Penguin History of the United States of America (28 page)

This was music to Massachusetts, though no sweeter, presumably, than Dickinson’s remark in a letter to James Otis that ‘Whenever the cause of American freedom is to be vindicated, I look towards the province of Massachusetts Bay.’ Thus encouraged, Otis and Sam Adams worked with a will at the winter session of the General Court. On 20 January 1768 the House of Representatives agreed on a petition to the King seeking the repeal of the Townshend Acts, and on 11 February, after many of the western conservatives had gone home, the House voted to send a circular letter to all the other colonial assemblies, affirming American rights, denouncing the Townshend Acts and reporting what the Massachusetts assembly had done by way of protest. Then on 1 March the merchants of Boston (that is, everybody who traded directly with England) met in conclave and pledged themselves to refrain for a year from importing anything but a few fishing essentials from Great Britain, provided only that New York and Philadelphian merchants would agree to abstain too.

The merchants’ action was just what John Dickinson had recommended, but the circular letter had the first success. This document was written chiefly by Samuel Adams and is a monument to his literary skill. Unalarmingly polite, moderate and logical in its language, it nevertheless stood rock-firm on the question of taxation:

what a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken from him without his own consent.

Since Americans neither were, nor, in practice, could be, properly represented
in
Parliament, they could not be lawfully taxed
by
Parliament. It was becoming a familiar doctrine, and was welcomed throughout the colonies. The Virginia General Court, for example, sent off a petition to the King, a memorial to the House of Lords and a remonstrance to the Commons. This action (16 April 1768) prompted the acting Governor to prorogue the assembly. This, or an even stronger measure, was just what the British government would have required of him.

For during the previous winter the government had been reconstructed (though Chatham did not resign until October 1768). The supporters of the Duke of Bedford now dominated the Cabinet, and, like the King, indeed even more enthusiastically, believed that a policy of ‘firmness’ was what the situation required. A new post of American Secretary had been created, and its first occupant, Wills Hill, Lord Hillsborough (1718–93), read the circular letter with great rage, though he was not a Bedfordite. Massachusetts, it seemed to him, was attempting to form an ‘unwarrantable combination’ to resist the law and revive the ‘distractions’ of the Stamp Act crisis; so he sent a circular letter of his own to the royal Governors, telling
them to dissolve any assembly that looked like acting favourably on the Massachusetts proposals, which the assembly of that colony must withdraw. All to no avail. As 1768 went on, one assembly after another defied Hills-borough and the Governors and was accordingly dissolved, New Jersey in April being the first, New York in January 1769 being the last. Hillsborough’s letter had done no more than make matters worse: in Pennsylvania it was denounced as ‘the ministerial mandate, by which it seems we must bow our neck to the yoke, without uttering one groan’.

Meanwhile the non-importation movement could not be said to be flourishing: New York had been ready to follow Boston’s lead, as had the minor towns of Massachusetts, but Philadelphia hung back, and without it nothing could be attempted. Fortunately for the cause the British again intervened with ill-advised decisions and (for them) disastrous results.

During the winter of 1767–8, as Massachusetts Bay tried to rally the colonies for common action, Samuel Adams had kept the Boston crowd on a short rein, so that the customs commissioners had been able to work comparatively unmolested, though their life was far from pleasant. A favourite trick of the ‘disorderly boys’ of the city was to lay night-time siege to the commissioners’ houses, with drum-beating, horn-blowing (through conches) and the ‘most hideous howlings as the Indians, when they attack an enemy’. This unnerved the commissioners, and the knowledge that the crowd went no further only because Adams had laid it down that for the time being there were to be ‘
NO MOBS-NO CONFUSIONS-NO TUMULTS
’ was scarcely comforting. Then on 10 June 1768 there was at last a real riot when the customs seized John Hancock’s sloop
Liberty
on the grounds that she was smuggling madeira. The mob stoned the commissioners and broke the windows of their houses, so that they had to flee to the protection of HMS
Romney
, a warship recently stationed in Boston harbour. On 30 September the British government rashly sent two regiments of regular soldiers to Boston, to restore and maintain order.

