The Glorious Cause, page 30
III
Although many colonists branded the legislation closing the port of Boston and altering the government of Massachusetts the Intolerable Acts, just as many seemed in spring 1774 quite willing to tolerate the intolerable. Sam Adams and the Boston committee of correspondence, however, were no more able to accept such complacency than they were the punishment of Boston. The full extent of Parliament’s reactions became known only gradually, but news of the most drastic measure, the shutting up of Boston, arrived on May 10 and was widely dispersed through the colonies by the end of the month. Adams did not wait for this information to spread before acting. He and the committee proposed that the town suspend all trade with Great Britain and the British West Indies and that the rest of America do the same. The town meeting gave the proposal its support almost immediately, but at that point a different spirit showed itself.
The last try at nonimportation had ended with accusations of bad faith ringing in all the colonies. John Mein’s charges that John Hancock and associates had cheated had created suspicions of Boston, and the understandable desires of merchants everywhere to make money inhibited whatever enthusiasm they might once have felt about still another stoppage of business. Even those aroused enough to break off their trade were concerned that they not act alone, that such action be taken everywhere with no chiseling. By this time, with recent experience in mind, guaranteeing such united action did not seem easy. Therefore, the tendency of merchants almost everywhere was to hang back while awaiting evidence that economic coercion against Britain would be concerted in all the colonies.
The evidence of merchants’ intentions promised anything but joint action. In Boston the reluctant among them must have taken heart when General Gage arrived on May 13 with a commission as governor. Soon afterward a group of merchants proposed to pay for the tea destroyed in December and commissioned Thomas Hutchinson, who was leaving for England at the beginning of June, to carry their offer to London. The Boston committee of correspondence could not ignore this opposition and a few days later announced that it was sponsoring a “Solemn League and Covenant” for the public’s signature. This covenant pledged its signers to stop all trade with Great Britain, to refuse to purchase any English goods imported after August 31, and to break off trade with anyone refusing to sign. The next step was to mobilize the town meeting; here again the radicals proved their political mastery as the town voted against payment for the tea on June 17 and ten days later endorsed the Solemn League and Covenant. Neither action came easily—the merchants fought savagely against both, moving in the town meeting that the committee of correspondence be dissolved. That motion failed, but the intimidation intended by the “Solemn League” failed too, as more than one hundred merchants signed and published a protest against it and its parent, the committee of correspondence.21
Adams and the committee won these struggles, but their victory was worthless. To be sure, several New England towns supported nonimportation, and more than one committee of correspondence responded favorably to appeals from Boston for support. Outside New England there were promises of supplies for “suffering Boston” and there were denunciations of the Intolerable Acts. Perhaps the most impressive was sounded in Virginia, where in late May the House of Burgesses declared that Boston was enduring a “hostile Invasion” and set aside June 1, the day Boston was to be shut up, as a “Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer, devoutly to implore the divine Interposition for averting the heavy Calamity, which threatens Destruction to our civil Rights, and the Evils of Civil War. . . .” A fast day must have gratified Puritan Boston, where such days had a long and honorable tradition. Reverting to such a technique was intended to arouse sensitivities to threats against liberty such as had been present during the English Civil War. Jefferson claimed the inspiration for such a technique for himself and half a dozen other burgesses, among them Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee. These spirits, very much aware of their boldness, “cooked up” a resolution based on the forms and language, suitably modernized for eighteenth-century readers, employed in the Puritan Revolution. Derivative, “cooked up,” and bold as it was, the resolution with its call for a fast day struck a pleasing note in the ears of older burgesses who speedily approved it. The governor, Lord Dunmore, reacted as governors representing outside authority always did and dissolved the House.22
From other colonies came similar, though less forceful, expressions of support for Boston. These muted declarations barely concealed the struggles behind them between merchants and popular leaders. The issue dividing them concerned the action to be taken in response to the Boston Port Act. Each “side” included various shadings of opinion, but most seemed to have agreed with Boston’s claim that it was representing the “common cause,” that its liberties stood for all, and that if Parliament suppressed it, all would lose their liberties. Acceptance of these propositions did not carry all groups to an agreement on what should be done. Boston’s call for stoppage of all trade with Britain aroused open opposition in virtually all merchant groups, and skepticism even among some “popular” groups—among mechanics, for example, in New York. The way nonimportation had collapsed four years earlier had disenchanted many merchants and others as well. In 1770, merchants in several cities had been unable to resist large profits while the competition tied itself up. Merchants in Boston had been accused of such tactics; and appeals from Boston thereafter were always slightly suspect. Boston’s merchants distrusted those in nearby Rhode Island, and there was a mutuality of suspicion in New York and Philadelphia.23
In an environment heavy with mistrust, the proposal to convene a continental congress drew surprising agreement. The reasons are fairly clear. Some merchants who had felt themselves betrayed in 1770 retained confidence in action that united their kind in all the colonies. If both obligations and penalties were clear, they reasoned, economic coercion had a chance of success. Other merchants, probably a smaller number, expected to be able to forestall any concerted action in a general meeting. But even these men seem to have believed that Parliament’s action presented a threat to political liberty as well as to business. The question was, as before, how to respond—not whether to respond.
