The Glorious Cause, page 23
The day after the convention ended, transports carrying troops from Halifax, elements of the 14th and 29th Regiments, began entering Boston harbor. More arrived the next day accompanied by warships. On October 1 they disembarked under the guns of men-of-war all in a line.46
The governor may have felt relief, but he confessed to pessimism about the future of royal government in the province. The Sons of Liberty seem to have shared this feeling but were happy. There was no reason to be happy—Bernard’s ordeal was not yet complete, and Boston’s and America’s had not yet really begun.
9
The “Bastards of England”
British troops did not end Boston’s disaffection; they simply gave it another focus—themselves. The immediate problem they faced was the refusal of town and provincial authorities to pay for their housing. Governor Bernard blustered and threatened in an unsuccessful attempt to extract money from the legislature; Colonel Dalrymple spoke coolly but to no purpose; and General Gage arrived from New York only to discover that he could accomplish nothing. For a short time, the “Manufactory house,” a building the province sometimes used to house a spinning school and a linen-making works, seemed available, but just as Dalrymple was about to quarter some of his men there, several dozen poor families took up residence—and refused to be moved. Otis, Adams, and company probably “encouraged” these families to claim the building; in any case Dalrymple recognized that evicting the poor would bring him more grief than space.1
While all these little conflicts were enacted, a part of the troops pitched tents on the common, some went into Faneuil Hall, still others resorted to Castle William. Before too long Gage and Bernard authorized the use of royal funds for the renting of several large warehouses which were then converted to rough barracks. The owners of these buildings encountered little if any public enmity—taking British money apparently did not compromise one’s opposition to the quartering of troops.
II
Such transactions might not have been understood elsewhere in the colonies. They were not widely known but news of the troops’ arrival in Boston soon was. The coming of the soldiers topped off a summer of ferment and virtually assured that the Massachusetts appeal in the Circular Letter would receive powerful support.
Hillsborough prepared the way for colonial action; some colonists said that he left them no choice. For in April, when he sent Governor Bernard orders which eventually produced the smashing anti-rescinding vote, he also dispatched his own circular letter to the other colonial governors instructing them to inform their assemblies that no notice was to be taken of the letter from Massachusetts. Should the assemblies ignore this command, the governors were to dissolve them.2
Hillsborough’s fatuity, the scorn heaped on him by the House of Representatives in Massachusetts, the arrival of soldiers in Boston, along with information about the Liberty riot and the Customs commissioners, all helped call forth official declarations endorsing the Circular Letter and protesting against the Townshend acts. But beyond these events and the circumstances surrounding them, local politics continued to affect the form, the substance, and the timing of colonial resistance.
New Jersey, Connecticut, and Virginia had required none of the provocation these events supplied and had acted in late winter or early spring. The Maryland assembly may have needed no more, but Governor Horatio Sharpe in a well-meaning and dutiful act gave it a spur it could not ignore. In late June, Sharpe sent along Hillsborough’s letter with a message of his own meant to be reassuring but saying that he trusted the assembly would take no “notice” of the Circular Letter. A repetition of Hillsborough’s language was about as inept a tactic as he could have used. The delegates replied that they would not be “intimidated by a few sounding Expressions, from doing what we think is Right,” but refused to say what they considered right. They did not keep the “right” from Sharpe for long: the next day they approved a petition to the king protesting against the Townshend duties and appealing for redress. The leading assumption of the petition varied little from what by this time had become virtually an American doctrine: it was, the assembly declared, “a fixed, and unalterable principle in the nature of things, and a part of the very idea of property that whatever a man hath honestly acquired cannot be taken from him without his consent.”3 After receiving the caustic reply, Sharpe did not have to see the petition to know what he must do—and dissolved the assembly immediately.
