Part 8 (1/2)

The policy which history a.s.sociates with the name of Grenville did not originate with him, nor yet with his royal master, George III. It was the unhappy experience of the Austrian Succession War that enforced upon the English Government the necessity of a stricter attention to the colonies. Ministers who then set themselves to read the American dispatches were amazed to find the governors everywhere without adequate support against the a.s.semblies, the a.s.semblies everywhere indifferent to imperial interests. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle plantation affairs were accordingly placed under the direction of the able Halifax; and in 1752 the governors were instructed to transmit all correspondence ”to His Majesty by one of His Majesty's princ.i.p.al Secretaries of State.”

To remedy an untoward situation many schemes were broached, on the eve of the Seven Years' War, designed to bring the colonies ”to a sense of their duty to the king, to awaken them to take care of their lives and fortunes.” The need of the hour was a union of the colonies for military defense; and in 1754, on the initiative of the English Government, representatives from seven colonies adopted a scheme drafted by Franklin and known as the Albany Plan of Union. It was ominous for the success of all such attempts in the future that a plan which was thought by the ministers too weak to be effective was thought by the colonial a.s.semblies too strong to be safe. In any case, with hostilities already begun, the issue could not be pressed to a conclusion when, as the Board of Trade a.s.serted, ”a good understanding between your Majesty's governors and the people is so absolutely necessary.” Under the stress of war, all ministerial projects for a stricter control of the colonies were accordingly laid aside until the restoration of peace.

The war itself only proved once more how defective was England's colonial administration. Three years of devastating Indian warfare again demonstrated the necessity of an adequate defense of the frontier, and a stricter control of Indian trade. A customs service which collected annually 2000 of revenue and cost 7000 to maintain, manned by officials who sold flags of truce to traders carrying ammunition and supplies to the enemy, was seen to be but an expensive luxury in time of peace and a military weakness in time of war. The a.s.sistance which Pitt, and Pitt alone, could induce the colonists to render, however adequate, was purchased at the price of concessions which deprived the governors of all but nominal influence, while placing in the a.s.semblies the effective powers of government. And the results achieved by the Peace of Paris but confirmed the conclusions which followed from the experience of the war. The territory then acquired by England was imperial in extent; and the acquisition of it had in six years raised the annual cost of her military and naval establishment from 70,000 to 350,000.

This far-flung and diversified empire had to be organized in order to be governed, and defended in order to be maintained. In view of the unprecedented responsibilities thus thrust upon the little island kingdom, it seemed that the oldest and most prosperous, the most English and best disposed of England's colonies might well be asked to submit to reasonable restraints in the interests of the empire, and in their own defense to furnish a moderate a.s.sistance.

Before the war was over a.s.siduous royal governors were offering counsel as to the ”regulation of the North American governments.” If there is to be a new establishment ”upon a true English const.i.tutional bottom,”

wrote Bernard in 1761, ”it must be upon a new plan,” for ”there is no system in North America fit to be made a module of.” High officials in England were not lacking who agreed with the Ma.s.sachusetts governor. The Peace of Paris was scarcely signed before Charles Townshend, First Lord of Trade in Bute's Ministry, proposed that the authority of Parliament should be invoked to remodel the colonial Governments upon a uniform plan, to pa.s.s stringent laws for enforcing the Trade Acts, and by taxation to raise a revenue in America for paying the salaries of royal officials and for the maintenance of such British troops as might be stationed there for the defense of the colonies. Townshend's proposals would doubtless have been formulated into law had it not been for the fall of Bute's Ministry in April; but the measures which were finally carried by Grenville, if they left the colonial charters untouched, were no less comprehensive, in respect to the purely imperial matters of trade and defense, than those initiated by his brilliant predecessor.

Adequate and well-administered laws for advancing the trade and securing the defense of the empire were, indeed, the primary objects of Grenville's colonial legislation. Grenville, who was the fingers rather than the soul of good government, could not endure the lax administration of the customs service which in the course of years had given the colonies, as it were, a vested interest in non-enforcement. He accordingly set himself to correct the faults which Walpole had condoned in the interest of the Hanoverian succession, and which Newcastle had utilized in the service of the Whig faction. Commissioners of the customs, long regarding their offices as sinecures and habitually residing in England, were ordered to repair at once to their posts in America. Additional revenue officers were appointed with more rigid rules for the discharge of their duties. Governors were once more instructed to give adequate support in the enforcement of the Trade Acts. The employment of general writs, or ”writs of a.s.sistance,” was authorized to facilitate the search for goods illegally entered; and s.h.i.+ps of war were stationed on the American coast to aid in the suppression of smuggling.

