5 Colonies Response to Taxation
Americans outside Massachusetts proved so adept in following Boston’s violent example that we may suspect that they did not need it. Needed or not, Boston’s action offered a model that captured attention everywhere in America. Revulsion from the Stamp Act permeated social groups of all sorts and came to focus, almost naturally it seems, on the men chosen to distribute the stamped paper—on the tax collectors and their friends. By the end of October all but two of the stamp distributors had resigned, usually in order to save their lives and property; and of the remaining two, one, William Houston of North Carolina, gave way on November 16, and the other, George Angus, appointed for Georgia, did not arrive in America until January 1766. Once in Georgia, he quickly sensed what might happen to him and promptly took the oath, passed the stamped paper to the Customs collectors, and fled the colony.1
By the time Angus arrived in Georgia, the pattern of coercion and violence was well established. Mobs used whatever force necessary to produce resignations, and simply by threats they prevented the landing or the distribution of the stamped paper. In several cases they scarcely had to flex their muscles to frighten distributors into sending in their resignations. James McIvers of New York, for example, submitted his resignation even before his commission and the stamps arrived. McIvers was a merchant whose business and property were located in New York City. He was no more averse than the next man to collecting the fees of office but did not want to see his house and store of goods, which he estimated to be worth £20,000 sterling, destroyed. McIvers suspected that Oliver’s fate might become his own, and on August 22, a week after the first Boston riot, he resigned. In a letter to the lieutenant governor explaining his decision, McIvers put his reason succinctly: “a storm was riseing, and I should soon feel it.”2
In nearby New Jersey, William Coxe waited a few days longer, until September 3, before the feeling of a rising storm persuaded him to surrender his office. The governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, son of Benjamin, expressed annoyance at Coxe, who, he complained, had cowardly backed out for no reason at all. No one had threatened Coxe, the governor said, nor was Coxe going to be obstructed from carrying out his duties. The governor evidently did not read the newspapers that suggested to Coxe he would be well advised to insure his house.3
The New Hampshire distributor, George Meserve, received less subtle hints and acted even more promptly. In England when Parliament passed the Stamp Act, Meserve got himself appointed before sailing for home. The ship he sailed aboard had not yet anchored when he was made to realize his mistake. First, the pilot who boarded the ship in Boston harbor handed him a letter from several gentlemen of Portsmouth suggesting that for his own safety he should resign before returning to the town. And then a Boston mob, convinced that the ship he was on carried stamps, refused to let anyone come ashore. Meserve stayed aboard until September 10, at which time the mob learned that the ship carried no stamps. He resigned before he touched land and sent the news to the mob, who then greeted him with praise and carried him to the Exchange Tavern for a celebration. Evidently a resignation in Boston was invalid in New Hampshire—at any rate, several days later Meserve was forced to resign publicly in Portsmouth, and in January a third time. In public, Meserve did what was expected; in private he attributed his troubles to the “damned Rebellious Spirit” which filled the crowd.4
That same spirit assumed more violent shapes elsewhere. As in Massachusetts, mobbing and rioting occurred in most extreme forms in colonies where political divisions already existed and where one side became identified with the Stamp Act. In several cases, indeed, one faction successfully tagged another with the responsibility for the Stamp Act, accusing its political enemies of plotting with the ministry the destruction of American liberty. Thomas Hutchinson experienced the effects of this tactic and ruefully complained of its unfairness. Hutchinson, an exponent of parliamentary government, discovered that his enemies would seize his defense of the principle of parliamentary authority as evidence of his approval of all of Parliament’s work. Hutchinson was a man who appreciated the fine points of court arguments; he knew it was possible to uphold parliamentary government and simultaneously condemn the Stamp Act—on grounds of expediency. The mob that gutted his house was a rather blunt instrument: it or its leaders had old scores to settle, and in any case it believed that Thomas Hutchinson had instigated the Act.
In Rhode Island there was no one quite like Thomas Hutchinson, but there were important political divisions which affected the response to the Stamp Act. Rhode Island, a colony founded in dissidence, had always harbored the strange and offbeat—some said fanatics and lunatics—but by the eve of the Revolution its politicians resembled those elsewhere in America. They operated, however, under conditions which might have aroused envy or disgust everywhere else—a seventeenth-century charter which created a virtually independent government. Almost all offices were elective, including the governor’s, and to vote a man had only to own land worth £400 in currency. It has been estimated that three-fourths of all adult males could vote if they wanted to.5
Power in the government resided in the General Assembly, a two-house legislature that usually dominated the governor and the courts. Naturally enough, control of the General Assembly was much sought after. By the 1750s two factions had made their appearance in Rhode Island and competed for political power. Providence served as the headquarters of the Hopkins faction, so named because led by Stephen Hopkins, probably the ablest politician in the colony. Newport provided the center of the other, the Ward faction, the name derived from its leader, Samuel Ward. The two cities themselves engaged in competition for business and profit. Providence had entered a period of growth about thirty years before and by the 1750s had begun to challenge the economic supremacy of Newport, its neighbor to the south. In several respects Providence had a better location than Newport. It commanded a larger surrounding area, which produced foodstuffs and raw materials for export. Since the market for such commodities was increasing, the port that could supply them would grow. Newport had only the Narragansett country across the Bay. Providence could tap southern Massachusetts and Connecticut, as well as much of Rhode Island. Providence merchants in fact had begun to supply candles, rum, barrels, and rope to Newport.
