The Glorious Cause, page 18
The composition of the mobs made them difficult to lead around by the nose. In the Connecticut countryside small farmers—there were not many large farmers—did the heavy work against the Stamp Act. In small and large cities elsewhere the mobs included too many different social groups for easy manipulation. The largest component of any urban crowd was probably workers—unskilled laborers, sailors, artisans, and a smattering of free blacks and sometimes of women. These groups differed from one another in what they did and in owning property, or not owning it. Reliable figures for all the towns and cities are lacking, but in Boston about 30 percent of the male laboring force owned no property and doubtless this group sent many into the mobs. Yet property owners, including merchants, also took part in the riots of August 1765. In Virginia and the Carolinas, planters joined craftsmen and sailors. None of these groups felt great social oppression, and the only groups in America that did, black slaves and Indians, had by definition been excluded from the active polity.30
Of those inside who might have borne grudges against their social betters, artisans or craftsmen often aspired to higher status. Some of them, perhaps most, looked upward in part because their own economic and occupational status was not clear. An artisan worked with his hands—he had a skill or proficiency—but he might also engage in trade, keeping a small shop and selling his own productions. Sailors, mechanics of the sea, seem at first sight to have been rootless. Undoubtedly some were, but others engaged in small-scale commerce themselves while sailing on the ships owned by merchants. The merchants paid abysmal wages, but in extenuation they often permitted sailors to bring in sea chests, crammed with goods to be sold when port was reached. Sailors could be exploited by unscrupulous customs collectors, and sometimes were. As entrepreneurs, coupling liberty and property made sense to them, and they resented the greedy hands of customs officials.31
A few years after the Stamp Act crisis, a group of ship carpenters in Philadelphia demonstrated the curious forms political identification could take. An old artisan, a one-time printer, figured centrally in the affair. This printer—now, in 1770, something more—was Benjamin Franklin. In 1765 he had secured the appointment of his friend, John Hughes, a merchant who had been a baker in his earlier years, as stamp distributor. When news got around Philadelphia that Hughes was now the royal official charged with administering the detested Stamp Act, the rumbles of opposition were soon heard. Hughes eventually resigned, but before he did, the rumor made the rounds that his house would be torn down to encourage him. The rumor also circulated that Benjamin Franklin’s house would suffer the same fate for his part in obtaining what he had apparently thought was a rich plum for his friend. On September 16, 1770, the day of action, the White Oaks, an organization of ship carpenters in the city, gathered to defend the houses of both men. A similar scene occurred the next month. There was no riot on either day.32
What is so revealing in this affair is the identification that the White Oaks felt with Franklin and Hughes, both men of wealth and prestige. They were seen as embodying the aspirations and hopes of artisans, for they had been upwardly mobile, hard workers who had succeeded. Hence the White Oaks, sharing their values, came to their rescue in what was surely not a socially radical gesture.33
The clearest evidence of popular support for the resistance to British policies lies in what the mobs actually did. Royal officials, for the most part in the customs or engaged in some form of collecting and enforcing taxes, supplied the targets for popular action. These officials sometimes employed “informers” to betray merchants and ship captains who violated commercial regulations. When opponents of the Crown used boycotts and non-importation, mobs sometimes served as enforcers, either by threatening violence or using it against those who broke such agreements not to trade with the “enemy.” But violence and economic coercion observed limits; they were not resorted to indiscriminately. Nor, when mobs flexed their muscles, did they go off on a mad rampage. Their self-control proved remarkable—and quite effective. British officials dismissed them as rabble, a mistaken judgment by those who could not see what stood before their eyes: American opposition bit deeply into society and suggested how powerful the revulsion was against imperial authority.
The other sort of circumstance leading Americans to accept charges of conspiracy as simply commonsense truth was the character of their Protestantism. The children of the awakened, the evangelical, the revivalistic could not have been astonished at the news that an evil plot against their liberties had been hatched in a corrupt and faintly “Catholic” England. The founders had come to America in the seventeenth century to escape an earlier version of what seemed by the eighteenth a persistent conspiracy. Christian history afforded many such examples.
Protestant Americans were especially sensitive to the pictures of hordes of placemen and taskmasters that the pamphleteers predicted would descend upon the colonies. The traditional Protestant virtues—purity and simplicity in life, work, thrift, and frugality—shaped their lives and conduct, after all. Hence the revulsion they felt at the accounts of the degeneracy, idleness, and profligacy which threatened to pass from England to America in the persons of placemen and their satellites.34
This feeling suggests that the uprising in the colonies, half-articulated and partially disguised as it was, occurred in part over values. The hatred of English corruption set off fears in many colonists that their society too might give way to effeminacy, sloth, luxury, and moral decay. Thus the victims chosen by the mobs at the time of the Stamp Act were struck not simply because they supported or were presumed to support English policy. Such men as Andrew Oliver, Jared Ingersoll, and in particular Thomas Hutchinson represented a dangerous moral order. In attacking them, and others like them, the mobs not only defended political liberty in America but also virtue and morality.