More careful administrative supervision was but the prelude to additional legislation. Throughout the eighteenth century, the trade of the Northern and Middle colonies with the French and Spanish West Indies had been one of the most extensive branches of colonial commerce. To divert this traffic to the British sugar islands, Walpole had carried the Mola.s.ses Act in 1733. But the Mola.s.ses Act, though many times renewed and now in 1763 once more about to expire, had never been enforced, and had never, therefore, either benefited the British sugar planters or brought any revenue into the treasury. It was to secure one or both of these advantages that Grenville procured from Parliament the pa.s.sage in 1764 of the law known as the Sugar Act; a law which reduced the duty upon foreign mola.s.ses imported into the continental colonies from 6_d._ to 3_d._, and imposed new duties upon coffee, pimento, white sugar, and indigo from the Spanish and French West Indies, and upon wine from the Madeiras and the Azores. Even such men as Bernard, Hutchinson, and Colden believed that the new duties would destroy a trade which they a.s.serted was indispensable to the Northern colonies and highly beneficial to the commerce of the empire. But the sugar planters, powerfully represented in Parliament, demanded protection, while to Grenville's mind the systematic violation of a law was rather an argument against its repeal than an evidence of its impracticability.

The measure, therefore, became a law; and for its better enforcement the jurisdiction of the admiralty courts was extended, and naval officers were empowered to act as collectors of the customs.

Less noticed at the time, but scarcely less important in its effects upon trade and industry, was the law pa.s.sed by Parliament in the same year for regulating colonial currency. With the rapid development of commerce in the eighteenth century, and on account of the steady flow of specie to London, the colonies had commonly resorted to the use of paper money as a legal tender in the payment of local debts. Such men as Franklin and Colden defended the practice on the ground of necessity, and it was undoubtedly true that without the issue of new bills of credit the colonies could not have given the military a.s.sistance required of them for the conquest of Canada. But it was equally true that in most colonies, except Ma.s.sachusetts where the issues had been retired in 1749, and New York where their par value had been consistently maintained, the evils of depreciated currency had long existed and still went unremedied. Debtors profited at the expense of creditors, while colonial a.s.semblies often took advantage of the situation to pa.s.s laws enabling the American trader to avoid meeting his just obligations to English merchants. In response to the loud complaints of the latter, and without adequately discriminating between the uses and the abuses of a colonial paper currency, Parliament pa.s.sed the act ”to prevent paper bills of credit hereafter issued in any of his Majesty's colonies, from being declared to be a legal tender in payment of money, and to prevent the legal tender of such bills as are now subsisting, from being prolonged beyond the periods limited for calling in and sinking the same.”

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Grenville had already turned to the problem of defense, so inseparably connected with the question of Indian relations and Western settlement. The English Government had long recognized the necessity of securing the friends.h.i.+p of the Indians; and to this end it had fostered the settlement of the interior. Indian traders, employing methods none too scrupulous, had been encouraged to ply their traffic beyond the mountains. Many thousands of acres of land had been granted, to individuals and to companies of promoters, in the belief that ”nothing can more effectively tend to defeat the dangerous designs of the French,” or better enable the English ”to cultivate a friends.h.i.+p and carry on a more extensive commerce with the Indians inhabiting those parts.” It was a policy which all Americans could understand. To those colonists who had fought with Was.h.i.+ngton to beat back the tide of Indian ma.s.sacre, to those who had witnessed the destruction of Fort Duquesne, the conquest of Canada had no meaning unless it opened the great West to free settlement. And during the latter years of the war, thousands of families in all the old provinces were prepared, as Franklin said, ”to swarm,” while many hundreds had crossed the mountains and were already seated in the upper valleys of the Ohio.

