Part 4 (1/2)
The Stamp Act brought violence, rioting, and destruction in several colonies. Virginia met the act with rigid non-compliance, reasoned arguments, ”friendly persuasion”, non-importation of British goods, and finally, nullification of the act altogether. Virginians of all ranks united against the Stamp Act as they were not to unite against any British action thereafter. No one defended the act. Virginians were aided by the complicity and courage of soft-spoken Governor Francis Fauquier.
Enforcing the Stamp Act depended upon having a law to enforce, a commissioner to administer it, and stamps to attach to the doc.u.ments.
Colonel George Mercer, prominent planter who had won the commissioner's post from Richard Henry Lee, arrived in Williamsburg from London on October 30, 1765. The law was to take effect on November 1. As Mercer's ill-luck would have it, the Virginia General Court was in session and hundreds of citizens were in town, many of them the leading gentry and lawyers. Hearing that Mercer had arrived, a crowd quickly gathered and moved on the Mercer family residence. Learning of their coming, Mercer set out to meet them. At once they demanded to know whether or not he would resign his post. Mercer pleaded for time and promised an answer before the law would become effective. With that he went to what is now Mrs. Christiana Campbell's coffee house where the governor was eating.
The crowd followed. After talking with Mercer briefly, the governor invited him to the palace and walked unescorted with Mercer through the a.s.sembled hundreds. Privately to the Board of Trade, Fauquier remarked that he would have called the crowd a ”mob, did I (not) know that it was chiefly if not altogether composed of Gentlemen of property in the Colony, some of them at the Head of their Respective counties, and Merchants of the Country, whether English, Scotch, or Virginia.”
Mercer, after talking with the governor, returned to his father's house and discussed the situation with his brothers. The next morning he found 2,000 Virginians a.s.sembled and awaiting his answer. Concluding it was ”an Impossibility to execute the Act” and ”being obliged to submit to Numbers”, he resigned as commissioner and wrote Fauquier that he had no stamps with which to execute the act. With that the crowd carried him off in triumph to the coffee house.
Virginia developed a clever legal stratagem to allow the tobacco fleet to sail without the required stamps. Here the agreement of governor, gentry, merchants, and s.h.i.+p captains was essential. Once Mercer had resigned and stated he had no stamps for the customs office, Councilor Peter Randolph, in his capacity of Surveyor General of His Majesty's Customs, declared the s.h.i.+ps could sail for England with the stamps on the s.h.i.+ps' manifests. Governor Fauquier then followed with sealed certificates for each s.h.i.+p captain attesting to this fact and relieving the captains of any responsibility for non-compliance. With that the tobacco fleet sailed off to England and Scotland.
The other Virginia inst.i.tution most effected by the tax was the court system. The General Court closed. Many county courts did likewise. At the suggestion of Richard Henry Lee, the Westmoreland County court on September 24, 1765 stated it would not sit again until the Stamp Act was repealed. Northampton County court took a radically different approach proposed by Littleton Eyre and stayed open, declaring the Stamp Act ”did not bind, affect or concern the inhabitants of this colony, inasmuch as they conceive the same to be unconst.i.tutional.” The neighboring Eastern Sh.o.r.e county of Accomac followed suit. Edmund Pendleton advised James Madison, Sr., that justices of the peace should serve on the county courts and the courts should stay open, for the justices had taken an oath to uphold the law since the Stamp Act was unconst.i.tutional, they would not be violating their oaths if they held court without the stamps. It was a strange restructuring of British const.i.tutional procedure which saw Virginia county courts and individual justices of the peace declaring the laws of parliament unconst.i.tutional. Nullification of the law was at hand.
Most county courts stayed closed to pursue Lee's tactics of applying pressure on British merchants who needed the courts to enforce contracts and collect debts. By closing the courts and boycotting British imports, the Virginians put pressure on the merchants who put pressure on the government. a.s.serting pressure in a more direct manner, Lee and his fellow gentry, and any other freeholders who wanted to attend, gathered at Leedstown, Westmoreland County, on February 27, 1766 and drew up an ”a.s.sociation”. They restated the Stamp Act Resolves and a.s.serted that should anyone comply with the Stamp Act the ”a.s.sociators--will with the utmost Expedition convince all such Profligates, that immediate danger and disgrace shall attend their prost.i.tute Purpose.” Should any a.s.sociator suffer as a result of his action, the others pledged ”at the utmost risk of our Lives and Fortunes to restore such a.s.sociate to his Liberty.” The next day the a.s.sociators crossed over the Rappahannock to Hobb's Hole and ”convinced” Tory merchant Archibald Ritchie to forego his announced intention to use stamps. A similar a.s.sociation in Norfolk, the Sons of Liberty, actually tarred and feathered s.h.i.+p captain William Smith, tied him to a pony cart and dragged him through Norfolk streets to Market House. Along the way by-standers, including Mayor Maximilian Calvert, heaved rocks and rotten eggs at the hapless captain whose final humiliation came when he was tossed into the harbor beside his s.h.i.+p.[20] Small wonder s.h.i.+p captains did not sail to Virginia and London merchants were quickly submitting pet.i.tions against the Stamp Act.
[20] The resolution of the Westmoreland and Northumberland courts, and Leadstown a.s.sociation, and the Norfolk Sons of Liberty are found in Van Schreeven and Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia, I, 19-26, 25-48.
Repeal and the Declaratory Act, 1766
In July 1766 for reasons unrelated to the American crisis, George III replaced the Grenville ministry with a new ministry, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham, which included the Duke of Newcastle, Henry Conway, and the Duke of Grafton. Missing was the Old Whigs princ.i.p.al leader, William Pitt, who preferred to pursue his independent and mercurial ways. The Rockingham ministry, most of whose members had disliked the Stamp Act from the beginning, drew their greatest strength from the merchant communities. By the time parliament opened in December, Rockingham and his supporters were in agreement--the act must be repealed. But how? The violence and riots in Boston and Newport had raised cries against property destruction while the extreme const.i.tutional position attributed to Virginia and the Stamp Act Congress challenged the very heart of parliament's sovereignty. Pitt hardly helped Rockingham by excoriating Grenville and exclaiming, ”I rejoice that America resisted.”
