Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (77 page)

To American colonists following intently the British domestic debate, this seemed to have an immediate relevance to their own situation. They too saw themselves as the victims of the arbitrary exercise of power by an arrogant and unrepresentative parliament, and their reading of British history and British political tracts like Cato's Letters encouraged them to find the explanation of that arbitrary power in the deformation of the constitution by the corruption that had taken hold of the British body politic. In the writings of the radical Whigs in defence of the Old Cause they sought and found a source of inspiration for the fighting of their own battles.

The doctrines of the Commonwealthmen were an amalgam of intellectual and religious traditions: the classical republicanism of ancient Greece and Rome, the rational moral philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and their heirs; the English common law and natural law traditions; and the religious traditions of the Protestant Reformation and Christian humanism.35 Out of these traditions, to which the new century would add Enlightenment rationalism, the Commonwealthmen fashioned their vision of a republic grounded in the virtue of citizens who placed the common good above the pursuit of mere self-interest. For the eighteenthcentury successors of the Commonwealthmen, self-interested politics were sapping the foundations of the finely balanced constitutional arrangements achieved through the heroic struggles of the seventeenth century, and had brought about the corruption and degeneracy of the present age. Only a virtuous citizenry could ward off the evils of corruption and thus wage the eternal war in defence of liberty.

The exercise of public virtue therefore came to be seen as the only effective answer to the evils of the age. Some were now beginning to fear that Britain might already be sunk too deep in the mire of corruption to recover its virtue,36 but on the American shores of the Atlantic the battle could still be fought and won. The patronage machines of royal governors, the nefarious activities of royal officials and the parasitic spread of their network of dependants,37 and the pursuit of factional and personal interest in electoral contests in New York, Pennsylvania and elsewhere,38 indicated that the corruption that had taken hold of British public life was beginning to infect the colonies. In the face of this alarming threat to liberty, it was incumbent on the property-owning elite to exercise the self-restraint required if the common good were to be elevated above the politics of interest. All, however, had their part to play in the unfolding struggle. In his tracts published as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson adopted not only the language of the Whig opposition in his assaults on British policy, but also the persona of the independent yeoman farmer who represented, in the Harringtonian world-view, the epitome of patriotic virtue.

The opportunity for a colonial-wide expression of patriotic virtue was amply provided by the sequence of events that followed the repeal of the Stamp Act. In May 1767 Charles Townshend, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced in the House of Commons a bill imposing new duties on a variety of goods on their entry into colonial ports. The object was to raise revenue to defray the expenses of colonial administration and provide an emergency fund to improve the salaries of governors and judges so that they would be less dependent on the colonial assemblies. It was a project that Townshend had cherished since serving many years earlier in the Board of Trade under Halifax. As a device for securing a more effective deployment of imperial power it made good sense, especially as it was to be accompanied by a reorganization of the totally inadequate American customs administration.39 In its assumption that the colonists objected only to internal rather than external duties, however, it was hardly attuned to colonial sensibilities at this delicate moment in the transatlantic relationship.

There was some initial hesitation in the colonies over how to respond to the Townshend duties, but Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer, published over the winter of 1767-8, did much to rally opinion in favour of constitutional and legal methods of resistance, rather than open confrontation. Following unsuccessful petitioning for relief from the Townshend Act, the colonists reverted to the strategy that had served them so well in securing the repeal of the Stamp Act, and turned again to the use of non-importation agreements.40 Between 1768 and 1770 innumerable groups sprang up to monitor the activities of merchants, many of whom showed themselves less keen to boycott British goods than in 1765-6, when goods were overstocked. The New England town meeting, which provided an ideal forum for decision-making and collective action, was imitated in other colonies, and large public meetings were held in New York, Philadelphia and Charles Town.41

The non-importation movement involved both open and covert coercion. As during the Stamp Act embargo, it acquired some of its momentum from those who stood to gain personally from rallying to a patriotic cause - smaller merchants resentful of the wealth and power of their more successful colleagues, artisans who saw the possibility of turning their hands to the manufacture of goods that had hitherto been imported, and debt-ridden southern gentry who saw in the boycott a convenient device for cutting down on conspicuous consumption while gaining the plaudits of the public.