The mobs and no doubt popular leaders as well acted in the belief that they faced an unqualified evil. The Devil’s specter had been summoned up in the denunciation of the stamp men. Protestant concerns and mental patterns had fostered an exaggerated clarity of morality and immorality, thereby heightening the emotional receptivity to fear of unseen, utterly evil forces. This disposition was broadly diffused in colonial society, and it seized ways of thinking and feeling because it was encouraged by a Protestantism that also supplied many moral and psychological values. It seemed to explain political conduct because it had always explained private behavior. It aligned the colonists with much that was old, comfortable, and good in their moral code, for a hatred of idle, dissolute placemen who served the designs of tyrants implied a love of honest, hard-working freemen committed to constitutional government. There is irony, of course, in fears and delusions fostering a national and responsible public order, but ultimately that occurred in the prolonged crisis that began with the passage of the Stamp Act.
7
Chance and Charles Townshend
Rumors that Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act, or soon would, seeped through the colonies soon after Grenville’s dismissal in July 1765. Ships from England brought most of these reports and occasionally less happy news as well—of a reluctant Commons and a beleaguered ministry trying unsuccessfully to get the Act off the books. Certainty replaced rumor on May 2, 1766, when the Virginia Gazette published copies of the repealing and Declaratory acts, and in a few weeks printers spread the statutes all over their newspapers.
News of the repeal set off celebrations in small towns and cities through America. The cities, of course, made more of the opportunity than the towns. New York proved itself especially rowdy, with the Sons of Liberty there consuming an incredible amount of hard drink, offering toasts to a long list of English heroes and to themselves, exploding fire-works, shooting guns, and finally marching in a body to the fort to “congratulate” the governor. That eminence received three of them, drunk as they were, as representatives of the rest. An officer in the British army who witnessed the celebration reported sourly that the night “ended in Drunkeness, throwing of Squibbs, Crackers, firing of muskets and pistols, breaking some windows and forcing off the Knockers off the doors.”1 Far to the south, the citizens of Charleston in their joy did some of these things, but more sedately and with restraint. Boston thoroughly enjoyed itself with fireworks, music, “a magnificent Pyramid” decorated with 280 lamps, and the recitation of a surprising number of grandiloquent verses. Several wealthy citizens put up the money to obtain the release of all debtors in jail, and perhaps the wealthiest, John Hancock, “treated the populace with a Pipe of Madeira Wine.”2 Hancock also gave a lavish party for his friends. Philadelphia behaved itself—it had written that repeal should not occasion either boasting or recriminations. The city gave a handsome dinner, presided over by the mayor and attended by the governor and other officials. There was an “illumination” by fireworks for ordinary people which, according to one of Franklin’s friends, “was conducted with great Prudence.”3
As the colonial legislatures convened throughout the remainder of the year, they too declared their pleasure over the repeal, and most sent addresses of gratitude to the king. None matched the Massachusetts House of Representatives in professions of loyalty or in fulsome sentiment. Only the Virginia House of Burgesses, where opposition had first declared itself, failed to rise to the occasion. In refusing to send thanks to the king, the Burgesses maintained the integrity it had shown a year earlier.4
The Burgesses was not in session when the report of repeal reached America in May, and it did not convene until the following November. In the interval, enthusiasm for Parliament’s action inevitably cooled and just as surely the meaning of the previous year penetrated more Americans’ minds. As it did, thoughtful people asked what all the celebrating was about.
Not that Americans had not felt genuine joy and relief in May. They had, and they quite rightly said so. What they felt but conveyed only rarely was a mood, a feeling of uneasiness at what had befallen them and distrust of the English across the sea, even of those merchants who had interceded in their behalf. The belief that a sinister ministry had conspired to deprive them of their liberties remained strong, though expressions of this conviction were naturally muted after the Rockingham Whigs took over. The plotters had long since identified themselves—George Grenville ostensibly led them, but behind him lurked the Earl of Bute.