While Boston’s leaders plotted, and arguments over this problem went on everywhere, colonial legislatures and unofficial bodies began to cut through the debate and to act. Connecticut’s lower house was one of the first; early in June it instructed its committee of correspondence to choose delegates to what became the first Continental Congress. Less than two weeks later Rhode Island’s General Assembly chose its own delegates. Five colonies—Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Delaware, North Carolina—resorted to provincial assemblies, extraordinary bodies substituting for legislatures dissolved by peace-loving governors. A similar agency, the convention, chose Virginia’s delegates in August; local committees made the choices in New York, and in South Carolina the Commons House of the Assembly ratified the selections of the inhabitants. Georgia in 1774, badly frightened by an uprising of Creek Indians on the northern frontier, decided against sending delegates, lest it be deprived of British arms. Boston was distant, the Indians close by; danger may not have revived loyalty in Georgia but it subdued daring.24
These local conflicts over the tactics to be used in responding to the Intolerable Acts were of great importance and affected the actions of the Congress itself. But they should not be overplayed. The fact is that a Continental Congress met and proved capable of making decisions crucial to the future of the empire. It did in part at least because the values and interests its delegates represented overrode the disagreements that marked its origins.
When the Congress met on September 5, 1774, most Americans agreed that Parliament had no power to tax the colonies. This proposition had been announced almost ten years before, and attachment to it had swollen to near unanimity long before the crisis over the Stamp Act ended. At that time almost no one openly repudiated Parliament’s claim to legislate on matters of general concern to the colonies as constituent parts of the empire. Within a few years, however, that claim also met flat opposition from an occasional essayist. Parliament of course had stimulated this rejection by passing the Townshend acts in a fit of fatuity, as though the colonists were not really serious in their objections to attempts to take their property without their consent.
The denial of Parliament’s authority occurred under various guises—discussions of the powers of representative bodies, for example, or in arguments over the nature of the empire. William Hick’s Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power exemplifies the first in its concentration on the act of delegation as essential to legislative power. By what means, he asked, had the colonies—unrepresented in Parliament—delegated power to it? Obviously they had not delegated power to Parliament, and its decisions regarding them were nothing more than “violence and oppression.” James Wilson’s Considerations on the Authority of Parliament, which lies in the second category, assumes that colonies owe allegiance only to the Crown. Parliament, Wilson held, simply had no jurisdiction in an empire of states virtually independent except for their connection to the Crown.25
The monarch too underwent some cutting down in the political theory published on the eve of the meeting of the Congress. In the fray over the Stamp Act, the king had escaped all abuse while the Parliament and ministry absorbed it. In the careful conventions observed in these writings he appeared the unwitting prisoner of evil ministers, a creature apparently at once wise, just, and by implication blind to his subjects’ interests. This delicately ironic treatment of the monarch continued in most writings published in 1774, but with one difference. In the mood of defiance engendered by the Intolerable Acts, the colonists did not hesitate to implicate the king directly in the misrule and oppression they felt themselves to be enduring. At the same time they shrank from saying that George III was evil; rather he had made mistakes; he had, as the young Thomas Jefferson said in A Summary View, “no right to land a single armed man on our shores.” But “his majesty has expressly made the civil subordinate to the military”—in order to enforce “arbitrary measures” which began in England with the Norman Conquest and which were extended to the colonies with their founding. The worst of these measures, according to Jefferson, was the royal claim to all lands in England and America—the introduction of feudal tenures and all the exactions which accompanied them. Whatever the justice of such arrangements in England, they had no place in America, Jefferson believed, for “America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him or any of his successors.” Rather the colonies were founded by free men exercising their natural right to depart from Britain, “the country in which chance, not choice has placed them.” The colonies were settled under laws and regulations these founders deemed most likely “to promote public happiness.” 26
Jefferson’s assumptions about the empire appear clearly in this argument: Parliament did not have jurisdiction over the colonies—all that it had done was usurpation. The king on the other hand did have authority in America but only of a limited kind. Kings, Jefferson observed, are the “servants, not the proprietors of the people.” This sort of flourish—so typical of Jefferson—described what he and others made explicit elsewhere. The king was bound by laws; he was a party to a contract and governed according to the limits and regulations it established. The empire was composed of parts virtually independent and tied together only under rules agreed to by its members.
