Volume I Part 30 (1/2)
He barred his windows, determined to resist their fury; but his family dragged him away with them in their flight. The mob rushed on, and beating down his windows, sacked the house (one of the finest in Boston) and destroyed everything, even a valuable collection of books and ma.n.u.scripts.
”This excess shocked the wise friends of liberty, and in a public meeting the citizens discovered the destruction, and set their faces against any further demonstrations of the sort. Rewards were offered for the rioters, and Mackintosh and some others were apprehended, but were rescued by their friends; and it was found impossible to proceed against them.” (Elliott's New England History, Vol. II., pp. 254, 255.)
”Mayhew sent the next day a special apology and disclaimer to Hutchinson. The inhabitants of Boston, at a town meeting, unanimously expressed their abhorrence of these proceedings, and a civil guard was organized to prevent their repet.i.tion. Yet the rioters, though well known, went unpunished--a sure sign of the secret concurrence of the ma.s.s of the community. Those now committed were revolutionary acts, designed to intimidate--melancholy forerunners of civil war.”
(Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol. II., Chap, xxviii., p.
528.)]
[Footnote 273: _Ib._, p. 527.
1. Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, whose house was thus sacked and his valuable papers destroyed, was the historian of his native province of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, whom I have quoted so frequently in the present volume of this history. Of his history, Mr. Bancroft, a bitter enemy of Hutchinson's, says:
”At the opening of the year 1765, the people of New England were reading the history of the first sixty years of the Colony of Ma.s.sachusetts, by Hutchinson. This work is so ably executed that as yet it remains without a rival; and his knowledge was so extensive that, with the exception of a few concealments, it exhausts the subject. Nothing so much revived the ancestral spirit which a weaving of the gloomy superst.i.tions, mixed with Puritanism, had for a long time overshadowed.” (History of the United States, Vol. V., Chap, xi., p. 228.)
2. But though mob violence distinguished Boston on this as well as on other occasions, the opposition was such throughout the colonies, from New Hamps.h.i.+re to Georgia, that all those who had been appointed to receive and distribute the stamps were compelled, by the remonstrances and often threats of their fellow-colonists, to resign the office; and the stamped paper sent from England to the ports of the various provinces was either returned back by the vessel that brought it, or put into a place of sate keeping. ”Though the Stamp Act was to have operated from the 1st of November, yet the legal proceedings in Courts were carried on as before. Vessels entered and departed without stamped papers. The printers boldly printed and circulated their newspapers, and found a sufficient number of readers, though they used common paper, in defiance of the Act of Parliament. In most departments, by common consent, business was carried on as though no stamp law existed. This was accompanied by spirited resolutions to risk all consequences rather than submit to use the paper required by the Stamp Act. While these matters were in agitation, the colonists entered into a.s.sociations against importing British manufactures till the Stamp Act should be repealed. Agreeably to the free const.i.tution of Great Britain, the subject was at liberty to buy, or not to buy, as he pleased. By suspending their future purchases until the repeal of the Stamp Act, the colonists made it the interest of merchants and manufacturers in England to solicit its repeal. They had usually taken so great a proportion of British manufactures, amounting annually to two or three millions sterling, that they threw some thousands in the mother country out of employment, and induced them, from a regard to their own interest, to advocate the measures wished for by America.” (Ramsay's Colonial History, Vol. I., pp. 345, 346).]
[Footnote 274: ”Pet.i.tions were received by Parliament from the merchants of London, Bristol, Lancaster, Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow, etc., and indeed from most of the trading and manufacturing towns and boroughs in the kingdom. In these pet.i.tions they set forth the great decay of their trade, owing to the laws and regulations made for America; the vast quant.i.ties of our manufactures (besides those articles imported from abroad, which were enclosed either with our own manufactures or with the produce of our colonies) which the American trade formerly took off our hands; by all which many thousand manufacturers, seamen, and labourers had been employed, to the very great and increasing benefit of the nation. That in return for these exports the pet.i.tioners had received from the colonies rice, indigo, tobacco, naval stores, oil, whale-fins, furs, and lately potash, with other staple commodities, besides a large balance of remittances by bills of exchange and bullion obtained by the colonists for articles of their produce, not required for the British market, and therefore exported to other places.
”That from the nature of this trade, consisting of British manufactures exported, and of the import of raw material from America, many of them used in our manufactures, and all of them tending to lessen our dependence on neighbouring states, it must be deemed of the highest importance in the commercial system of this nation. That this commerce, so beneficial to the state, and so necessary to the support of mult.i.tudes, then lay under such difficulties and discouragements, that nothing less than its utter ruin was apprehended without the immediate interposition of Parliament.
”That the colonies were then indebted to the merchants of Great Britain to the sum of several millions sterling; and that when pressed for payment, they appeal to past experience in proof of their willingness; but declare it is not in their power at present to make good their engagements, alleging that the taxes and restrictions laid upon them, and the extension of the jurisdiction of the Vice-Admiralty Courts, established by some late Acts of Parliament, particularly by an Act pa.s.sed in the 4th year of his present Majesty, for granting certain duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America, and by an Act pa.s.sed in the 5th year of his Majesty, for granting and applying certain stamp duties, etc., in said colonies, etc., with several regulations and restraints, which, if founded in Acts of Parliament for defined purposes, they represent to have been extended in such a manner as to disturb legal commerce and hara.s.s the fair trader, and to have so far interrupted the usual, former and most useful branches of their commerce, restrained the sale of their produce, thrown the state of the several provinces into confusion, and brought on so great a number of actual bankruptcies that the former opportunities and means of remittances and payments were utterly lost and taken from them.
