Chapter Three
America in the British Empire
Because the colonies were founded piecemeal by 10 persons with varying motives
and backgrounds, common traditions and loyalties developed slowly. For the same
reason, the British government was slow to think of its American possessions as
a unit or to deal with them in any centralized way. The particular circumstances
that led to its founding determined the specific form of each colony's
government and the degree of local independence permitted to it.
The British Colonial System
There was a pattern basic to all colonial governments and a general framework to
the system of imperial control for all the king's overseas plantations. In the
earliest days of any settlement, the need to rely on home authorities was so
obvious that few questioned England's sovereignty. Thereafter, as the fledglings
grew strong enough to think of using their own wings, distance and British
political inefficiency combined to allow them a great deal of freedom. Although
royal representatives in America tried to direct policy, the Crown generally
yielded the initiative in local matters to the colonies, while reserving the
right to veto actions it deemed to be against the national interest. External
affairs were controlled entirely in London.
Each colony had a governor. By the eighteenth century he was an appointed
official, except in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Governors were chosen by the
king in the case of the royal colonies and by the proprietors of Maryland,
Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Their powers were much like those of the king in
Great Britain. They possessed the right to veto colonial laws, but in most
colonies, again like the king, they were financially dependent on their
"subjects."
Each colony also had a legislature. Except in Pennsylvania, these assemblies
consisted of two houses. The lower house, chosen by qualified voters, had
general legislative powers, including control of the purse. In all the royal
colonies members of the upper house, or council, were appointed by the king,
except in Massachusetts, where they were elected by the General Court.
The lower houses of the legislatures tended to dominate the government in nearly
every colony. Financial power, including the right to set the governor's salary,
gave them some importance, and the fact that the assemblies usually had the
backing of public opinion was significant. They extended their influence by slow
accretion. Governors came and went, but the lawmakers remained, accumulating
experience, building on precedent, widening their control over colonial affairs
decade by decade.
At times the British authorities, uneasy about their lack of control over the
colonies, attempted to create a more effective system. Whenever possible, the
original, broadly worded charters were revoked. In 1696 officials in London
attempted more direct control over colonial affairs. A Board of Trade nominated
colonial governors and other high officials. It reviewed all the laws passed by
the colonial legislatures, recommending the disallowance of those that seemed to
conflict with imperial policy.
Colonists naturally disliked having their laws disallowed, but London exercised
this power with considerable restraint; only about 5 percent of the laws
reviewed were rejected. Furthermore, the board served as an important
intermediary for colonists seeking to influence the king and Parliament. All the
colonies in the eighteenth century maintained agents in London to present the
colonial point of view. The most famous colonial agent was Benjamin Franklin,
who represented Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts at various
times during his long career. However, agents seldom had much influence on
British policy.
The British never developed an effective, centralized government for the
American colonies. By and large, their American "subjects" ran their
own affairs. This fact more than any other explains our present federal system
and the wide areas in which the state governments are sovereign and independent.
Mercantilism
According to prevailing European opinion, colonies were important chiefly for
economic reasons. The seventeenth century was a period of hard times. Many
people were unemployed. Therefore some authorities saw the colonies as excellent
dumping grounds for surplus people. If only two idlers in each parish were
shipped overseas, one clergyman calculated in 1624, England would be rid of
16,000 undesirables.
Most seventeenth-century theorists, however, envisaged colonies as potential
sources of raw materials. To obtain these, they developed a system that later
economists called mercantilism. The most important raw materials in the eyes of
mercantilists were gold and silver, which, being universally valued, could be
exchanged at any time for anything the owner desired. How much gold and silver
("treasure" according to mercantilists) a nation possessed was
considered the best barometer of its prosperity and power. Because there were no
significant deposits of gold or silver in western Europe, every early colonist
dreamed of finding El Dorado. The Spanish were the winners in this search; from
the mines of Mexico and South America a rich treasure in gold and silver poured
into the Iberian Peninsula. Failing to control the precious metals at the
source, the other powers tried to obtain them by guile and warfare (witness the
exploits of Francis Drake).
In the mid-seventeenth century another method, less hazardous and in the long
run far more profitable, called itself to the attention of the statesmen of
western Europe. If a country could make itself as nearly self-sufficient as
possible and at the same time keep all its citizens busy producing items
marketable in other lands, it could sell more abroad than it imported. This
state of affairs was known as "having a favorable balance of trade."
The term is misleading; in reality, trade, which means exchange, always balances
unless one party simply gives its goods away, an uncommon practice among
traders. A country with a favorable balance in effect made up the difference by
"importing" money in the form of gold and silver. Nevertheless,
mercantilism came to mean concentrating on producing for export and limiting
imports of ordinary goods and services in every way possible. Colonies that did
not have deposits of precious metals were well worth having if they supplied raw
materials that would otherwise have to be purchased from foreign sources, or if
their people bought substantial amounts of the manufactured goods produced in
the mother country.
If the possession of gold and silver signified wealth, trade was the route that
led to riches, with merchants as pilots to steer the ship of state to
prosperity. "Trade is the Wealth of the World," Daniel Defoe wrote in
1728. One must, of course, have something to sell, so internal production must
be stimulated.
The Navigation Acts
The nurture of commerce was fundamental. Toward this end Parliament enacted the
Navigation Acts. These laws, put into effect over a period of half a century and
more, were designed to bring money into the treasury, to develop the imperial
merchant fleet, to channel the flow of colonial raw materials into England, and
to keep foreign goods and vessels out of colonial ports (because the employment
of foreign ships in the carrying trade was as much an import as the consumption
of foreign wheat or wool).
The system originated in the 1650s in response to the stiff commercial
competition offered by the Dutch, whose ships had carried much of the trade
between Europe and the colonies.
The Navigation Act of 1660 reserved the entire trade of the colonies to English
ships and required that the captain and three-quarters of his crew be English.
(Colonists, of course, were English, and their ships were treated on the same
terms as those sailing out of London or Liverpool.) The act also provided that
certain colonial "enumerated articles"-sugar, tobacco, cotton, ginger,
and dye like indigo could not be "shipped, carried, conveyed, or
transported" outside the empire. Three years later Parliament required that
with trifling exceptions all European products destined for the colonies be
brought to England before being shipped across the Atlantic. Because trade
between England and the colonies was reserved to English vessels, this meant
that the goods would have to be unloaded and reloaded in England. Early in the
eighteenth century the list of enumerated articles was expanded to include rice,
molasses, naval stores, furs, and copper.
The English looked upon the empire broadly; they envisioned the colonies as part
of an economic unit, not as servile dependencies to be exploited for England's
selfish benefit. The growing of tobacco in England was prohibited, and valuable
bounties were paid to colonial producers of indigo and naval stores. A planned
economy, with England specializing in manufacturing and the colonies in the
production of raw materials, was the grand design. By and large, the system
suited the realities of life in an underdeveloped country rich in raw materials
and suffering from a chronic labor shortage.
Much has been made by some historians of the restrictions that the British
placed on colonial manufacturing. The Wool Act of 1699 prohibited the export
(but not the manufacture for local sale) of colonial woolen cloth. A similar law
regarding hats was passed in 1732, and in 1750 an Iron Act outlawed the
construction of new rolling and slitting mills in America. No other restrictions
on manufacturing were imposed. At most the Wool Act stifled a potential American
industry; the law was directed chiefly at Irish woolens rather than American.
