Penguin History of the United States of America (22 page)

It never seems to have occurred to him that by failing to consult those colonial leaders most sympathetic to his problems and policies he was helping their opponents. He thought he could afford to ignore the petitions of protest that poured in from every colony as the year of grace ended. His clerks produced, and he laid before Parliament, a sweeping measure, which might have been designed to affront the urban colonial élite – lawyers, merchants, editor-printers – and thus to provoke unanimous resistance, for it taxed not only legal but also commercial transactions and documents (liquor licences, mortgages, insurance policies, customs clearances and so on) and pamphlets, almanacs, newspapers, newspaper advertisements – a printer’s whole business, in fact. These necessary stamps were to be embossed on sheets of paper in England and sold only by the stamp commissioners – thus injuring the printers still further, since many of them, like Benjamin Franklin, were accustomed to manufacturing their own paper. On 22 March 1765 the Stamp Act became law, and the American Revolution began.

For the Stamp Act was a catalyst, touching off fundamental change. The reasons for its immense unpopularity are simple enough and (except for the straightforward grievance of the lawyers and businessmen) are summed up in the famous slogan, ‘no taxation without representation’. As the earlier chapters of this book should have made clear, the American colonists were a vigorous, thriving, independent-minded people. They had enjoyed most of the essentials of self-government from the time of the earliest settlements, and were well aware of its benefits. Furthermore, they regarded themselves as still retaining and enjoying the rights of Englishmen, which had been codified and made explicit at the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Among the most fundamental of those rights was the right to be taxed only with the consent of themselves or their representatives. This right of representation, they came to think, was beyond the power of kings to give or to withhold. The power of the purse, it was held, had enabled the seventeenth-century Parliaments to wrest a free constitution from tyrannous rulers; to relinquish that power was to risk, or rather to ensure, a return of slavery. This much was agreed on both sides of the Atlantic; but whereas the English Whigs were content to leave it at that, to assume that victories won by Parliament were best and sufficiently safeguarded by Parliament, the colonists (more attached to rights than to institutions) went further. They were not, and probably could not be, properly represented in Parliament by their own MPs, so Parliament could not lawfully tax them. Some politicians (among them Grenville) held that they were ‘virtually’ represented in Parliament because men whose interests coincided with theirs sat there: they brushed aside this cobweb. In their situation, they held, only their assemblies could truly represent them; the assemblies exercised the power of the purse in the
colonies. The Stamp Act encroached on that power. The colonists had never been overtly taxed from Britain before, though, as they soon discovered, the new Sugar Act was essentially a taxing device too. But the Sugar Act, though possibly unwise, was clearly constitutional in their eyes, since it was ostensibly concerned only with the regulation of trade, a legitimate concern of the imperial Parliament, whereas the Stamp Act illegally taxed the colonists without their consent, for that consent could be given only in the little parliaments, the assemblies.
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It was a light tax, true; but to consent to a light tax was to give warrant for the subsequent imposition of a heavy tax – possibly, O horror!, to risk the transfer of the complete tax burden of the Empire from British shoulders to colonial ones. (Besides, light though it was, it would actually double the amount paid by Americans in taxes.) ‘The same principles which will justify such a tax of a penny will warrant a tax of a pound,’ they said, ‘an hundred, or a thousand pounds, and so on without limitation.’ This was an encroachment of power on liberty: some of the protesters may have noticed that for some time past Whitehall had steadily been encroaching on the independence of colonial governors, especially in the matter of patronage. Now it was the assemblies’ turn. The government might go on from there to pay the governors, at present dependent on the assemblies for their salaries, with the proceeds of the Stamp Act, and thus make them wholly independent of the will of their subjects. (In fairness we should note that Grenville had ‘warmly rejected’ this allegation.) No wonder the cry against the Act was almost unanimous.

The Act had been passed after the most energetic, intelligent, earnest and loyal protests and remonstrances from the colonies. ‘The boldness of the minister amazes our people,’ wrote a New Yorker. ‘This single stroke has lost Great Britain the affection of all her colonies.’ The blow to American confidence in British wisdom, justice and goodwill was indeed very heavy if not mortal; and the subsequent discovery that resistance could prevent the Act’s operation gave the colonists a heady sense of their own strength. Only years of patience and good temper could have made good the damage: and they were not forthcoming.

Bad though it was, the Act could not have had such a devastating effect in isolation. Had Grenville held his hand, there might never have been a quarrel between Britain and her colonies; but to say this is to say that the Stamp Act was the last straw, confirming suspicions and fears which had been steadily mounting since 1759. To understand them it is necessary to look again at the colonial policies adopted by England after the fall of Quebec.

Colonial grievances made up a formidable but mixed bundle. Some were more or less chronic, arising from the day-to-day difficulties of governing
an empire, and had little significance beyond the highly important result of producing a general loss of temper. Of such a nature were the complaints peculiar to particular provinces. Thus, New Hampshire bitterly resented the White Pine Acts, which reserved white pine-trees growing outside private property for the use of the Royal Navy. These laws were ill-thought-out, not distinguishing between trees which were useful to the navy and trees which were only useful to the colonists: all were reserved. An ill-advised effort at strict enforcement in 1763 roused the whole of the Connecticut valley
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against the Acts, just when the more general crisis was brewing.

A nagging grievance concerning judges affected four colonies in this period – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Jamaica. Each wanted their judges to sit, in accordance with post-1701 English practice, during good behaviour, thus giving them security of tenure and political independence. The Crown, however, insisted on appointing colonial judges during pleasure, so that it could, in theory, dismiss them at will (in practice it never did so). Its motive was to retain political control, for otherwise the judges, dependent, like the Governors, on the assemblies for their salaries, might be too tender to certain types of criminal – smugglers, for example. The Crown would not relinquish this control, even when Pennsylvania and Jamaica wanted to give judges permanent salaries as well as tenure during good behaviour, thus making them independent of both Crown and assemblies. The colonists disliked what they saw as an attempt to rob them of their Revolutionary heritage.

