The Glorious Cause, page 10
These organizations did not speak with a single voice. Most concentrated on the inequity of the Act and its potentially disastrous effects on trade. What Parliament had failed to recognize was that the New England and middle colonies did not pay for imports from Britain simply by exporting locally produced commodities. Rather, they imported molasses from the French West Indies, turned it into rum, which was exchanged for slaves from Africa, who were commodities in a complex trade with the southern colonies and, again, the West Indies. Fish, horses, meat, grain, and bread were also carried to the French and British West Indies. These exchanges produced money as well as molasses, “credit”—usually in the form of notes or bills of exchange—which was used in the trade with Britain to pay for British manufactures: clothes, hardware, tea, furniture, beer, and necessities, as well as luxuries of all sorts.39
Understandably, colonial legislatures, which began sending off petitions and memorials in the autumn of 1764, also bore in on the economic consequences of the statute. By late in the following winter, nine had sent messages to England through their governors or their agents. All argued or implied that Parliament had abused its power to regulate trade. The British planters in the West Indies would surely benefit from the stoppage of exchanges with the French islands, but neither the mother country nor the colonies on the mainland would.40
If these legislatures, like the colonial merchants, seemed to be of one mind about the results for trade that the Sugar Act would produce, they were less sure in speaking of the rights involved. None of the nine conceded Parliament’s “right” to tax for the purpose of raising a revenue in America, but only two—New York and North Carolina—forcefully denied the right. The General Assembly of New York confessed its “Surprize” that Parliament would consider such an “Innovation” and reported their “Constituents” claimed “an Exemption from the Burthen of all Taxes not granted by themselves.” For such “an Exemption from the Burthen of ungranted, involuntary Taxes, must be the grand principle of every free State. Without such a Right vested in themselves, exclusive of all others, there can be no Liberty, no Happiness, no Security; it is inseparable from the very idea of Property, for who can call that his own, which may be taken away at the Pleasure of another? And so evidently does this appear to be the natural Right of Mankind, that even conquered tributary States, though subject to the Payment of a fixed periodical Tribute, never were reduced to so abject and forlorn a condition, as to yield to all the Burthens which their Conquerors might at any future Time think fit to impose. The Tribute paid, the Debt was discharged; and the Remainder they could call their own.” And the New Yorkers made explicit their “disdain” of claiming “that Exemption as a Privilege. They found it on a Basis more honourable, solid and stable, they challenge it, and glory in it as their Right.”41
North Carolina’s legislature also resisted the Sugar Act as an encroachment upon their “right” to tax themselves. Perhaps some especially forceful—and foresighted—individual drove these protests through the legislatures of New York and North Carolina. Neither colony offered leadership later on, and these statements of rights seem aberrant somehow. For the Americans in countinghouses and legislatures, if not exactly confused, were at the least unclear about what they were up against. They had not had to face a Parliament committed to taxing them for revenue. They had enjoyed rights without having to think about them. Unexamined rights may always be something of a luxury. The Americans were soon to think so.42
Of course, not many Americans had become involved in the struggles over the Sugar Act. And those who did were, for the most part, securely at the top of colonial society—merchants and representatives in colonial legislatures. Occasionally these men had found support among men less powerful than themselves. In the crisis that would occur over the Stamp Act, these leaders were to turn to such men more frequently and in the process to examine their rights more closely. Their example proved edifying to these others—artisans, shopkeepers, workers of various sorts. Quite clearly, what had begun at the top did not end there.
4
The Stamp Act Crisis
While the colonists conducted operations against the duties on molasses, the most thoughtful among them worried about the possibility that still another tax would be levied on America. They owed the worry to George Grenville, who on March 9, 1764, the day he introduced the proposals for the new molasses duties, warned that to meet the national expenses “it may be proper to charge certain Stamp Duties in the said Colonies and Plantations.”1 Grenville didn’t say much more about what he had in mind except that he would postpone introducing the necessary legislation until the colonies had an opportunity to offer objections. But the objections should not include challenges to Parliament’s right to tax the colonies; it had the right as far as Grenville was concerned, and he did not mean to be subjected to arguments to the contrary.
Grenville learned before the year was out that a disposition not to listen would not still angry American voices. At first, though, as rumors of a stamp tax reached the colonies, the Americans did not protest but instead asked for information about the duties. The reports reaching the colonies all suffered from a lack of precision, from second-and sometimes third-hand observations, and from a general vagueness. Grenville had told so little that not much distortion seeped into these accounts. What seems surprising at first sight is that he was not inclined to tell more.