The hat industry cannot be considered a major one. Iron, however, was important;
by 1775 the industry was thriving in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania, and America was turning out one-seventh of the world supply. Yet
the Iron Act was designed to steer the American iron industry in a certain
direction, not to destroy it. Eager for iron to feed English mills, Parliament
eliminated all duties on colonial pig and bar iron entering England, a great
stimulus to the basic industry.
The Effects of Mercantilism
All the legislation reflected, more than it molded, the imperial economy. It
made England the colonies' main customer and chief supplier of manufactures, but
this would have happened in any case. Furthermore, important colonial products
for which no market existed in England, such as fish, wheat, and corn, were
never enumerated and moved freely and directly to foreign ports. Most colonial
manufacturing was untouched by English law. Shipbuilding benefited from the
Navigation Acts, because many English merchants bought vessels built in the
colonies. Between 1769 and 1771, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island
shipyards constructed perhaps 250 ships of 100 to 400 tons for transatlantic
commerce and twice that many sloops and schooners for fishermen and coastal
traders. The manufacture of rum for local consumption and for the slave trade
was significant; so were barrel making, flour milling, shoemaking, and dozens of
other crafts that operated without restriction.
Two forces that worked in opposite directions must be considered before arriving
at any judgment about English mercantilism. Although the theory presupposed a
general imperial interest above that of both colony and mother country, when
conflicts of interest arose, the latter nearly always predominated. The Hat Act,
for example, may have been good mercantilism, but Parliament passed it because
English feltmakers were concerned over the news that Massachusetts and New York
were turning out 10,000 hats a year.
Mercantilistic policies hurt some colonists, such as the tobacco planters, who
grew far more than British consumers could smoke. But the policies helped
others, and most people proved adept at getting around those aspects of the
system that threatened them. In any case, the colonies enjoyed almost continuous
prosperity in the years between 1650 and the Revolution, as even so dedicated a
foe of trade restrictions as Adam Smith admitted.
By the same token, England profited greatly from its overseas possessions.
Despite all its inefficiencies, mercantilism worked. Prime Minister Sir Robert
Walpole's famous policy of "salutary neglect," which involved looking
the other way when Americans violated the Navigation Acts, was partly a bowing
to the inevitable and partly the result of complacency. English manufactures
were better and cheaper than those of other nations. This fact, together with
ties of language and a common heritage, predisposed Americans toward doing
business in England. All else followed naturally; the mercantilistic laws merely
steered the American economy in a direction it had already taken. They were not
a cause of serious discontent until after the French and Indian War.
The Great Awakening
Although a majority of the settlers were of English, Scotch, or Scotch-Irish
descent, and their interests generally coincided with those of their cousins in
the mother country, people in the colonies were beginning to recognize their
common interests and character. Their interests and loyalties were still
predominantly local, but by 1750 the word American, used to describe something
characteristic of all the British possessions in North America, had entered the
language. Events in one part of America were beginning to have direct effects on
other regions. One of the first of these developments was the so-called Great
Awakening.
By the early eighteenth century, religious fervor had slackened in all the
colonies. Prosperity turned many colonists away from their forebears'
preoccupation with the rewards of the next world to the more tangible ones of
this. John Winthrop invested his faith in God and his own efforts in the task of
creating a spiritual community; his grandsons invested in Connecticut real
estate.
The proliferation of religious denominations made it impracticable to enforce
laws requiring regular religious observances. Even in South Carolina, the colony
that came closest to having an "Anglican Establishment," only a
minority of persons were churchgoers. Settlers in frontier districts lived
beyond the reach of church or clergy. The result was a large and growing number
of "persons careless of all religion."
This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with the Great Awakening of the
1740s. The Awakening began in the Middle Colonies as the result of religious
developments that originated in Europe. In the late 1720s two newly arrived
ministers, Theodore Frelinghuysen, a Calvinist from Westphalia, and William
Terment, an Irishborn Presbyterian, sought to instill in their sleepy
Pennsylvania and New Jersey congregations the evangelical zeal and spiritual
enthusiasm they had witnessed among the pietists in Germany and the Methodist
followers of John Wesley in England. Their example inspired other clergymen,
including Terment's two sons.
A more significant surge of religious enthusiasm followed the arrival in 1738 in
Georgia of the Reverend George Whitefield, a young Oxford-trained Anglican
minister. Whitefield was a marvelous pulpit orator and no mean actor. He played
on the feelings of his audience the way a conductor directs a symphony.
He undertook a series of fund-raising tours throughout the colonies. The most
successful began in Philadelphia in 1739. Benjamin Franklin, not a very
religious person and not easily moved by emotional appeals, heard one of these
sermons. "I silently resolved he should get nothing from me," he later
recalled.
I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and
five Pistoles in Gold. As be proceeded I began to soften and concluded to give
the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory ... determin'd me to give the Silver;
and he finished so admirably that I empty'd my Pocket wholly into the
Collector's Disb. Wherever Whitefield went, he filled the churches. If no local
clergyman offered his pulpit, he attracted thousands to meetings out-of-doors.
During a three-day visit to Boston, 19,000 people (more than the population of
the town) thronged to hear him.
His oratorical brilliance aside, Whitefield succeeded in releasing a torrent of
religious emotionalism because his message was so well suited to American ears.
By preaching a theology that one critic said was "scaled down to the
comprehension of twelve-year olds," he spared his audiences the rigors of
hard thought. Though he usually began by chastising his listeners as sinners,
"half animals and half devils," he invariably took care to leave them
with the hope that eternal salvation could be theirs. Although not denying the
doctrine of predestination, he preached a God responsive to good intentions. He
disregarded sectarian differences and encouraged his listeners to do the same.
"God help us to forget party names and become Christians in deed and
truth," he prayed.
Whitefield attracted some supporters among ministers with established
congregations, but many more from among younger "itinerants," as
preachers who lacked permanent pulpits were called. A visit from him or one of
his followers inevitably prompted comparisons between this new, emotionally
charged style and the more restrained "plaine style" favored by the
typical settled minister.
Of course not everyone found the Whitefield style edifying. When those who did
not spoke up, churches sometimes split into factions.-Those who supported the
incumbent minister were called, among Congregationalists, "Old
Lights," and among Presbyterians, "Old Sides," whereas those who
favored revivalism were known as "New Lights" and "New
Sides." These splits often ran along class lines. The richer,
better-educated, and more influential members of the church tended to stay with
the traditional arrangements.
But the emotional upheaval that accompanied the Great Awakening transcended
issues of class. Persons chafing under the restraints of Puritan
authoritarianism and made guilt ridden by their rebellious feelings now found
release. For some the release was more than spiritual; Timothy Cutler, a
conservative Anglican clergyman, complained that as a result of the Awakening
"our presses are forever teeming with books and our women with
bastards." Whether or not Cutler was correct, the Great Awakening helped
some people to rid themselves of the idea that disobedience to authority
entailed damnation. Anything that God justified, human law could not condemn.
Other institutions besides the churches were affected by the Great Awakening. In
1741 the president of Yale College criticized the theology of itinerant
ministers. One of these promptly retorted that a Yale faculty member had no more
divine grace than a chair! Other revivalists called on the New Light churches of
Connecticut to withdraw their support from Yale and to endow a college of their
own. The result was the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), founded in 1746
by New Side Presbyterians. Three other educational by-products of the Great
Awakening followed: the College of Rhode Island (Brown), founded by Baptists in
1765; Queen's College (Rutgers), founded by Dutch Reformers in 1766; and
Dartmouth, founded by New Light Congregationalists in 1769. These institutions
promptly set about to refute the charge that the evangelical temperament was
hostile to learning. Jonathan Edwards, the most famous native-born revivalist of
the Great Awakening, was living proof that it need not be.
