The Glorious Cause, page 20
Money indeed connected all the various problems of America and the East India Company. Beyond extracting revenue from the company, Chatham had no clear ideas on how to strengthen the finances of the government. His refusal to try to persuade Townshend and Conway to support his plan for the company killed whatever chances it had. And his withdrawal to Bath, followed by his collapse in March 1767, after a brief foray into London and the government once more, opened the way for Townshend to take the lead.26
Townshend’s manner of taking the lead evidently caught his colleagues by surprise. In January 1767 debate began on the army estimates; for America, the army proposed costs of some £400,000. During the discussions of this sum George Grenville moved that it be halved and that the colonies bear the expense of troops stationed in America. The government beat back this proposal, but Townshend in the course of the debates pledged that the government would raise at least a part of the revenue from the colonies. Although this promise distressed Conway and others in the government, it did not attract great attention in Parliament. Grenville did not respond, nor did others, probably because all agreed that Parliament possessed the authority to tax the colonies, a view which they believed had been embodied in the Declaratory Act.
If Townshend had rather casually committed the government to raise money in America, the necessity to do so soon appeared anything but casual. For in February the Rockingham Whigs with the support of much of the opposition pushed through a reduction in the land tax from four shillings on the pound to three. This cut forced the government to look for an additional £500,000.
Chatham still withheld himself from the struggles in Parliament. A despairing Grafton wrote him of the reduction of the land tax and begged him to return to defend his position on the East India Company. The king indicated his support, were it to be called for, but still Chatham remained aloof. By mid-February it looked as though Townshend would settle the East India business in his own way, but two weeks later Chatham exerted himself to pull his administration together. He saw he must rid the government of Townshend; hence on March 4 he offered Townshend’s place at the Exchequer to Lord North. North refused. Chatham sank back into himself and did not take part in the affairs of the government for the next two years.
Grafton simply lacked the drive and the experience, and perhaps the intellect, to replace Chatham. Townshend possessed these qualities in abundance though his temperament sometimes disabled him, but for the next few months he was in command. He spent a part of this period in graceless flirtation—a political matchmaking, not an affair of the heart—as the Rockingham Whigs courted him in a fruitless effort to entice him out of the government. By May, Townshend seems to have had his fill of courtship—he had more powerful suitors in the ministry, in any case—and he offered his American program. His proposals were of three sorts: the New York Assembly should be suspended until it agreed to comply with the Quartering Act; import duties should be collected in the colonies on lead, glass, paper, painter’s colors, and tea; an American Board of Customs Commissioners with its headquarters in the colonies should be established. By the end of June all three proposals had been embodied in legislation and approved with virtually no opposition. George Grenville wanted to go farther and argued that Parliament should enact legislation requiring colonial officials, including governors, councillors, and representatives, to take an oath upholding the Declaratory Act. The oath included a statement that “the colonies and plantations in America are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial Crown and Parliament of Great Britain,” a sentiment that commanded almost unanimous approval in Parliament but which seemed unnecessarily redundant and perhaps provocative at this point. Commons turned it down.27
In the debate over the Revenue Act of 1767, Townshend explained that he did not expect the duties on lead, glass, tea, and the other items to return more than £40,000 a year. This admission must have startled some members (but apparently not many), for the sum expected did little to reduce the loss from the reduced tax on land; and in any case this American revenue would be placed at the disposal of the Crown to be used to pay the salaries of royal officials in the colonies, thereby removing them from local control. Townshend seemed quite proud that his proposal to raise revenue entailed only what was called in England an “external tax.” In the confusion over the repeal of the Stamp Act some members had evidently been persuaded that the colonists did not object to such taxes but only to internal taxes. Of course the colonists made no such distinction and opposed all taxes for revenue, though they conceded the expediency of Parliament’s regulation of trade through use of certain duties.28
What Townshend and Parliament had done in the Revenue Act was to revive fears and resentments in a people already convinced that a plot against their liberty and property had been hatched in 1765. Moreover, the plan to pay royal officials with the money raised simply made the statute worse. Not only were colonial pockets about to be picked, but another constitutional protection was to be removed.