Yet before the war began, the Board of Trade perceived that the policy originally advocated required serious modification. It was obvious enough that if t.i.tles to land were granted, not only by the English Government, but also by different colonies claiming jurisdiction over the same territory, endless conflict and litigation would be the sure result. And it soon appeared that the actual occupation of the interior was after all far more likely to provoke the hostility than to win the allegiance of the Western tribes. Overreached and defrauded in nearly every bargain, the Indian hated the trader whose lure he could not resist, and with the coming of the surveyor and the settler was well aware that the pretended friends.h.i.+p of the English was but a thin mask to conceal the greed of men who had no other desire than to rob him of his land. During the latter years of the war, after the conquest of Canada placed the allies of France under the heavy hand of Amherst and opened the way to actual settlement, it became clear that an ominous spirit of unrest was spreading throughout all the Northwest. It was precisely to guard against the danger of an Indian uprising, which in fact came to pa.s.s in the formidable conspiracy of Pontiac, that the Board of Trade formulated as early as 1761 the policy which found expression in the famous Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The Proclamation announced the intention of the English Government to take exclusive control of Indian relations and Western settlement. ”For the present,” all territory west of the Alleghanies, from the new provinces of Florida on the south to Canada on the north, was to be ”reserved to the Indians.” Governors were forbidden to grant land there. Those who had already settled within reserved territory were required to remove forthwith; and every Indian trader was bound to give security for observing such rules as the Imperial Government might establish. It was the intention of the ministers, although unfortunately not so expressed in the Proclamation, to open the reserved lands to settlement as soon as Indian t.i.tles could be justly extinguished. In accordance with this intention, the Government negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, by which the Six Nations ceded to the Crown their rights to lands south of the Ohio; and both before and after that event it was seriously concerned with projects for new colonies in the interior. The most famous of these projects was that of the Vandalia Colony, for which a royal grant was about to be executed in 1775 when the promoters were requested to ”wait ... until hostilities ... between Great Britain and the United Colonies should cease.”

Undoubtedly the Proclamation of 1763 was primarily a measure of defense; but even if strictly enforced, which was found to be quite impossible in fact, it could not alone have secured unbroken peace on the frontier. Primitive in his instincts and treacherous in his nature, the Indian harbored in his vengeful heart the rankling memory of too many grievances, was too easily swayed by his ancient but now humiliated French allies, to be held in check without a show of force to back the most just and wisely administered policy. The English Government would doubtless have been content to leave the management of defense in the hands of the colonists had they shown a disposition to undertake it in a systematic manner. After the Albany Plan was rejected by the a.s.semblies, the Board of Trade recommended a scheme by which commissioners, appointed in each colony by the a.s.sembly and approved by the governor, should determine the military establishment necessary in time of peace, and apportion the expense for maintaining it among the several provinces on the basis of wealth and population. s.h.i.+rley and Franklin were heartily in favor of such a plan. But there is no reason to think that a single a.s.sembly could have been got to agree to it, or to any measure of a like nature. ”Everybody cries, a union is absolutely necessary,” said Franklin in amused disgust, ”but when it comes to the manner and form of the union, their weak noddles are perfectly distracted.” The colonies being thus unwilling to cooperate in the management of their own defense, the Board of Trade could see no alternative but an ”interposition of the authority of Parliament.” This alternative the Government therefore adopted; and the permanent establishment of British troops in America to overawe the Indians and maintain the conquest of Canada, already proposed by Townshend, was now determined upon by Grenville. It was the opinion of Grenville, as well as of most men in England and of many in America, that the colonies might rightly be expected to contribute something to the support of such troops. The Mutiny Act, requiring the a.s.semblies to furnish certain utensils and provisions to soldiers in barracks, was now first extended to the colonies; and for raising in America a portion of the general maintenance fund, the ministry, with some reluctance on the part of Grenville, proposed a stamp tax as the most equitable and the easiest to be levied and collected. ”I am, however, not set upon this tax,” said Grenville. ”If the Americans dislike it, and prefer any other method of raising the money themselves, I shall be content.” It was soon apparent that the Americans did dislike it; and in February, 1765, Franklin, speaking for the colonial agents then in England, urged that the money be raised in ”the old const.i.tutional way,” by requisitions upon the several a.s.semblies. ”Can you agree on the proportions each colony should raise?” inquired the minister. Franklin admitted that it was impossible; and Grenville, more concerned with what was equitable than with what was politic, pressed forward with his measure to require the use of stamped paper for nearly all legal doc.u.ments and customs papers, for appointments to offices carrying a salary of 20 except military and judicial offices, for grants of franchises, for licenses to sell liquor, for packages containing playing-cards and dice, for all pamphlets, advertis.e.m.e.nts, hand-bills, calendars, almanacs, and newspapers. The revenue which might be raised by this law, estimated at 60,000, was to be paid into the exchequer, and to be expended solely for supporting the British troops in America.

At the time there were few men either in England or in the colonies who imagined that the Stamp Act would release forces that were destined to disrupt the empire. It was scarcely debated in the House of Commons.

”There has been nothing of note in Parliament,” wrote Horace Walpole, ”but one slight day on the American taxes.” And even in America few men supposed that it would not be executed, however much they might dislike it. It was impossible to prevent the pa.s.sage of the act, Franklin a.s.sured his friends. ”We might as well have hindered the sun's setting.

