The Glorious Cause, page 27
For the next twenty-four hours, public order threatened to break down completely. A crowd estimated to be at least a thousand swirled through the streets almost immediately after the killings. So far as a crowd is capable of expression, this one called for vengeance against Preston, the guard, and the army. The governor showed courage and judgment in facing these people. Jailing Preston and the soldiers siphoned off some anger, but the presence of the 14th and 29th Regiments kept popular emotion near rage. Hutchinson did not want to order these troops out of town; a few hours of watching and listening to the town the next day told him he would have to give the order.
After the troops left, popular leaders shifted their attention to getting early trials. Here they encountered the judges of the superior court who, recognizing that a fair trial would not be obtained in the mood of the town, delayed judicial action until the autumn. By that time although popular fevers had subsided they remained capable of surging upward again. With public peace apparently secured, the trials began.
John Adams, full of honest conviction that every Englishman deserved a fair trial, not to mention self-righteous satisfaction at taking on an unpopular case, defended Preston. The court heard many witnesses who gave a bewildering variety of testimony—and found Captain Preston innocent. The soldiers also escaped punishment, but two who were found guilty of manslaughter and pleaded benefit of clergy were branded and released.65
Although the remaining months of 1770 offered up no further violence in Boston, the angers and the hatreds that had come to the town since 1765 did not disappear. Similar feelings elsewhere in America took fresh life from the killings in Boston. The Massacre—it was called that almost immediately—compelled attention all over again to the question of what British power was doing in America. The legitimacy of that power had been questioned since 1765; now apparently it had given one sort of answer to questioners of its purposes.
The constitutional issues dividing Britain and her American colonies had been clear since 1765. A number of Americans had attempted to clarify them for their countrymen and for the king and Parliament. They had succeeded in America and failed in Britain. Still, they and most of their countrymen hoped for a resolution within the old constitutional order. The crisis set up by the Townshend acts and the conversion of a major city into a garrison town had made the constitutional questions all the more urgent. The gravest implications of the British case had been clear for some time; as the House of Representatives of Massachusetts pointed out the next year—”A Power without a Check is subversive of all Freedom.”66
Unchecked power destroyed freedom and lives in Boston. The bitterness felt by the victims understandably made calm review of the political theory underlying Anglo-American relationships hard to sustain. In the next few years, however, the Americans would continue to think about the British constitution. They inevitably also thought much about themselves. A few years before, William Pitt, a man much admired in the colonies, had reminded Parliament that the Americans were “the sons, not the bastards of England.” Experience made many Americans wonder at Pitt’s formulation. Recent history culminating in the Massacre was leading them to the discovery that perhaps they were the bastards of England—and the legitimate children of America.
10
Drift
On the first day of January 1771, Samuel Cooper, the minister of the Brattle Square Church in Boston, wrote his friend Benjamin Franklin that “There seems now to be a Pause in Politics.” Cooper offered this assessment not primarily because the agitation about the Massacre and the trials of Preston and the soldiers appeared over but because, as he explained, “The Agreement of the Merchants is broken,” a reference to the decision of the Boston merchants in the preceding October to give up nonimportation.1
The merchants had acted after they learned that Parliament had approved a bill repealing all the Townshend duties except the one on tea. A new ministry headed by Lord North had decided on this action. North’s government had taken over from Grafton’s early in 1770 and soon after had decided to extricate itself from colonial disputes. North possessed a peaceful temperament, a spirit that would be harshly bruised in the next twelve years. Even when aroused, North had little taste for conflict; he wanted only to serve his king. Thus he acted to remove the causes of strife with a sense of genuine relief. He also led Parliament to modify the Currency Act which had troubled New York. That colony now would be allowed to issue bills of credit which might be used to pay public—though not private—debts. Altogether it was an enlightened measure, further evidence that a reassuring colonial policy might be in the offing.2
In reality, for most of the next three years the government paid little attention to the colonies. It had expected nonimportation to collapse and certainly had not intended to signal that it approved resistance to efforts to tax the colonies. Like the ministries before it, North’s had no doubts about Parliament’s right to do just about anything it wanted to do in America. North was content to let colonial affairs drift, as long as they drifted quietly.