The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards, though deeply pious, was passionately devoted to intellectual
pursuits. But in 1725, four years after graduating from Yale, he was offered the
position of assistant at his grandfather Solomon Stoddard's church in
Northampton, Massachusetts. He accepted, and when Stoddard died two years later,
Edwards became pastor.
During his six decades in Northampton, Stoddard so dominated the ministers of
the Connecticut Valley that some referred to him as "pope." His
prominence came in part from the "open enrollment" admission policy he
adopted for his own church. Evidence of saving grace was neither required nor
expected of members; mere good behavior sufficed. As a result, the grandson
inherited a congregation whose members were possessed of an "inordinate
engagedness after this world." How ready they were to meet their Maker in
the next was another question.
At Edward's rendering, the heat of Hell's consuming fires and the stench of
brimstone became palpable. In his Most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God," delivered at Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741, he pulled out
all the stops, depicting a "dreadfully provoked" God holding the
unconverted over the pit of Hell, "much as one holds a spider, or some
loathsome insect." Later, on the off chance that his listeners did not
recognize themselves among the "insects" in God's hand, he declared
that "this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has
not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may
otherwise be." A great moaning reverberated through the church. People
cried out, "What must I do to be saved?"
Unfortunately for some church members, Edwards's warnings about the state of
their souls caused much anxiety. One disconsolate member, Joseph Hawley, slit
his throat. Edwards took the suicide calmly. "Satan seems to be in a great
rage," he declared. But for some of Edwards's most prominent parishioners,
Hawley's death aroused doubts. They began to miss the easy, Arminian ways of
Solomon Stoddard.
Rather than soften his message, Edwards persisted, and in 1749 his parishioners
voted unanimously to dismiss him. He became a missionary to some Indians in
Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1759 he was appointed president of Princeton, but
he died of smallpox before he could take office.
By the early 1750s, a reaction had set in against religious
"enthusiasm" in all its forms. Except in the religion-starved South,
where traveling New Side Presbyterians and Baptists continued their evangelizing
efforts, the Great Awakening had run its course. Whitefield's last tour of the
colonies in 1754 attracted little notice.
Although it caused divisions, the Great Awakening also fostered religious
toleration. If one group claimed the right to worship in its own way, how could
it deny to other Protestant churches equal freedom? The Awakening was also the
first truly national event in American history. It marks the time when the
previously distinct histories of New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South
began to intersect. Powerful links were being forged. As early as 1691 there was
a rudimentary intercolonial postal system. In 1754, not long after the
Awakening, the farsighted Benjamin Franklin advanced his Albany Plan for a
colonial union to deal with common problems, such as defense against Indian
attacks on the frontier. Thirteen once-isolated colonies, expanding to the north
and south as well as westward, were merging.
The Enlightenment in America
The Great Awakening pointed ahead to an America marked by religious pluralism;
by the 1740s many colonists were rejecting the stern Calvinism of Jonathan
Edwards in favor of a far less forbidding theology, one more in keeping with the
ideas of the European Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment had an enormous impact in America. The founders of the
colonies were contemporaries of the astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the
philosopher-mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Sir Isaac Newton
(1642-1727), the genius who revealed to the world the workings of gravity.
American society developed amid the excitement generated by these great
scientists. Their discoveries implied that impersonal, scientific laws governed
the behavior of all matter, animate and inanimate. Earth and the heavens, human
beings and the lower animals-all seemed parts of an immense, intricate machine.
God had set it all in motion and remained the master technician (the divine
watchmaker) overseeing it, but He took fewer and fewer occasions to interfere
with its immutable operation. If human reasoning powers and direct observation
of natural phenomena rather than God's revelations provided the key to
knowledge, it followed that knowledge of the laws of nature, by enabling people
to understand the workings of the universe, would enable them to control their
earthly destinies and to have at least a voice in their eternal destinies.
Most creative thinkers of the European Enlightenment realized that human beings
were not entirely rational and that a complete understanding of the physical
world was beyond their grasp. They did, however, believe that human beings were
becoming more rational and would be able, by using their rational powers, to
discover the laws governing the physical world. Their faith in these ideas
produced the so-called Age of Reason.
Many churchgoing colonists, especially better educated ones, accepted the
assumptions of the Age of Reason wholeheartedly. Some repudiated the doctrine of
original sin and asserted the benevolence of God. Others came to doubt the
divinity of Christ and eventually declared themselves Unitarians. Still others,
among them Benjamin Franklin, embraced Deism, a faith that revered God for the
marvels of His universe rather than for His power over humankind.
The impact of Enlightenment ideas went far beyond religion. The writings of John
Locke and other political theorists found a receptive audience. Ideas generated
in Europe often reached America with startling speed, where they were quoted in
newspapers from Massachusetts to Georgia. No colonial political controversy
really heated up in America until all involved had published pamphlets citing
half a dozen European authorities. Radical ideas that in Europe were discussed
only by an intellectual elite became almost commonplace in the colonies.
As the topics of learned discourse expanded, ministers lost their monopoly on
intellectual life. By the 1750s only a minority of Harvard and Yale graduates
were becoming ministers. The College of Philadelphia (later the University of
Pennsylvania), founded in 1751, and King's College (later Columbia), founded in
New York in 1754, added two institutions to the growing ranks of American
colleges that were not primarily training grounds for clergymen. Lawyers, who
first appeared in any number in colonial towns in the 1740s, swiftly asserted
their intellectual authority in public affairs. Physicians and the handful of
professors of natural history declared themselves better able to make sense of
the new scientific discoveries than clergymen. And self-educated amateurs could
also make useful contributions.
The most famous instances of popular participation occurred in Philadelphia. It
was there, in 1727, that 21-year-old Benjamin Franklin founded the junto, a club
at which he and other young artisans gathered on Friday evenings to discuss
"any point of morals, politics, or natural philosophy." In 1743
Franklin established an expanded version of the Junto, the American
Philosophical Society, which he hoped would "cultivate the finer arts and
improve the common stock of knowledge."
Colonial Scientific Achievements
America produced no Galileo or Newton, but colonists contributed significantly
to the collection of scientific knowledge. The unexplored continent provided a
laboratory for the study of natural phenomena. The Philadelphia Quaker John
Bartram, a "down right plain Country Man," ranged from Florida to the
Great Lakes during the middle years of the eighteenth century, gathering and
classifying hundreds of plants. Bartram also studied Indians closely,
speculating about their origins and collecting information about their culture.
Astronomy was another science to which eighteenth -century Americans were able
to contribute by virtue of their distance from Europe.
"No one of the present age," Thomas Jefferson said, had made
"more important discoveries" than Benjamin Franklin. One of his
biographers has called Franklin a "harmonious human multitude." His
studies of electricity, which he capped in 1752 with his famous kite experiment,
established him as a scientist of international stature. He also invented the
lightning rod, the iron Franklin stove (a far more efficient way to heat a room
than an open fireplace), bifocal spectacles, and several other ingenious
devices. In addition he served 14 years (1751-1764) in the Pennsylvania
assembly; he proposed using a lottery to raise funds. He founded a circulating
library and helped to get the first hospital in Philadelphia built.
