Part 5 (1/2)
This measure--though doubtless unintentionally--served to encourage the soldiery in shooting down peaceful citizens, and it led by a natural sequence to the bloodshed on Lexington green. It was defended on the ground that in case of any chance affray between soldiers and citizens, it would not be possible for the soldiers to obtain a fair trial in Ma.s.sachusetts. Less than four years had elapsed since Preston's men had been so readily acquitted of murder after the shooting in King Street, but such facts were of no avail now. The momentous bill pa.s.sed in the House of Commons by a vote of more than four to one, in spite of Colonel Barre's ominous warnings.
By the fourth act all legal obstacles to the quartering of troops in Boston or any other town in Ma.s.sachusetts were swept away.
[Sidenote: The Quebec Act]
By the fifth act, known as the Quebec Act, the free exercise of the Catholic religion was sanctioned throughout Canada,--a very judicious measure of religious toleration, which concerned the other colonies but little, however it might in some cases offend their prejudices. But this act went on to extend the boundaries of Canada southward to the Ohio river, in defiance of the territorial claims of Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia. This extensive region, the part of North America which was next to be colonized by men of English race, was to be governed by a viceroy, with despotic powers; and such people as should come to live there were to have neither popular meetings, nor _habeas corpus_, nor freedom of the press. ”This,” said Lord Thurlow, ”is the only sort of const.i.tution fit for a colony,”--and all the American colonies, he significantly added, had better be reduced to this condition as soon as possible.
[Sidenote: Gage sent to Boston]
When all these acts had been pa.s.sed, in April, 1774, General Gage was commissioned to supersede Hutchinson temporarily as governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, and was sent over with as little delay as possible, together with the four regiments which were to scare the people into submission. On the first day of June, he was to close the port of Boston and begin starving the town into good behaviour; he was to arrest the leading patriots and send them to England for trial; and he was expressly authorized to use his own discretion as to allowing the soldiers to fire upon the people. All these measures for enslaving peaceful and law-abiding Englishmen the king of England now contemplated, as he himself declared, ”with supreme satisfaction.”
In recounting such measures as these, the historian is tempted to pause for a moment, and ask whether it could really have been an _English_ government that planned and decreed such things. From the autocratic mouth of an Artaxerxes or an Abderrahman one would naturally expect such edicts to issue. From the misguided cabinets of Spain and France, in evil times, measures in spirit like these had been known to proceed. But our dear mother-country had for ages stood before the world as the staunch defender of personal liberty and of local self-government; and through the mighty strength which this spirit of freedom, and nothing else, had given her, she had won the high privilege of spreading her n.o.ble and beneficent political ideas over the best part of the habitable globe. Yet in the five acts of this political tragedy of 1774 we find England arrayed in hostility to every principle of public justice which Englishmen had from time immemorial held sacred. Upon the great continent which she had so lately won from the French champions of despotism, we see her vainly seeking to establish a tyrannical _regime_ no better than that which but yesterday it had been her glory to overthrow. Such was the strange, the humiliating, the self-contradictory att.i.tude into which England had at length been brought by the selfish Tory policy of George III.!
But this policy was no less futile than it was unworthy of the n.o.ble, freedom-loving English people. For after that fated 1st of June, the sovereign authority of Great Britain, whether exerted through king or through Parliament, was never more to be recognized by the men of Ma.s.sachusetts.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] In his account of the American Revolution, Mr. Lecky inclines to the Tory side, but he is eminently fair and candid.
CHAPTER III
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
[Portrait: Tho.' Gage]
[Ill.u.s.tration: FOX AND BURKE DENOUNCING LORD NORTH (_A contemporary caricature_)]
[Sidenote: Belief that the Americans would not fight]
The unfortunate measures of April, 1774, were not carried through Parliament without earnest opposition. Lord Rockingham and his friends entered a protest on the journal of the House of Lords, on the grounds that the people of Ma.s.sachusetts had not been heard in their own defence, and that the lives and liberties of the citizens were put absolutely into the hands of the governor and council, who were thus invested with greater powers than it had ever been thought wise to entrust to the king and his privy council in Great Britain. They concluded, therefore, that the acts were unconst.i.tutional. The Duke of Richmond could not restrain his burning indignation. ”I wish,” said he in the House of Lords,--”I wish from the bottom of my heart that the Americans may resist, and get the better of the forces sent against them.” But that the Americans really would resist, very few people in England believed. The conduct of the ministry was based throughout upon the absurd idea that the Americans could be frightened into submission.
General Gage, as we have seen, thought that four regiments would be enough to settle the whole business. Lord Sandwich said that the Americans were a set of undisciplined cowards, who would take to their heels at the first sound of a cannon. Even Hutchinson, who went over to England about this time, and who ought to have known of what stuff the men of Ma.s.sachusetts were made, a.s.sured the king that they could hardly be expected to resist a regular army. Such blunders, however, need not surprise us when we recollect how, just before the war of secession, the people of the southern and of the northern states made similar mistakes with regard to each other. In 1860, it was commonly said by Southern people that Northern people would submit to anything rather than fight; and in support of this opinion, it was sometimes asked, ”If the Northern people are not arrant cowards, why do they never have duels?” On the other hand, it was commonly said at the North that the Southern people, however bravely they might bl.u.s.ter, would never enter upon a war of secession, because it was really much more for their interest to remain in the Federal Union than to secede from it,--an argument which lost sight of one of the commonest facts in human life, that under the influence of strong pa.s.sion men are unable to take just views of what concerns their own interests. Such examples show how hard it often is for one group of men to understand another group, even when they are all of the same blood and speech, and think alike about most matters that do not touch the particular subject in dispute. Nothing could have been surer, either in 1860, or in 1774, than that the one party to the quarrel was as bold and brave as the other.