That we could not do. But since 't is down, my friend, ... let us make as good a night as we can. We may still light candles.” It was not candles alone that were lighted, but a conflagration; a conflagration which soon spread from the New World to the Old and burned away, as with a renovating flame, so much that was both good and bad in that amiable eighteenth-century society.

II

If the experience of the last French war convinced the English Government that a stricter control of the colonies was necessary, the conquest of Canada convinced the colonists that they could defend themselves, and at the same time removed the only danger which had ever made them feel the need of English protection. As early as 1711, Le Ronde Denys warned the New Englanders that the expulsion of the French from North America would leave England free to suppress colonial liberties, while another French writer predicted that it would rather enable, the colonies to ”unite, shake off the yoke of the English monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy.” The prediction was often repeated. Between 1730 and 1763, many men, among them Montesquieu, Peter Kalm, and Turgot, a.s.serted that colonial dependence upon England would not long outlast the French occupation of Canada. The opposition to Grenville's colonial legislation, which gathered force with every additional measure, seemed now about to confirm these predictions.

No single law of these early years would have caused its proper part of the resistance which all of them in fact brought about. A measure of oppression could be attributed to each of them, but the pressure of any one was not felt by all cla.s.ses or all colonies alike. The Proclamation of 1763 was an offense chiefly to speculators in land, and to those border communities that had fought to open free pa.s.sage to the West only to find the fertile Ohio valleys ”reserved to the Indians”--the very tribes which had brought death and desolation to the frontier. The Sugar Act was a greater grievance to the New England distiller of rum and the exporters of fish and lumber than it was to the rice and tobacco planters of the South. New York merchants were seriously affected by the Currency Act, which scarcely touched Ma.s.sachusetts, and which, in Virginia, meant money in the pockets of creditors, but bore hardly on debtors and the speculators who bought silver at Williamsburg in depreciated paper in order to sell it at par in Philadelphia. The famous Stamp Act itself chiefly concerned the printers, lawyers, officeholders, the users of the custom-house, and the litigious cla.s.s that employed the courts to enforce or resist the payment of debt.

Only when regarded as a whole was the policy of Grenville seen to spell disaster. Each new law seemed carefully designed to increase the burdens imposed by every other. The Sugar Act, for example, taken by itself, was perhaps the most grievous of all. The British sugar islands, to which it virtually restricted the West Indian trade of the Northern colonies, offered no sufficient market for their lumber and provisions, nor could they, like the Spanish islands, furnish the silver needed by continental merchants to settle London balances on account of imported English commodities. Exports to the West Indies and imports from England must, therefore, be reduced; the one event would cripple essential colonial industries such as the fisheries and the distilling of rum, while the other would force the colonists to devote themselves to those very domestic manufactures which it was the policy of the English Government to discourage. These disadvantages, which attached to the Sugar Act itself, were accentuated by almost every other cardinal measure of Grenville's colonial policy. With the chief source of colonial specie cut off, the Stamp Act increased the demand for it by 60,000; when the need for paper money as a legal tender was more than ever felt, its further use was shortly to be forbidden altogether; when the diminished demand for labor, occasioned by restrictions upon the West Indian trade, was likely to stimulate migration into the interior, the West was closed to settlement. And the close of the French war, which had raised the debt of the colonies to an unprecedented figure, was the moment selected for restricting trade, remodeling the monetary system, and imposing upon the colonies taxes for protection against a danger which no longer threatened. Little wonder that to the colonial mind the measures of Grenville carried all the force of an argument from design: any part, separated from the whole, might signify nothing; the perfect correlation of the completed scheme was evidence enough that somewhere a malignant purpose was at work bent upon the destruction of English liberties.

Members of the House of Commons who yawned while voting the new laws were amazed at the commotion they raised in America. In all the colonies scarcely a man was to be found to defend any of them. Those afterwards known as loyalists, with Hutchinson, Colden, Dulaney, and Galloway as their most distinguished representatives, were of one accord with the Lees, with Patrick Henry, with d.i.c.kinson, and the Adamses, in a.s.serting that the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act were inexpedient and unjust.

Hutchinson urged the repeal of both measures. Colden a.s.sured the Board of Trade that the Currency Act, so far as New York was concerned, was uncalled for and very prejudicial to colonial industry and the manufactures of England. The three-penny duty on mola.s.ses, said Samuel Adams, will make useless one third of the fish now caught, and so remittances to Spain, Portugal, and other countries, ”through which money circulates into England for the purchase of her goods of all kinds,” must cease. ”Unless we are allowed a paper currency,” Daniel c.o.xe wrote to Reed, ”they need not send tax gatherers, for they can gather nothing--never was money so very scarce as now.” Governor Bernard expressed the belief that if the proposed measures were executed ”there will soon be an end to the specie currency of Ma.s.sachusetts.”

