Penguin History of the United States of America (29 page)

As tempers cooled again, however, it could be seen that the extremists had done themselves more harm than good. It was tolerably plain that they had provoked the ‘Massacre’, and the spectacle of seething Boston had little
appeal to the respectable elsewhere. This was especially true of the richer merchants, who, on learning that the Townshend measures had been repealed, rushed to dissociate themselves from their dangerous allies. New York resumed importation in July, Philadelphia in September, Boston in October. The other ports did likewise, and once more an uneasy peace descended on the thirteen colonies.

Thomas Hutchinson was sworn in as Governor of Massachusetts in March 1771 and was welcomed with great warmth throughout the province. He was, after all, native-born and an ornament to the land he had served long and well. Normality of a different kind manifested itself at the same time in North Carolina, where the feud between the western and eastern areas culminated in the rebellion of the so-called Regulators,
¹⁰
the men of the West, who after overturning the government in the back-countries in late 1770 were met and defeated in battle at the Alamance river by Governor Try on and the tidewater militia on 16 May 1771. It was not a very impressive battle: the Regulators, lacking effective military organization, were easily routed, many having been wounded though only nine were killed; amnesty was granted to the rest, on condition that they took an oath of allegiance to the King. Yet it was the most thrilling event between the collapse of non-importation and the summer of 1772 – a period of nearly two years.

This appearance of restored calm was deeply misleading. The period since the Stamp Act had transformed American attitudes to Great Britain. The slightest action of the mother country was now regarded with automatic suspicion: any major initiative might well re-open the volcano. Nor was that all. In eleven of the thirteen colonies – all, that is, except New Hampshire and Georgia – the Sons of Liberty retained power, and in Massachusetts, under the command of Sam Adams, they were organized to extend and exert it – if necessary by stirring up trouble instead of tamely waiting for it to arise.

There was for a moment a chance of driving Adams from the stage. In Governor Hutchinson he at last had a worthy foe. Hutchinson was in the end to be the one great tragic figure of the Revolution: a moderate, patriotic, able and devoted man, whose virtues as much as his limitations (he had no vices to speak of) would lead him to disaster; but during the first two years of his Governorship he had some appreciable successes. A reaction set in among the country people against the agitations of their long-distrusted capital. Even in Boston itself Sam Adams lost ground: he ran
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for Registrar of Suffolk County (which includes Boston) and lost. His vote at the elections for the House of Representatives sank to a dangerously low level. Hutchinson rejoiced to report to Lord Hillsborough that there was more ‘general appearance of contentment’ in Massachusetts at the beginning of 1772 than at
any time since the Stamp Act. All the same, Adams’s control of the General Court was never seriously threatened, and he kept up his strategy of picking quarrels with authority on every occasion.

Events in Britain also belied the appearance of calm. The great Wilkes affair is too long a subject to be detailed here. Suffice it to say that John Wilkes, prosecuted, banished, imprisoned and expelled from the House of Commons, had become by the late sixties a heroic symbol for all those forces which, in Britain as in America, were struggling, for all manner of reasons, against the ossification of the old order. Potentially Wilkes was for Britain what Patrick Henry and Sam Adams were for America. His weaknesses were twofold: he was a conservative, or at any rate not a revolutionary, at heart (else he could hardly have become Lord Mayor of London); and his personal character, that of a reckless, if attractive, gambler and rake, tended to alienate the Puritan element, then as now an essential part of any British reform movement. Franklin, that incarnation of late Puritanism (even though he was himself something of a rake on the sly), dismissed Wilkes as ‘an outlaw and an exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing’. More perceptive was somebody’s remark that if Wilkes had had the unblemished personal reputation of George III, he could have dethroned the King: it gives an exact idea of his importance.

Americans watched the drama, from their distance, with fascination. It seemed their own battle, as indeed to some extent it was. Wilkes’s fight against general warrants was the same as their fight against writs of assistance. They sympathized instinctively with his stand for freedom of the press, free elections, the rights of man, and some measure of Parliamentary reform (a cause, it is worth noting, that their other great English hero, Lord Chatham, would soon endorse). The Wilkite crowd was’much like the Bostonian one in composition, aims and behaviour: it too was led by sailors and pulled down houses, though it was much more good-humoured. It had the same enemies: the standing army shot down Londoners in the St George’s Fields Massacre as it shot down Bostonians. Accordingly American patriots toasted ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ at many a banquet and subscribed liberally to Wilkite funds. They mourned the hero’s defeats, cheered his victories, read his pamphlets. And thus a new poison entered the American bloodstream.