During the autumn and early winter three other colonies, Delaware, North Carolina, and Georgia, which had played minor parts in the Stamp Act crisis, responded. The Delaware assembly formally received only the Virginia letter, but in October in a petition to the king it aligned itself with those who challenged the constitutionality of the new taxes. North Carolina approved a similar petition and conducted itself with a skill its governor, William Tryon, confused with “moderation.” Tryon had learned three years earlier that the North Carolinians could be tough in a fight, and he chose not to dissolve the assembly despite Hillsborough’s order. In Georgia the Commonshouse of Assembly decided to wait until late December, but it got off an address to the king modeled on the Circular Letter before Governor James Wright could dissolve it.4
In these colonies local factions either did not exist or managed to submerge their conflicts in the shared discontent over Townshend’s program. Several other colonies did not act so easily. The Ward and the Hopkins factions in Rhode Island took the entire spring dividing up political spoils and working out a deal for the governorship, but over the summer they decided that the assembly should petition the king against the new taxes. By the time the king rejected the petition, the assembly, now running smoothly, informed the ministry that it shared the view of anti-rescinders in Massachusetts.5
Factions did not ordinarily disturb the sway of the tidewater planting elite in South Carolina. These rice planters had long enjoyed having things their own way in and out of government when in 1768 two sorts of challengers appeared. One, the Regulators in the backcountry, had actually begun to make themselves known the year before. The Regulators, so-named apparently because they sought to bring regularity, social order, law, and government to the West, were planters themselves though they did not raise rice. They also included other solid middle-class citizens, storekeepers, a few professionals, landowners, who in 1767, in exasperation at the indifference of the government, had taken the law into their own hands. They faced formidable problems—a backcountry still reeling from the ravages of the Cherokee War (1760–61), abounding with criminal gangs that plundered their respectable neighbors, and almost totally deficient in governmental and other institutions. By March 1768, organized into ranger companies, the Regulators had killed or driven out most of the criminals and, inflated with success, taken upon themselves debt collection, the supervision of family life, and an eager but crude program of putting the unemployed to work. By autumn they had beaten back eastern attempts to curb these activities and in the October election managed to elect two or three of their number to the legislature. They took no discernible stand on the Townshend measures: they had more immediate concerns such as the extension of representative government to the West. Their demands and their use of force had distracted the legislature for almost two years, however.6
The legislature in South Carolina had at its doorstep still another group with a different set of demands. The mechanics of Charleston had become politically aware several years earlier at the time of the Stamp Act. Now in October 1768 with elections to be held, they nominated Christopher Gadsden, a merchant and a planter, not a craftsman, and proceeded to hold mass meetings celebrating American “liberty.” They drank toasts to the “Glorious Ninety-two,” “consecrated” a liberty tree, sang John Dickinson’s Liberty Song, praised and toasted John Wilkes, and urged the assembly to defy Hillsborough’s order. Gadsden was elected but the assembly remained in the old comfortable hands. Still the old order had been shaken, both from the West and from within Charleston, and when the assembly met in November almost half its members avoided voting on the crucial issue. Governor Montagu in his address opening the session informed the House that he expected it to treat with contempt any seditious letters it had received—a transparent reference to the Massachusetts Circular Letter. The House declared that it had received no such letters and then adopted resolutions protesting against the Townshend duties and praising the letters from Massachusetts and Virginia. Of forty-eight members only twenty-six were present when these votes were taken, all from Charleston or nearby parishes; the others, either out of opposition or fear, stayed away. When the governor learned of these resolutions he followed his instructions and dissolved the assembly. It had sat for exactly four days.7
In Pennsylvania the Quaker party, which had successfully postponed action when the legislature received the Circular Letter, faced a gathering opposition as news of events in Massachusetts arrived. Joseph Galloway, the speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, under the name “Pacificus,” criticized Hillsborough in the Pennsylvania Chronicle but also urged delay until the colony’s agents in London had a chance to appeal against the taxes. Galloway’s actual reason for delay was to give Franklin more time to secure royal government for the colony; an official blast at Parliament or an endorsement of the Circular Letter could not make Franklin’s task easier. Most of the colony seems to have opposed royal government, and in July, despite Galloway’s ploy in the newspapers, a mass meeting in Philadelphia demanded united action in support of Massachusetts. By September when the assembly met, Galloway and the Quaker party seemed beaten—their patriotism was under attack for their apparent failure to protect colonial interests from an encroaching ministry while they were seeking further royal control. The assembly, now sensitized to popular feeling, sent off protests to king, Lords, and Commons denying Parliament’s right to tax the colonies and claiming for Americans all the rights of Englishmen. But the assembly, prudently, did not approve the Circular Letter. Obviously Galloway had managed to salvage some of his authority.8
As in Pennsylvania, New York’s factions sought to use imperial tensions for their own advantage. The legislature was awaiting elections when Massachusetts sent the Circular Letter. The Livingstons survived the elections in March 1768 though their grip on the assembly was loosened by the defeat of one of their chiefs, Robert R. Livingston of Dutchess County. An important leader in New York City, John Morin Scott, also lost his seat in the assembly. The Livingstons’ problem was their record: under their guidance the assembly had finally complied with the Quartering Act and had supported the use of regular British troops against an upstate tenant uprising in 1766.9
The DeLanceys, though surely no more “patriotic” than the Livingstons, saw an opportunity in the Circular Letter to get their opponents turned out of office. Realizing that Governor Moore would dissolve the assembly should it take up the Circular Letter, an event which would of course force new elections, the DeLanceys set about to compel the assembly to act.
