a stamp tax and then in 1765 to refuse to receive the objections. Commons was in no mood for paradox, or logic, or anything but the passing of the bill. After the second reading no further opposition seemed possible and the bill sailed through the third, and received the king's approval on March 22.
¹⁴

The opposition within Parliament to the Stamp Act had given its best, and it had provided some fine moments, as, for example, in Colonel Barré's answer to Charles Townshend. The opposition won the contest in rhetoric but lost it in the vote, the part of parliamentary action that counts. Those who approved of the Act had voted half in exasperation at the burden of taxation, already carried for too long, and half in the conviction that justice required the colonies to contribute to their own defense. Their votes were given rather easily, if the record of debate may be trusted; most of the objections were not considered worthy of discussion. The Commons had made up its mind quickly, and Grenville, knowing that he had the support he needed, was content to let the opposition sing its sad songs. He then pushed the measure through with an ease bordering on contempt.

The king's approval was the last event connected to the Stamp Act to be accomplished with ease. For the Stamp Act set off in America a crisis that had no precedents. In a sense, the rioting and mobbing that ensued during the summer and autumn of 1765 are the most interesting features of the episode; but interesting though they were, the organization of protest and the reorganization of local politics that emerged in the

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¹⁴
Conway's speech is in
ibid.,
34-35.

crisis were more important. And most important of all was the development of the colonial constitutional position, so evocative and expressive of self-consciousness among the colonists.

News of the stamp tax arrived in the colonies in the first two weeks of April. For the next six weeks almost nothing about the Act made its way into the colonial press, and certainly no public body seemed eager to take the lead in opposition. At the end of May, however, an official body, the House of Burgesses in Virginia, took action. The Burgesses approved a set of resolves on May 31 which declared that the constitution limited the right of taxation to the people or their representatives and that this right belonged to Virginians by virtue of the fact that they were British subjects who lived under the British constitution. The implication was inescapable: Parliament, a body to which they sent no representatives, had no authority to tax them. 15

On the face of things, this action hardly seems explosive -- yet it was. That an explosion occurred in Virginia was something of a historical accident, or at least an event in which chance -- or contingency -- played more than a normal role. Chance in this case may have been nothing more than astute timing by several political manipulators whose spokesman was Patrick Henry. For Henry introduced the Virginia Resolves at the very end of a legislative session after most of the burgesses had already left for home. Thirty-nine members remained of 116 when Henry got to his feet to introduce his resolves.

Patrick Henry was twenty-nine years old in 1765, a gay blade who loved music and dancing and who in turn was loved by young ladies for his dash and charm. He was well known for so young a man, having made his name in a celebrated struggle over the payment of the Anglican clergy in Virginia, a case appropriately called the Parson's Cause. 16

The Parson's Cause began with the price of a weed -- tobacco. In the middle of the eighteenth century, tobacco dominated Virginia's economy in a way inconceivable today. Tobacco was the most important crop raised on plantations, though some diversification had begun a

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¹⁵
McIlwaine and Kennedy, eds.,
Jour. Va. Burgesses
, X, 360. The resolves, along with many other documents essential to an understanding of the Stamp Act, have been reprinted in Morgan, ed.,
Prologue
.

¹⁶
For the Parson's Cause, see Richard L. Morton,
Colonial Virginia
(2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960), II, 751-819; Richard Beeman,
Patrick Henry: A Biography
( New York, 1974), 13-22; and Rhys Isaac, "Religion and Authority: Problems of the Anglican Establishment in Virginia in the Era of the Great Awakening and the Parson's Cause",
WMQ
, 3d Ser., 30 ( 1973), 3-36.

few years earlier; once harvested and cured, it was shipped to England for sale or for trans-shipment to the Continent. Most cultivated land in Virginia was put into tobacco production; the thousands of black slaves in the colony spent most of their waking hours with the plant; and planters seem not only to have used their days in its cultivation and sale but also to have dreamed in their nights of its expansion and increase.
¹⁷

Notes issued on tobacco deposited in the local warehouses circulated as money, and many private contracts provided that payment of obligations was to be in tobacco rather than in money. Public acts also sometimes required that payments of debts be in tobacco -- among them a statute of 1748 which required that an Anglican clergyman should be paid 17,280 pounds of tobacco a year.