Both factions called upon the same sorts of economic groups—merchants, tradesmen, professionals, and the small farmers in the towns and countryside tied to each. Thus the Ward-Hopkins struggle was in part a contest for economic power between Providence and Newport, each with satellites, struggling to control a government which could confer extensive economic advantages. For the General Assembly possessed the power to grant monopolies to manufacturers; it had public resources to spend on roads, buildings, bridges, and lighthouses, among other things; it apportioned taxes among the towns, and not surprisingly when Providence and the northern towns ran things, the tax bills in Newport and to the south had a way of going up, and when Newport and the southern towns won the legislature, Providence and to the north felt the bite. Control of the General Assembly also entailed control of political spoils. At the middle of the eighteenth century there were more than 150 justices of the peace to be appointed by the Assembly, and there were sheriffs, clerks, some militia officers, and others also in the gift of the Assembly.
These opportunities for economic and political advantage and one of the most democratic constitutions of the century gave rise to a raucous and exuberant factionalism. Elections were bitterly fought, and fraud—stuffing the ballot box, for example—was not uncommon. At times voters were bought to vote the right way and some were bribed not to vote at all. In 1758, for example, only 400 out of 600 freemen in Newport voted; “one third lie still,” Ezra Stiles noted, “silenced by Connexions.”6 The Assembly itself was frequently the scene of disorder: shrill charges, deals, and undignified squabbles.
Most Rhode Islanders apparently enjoyed and valued all this political smoke, and the politicians played their parts with enthusiasm if not with aplomb. But not everyone found the spectacle of brawling politicians and a large and apparently unstable electorate to his liking. In Newport a small group, probably no larger than fifteen, despised the course of government and politics in Rhode Island. The two most important members were Martin Howard, Jr., of a well-established family, a leading lawyer, an Anglican, a man of supercilious bearing and possessing an aristocratic temperament found only in provincials, and Dr. Thomas Moffat, a physician who had lived in Newport since sometime in the 1730s when he arrived to be near Bishop Berkeley. Among the others were George Rome, an agent of an English commercial house; Augustus Johnston, the attorney general; and Peter Harrison, the architect who designed the Redwood Library and the Touro Synagogue. Most of these men and their followers were Anglicans, most felt some special affinity to England, and several seemed to yearn for place and influence.7
This Tory Junto, as these men have been called, also shared a common revulsion from Rhode Island’s coarse factionalism and from the accommodation in the political system of the “Herd,” as Thomas Moffat designated the people. They proposed to change this system by securing the repeal of the charter of 1663 and by persuading Parliament to impose royal government on the colony. The contempt they felt for the charter government is manifest in Martin Howard’s characterization of it as “Nothing but a Burlesque upon Order and Government.”8
The open pursuit of royal government by the Tory Junto was signaled by a letter to the Newport Mercury published on April 23, 1764, and signed Z.Y. The letter attacked popular government in Rhode Island and insisted that only Parliament could end the disgraceful disorders of party and factional strife. Six weeks later, the newspaper reprinted, at the request of its readers it said, the commission Charles I issued to Archbishop Laud in the seventeenth century giving him power to revoke colonial charters. The point was obvious: the power to revoke colonial charters had a long history.9
In August, “O.Z.” made his appearance in the Mercury. (Why Howard and Moffat discarded Z.Y. for this designation is not known.) The letters by O.Z. appeared off and on until March 1765. O.Z. professed to offer advice on the production of sheep, hemp, and flax in the colony, a much healthier activity, he implied, than protesting against the Sugar Act and challenging generally the sovereignty of Parliament. Hemp appeared especially attractive to O.Z., for it received a bounty from the English government far greater than any taxes imposed on trade.10
These engaging themes probably deceived no one in Rhode Island as to O.Z.’s real purpose—to attack the charter government. In any case O.Z. soon let his mask slip and in a discourse on politics and government recommended the example of Pennsylvania, where the legislature had recently sought to replace proprietary with royal government. O.Z. did not publish the fact, but the Tory Junto, emboldened by Pennsylvania’s action, in October sent Joseph Harrison with a private petition for an end to the charter. And Martin Howard attempted in November to persuade Benjamin Franklin, to whom he attributed “Intimacy with the Great” in the English government, to represent this royalist interest.11
Newport was much too small to keep secret an attempt to get the charter revoked. And the Tory Junto had let the cat out of the bag by their public praise of Pennsylvania’s pursuit of royal government. What they were about was soon widely known and brought them unwanted attention: in September they were stained with the charge that they constituted a “club” of conspirators “against the Liberties of the Colony.”12 This charge soon grew more specific and seemed more portentous as anonymous writers in the newspapers indicted the Junto as part of the forces behind the Stamp Act. On November 4, 1764, Governor Hopkins sent a message to the Assembly which reported that a petition against the charter had been sent. The governor followed up his address with a full-scale attack a few weeks later in his Rights of the Colonies Examined. Martin Howard’s answer, A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, met the governor head-on with sneers and barbs, but also offered a version of the constitution in which colonial rights were severely cut back. From this point on, the printing presses were well oiled, as pamphlets and essays poured out. Hopkins hit the Halifax Letter through the columns of the Providence Gazette, and he received support from James Otis, who had relatives in Newport, in A Vindication of the British Colonies against the Aspersions of the Halifax Gentleman in his Letter to a Rhode Island Friend. Neither man subdued Howard, who issued A Defense of the Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, but Otis’s Brief Remarks on the Defense of the Halifax Libel managed to reduce the constitutional issues to simple abuse of the Tory Junto as a “little, dirty, drinking, drabbing, contaminated knot of thieves, beggars and transports, or the worthy descendents of such, collected from the four winds of the earth, and made up of Turks, Jews and other Infidels, with a few renegade Christians and Catholics, and altogether formed into a club of a scarce a dozen at N-p-t. From hence proceed Halifax-letters, petitions to alter the colony forms of government, libels upon all good colonists and subjects, and every evil work that can enter into the heart of man.”13
By spring 1765 the anger at Howard, Moffat, and their friends was clear, and the identification of their cause, the replacement of the charter by royal government, with English encroachments upon colonial liberties, had been made. The crude suggestions that these Newport gentlemen were somehow behind both the Sugar Act and the tighter enforcement of trade regulations had convinced many. To attribute plotting for the Stamp Act to them did not seem farfetched.
