The March of Folly (27 page)

Agitators and pamphleteers kept passions excited. Hardly a family from Canada to Florida had not heard of the Act though many had
little idea what it threatened. A country gentleman whose servant was afraid to go out to the barn on a dark night asked him, “Afraid of what?”

“Of the Stamp Act,” the servant replied. In Connecticut, three out of four were ready to take up the sword, as reported by Ezra Stiles, preacher and future President of Yale. More astonishing and, to any Englishmen who took notice, ominous was the agreement of nine colonies at a Stamp Act Congress in October in New York. After a mere two and a half weeks of bickering, they united on a petition for repeal, and agreed also to abandon the troublesome distinction that figured so largely in the whole American dispute between acceptable “external” taxation in the form of duties on trade and unacceptable “internal” taxation on domestic processes.

Beyond all words and petitions, the effective protest was boycott, known as Non-Importation. Already set in motion in response to the Sugar Act, a program to cut off imports of English goods was now formally adopted by groups of merchants in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The call swept through the colonies on winds of enthusiasm. Women brought their spinning wheels to the minister’s parlor or to the courthouse to compete in the number of skeins they could turn out for homespun to replace English cloth. Flax was spun for shirts “fine enough for the best gentlemen in America.” By the end of the year, imports were £305,000 less than the year before out of a total of some
£2
million.

What of the alternative available to the British? It was, as many thought, to give the Americans the representation in Parliament they claimed and let taxation follow. At one stroke, this would have invalidated American resistance. While other dynamics of conflict were present, nothing raises tempers like money, and taxation was the Americans’ most vibrant issue. They were ready enough to claim representation as a right but the fact was that they did not really want it in the flesh. The Stamp Act Congress agreed to declare it “impractical.”

In all discussions of representation, much was made of the 3000-mile distance, where “seas roll and months pass” between order and execution. Yet distance did not prevent Americans from ordering English furnishings, clothes and books, adopting English fashions, sending children to English schools, corresponding steadily with colleagues in Europe, sending botanical specimens, absorbing ideas and generally maintaining a close cultural relationship. It was not so much the “vast and hazardous ocean” that was the deterrent as a growing realization in the colonies that what they really wanted was less interference and
greater home rule. Although separation, much less independence, was not contemplated, many did not want a closer connection for they shuddered at the corruption of English society. John Adams believed that England had reached the same stage as the Roman Republic, “a venal city, ripe for destruction.” Visiting Americans were shocked at the corrupt politics, the vice, the gap between the “Wealth, Magnificence and splendour” of the rich and the “extreme Misery and distresses of the Poor … amazing on the one hand and disgusting on the other.”

They viewed the patronage system as hostile and dangerous to liberty, for when government rested on purchased support, true political liberty was a dead letter. Englishmen were the only people to have gained that liberty; pervading American polemic in these years was a sense of America’s mission, as inheritor, to foster and preserve it for mankind. Colonial members in Parliament were believed likely to be corrupted by English decadence and in practice would be a helpless minority always outvoted. It was also clear that if the colonies gained representation, they would no longer have grounds for resisting Parliament’s right to tax. Americans recognized this ahead of the English, who, indeed, never seriously considered the advantage to themselves of admitting American representation.

Attitude was again the obstacle; the English could not visualize Americans in terms of equality. Should uncouth provincials, the “spawn of our [prisoners’] transports,” rabble-rousers “with manners no better than Mohawks,” be invited, asked the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, to occupy the “highest seats of our commonwealth?” To the
Morning Post
, Americans were “a mongrel breed of Irish, Scotch and Germans leavened with convicts and outcasts.” Deeper than social disdain was fear of the colonials as “levellers” of class, whose representation in Parliament would encourage unrepresented English towns and districts to demand seats, destroying property rights in the boroughs and overturning the system.