By the spring reports surfaced in England that Grenville had delayed in order to give the colonies time not only to furnish information but also to propose another mode of taxation. Thomas Whately, one of the Treasury secretaries, mentioned the possibility that Grenville was awaiting suggestions from America for less burdensome ways of raising money. The agents of Massachusetts and Virginia wrote their respective employers that Grenville might be inclined to leave matters to the colonies—so long as the money was eventually forthcoming. But these agents’ reports, like Grenville’s original announcement in March, had about them an air of mystery and even unreality: no sums of money were mentioned and no plans for apportioning tax burdens among the colonies—each with its own legislature after all—were offered.2
To clear up the mysteries of Grenville’s intentions, several agents asked him for a meeting. He obliged them on May 17, 1764, and they came away wiser, perhaps, but with very little information. When asked for a copy of the bill, Grenville replied that he could not supply one since it had not yet been drafted. When asked what would be taxed and at what rate, he replied vaguely that about the same things would be taxed as in Britain, but that he could say nothing about rates of taxation since they had not been decided. Nor did Grenville lay to rest speculation that his purpose in delaying the bill was to permit the colonies to suggest alternative modes of taxation. He neither confirmed nor denied that he would be receptive to fresh plans. Yet despite his coyness he did manage to convey knowledge of what he really wanted: approval in advance from the colonies of the general proposal. The objections he had seemed to welcome would be received—or welcomed—only after the colonies gave their assent. To be sure, he would give colonial proposals for different sorts of taxation “all due consideration,” but what he seemed to have in mind was taxation by Parliament.3
Understandably, the agents, and soon the colonial legislatures, found all this rather bewildering. And what made matters worse, and induced a certain skepticism about Grenville’s sincerity in professing to give consideration to American views, was his failure to notify the colonial governors that he had decided to ask Parliament for a stamp duty. Ordinarily when decisions were made about the colonies, the usual procedure was for the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, acting on the orders of the ministry (or officially of the Privy Council), to pass the news to the colonial governors. Information customarily was dispensed this way, though of course other means were employed as well. In this case, Grenville abandoned the normal procedures, though Thomas Whately asked several colonial officials about the nature of legal documents used in the colonies: these documents were to be subject to a tax.4
Whately had good reason to ask such questions, for he was charged by his chief to draw up the bill to be presented to Parliament. Whately, who had been admitted to the bar after attendance at Cambridge and study in the Middle Temple, possessed the technical qualifications to draft legislation. Moreover, he was intensely loyal to Grenville, and he believed in hard work for himself and not just for others. The ministry’s ignorance of the details of colonial life was so great that considerable work proved necessary. Whately went about it with a dedication that must have gratified Grenville. Before he finished a rough draft suitable for the ministry’s consideration early in December 1764, he had canvassed a variety of departments and officials, including the Board of Trade and its knowledgeable secretary John Pownall, the Customs commissioners, and the English Stamp Board. Whately also approached Americans and English officials in the colonies, though here his efforts may have been less systematic. John Temple, the surveyor general of Customs in the northern colonies, was consulted, as were lesser officials in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Whately also wrote at least one prominent private citizen in America, Jared Ingersoll in Connecticut. Ingersoll and Temple knew the colonists well and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Whately that the idea of an American stamp tax was a mistake. Ingersoll, a blunt-speaking Yankee and as far from radicalism as almost anyone in America, responded with particular directness to Whately’s questions about American attitudes. The minds of the Americans, he wrote in July 1764, “are filled with the most dreadful apprehensions from such a Step’s taking place, from whence I leave you to guess how easily a tax of that kind would be Collected; it is difficult to say how many ways could be invented to avoid the payment of a tax laid upon a country without the Consent of the Legislature of that Country and in the opinion of most of the people Contrary to the foundation principles of their natural and Constitutional rights and Liberties.” And, as other colonists had, Ingersoll added that if the colonists were asked to provide a portion of a revenue, they would do so willingly, but if even a moderate tax were laid by Parliament, he would not predict “what Consequences may, or rather may not follow.”5
Whately had not expected to receive warnings that a stamp tax might invite unhappy reactions in America, and he brushed them aside. Grenville could not have been disturbed by these responses, even though he had indicated that the one argument he would not listen to was a challenge of Parliament’s right to tax, an argument Ingersoll and others, in letters and petitions, were making. Such arguments actually played into Grenville’s hands. If there was anything intolerable to a good Parliament man, it was to be told that the Parliament lacked the right to do what it wanted to do. The colonial agents in England realized that what they were instructed to say in defense of colonial rights would only produce the result it was calculated to avoid—the passage of the stamp bill. But what could they do? English merchants trading to America were made uneasy by the conflict that was taking shape before their eyes, but they too hesitated to make the colonial constitutional case.6
Just before Parliament convened in February 1765, the agents, now desperate, sent four of their number to meet one final time with Grenville. They were an impressive group—Benjamin Franklin, already famous for his electrical experiments, worldly-wise and a little cynical; Jared Ingersoll, fresh from America, tough-minded and fundamentally very conservative; Richard Jackson, a member of Parliament and agent for Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania; and Charles Garth, another member of Parliament, agent for South Carolina, shrewd and quick-witted. Grenville received them with kindness and early in the meeting said that he regretted giving the Americans so much uneasiness, but he thought it only fair that they help pay for their own defense and that he knew no better way than by a tax levied by Parliament. The agents repeated what by now must have been familiar to everyone—that the Americans preferred to tax themselves. Richard Jackson made the reasons for this preference absolutely clear by arguing that a tax by Parliament would subvert representative government in America. Fed by a Parliamentary tax on the colonies, the royal governors there would have no reason ever to convene the local assemblies. Grenville of course denied that he had any such intention in mind, and he denied furthermore that any such thing would take place.7
At about this point in the meeting Grenville asked the agents if they “could agree upon the several proportions Each Colony should raise,” if the colonies were permitted to raise the money through the assemblies.8 The question has been called “fatuous,” and in a sense it was.9 The Grenville ministry itself had the responsibility of establishing such proportions, and it had had a year to do so, assuming, of course, that it had any interest in the answer. If there was any doubt that it had no such interest and no intention of allowing the colonies to tax themselves to support the troops in America, the question served to dispel it. Grenville knew that and doubtless asked the question, silly as it seemed, in order to disabuse the agents of any hope that they could deflect him from his course.