The suspension of the New York Assembly was to become effective October 1, 1767. It deprived the legislature of its right to pass acts after that date and declared them “null and void” in advance if the legislature persisted. And, in a strange redundancy, the governor was ordered to veto any legislation passed in defiance of the suspension. Once the legislature complied with the Quartering Act these prohibitions would be lifted. Taken with the civil list to be financed by the Revenue Act, this statute seemed to give firmer evidence of Parliament’s intentions to destroy constitutional rights in America.29
Along with the statute creating an American customs service, the Revenue Act and the Suspending Act expressed some long-standing attitudes toward the colonies, especially the persuasion that they were somehow subordinate to Parliament and must be brought under control. The Townshend legislation did more, however: it vented an anger and frustration bordering on the emotions parents often feel over rebellious children. Like inexperienced children, the colonies had misbehaved and must be disciplined. To be sure, reason took a part in the internal history of the Townshend program as it had in Grenville’s policies. Britain bore a heavy debt and the colonies, lightly taxed, might take over a part of the burden. Yet questions might be raised about how reasonable the taxation of imports was. Reason had always urged the expansion of commerce; given colonial resentments against Parliamentary taxation, how reasonable was it to expect that the duties would not impair commerce? And how reasonable was it to expect the colonies to pay? These questions were not really broached in Parliament.
The irony in this episode is that an administration at least nominally headed by a man who opposed Parliamentary taxation of America approved Townshend’s policies. Of course Chatham was sick, or incapable of action, in 1767, but Grafton and Conway, who had pushed the repeal of the Stamp Act, were well. And the ministry included Shelburne and Camden, both of whom had opposed the Declaratory Act the year before. If this ministry were incapable of settling American affairs on a basis of friendship and cooperation, it might at least have managed to avoid the explosive mixture Charles Townshend bestowed upon it. Accident and chanceseem prominent in the history of this disastrous year. The timing of Chatham’s collapse could not have been worse for American affairs. Chatham’s removal from the political scene in March left a tired and dispirited leadership—Grafton, Conway, and Shelburne—facing a strange, irresponsible, but finally tough and determined man who got his way. Had the Rockinghams succeeded in wooing Townshend to their side, his program probably would not have been proposed; or had his energy encountered an opposing force, he probably would not have won. But the Rockinhams failed to persuade Townshend to leave the ministry, and his colleagues in the ministry went along with his proposals. Townshend did not live to see the consequences; his death on September 4, 1767, like so much in his life, came abruptly and with shocking surprise.30 But before his death Townshend had made his mark on policies affecting England and America. That was the final irony: this man, apparently memorable only for personal eccentricities, succeeded in leaving an impression on public affairs such as few men have ever done.
8
Boston Takes the Lead
Perhaps more than most crises in the past, revolutions take on the appearance of inevitable, even natural events. They usually have small beginnings that grow into large confrontations between political bodies and a people. Riots become rebellions, and rebellions, war; at the climax, power shifts—or seems to—as a ruler or class is deposed and the state transformed.
In some ways the appearance resembles reality: the populace experiences the growth of popular emotion, of disaffection from old authority, of new loyalties, and perhaps of actual power. But these developments are by no means inevitable. Frequently, established authority emerges not only unscathed but stronger after putting down upheavals against itself. And in the course of “successful” revolutions the way is never free of failure, of loss of popular support, for example, of weariness, declining faith, and confusion.
Certainly confusion and weariness abounded in the American colonies early in the struggle over the Townshend acts. At this time no self-conscious revolutionary movement existed in America, but rather a determination to resist unconstitutional authority, which was much stronger in urban communities and among professionals, merchants, skilled craftsmen, and the great planters in the southern colonies who produced staples for the market than it was in the countryside remote from markets and communications. Yet there were divisions within these groups, especially among the merchants, who resented their financial losses in the resistance to the Stamp Act.
