Penguin History of the United States of America (24 page)

However, there is much that we do not yet know about the crowd, much that we need to know that at present we can only guess. There had always been riots in the American towns and countryside, but what touched them off?’ What was the relation of the economic to the political in a crowd’s sense of grievance? Above all, who and what were the rioters?

Some valuable work has been done on this last topic
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which throws some light on the others as well. Apart from a group of carpenters who formed part of a New York mob in 1765, the chief identifiable components of the urban crowd were ‘armed seamen, servants, Negroes…’; ‘seamen, boys, and Negroes’; ‘saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tars’ – this last being John Adams’s account of the mob that rampaged through Boston after the Massacre in 1770. We need to be on our guard here – Adams was describing one incident only, in a speech, furthermore, as defending counsel. Studies of French popular history suggest that the well-off were very prone to exaggerate the importance of ungrateful servants in revolutionary movements, though the likelihood that, here, indentured servants are meant makes the analysis more acceptable. No doubt many of the ‘Negroes’ were whites with blackened faces (it was certainly a respectable mob – it Puritanically refused to riot on Sundays). Nevertheless there is no need to be entirely sceptical, since there is ample confirmatory evidence that sailors formed a large element in these mobs, and since the lists present a consistent picture of a crowd formed of the severely disadvantaged, little attached to their communities and their rulers. The population of the colonial cities and towns was highly mobile at the lowest level: if a man could not earn a decent living in, say, Boston, he went elsewhere. Many ‘saucy boys’ chafed, like the young Franklin, at the restraints of the apprenticeship system and ran away from their native places, like him, to try their luck in another colony – or in England – or at sea. Africans, whether free or enslaved, were profoundly disadvantaged, in the North as in the South, in the cities as in the countryside; but they were least amenable to coercion and control in the towns. As to the seamen, the largest element in the urban working class, they had a host of grievances and a long experience of rioting. Every colony with seaboard traffic knew what a press-riot was; every sailorman went in dread of the press-gang.

We tend to look back on impressment as a picturesque necessity of the Age of Hornblower. Actually it was a savage practice of a savage service: legalized kidnapping. Not until the mutinies (more properly, strikes) at the Nore and Spithead during the French Revolutionary wars did the working conditions of the Royal Navy begin to improve. In mid-century they were horrible. Life on the ocean blue was no picnic in the merchant fleets: whaling was a particularly bitter and dangerous occupation. Life in the Royal Navy
was far worse. Discipline was harsh and irrational; cruel punishments far from unusual (merciless flogging was the rule); the pay was bad, and, apart from the dangers of war, a man’s health was constantly imperilled by scurvy, fever and the wet and filthy living conditions of the lower deck. On one point Doctors Johnson and Franklin were agreed: the sea was no life for a man. Dr Johnson rescued his black servant from it, Dr Franklin his son. Dr Johnson remarked that ‘no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned’. Dr Franklin observed that illness was even commoner in the Royal Navy than in the merchant marine, and more frequently fatal at that. Death from drink, madness or disease was indeed so common that we cannot wonder that the navy was incessantly plagued by the problems of desertion and undermanning. Some captains tried to avert desertion by withholding their crews’ pay for years, calculating that a man would hang on to collect, eventually, what was owed him, rather than lose all hope of his pay by taking to flight; but this only added one more evil to a life already too full of them, and was ineffective. So, rather than treat sailors decently, impressment was constantly resorted to.

It was of very uncertain legality in America between 1708 and 1775, but that could not stop the navy. Its ships haunted the coast, its gangs regularly went ashore or boarded merchant vessels in search of deserters or of extra hands. The people of the colonies reacted to the quest for deserters and men to press much as their descendants in the North were to react to the quest for fugitive slaves in the mid-nineteenth century; and indeed sailors were no better off than slaves in all too many respects, being totally at the mercy of their employers: there is even a tale of one of the too-numerous corrupt captains pressing men and then selling them to other ships. Wives feared for their husbands, parents for their sons, parsons for their flocks, merchants and skippers for the crews of their trading vessels. Even the argument that the Royal Navy protected the Empire and the trade routes lost force: Franklin commented, at the height of the war in 1759, that ‘New York and Boston have so often found the inconvenience of… station ships that they are very indifferent about having them: the pressing of their men and thereby disappointing voyages, often hurting their trade more than the enemy hurts it.’