This view of the empire did not conceal the problem of reconciling the various interests of members; nor did it resolve the question of which agency, if any, should mediate differences of interpretations of the contract. The traditional way of meeting such issues was of course to concede power to Parliament as a superintending agency. When the first Continental Congress opened, many in America surely still believed that Parliament should exercise such power. One who did, Jonathan Boucher, the distinguished Anglican clergyman in Virginia, published his convictions in A Letter from a Virginian to Members of Congress, an extended and powerful statement on behalf of Parliamentary supremacy and colonial subordination. Boucher’s argument rested in part on a denial of the realities of the previous ten years. A “British community” existed in the world, he argued, and the colonies made up only a small part of it. A majority represented in Parliament governed the empire; the colonies owed obedience to that majority as a small part owed its being to a whole.27
Boucher had little chance of convincing most Americans in 1774. He not only assumed that Parliament’s power was unchallengeable; he phrased this assumption in language that could only infuriate most Americans. The cause of liberty, he wrote, had always attracted “knaves” and “Qua[c]ks in Politics,” “Impostors in Patriotism” who imposed upon the “credulity of the well-meaning deluded Multitude.”
Deluded or not, the multitude did not care to be likened to “froward children, who refuse to eat when they are Hungry, that they vex their indulgent Mother.” Thomas Bradbury Chandler adopted similar language in The American Querist, which appeared three days after the Congress began its meetings. One of Chandler’s queries was “whether some degree of respect be not always due from inferiors to superiors and especially from children to parents?” Chandler, like Boucher, found in the Declaratory Act the appropriate description of the colonies’ relations to Parliament. They were to be bound by Parliament in “all cases whatsoever.”28
That phrase from the Declaratory Act still angered Americans. John Hancock had quoted it in March in the Old South Meetinghouse in the oration he gave commemorating the Boston Massacre. The British claim to tax the colonies without their consent was one of the “mad pretensions” of the government, pretensions so mad in fact that an army had to be sent to enforce them. Hancock spoke before plans for the Continental Congress took shape. By summer with planning well advanced and more British pretensions known, many Americans responded even more harshly. The responses in general carried few substantial surprises: Parliament had no authority in America, but, as a matter of expediency born of the complexity of the empire, it might exercise a general superintending power. It might regulate imperial trade, always remembering that the colonies agreed to the principle of regulation. But it could not tax or otherwise interfere with the internal governance of the colonies.
These concessions struck minor notes in the blasts directed against the British government by writers and preachers in America. The main theme of essays and sermons of the summer concentrated on what seemed apparent—the Intolerable Acts left no doubt that the British government had set out to destroy American liberties. The British “Ministry,” an anonymous New Yorker wrote, “are bent on the establishment of an uncontrollable authority in parliament over the property of Americans.”29 William Henry Drayton of South Carolina said that matters had proceeded beyond unconstitutional taxation to the point where the question was whether Britain “has a constitutional right to exercise Despotism over America!” Elsewhere colonials made assessments equally bleak.30
The remedies available to an America willing to follow a Continental Congress might produce a redress, but no optimistic predictions of easy accomplishment were made. Parliament and the British ministry appear in dark hues in these accounts, and no brightening seemed likely. Something had to be tried, however. Some Americans urged that a total prohibition of trade, including a ban on exports to Britain, should be instituted. Others suggested that military preparations should be made, and at least one minister preached on the doctrine of a “just war.”31
In all the outrage and the proposals for getting things changed there was a sense that the Americans faced evil and corruption which would spread to their own shores if they failed to defend themselves. The sources of this conviction lay deeply within Protestant culture, especially the belief that most conflict involved questions of good and evil, and right and wrong. Self-government, in this view, rested on virtue, on righteousness, and in the conflict the Americans confronted a government, as John Hancock pointed out, that was not “righteous.” The proof of the evil appeared everywhere—in the standing army the British had sent to America, an institution which, as Josiah Quincy said, “had introduced brutal debauchery and real cowardice” among the lower classes and “venal haughtiness and extravagant dissipation” to the “higher orders of society.” Proof existed too in the Quebec Act by which, Ebenezer Baldwin insisted, “Popery is established,” a forecast of what awaited the thirteen English colonies. Evil and corruption appeared too in the protection extended by the Administration of Justice Act to the “harpies and bloodsuckers” of the Customs service.32
All these conclusions and the ones which found corruption and sin in the Massachusetts Government Act, the Boston Port Act, indeed the entire array of British actions against America since 1764, repeated old concerns. They also employed a familiar vocabulary and referred to the deepest values of Americans. What was different in 1774 was the air of near hopelessness; the corrosive feeling that almost nothing worked, nothing would recall Britain to its senses, recall it to the service of the good and the freedom that once filled Anglo-American life. Yet much could be done—a virtuous self-denial would help keep Americans free of corruption, a rejection of placemen and troops would aid in keeping their institutions pure, and a principled defense of their right to govern themselves gave the only hope possible that their liberty might be preserved.
IV
The bitterness so obvious in the essays and pamphlets published throughout the summer did not show itself immediately in the meeting of the first Continental Congress. The delegates who rode into Philadelphia in late August and early September felt excitement and pride and even awe at what they were doing—not rage at Britain. The Massachusetts delegates, John and Sam Adams, differed from their colleagues in their feelings but they kept their anger in check. They and their colleagues Robert Treat Paine and Thomas Cushing were shrewd men who proposed to serve Massachusetts and America without any display of self.