In part this was possible because Lord Hillsborough had abandoned all attempts to police the West, in view of what he called ‘the enormous and ruinous expense’ involved. Since it had so far proved impossible, on either side of the Atlantic, to raise a revenue for imperial purposes, the authorities had perforce fallen back on a policy of reckless penny-pinching. General Gage had launched economies that were to leave the army in a poor way to fight the War of the American Revolution. Now Hillsborough decided that the regulation of the fur-trade and the prevention of another Indian war were policies that no longer justified their cost, so most of the interior forts were abandoned. It was another British abdication; but this most significant fact was overlooked because it was immediately followed by the military occupation of Boston.

This development had a very bad effect on American opinion. For five years the government had insisted that the standing army was in America only for imperial defence, yet now it was declared to be for the purpose of
enforcing obedience to Parliament, and was to police Boston. How could Crown or Parliament ever be trusted again? Sam Adams, who regarded a standing army in peacetime as a sure sign of impending tyranny, talked of organizing armed resistance, but there were no volunteers. However, he did persuade the House of Representatives to meet (unofficially, since Governor Bernard refused to summon it), calling itself a convention, on the favourite seventeenth-century English model. This convention gathered in the week before the troops landed, and did little, except to scuttle out of town ‘like a herd of scalded hogs’ on the day the troopships appeared off-shore: no one wanted to be the first martyr for liberty. Furthermore, during the convention it became plain for the first time that there was a solid opposition to Bostonian extremism in country Massachusetts, which sufficed for the moment to keep Adams in check. But it was sufficient for the grossly unconstitutional convention to have met: British law was thus again flouted, and in a new way.

It is scarcely surprising that the talk in London, even among the Rocking-ham Whigs, began to be about isolating and punishing Massachusetts, that ‘ringleading province’. However, this was easier to will than to do, and in the upshot this frustrated feeling grew into an obsession that was to prove very harmful. In the winter of 1768–9 it issued in new provocations – or, as American conservatives would have argued, in mere gestures which annoyed without disciplining the patriots. In August 1768 New York joined the non-importation movement, and in March 1769 Pennsylvania at last did likewise, all its attempts to extract concessions or redress from the British government having failed. What came over instead was a report of eight Parliamentary resolutions. Sponsored by Hillsborough, they were all sound and fury, denouncing all the proceedings – riots, circular letter, convention – of Massachusetts and Boston, and asking the King to take what steps he could to prosecute any treason or misprision of treason that had occurred, if necessary by carrying the culprits to England for trial. No more was done or attempted, but the colonies were greatly provoked, and both the Virginia and South Carolina assemblies prepared counter-resolutions stoutly supporting Massachusetts. The plantation colonies (those lying south of Pennsylvania) had not previously been much touched by the agitation of the commercial colonies: Boston was too mobbish for them; but now they took alarm. For instance, George Washington of Mount Vernon, Virginia (1732–99), a prosperous (for a wonder) planter, a retired militia colonel who had seen much service in the Seven Years War, was convinced by the Hillsborough Resolutions that ‘our lordly masters in Great Britain will be content with nothing less than the deprication
[sic]
of American freedom’, and that a resort to arms might prove necessary, if only as a last defence. In the meantime he advocated Virginia’s entry into the non-importation movement, and enough of his countrymen agreed with him for Virginia to do just that, though only after a year of painful negotiation. All the other Southern colonies had done the same by the end
of 1769 (the agreement was but ill-observed in Georgia) and by the spring of 1770, of the leading English provinces, only New Hampshire was holding aloof.

