The March of Folly (34 page)

News of this criminal attack on property, which reached London as early as 20 January, exasperated the British. It wrecked the plan for quiet establishment of a revenue tax, jeopardized the finances of the East India Company and proved the people of Massachusetts to be incorrigible insurrectionists. Britain’s interest might have suggested at this point a review of the series of increasingly negative results in the colonies with the aim of re-directing the by now alarming course of events. That would have required thought instead of mere reaction, and pause for serious thought is not a habit of governments. The ministers of George III were no exception.

They launched themselves instead upon that series of measures generally called the Coercive or Punitive Acts, and in America the Intolerable Acts, which served to advance antagonism in the direction it was already pointing and to pass the fork in the road at which another path might have led to another outcome.

As an act of war upon Crown property, the Tea Party was adjudged another case of treason. Judiciously deciding to avoid the embarrassment of the
Gaspée
procedure, the Cabinet chose instead to punish Boston as a whole by act of Parliament. Accordingly, a bill was presented to close the port of Boston to all commerce until indemnity had been paid to the East India Company and reparations to the customs commissioners for damages suffered, and until “peace and obedience to the Laws” was assured sufficiently that trade might be safely carried on and customs duly collected.

While preparing the bill, the Cabinet, having learned nothing from the ten years of angry protests since Grenville’s first tax, expected, as always, no trouble. Ministers believed the other colonies would condemn the Bostonians’ destruction of property, would not intervene on their behalf and might indeed be happy to absorb the tea diverted to their ports by the closing of Boston. Wooden-headedness enjoyed no finer hour. To respond angrily and positively to the grand larceny on the wharves was natural and lawful, but to suppose that the Boston Port Bill would contribute to control of the situation or to the stability of
empire or be regarded with equanimity by Massachusetts’ neighbors was to let emotional reaction prevail over every indication of recent evidence.

Emotionalism is always a contributory source of folly. It showed itself at this time in the savage glee of which Benjamin Franklin was made a target at the hearings in the affair of the Hutchinson letters. These letters to Thomas Whately, the Treasury Secretary, advising more emphatic measures to suppress the rebelliousness of Massachusetts had been acquired by Franklin sub rosa and when published caused Massachusetts, in a fury against Hutchinson, to petition Parliament for his dismissal as Governor. Wedderburn conducted the examination of Franklin in hearings on the petition in a chamber aptly called the Cockpit before 35 members of the Privy Council, the largest number ever to attend such a hearing, and an eager audience of peers, M.P.
S
and other guests. They responded with snickering delight and open laughter as Wedderburn rose through sneers and jibes to heights of brilliant and malevolent invective depicting the most influential American in London as a thief and a traitor. Lord North was reported to be the only listener who did not laugh. Franklin was dismissed next day by the Crown from his post as Deputy Postmaster of the colonies, which did nothing to encourage the man who was the strongest advocate of accommodation, and Franklin did not forget. Four years later, when signing the Treaty of Alliance with France that confirmed the birth of his nation, he dressed himself in the same suit of Manchester velvet he had worn under Wedderburn’s torment.

Sentiment against Boston was so strongly with the Government that the Port Bill excited no disapproval at its first two readings; even Barré and Henry Conway spoke in favor of firm action. At the third reading, opposition speakers found their voice, pointing out that other ports had sent the tea back to England and urging that Boston be given a chance to pay the indemnity before her commerce was cut off. The most important statement was made by a person with experience on the spot, former Governor George Johnstone of West Florida, who warned “that the effect of the present Bill must be productive of a General Confederation, to resist the power of this country.” Few listened to his prophecy. Opposition speakers, admitted Burke, who was one of them, “made so little impression” that the House did not need to divide for the vote. In the Lords, Shelburne, Camden and the Duke of Richmond deplored the bill with no greater effect. The Boston Port Bill passed through Parliament like melted butter.