Still, when news of the Act arrived, no violence occurred even though Newport’s libertarian sensitivities were quivering. They were soon to explode, not over the Stamp Act, but over the Royal Navy. Earlier in the year the navy had contributed its bit to the alienation of Newporters by conducting a brutal program of impressment. The navy needed sailors and it was not overly scrupulous in getting them. In May, after a series of raids which had caused trade to stagnate because ships had begun to avoid Newport where their crews might be impressed, the HMS Maidstone foolishly sent her boat to the dock. A mob numbering around five hundred seized and burned it.14
Late in June the Newport Mercury reprinted the Virginia Resolves, including the two most sensational ones which had not passed. On August 14, of course, Boston provided the edifying example of how a stamp distributor might be persuaded to resign. It was an important lesson, and it was studied closely in Newport.
Although rioting had a long and apparently honorable history in Newport, there was no mob-in-being such as the North and South Enders of Boston. The opposition to the Stamp Act in Newport was organized by Samuel Vernon and William Ellery, both merchants, who proved inventive and unafraid to begin action themselves. They first planned to hang effigies of Stamp Distributor Augustus Johnston, and of Thomas Moffat and Martin Howard, presumably expecting that Johnston’s resignation would soon follow. Their plans leaked out, and Howard and Moffat, who learned on August 20 that their effigies would be hung on August 27, appealed to Governor Ward to stop the demonstration. Ward professed to believe that the whole business had been exaggerated, but he apparently cautioned Vernon and Ellery against going ahead. These two were not easily deterred and may have already begun a campaign they could not stop. A special issue of the Providence Gazette appeared four days later, relaying the Providence town meeting’s condemnation of the Stamp Act and also reporting that Augustus Johnston had promised not to execute his office against the will of the people. Johnston had made no such statement, but denying it would leave him looking like an enemy of the people. For the next few days Johnston held his tongue.15
The day before the scheduled effigy hanging, August 26, the Mercury carried full accounts of the riot against Andrew Oliver of Boston; the same issue contained a plea by Martin Howard for liberty of opinion, an argument calculated to head off the activities of the next day. The argument failed, and the next morning saw the opening of four days of upheaval in Newport.
Early on Tuesday, August 27, the demonstrations began with the effigies hung on gallows hastily erected on Queen Street near the Town House, where the freeholders were to meet later in the day. Adorning the effigies were placards inscribed with language that left no one in doubt as to the meaning of this spectacle. The inscription on Johnston’s simply identified him as “THE STAMP MAN.” Doctor Moffat did not escape so easily, for a paper pinned to his breast described him as “THAT INFAMOUS, MISCREATED, LEERING JACOBITE DOCTOR MURFY”16 James Otis had tagged Moffat with this name in one of his abusive pamphlets and apparently it had stuck. There was more written across Moffat’s figure, but perhaps the most effective touch of all came with the boot hanging over his shoulder with the devil peeping out, an obvious imitation of Boston. Howard’s effigy also bore inscriptions, including another inspired by Otis, “THAT FAWNING, INSIDIOUS, INFAMOUS MISCREANT AND PARACIDE MARTINUS SCRIBLERIUS.”17 But the most devastating touch was locally spawned: a rope tied Howard’s neck to Moffat’s, and a placard had them saying “We have an Hereditary Indefeasible Right to a Halter, Besides we encourag’d the Growth of Hemp you know.”18 Vernon, Ellery, and Robert Crook, another merchant, all muffled in big coats and hats and carrying bludgeons, guarded these images until late afternoon when a crowd fortified by “strong Drink in plenty with Cheshire cheese,” sent by the merchants, gathered and burned the effigies after sunset.19 The honorees—Johnston, Howard, Moffat—had long since fled the town after receiving warnings that they might be murdered.
The next three days provided evidence that the threats had substance. On Wednesday, the day following the effigy burning, Howard, Moffat, and Johnston made their way back into town, but so did the news of the great riot in Boston against Thomas Hutchinson. That night in Newport, the mob struck Howard’s house three times (at eight, eleven, and two o’clock in the morning) and Moffat’s twice. The two houses went the way of Hutchinson’s and when the mob finished its work they were little more than shells. Johnston’s escaped—he still commanded some popularity in Newport, and his friends interceded with the mob by promising that Johnston would resign the next day.
The next morning, Thursday, August 29, Johnston returned and resigned in public, but the mob had not yet exhausted itself. Indeed, one of its working leaders, an English sailor named John Webber, boasted in the streets of his leadership and in a thinly veiled attempt at extortion insulted his merchant-patrons. These merchants set the sheriff on Webber; in custody, Webber was delivered to HMS Cygnet for safekeeping. Webber’s followers thereupon threatened to tear the town apart, especially the houses and warehouses of the merchants, and the merchants sent an abject sheriff to fetch Webber from the Cygnet. Back on the streets of Newport, Webber proved unsubdued, threatening once more to pull down houses. The merchants in something of a panic bribed him to quiet down; and the sheriff, now thoroughly humiliated, offered to lie down while Webber trod on his neck. The day ended with all parties retiring uneasily to their beds.