The English had contrived a convenient theory of “virtual representation” to cover the masses who lacked votes or members to represent them. Every member of the House, it was maintained, represented the whole body politic, not a particular constituency, and if Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham had no seats and London had only six while Devon and Cornwall had seventy, the former could take comfort in being “virtually represented” by the bluff gentlemen from the country. These gentlemen on the whole, bearing the main weight of the land tax, heartily favored taxing the colonies for their share of the burden and firmly believed in the assertion of parliamentary sovereignty.

An alternative to conflict that serious men gave thought to, and proposed, was colonial union followed by some form of federation with Britain, and with colonial representation in an imperial parliament. In 1754, a Plan of Union to meet the French and Indian threat had been proposed by Benjamin Franklin, with advice from Thomas Hutchinson, at the Albany Congress and found no takers. During the Stamp Act crisis the idea was revived by persons who held governing responsibility in the colonies and were worried by the growing alienation from the mother country. Franklin himself, Thomas Pownall, a former Governor of Massachusetts, now an M.P., Thomas Crowley, a Quaker merchant familiar with America, and Francis Bernard, the current Governor of Massachusetts, all proposed various plans for rationalization of the colonial government and definitive settlement through debate of reciprocal rights and obligations leading to federation. Pownall complained at a later crisis in 1775 that as no one in government paid any attention to his views, he would offer them no more. Francis Bernard, who formulated a detailed plan of 97 propositions which he sent to Lord Halifax and others, was told by Halifax that the plan was “the best thing of the kind by much that he had ever read,” and that was the last he heard.

Benjamin Franklin urged his British correspondents to recognize the inevitability of American growth and development and to make no laws intended to cramp its trade and manufacture, for natural expansion would sweep them aside, but rather to work toward an Atlantic world peopled by Americans and English possessing equal rights in which the colonists would enrich the mother country and extend its “empire round the whole globe and awe the world!” It was a splendid vision which had enthralled him since the Albany Plan of Union. “I am still of the opinion,” he wrote years later in his autobiography, “that the Plan of Union would have been happy for both Sides of the Water if it had been adopted. The Colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves; there would have been no need of Troops from England; of course the subsequent Pretence for Taxing America, and the bloody Contest it occasioned would have been avoided.” Franklin ends with a sigh: “But such Mistakes are not new; History is full of the Errors of States and Princes.”

Repeal became an issue in England almost as soon as the Stamp Act became law. As Non-Importation emptied the ports, and shippers and handlers and factory workers lost employment and merchants lost money, Britain awoke to American sentiment. For the next six months the Stamp Act was a leading topic in the press. With the 18th century’s
passion for political principle, all the issues—the rights of Parliament, the iniquity of taxation without representation, “virual representation,” external versus internal taxation—were debated in comments, columns and angry letters.

Great impact was made by a pamphlet published by Soame Jenyns, a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, who insisted that both the right to tax and the expediency of exerting it were “propositions so indisputably clear” that they needed no defense, were it not for arguments challenging them “with insolence equal to their absurdity.” The phrase “liberty of an Englishman,” snorted Mr. Jenyns, had lately been used “as a synonymous term for blasphemy, bawdry, treason, libels, strong beer and cyder,” and the American argument that people cannot be taxed without their consent was “the reverse of truth, for no man I know is taxed by his own consent.”

Lord Chesterfield, observing affairs, like Horace Walpole, from the sidelines, had a way of picking out the essence in contrast to the stilted etiquette he preached to his nephew. The “absurdity” of the Stamp Act, he wrote to Newcastle, equaled “the mischief of it by asserting a right you know you cannot exert.” Even if effective, he wrote, the tax should bring in no more than £80,000 a year (the government calculated on no more than £60,000), which could not compensate for the loss to Britain in trade worth at least a million a year (it was worth two million). A harder truth came from General Thomas Gage, commander of British forces in the colonies, who reported in November that resistance was widespread throughout the colonies, and that “Unless the Act from its own nature enforces itself, nothing but a very considerable military force can do it.” The gentlemen of England could not envisage this necessity vis-à-vis rabble.