Three more Coercive Acts followed in rapid succession. First was
the Massachusetts Regulatory Act, virtually annulling the charter of the Bay colony. Rights of election and appointment of officials, representatives, judges and juries and the basic right to summon town meetings, all that had been at “the sole disposal of her own internal government,” in Burke’s phrase, were taken over by the Crown acting through the Governor. Not unnaturally, this suggested to other colonies that what was done to Massachusetts could be done to them. The Administration of Justice Act followed, which allowed Crown officials accused of crime in Massachusetts who claimed they could not be assured a fair trial to be tried in England or in another colony. This was an insult considering that Boston had leaned over backward to give Captain Preston, commanding officer in the “Massacre,” a fair trial with defense by John Adams and had acquitted him. Next, the annual Quartering Act added a new provision authorizing, in case of any refusal to furnish barracks, the billeting of troops in citizens’ homes, taverns and other buildings. At the same time, General Gage was ordered to Boston to take over from Hutchinson as Governor.

The most furiously resented of the measures, though it was not one of the Coercive Acts, was the simultaneous Quebec Act extending Canada’s boundaries to the Ohio River, where Virginia and other colonies had territorial claims. The Act also formulated terms of civil government in Canada providing for the right of taxation by Parliament, for trial without jury according to the French manner and for toleration of the Catholic religion. Since 95 percent of Canadians were Catholic, this was a surprisingly sensible measure of toleration, but it gave the colonists and their friends in England a fiery issue. Roars of “Popery” thundered. The Inquisition was forecast for Pennsylvania, the “carnage of a St. Batholomew’s Day” foreseen in Philadelphia, the whore of Babylon invoked, a “Popish army” and “Popish hordes” pictured by Lord Camden as ready to subvert the liberties of the Protestant colonies. As for the elimination of trial by jury, it was declared by the
St. James Chronicle
“too scandalous a clause to have been framed by any Englishman.” A motive for this strangely ill-timed act granting favors to the Canadians may have been the hope of winning their loyalty in order that they might help to check any American outbreak. Yet if any intention remained of calming and eventually reconciling the colonies, passage of the Quebec Act on top of the Coercive Acts was a perfect model of how not to proceed.

How much of the Government’s ineptitude was ignorance and how much deliberate provocation, as the opposition firmly believed, is impossible to say. Governor Johnstone once remarked rather helplessly
in the Commons that he noticed “a great disposition in this House to proceed in this business without knowing anything of the constitution of America.” Ignorance was certainly a factor.

The measures of March–June 1774 roused the opposition to real apprehension and to explicit warnings of dire consequences. Coming use of force could be sensed and the prospect of its use against people of English blood and tradition appalled many. John Dunning, a liberal-minded lawyer who had served as Solicitor-General in Grafton’s ministry and who would later summarize matters toward the end of the war in the memorable Dunning’s Resolution, saw in the Coercive Acts a trend toward “war, severe revenge and hatred against our own subjects.” It was the lack of chance of success that disturbed others. Major General William Howe, who had scaled the Heights of Abraham with Wolfe at Quebec, told his constituents while canvassing for the election of 1774 that the whole British Army together would not be enough to conquer America. General John Burgoyne, who also held a seat in Parliament, said he would like “to see America convinced by persuasion rather than the sword.”

Ministers too were warned. Henry Laurens, when consulted by Dartmouth as to the probable effect of the Coercive Acts, prophesied, as had Governor Johnstone in Parliament, that the people “from Georgia to New Hampshire would be animated to form such an Union and phalanx of resistance” as had hitherto been thought only a miracle could accomplish. But the fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes to believe otherwise. In formulating Cassandra’s curse—that she would tell the truth and not be believed—the ancient Greeks showed their remarkable early insight into the human psyche.