Webber arose with the sun and once more promised to destroy his onetime sponsors. By this time, Augustus Johnston, now a former stamp distributor but still the attorney general, was back in town. Johnston was a brave man and doubtless more than a little angry. Running into the swaggering Webber on the streets and hearing his renewed threats, Augustus Johnston solved Newport’s problem by clapping him into jail.20
In Connecticut, as in Rhode Island, political factions seized upon the Stamp Act as an opportunity to wound hated rivals. But whereas in Rhode Island the Ward-Hopkins groups joined in battering the Tory Junto, which they perceived as a threat to the charter government, in Connecticut the two factions sought to use the crisis over the Act to destroy one another. The two factions are sometimes referred to as the New Lights and the Old Lights; the New were the supporters of the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the Old the opponents. Religion had given these two factional groups their beginnings, but originally the New and Old Lights had no political cast at all. They gradually acquired one in the fifteen years following the climax of the revival in 1741–42, thanks to attempts to cool its enthusiasm and to several issues having nothing to do with it.21
The Awakening had naturally frightened some solid citizens, just as it had inspired others. It was a frightening, even shattering event, with thousands of men, women, and children convinced that the spirit possessed them, with revivalists denouncing the established ministry as unconverted, with churches splitting, and with excess in personal behavior everywhere in evidence. The solid citizens who controlled the legislature—indeed, most reputable institutions—tried to deflate what they considered to be a spirit of madness. In the legislature in 1742, they pushed through statutes prohibiting itinerants from preaching and barring the unordained from pulpits. The next year they repealed a longstanding statute providing religious toleration.22
Such action gave the New Lights pause and virtually forced them to begin to think politically. A major dispute at Yale College in the next decade, pitting the New Light rector against the First Church of New Haven, encouraged this disposition to think about politics and kept Old Light rage smoldering. The issue at Yale revolved around the plan of Thomas Clap, the rector or head of Yale, to appoint a professor of divinity who would then preach the true faith to faculty and students. Yale College would in this way become a church, a most desirable circumstance in Clap’s view, because the Reverend Joseph Noyes of the First Congregational church in New Haven preached in such a cold and insipid style. Yale College was an important institution, and the struggle, which continued until 1756 when Clap got his way, further divided the colony.23
Money and land also contributed to division. The Connecticut charter which was issued in 1662 provided that the colony’s western boundary should be the Pacific Ocean. To insist in the 1750s on the validity of this limit, in part the result of seventeenth-century ignorance of American geography, was not altogether reasonable, as some in Connecticut recognized. Nevertheless, in 1754, the Susquehannah Company, an organization of land speculators with expansionist visions, was formed and immediately began planning the settlement of the upper Wyoming Valley. One of the company’s problems was that the Wyoming Valley lay within Pennsylvania. Another was that the legislature took a dim view of the company and its claims.24
In the 1750s the legislature and the governor were Old Light. There were Old Lights in every part of the colony, but most were in the western half and concentrated especially heavily in Fairfield County. The New Lights had also spread themselves, but they too were concentrated, mostly in two eastern counties, Windham and New London. Most of the stockholders in the Susquehannah Company also lived in these eastern counties and most were New Light.25
Jared Ingersoll, the stamp distributor for Connecticut, was an Old Light, a graduate of Yale College, a lawyer, a onetime king’s attorney for New Haven County, a man well acquainted with England and fond of it. He had opposed Thomas Clap’s scheme to turn Yale College into a New Light church, and he had opposed the Susquehannah Company’s claims to the Wyoming Valley and its attempt to get itself incorporated by the Crown. Not surprisingly, Jared Ingersoll enjoyed a certain reputation in the colony; indeed, the New Lights detested him.26
The Stamp Act was one more thing Ingersoll had opposed, but though he had predicted heavy weather for the tax in America, he accepted appointment as distributor while still in England. He may have found reassurance in the first reactions from America to his appointment, which became public knowledge late in May 1765. For the postal service soon groaned under the weight of letters to Ingersoll from office-seekers who wrote from towns all over Connecticut asking for appointments as his local representatives. Some of these letters have an obsequious flavor common to such communications: “I should esteem myself honoured to be thought Worthy your Service; and would Receive the Favour with Gratitude . . . and I hope I shall be able to Convince you—as much as the Difference of station will admit—how much I am your sincere Friend and Obedient Servent.”27
Ingersoll discovered shortly after his return from England on July 28 that these sincere friends had rather brittle desires to assist him. Local animosities to the new tax were just beginning to be revealed publicly, inspired at least in part by the Virginia Resolves. There were other reasons of course—no one relished the obligation to pay taxes, and the people of Connecticut, already overburdened and in default many thousands of pounds, shrank before still another demand. Hence the attacks on the Act and its local representative, Ingersoll, who became an object of vituperation.