Drift would not have displeased most Americans had they been convinced that Parliament had given up its old claims to powers to drive them where it desired. Most agreed with Samuel Cooper that the new ministry had the opportunity of adopting mild measures without looking weak, and should it “Place us on the old Ground on which we stood before the Stamp Act, there is no Danger of our rising in our Demands.” But everyone knew that the Declaratory Act remained on the books—and so did the tax on tea.3
II
Despite the lingering sense of menace that these statutes imparted, the atmosphere in 1771 was different largely because no great issue had replaced the Townshend duties. Not that, below the surface of politics, issues did not exist which twisted men’s desires for calm. In North Carolina and Georgia, for example, the assemblies and the governors struggled with one another, a common circumstance but one which produced more than the expected rancor because mutual trust had almost vanished in the previous five years.4
In South Carolina the governor and assembly fought over an issue closely related to the conflicts of the recent crises. The dispute had begun near the end of 1769 when the assembly appropriated £1500 “for the support of the just and constitutional rights and liberties of the people of Great Britain and America.” This sum was to be sent to the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, an English group organized to press the claims of John Wilkes to a seat in Parliament. Because of procedures which had grown up since the 1740s, the governor, William Bull, was unable to stop it. Bull did inform his English superiors who, shocked, soon instructed him that he was not to consent to money bills that did not designate the money for specific purposes. The English officials clearly aimed to get the governor of South Carolina on a footing enjoyed by governors in other colonies. Bull tried to comply with these instructions but the way had become slippery for governors of South Carolina. The best he could do was to withhold his approval of actions taken by the assembly. The result was deadlock—no annual tax bill passed into law after 1769, and no legislation of any kind after February 1771.5
Far to the north, another sort of conflict persisted, though by the early 1770s it had lost some of its corrosiveness. It would not disappear entirely, however, until Americans declared their independence, because it concerned religious freedom—in particular the freedom of Protestant sects from Anglican domination. In reality, there probably was little possibility that the Church of England would ever control religious life in the colonies. The dispositions of most Americans, those of English stock as well as the new immigrants, tended toward either evangelicalism or an unstructured arminianism or liberalism. Bishops and hierarchies had no appeal for the faithful, and establishments of any persuasion were attracting increasing criticism.6
Yet bishops, who did not exist in America, furnished the center of the religious controversy. Because at a distance, bishops seemed especially malignant. Their remoteness freed the fancies of dissenters who long before the Revolution professed to dread their coming and warned against attempts by the Anglican clergy—especially the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel whose commission ostensibly was to spread the light to the Indians—to insinuate themselves into the centers of education and religion in America.
One of the more lurid revelations of Anglican intentions was made in New York just before the French and Indian War. The defender of liberty in this case was William Livingston, a recent graduate of Yale and a man of no very strong religious beliefs. In 1753 as King’s College (later Columbia) took shape, Livingston smelled a plot by Anglicans in New York to make the college their own. Livingston did not want the college under the control of any church or sect. Anglicans outnumbered all other groups on its board, and Anglicans agitated for a royal charter. To prevent them from seizing control, Livingston resorted to the press in 1753 and began to issue The Independent Reflector, a monthly magazine modeled on the Independent Whig of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Livingston chose his model well—the anticlericalism of the Independent Whig had a wicked bite to it, a characteristic of particular utility in the struggle with the Anglicans of New York City. In the pages of the Independent Reflector two tactics emerged. The first was an appeal to the most prominent dissenting groups in the colony, among them Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Dutch Reformed. The second was to plead the larger implication of what at first sight appeared to be a provincial struggle over a pathetic little colonial college. That implication was political: religious and civic freedom could not really be separated, and therefore the apparently open Anglican intention to control only the college actually concealed a larger design to master church and state.7
The Anglicans eventually won the fight for King’s, won at least the presidency, which one of their own, Dr. Samuel Johnson, held until 1763. But Livingston won too, for the struggle in the press alerted a large dissenting constituency in New York and undoubtedly helped ready it for the conflicts leading to independence. And during the 1760s, when rumors spread that an Anglican bishop was on the way to America, dissenting ministers in New York joined colleagues to the north in organizing opposition.
The rumors found their most avid audience in New England. There—especially in Boston and Cambridge—rumors could be attached to substance. The Reverend East Apthorp, the Anglican pastor in Cambridge, was surely a substantial figure when he arrived with Governor Francis Bernard in 1760. Apthorp, who had not reached his thirtieth birthday, soon married Elizabeth Hutchinson, daughter of Judge Eliakim Hutchinson, a wealthy merchant and a warden and vestryman of King’s Chapel. Marrying into the Hutchinsons did not exhaust Apthorp’s bright ideas, and shortly after his arrival he began announcing them in the local newspapers. For example, he proposed that Harvard introduce Anglican services into its commencement. Apthorp made this suggestion in such innocence as to make it appear as arrogance. His proposal that the Harvard Board of Overseers add Anglicans to its number revealed either ignorance of the religious realities in New England or a sublime taste for the fantastic. In any case the response was predictable, a series of savage attacks in the newspapers on Apthorp and all his schemes.8
By such proposals Apthorp made himself an easy target. Jonathan May-hew, pastor of Boston’s West Congregational Church, scored repeatedly off him in the skirmishes conducted in pamphlets and newspapers in the 1760s. Of all Mayhew’s touches the tag he hung on Apthorp’s handsome house in Cambridge, the “Bishop’s Palace,” was one of the most effective.9
The Bishop’s Palace, a lordly name for a lordly behaving clergy, seemed apt. For the Anglican clergy behaved as if they lived in a land of heathen. At least this interpretation occurred to Congregationalists who were subjected to incessant efforts to convert them to the Church of England, as if they were unchurched. Thus, Mayhew’s charge in 1763 that there was formal design to carry on a spiritual siege of our churches” simply stated the obvious as far as Congregationalists were concerned. Two years later in the midst of the upheaval over the Stamp Act, John Adams linked spiritual and secular assaults on American liberties—”there seems to be,” Adams wrote in the essays later called a Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law, “a direct and formal design on foot to enslave America.”10 During the remainder of the decade the attack on the Anglican clergy in the middle and New England colonies continued. By the early 1770s, however, though the uneasiness of the dissenters remained, the worst of the threat of the “foreign” clergy seemed to have been contained. The Anglicans had been exposed and no bishop had appeared. With no further evidence of the coming of bishops, even the most sensitive dissenter had difficulty keeping his attention on the threat.