English radicals strongly sympathized with their American counterparts, and anyway found the American question a useful stick with which to beat the government. But being closer to the scene of action than the colonials, and being even more deeply impregnated with Whiggish notions deriving from the struggle between King and Parliament in the seventeenth century, they were much quicker to blame George III as well as his ministers for the plot against liberty that they detected in every act of the administration. In his great philippic against the King of 19 December 1769, the pamphleteer ‘Junius’ assumed that the colonials had seen the point:

They were ready enough to distinguish between
you
and your ministers. They complained of an act of the legislature, but traced the origin of it no higher than to the servants of the crown: They pleased themselves with the hope that their sovereign, if not favourable to their cause, at least was impartial. The decisive, personal part you took against them, has effectually banished that first distinction from their minds. They consider you as united with your servants against America, and know how to distinguish the sovereign and a venal parliament on one side, from the real sentiments of the English people on the other… They left their native land in search of freedom, and found it in a desert. Divided as they are into a thousand forms of policy and religion, there is one point in which they all agree:– they equally detest the pageantry of a king, and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop. It is not then from the alienated affections of Ireland or America, that you can look for assistance…

This was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Americans read it, and others like it, and began to wonder if it was not true. Were their affections alienated? Was the King their real oppressor? They began to study his behaviour, and soon discovered the obvious, that George, far from being the victim of misleading and oppressive ministers, was their energetic and willing ally. He snubbed Wilkite petitions and led the battle against Wilkes himself. An American merchant in London wrote home that ‘the
Best of Princes
had taken care to offend all his English subjects by a uniform and studied inattention which irritable men like myself construe into more than neglect and downright insult…’. The image, once dear even to John Adams, of a patriot King, the benevolent scion of the House of Brunswick, the guarantor of the Protestant succession, began to crumble, and memories of the legendary Stuart tyrants to revive. One more link with Britain was snapping.

Matters were not helped in the summer of 1772 when the merchants (that is, the smugglers) of Newport, Rhode Island, captured and burned the revenue schooner HMS
Gaspee
, whose commander, it was alleged, had not only pressed men in the colony, but stolen sheep, hogs and poultry, and cut down fruit-trees for firewood. He had also been inconveniently diligent in enforcing the Navigation Acts. This outrage compelled some imperial reaction, since the local officials made not the slightest attempt to bring the criminals to justice. When it came, the reaction was significantly feeble, showing that the British had learned a few lessons. They had learned, for example, to keep out of quarrels between, or within, colonies, and to move cautiously, one might say timidly, when involvement was inescapable. Their response to the
Gaspee
incident was to set up an investigatory commission consisting of the Governor of Rhode Island, the Chief Justices of Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, and the judge of the vice-admiralty court for the New England district. These men were all far too American and far too cautious to take any risks, so the commission was ineffective, as might have been foreseen. All in all, it was a pitiful way of dealing with what was, in one sense, a deadlier challenge than the Boston
Tea Party itself was to be, since it involved the destruction of one of the King’s ships, not just of some private property. Such feebleness was another sign of abdication, even though the commission was too strong for radical stomachs and was treated everywhere by the Sons of Liberty as a tyrannical interference. For among its instructions was the fatal provision that persons arrested as a result of its findings were to be transported to England to stand trial. The alarm occasioned by this ‘court of inquisition, more horrid than that of Spain and Portugal’ (!) led the Virginian House of Burgesses in the spring of 1773 to propose the establishment of a chain of inter-colonial committees of correspondence, for the concerting of common measures against acts of oppression. This proposal was eagerly taken up by the other colonies.

So failed the policy of feebleness. But its alternative, ‘vigour’, failed even worse when it was at length applied to the most mutinous of the colonies, Massachusetts Bay.

There, months before Virginia acted, Sam Adams had recaptured the initiative. Using as his pretext the new policy by which the proceeds of the American customs were used for the salaries of government officials, including judges, he painted a frightful picture of liberty and justice in America being subverted by ‘pensioners, placemen and other jobbers, for an abandon’d and shameless ministry; hirelings, pimps, parasites, panders, prostitutes and whores’ (this use of extravagant sexual abuse was common with Adams and his associates).
¹²
He was able, by much hysteria and not a little trickery, to induce Boston town-meeting to start a chain of committees of correspondence within Massachusetts, each township to have one. These committees were eventually to usurp the government of the province. By 1774,300 towns had been drawn into the network. Each committee reported directly to Boston; and at Boston a connection was established with the committees of the other colonies.

Working for the imperial government was men’s natural desire for a quiet life and a return of prosperity. In Virginia, George Washington, forgetting his talk of armed resistance, was devoting himself entirely to the management of his plantations and the pursuit of rich land-grants in the new country opening up across the Allegheny mountains. There were many like him in every colony. But on the whole conditions for British policy were getting slowly, imperceptibly, but definitely worse.