Old enemies took advantage of Ingersoll’s precarious situation to settle old feuds. Naphtali Daggett, professor of divinity at Yale and a New Light, struck him hard in the pages of the Connecticut Gazette. Daggett doubtless hated the Stamp Act as an encroachment upon American rights, but Ingersoll was also a welcome target because of his part in the fight in the 1750s over the professorship of divinity. Daggett described Ingersoll as a man of guile who in justifying his acceptance of the stamp distributorship asked, “But had you not rather these duties should be collected by your brethren than by foreigners?” Daggett marked Jared Ingersoll as a betrayer, and when another attacker pointed out that his initials, J.I., were also those of Judas Iscariot, his “treachery” was made to seem even more reprehensible.28
Ingersoll and a few hardy friends answered as best they could, but they were up against a growing passion. The first violence seems not to have been used on Ingersoll but on one of his assistants, the venerable Nathaniel Wales of Windham. Sometime after August 15, a crowd surrounded Wales’s house and warned him not to travel to New Haven to receive his commission from Ingersoll. Wales broke immediately and wrote to Ingersoll that he had decided not to take the post after all. Other representatives of the stamp distributor did not escape so easily, especially, if they proved stubborn about resigning. In New Providence a crowd threatened to bury the distributor alive when he insisted on remaining in office. The crowd put this stout-hearted soul inside a coffin, nailed the lid shut, and lowered him into a grave. They then began shoveling dirt on the coffin. The official listened to the awful sound of dirt striking wood and called for release and thereupon submitted his resignation.29
The chief object of crowd action, led by men calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, was of course the chief villain in Connecticut, Jared Ingersoll. On August 21 the Sons hanged his effigy in Norwich and the next day in New London. Windham and Lebanon followed suit on August 26, Lyme on August 29, and West Haven burned “a horrible Monster, or Male Giant, twelve Feet High, whose terrible Head was internally illuminated.”30 New Haven, where Ingersoll lived, burned no effigies, but on a September evening a crowd surrounded Ingersoll’s house threatening to pull it down should he not resign. Ingersoll appeared before this crowd and explained that he could not resign until the government of Connecticut took a stand; in the meantime, he would not execute his office and would even allow the people to destroy any stamps sent to him.
Following, evidently, the example of Boston’s treatment of Andrew Oliver, the crowd usually tied Ingersoll’s effigy in some fashion to the devil’s, or the connection of the two was described by a speaker at a large meeting. The Earl of Bute also figured prominently in these pageants, usually as a prime instigator of the Stamp Act—in New London, for example, where an orator referred to Pitt as Moses and Stamp Distributor Ingersoll as “the Beast that Lord Bute set up in this Colony to be worshipped”—a confused but effective evocation of the fear of the Antichrist.31 The Boston Sons had set this pattern; now the Connecticut wing added its own innovations. The Sons of Liberty of several towns held mock trials with elaborate proceedings, forceful prosecutions, and farcical defenses. In Lyme, for example, the Sons charged J——d Stampman with conspiracy “to kill and destroy his own mother, Americana”; the murder weapon was to be a “Stamp, which came from an ancient and lately Bute-fied Seat in Europe.”32 The defense was that as his mother’s fate was “absolutely determined, and could not possibly be avoided, he had good right himself to be the Executioner, since he should by that means save 8 per cent out of her Estate, to himself (which probably would be a living worth 5 or 600 per ann.) which might as well be put into his Pocket as another’s.” With such a defense, guilt was a foregone conclusion. The sentence prescribed that the prisoner should be tied “to the tail of a Cart, and drawn through all the principal streets in Town, and at every corner and before every House should be publicly whipped; and should be then drawn to a Gallows erected at least 50 feet high, and be there hanged till he should be dead.”
Ingersoll was tried in absentia in Lebanon. The trial contained the only subtle touch in all these affairs, an argument by the prosecution that the trial in absentia was legal because Ingersoll was “virtually represented” and thus was denied none of the sacred rights of Englishmen.33
II
While resistance gathered in America, sentiment for both enforcing and repealing the Act built in England. Had the Grenville ministry succeeded in remaining in office, an attempt would have been made to collect the stamp tax everywhere in the colonies, but George Grenville had been dismissed from office on July 10, three and a half months before the Act was to take effect. Grenville had been forced out for several reasons. He had become personally unacceptable to the king for his part in the attempt in Parliament to exclude the king’s mother from the regency council. This council was set up to govern in event of the king’s illness and was to exercise the monarch’s power until he recovered or, in case of his death, until his heir reached maturity. George III had fallen sick in early 1765—he was not insane as later rumored—and the bill establishing the council was proposed because his death was feared for a time. Members of the ministry persuaded him that the House of Commons would not agree to his mother’s membership in the council. When the bill reached Commons, it was amended to include his mother’s name and then approved. The king was embarrassed and annoyed and blamed his chief minister, George Grenville, who in fact had declined to make any recommendations about appointments to the regency council. This affair plus a series of unhappy experiences with Grenville set the king’s mind, and when the opportunity presented itself he got rid of the ministry.34
The new ministry stood on wobbly legs. Lord Rockingham, heading it as first lord of the Treasury, possessed a following—the so-called “Rockingham Whigs”—but it was neither very stable nor strong. Rockingham himself lacked experience, and he was virtually incapable of making himself understood in Parliamentary debate. Although his ministry was not to be one of great principles or policies, he did have some idea about what should be done in colonial affairs. Moreover, he could call on Edmund
Burke, member from Bristol and his private secretary, for advice. Yet this source of strength could do little to keep the government in office or Rockingham at its head, which posed a problem, for two of Rockingham’s new colleagues, Secretaries of State Conway and Grafton, wanted Pitt to replace him. And two other ministers, the Lord Chancellor, Northington, and the Secretary at War, Barrington, were King’s Friends and carry-overs from the previous ministry. Altogether, it would be hard to imagine a more unpromising beginning.35
The problem of America fell on the Rockingham Whigs even as they took office. Trade had been depressed for months as the Americans cut back on the consumption of British goods in an attempt to get the Sugar Act repealed. And British merchants discovered just how difficult it is to collect debts in a period of economic depression. These merchants soon announced these facts to the country in a series of complaints about trade and public policy.