Confusion, weariness, and resentment affected the initial reactions among Americans to the Townshend program. Whether the new duties constituted a violation of colonial rights was a question honestly asked; the answers did not always dispel the confusion. Long after the appearance of John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, (1767–68), which insisted that the duties encroached upon the constitutional rights of the Americans just as the Stamp Act had, Richard Henry Lee, the Virginia planter, wrote that the duties were “not perhaps, literally, a violation of our rights,” though he added that they were “arbitrary” and “unjust.” Lee read Dickinson’s essays on the Townshend program and he eventually became convinced that American rights had been violated, but he with others was slow to come to this conclusion.1
Others, especially merchants who knew that they would be called upon to give up the importation of English goods if the public construed the new duties the way they had the stamp tax, simulated confusion about whether rights were at stake, or attempted to avoid the constitutional issue altogether. Rather than discuss rights and liberties, they moved immediately to the issue of nonimportation as if to head off any demand that they reinstitute what had apparently worked so well the year before. They showed themselves first in Boston, whose example everyone knew would be important elsewhere in America. Early in September, news of the Townshend policies having arrived in August, the Boston Evening Post opened the campaign against nonimportation. Among the earliest articles, one held forthrightly that nonimportation pressed too hard on the merchants who had to bear the sacrifices virtually alone and without reimbursement. Two weeks later “a true Patriot” attacked the “Blow-coals,” presumably the group around Otis, as giving way to “political enthusiasm” in their opposition to British measures; and “Libernatus” stressed that as a “remedy” nonimportation fell unequally on the merchants. Nonimportation, he concluded, is a “partial” method, “the consent partial, the execution partial.” In October “A Trader” argued that besides violating the “civil ” liberties” of merchants, nonimportation would ruin business. According to the “Trader,” only those who had “no property to lose” favored it, and he pronounced them “brawling boys” and “hectoring bullies.”2
Naturally, little of this went unanswered. The Boston Gazette made the case for nonimportation, though only after a period of indecision, in late summer 1767. Eventually it created or picked up a slogan that served well in the controversy: “Save your money, and you save your country.”3 Elsewhere in the colonies—Philadelphia, for example—this slogan caught on and appeared in newspapers and tracts. But in most colonies little was published about Townshend’s policies until after the appearance of John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.4
John Dickinson called himself a farmer in these letters, but his ties to the soil were rather remote by 1767. He was the son of a planter in Maryland, where he was born in 1732 and where his father practiced law. The family moved to Dover, Delaware, when Dickinson was still a boy; in Delaware he received a classical education and began his legal training. In 1754 he entered the Middle Temple in London for the study of law and remained there until 1756. On his return he practiced law in Philadelphia, earned a small fortune, and eventually established a handsome country estate in Delaware. Like so many lawyers, he found politics irresistible, and in 1760 he was elected to the assembly in Delaware and two years later to the assembly in Philadelphia.5
Dickinson’s Letters struck the colonies with a peculiar impact, unsurpassed, according to many historians, until Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared in 1776. The letters were published first in the Pennsylvania Chronicle and reprinted in all but four colonial newspapers. Collected, they made their appearance as a pamphlet in several editions—three in Philadelphia, for example, two in Boston, and still others in New York and Williamsburg. Benjamin Franklin, ordinarily on the opposite side of the political fence in Pennsylvania, was sufficiently impressed to write a brief preface for the edition published in London in June 1768. And others, sensing the importance of the essays, had them reprinted in Paris and Dublin.6