”That the pet.i.tioners were, by these unhappy events, reduced to the necessity of applying to the House, in order to secure themselves and their families from impending ruin; to prevent a mult.i.tude of manufacturers from becoming a burden to the community, or else seeking their bread in other countries, to the irretrievable loss of the kingdom; and to preserve the strength of this nation entire, its commerce flouris.h.i.+ng, the revenues increasing, our navigation the bulwark of the kingdom, in a state of growth and extension, and the colonies, from inclination, duty, and interest, attached to the mother country.”
”Such a number of pet.i.tions from every part of the kingdom, pregnant with so many interesting facts, stated and attested by such numbers of people, whose lives had been entirely devoted to trade, and who must be naturally supposed to be competent judges of a subject which they had so long and so closely attended to (besides that it showed the general sense of the nation), could not fail of having great weight with the House.” (Annual Register for 1766, Vol. IX., Chap, vii., pp. 35, 36.)]
[Footnote 275: Ramsay's Colonial History, Vol. I., p. 348.
”At the same time that the Stamp Act was repealed, the absolute and unlimited supremacy of Parliament was, in words, a.s.serted. The opposers of repeal contended for this as essential. The friends of that measure acquiesced in it, to strengthen their party and make sure of their object. Many of both sides thought that the dignity of Great Britain required something of the kind to counterbalance the loss of authority that might result from her yielding to the clamours of the colonists.
The Act for this purpose was called the Declaratory Act, and was, in principle, more hostile to America's rights than the Stamp Act; for it annulled those resolutions and acts of the Provincial a.s.semblies in which they had a.s.serted their right to exemption from all taxes not imposed by their own representatives; and also enacted that the King and Parliament had, and of right ought to have, power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.”--_Ib._, p. 349.]
[Footnote 276: ”The aborigines were never formidable in battle until they became supplied with the weapons of European invention.”
(Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. I., p. 401.)]
[Footnote 277: The treatment of the Indians by the early New England Puritans is one of the darkest pages in English colonial history. I have slightly alluded to it in the preceding pages of this volume. Many pa.s.sages might be selected from the early divines of New England, referring to the Indians as the heathen whom they were to drive out of the land which G.o.d had given to this Israel. I will confine myself to the quotation of a few words from the late Rev. J.B. Marsden, A.M., noted for his Puritan partialities, in the two volumes of his _History of the Early and Later Puritans_. But his sense of Christian justice, tolerance, and humanity revolted at the New England Puritans'
intolerance to each other, and their cruel treatment of the Indians. Mr.
Marsden says:
”The New England Puritans were revered beyond the Atlantic as the Pilgrim Fathers, the founders of great cities, and of States renowned through the wide world for wealth, intelligence, and liberty. Their memory is cherished in England with feelings of silent respect rather than of unmixed admiration; for their inconsistencies were almost equal to their virtues; and here, while we respect their integrity, we are not blinded to their faults. A persecuted band themselves, they soon learned to persecute each other. The disciples of liberty, they confined its blessings to themselves. The loud champions of the freedom of conscience, they allowed no freedom which interfered with their narrow views. Professing a mission of Gospel holiness, they fulfilled it but in part. When opposed, they were revengeful; when irritated, fanatical and cruel. In them a great experiment was to be tried, under conditions the most favourable to its success; and it failed in its most important point. The question to be solved was this: How would the Puritans, the hunted, persecuted Puritans behave, were they but once free, once at liberty to carry their principles into full effect? The answer was returned from the sh.o.r.es of another world. It was distinct and unequivocal. And it was this: they were prepared to copy the worst vices of their English persecutors, and, untaught by experience, to imitate their worst mistakes. The severities of Whitgift seemed to be justified when it was made apparent on the plains of North America, that they had been inflicted upon men who wanted only the opportunity to inflict them again, and inflict them on one another.” (Marsden's History of the Early Puritans, Chap, xi., pp. 305, 306.)
After referring to early conflicts between the Puritans and Indians, Mr.
Marsden remarks as follows in regard to the manner in which the Puritans destroyed the Pequod nation:
”If there be a justifiable cause of war, it surely must be this, when our territory is invaded and our means of existence threatened. That the Indians fell upon their enemies by the most nefarious stratagems, or exposed them, when taken in war, to cruel torments (though such ferocity is not alleged in this instance), does not much affect the question.
They were savages, and fought white men as they and their fathers had always fought each other. How then should a community of Christian men have dealt with them? Were they to contend as savages or civilized men?
As civilized men, or rather as men who had forsaken a land of civilization for purer abodes of piety and peace? The Pequod war shows how little their piety could be trusted when their pa.s.sions were aroused.”
”After a week's marching, they came at day-break on the Indian wigwams and immediately a.s.saulted them. The 'ma.s.sacre' (so their own chronicler, Mr. Bancroft, has termed it) spread from one hut to another; for the Indians were asleep and unarmed. But the work of slaughter was too slow.