Parliament in adjournment was enjoying the summer silence while the merchants wept bitter tears, but in October even Parliament had to listen as alarming stories of mob violence in America arrived. As the extent of this violence became known and its effects on the stamp distributors became evident, outrage grew. Even before the Parliament resumed, the words “treason,” “anarchy,” and “rebellion” were spoken in describing American behavior. And when the session began in December, many members had set themselves against repeal of the Stamp Act, evidently convinced that repeal would establish a precedent so dangerous as to affect the power to govern.36
The king shared many of their fears, although he seems not to have felt the anger at Americans that was common in Parliament. Rather, the accounts of mobbing and rioting saddened him and filled him with gloomy forebodings. As he wrote Secretary of State Conway. “I am more and more grieved at the accounts in America. Where this spirit will end is not to be said.”37
George’s address on December 17, 1765, to the reconvened Parliament betrayed little of this anxiety. The king did not write the speech of course; the Cabinet council took care of that delicate chore, and in the process took care that the king did not say too much, in particular that he did not reveal the extent of the defiance in America. Hence his address offered a general description of the American situation, stopping well short of concrete examples with a vague reference to “Matters of Importance.” The House in its reply matched this vagueness, but only after it put down an amendment by George Grenville, still a member of Parliament, calling upon it to express resentment and indignation at the riots. The House might suppress its own anger, but not Grenville’s, and he spoke with bitterness in these December meetings. Edmund Burke, who in private correspondence sardonically referred to Grenville as the “Grand Financier,” reported a few days afterward that Grenville had addressed the House every day “taking care to call whore first.” The House listened, voted against Grenville’s amendment, and on December 20 adjourned in order that special elections might be held to fill vacancies.38
The ministry in these December days did much more than put vague words in the king’s mouth and rebuff George Grenville. Because the ministry was so weak in Parliament and because its continuation in office depended upon meeting the crisis over the Stamp Act successfully, it turned to out-of-doors support—namely, the merchants and manufacturers in cities all over England who were enduring the depression in business. These merchants themselves proved responsive to Rockingham and had met in London early in December to plan a national campaign for repeal. With the assistance of Rockingham and Burke, the London merchants formed a committee and began writing to friends, associates, and soon to similar committees in England and Scotland. Barlow Trecothick, a rich merchant who had been reared in New England, headed the London group and provided first-rate leadership. By the end of January 1766 many individual merchants had written their representatives, and several dozen memorials and petitions from large groups had been received by Parliament.39
These appeals for relief were couched in terms calculated not to raise the constitutional scruples of Parliament. The colonists with all their talk about representation had already trampled on these scruples; the merchants, if not wiser at least more prudent, framed their petitions in terms of the health of the economy. The present situation, they forecast, could only worsen should action not be taken; indeed, according to the London committee, it threatened to “annihilate” the trade to North America. Everyone knew something of the commercial depression in progress; the merchants also reported bankruptcies caused by the Sugar Act and Stamp Act and on the difficulty of collecting debts in America. No exact estimate of defaults could be given, but more than one group predicted that losses might reach several million pounds sterling.40
Even with this powerful support from out-of-doors, Rockingham had his work cut out and he knew it. When Parliament reconvened on January 14 of the New Year, he and the ministry had resolved to attempt to get the Stamp Act repealed. Earlier in the winter they had played with the idea of amendments—for example, of allowing each colony to pay the tax in its own currency rather than sterling. Events disabused the ministry that anything short of repeal would end the upheavals in America.
Facing a Parliament angry over the riots and the challenge to its sovereignty, Rockingham decided to tap the discontent of English merchants and manufacturers. If he could demonstrate that the consequence of a failure to repeal would be economic disaster, he had a good chance of ridding the statute books of the Act. His problem was how to deal with the embarrassing defiance of Parliament’s authority. The colonies had denied that authority: Parliament had no right to tax Americans, they said, because Americans were unrepresented in Parliament. To be sure, Parliament was the sovereign body in the empire and it might pass statutes affecting the colonies. Legislation was one of its rights as the center of sovereignty, but legislation did not include the right to tax, which belonged to representative bodies. Whatever the distinctions that the colonies made between legislation and taxation, the fact remained that they had challenged a right Parliament had long cherished. How to blunt that challenge, or better yet how to bury it?
How indeed when—doubtless to Rockingham’s despair—these issues were raised by William Pitt, upon whom the Rockingham Whigs counted to help solve problems, not create them. Pitt entered the debate soon after it began on January 14—” entered” does not begin to describe the sensation his speech produced. He began in a voice so low as to be inaudible, and then, explaining that he had not heard the address from the Crown, asked that it be read again. As in the speech of December, the ministry had given the king only vagueness to espouse, a fact he almost immediately used to announce to the House and to George Grenville, who sat one place away from him, that “every capital measure” taken by the late ministry “has been entirely wrong!”41 Having disposed of the Grenville ministry, Pitt defended the constitutional case made in America. “It is my opinion,” he said, “that this Kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same time, I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies, to be sovereign and supreme, in every circumstance of government and legislation whatsoever.” For in Pitt’s view the Americans shared all the rights of Englishmen, were bound by England’s laws, and were subject to all the protections of its constitution. And the crucial one in this case was the right to be taxed by one’s representatives. Taxes after all were “no part of the governing or legislative power.” Rather, “taxes are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. In legislation the three estates of the realm are alike concerned, but the concurrence of the peers and the crown to a tax, is only necessary to close with the form of a law. The gift and grant is of the Commons alone.”
