The Glorious Cause, page 14
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