It is not surprising, therefore, that men were often so desperate to avoid impressment that they preferred to fight rather than come quietly. Consequently press-riots, in which deaths occurred on both sides, were regular occurrences. Nor would it be surprising if, as may have happened, sailors and the poorer inhabitants of the ports conceived a sense of the rights that were denied them, a hatred of the navy
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and a scepticism about the claims
of the authorities. Like the poor of London and Paris, they had suffered too much to be natural supporters of the
status quo
. When they rioted they wanted justice, or, if that was unattainable, revenge. Plunder, even alcoholic plunder, seems to have been a minor inducement: they were not soldiers.

The question remains, what brought them out against the stamp tax? Being a charge on legal and commercial business, it could have little direct effect on the poorer classes; and the cry of ‘no taxation without representation’ could mean little to those who were not represented even in the colonial assemblies. But in the thirteen colonies in 1765 (and outside them too: several of the West Indian islands opposed the tax) all conditions worked to one end. The economy was still depressed, so unemployment was high. Sailors were cast on shore with the coming of peace: no more privateers, and a slump in maritime trade, cut the job-supply.
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During the war prices had risen; in the peace the money supply was cut back, but prices did not fall and the wage-earner was worse off than ever. The Sugar Act brought the fear that the price of rum would rise (and rum was a food as well as a drink to many poor people): a similar fear had touched off the riots against the cider tax in the apple-counties of England. Finally, it may be argued, someone lifted the lid. Never before had trouble spread so rapidly or so universally from colony to colony – not even in 1689, when the news of the Glorious Revolution had touched off rebellion against half-a-dozen unpopular governments. The English might well regret alienating the printers: through their newspapers and pamphlets they now helped to unite opinion, from top to bottom and north to south, in opposition to the Stamp Act. Even the conservatives in Massachusetts echoed James Otis’s language of natural rights in denouncing it. Radicals urged resistance. Secret groups met to concert plans, for it was generally felt that desperate measures were needed. These groups formed contacts with the leaders of the crowd.

The storm broke in August, in Boston. Andrew Oliver had been appointed Distributor of Stamps for Massachusetts; so on 14 August the mob hanged him in effigy from a tree in Boston (known thereafter as the Liberty Tree); levelled a new brick building he had built as a speculation; broke the windows of his private house, which it later sacked; and burned the effigy at a great bonfire. The colonial government could do nothing but wring its hands; so the next day Oliver, impressed by this clear expression of public opinion, announced that he would resign his post. ‘Everyone agrees that this riot exceeds all others known here,’ the Governor reported, ‘… never had any mob so many abettors of consequence as this is supposed to have had.’ But it was quickly outdone. For twelve days later the crowd decided to vent its anger against all those involved in enforcing the trade laws. It destroyed
the records of the vice-admiralty court and wrecked the houses of the register of the court, of the Comptroller of Customs and of Chief Justice Hutchinson – who, as he was too well aware, had done nothing to deserve this punishment.

Yet the attack on Hutchinson is probably the most significant of these episodes. He was easily the most distinguished man in the colony: a descendant of Anne Hutchinson; a leading merchant; an excellent historian; Lieutenant Governor. More to the point, he had devoted himself to the public welfare as a leading official for twenty years or more, and had done great service, first, in the reform of Massachusetts’ currency immediately after the War of the Austrian Succession, a reform which had given the colony the soundest money in America;
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second, by his conduct of the colony’s finances during the Seven Years War; thirdly, by his administration of those finances since 1763. Unfortunately he was also something of a monopolist of government office. He was related by marriage to Andrew Oliver, and the families of the two men, closely intertwined, found few posts beneath their dignity. The rising tide of imperial ordinances and imperial enforcement led to an increase in the number of posts available to such collectors. Accordingly, when the mob attacked Hutchinson it was attacking the perfect symbol of Anglo-American imperial orthodoxy. It was attacking the economic policies which kept many of its members out of work; the political structure which involved them in war or the exigencies of war (especially impressment); and the aristocracy, part-mercantile, part-official, which was slowly forming (Governor Bernard of Massachusetts, a close ally of Hutchinson’s, dreamed of creating a colonial peerage, in which his friend would no doubt have enjoyed a place). So it is hard to believe that the crowd needed much incitement; but if it did, there was an action committee of middle-class tradesmen, known at first as the Loyal Nine and then as the Sons of Liberty, to egg it on through its leader, Ebenezer Macintosh, a shoemaker.
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The Loyal Nine had been behind the riot of 14 August, and it is hard to doubt that they had a hand in that of the 26th. Yet it also seems clear that some of the men behind the second affair had little interest in stamps but a great one in destroying evidence that they were smugglers which, they feared, had come into Hutchinson’s hands. If so this completes the picture of an uprising against all aspects of the traditional order.