Pitt did, however, inadvertently propose the solution when he concluded his denunciation by saying:
... the Stamp Act (must) be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately. That a reason be a.s.signed, because it was founded on an erroneous principle. At the same time, let the sovereign authority of this country over the colonies be a.s.serted in as strong terms of legislation whatsoever. That we may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever, except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent.[21]
[21] Cited in Morgans, Stamp Act, 335. The discussion which follows accepts as convincing the Morgan's contention, pgs.
15-154, that the colonists made no distinction between internal and external taxes in theory, only between taxes in general and navigation acts for regulatory purposes.
Pitt, following the resolution of the Stamp Act Congress, defined ”legislation” to mean laws governing trade for regulation and general government, but not internal or external taxes.
By January the clamor for repeal in financially-stricken London rose to fever pitch, but no solution which admitted that the act was based on ”erroneous principle” would pa.s.s. Finally, a Declaratory Act was pa.s.sed embodying the ambivalent statement to the effect that parliament did have the power to make laws binding on the colonies ”in all Cases whatsoever.” Though Pitt and the colonists interpreted laws to mean everything except taxes, others interpreted it to mean taxes; and still others interpreted it to mean internal but not external taxes. But the ambivalence was removed when Pitt and Isaac Barre sought to remove the phrase ”in all cases whatsoever” to prevent it being used to justify taxes. They failed. Thus, when the Declaratory Act pa.s.sed, most members of parliament were convinced they had declared their authority to levy taxes even though they had repealed a specific tax, the Stamp Tax.
In that same series of debates and those which followed on repeal itself, the idea grew in the minds of many members that the colonists had made a distinction between ”internal” and ”external” taxes--the one levied on goods and services inside the colony and the other levied outside the colony or before the goods reached the colony. The first might be the prerogative of the colonial a.s.sembly, the other of parliament. Undoubtedly, many seized upon the distinction between ”internal-external” as a principle they could accept in the midst of a serious setback and failure. If so, they were helped along by a magnificent presentation by Benjamin Franklin, agent for Pennsylvania, who presented the colonial case to the commons. In his astute and often clever way, Franklin dodged the internal-external issue, knowing full well most house members would not accept the idea of complete colonial autonomy on tax matters, while the colonists would accept nothing less.
He hoped repeal would remove the immediate difficulty and parliament would avoid the taxation issue in the future. His brilliant presentation was instrumental in gaining repeal of the Stamp Act, but the short-term solution created long-term confusion.[22]
[22] ibid., 327-352.
Nevertheless, repeal was achieved and a collective sigh of relief was heard in London and in the colonies. The colonists rejoiced in their victory. A few men like George Mason read the Declaratory Act and the debates carefully and concluded that the act did not disavow parliament's taxing power. Until a specific disclaimer was included, the problem was not solved. Mason was particularly defiant and sarcastic about the claims by London merchants that they had been able to gain repeal only by promising good behavior from the colonies in the future and warning the Virginians not to challenge parliament again. In his reply Mason mockingly declared:
The epithets of parent and child have been so long applied to Great Britain and her colonies, that ... we rarely see anything from your side of the water free from the authoritative style of a master to a schoolboy:
”We have with infinite difficulty and fatigue got you excused this one time; pray be a good boy for the future, do what your papa and mama bid you, and hasten to return them your most grateful acknowledgements for condescending to let you keep what is your own ... and if you should at any time hereafter happen to transgress, your friends will all beg for you and be security for your good behaviour; but if your are a naughty boy,... then everybody will hate you, and say you are a graceless and undutiful child; your parents and masters will be obliged to whip you severely....”[23]
[23] Robert A. Rutland, ed., Papers of George Mason, 3 vols.
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), I, 65-73.
One other Virginian did not rest until he had challenged the notion, much discussed in parliament by commons member Soame Jenyns, that the colonists, like all British citizens, were ”virtually” represented in parliament. To Richard Bland nothing could be more vital to the rights of British subjects than to be represented ”directly” by those whom they knew and whom they chose to represent them. In March 1766 he published his magnificent defense of Virginia rights, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies. He would not concede to parliament the notion that the colonies and colonists were represented ”virtually” in that body just as the nine out of ten Englishmen were who did not have the vote, or because members of commons were elected from districts in which they did not live or own property, or because nearly every profession and ”interest”, be it merchant, farmer, west Indian planter, physicians, soldier, clergy, and even a few Americans sat in parliament. The Inquiry was a hard-hitting defense of ”direct representation”. Interlaced with citations to the ancient charters of Virginia were terms of fury--”detestable Thought”, ”Ungenerous Insinuation”, ”despicable Opinion”, ”slavery”, ”oppression”, terms which suggest the level to which rhetoric had risen even for as rational a man as the moderate burgess from Prince George County, now grown ”tough as whitleather” with ”something of the look of musty old Parchments which he handleth and studieth much”. The Inquiry was widely read in Virginia and England and its statement on ”direct representation” became the standard American defense against ”virtual representation” and any half-way measure which would have given the colonies a few seats in parliament in the manner of Scotland or Wales.
Still the conservative Bland, who said things in a most radical way, was among those most happy to read Governor Fauquier's proclamation of June 9, 1766 announcing Repeal.[24]
[24] For the full text of Bland's Inquiry, see Van Schreeven and Scribner, Revolutionary America, I, 27-44.