[Sidenote: Belief that Ma.s.sachusetts would not be supported by the other colonies]
Another fatal error under which the ministry laboured was the belief that Ma.s.sachusetts would not be supported by the other colonies. Their mistake was not unlike that which ruined the plans of Napoleon III., when he declared war upon Prussia in 1870. There was no denying the fact of strong jealousies among the American colonies in 1774, as there was no denying the fact of strong jealousies between the northern and southern German states in 1870. But the circ.u.mstances under which Napoleon III. made war on Prussia happened to be such as to enlist all the German states in the common cause with her. And so it was with the war of George III. against Ma.s.sachusetts. As soon as the charter of that colony was annulled, all the other colonies felt that their liberties were in jeopardy; and thence, as Fox truly said, ”all were taught to consider the town of Boston as suffering in the common cause.”
[Sidenote: News of the Port Bill]
News of the Boston Port Bill was received in America on the 10th of May.
On the 12th the committees of several Ma.s.sachusetts towns held a convention at Faneuil Hall, and adopted a circular letter, prepared by Samuel Adams, to be sent to all the other colonies, asking for their sympathy and cooperation. The response was prompt and emphatic. In the course of the summer, conventions were held in nearly all the colonies, declaring that Boston should be regarded as ”suffering in the common cause.” The obnoxious acts of Parliament were printed on paper with deep black borders, and in some towns were publicly burned by the common hangman. Droves of cattle and flocks of sheep, cartloads of wheat and maize, kitchen vegetables and fruit, barrels of sugar, quintals of dried fish, provisions of every sort, were sent overland as free gifts to the people of the devoted city, even the distant rice-swamps of South Carolina contributing their share. The over-cautious Franklin had written from London, suggesting that perhaps it might be best, after all, for Ma.s.sachusetts to indemnify the East India Company; but Gadsden, with a sounder sense of the political position, sent word, ”Don't pay for an ounce of the d.a.m.ned tea.” Throughout the greater part of the country the 1st of June was kept as a day of fasting and prayer; bells were m.u.f.fled and tolled in the princ.i.p.al churches; s.h.i.+ps in the harbours put their flags at half-mast. Marblehead, which was appointed to supersede Boston as port of entry, immediately invited the merchants of Boston to use its wharfs and warehouses free of charge in s.h.i.+pping and uns.h.i.+pping their goods. A policy of absolute non-importation was advocated by many of the colonies, though Pennsylvania, under the influence of d.i.c.kinson, still vainly cheris.h.i.+ng hopes of reconciliation, hung back, and advised that the tea should be paid for. As usual, the warmest sympathy with New England came from Virginia. ”If need be,” said Was.h.i.+ngton, ”I will raise one thousand men, subsist them at my own expense, and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston.”
[Portrait: John Hanc.o.c.k]
[Sidenote: Samuel Adams at Salem]
To insure concerted action on the part of the whole country, something more was required than these general expressions and acts of sympathy.
The proposal for a Continental Congress came first from the Sons of Liberty in New York; it was immediately taken up by the members of the Virginia House of Burgesses, sitting in convention at the Raleigh tavern, after the governor had dissolved them as a legislature; and Ma.s.sachusetts was invited to appoint the time and place for the meeting of the Congress. On the 7th of June the Ma.s.sachusetts a.s.sembly was convened at Salem by General Gage, in conformity with the provisions of the Port Bill. Samuel Adams always preferred to use the ordinary means of transacting public business so long as they were of avail, and he naturally wished to have the act appointing a Continental Congress pa.s.sed by the a.s.sembly. But this was not easy to bring about, for upon the first hint that any such business was to come up the governor would be sure to dissolve the a.s.sembly. In such case it would be necessary for the committees of correspondence throughout Ma.s.sachusetts to hold a convention for the purpose of appointing the time and place for the Congress and of electing delegates to attend it. But Adams preferred to have these matters decided in regular legislative session, and he carried his point. Having talked privately with several of the members, at last on the 17th of June--a day which a twelvemonth hence was to become so famous--the favourable moment came. Having had the door locked, he introduced his resolves, appointing five delegates to confer with duly appointed delegates from the other colonies, in a Continental Congress at Philadelphia on the 1st of September next. Some of the members, astonished and frightened, sought to pa.s.s out; and as the doorkeeper seemed uneasy at a.s.suming so much responsibility, Samuel Adams relieved him of it by taking the key from the door and putting it into his own pocket, whereupon the business of the a.s.sembly went on.
Soon one of the Tory members pretended to be very sick, and being allowed to go out, made all haste to Governor Gage, who instantly drew up his writ dissolving the a.s.sembly, and sent his secretary with it.