Franklin wrote so much about the virtues of hard work and thrift that some
historians have described him as stuffy and straitlaced. Nothing could be
further from the truth. He recognized the social value of conventional behavior,
but he was no slave to convention. He wrote satirical essays on such subjects as
the advantage of having affairs with older and plain-looking women (who were, he
claimed, more likely to appreciate the attention),
Franklin's international fame notwithstanding, the theoretical contributions of
American thinkers and scientists were modest. No colony produced a Voltaire, or
Gibbon, or Rousseau. Most were practical rather than speculative types,
tinkerers rather than constructors of grand designs. Thomas Jefferson, for
example, made no theoretical discovery of importance, but his range was almost
without limit: linguist, bibliophile, political scientist, architect, inventor,
scientific farmer, and-above all apostle of reason. Involvement at even the most
marginal level in the intellectual affairs of Europe gave influential New
Englanders, Middle Colonists, and southerners a chance to get to know one
another. Although their role in what Jefferson called "the Republic of
Letters" was still minor, by midcentury their influence on the intellectual
climate of the colonies was growing. That climate was one of eager curiosity,
flexibility of outlook, and confidence.
Repercussions of Distant Wars
The British colonies were part of a great empire that was part of a still larger
world. Seemingly isolated in their remote communities, scattered like a broken
string of beads between the wide Atlantic and the trackless Appalachian forests,
Americans were constantly affected by outside events both in the Old World and
in the New. Under the spell of mercantilistic logic, the western European
nations competed fiercely for markets and colonial raw materials. War-hot and
cold, declared and undeclared-was almost a permanent condition of seventeenth-
and eighteenth century life, and when the powers clashed, they fought wherever
they could get at one another, in America, in Europe, and elsewhere.
Although the American colonies were minor pieces in the game and were sometimes
casually exchanged or sacrificed by the masterminds in London, Paris, and Madrid
in pursuit of some supposedly more important objective, the colonists quickly
generated their own international animosities. North America, a huge and,
compared to densely populated Europe, an almost empty stage, evidently did not
provide enough room for French, Dutch, Spanish, and English companies to
perform. Frenchmen and Spaniards clashed savagely in Florida as early as the
sixteenth century. Before the landing of the Pilgrims, Samuel Argall of Virginia
was sacking French settlements in Maine and carrying off Jesuit priests into
captivity at Jamestown. Instead of fostering tranquility and generosity, the
abundance of America seemed to make the settlers belligerent and greedy.
The North Atlantic fisheries quickly became a source of trouble between Canadian
and New England colonists, despite the fact that the waters of the Grand Banks
teemed with cod and other fish. To dry and salt their catch, the fishermen
needed land bases, and French and English Americans struggled constantly to
possess the harbors of Maine, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.
Even more troublesome was the fur trade. The yield of the forest was easily
exhausted by indiscriminate slaughter, and traders contended bitterly to control
valuable hunting grounds. The French in Canada conducted their fur trading
through tribes such as the Algonquins and the Hurons. This brought them into
conflict with the Five Nations, the powerful Iroquois Confederation in central
New York. As early as 1609, the Five Nations were at war with the French and
their Indian allies. For decades this struggle flared sporadically, with the
Iroquois more than holding their own both as fighters and as traders. They
combined, according to one terrified Frenchman, the stealth and craftiness of
the fox, the ferocity and courage of the lion, and the speed of a bird in
flight. They brought quantities of beaver pelts to the Dutch at Albany, some
obtained by their own trappers, others taken by ambushing the fur-laden canoes
of their enemies. They preyed on and ultimately destroyed the Hurons in the land
north of Lake Ontario and dickered with Indian trappers in far off Michigan.
When the English took over the New Amsterdam colony, they eagerly adopted the
Iroquois as allies, buying their furs and supplying them with trading goods and
guns. In the final showdown for control of North America, the friendship of the
Iroquois was vitally important to the English.
By the last decade of the seventeenth century, it had become clear that the
Dutch lacked the strength to maintain a big empire and that Spain was fast
declining. The future, especially in North America, belonged to England and
France. In the wars of the next 125 years, European alliances shifted
dramatically, yet the English and what Boston lawyer John Adams called "the
turbulent Gallicks" were always on opposite sides.
These conflicts did not directly involve any considerable portion of the
colonial populace, but they served to increase the bad feelings between settlers
north and south of the St. Lawrence. Every Indian raid was attributed to French
provocateurs, although more often than not the English colonists were
responsible for the Indian troubles. Conflicting land claims further aggravated
the situation. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia possessed overlapping
claims to the Ohio Valley, and Pennsylvania and New York also had pretensions in
the region. Yet the French, ranging broadly across the midcontinent, insisted
that the Ohio country was exclusively theirs.
The Great War for the Empire
In this beautiful, almost untouched land, a handful of individuals determined
the future of the continent. Over the years, the French had established a chain
of forts and trading posts throughout the northwest. By the 1740s, however,
Pennsylvania fur traders, led by George Croghan, a rugged Irishman, were setting
up posts north of the Ohio River and dickering with Miami and Huron Indians who
ordinarily sold their furs to ',the French. In 1748 Croghan built a fort at
Pickawillany, deep in the Miami country, in what is now western Ohio. That same
year agents for a group of Virginia land speculators, who had recently organized
what they called the Ohio Company, reached this area.
With trifling exceptions, an insulating band of wilderness had always separated
the French and English in America. Now the two powers came into contact. The
immediate result was a showdown battle for control of North America, the
"great war for the empire." Thoroughly alarmed by the presence of the
English on land they had long considered their own, the French struck hard.
Attacking suddenly in 1752, they wiped out Croghan's post at Pickawillany and
drove his traders back into Pennsylvania. Then they built a string of barrier
forts south from Lake Erie along the Pennsylvania line: Fort Presque Isle, Fort
Le Boeuf, and Fort Venango. The Pennsylvania authorities chose to ignore this
action, but Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia (who was an
investor in the Ohio Company) dispatched a 2 1 -year old surveyor named George
Washington to warn the French that they were trespassing on Virginia territory.
Washington, a gangling, inarticulate, and intensely ambitious young planter,
made his way northwest in the fall of 1753 and delivered Dinwiddie's message to
the commandant at Fort Le Boeuf. It made no impression. "[The French] told
me," Washington reported, "That it was their absolute Design to take
Possession of the Ohio, and by G____they would do it." Governor Dinwiddie
thereupon promoted Washington to lieutenant colonel and sent him back in the
spring of 1754 with 150 men to seize a strategic junction south of the new
French forts, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio.
Eager but inexperienced in battle, young Washington botched his assignment. As
his force labored painfully through the tangled mountain country southeast of
the fork of the Ohio, he received word that the French had already occupied the
position and were constructing a powerful post, Fort Duquesne. Outnumbered by
perhaps four to one, Washington foolishly pushed on. He surprised and routed a
French reconnaissance party, but this brought the main body of enemy troops upon
him.
Hastily he threw up a defensive position, aptly named Fort Necessity, but the
ground was ill chosen; the French easily surrounded the fort, and Washington had
to surrender. After tricking the young officer, who could not read French, into
signing an admission that he had "assassinated" the leader of the
reconnaissance party, his captors, with the gateway to the Ohio country firmly
in their hands, permitted him and his men to march off. Nevertheless, Washington
returned to Virginia a hero, for although still undeclared, this was war, and he
had struck the first blow against the hated French.