In 1758, there was a drought that drastically reduced the tobacco crop, and the shortage that resulted drove up the price of tobacco to about four and one-half pence per pound, an amount about three times greater than the normal price. This inflation of price threatened the interests of debtors who of course had incurred debts when tobacco was cheaper. These debtors, for the most part tobacco planters, demanded some protection from the Virginia legislature, which responded with an act holding that debts payable in tobacco might be paid in currency for one year, at the rate of two pence per pound of tobacco -- an amount well above the normal price. The statute, locally referred to as the Two Penny Act, was not aimed at the clergy, but they were clearly affected since their salaries, set by law, were ordinarily paid in tobacco.

Creditors of all kinds would have benefited had the law not been passed. But though it cut into their pocketbooks, most did not complain. Nor did many clergymen, but several did -- and loudly. Not satisfied by these protests, they also sent the Reverend Mr. John Camm to England to have the law disallowed by the Privy Council. Hearings were held, arguments given, petitions received, and the Privy Council in August 1759 set aside the Act. From Virginia's point of view this was an unfortunate ruling, particularly because the councillors also declared that in the future laws which were passed in violation of the government's instruction were void from their inception. In practice, this ruling would have made governing difficult.

The clergy further soured popular feeling when a handful of their number sued to collect the full value of their salaries under the old

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¹⁷
Lewis C. Gray,
History of Agriculture in the Southern United State's to 1860
(2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1933) is a fine study of antebellum planting.

rate of 17,280 pounds per year. The Two Penny Act had been disallowed, and they wanted full pay; if there was drought and inflation, well, that was too bad.

In the first two cases heard by county courts in the colony, the decisions went against the clergy. The third, brought by the Reverend Mr. James Maury of Louisa County, was heard in Hanover County. The court found for Maury -- the reasons are not known -- and the case went to the jury which was to decide on the amount of damages to be awarded. To aid the jury in reaching an equitable decision, the county hired Patrick Henry to make the argument for the defense -- in other words, for the local interest. 18

Because Henry knew very little law at this time, he ignored legal niceties in favor of a brilliant attack: the clergy, Henry said, were enemies of the community who deserved not damages but punishment for bringing the case. The clergy, after all, had proved unwilling to obey the law. As for the British government, in disallowing the Two Penny Act, it had encroached upon colonial freedom. The climax to this address was a daring declaration that "a King, by disallowing Acts of this salutary nature, far from being the father of his people, degenerates into a Tyrant, and forfeits all rights to his subjects' obedience." 19 At this point there were cries of "Treason," but the presiding justice, Colonel John Henry, father of Patrick, unsympathetic to clergy and kings, let his son go on unreprimanded. The jury, according to the Reverend Mr. Maury, who was in anguish, sat there nodding its agreement all the while. Indeed Henry had been persuasive: the jury awarded Maury the magnificent sum of one penny.

Although this case made Henry's name in Virginia, he added to his fame by brilliant performances in hundreds of others. And Louisa County, in a demonstration of its admiration of him, chose him burgess in a special election held in the spring of 1765. Henry in fact made his first appearance in the House on May 20; ten days later, a new, untried burgess but a well-known man, he introduced the Virginia Resolves.

The main outlines of what happened that day and the next -- May 30-31 -- are known, but several important aspects of the passing of the Virginia Resolves remain elusive. Two facts are indisputable: only thirtynine of the 116 burgesses remained, the others having already departed for home; and these thirty-nine passed -- by no means unanimously -five resolves on May 30. Henry then left the House, presumably satisfied