Yet if the non-importation movement was inspired by mixed motives, and tended to be unevenly observed and inconsistently enforced, it evoked, in both its scale and its rhetoric, an impressive display of that civic virtue which lay at the heart of the republican tradition. It helped to politicize American women,42 and to involve the lower orders of colonial society in anti-British protests. The denial of luxuries had always played a part in programmes for the reformation of morals and manners, but the ideals of classical republicanism, when added to the traditional moralizing appeal for self-restraint, ensured that, in clothing themselves in homespun, the colonists also donned the virtuous garb of Greek and Roman patriots. `These are efforts of patriotism', claimed one publicist in 1769, `that Greece and Rome never yet surpassed, nay not so much as equaled.'43

In capturing the public imagination and encouraging co-operation among the colonists, the movement reinforced the sense of a united struggle in the cause of liberty. The unexpected strength of colonial resistance, coupled with the failure of the Townshend duties to generate the anticipated revenue, persuaded the new government of Lord North to sound the retreat. On 5 March 1770 he announced his intentions to the House of Commons, and in April all the duties were repealed except for that on tea, which was retained as a symbolic assertion of parliamentary supremacy.

Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic now hoped for a return to calm. For a time at least, calm did indeed return. Yet mutual distrust ran deep. The ministry of Lord North, having retreated, had also determined on the point at which it must stand firm. There must be no yielding of the sovereignty of parliament. For their part, the conflicts of the 1760s had given the colonists a sense of common purpose against a common oppressor. Equally important, those conflicts had also given them them a chance to assemble the arguments and burnish the language on which they would need to draw in any final confrontation to save their cherished rights.

On 5 March 1770, the day on which Lord North announced in parliament that the Townshend duties would be withdrawn, eight soldiers of the 29th Regiment guarding the Boston custom house responded to taunts and a volley of missiles from a hostile crowd by opening fire and killing or mortally wounding five civilians. At the subsequent trial, where the accused soldiers were ably defended by John Adams, Samuel's younger second cousin, a fair-minded Boston jury acquitted six of the eight soldiers, and found the remaining two guilty only of manslaughter. The radicals, however, seized on the incident as proof that the British would stop at nothing in their determination to destroy colonial liberties. Blood was running in American streets, and the `Boston Massacre' was duly inscribed in the glorious annals of revolutionary history (fig. 39).44

The Massacre was only the latest in a long line of street riots and acts of violence against customs officials and recalcitrant merchants that marred what was supposed to be a peaceful boycott of British goods. Colonial governors and British ministers saw the hand of the radicals in these disorders. They suspected street leaders, like William Molineux in Boston '41 of acting as intermediaries between the rioters and members of the colonial elite. Yet there were bound to be tensions between popular agitators and elites imbued with deep-seated fears about the dangers of unleashing mob violence,46 and the extent of collusion is difficult to gauge. Samuel Adams, who is said to have been persuaded as early as 1768, when British troops arrived in Boston, that there was no alternative to independence, seems to have been connected with most of the major street actions in Boston in the years after 1765. But he covered his tracks well, and it is far from clear whether this passionate defender of the people's liberties was taking the initiative in order to advance his chosen policy, or riding a tiger that he found impossible to control.47

In New York, as in Boston, the presence of British soldiers gave rise to street fights and brawls 4' but that same presence also acted as a reminder of the weakness of British imperial authority. If little or no blood was shed by American mobs in the pre-revolutionary years, this may largely have been because they met with no resistance.49 Like other colonial governors, Francis Bernard, the governor of Massachusetts, simply did not have at his command an administrative apparatus for maintaining public order, and the institutions of imperial authority had no natural constituency of support in American society. For his part, General Gage lacked both the will, and the military resources, to restore authority by force of arms in Massachusetts. His weakness allowed Samuel Adams to negotiate the removal of the troops from the city to an island in Boston harbour. Adams's plan, however, to maintain the pressure on London by keeping the non-importation movement in being was to end in failure. With the British in an apparently conciliatory mood, the merchants along the eastern seaboard proved increasingly reluctant to participate, and by the autumn of 1770 the movement was everywhere unravelling.so