To persuade Grenville to give up the idea of a stamp tax was beyond the agents and everyone else. On February 6, 1765, he brought the resolution of 1764 before the Commons; the debates and the votes that followed demonstrated the imprudence of principled opposition. Although only William Beckford denied on the floor of Commons Parliament’s right to tax, that right was clearly uppermost in the minds of most members. Anger against the colonials for presuming to challenge Parliament’s absolute sovereignty was so widespread that opponents to the proposed tax phrased their arguments very carefully—but not carefully enough.10
Nothing that was said changed many votes. And the most eloquent defense of the American case, made in a speech by Colonel Isaac Barre, may actually have stiffened Parliament’s resolve to tax. Barre’s outburst came in response to a sardonic complaint by Charles Townshend: “And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength and Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”11 Barre’s reply was explosive:
They planted by your Care? No! your Oppressions planted em in America. They fled from your Tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable Country—where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human Nature is liable, and among others to the Cruelties of a Savage foe, the most subtle and I take upon me to say the most formidable of any People upon the face of Gods Earth. And yet, actuated by principles of true english Lyberty, they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own Country, from the hands of those who should have been their Friends.
They nourished up by your indulgence? they grew by your neglect of Em: as soon as you began to care about Em, that Care was Exercised in sending persons to rule over Em, in one Department and another, who were perhaps the Deputies of Deputies to some Member of this house—sent to Spy out their Lyberty, to misrepresent their Actions and to prey upon Em; men whose behaviour on many Occasions has caused the Blood of those Sons of Liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest Seats of Justice, some, who to my knowledge were glad by going to a foreign Country to Escape being brought to the Bar of a Court of Justice in their own.
They protected by your Arms? they have nobly taken up Arms in your Defence, have Exerted a Valour amidst their constant and Laborious industry for the defence of a Country, whose frontier, while drench’d in blood, its interior Parts have yielded all its little Savings to your Emolument. And believe me, remember I this Day told you so, that same Spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany them still.—But prudence forbids me to explain myself further. God knows I do not at this time speak from motives of party Heat, what I deliver are the Genuine Sentiment of my heart.12
An American who listened to Colonel Barre thought the speech was “noble” and relished the House’s initial reaction: it sat there “awhile as Amazed,” unable or unwilling to speak even a word.13 But the house soon recovered its voice and, when Barre and his friends moved to adjourn in order to avoid a vote on the proposed tax, voted 245 to 49 against. Such maneuvers were not going to stop Grenville with the Commons at his back; the stamp bill received its first reading on February 13 and two days later the second was passed without even a division. On this day, February 15, the opposition assisted by the colonial agents did its best and failed pathetically. Charles Garth offered a petition, framed from South Carolinian protests, which carefully skirted the questions of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. Sir William Meredith, a London merchant, handed in a petition from Virginia, and Richard Jackson presented several from Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Commons refused even to receive the petitions, holding that the House of Commons simply did not hear petitions against money bills, and in any case it was not going to indulge questioners of its authority. This ruling prompted General Henry Conway to point out the paradox in the Commons’ decision in 1764 to give the colonies time to prepare objections to a stamp tax and then in 1765 to refuse to receive the objections. Commons was in no mood for paradox, or logic, or anything but the passing of the bill. After the second reading no further opposition seemed possible and the bill sailed through the third, and received the king’s approval on March 22.14
The opposition within Parliament to the Stamp Act had given its best, and it had provided some fine moments, as, for example, in Colonel Barre’s answer to Charles Townshend. The opposition won the contest in rhetoric but lost it in the vote, the part of parliamentary action that counts. Those who approved of the Act had voted half in exasperation at the burden of taxation, already carried for too long, and half in the conviction that justice required the colonies to contribute to their own defense. Their votes were given rather easily, if the record of debate may be trusted; most of the objections were not considered worthy of discussion. The Commons had made up its mind quickly, and Grenville, knowing that he had the support he needed, was content to let the opposition sing its sad songs. He then pushed the measure through with an ease bordering on contempt.