Pitt then asked what happened when Commons levied a tax. The answer seemed obvious to him—” we give and grant what is our own.” But in taxing America what did the Commons do? “We your Majesty’s Commons of Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty, what? Our own Property? No. We give and grant to your Majesty, the property of your Majesty’s commons of America. It is an absurdity in terms.”
Pitt knew that several Englishmen, among them perhaps George Grenville, had anticipated the objection to taxation without representation by insisting that the Americans were “virtually represented” in Parliament. Pitt dismissed this notion in half a dozen sentences. Who in England represented the Americans, he sneered—the knights of the shire, the representative of a borough, “a borough, which perhaps, its own representative never saw.” Here was another absurdity, “the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of man.”
The Parliamentary History, wherein this speech was printed, reports that a “considerable pause” ensued after Pitt’s speech—members understandably disliked following Pitt—but Secretary Conway gathered his courage and said that he agreed with Pitt, though in fact he disagreed on several points unrelated to the constitutional argument.42 The House did not want to hear Conway, and no doubt he knew it. Everyone waited for Grenville, who now rose to answer Pitt.
Grenville’s answer was brilliant rhetorically, capturing much of the doubt and resentment of the House. He began by censuring the ministry for delay in reporting the rebellion in America and predicted that should Pitt’s “doctrine” be upheld the rebellion would become a revolution. And he declared that he could not “understand the difference between external and internal taxes.”43 Nor could he understand the difference between legislation and taxation. Taxation, he insisted, was both part of the sovereign power and “one branch of the legislation.” Moreover, taxation had long been exercised over many who were unrepresented—the great manufacturing towns, for example. As for America, no member had objected to Parliament’s right to tax the colonies when the Stamp Act was introduced.
Up to this point, Grenville had kept his anger in check; now it broke through in a powerful denunciation of the Americans’ lack of gratitude for the military protection and economic advantage afforded them by the empire.
Protection and obedience are reciprocal. Great Britain protects America; America is bound to yield obedience. If not, tell me when the Americans were emancipated? When they want the protection of this kingdom, they are always ready to ask for it. That protection has always been afforded them in the most full and ample manner. The nation has run itself into an immense debt to give them their protection; and now they are called upon to contribute a small share towards the public expence, and expence arising from themselves, they renounce your authority, insult your officers, and break out, I might almost say, into open rebellion.44
Grenville said more, but these few words aroused Pitt, who got to his feet at the completion of the speech. Pitt now spoke with extraordinary eloquence and probably carried many members with him—at least temporarily. In several respects, however, he made the task of the ministry all the more difficult. For Pitt praised American resistance: “I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.” He also reasserted that Parliament possessed full authority to legislate for the colonies. England and her colonies were connected and “the one must necessarily govern; the greater must rule the less; but so rule it, as not to contradict the fundamental principles that are common to both.”45
Grenville had given him an opportunity to explain what ruling entailed by asking the question “when were the colonies emancipated?” Pitt’s brief reply—” I desire to know when they were made slaves?”—struck through all the rhetoric to the central issue of liberty within constitutional order. Of course the Americans could be crushed by armed force, Pitt noted, but the dangers of crushing them would be great. For “America, if she fell, would fall like a strong man. She would embrace the pillars of the state, and pull down the constitution along with her.”46
Pitt’s eloquence so thoroughly dazzled several of his listeners that they failed to understand what he was saying. One member wrote in a letter after hearing Pitt:
It seems we have all been in a mistake in regard to the Constitution, for Mr. Pitt asserts that the legislature of this country has no right whatever to lay internal taxes upon the colonys; that they are neither actually nor virtually represented, and therefore not subject to our jurisdiction in that particular; but still as the Mother Country we may tax and regulate their Commerce, prohibit or restrain their manufactures, and do everything but what we have done by the Stamp Act; that in our representative capacity we raise taxes internally and in our legislative capacity we do all the other acts of power. If you understand the difference between representative and legislative capacity it is more than I do, but I assure you it was very fine when I heard it.47
If Pitt created confusion, he also gave offense to many members by his statement approving of colonial resistance. Rockingham did nothing to remove the confusion, but he acted soon to shift the House’s attention from the treacherous sand of constitutional theory to the firm ground of economics. Between January 17 and 27 the petitions from merchants from all over the realm were presented and read. These petitions argued against the Stamp Act on economic grounds: they described the decay of trade, the inability of merchants to collect American debts, the hardships resulting to all classes in Britain, and several hinted that the merchants might remove themselves from the islands if repeal were not achieved.48
From this point on, the ministry asserted greater control in the House. First of all, on January 28, it persuaded the House to resolve itself into a committee of the whole and then to consider motions embodying a program of action in response to the crisis. This program made no concessions to Pitt’s argument that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies. That right had to be stated at the outset if the ministry was to obtain repeal. Therefore, on February 3, 1766, Conway moved a resolution declaring that Parliament possessed the power to make laws binding the colonies “in all Cases whatsoever.”49 In introducing this resolution—which was the basis of the Declaratory Act—Conway explained that while the right to tax was clear, the expediency of it was not. Whether this resolution had any meaning given the ministry’s intention to propose repeal of the stamp tax was immediately questioned by Hans Stanley, a highly respected member. Others clearly shared Stanley’s doubt—the declaration did not seem to comport well with repeal. Attorney General Yorke answered as well as he could for the ministry that the resolution did have meaning, and the resolution passed overwhelmingly on the next day with only Pitt, who had displayed unwonted indecisiveness in this debate, and three or four others voting against it. Over the next two days resolutions passed declaring that the riots in America violated the law, that the legislative assemblies in America had countenanced them, that those persons who suffered injury or damage on account of their desires to comply with the laws should be compensated by their colonies, that such persons who had desired to comply with the laws or assisted in their enforcement would have the protection of the House of Commons, and that anyone suffering penalties because stamped paper was unavailable ought to be compensated.50
These last two resolutions were offered by Grenville and accepted by the ministry. Their passage must have pleased him, though he could have been under no illusions that the House was disposed to take a hard line against the colonies. Still, on February 7, he offered a resolution calling for an address to the king informing him that the Commons would back him in enforcing the Stamp Act. Although this proposal went down to defeat 274 to 134, the debate was rough, with Grenville accusing the ministry of sacrificing the sovereignty of Britain to placate the colonies. Pitt hit the resolution hard, demonstrating, according to Horace Walpole, “the absurdity of enforcing an Act which in a very few days was likely to be repealed.”51 The absurdity might produce the spilling of blood, according to Pitt, who argued that orders countermanding the instruction to enforce the Act might be delayed—should enforcement and then repeal be approved. In the interval who knew what disasters this “absurdity” might produce?