In South Carolina disaffection was caused in the early sixties by a clash between the assembly and a blockheaded royal Governor, who abused his power of dissolving the assembly.

These local grievances, more or less important in each case, all involved a disturbing rigidity in the official British attitude to the problems of colonial life and government: in all three cases the basic trouble was a refusal on the part of the authorities to take sufficient note of the colonists’ point of view. More serious were a set of complaints that affected all the colonies, more or less.

There was the bishop question. The Anglican church in America had never known a bishop, so that colonial clergy had to cross to England to be ordained. There were other sound ecclesiastical reasons for thinking the appointment of an American bishop desirable, but sounder political reasons against it. To the descendants of the Puritans the idea of a bishop was inseparably connected with the idea of persecution. The planters of Virginia, as we have seen, liked to run the church themselves. There would certainly be a storm in the colonies if a bishop was appointed (though the Dissenters
would not, apparently, have objected to a visit from one of the English bishops). For once the government was sensible enough not to stir up a hornets’ nest: no bishop was appointed in the pre-Revolutionary period. But Thomas Seeker (1693–1768), created Archbishop of Canterbury in 1758, was not so sensible. Born a Dissenter, he had a convert’s misplaced zeal, various expressions of which seriously alarmed the colonists. He backed the opening of an Anglican missionary church at Cambridge, Massachusetts, seat of Harvard College and centre of New England Congregationalism: this looked like an attempt to undermine Puritanism in Massachusetts, and probably was. He induced the Privy Council to disallow a Massachusetts Act setting up a Congregationalist society for missionary work among the Indians. He pressed for the appointment of a colonial bishop and stirred up a pamphlet war on the topic in New England. These activities of so powerful and influential an Englishman did nothing to endear the mother country to American Dissenters – who were still in an overwhelming majority in New England.

Even more unsettling was the question of the British army in North America. Basically, this was a matter of two right opinions clashing. The British noticed that during the late war the colonial militia had proved strategically and tactically useless – a point reinforced by its performance during a war with the Cherokees (1759–61) and Pontiac’s rising. With some honourable exceptions, above all Massachusetts, the colonies had failed to supply either sufficient men or sufficient money for prosecuting the war, and yet all had repeatedly and urgently summoned help from the regular army: help which had always been forthcoming. It had in fact been proved again and again that without some central, organizing military authority and a body of trained troops, some engaged in building and garrisoning forts in the wilderness, others embodied in a strategic reserve, for use where necessary in Amherst’s ‘Immense Extent’, the colonies, particularly the westernmost settlements, were helpless and indefensible. Further proof of the point, if it be needed, is furnished by the fact that after the Revolution the newly independent Americans found that, however unmilitaristic and anti-taxation they were, they still had to set up and pay for a national army. This became one of the inescapable responsibilities of the federal government. In the colonial period it was the inescapable responsibility of the imperial government; which naturally wanted gratitude, co-operation and financial help in bearing it.

On the other hand, the colonists had all the distrust of a standing army traditional in England since the time of Cromwell’s major-generals. They could not forget that it was their efforts which had conquered the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, the only serious British gain during the War of the Austrian Succession (nor that Louisbourg had been returned to France at the peace); that in 1755 the British General Braddock, far from saving the Pennsylvania frontier, had led his army to disaster; and that the regulars who eventually won the war in America had largely been
enlisted there, and employed tactics devised in the colonies out of long experience of battle in the woods. Nor could they overlook Amherst’s large part in provoking Pontiac’s rising
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– any more than Amherst could overlook the part which the persistent movement of settlers westward, across the mountains, into the Ohio river valley, played in alarming the tribes. On military matters, in short, the Americans and the British could each plume themselves on their success and each justly accuse the other of incompetence. What both tended to overlook was that both were carrying out essential tasks. The colonists furnished the troops, the tactics, some funds and many supplies; the British furnished the organization, the discipline, the training, the strategy, the rest of the supplies and funds, and above all, the sustaining energy to keep the army in being and prepare for future contingencies.

Linked to the military question, as I have indicated, was that of the Indians and the Western lands. The imperial government took the view that unless there was to be endemic, expensive and bloody war on the frontier of settlement, pledges made to the Indians had better be kept, and all transfers of land from red men to white had better be made with due legal propriety, including fair payment of the Indians. It was the policy of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and was to be that adopted, on the whole, by the federal government in the post-Revolutionary era, thus again illustrating the continuity of American history. The settlers, or pioneers as they would come to be called, took, the reader will not be surprised to learn, a bolder and crueller attitude, and bitterly resented the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which drew a line along the map from north to south and stated that thus far might they go, and no further, in their quest for land, ‘until our further pleasure be known’. Their indignation, and willingness to defy the Proclamation, would have been much increased had they known that the Board of Trade wished to pen them up between the Appalachians and the sea so that they would be forced to emigrate to the new and empty colonies of Nova Scotia, Georgia and the Floridas, ‘where they would be useful to their mother country, instead of planting themselves in the heart of America, out of the reach of government, and where from the great difficulty of procuring European commodities they would be compelled to commence manufactures to the infinite prejudice of Britain’. Not knowing this, the colonists consoled themselves with the thought expressed by George Washington to his land agent, that the Proclamation was only ‘a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians’. As such, it could of course be ignored. ‘Those seeking good lands in the West,’ said Washington, ‘must find and claim them without delay.’