The example thus given quickly spread to other colonies. It became a favourite pastime to burn the effigy of a stamp distributor (often, as in the Oliver incident, with a boot, to stand for Lord Bute, tied to its shoulder), to pull down houses and to terrorize the respectable.
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The New York
distributor was driven to resign on the night of the Hutchinson riot; two days later, a mob at Newport, fortified by ‘strong drink in plenty with Cheshire cheese and other provocations to intemperance and riot’, forced the resignation of the Rhode Island distributor; September and October saw the distributors in most of the other colonies resigning too. The distributor in Connecticut was threatened with lynching if he didn’t; so was the distributor in the Bahamas; both took the hint.

The countryside was as roused as the town – in Massachusetts, more so. ‘They talk of revolting from Great Britain in the most familiar manner,’ the Governor reported, ‘and declare that though the British forces should possess themselves of the coast and maritime towns, they will never subdue the inland.’ In Georgia it was the country people who forced the merchants of Savannah not to use the stamps.

It was against this turbulent background that the Stamp Act Congress met at New York on 7 October. We must not exaggerate the significance of the meeting. Only nine of the continental colonies were represented, and of those New York, New Jersey and the Three Counties of Delaware sent only unofficial or irregularly chosen delegates.
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The resolutions passed by the Congress, though firm, indeed incontrovertible, statements of the American case, were all moderately, even conservatively, couched, and events rapidly outran its deliberations, as the Whig or patriot party which was forming evolved a programme, first, of refusal to use or allow the distribution of the stamps; second, of non-importation – that is to say, of cutting off all trade with Great Britain; third, of allowing legal and commercial life to go forward without stamps, though this risked heavy penalties at the hand of the authorities, especially the Royal Navy, which was standing by to intercept unwarranted cargoes. Nevertheless the Stamp Act Congress was important. It was no abortive Albany conference. Its members exercised for the first time on a continental scale those arts of organization, compromise and conciliation which were eventually to make a continental legislature possible. It had a national tinge: as one of the South Carolina delegates, Christopher Gadsden (1724–1805), remarked,

we should all endeavour to stand upon the broad and common ground of those natural and inherent rights that we all feel and know, as men and as descendants of Englishmen, we have a right to… There ought to be no New England men, no New Yorker &c; known on the continent, but all of us Americans.

For the first time an inter-colonial body met whose authority was accepted, not rejected, by all the colonies.

The events of the winter confirmed the drift of events. It was of no account to be opposed to the Stamp Act, as Thomas Hutchinson had been from the beginning: the question was, what was a man prepared to do about it? The moderates were hopelessly overtaken by events and passions. It was well for Dr Franklin that he was in England at the time. He had opposed the passage of the Act, but had seen no harm in acquiescing afterwards, and had secured the post of distributor in Pennsylvania for his friend John Hughes, who was soon forced to resign it and eventually to leave the colony. Franklin was at first opposed to ‘the madness of the populace’ and ‘acts of rebellious tendency’; but his foreign residence gave him time to change his tune and emerge as a leader of the opposition: his representations to the House of Commons were to be influential in persuading Parliament to repeal the Act. Moderates in America were less fortunate: they lost political control to the radicals and could only count themselves lucky if they were left in peace.