If the Americans who had written and rioted against the Stamp Act hated these men, they regarded with something less than love the “friends of the colonies”—those who had pushed through repeal. These friends had also passed the Declaratory Act with its curious phrase about Parliament’s right “to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.” At first, most colonists who read this line seemed to believe that by this claim Parliament did not include taxation. Others were not so sure. More ominous was the curiously patronizing, even arrogant, attitude of the so-called friends of the colonies. The merchants, for example, who had organized support outside of Parliament seemed more than smug over their success—they acted as if the colonists were under great obligation to them, when everyone knew that they had favored repeal in order to get trade flowing again, and profits flowing too. The Americans had felt no cynicism or even surprise that British merchants defended America to protect British commerce; they understood this motive and indeed had depended on it. The British merchants, however, persisted in talking as if they had saved the foolish Americans from themselves and not from a policy which the Americans regarded as subverting their rights and which had cut into British profits. Yet the British merchants betrayed no understanding of these facts—at least not in their warnings to Americans against repeating claims to be exempt from Parliamentary taxation. The manner of the merchant addresses to the colonies was all wrong and had been from the beginning of the crisis. It approached, as George Mason the distinguished Virginia planter said,
the authoritative Style of a Master to a School-Boy: “We have, with infinite Difficulty and Fatigue got you excused from this one Time; pray be a good boy for the future; do what your Papa and Mama bid you, and hasten to return them your most grateful Acknowledgements for condescending to let you keep what is your own; and then all your Acquaintance will love you, and praise you, and give you pretty things;. . . but if you are a naughty Boy, and turn obstinate, and don’t mind what your Papa and Mama say to you, but presume to think their Commands (let them be what they will) unjust or unreasonable, or even seem to ascribe their present Indulgence to any other motive than Excess of Moderation and Tenderness, and pretend to judge for yourselves, when you are not arrived at the Years of Discretion, or capable of distinguishing between Good and Evil; then everybody will hate you, and say you are a graceless and undutiful Child; your Parents and Masters will be obliged to whip you severely, and your Friends will be ashamed to say anything in your Excuse; nay they will be blamed for your Faults.”5
Disquieting as the supercilious tone was, what lay beneath it appeared worse—an incomprehension of the American constitutional argument, or even a glimmer of suspicion that the Americans really believed in the principles they professed. Historians of the American Revolution sometimes argue that a lack of communication divided the British and their colonies. After all, the Atlantic Ocean lay between England and America, and getting information back and forth took months. When news arrived it was often out of date. There is some truth in this contention, but despite the slowness of ship crossings a surprising amount of knowledge was exchanged. In the case of the aftermath of the Stamp Act crisis, one might suggest that there was too much communication; surely the Americans who read the merchant letters published in the newspapers understood their meaning. And the American position had been amply laid out in Britain; yet few took it seriously or brought much sympathy to it.
The problem the British had was an inability to see that they had a problem—despite the letters, petitions, and memorials of the previous year. Years of dominance over the colonies had deadened their sensitivities. In the seventeenth century when the colonies began to trade with the Dutch, Parliament confined their trade to British ports; and when the colonies showed a fancy for European goods, Parliament soon nipped it in the bud. Did the colonies threaten the market for English manufactures? Pass a statute stopping them. They were “our colonies,” “our subjects,” and as George Mason noted, “our children”; Parliament the parents, the mother and father, and they should obey.
The colonists played their parts in this relationship with proper deference, in fact with willingness, for years. They connived at their own subordination: they were provincials, and provincials in the eighteenth century may have admired the metropolis, but they did not deceive themselves that they were its equals. They also resorted to the familial metaphors in describing their subordination—England was the mother country and they were children owing deference. But there were distinct limits to these colonial attitudes, and in the crisis produced by the Stamp Act, Parliament and the Grenville ministry had blundered across those limits. The immediate aftermath revealed how few in Britain possessed the insight to see the full extent of this blundering.
II
The lingering suspicion of Britain did not quiet the bitter factionalism of American politics, and in fact in several colonies the defeat of the Stamp Act permitted important shifts of local power. These alterations sometimes entailed the control of offices, sometimes of legislatures, and everywhere forced men to make clear their allegiances. More important, provincial politics now had an abiding issue which carried the potential of unifying the colonies: hostility to control from Britain.
Drastic changes in local alignments occurred where colonial politicians were able to exploit this issue, an event which depended largely on their ability to impute to the opposition support of ministerial policies. In Massachusetts the Otis faction had no trouble in smearing Governor Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson and their friends with the tar of the Stamp Act and for sucking up offices and patronage and disgorging them in bribes to supporters. Many of the charges were no smear, and Otis and company made the most of them. Their opportunity came in the elections held in May 1766, the first chance they had since the violence of the previous summer to rid the House and Council of, as they said, the enemies of the people. They opened their campaign in the Boston Gazette, their house organ, with an assortment of attacks. They charged the governor and the council with appropriating money to their friends without the consent of the House; they protested against the practice of “treating” (some delicacy made them use this word rather than “bribing”)—supplying the electorate with rum and wine in return for votes—a practice, of course, only of the administration. They condemned anyone who had urged compliance with the Stamp Act or who referred to the “Sons of Liberty” without due respect—Hutchinson’s crowd choked on the name and suggested a more apt description would be “Sons of Violence.”6
These charges were offered for the edification of Sons of Liberty all over Massachusetts. Lest anyone miss the point, the Gazette published model instructions for representatives to the House and urged the towns to use them. Believing that at least thirty-two representatives had demonstrated their unfitness for office, the Gazette published their names with the suggestion that the best instruction for them would be retirement to private life.7
Governor Bernard detested unseemly behavior, especially in public and particularly at his expense. Thomas Hutchinson did not admire it either, but he had friends who took up his cause in the Boston Evening Post. The defense, however, worked under the handicap of respect for the truth, at least the truth so far as the Stamp Act was concerned. Neither Hutchinson nor Bernard had urged its passage; Hutchinson had deplored it in private. Announcing their opposition long after the event left their critics unmoved—indeed in control of the battlefield. The Boston Evening Post attacked as well as defended, and its victim, James Otis, took a savage lashing in its columns. Otis’s Brief Remarks on the Halifax Libel, which had revealed a rather different emphasis on Parliament’s power from his Rights of the Colonies, drew particular scorn for its “inconsistencies and Prevarications.” And Otis himself received rough handling as a “doublefaced Jacobite Whig” and as a “slight of hand-man.”8