The moment of the radicals seemed to have passed, but this was to reckon without the pretensions of parliament, the intransigence of British public opinion, and the miscalculations of Lord North and his cabinet colleagues. The Tea Act remained in force, and colonial grievances unredressed. During the Stamp Act crisis and the agitation over the Townshend duties, `correspondence committees' had sprung up in the different colonies to share information and co-ordinate resistance. In May 1773 the Massachusetts House established a revived and strengthened committee to maintain correspondence `with our sister Colonies'. With Samuel Adams at its head, the Boston committee assumed leadership of a campaign against the Tea Act."

In December of that year a bunch of colonists disguised as Mohawks threw £10,000 worth of East India Company tea overboard into Boston harbour. Lord North's government responded between March and May 1774 by enacting a series of punitive measures. The Coercive, or Intolerable, Acts closed Boston harbour to commercial shipping, gave the governor the right to appoint and remove inferior judges, sheriffs and justices of the peace, and partially abrogated the colony's 1691 charter by placing appointments to the council in the hands of the London government. The commander-in-chief in North America, General Gage, who replaced Bernard's discredited successor, Thomas Hutchinson, as governor of Massachusetts, was authorized to use his four regiments to impose submission by force if necessary.12

The events which followed over the following two years - the convening of the first and second Continental Congresses (1774 and 1775-6), the Declaration of Independence, and the resort to arms - saw the metamorphosis of increasingly generalized resistance into revolution, a revolution that within nine years would transform the thirteen rebellious mainland colonies into an independent republic. In September 1774, when the first Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, this outcome would have been difficult to predict, and none of the stages by which it was reached was a foregone conclusion. It was not inevitable that Massachusetts should win the support of the other colonies, nor that the leaders of those colonies should unite to renounce their allegiance to the crown. Nor was it inevitable that they would succeed in mobilizing their populations for war, and still less that the war would end in victory. For Spanish Americans, who would follow their example a generation later, it would take up to twenty years of savage warfare to achieve a comparable result.

When Massachusetts, under pressure from the Coercive Acts, appealed to the other colonies for help, its appeal was far from being assured of success. While war and politics during the past two decades had brought the mainland colonies closer together and had forged personal friendships and a better mutual understanding, Massachusetts had a reputation for abrasive and precipitate behaviour, and the destruction of £10,000 worth of private property in the waters of Boston harbour could well be construed as another rash act by New Englanders that could only inflame passions and play into the hands of the imperial authorities.

The Coercive Acts, however, profoundly changed the political atmosphere in the colonies. Although the Acts were designed to punish Massachusetts, the coercion of one colony implied a potential threat to all. For George Washington, writing from his home at Mount Vernon on 4 July 1774, there was clearly a `regular, systematic plan' to destroy American freedom.53 Lord North's government contrived to strengthen this suspicion by a fortuitous piece of bad timing, when it secured the passage of the Quebec Act at the end of June. This replaced the current military administration in Canada with a civil administration. Quebec was to retain French civil law, and, for the time being, was not to be given a representative assembly. The Act managed simultaneously to offend the religious sensibilities of Protestants by conceding special privileges to the Roman Catholic church, and the territorial sensibilities of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia by extending Quebec's provincial boundaries into the Mississippi Valley as far as the Ohio River. Coinciding as it did with the Coercive Acts, and coming at a time of renewed apprehension about alleged plans to establish an Anglican bishop in America,` it inevitably evoked in the overheated imaginations of colonists the twin spectre of political and ecclesiastical tyranny which, they fondly thought, the Glorious Revolution had banished. This was a society, and an age, in which conspiracy theory seemed to provide the most rational explanation of otherwise incomprehensible conjunctions of events.55