Part 6 (1/2)
28. COLONIAL PROTESTS AND REPEAL (1767-1770).
[Sidenote: Colonial protest.]
[Sidenote: Ma.s.sachusetts circular.]
[Sidenote: Coercive measures.]
This time the colonies avoided the error of disorderly or riotous opposition. The leading men resolved to act together through protests by the colonial legislatures and through non-importation agreements. Public feeling ran high. In Pennsylvania John d.i.c.kinson in his ”Letters of a Farmer” pointed out that ”English history affords examples of resistance by force.” Another non-importation scheme was suggested by Virginia, but was on the whole unsuccessful. In February, 1768, Ma.s.sachusetts sent out a circular letter to the other colonies, inviting concerted protests, and declaring that the new laws were unconst.i.tutional. The protest was moderate, its purpose legal; but the ministry attempted to destroy its effect by three new repressive measures. The first of them, April, 1768, directed the governors, upon any attempt to pa.s.s protesting resolutions, to prorogue their a.s.semblies. The second was the despatch of troops to Boston: they arrived at the end of September, and remained until the outbreak of the Revolution. The third coercive step was a proposition to send American agitators to England for trial, under an obsolete statute of Henry the Eighth.
[Sidenote: Effect of the tax.]
Meanwhile the duties had been levied. The result was the actual payment of about sixteen thousand pounds; this sum was offset by expenses of collection amounting to more than fifteen thousand pounds, and extraordinary military expenditures of one hundred and seventy thousand pounds. Once more the ministry found no financial advantage and great practical difficulties in the way of colonial taxation. Once more they determined to withdraw from an untenable position, and once more, under the active influence of the king and his ”friends,” they resolved to maintain the principle. In April, 1770, all the duties were repealed except that upon tea. Either the ministry should have applied the principle rigorously, so as to raise an adequate revenue, or they should have given up the revenue and the principle together.
29. SPIRIT OF VIOLENCE IN THE COLONIES (1770-1773).
[Sidenote: Troops in Boston.]
[Sidenote: Collision with the mob.]
Repeal could not destroy the feeling of injury in the minds of the colonists; and repeal did not withdraw the coercive acts nor the troops.
The garrison in Boston, sustained at the expense of the British treasury, was almost as offensive to the colonists of Ma.s.sachusetts as if they had been taxed for its support. From the beginning the troops were looked upon as an alien body, placed in the town to execute unpopular and even illegal acts. There was constant friction between the officers and the town and colonial governments, and between the populace and the troops. On the night of March 5, 1770, an affray occurred between a mob and a squad of soldiers. Both sides were abusive and threatening; finally the soldiers under great provocation fired, and killed five men. The riot had no political significance; it was caused by no invasion upon the rights of Americans: but, in the inflamed condition of the public mind, it was instantly taken up, and has gone down to history under the undeserved t.i.tle of the Boston Ma.s.sacre. Next morning a town meeting unanimously voted ”that nothing can rationally be expected to restore the peace of the town and prevent blood and carnage but the immediate removal of the troops.” The protest was effectual; the troops were sent to an island in the harbor; on the other hand, the prosecution of the soldiers concerned in the affray was allowed to slacken. For nearly two years the trouble seemed dying down in Ma.s.sachusetts.
[Sidenote: Samuel Adams.]
[Sidenote: Committee of Correspondence.]
That friendly relations between the colonies and the mother-country were not re-established is due chiefly to Samuel Adams, a member of the Ma.s.sachusetts General Court from Boston. His strength lay in his vehemence, his total inability to see more than one side of any question, and still more in his subtle influence upon the Boston town meeting, upon committees, and in private conclaves. He seems to have determined from the beginning that independence might come, ought to come, and must come. In November, 1772, he introduced into the Boston town meeting a modest proposition that ”a committee of correspondence be appointed ... to state the Rights of the Colonists and of this Province in particular as Men, as Christians, and as Subjects;--and also request of each Town a free communication of their Sentiments on this subject.” The committee blew the coals by an enumeration of rights and grievances; but its chief service was its unseen but efficient work of correspondence, from town to town. A few months later the colony entered into a similar scheme for communication with the sister colonies. These committees of correspondence made the Revolution possible. They disseminated arguments from province to province: they had lists of those ripe for resistance; they sounded legislatures; they prepared the organization which was necessary for the final rising of 1774 and 1775.
[Sidenote: ”Gaspee” burned.]
[Sidenote: Tea.]