Lord North did not notice: Parliament did not discuss America for two years. He had other problems on his mind, the foremost being India. Like everything else it was connected with the difficulties of government finance.

The East India Company was another victim of the decaying mercantilist system. Chatham, it will be remembered, had hoped to pay for the Empire not by taxing the West but by squeezing the East: the Company was saddled
with the requirement to pay an annual £400,000 to the government. It was also burdened with rising administrative costs in India, with competition in the tea-trade from English and American smugglers, and with the consequences of a great famine in Bengal. Its purely business affairs were being badly managed, the price of its shares had collapsed, and a financial panic, followed by a twelve-month trade depression, which made the collection of money owed to the Company very difficult, started early in 1772. By September in that year, with debts amounting to more than £1,300,000, it was nearing bankruptcy, and the government had to intervene.

The resulting legislation took the first step on the road that led eventually to supersession of the Company in India by the Crown. North also adopted an ingenious idea, put forward by Company officials, for aiding it commercially. He prepared an Act of Parliament (the so-called Tea Act) by which all mercantilist burdens on the export of the Company’s tea to America were lifted. Company tea would thereby be able to compete effectively with the smuggled sort, which at the time was selling in the colonies at 2s. 7d. per pound. The appearance on the market of fine East Indian teas at 2s. per pound would force the smugglers’ prices down in a rush (though they would still enjoy a 6 per cent profit). Furthermore, under North’s arrangements the Company would be allowed to act as its own retailer, selling direct to the colonial consumer, not, as previously, through middlemen. This was manna to the East Indiamen. They expected to accumulate, in 1773–4, a surplus of thirty-one million pounds of tea, and before the Tea Act (which became law on 10 May 1773) they had not expected to sell more than thirteen million pounds. Now they were free to dump as much as they could on the American market, being required only to keep back ten million pounds in case of some national emergency (a very British piece of foresight). No wonder Lord North spoke of the Act as ‘prodigiously to the advantage of the Company’.

He had not consulted any of the American merchants or colonial agents in London before legislating. To judge by his later statements, he had assumed that the Americans would rush to buy cheap tea and given the matter no further thought. It certainly never occurred to him that the ordinary American tea-drinker would make common cause with the smugglers and legal importers to protest against a measure which substantially lowered the price of the stuff, just because it did not abolish a duty which had been accepted in practice, at any rate in New England, for the previous five years. He took no warning from the fact that the colonies south of Connecticut had never accepted the duty. In 1770 the amount of dutied tea imported to New York was only 147 pounds; Philadelphia took only sixty-five. Both cities drank enormous quantities of contraband tea instead. The plantation colonies showed a similar pattern. The duty was never accepted in principle anywhere, of course: the colonies had continuously petitioned against it. North’s blindness to all this demonstrated, as had Grenville and Townshend, how little fitted British ministers were to govern the Empire. The Tea Act
would, unless nullified or repealed, gravely injure American smugglers, a not inconsiderable force in colonial life, as the
Gaspee
incident had proved; by eliminating the middlemen it would also injure merchants in the legitimate tea-trade; and as the Townshend tea-duty of 3d. a pound was to continue, the revenue of the Crown in America would be greatly enhanced while the great principle of no taxation without representation went by default. North should have known, or should have found out, that the colonials would be most unlikely to accept the Act: to barter the principles of their liberty for cheap tea. He did not, and thereby missed a great opportunity. Benjamin Franklin had suggested, vainly as usual, that merely by repealing the duty North would enable the American market to absorb four million pounds’ worth of the surplus tea in the East India Company’s warehouses. Such a repeal, combined with the Tea Act, would have been a masterstroke of policy. North would have greatly aided the East India Company and removed an American grievance, the latter quite without compulsion or agitation. He might have won the government some much-needed popularity, as well as the political initiative. Such a move would have angered the mercantile but not the consuming interest in the colonies. It would have opened the way to replacing mercantilism by free trade, the most pressing of necessary imperial reforms. But these grand ideas never crossed North’s mind. Muddled and complacent, he rejected the Rockinghamite suggestion that the Townshend duty, not the British duty on exports, should be abolished, for he saw no need to gratify the Americans, whose temper, he said, was ‘little deserving favour from hence’. He refused to listen to William Dowdeswell’s warning, made in the debate on the Tea Act, that ‘if he don’t take off the duty they won’t take the tea’. The East India merchants were equally obtuse and sanguine. In vain John Norton, an American trader in London, warned them ‘not to think of sending their tea till Government took off the duty, as they might be well assured it would not be received on any other terms’. Bright visions of immediately exporting 600,000 lb. of tea to America danced before their eyes. More could follow… they pressed ahead.