Penguin History of the United States of America (27 page)

Accordingly Townshend felt emboldened to fulfil his pledge. One of his talents as a politician was that he always knew which way the wind was blowing: according to Burke, ‘He conformed exactly to the temper of the house; and he seemed to guide, because he was always sure to follow it.’ He knew the general irritation caused by the antics of Massachusetts and, even more, of New York; even Chatham had called New York infatuated, the victim of a demon of discord, and believed that it would have to be disciplined. The House of Commons, being even more reluctant than usual to vote taxes on itself, would welcome levies on America, so long as they did not bring with them Stamp-like troubles. This Townshend promised to arrange. He also meant to put the whole government of North America on a radically new footing, of the centralizing kind he favoured.

On 13 May 1767 he introduced his measures. The last was signed by the King on 2 July. All had an easy passage through Parliament. They were helped on by a general resentment of New York’s ungrateful behaviour, as is shown by the fact that one of them (the New York Restraining Act) invalidated all Acts of the New York assembly until the Quartering Act was obeyed. This particular measure remained a dead letter, because the New York assembly had complied with the Quartering Act in June,
³
but its mere passage was resented as an act of arbitrary usurpation. It was to be remembered. And the other Townshend laws were also directed against the colonial assemblies. For whereas the Stamp Act had been carefully limited to the purpose of providing funds for the imperial military establishment, Townshend exploited the financial problem and the unpopularity of the Americans to strike at institutions which he had long held to be the real originators of all Anglo-American troubles. His Revenue Act revived the question of taxation by imposing new duties on glass, lead, painters’ colours, paper and tea, and explicitly authorized writs of assistance in their collection; while another act set up an American Board of Customs Commissioners at Boston to expedite the collection of these and other, older duties. The following year four new vice-admiralty districts (Halifax, Boston,
Philadelphia, Charles Town) were set up to act as further instruments of mercantilist control and law-enforcement. These, since they operated without juries, were seen by Americans as encroaching further on sacred rights: ‘What has America done to be… disfranchised and stripped of so invaluable a privilege as trial by jury?’ It was worse than the Stamp Act. Above all, Townshend earmarked the proceeds of the new duties to set up a colonial civil list, which would enable the King to pay the salaries of colonial Governors, customs officers and other officials without recourse to the assemblies which had hitherto paid them. In short, here was a direct assault on the power of the colonial purse. It was bold, intelligent and exceedingly unwise – so unwise that the most mysterious thing about the affair is that Townshend apparently never asked himself seriously if and how his Acts could be enforced.

Even without the Stamp Act precedents the challenge must have been resisted. I have already tried to make it clear that representative self-government was a principle coeval with the English settlements. The eighteenth-century assemblies embodied this principle and by 1767 were doing so very effectively indeed. Thanks partly to British neglect and partly to the stresses of local politics, in every colony the lower, popularly elected house had gained an ascendancy over both the executive (the Governors) and the upper house (the Council).
⁴
It had constantly been represented to Whitehall that as long as the Governors depended on annual votes of the colonial assemblies for their salaries the assemblies would have the whip hand: but Charles Townshend was the first minister ever to listen, and by the time he acted it was too late. Even in Virginia, where the Governor’s salary was safe from opponents in the House of Burgesses, the assembly had grown used to running the colony, quite as the House of Commons was to run nineteenth-century England (here, as so often, colonial development had raced ahead of that of the mother country). As to the upper houses, the Councils, these had declined for various reasons. In Massachusetts Bay, under the 1691 Charter, the House of Representatives elected the Councillors, and it is only surprising that not until 1766 and the Stamp Act crisis did it designedly choose men who would do its own bidding rather than the Governor’s; but the Council had been weakening for sixty years previously. Other colonies reached the same goal by different paths, but all reached it. The purest Whig doctrine came to prevail: the right of no taxation without representation had been successfully exploited to make each province essentially self-governing, and Townshend should have known enough to realize that any challenge to the assemblies’ powers was certain to provoke a ferocious reaction.