They did not have the votes indoors, but by a skillful, if heavy-handed use of newspapers, mass meetings, and an effigy-burning featuring Governor Bernard of Massachusetts, they won over a number of representatives sufficient to compel the assembly to endorse the popular constitutional case and take up the Circular Letter. No representative wanted to be tagged an “enemy” of “the country,” a label the DeLanceys attached to those who refused to meet Hillsborough head-on. As soon as Governor Moore learned of the assembly’s action at the end of December, he dissolved it and soon after called a new election. This election, which the DeLanceys won handily, brought home to everyone the practical meaning of the new patriotism.10
III
Beneath the actions of official bodies whose petitions, addresses, remonstrances, and circular letters seem on the surface remote from the passions of ordinary men lay a popular disaffection, a feeling soon to be transformed into anger. The concern of anonymous men over the new British policies had in fact helped dispose public bodies to act; the town meeting in Boston, for example, heard others besides Otis, Adams, and company. In Virginia, where strong resolves issued from the Burgesses, “sundry Freeholders” from a variety of counties met together and produced their own petitions protesting against the suspension of the New York assembly—”a fatal tendency . . . destructive of the Liberty of a free People”—and branding the Quartering Act and the Townshend duties as “cruel and unconstitutional.”11
These petitions and similar ones elsewhere came out of small informal meetings, organized by men with no social standing and no offices but with their own interests and the public’s in mind. For the next three years more and more such men took part in politics, or in those political activities directed against British policy. Protests against Britain marked a broadening of participation, a process encouraged by the atmosphere of urgency and crisis and by the fact that official bodies on all levels proved incapable of defending American interests with the effectiveness and passion a larger public demanded. The extension of this participation, however, was slow and uneven, as, for example, in the nonimportation movement of 1768 to 1770.
Economic coercion in the form of a refusal to import British goods had worked three years before, and now in 1768, official and unofficial bodies looked to it again. Predictably the first attempts to conclude a nonimportation pact were made in Boston. The Junto, as the group around Sam Adams was called, tried first in the town meeting in October 1767; the legislature not sitting, the town, which had been a bellwether to the province, seemed a logical place to begin. The merchants who had already sounded their dislike of stopping trade now packed the meeting and voted down the proposals to end trade with Britain until the repeal of the new taxes. The best the Junto could get was a voluntary nonconsumption agreement, binding only those who signed not to use a list of British imports which did not even include all the dutied articles. The town also resolved to encourage local manufactures and singled out paper and glass as especially worthy of domestic production.12
The town recommended nonconsumption to the province as a whole and in irresistible language. Its subscribers proposed to stimulate local “industry,” to cut the rise of British “superfluities,” to curtail “luxury.” This is the language of the Protestant ethic, appealing to values still deeply embedded in the culture of New England, and only slightly less so in the middle and southern colonies, where it later appeared in agreements banning importation of British goods. Its force was probably greatest in small towns where Protestantism survived uncorrupted by urban fashions. In any case during the next three months towns all over New England took up Boston’s example and signed their own agreements not to consume British imports.
Whether the popular leaders in Boston ever believed that nonconsumption would affect British policy is not clear. But early in 1768 they pushed merchants toward closing down imports from Britain. To be sure not all merchants needed pressure; John Rowe, for example, confided to his diary his belief that the Townshend duties were “as dangerous as the Stamp Act,”13 and Rowe agreed with other merchants in March to limit most British imports for a year. This agreement never went into effect, for these Boston merchants decided not to observe its terms until their competitors in New York and Philadelphia concurred. By mid-April virtually every merchant in New York had signed a similar agreement, but in June, a deadline set by the New Yorkers, the merchants of Philadelphia, despite pleas from John Dickinson, refused.14
Philadelphia’s merchants were neither grasping nor “unpatriotic.” They did not lack principles, and they did not admire the new import duties. But they were freer than their colleagues in Boston and New York, freer of popular intimidation. Mobs had made themselves known in Philadelphia three years earlier but the city had not endured the convulsions of Boston and New York. And one important faction, the Quaker party led by Franklin and Galloway, playing for time and craving a royal charter, had dampened or at least divided popular enthusiasm. Hence in this atmosphere of moderation, though not of brotherly love, the merchants of Philadelphia felt able to defend their rights to business and profits even though they despised Parliamentary usurpation.15
Within eighteen months of the refusal of Philadelphia in June 1768, the atmospheres had darkened everywhere in America, and nonimportation had spread to every colony but New Hampshire. As before, Boston provided the impetus. Why merchants in Boston decided to draft another agreement is not hard to fathom. They had given up their first attempt only after Philadelphia backed away. Now, on August 1, another try seemed promising, indeed imperative, for revulsion against Hillsborough’s circular letter was spreading; more importantly, the town had experienced riots against the racketeering of Customs commissioners, and it was listening to rumors that British troops would soon arrive. The merchants discussed their problems several times in the summer and on August 1, 1768, agreed to stop importation of most British goods for the year beginning January 1. Sixty of sixty-two merchants at this meeting signed, and within a few days almost all others in the town had followed suit.16
Near the end of August, merchants in New York approved an agreement requiring the importation of British goods to stop November 1 and not to resume until the repeal of the Townshend duties. Coupled with Boston’s, the New York agreement drew Philadelphia to center stage. Newspapers in New York City and Boston printed letters and articles with unflattering remarks on the public spirit of Philadelphia merchants, and private correspondence must have been no less blunt. Still, the Philadelphia merchants held back until March 1769, when they finally entered an agreement similar to New York’s. Most merchants subscribed within a couple of weeks, and their example inspired their associates in nearby
Newcastle County, Delaware, to form a similar association in late August. New Jersey merchants also explicitly acknowledged the importance of action in Pennsylvania and New York but delayed formal agreements until June 1770. They may have restricted trade before that time, however. When they did finally conform publicly, they moved in response to mass meetings in New Brunswick and in Essex County.17