By the time the crisis that Grenville’s Stamp Act had engendered was at hand, he had lost office. The King, long irritated and bored by Grenville’s habit of lecturing him on economic policy, became enraged when his mother’s name was eliminated by Grenville’s faction for devious political reasons from a Regency Bill drawn up in consequence of the King’s illness early in 1765.
^*
George dismissed him, unfortunately before locating someone sufficiently master of the conflicts stirred up by the Regency Bill to form a ministry in his place. At a loss, George turned to his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, a person of un-Hanoverian
ability and considerable prestige. The Duke offered the premiership to Pitt, who obstinately refused for reasons not easily discerned in this complex and opaque character. He may have been already determined on repeal and not sure whether he could command it and too stiff-necked to compromise or, given that he had been absent from affairs for the past year, the physical and sometimes mental disturbances that afflicted him from time to time may have been active.

Historians have suggested that, had Pitt taken office in 1765, the course of the next decade might have been different, but that is a supposition dependent on his continuing to function, which, as events soon proved, he could not. Pitt’s intransigence and exaggerated demands for an autonomous hand unquestionably weakened the government during the conflict with America. With his immense popularity, reputation and influence, and his incomparable sway over the House of Commons, he was an epic figure who had won, and could not save, an empire.

Pitt owed his rise as a younger son of what Lord Chesterfield called “a very new family” to force of character and his own abilities. His grandfather, called “Diamond” Pitt, was a nabob of the East India Company, of brutal temperament and wild and tyrannical habits, who had made the family fortune in the Indian trade and held a share of command for a while as Governor of Madras. The diamond for which he was known was bought by the French Crown for more than two million livres. In England the family acquired the rotten borough of Old Sarum in Wiltshire, whose seat Pitt held from 1735. He took it over at 27 from his elder brother, who, having dissipated his fortune and alienated all friends in the process, retired abroad “in very bad circumstances” and intermittently mad, “though not confined but obliged to lead a very retired life.” The streak of madness in the blood, whether or not stemming from the grandfather, appeared also in Pitt’s sisters, one of whom was confined and two others more or less so.

Throughout his life Pitt suffered from incapacitating gout, which had afflicted him since schooldays at Eton. Rare in youth, gout at that age was evidence of a severe form. Its recurring pain caused the irritability common to gout-sufferers and required a gout-stool and huge boot to be built into the front of Pitt’s carriage and sedan chair.

His political career gained notoriety by a much publicized refusal as Paymaster of the Forces to take commissions or hold back for personal investment the sums assigned for pay, both customary perquisites of office. As Secretary of State during the Seven Years’ War, he was able to abide shared command with the Duke of Newcastle as
premier because Newcastle stayed within his specialty, the handling of patronage, and left policy to Pitt.

Pitt was driven by conviction that England’s destiny was maritime supremacy and that her resources could prevail in the rivalry with France by destruction of French trade and trading bases. With passionate application of funds and forces to this object, and infusion of his own assurance, which once expressed itself in the statement “I know I can save this country and that I alone can,” he reconditioned and manned the fleet, recruited fellow-countrymen to replace foreign mercenaries, and turned feckless campaigning into a national war and tide of victory. Louisburg, on Cape Breton, Guadeloupe, Ticonderoga, Quebec, Minden in Europe, naval triumph in the Bay of Biscay—such a series of successes, wrote Horace Walpole, that “we are forced to ask every morning what victory there has been for fear of missing one.” Captured French flags were hung from St. Paul’s amid roars of the multitude. Supplies were voted without discussion. Pitt dominated his colleagues and, as the Great Commoner, was the idol of the public, who admired his absence of title and felt that in him they had a representative. This feeling carried as far as New England, where, according to Ezra Stiles, he was “idolized.” Fort Duquesne, captured from the French in 1758, was renamed Fort Pitt and its wooden village Pittsburgh.