This was so for more reasons than one. Not only were the assemblies essentially sovereign by the mid-eighteenth century: each had become the instrument of a particular group, or interest, which used them to wield and
keep local power. Planters to the South, merchants to the North, those living on or near ‘tidewater’ had flourished mightily in the past century, and in a hundred ways their interest in continuing to do so affected their politics. In Massachusetts, typical of the New England colonies, everything turned on the townships, with which men identified themselves before they thought of themselves as citizens of Massachusetts, certainly before they thought of themselves as subjects of King George. Representation in the General Court was weighted in favour of the seaboard, mercantile towns, and the fact that the Court met at Boston, where the mob was always at hand to intimidate inland representatives, did nothing to correct the balance. Important though these factors were, tidewater ascendancy in Massachusetts Bay was chiefly the result of the fact that the merchants and shopkeepers of Boston knew what they wanted and how to get it: they were the most dynamic elements in the colony’s politics, and the Stamp Act crisis had united the colonials in views most congenial to them. Subsequent British blunders refreshed the union. Thus the Revolution in Massachusetts was chiefly to be shaped by Boston, capital of commerce and patriotism. In Pennsylvania the great fight was between the Perm family, still exploiting its position (for example, its enormous landholdings were untaxed), and the so-called Quaker party – which, by the time Franklin and his friend Galloway came to lead it, was misnamed, being essentially the party of the merchants and eastern landholders. These men looked on themselves as the true representatives of the people of Pennsylvania. They based their claim partly on their descent from the first Quaker and Anglican settlers, partly on their wealth (for property was increasingly coming to be seen as a necessary qualification for participation in politics) and partly on the kudos they felt they had earned by their long struggle against the oppressive and aristocratical Penns. But the Quaker party was nevertheless at odds with the hinterland, now filling up with German and Northern Irish aliens: its control of the assembly, and so of Pennsylvania, had to be defended on two fronts, and indeed was, by many advanced political methods, including that of gerrymandering.
⁵
In Virginia an advance to the West was a matter of desire, not alarm, to the great planters: they hoped to make a fortune out of it, and were happy in principle to extend the suffrage to Western settlers if this induced them to play their part in opening up new territory. But the planters had, of course, no intention of relinquishing control. They were quite at one with the Pennsylvanians in holding that property was a prerequisite for political power. As a 1670 Virginian law stated, a voice in elections belonged only ‘to such as by their estates real or personal have interest enough to tie them to the endeavour of the public good’. Even between
property-holders there was no democracy. The mere right to vote was not worth very much, since local government was in the hands of the oligarchs, who also ensured that no candidates from outside their ranks ever got elected to the House of Burgesses, or even came forward. Controlling the assembly, on the other hand, was well worthwhile, and the oligarchs’ prolonged success in doing so (going back to the seventeenth century) naturally fortified their belief in themselves and their attachment to Whig principles. Few of them had read Harrington, Sidney or Locke, but those writers’ insistence that, both in nature and in right, governments could be founded only on the will of the people, which will was best expressed through representative institutions (related notions which together made up the doctrine of legislative supremacy), like their failure to support universal suffrage, was very compatible with American conditions. The ideas of these writers had, over time, become widely diffused in the colonies, even if their works had not.

Accordingly, when news of the Townshend Acts reached America, the only question was what form resistance should take this time. So clear was the challenge, whether to the rights of the citizens or the powers of the assemblies, that some sudden, single, vigorous outburst like that which had defeated the Stamp Act might have seemed a probable response. If, instead, the reaction was prolonged over three years or so and varied greatly in intensity from place to place and time to time, it was, paradoxically, because opposition to Townshend touched even more people than had opposition to Grenville; because the patriot leaders saw, and seized, the opportunity to devise new and even more formidable organizations of resistance, which necessarily took time; and because this last development began seriously to alarm certain American interests, so that where the Stamp Act crisis had, on the whole, united the colonials (for even Thomas Hutchinson had objected to British policy) the Townshend crisis, just because it ran deeper, divided them.