The essays appealed to a people fatigued by the strain of extravagant rhetoric and violent measures. Their tone is established by Dickinson’s modest recommendations of further petitioning as a method of obtaining repeal of the Townshend duties; he also proposed economy, frugality, hard work, and home manufacturing, all for the purpose of lessening the consumption of English goods. His language is mild, even meek in places—as, for example, in the suggestion, “Let us behave like dutiful children who have received unmerited blows from a beloved parent,” a proposal George Mason had scorned the year before in the aftermath of the Stamp Act. Within these submissive inflections, the message was inescapable: although Parliament possessed the right to regulate commerce, it had no right whatsoever to levy duties for revenue. And however disguised as regulation, the Townshend duties were taxes to raise money on the colonies, an “experiment,” Dickinson wrote, to test the colonists’ disposition, and, if it were acquiesced in, “A direful foreteller of future calamities.” Dickinson’s clarity of analysis and his modest phrasing forced Americans to confront the constitutional implications of the Townshend duties—or, perhaps more accurately, made it possible for the reluctant and the confused to confront them without endorsing the popular upheavals that had marked the crisis of the Stamp Act. Still, action bent toward forcing the repeal of the Townshend duties did not follow hard on the heels of the Pennsylvania Farmer.7
The reasons lie in that gray area of public will and mood. Dickinson had informed men’s minds as to the constitutional issues but left their passions unmoved—indeed, left them in the trough of exhaustion where popular emotion had fallen in summer 1766. Normal desires prevailed then—desires for business and profits as usual. Recognizing these desires, Dickinson offered an incisive critique of the constitutional issues raised by the Townshend duties and with it sweet reason and condemnation of mobbish violence. His appeals for childlike submissiveness, his quiet calls for petitioning and home manufacturing, seem to have comforted many precisely because they asked for so little. What Dickinson could not supply were lurid descriptions of plots against liberty, of sinister conspiracies of a degenerate ministry determined to enslave the liberty-loving Americans. The colonists read the Letters, agreed, and with few exceptions, did nothing.
The exceptions—who, not surprisingly, lived in Boston—turned out to be rather important. They did not include James Otis—at least they did not until sometime after the first of January 1768. On one of his curious gyrations in the autumn, Otis evidently argued in the Boston meeting for the constitutionality of the Townshend duties. The town may have been impressed; in any event it turned down demands that it endorse nonimportation of British goods. It contented itself with a resolution calling for reduced consumption of certain specified British goods which, according to the town, were superfluous anyway. Curiously, the articles slated for the Townshend duties were not included, but the town did resolve to encourage the manufacture of paper and glass.8
A week later the Customs commissioners arrived from England. Their arrival had been expected—they were already odious figures—but its timing was a stroke of bad luck: November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, a day ordinarily of riotous behavior. Somehow they avoided all abuse, though they were greeted by a large crowd parading with effigies of “Devils, Popes, & Pretenders,” all with labels on their breasts reading “Liberty & Property & no Commissioners.”9
The presence of the commissioners, visible embodiments of a parasitic policy, might have given the faction an advantage, but still they were unable to push through a nonimportation agreement. Late in December they evidently persuaded the town to instruct its representatives in the legislature to protest against the Townshend duties, and by this time several small towns, eventually numbering around twenty-five, passed nonconsumption agreements in obvious imitation of Boston. Although the spread of the boycott must have been encouraging, all the signs indicated that the province would submit to the Townshend program.10
Governor Bernard confessed to an uneasy delight at the absence of opposition. In December, just before the legislature convened, Otis seemed less threatening to the governor and, as the new session stretched into January 1768, calm evidently prevailed. Bernard remained anxious—wounds, he wrote Secretary of War Barrington, sometimes “skinned-over” without healing. Bernard did not know and could not find out during these peaceful January days that the House, under Sam Adams’s tutelage, was writing a series of protests to its agent Dennys De Berdt, Secretary Shelburne, and others it considered friendly, asking that the Townshend acts be repealed. The House also sent a moderate but clear appeal to the king—again without informing the governor.11