In the resulting conflict, which historians call the French and Indian War (the
colonists simply "the French War"), the English outnumbered the French
by about 1.5 million to 90,000. But the English were divided and disorganized,
the French disciplined and united. The French controlled the disputed territory,
and most of the Indians took their side. With an ignorance and arrogance typical
of eighteenth-ccntury colonial administration, the British mismanaged the war
and failed to make effective use of local resources. For several years they
stumbled from one defeat to another.
General Edward Braddock, a competent but uninspired soldier, was dispatched to
Virginia to take command. In June 1755 he marched against Fort Duquesne with
1,400 Redcoats and a smaller number of colonials, only to be decisively defeated
by a much smaller force of French and Indians.
Elsewhere Anglo-American troops fared little better in the early years of the
war. Expeditions against Fort Niagara, key to all French defenses in the west,
and Crown Point, gateway to Montreal, bogged down. Meanwhile Indians armed by
the French bathed the frontier in blood. Venting the frustrations caused by 150
years of white advance, they attacked defenseless outposts with unrestrained
brutality. They poured molten lead into their victims' wounds, ripped off the
fingernails of captives, and even drank the blood of those who endured their
tortures stoically.
In 1756 the conflict spread to Europe to become the Seven Years' War. Prussia
sided with Great Britain, Austria with the French. On the world stage too,
things went badly for the British. Finally, in 1758, as defeat succeeded defeat,
King George 11 was forced to allow William Pitt, whom he detested, to take over
leadership of the war effort.
Pitt recognized, as few contemporaries did, the potential value of North
America. Instead of relying on the tightfisted and shortsighted colonial
assemblies for men and money, he poured regiment after regiment of British
regulars and the full resources of the British Treasury into the contest,
recklessly mortgaging the future to secure the prize. Grasping the importance of
sea power in fighting a war on the other side of the Atlantic, he used the
British navy to bottle up the enemy fleet and hamper French communications with
Canada. He possessed a keen eye for military genius, and when he discovered it,
he ignored seniority and the outraged feelings of mediocre generals to promote
talented young officers to top commands. His greatest find was James Wolfe, whom
he made a brigadier at age 31.
In the winter of 1758, as Pitt's grand strategy matured, Fort Duquesne fell. It
was appropriately renamed Fort Pitt, the present Pittsburgh. The following
summer Fort Niagara was overrun. General Jeffrey Amherst took Crown Point, and
Wolfe sailed up the St. Lawrence to Quebec. There the French General, Louis
Joseph de Montcalm, had prepared formidable defenses. But after months of
probing and planning Wolfe found and exploited a chink in the city's armor and
captured it. Both he and Montcalm died in the battle. In 1760 Montreal fell, and
the French abandoned all Canada to the British. Spain attempted to stem the
British advance, but failed utterly. A Far Eastern fleet captured Manila in
1762, and another British force took Cuba. The French sugar islands in the West
Indies were also captured, while in India British troops reduced the French
posts one by one.
The Peace of Paris
Peace was restored in 1763 by the Treaty of Paris. Its terms were moderate
considering the extent of the British triumph. France abandoned all claim to
North America except two small islands near Newfoundland; Great Britain took
over Canada and the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley, Spain (in a separate
treaty) the area west of the great river and New Orleans. Guadeloupe and
Martinique, the French sugar islands, were returned by the British, as were some
of the captured French bases in India and Africa. Spain got back both the
Philippine Islands and Cuba; in exchange the Spanish ceded East and West Florida
to Great Britain. France and Spain thus remained important colonial powers.
"Half the continent," the historian Francis Parkman wrote, "had
changed hands at the scratch of a pen." From the point of view of the
English colonists in America, the victory was overwhelming. All threat to their
frontiers seemed to have been swept away. Surely, they believed in the first
happy moments of victory, their peaceful and prosperous expansion was assured
for countless generations.
No honest American could deny that the victory had been won chiefly by British
troops and with British gold. Colonial militiamen fought well in defense of
their homes or when some highly prized objective seemed ripe for the plucking.
However, they lacked discipline and determination when required to fight far
from home and under commanders they did not know. Little wonder that the great
victory produced a burst of praise for king and mother country throughout
America. Parades, cannonading, fireworks, banquets, the pealing of church
bells-these were the order of the day in every colonial town.
"Nothing," said Thomas Pownall, wartime governor of Massachusetts and
a student of colonial administration, "can eradicate from [the colonists']
hearts their natural, almost mechanical affection to Great Britain." A
young South Carolinian who had been educated in England claimed that the
colonists were "more wrapped up in a king" than any people he had ever
heard of.
Putting the Empire Right
In London peace proved a time for reassessment; that the empire of 1763 was not
the same as the empire of 1754 was obvious. The new, far larger dominion would
be much more expensive to maintain. Pitt had spent a huge sum winning and
securing it, much of it borrowed money. Great Britain's national debt had
doubled between 1754 and 1763. Now this debt had to be serviced and repaid, and
the strain that this would place on the economy was clear to all. Furthermore,
the day-to-day cost of administering an empire that extended from Hudson Bay to
India was far larger than what the already burdened British taxpayer could be
expected to bear. Before the great war for the empire, Britain's North American
possessions were administered for about L70,000 a year; after 1763 the cost was
five times as much.
The American empire had also grown far more complex. A system of administration
that treated it as a string of separate plantations struggling to exist on the
edge of the forest would no longer suffice. The war had been fought for control
of the Ohio Valley. Now that the prize had been secured, ten thousand hands were
eager to secure it. How best could their needs be satisfied now that peace had
come? Colonial claims, based on charters drafted by men who thought the Pacific
lay over the next hill, threatened to make the great valley a battleground once
more. The Indians remained unpacified. Rival land companies contested for
charters, and fur traders strove to hold back the wave of settlement that must
inevitably destroy the world of the beaver and the deer. One Englishman who
traveled through America at this time predicted that if the colonists were left
to their own devices "there would soon be civil war from one end of the
continent to the other."
Apparently only Great Britain could deal with these problems and rivalries, for
when Franklin had proposed a rudimentary form of colonial union-the Albany Plan
of 1754-it was rejected by almost everyone. Unfortunately, the British
government did not rise to the challenge. Perhaps this was to be expected. A
handful of aristocrats (fewer than 150 peers were active in government affairs)
dominated British politics. Even the best-educated English leaders were nearly
all monumentally ignorant of American conditions. Serene in their ignorance,
most English leaders insisted that colonials were uncouth and generally inferior
beings. During the French and Indian War, General Wolfe characterized colonial
troops as "the dirtiest, most contemptible cowardly dogs you can
conceive."
Many English people resented Americans simply because the colonies were rapidly
becoming rich and powerful. They were growing at an extraordinary rate. Between
1750 and 1770 the population of British America increased from one million to
more than two million. As early as 1751, Benjamin Franklin predicted that in a
century "the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this Side of the
Water." (His guess was nearly on the mark: in 1850 the population of Great
Britain was 20.8 million, that of the United States 23.1 million, including some
4 million slaves and others who were not of British descent.) If the English did
not say much about this possibility, they too considered it from time to
time-without Franklin's complacency.
Tightening Imperial Controls
The British attempt to deal with the intricate colonial problems that resulted
from the great war for the empire led to the American Revolution-a rebellion
that was costly, but which produced excellent results for the colonists, for
Great Britain, for the rest of the empire, and eventually for the entire world.
Trouble began when the British decided after the war to intervene more actively
in American affairs. Parliament had never attempted to raise revenue in America.