Massachusetts, as might have been expected, led the way. The radical patriots, led by Sam Adams, were most concerned with the political implications of the Townshend Acts: here was renewed taxation without representation, here was a plot to make the colonial governments independent of the governed, here was the thin end of the wedge. Before long colonial money would be used to support the standing army in America and (Adams did not scruple to add) a bishop over New England. The customs commissioners, now on their way to take up their duties in Boston, should be given as hot a reception as had greeted the would-be Stamp collectors. But this advice fell on deaf ears. For the moment it was the economic aspects of the Townshend Acts which most dismayed the merchants and shopkeepers: the merchants because stricter customs regulation would put an end to the smuggling in which so many of them (especially John Hancock) so profitably engaged; the small men because they were frightened that the rise in prices which the new duties would bring about would put them out
of business. There may have been some substance in their fears. For example, the duty on tea was threepence a pound, a not inconsiderable sum in the eighteenth century. There were said to be ‘deluges of bankruptcies’ in Rhode Island that autumn; the
Massachusetts Post-Boy
spoke of an ‘alarming scarcity of money and consequent stagnation of trade’ in that province. Conditions were much the same in New Hampshire. Whatever the real cause, the Townshend duties were blamed for this state of affairs, and a spontaneous movement sprang up to counteract them. ‘Save your money and save your country,’ said the
Post-Boy
. On 28 October the Boston town-meeting launched a non-consumption agreement, the subscribers to which pledged themselves to boycott a large number of goods that were usually imported (for example, ‘loaf sugar, cordage, anchors, coaches… Men and women’s hats… shoes… snuff, mustard… glue’), to buy colonial produce instead, and to observe frugality in mourning (since the yards and yards of black cloth necessary to lament the dead in the usual style had to come from England). Tea was not officially boycotted, but it became a patriotic duty to shun it; besides, it was a ‘most luxurious and enervating article’, probably to blame for all the new-fangled ailments (‘tremblings, apoplexies, consumptions’) that were going round.

This sort of thing proved popular, and the non-consumption movement spread throughout seaboard Massachusetts; but it could not be expected to have much effect on imperial policy, being neither universal nor dramatic. Accordingly, radicals and shopkeepers (of course the two categories often overlapped) began to look for more assertive measures, as did many of the leading merchants. These, through their mouthpiece James Otis, had ensured that the customs officers were unmolested when they arrived in Boston on 5 November 1767; but they were so forbearing only because they were anxious not to alienate opinion in the other colonies by riotous behaviour. What was hoped for was a renewal of the non-importation agreements of 1765: a hope that was much encouraged by the publication of John Dickinson’s
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
, which appeared in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
between December 1767 and February 1768. These
Letters
were immensely successful: officially commended by town-meetings, republished in newspapers throughout the colonies and also in pamphlet form, they became the Bible of American patriotism until the eve of independence. With cool good temper and good sense Dickinson (1732–1808), a prosperous Philadelphian lawyer, acknowledged the sovereignty of the Crown and the authority of Parliament to regulate the trade and industry of the Empire, but attacked everything else: the New York Restraining Act, the Townshend Acts and, root and branch, all attempts to tax the colonies without their consent or govern them otherwise than through their assemblies, which, deprived of the power of the purse, might ‘
perhaps
be allowed to make laws
for the yoking of hogs
, or
the pounding of stray cattle
. Their influence will hardly be permitted to extend
so high
, as the
keeping roads in repair
, as
that business
may more properly be executed
by those who receive the public cash.’ Americans must resist, or become mere slaves; and, strongly deprecating violence, Dickinson advocated a non-importation movement as the best means.