Having beaten Grenville again, and having clearly established that Commons believed in its right to tax the colonies, the ministry now proceeded to demonstrate the inexpediency of levying this particular tax. The petitions presented by the merchants in January had prepared the way for a motion for repeal. There was a bad moment when the king seemed to back away from repeal, but Rockingham went to him and demanded his support. The king gave it—grudgingly (and in the end about fifty of his “Friends” who sensed that his heart was not with the ministry voted against repeal). What remained for the ministry to do was to renew—or establish—in the minds of members the impression that economic ruin faced the nation if the statute remained on the books. This task appeared all the more difficult as the ministry came under especially bitter attack in the newspapers, attacks designed more to influence Parliament than the public. Anti-Sejanus, the cover of James Scot, chaplain to the Earl of Sandwich, asked the most embarrassing question—how did the ministry ever expect to collect taxes in America if it gave way on the stamp tax?52
The merchants paraded before Commons by Rockingham did not exactly answer this question. But these sad-eyed fellows made an impression as they appeared before the committee of the whole, dripping with pathos and full of the descriptions of present horrors, to be followed by worse if repeal failed. And to reassure the House that the Americans did not object to all taxes, and were really loyal subjects, the ministry called on the redoubtable Benjamin Franklin. Members of the ministry prepared themselves and Franklin for this examination, but, since they could not control the questioning, Grenville’s supporters asked slightly more than half the questions. Franklin performed brilliantly, meeting the hostility of the Grenville group with patience and tact, and cultivating the impression that the Americans were nothing but loyal subjects much put upon by a tax destructive to their interests. He also used the questions to feed the fears of Parliament that Grenville’s policies had begun a movement for economic independence in America. Repeal, however, he assured the House, would start the Americans consuming English manufactures once more. To the question “What used to be the pride of Americans?” he answered: “To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great-Britain.” And to the question that followed—” What is now their pride?”—the reply was “To wear their old cloaths over again, till they can make new ones.”53
Franklin’s most masterful comments came in answer to a question similar to the one posed by Anti-Sejanus—why should anyone expect them to pay taxes again if they succeed in escaping this one? In answer, Franklin made a distinction between internal and external taxes. The colonies, he told the House, objected only to internal taxes; they would willingly pay duties on trade to Britain in return for the protection the Royal Navy provided on the high seas. Franklin knew that some in England denied that there was any difference between the two sorts of taxes and reminded the House of it with a series of shrewd remarks to the effect that “At present they do not reason so, but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments.”
The ministry gave the House a week to consider this testimony along with the massive evidence from the merchants, and on February 21, Conway introduced the resolution to repeal the Stamp Act. This was the point to pull together the case against the Act. Conway did the job effectively, taking care to reaffirm once more that though the ministry believed in Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, enforcement would produce civil war to the disadvantage of trade and to the advantage of such vulturous nations as France and Spain. The hard core around Grenville remained unconvinced and said so. Grenville himself, trying one last desperate measure, interrupted Conway to say that repeal of the Act was premature since reports that morning had arrived which indicated that the southern colonies were complying with the Act. A listener to Grenville styled this attempt as “dilatory finesse”; in less polite language it was pure fabrication. Conway in any case was not deflected and neither was repeal, which passed 276 to 168. 54
By early March the resolutions which had been approved in February had been embodied in a Declaratory bill and a Repeal bill. After one more attempt by Pitt to remove the phrase “in all cases whatsoever,” which described Parliament’s claim to bind the colonies, both passed the House on March 4 with resounding majorities.55
The Commons sent the bills to the House of Lords the next day. The Lords too had listened to the addresses from the throne in December and January, and the Lords contained members who, like George Grenville, wished to reply with expressions of indignation at the “rebellion” in the colonies. Debate in the Lords included ferocious denunciations of the Americans and a few defenses of the American position that Parliament lacked the right to tax the colonies.
After these preliminaries were got out of the way, the Declaratory bill was quickly approved; the Repeal bill received its last reading on March 17 and the next day the king gave his assent.
READ MORE: 2. Children of the twice-born
The Glorious Cause : Robert Middlekauff