"Compelling the colonies to pay money without their consent would be rather
like raising contributions in an enemy's country than taxing Englishmen for
their own benefit," Benjamin Franklin wrote. Nevertheless, the legality of
parliamentary taxation, or of other parliamentary intervention in colonial
affairs, had not been seriously contested.
In 1759 a general tightening of imperial regulations began. Royal control over
colonial courts was strengthened. In Massachusetts the use of general search
warrants (writs of assistance) was authorized in 1761. These writs authorized
customs officers searching for smuggled goods to enter homes and warehouses
without evidence or specific court orders. Nearly all Americans resented the
invasions of privacy that the writs caused. A Boston lawyer, James Otis, argued
in a case involving 63 merchants that the writs were "against the
Constitution" and therefore "void." Otis lost the case, but by
boldly suggesting that Parliament's authority over the colonies was not
absolute, he became a colonial hero.
After the signing of the peace treaty in 1763, events pushed the British
authorities to still more vigorous activity in America. Freed of the restraint
imposed by French competition, Englishmen and colonists increased their pressure
on the Indians. Fur traders now cheated them outrageously, while callous
military men hoped to exterminate them like vermin. One British officer
expressed the wish that they could be hunted down with dogs.
Led by an Ottawa chief named Pontiac, the tribes made one last effort to drive
the whites back across the mountains. What the whites called Pontiac's Rebellion
caused much havoc, but it failed. By 1764 most of the western tribes had
accepted the peace terms offered by a royal commissioner, Sir William Johnson,
one of the few whites who understood and sympathized with them. The British
government then placed 15 regiments-some 6,000 soldiers-in posts along the
frontier, as much to protect the Indians from the settlers as the settlers from
the Indians. It proclaimed a new western policy: no settlers were to cross the
Appalachian divide. Only licensed traders might do business with the Indians
beyond that line. The purchase of Indian land was forbidden. In compensation,
three new colonies-Quebec, East Florida, and West Florida-were created, but they
were not permitted to set up local assemblies. This Proclamation of 1763 excited
much indignation in America. The frustration of dozens of schemes for land
development in the Ohio Valley angered many influential colonists.
The Sugar Act
Americans disliked the new western policy but realized that the problems were
knotty and that no simple solution existed. Their protests were somewhat muted.
Great Britain's effort to raise money in America to help support the increased
cost of colonial administration caused far more vehement complaints. George
Grenville, who became prime minister in 1763, was a fairly able man, although
long-winded and rather narrow in outlook. His reputation as a financial expert
was based chiefly on his eagerness to reduce government spending. Under his
leadership Parliament passed, in April 1764, the so-called Sugar Act. This law
placed tariffs on sugar, coffee, wines, and other things imported into America
in substantial amounts. Taxes on European products imported by way of Great
Britain were doubled, and the enumerated articles list was extended to include
iron, raw silk, and potash.
At the same time, measures aimed at enforcing all the trade laws were put into
effect. Those accused of violating the Sugar Act were to be tried before British
naval officers in vice-admiralty courts. Grenville was determined to end
smuggling, corruption, and inefficiency. Soon income from import duties soared.
Few Americans were willing to concede that Parliament had the right to tax them.
As Englishmen, they believed that no one should be deprived arbitrarily of his
property and that, as James Otis put it in his stirring pamphlet The Rights of
the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764 ), I everyone should be
"free from all taxes but what he consents to in person, or by his
representative." The philosopher John
Locke had made clear in his Second Treatise of Government (1690) that property
ought never be taken from people without their consent, not because material
values transcend all others, but because human liberty can never be secure when
arbitrary power of any kind exists. "If our Trade may be taxed why not our
Lands?" the Boston town meeting asked when news of the Sugar Act reached
America. "Why not the produce of our Lands and every Thing we possess or
make use op.
American Colonists Demand Rights
To most people in Great Britain, the colonial protest against taxation without
representation seemed a hypocritical quibble (and it is probably true that many
protesters had not thought the argument through). The distinction between tax
laws and other types of legislation was artificial, the British reasoned. Either
Parliament was sovereign in America or it was not, and only a fool or a traitor
would argue that it was not. If the colonists were loyal subjects of George 111,
as they claimed, they should bear cheerfully their fair share of the cost of
governing his widespread dominions. As to representation, the colonies were
represented in Parliament; every member of that body stood for the interests of
the entire empire. If Americans had no say in the election of members of
Commons, neither did most Englishmen.
This concept of "virtual" representation accurately described the
British system. It made no sense in America, where from the time of the first
settlements members of the colonial assemblies had represented the people of the
districts in which they stood for office. The confusion between virtual and
geographically based representation revealed the extent to which colonial and
British political practices had diverged over the years.
The British were correct in concluding that selfish motives influenced colonial
objections to the Sugar Act. The colonists denounced taxation without
representation, but they would have rejected the offer of a reasonable number of
seats in Parliament if it had been made, and they would probably have complained
about paying taxes to support imperial administration even if imposed by their
own assemblies. American abundance and the simplicity of colonial life had
enabled them to prosper without assuming any considerable tax burden. Now their
maturing society was beginning to require communal rather than individual
solutions to the problems of existence. Not many of them were prepared to face
this hard truth.
Over the course of colonial history, Americans had taken a narrow view of
imperial concerns. They had avoided complying with the Navigation Acts whenever
they could profit by doing so. Colonial militiamen had compiled a sorry record
when asked to fight for Britain or even for the inhabitants of colonies other
than their own. True, most Americans professed loyalty to the Crown, but not
many would voluntarily open their purses except to benefit themselves. In short,
they were provincials, in attitude and in fact.
But the colonists were opposed in principle to taxation without representation.
They failed, however, to agree on a common plan of resistance. Many of the
assemblies drafted protests, but these varied in force as well as in form.
Merchant groups that tried to organize boycotts of products subject to the new
taxes met with indifferent success. In 1765, Parliament welded colonial opinion
by passing the Stamp Act.
The Stamp Act: The Pot Set to Boiling
The Stamp Act placed stiff excise taxes on all kinds of printed
matter-newspapers, legal documents, licenses, even playing cards. Stamp duties
were intended to be relatively painless to pay and cheap to collect; in England
similar taxes brought in about L100,000 annually. Grenville hoped the Stamp Act
would produce L60,000 a year in America, and the law provided that all revenue
should be applied to "defraying the necessary expenses of defending,
protecting, and securing, the ... colonies."
Hardly a farthing was collected. Virginia was first to act. In late May of 1765,
Patrick Henry introduced resolutions asserting redundantly that the burgesses
possessed "the only and sole and exclusive right and power to lay
taxes" on Virginians and suggesting that Parliament had no legal authority
to tax the colonies at all. The more extreme of his resolutions failed of
enactment, but the debate they occasioned attracted wide and favorable
attention. On June 6, 1765, the Massachusetts assembly proposed an intercolonial
Stamp Act Congress, which, when it met in New York City in October, passed
another series of resolutions of protest. The Stamp Act was "burthensome
and grievous," the delegates declared. People should not be taxed without
"their own consent."
During the summer irregular organizations known as Sons of Liberty began to
agitate against the act. Far more than anyone realized, this marked the start of
the revolution. For the first time extralegal organized resistance was taking
place. Although led by men of character and position, the "Liberty
Boys" frequently resorted to violence to achieve their aims. In Boston they
looted the houses of the stamp master and his brother-in-law, Lieutenant
Governor Thomas Hutchinson. In Connecticut, stamp master fared Ingersoll faced
an angry mob demanding his resignation.