By that time sense was returning to Whitehall. It was, indeed, a perfectly pointless quarrel, and as early as May 1769 the Cabinet decided, in view of American hostility, to repeal the Townshend duties, except for the one on tea. This was to be retained for the principle of the thing, as the Declaratory Act had sweetened the pill of Stamp Act repeal. The about-turn took time to arrange, for the Westminster winter (1769–70) was preoccupied with the retirement of the Duke of Grafton, the notional Prime Minister. He was replaced by Frederick, Lord North (1732–92), the son and heir of the Earl of Guilford, and the sort of chief minister that George III had been looking for since the beginning of his reign. Not for North the abrasive policies of a Grenville, the abrasive personality of a Pitt, the weakness of a Bute, the factiousness of a Rockingham. Like his king, whom he resembled, physically, so closely that the story got around that they had the same father
⁶
– they both looked like bullfrogs, only in North the frog was more apparent than the bull – his strengths and weaknesses were those of the old order at its best. Hence his failure, for, except in matters of public finance, he was incapable of creative innovation, however necessary. He fumbled from expedient to expedient, which has its points in quiet times, but is a quite inadequate response to great emergencies. Yet if the old order could have responded to the challenge, North might well have been the instrument. For one thing he was utterly devoted to it, especially to the rights, powers and prestige of the old, unreformed Parliament, in which he would never find any flaw. He was ‘the complete House of Commons man’,
⁷
bland, humorous and occasionally eloquent in debate, a masterly political tactician, a competent administrator and personally more than acceptable to George III, whom he served loyally. He was steadfast in emergency, and if he was irresolute when great decisions were to be made, the King was always there to stiffen his nerve. He put together a stable ministry and a permanent Parliamentary majority, and was successful for years: only gradually did his weaknesses cripple him. To begin with, all went well. On 5 March 1770, in the first great measure of his administration, he moved the repeal of the Townshend duties, arguing that they were commercially nonsensical. He said nothing about the crucial fact that they had stirred up more trouble than they were worth.

They were still doing so. Across the Atlantic, on the very day of North’s speech, Boston erupted again.

The British had been too ready to mock the city’s peaceful acquiescence in the arrival of the troops. Since that time relations between the townspeople and the soldiers, never good, had got worse and worse. The humaner sort
of Bostonian was horrified at the brutal floggings by which officers tried to maintain discipline; everybody was inconvenienced by the challenging sentinels who were posted on Boston Neck to catch deserters; the presence of the army was widely resented as a check on liberty;
⁸
and the soldiers and officers themselves, while not perhaps exceptionally brutal and licentious, were too much so for the staid manners of Boston.
⁹
Harassment of the troops became a patriotic duty, to be combined if possible with those other duties, evading the trade laws and intimidating the merchants so that they dared not break the non-importation agreement (even Thomas Hutchinson’s sons were forced to comply). Sam Adams kept up a constant storm of inflammatory journalism. And the boys of Boston, reacting as children always do to prolonged periods of unrest, plunged headlong into the good work with all the recklessness of those who are still too young to know the difference between game and grim earnest. They took to rioting every Thursday – market day, when the schools were shut. On Thursday, 22 February 1770, some of them besieged a conservative in his house; he, in terror, fired into the crowd, wounding one boy and killing another, the eleven-year-old Christopher Snider, who was honoured with an enormous public burying. ‘My eyes never beheld such a funeral,’ wrote John Adams in his diary, ‘the procession extended further than can well be imagined.’ This was thrilling enough, but baiting soldiers was even better. There were several ugly incidents, and gangs had come to dominate the streets of Boston, before the assaults of a mob led by Crispus Attucks, a half-Negro working man, forced the guards of the Customs House to fire in self-defence, on 5 March. Five Bostonians were killed, including Attucks. This ‘massacre’ was quickly elevated into legend. It was used as evidence that the British would stick at nothing. It was held to vindicate a hundred times the traditional Whig belief that a standing army was necessarily a threat to civil peace and liberty, which the people should always be on guard against. The dead became martyrs, and, more prosaically, Sam Adams and the other radicals were able to use the incident to force the authorities to withdraw the troops from Boston to Castle William down the harbour. This, indeed, had probably been the purpose of the riot which had touched off the ‘Massacre’, for it was almost certainly instigated by the radical leaders. Next, New Hampshire was shocked into temporary acquiescence in the non-importation movement, and the rest of America resounded to cries of horror, especially after Adams’s grossly untrue accounts of the affair got round.