In the debate of 19 April 1774, on a motion by the opposition for repeal of the tea duty, Burke delivered the foundation speech of his views on the American question. It was an immense peroration on the successive acts and repeals, the vacillations and equivocations, the empty menaces, false assumptions and history of colonial policy all the way back to the Navigation Acts and forward to “the distempered vigor and insane alacrity with which you are rushing to your ruin.” Never, he said, “have the servants of the state looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected view.… They never had any system of right or wrong but only invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted.… By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils … they have shaken the pillars
of a commercial empire that circled the globe.” Striking at the token assertion of authority—what today would be called credibility—he said, in words with a long echo, “They tell you that your dignity is tied to it.… This dignity is a terrible encumbrance to you for it has of late been ever at war with your interest, your equity and every idea of your policy.”

That “terrible encumbrance” has pursued policy-makers in every century. Benjamin Franklin, a wise man and one of the few who derived principles from political experience and were able to state them, wrote during the Stamp Act crisis that it should not be supposed that honor and dignity are better served “by persisting in a wrong measure once entered into than by rectifying an error as soon as it is discovered.”

In America, the Boston Port Bill ignited solidarity. In May, Rhode Island issued the first call for an intercolonial congress, while Connecticut towns held indignation meetings and took vows to rush aid in money and provisions to Boston and “to sprinkle American altars with our hearts’ blood” if occasion arose. The old Indian fighter and ranger of the Seven Years’ War, Colonel Israel Putnam, chairman of the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, personally drove 130 sheep 100 miles from his home in Pomfret to Boston. Baltimore sent 1000 bushels of corn and ultimately gifts were received from all thirteen colonies. Patriot leaders demanded a complete denial of tea throughout the colonies, smuggling was stopped, the “hurtful trash” was burned on village greens and unappetizing herb potions called Liberty Tea substituted.

The summons to a congress was quickly supported by New York and Philadelphia and brought acceptances from twelve colonies during the summer. Many Americans had become convinced that, as Jefferson wrote in a draft of instructions to the Virginia delegates to the congress, Britain’s series of oppressions “pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”

This became an article of faith in America. George Washington endorsed it, speaking of “a regular systematic plan [to] fix the shackles of slavery upon us.” Tom Paine maintained “it was the fixed determination of the British Cabinet to quarrel with America at all events” in order to suppress her charters and control her progress in population and property. The accusation was convenient because it justified the ultimate rebellion, and indeed if Britain had really been pursuing a plan to goad the colonies to insurrection in order to subjugate them, then her conduct of policy becomes rational. Unhappily for reason, that version
cannot be reconciled to the repeals, the backings and fillings, the haphazard or individual decisions. Rather than “deliberate and systematical,” English policy, its critics complained, was exactly the opposite. “What enforcing and what repealing,” cried Burke; “what bullying and what submitting; what doing and undoing; what straining and what relaxing.… Let us embrace some sort of system before we end this session.… Let us hold some sort of consistent conduct.”

Believing, on the contrary, that England’s policy
was
consistent, Americans moved toward the overt break. By uniting the colonies into a whole, the Coercive Acts accomplished the same cohesion in the adversary as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor accomplished two centuries later—and with ultimately the same result. The first Continental Congress of 56 members representing all colonies except Georgia convened at Philadelphia in September 1774. They declared all acts of Parliament respecting the colonies since 1763 to have violated American rights and pledged themselves to renew Non-Importation until all were repealed. If there were no redress of grievances within a year, they would move to Non-Intercourse, that is, cessation of exports as well as imports. They adopted ten resolutions on the rights of self-government, including self-taxation by their own legislatures, and under pressure by the radicals, endorsed the Resolves taken by Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which declared the Coercive Acts to be unconstitutional and invalid, authorized no obedience until they were repealed and advised citizens to arm and form militia for defense if attacked. While acknowledging allegiance to the Crown, they considered themselves a “dominion” not subject to Parliament. In order not to alienate the conservatives among them, they issued no call for independence, “a Hobgoblin of so frightful mien,” declared John Adams, “that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it in the face.”