When threatened with death if he refused, he coolly replied that he was prepared
to die "perhaps as well now as another Time." Probably his life was
not really in danger, but the crowd convinced him that resistance was useless,
and he capitulated.
The fate of most of the other stamp masters was little different. For a time no
business requiring stamped paper was transacted; then, gradually, people began
to defy the law by issuing and accepting unstamped documents. Threatened by mob
action should they resist, British officials stood by helplessly. The law was a
dead letter.
The looting associated with this crisis alarmed many colonists, including some
prominent opponents of the Stamp Act. "When the pot is set to boil,"
the lawyer John Adams remarked, "the scum rises to the top." This does
not mean that people like Adams disapproved of crowd protests or even the
destruction of property. What Adams called "state-quakes" were similar
in his opinion to earthquakes, a kind of natural violence.
Rioters or Rebels?
In many cases the rioting had a social as well as a political character. Times
were hard and once roused, laborers and artisans may well have directed their
energies toward righting what they considered local wrongs.
Yet the mass of the people were not social revolutionaries. They might envy and
resent the wealthy landowners and merchants, but there is no evidence that they
wished to overthrow the established order.
The British were not surprised that Americans disliked the Stamp Act. They had
not, however, anticipated that they would react so violently and so unanimously.
Americans did so for many reasons. Business continued to be poor in 1765. The
taxes would also hurt the business of lawyers, merchants, newspaper editors, and
tavern keepers. Even clergymen dealt with papers requiring stamps. The protests
of such influential and articulate people had powerful impact on public opinion.
The greatest concern to the colonists was Great Britain's flat rejection of the
principle of no taxation without representation. This alarmed them because as
Americans they objected to being taxed by a legislative body they had not been
involved in choosing. To buy a stamp was to surrender all claim to
self-government. Furthermore, as British subjects they valued what they called
"the rights of Englishmen." They saw the Stamp Act as only the worst
in a series of arbitrary invasions of these rights.
Already Parliament had passed another measure, the Quartering Act, requiring
local legislatures to house and feed new British troops sent to the colonies.
Besides being a form of indirect taxation, a standing army seemed a threat to
liberty. Why were Redcoats necessary in Boston and New York where there was no
foreign enemy for miles around? In hard times, soldiers were particularly
unwelcome because being miserably underpaid, they took any job they could get in
their off hours, thus competing with unemployed colonists.
Reluctantly, many Americans were beginning to fear that the London authorities
had organized a conspiracy to subvert the liberties of all British subjects.
Taxation or Tyranny?
There was no such conspiracy; yet to the question, were American rights actually
in danger? no certain answer can be made. Grenville and his successors were
English politicians, not tyrants. They looked down on bumptious colonials, but
surely had no wish to destroy either them or their prosperity. The British
attitude was like that of a parent making a recalcitrant youngster swallow a
bitter medicine: Protests were understandable, but in the patient's own interest
they must be ignored.
At the same time, British leaders felt challenged to assert royal authority and
to centralize imperial power at the expense of colonial autonomy. The need to
maintain a substantial British army in America to control the western Indians
tempted the government to use some of the troops to "control" white
Americans as well. This attitude flew in the face of the fact that the colonies
were no longer entirely dependent on "the mother country." Indeed,
many colonists believed that America would soon become what Franklin called
"a great country, populous and mighty . . . able to shake off any shackles
that may be imposed on her." This view of the future surely meant dealing
with Great Britain on terms approaching equality. But psychologically, British
leaders were not ready to deal with Americans as equals or to consider American
interests on a par with their own. In the long run, American liberty would be
destroyed if this attitude was not changed.
Besides refusing to use stamps, Americans responded to the Stamp Act by
boycotting British goods. Nearly 1,000 merchants signed nonimportation
agreements. These struck British merchants hard in their pocketbooks, and they
in turn began to bring pressure on Parliament for repeal. After a hot debate,
the hated law was repealed in March 1766. In America there was jubilation at the
news. The ban on British goods was lifted, and the colonists congratulated
themselves on having stood fast in defense of principle. But the great
controversy over the constitutional relationship of colony to mother country was
only beginning. The same day that it repealed the Stamp Act, Parliament passed a
Declaratory Act stating that the colonies were "subordinate" and that
Parliament could enact any law it wished "to bind the colonies and people
of America."
To most Americans this bold statement of parliamentary authority seemed
unconstitutional-a flagrant violation of their conception of how the British
imperial system worked. Actually, the Declaratory Act highlighted the degree to
which British and American views of the system had drifted apart.
The Townshend Duties
Despite the repeal of the Stamp Act, the British did not abandon the policy of
taxing the colonies. If direct taxes were inexpedient, indirect ones like the
Sugar Act certainly were not. The government was hard pressed for funds to cover
an annual budget of over L8,500,000. Therefore, in June 1767, the chancellor of
the exchequer, Charles Townshend, introduced a series of levies on glass, lead,
paints, paper, and tea imported into the colonies. Townshend was a charming man
experienced in colonial administration, but he was something of a playboy (his
nickname was Champagne Charlie), and he lacked both integrity and common sense.
He liked to think of Americans as ungrateful children; he once said he would
rather see the colonies turned into "Primitive Desarts" than treat
them as equals.
By this time the colonists were thoroughly on guard, and they responded quickly
to the Townshend levies with a new boycott of British goods. In addition they
made elaborate efforts to stimulate colonial manufacturing. By the end of 1769
imports from the mother country had been almost halved. Meanwhile,
administrative measures enacted along with the Townshend duties were creating
more ill will. A Board of Customs Commissioners, with headquarters in Boston,
took charge of enforcing the trade laws, and new vice-admiralty courts were set
up to handle violations. These courts operated without juries, and many
colonists considered the new commissioners rapacious racketeers who
systematically attempted to obtain judgments against honest merchants in order
to collect the huge forfeitures-one-third of the value of ship and cargo-that
were their share of all seizures.
The struggle forced Americans to do some deep thinking about both American and
imperial political affairs. In 1765 the Stamp Act Congress (another extralegal
organization) had brought the delegates of nine colonies to New York. Now, in
1768, the Massachusetts General Court took the next step. It sent the
legislatures of the other colonies a "Circular Letter" expressing the
"humble opinion" of the people that the Townshend Acts were
"Infringements of their natural & constitutional Rights." The
limit of British power in America was much debated, and this too was no doubt
inevitable, again because of change and growth. As the colonies matured, the
balance of Anglo-American power had to shift or the system would become
tyrannical. Even in the late seventeenth century the assumptions that led
Parliament to pass the Declaratory Act would have been unrealistic. In 1766 they
were absurd.
After the passage of the Townshend Acts, John Dickinson, a Philadelphia lawyer,
published Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the
British Colonies. Dickinson considered himself a loyal British subject.
"Let us behave like dutiful children, who have received unmerited blows
from a beloved parent," he wrote. Nevertheless, he insisted that although
Parliament was sovereign and might collect incidental revenues in the process of
regulating commerce, it had no right to tax the colonies. Another moderate
Philadelphian, John Raynell, put it this way: "If the Americans are to be
taxed by a Parliament where they are not ... Represented, they are no longer
Englishmen but Slaves."
Some Americans were far more radical than Dickinson. Samuel Adams of Boston, a
genuine revolutionary agitator, believed by 1768 that Parliament had no right at
all to legislate for the colonies. If few were ready to go that far, fewer still
accepted the reasoning behind the Declaratory Act.