III
As tensions over bishops uncoiled early in the 1770s, they gradually wound up again over the collection of Customs duties. Only the tax on tea remained from the Townshend duties, an irritating reminder that Parliament had not yielded its right to tax for revenue when it repealed the other duties. This irritation did not prevent colonial merchants from importing British goods or their customers from buying them. During the three years beginning with 1771, the colonies’ imports from Britain reached £9 million in value, almost £4 million more than in the three years 1768–70. Boston merchants proved especially hungry for British goods and overcame their distaste for dutied tea sufficiently to bring in half a million pounds of the stuff.11
Still, illegal trade and Customs racketeering persisted despite the resumption of legal commerce. In many ports, smuggling merchants and unfair collectors thrived together, as, for example, on the Delaware River, where an illegal trade with the Dutch continued even after the Townshend duties were repealed. A prominent New Jersey collector was beaten by sailors in the autumn of 1770 when he imprudently tried to investigate a vessel off-loading its cargo into small boats in Delaware Bay. His son, who assisted him in the customshouse, received a coat of tar and feathers shortly after. A year later a Customs schooner captured a colonial vessel accused of smuggling but then was taken itself by a crowd which seems to have included several important merchants from Philadelphia. The crowd beat up the captain and the crew of the Customs schooner before stowing them in the hold. Before the night’s work was completed, the schooner’s prize disappeared with the crowd.12
Merchants and Customs collectors formed an explosive mixture everywhere in the colonies. In Rhode Island, where they were especially practiced in the art of making explosions, they combined in the familiar way a year after the worst of the encounters along the Delaware. The usual antagonism furnished the background. Nothing seemed to dampen the enthusiasm of the two groups for getting at one another’s throats. The Rhode Island merchants conducted a lively trade, most of it legal though their reputation for illegality was formidable.
The Royal Navy believed that the reputation conformed to the facts and, after losing two small vessels in Narragansett waters, assigned the Gaspee there in late March 1772. Her skipper, Lieutenant William Dudingston, seized several craft engaged in trade only to find himself threatened with arrest by the local sheriff. Dudingston’s commanding officer, Admiral Montagu, attempting to shield him, wrote a foolish letter to the sheriff in which he threatened to hang as pirates any citizens who attempted to rescue “any vessel the King’s schooner may take carrying on an illicit trade.” Governor Joseph Wanton replied with a letter not calculated to reassure the navy about civilian concern for the enforcement of the Acts of Navigation. The charge that local citizens had proposed rescuing by force any trader taken by the Gaspee was, Wanton said, “without any foundation, and a scandalous imposition.” And “as to your advice, not to send the sheriff on board any of your squadron, please to know that I will send the sheriff of this colony at any time, and to any place, within the body of it, as I think fit.”13
A few weeks later on June 9, Lieutenant Dudingston, in eager pursuit of a craft he suspected as a smuggler, ran the Gaspee aground. Unable to free her, he was vulnerable to unfriendly boarders. They appeared that night, apparently including John Brown of the great Providence family, and took the Gaspee by force. Dudingston tried to resist and received a bullet in the groin for his trouble. The boarding party took their time in their work, first laying about them with handspikes when the Gaspee’s crew tried to hold them off, then reading the ship’s papers, finally taking off everyone and then burning the ship. Dudingston, put ashore by these gentle souls, nursed his wounds for a couple of days, only to be arrested by the sheriff for an earlier seizure of colonial cargo. Admiral Montagu eventually rescued him by paying a stiff fine imposed by a Rhode Island court. After that Montagu decided that Lieutenant Dudingston had outlived his usefulness and sent him back to England to explain to a court-martial the loss of the Gaspee.14
As things turned out, punishing Dudingston proved to be about as much as either the Admiral or the home government could do. Montagu tried to uncover the names of the leaders of the raiders who burned the Gaspee and may have succeeded but could not establish their guilt. The ministry had no better luck though it appointed a commission to investigate the affair. The commission met in January 1773 and returned a report in the summer declaring civil officials in Rhode Island free of guilt. Who was guilty it could not say.15
The report ended the Gaspee affair in a legal sense, but the political results were longer lasting. The commission had been empowered to send persons it accused to England for trial along with witnesses and evidence. This arrangement violated the ancient English right of trial by a jury of one’s peers. The news of what the ministry had authorized spread rapidly, and within a few weeks the colonial newspapers had pointed to its dangers. Not long afterward, in 1773, the newspapers began to carry articles openly speculating on the timing of an American declaration of independence.16