Undoubtedly the general opinion of America was voiced by the Stamp Act Congress when it affirmed that the payment of the new duties would prove, ”from the scarcity of specie, ... absolutely impracticable,” and render the colonists ”unable to purchase the manufactures of Great Britain.”

But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to s.h.i.+ft the issue in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the multiplied resentments acc.u.mulated by two years of hostile legislation.

It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance, round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect without its material symbols--concrete and visible bundles of stamped papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and the very appearance of which was a challenge to action.

While all Americans agreed that the Stamp Act, like the Sugar Act, was unjust, or at least inexpedient, not all affirmed that it was illegal.

Hutchinson was one of many who protested against the law, but admitted that Parliament had not exceeded its authority in pa.s.sing it. But the colonial a.s.semblies, and a host of busy pamphleteers who set themselves to expose the pernicious act, agreed with Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, with the conciliatory John d.i.c.kinson, and the learned Dulaney, that the colonists, possessing all the rights of native-born Englishmen, could not legally be deprived of that fundamental right of all, the right of being taxed only by representatives of their own choosing.

Duties laid to regulate trade, from which a revenue was sometimes derived, were either declared not to be taxes, or else were distinguished, as ”external” taxes which Parliament was competent to impose, from ”internal” taxes which Parliament could impose only upon those who were represented in that body. And the colonies were not represented in Parliament; no, not even in that ”virtual” sense which might be affirmed in the case of many unfranchised English cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool; from which it followed that the Stamp Act, unquestionably an internal tax, was a manifest violation of colonial rights.

The ablest arguments against the Stamp Act were those set forth by John d.i.c.kinson, of Philadelphia, and Daniel Dulaney, of Maryland: the ablest and the best tempered. Unfortunately, the conciliatory note was all but lost in the chorus of angry protest and bitter denunciation that was designed to spur the Americans on to reckless action rather than to induce the ministers to withdraw an unwise measure. Clever lawyers seeking political advantage, such as John Morin Scott; zealots who knew not the meaning of compromise, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams; preachers of the gospel, such as Jonathan Mayhew, who took this occasion to denounce the doctrine of pa.s.sive resistance, and with over-subtle logic identified the defense of civil liberty with the cause of religion and morality;--such men as these, with intention or all unwittingly raised public opinion to that high tension from which spring insurrection and the irresponsible action of mobs. Everywhere stamp distributors, voluntarily or to the accompaniment of threats, resigned their offices. Stamped papers were no sooner landed than they were seized and destroyed, or returned to England, or transmitted for safe-keeping to the custody of local officials pledged not to deliver them. Often inspired and sometimes led by citizens of repute who were ”not averse to a little rioting,” the mobs were recruited from the quays and the grogshops, and once in action were difficult to control. In true mob fas.h.i.+on they testified to their patriotism by parading the streets at night, ”breaking a few gla.s.s windows,” and destroying the property of men, such as Hutchinson and Colden, whose unseemly wealth or lukewarm opinions were an offense to stalwart defenders of liberty.

The November riots disposed of the stamps but not of the Stamp Act.

Business had to go on as usual without stamps or cease altogether.

Either course would make the law of no effect; but the latter course would be a strictly const.i.tutional method of resistance, while the former would involve a violation of law. Many preferred the const.i.tutional method. Let the courts adjourn, they said, and offices remain vacant; let print-shops close, and s.h.i.+ps lie in harbor: English merchants will soon enough feel the pressure of slack business and force ministers to another line of conduct. A good plan enough for the man of independent fortune, for the judge whose income was a.s.sured, or the thrifty merchant who, signing a non-importation agreement, had laid in a stock of goods to be sold at high prices. But the wage-earner, the small shopkeeper who was soon sold out, the printer who lived on his weekly margin of profit, the rising lawyer whose income rose or fell with his fees: such men were of another mind. The inactivity of the courts ”will make a large chasm in my affairs, if it should not reduce me to distress,” John Adams confides to his _Diary_ in December; and adds navely that he was just on the point of winning a reputation and a competence ”when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as well as that of my country.” Men who saw their incomes dwindle were easily disposed to think that the cessation of business was an admission of the legitimacy of the law, a kind of betrayal of the cause. And it was to counteract the influence of lukewarm conservatives, men who were content to ”turn and s.h.i.+ft, to luff up, and bear away,” that those who regarded themselves as the only true patriots, uniting in an a.s.sociation of the Sons of Liberty, set about the task of ”putting business in motion again in the usual channels without stamps.”