[Sidenote: Hutchinson letters.]
[Sidenote: Boston Tea-party.]
Shortly before the creation of this committee, an act of violence in Rhode Island showed the hostility to the enforcement of the Acts of Trade. The ”Gaspee,” a royal vessel of war, had interfered legally and illegally with the smuggling trade. On June 9, 1772, while in pursuit a vessel, she ran aground. That night the s.h.i.+p was attacked by armed men, who captured and burned her. The colonial authorities were indifferent: the perpetrators were not tried; they were not prosecuted; they were not even arrested. On Dec. 16, 1773, a similar act of violence marked the opposition of the colonies to the remnant of the Townshend taxation acts. The tea duty had been purposely reduced, till the price of tea was lower than in England.
Soon after the appointment of the Committees of Correspondence public sentiment in Ma.s.sachusetts was again aroused by the publication of letters written by Hutchinson, then governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, to a private correspondent in England. The letters were such as any governor representing the royal authority might have written. ”I wish,” said Hutchinson, ”the good of the colony when I wish to see some fresh restraint of liberty rather than the connection with the parent state should be broken.” The a.s.sembly pet.i.tioned for the removal of Hutchinson, and this unfortunate quarrel was one of the causes of a decisive step, the Boston Tea-party. An effort was made to import a quant.i.ty of tea, not for the sake of the tax, but in order to relieve the East India Company from financial difficulties. On December 16, the three tea s.h.i.+ps in the harbor were boarded by a body of men in Indian garb, and three hundred and forty- two chests of tea were emptied into the sea. Next morning the shoes of at least one reputable citizen of Ma.s.sachusetts were found by his family unaccountably full of tea. In other parts of the country, as at Edenton in North Carolina, and at Charleston in South Carolina, there was similar violence.
30. COERCIVE ACTS OF 1774.
[Sidenote: Public feeling in England.]
The British government had taken a false step by its legislation of 1770, but the colonies had now put themselves in the wrong by these repeated acts of violence. There seemed left but two alternatives,--to withdraw the Tea Act, and thus to remove the plea that Parliament was taxing without representation; or to continue the execution of the Revenue Act firmly, but by the usual course of law. It was not in the temper of the English people, and still less like the king, to withdraw offensive acts in the face of such daring resistance. The failure to secure the prosecution of the destroyers of the ”Gaspee” caused the British government to distrust American courts as well as American juries. One political writer, Dean Tucker, declared that the American colonies in their defiant state had ceased to be of advantage to England, and that they had better be allowed quietly to separate. Pitt denied the right to tax, but declared that if the colonies meant to separate, he would be the first to enforce the authority of the mother-country.
[Sidenote: Coercive statutes.]
[Sidenote: Quebec Act.]
Neither orderly enforcement, conciliation, nor peaceful separation was the policy selected. England committed the fatal and irremediable mistake of pa.s.sing illegal statutes as a punishment for the illegal action of the colonists. Five bills were introduced and hastily pushed through Parliament. The first was meant as a punishment for the Tea-party. It enacted that no further commerce was to be permitted with the port of Boston till that town should make its submission. Burke objected to a bill ”which punishes the innocent with the guilty, and condemns without the possibility of defence.” The second act was intended to punish the whole commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts, by declaring void certain provisions of the charter granted by William III. in 1692. Of all the grievances which led to the Revolution this was the most serious, for it set up the doctrine that charters proceeding from the Crown could be altered by statute.
Thenceforward Parliament was to be omnipotent in colonial matters. The third act directed that ”Persons questioned for any Acts in Execution of the Law” should be sent to England for trial. It was not intended to apply to persons guilty of acts of violence, but to officers or soldiers who, in resisting riots, might have made themselves amenable to the civil law. The fourth act was a new measure providing for the quartering of soldiers upon the inhabitants, and was intended to facilitate the establishment of a temporary military government in Ma.s.sachusetts. The fifth act had no direct reference to Ma.s.sachusetts, but was later seized upon as one of the grievances which justified the Revolution. This was the Quebec Act, providing for the government of the region ceded by France in 1763. It gave to the French settlers the right to have their disputes decided under the principles of the old French civil law; it guaranteed them the right of exercising their own religion; and it annexed to Quebec the whole territory between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes. The purpose of this act was undoubtedly to remove the danger of disaffection or insurrection in Canada, and at the same time to extinguish all claims of Connecticut, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Virginia to the region west of Pennsylvania.