The British ignored American thinking. When news of the Massachusetts Circular
Letter reached England, the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Wills
Hillsborough, ordered the governor to dissolve the legislature. Two regiments of
British troops were transferred from the frontier to Boston, part of a general
plan to bring the army closer to the centers of colonial unrest.
The Boston Massacre
These acts convinced more Americans that the British were conspiring to destroy
their liberties. Resentment was particularly strong in Boston, where the postwar
depression had come on top of 20 years of economic stagnation. Crowding 4,000
British soldiers into a town of 16,000 people was a formula for trouble, and on
March 5, 1770, trouble erupted. Late that afternoon a crowd of idlers began
tossing snowballs at Redcoats guarding the Custom House. Some of these missiles
had been carefully wrapped around suitably sized rocks. Gradually the crowd grew
larger, its mood meaner. The soldiers panicked and began firing their muskets.
When the smoke cleared, five Bostonians lay dead or dying on the bloody ground.
This so-called Boston Massacre played into the hands of radicals like Samuel
Adams. But cooler heads again prevailed. Announcing that he was "defending
the rights of man and unconquerable truth," John Adams volunteered his
services to make sure the soldiers got a fair trial. Most were acquitted, the
rest treated leniently by the standards of the day. In Great Britain,
confrontation also gave way to adjustment. In April 1770 all the Townshend
duties except the threepenny tax on tea were repealed. The tea tax was
maintained as a matter of principle. "A peppercorn in acknowledgment of the
right was of more value than millions without it," one British peer
declared smugly-a glib fallacy. At this point the nonimportation movement
collapsed; although the boycott on tea was continued, many merchants imported
British tea and paid the tax too. During the next two years no serious crisis
erupted. Imports of British goods were nearly 50 percent higher than before the
nonimportation agreement.
The Tea Act Crisis
In the spring of 1773 an entirely unrelated event precipitated the final crisis.
The British East India Company held a monopoly of all trade between India and
the rest of the empire. This monopoly had yielded fabulous returns, but decades
of corruption and inefficiency together with heavy military expenses in recent
years had weakened the company until it was almost bankrupt.
Among the assets of this venerable institution were some 17 million pounds of
tea stored in English warehouses. Normally, East India Company tea was sold to
English wholesalers. They in turn sold it to American wholesalers, who
distributed it to local merchants for sale to the consumer. A substantial
British tax was levied on the tea as well as the threepenny Townshend duty. Now
Lord Frederick North, the new prime minister, decided to remit the British tax
and to allow the company to sell directly in America through its own agents. The
savings would permit a sharp reduction of the retail price and at the same time
yield a nice profit to the company. The Townshend tax was retained, however, to
preserve (as Lord North said when the East India Company directors suggested its
repeal) the principle of Parliament's right to tax the colonies.
The company then shipped 1,700 chests of tea to colonial ports. Though the idea
of buying this high-quality tea at bargain prices was tempting, after a little
thought nearly everyone in America appreciated the grave dangers involved in
buying it. If Parliament could grant the East India Company a monopoly of the
tea trade, it could parcel out all or any part of American commerce to whomever
it pleased.
Public indignation was so great in New York and Philadelphia that when the tea
ships arrived, the authorities ordered them back to England without attempting
to unload. The situation in Boston was different. The tea ship Dartmouth arrived
on November 27. The radicals, marshaled by Sam Adams, were determined to prevent
it from landing its cargo; Governor Hutchinson was equally determined to collect
the tax and enforce the law. For days the town seethed, while the Dartmouth and
two later arrivals swung with the tides on their moorings. Then, on the night of
December 16, a band of colonists disguised as Indians rowed out to the ships and
dumped the hated tea chests in the harbor.
The destruction of the tea was a serious crime for which many persons, aside
from the painted "Patriots" who jettisoned the chests, were
responsible. The British burned with indignation when news of the "Tea
Party" reached London. People talked (fortunately it was only talk) of
flattening Boston with heavy artillery. Nearly everyone agreed that the
colonists must be taught a lesson. George III himself said: "We must master
them or totally leave them to themselves."
From Resistance to Revolution
Parliament responded in the spring of 1774 by passing the Coercive Acts. The
Boston Port Act closed the harbor of Boston to all commerce until its citizens
paid for the tea. The Administration of Justice Act provided for the transfer of
cases to courts outside Massachusetts when the governor felt that an impartial
trial could not be had within the colony. The Massachusetts Government Act
revised the colony's charter drastically, strengthening the power of the
governor, weakening that of the local town meetings, making the council
appointive rather than elective, and changing the method by which juries were
selected. These were unwise laws-they cost Great Britain an empire. All of them,
and especially the Port Act, were unjust laws as well. Parliament was punishing
the community for the crimes of individuals, abandoning persuasion and
conciliation in favor of coercion and punishment.
The Americans named the Coercive Acts (together with a new Quartering Act and
the Quebec Act, an unrelated measure that attached the area north of the Ohio
River to Canada and gave the region an authoritarian, centralized government)
the "Intolerable" Acts. That the British answer to the crisis was
coercion the Americans found unendurable. The American Revolution had begun.
In the course of a decade the people of the colonies, loyal subjects of Great
Britain, had been forced by new British policies to take power into their own
hands and to unite in order to exercise that power effectively. Ordinary working
people, not just merchants, lawyers, and other well-to-do people, played
increasingly more prominent roles in public life as crisis after crisis roused
their indignation. This did not yet mean that most Americans wanted to be free
from British rule. Parliament, however-and in the last analysis George III and
most Britons-insisted that their authority over the colonies was unlimited.
Behind their stubbornness lay the arrogant psychology of the European:
"Colonists are inferior.... We own you."
Lord North directed the Coercive Acts only at Massachusetts, but the colonies
began at once to act in concert. In June 1774 Massachusetts called for a meeting
of delegates from all the colonies to consider common action. This First
Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in September; only Georgia failed to
send delegates. Many points of view were represented, but even the so-called
conservative proposal introduced by Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania called for a
thorough overhaul of the empire. Galloway suggested an American government,
consisting of a president general appointed by the king and a grand council
chosen by the colonial assemblies that would manage intercolonial affairs and
possess a veto over parliamentary acts affecting the colonies.
This was not what the majority wanted. If taxation without representation was
tyranny, so was all legislation. Therefore Parliament had no right to legislate
in any way for the colonies. John Adams, although prepared to allow Parliament
to regulate colonial trade, now believed that Parliament had no inherent right
to control it.
Propelled by the reasoning of Adams and others, the Congress passed a
declaration of grievances and resolves that amounted to a complete condemnation
of Britain's actions since 1763. A Massachusetts proposal that the people take
up arms to defend their rights was endorsed. The delegates also organized a
"Continental Association" to boycott British goods and to stop all
exports to the empire. To enforce this boycott, committees were appointed
locally "to observe the conduct of all persons touching this
association" and to expose violators to public scorn.
If the Continental Congress reflected the views of the majority-there is no
reason to suspect that it did not-it is clear that the Americans had decided
that drastic changes must be made. It was not merely a question of mutual
defense against the threat of British power, not only, in Franklin's aphorism, a
matter of hanging together lest they hang separately. A nation was being born.
Looking back many years later, one of the delegates to the First Continental
Congress made just these points. He was John Adams of Massachusetts, and he
said: "The revolution was complete, in the minds of the people, and the
Union of the colonies, before the war commenced."