by Nick Bunker
For the time being, Franklin expected the British to climb down and abolish the threepenny Townshend duty altogether. Like so many others, he believed that the next war with France could not be postponed indefinitely. If so, the British dared not lose the support of the colonies, with their naval bases and their reserves of ships and seafarers—or so the argument ran. However, from the spring of 1773, Franklin’s letters begin to convey a sense of unease as he found the government’s stance increasingly puzzling. As he wrote in a bewildered letter to his son in New Jersey, “All depends upon Circumstances and Events. We govern from hand to mouth. There seems to be no wise, regular Plan.”24
In all probability, Lord Dartmouth simply did not know Lord North’s intentions, and this would explain his vagueness. A ruthless operator when need be, North might very well choose to keep even his oldest friend in the dark until he was ready to spring his own agenda on an unsuspecting House of Commons. Indeed, from the surviving records, it seems that North never asked the Colonial Office its opinion about his scheme to use the surplus tea as a political weapon. The plan came from the Treasury alone.
Even so, Franklin had rightly detected a change in the political temperature. Thanks to the Gaspée incident, a colder wind was blowing from Whitehall, toward another confrontation with the colonies; and meanwhile, three thousand miles away, events were converging toward a climax of their own. At Newport the Gaspée commissioners were bringing their futile inquiry to a close. Although they knew that John Brown had organized the raid, they could find no witnesses reliable enough to put before a jury. Their work merely served to deepen hostility and suspicion on both sides of the Atlantic. In the eyes of the British military, the affair simply proved that disloyal Americans would never mend their ways; and among the people of New England a similar hardening of opinion occurred. Since the first news of the Stamp Act arrived nearly eight years earlier, gradually the northern colonies had become estranged from the mother country. In the second half of 1772 this process accelerated and became irreversible.
By the end of January 1773, partly as a result of Britain’s bungled attempt to prosecute the Gaspée raiders and partly because of other, older grievances, public opinion in New England had swung decisively against the empire. Long before the fighting began at Lexington, a rebellion took place in the mind, starting in Providence and Boston and then spreading outward across the rest of Massachusetts and further afield until eventually it reached kindred spirits in Virginia and Charleston, where many people had already arrived at the same revolutionary conclusions. Some of the ideas they adopted had been current in debate in America for decades, with roots stretching back to the age of Elisha Cooke, if not before, but now they acquired a fresh relevance. As yet, nobody in the colonies had even the slightest suspicion that Lord North intended to send them the company’s tea. Even so, in New England rebellious doctrines had already begun to circulate with a new intensity.
* * *
*1 In Yorkshire, Rockingham inhabited perhaps the finest English country house of the period, the immense Palladian mansion at Wentworth Woodhouse between Barnsley and Rotherham.
*2 All the more so, because Edmund Burke acted as agent in London for the colony of New York. Within a few months of its publication, the Providence Gazette printed a review of his book, and the Boston newspapers quoted Burke frequently.
*3 The deputation consisted of two grocers, Monkhouse Davison and Abraham Newman, who were substantial exporters of legal tea to Massachusetts.
*4 By January 1773, the company’s stock of tea had reached 16.8 million pounds by weight, of which they expected to sell only seven million pounds in the British Isles.
*5 In fact, Franklin had drifted so far out of touch with politics at Westminster that when at last he tried to write to Edmund Burke, in the autumn of 1774, he sent the letter to an address that Burke had left two years earlier.
Chapter Eight
MASSACHUSETTS ON THE EVE
I have long feared that this unhappy contest will end in Rivers of Blood.
—SAMUEL ADAMS, WRITING TO A FRIEND IN RHODE ISLAND, JANUARY 17731
The town of Boston stood in urgent need of a change of government, for the sake of its prosperity and for its peace of mind. The same was true of the rest of Massachusetts, where the bonds of obedience were swiftly becoming untied.
Of course, the strength of hostility toward Great Britain varied from place to place in the old Bay Colony. Some districts were far more radical than others; and at least one in five of its citizens never wanted to leave the empire, even long after Bunker Hill. Many others were uncommitted either way. And yet, within a year of the Gaspée incident, one thing was already very clear. Impervious to colonial control, Massachusetts contained tens of thousands of men and women, perhaps already forming a majority, who had relinquished all but a token loyalty to the king and Parliament.
Perhaps the closest equivalent in modern times was the end of the Communist regime in East Germany. Of course King George III never had a Stasi. The old colonial system was anything but totalitarian. It was loose, it was flimsy, it dithered and delayed. Its most appalling feature—the institution of slavery—was a private system run by Americans, protected by laws they had passed themselves. Even so, a parallel can still be drawn between the earliest phase of the American Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 1989 it became apparent that the Soviet empire was in full retreat, unable to prevent the Hungarians from opening their frontier to the west. When the East German authorities tried to defend the old order, the first demonstrations began in Leipzig in September. At first only a few thousand people gathered in the main square. As the days passed, the protests grew bolder. The authorities began to waver. The number of people out on the streets increased until they reached as many as seventy thousand. Confronted by the unthinkable, the Honecker regime lost its nerve. A month later the game was up, and the wall that divided Berlin proved to be nothing more than concrete and asbestos.
Something of the kind took place in Massachusetts in the autumn of 1774, with General Gage performing the role of Erich Honecker on horseback. In the space of eight weeks the colony ceased to be British. After a series of episodes of civil disobedience in Worcester, in Salem, and deep in the interior, a provisional government met in October, with John Hancock in the chair.
To outsiders who had never visited New England or the Soviet bloc, these two revolutions appeared to occur with startling speed. But in fact the revolution on the streets could only occur because of an earlier rebellion in the head, gradually unfolding over many years. Long before the events of 1989, the bullies who ran the old East Germany began to lose their grip on the minds of the people. In the cafés a customer could not buy a cup of coffee, and in the restaurants even bratwurst was off the menu. Most families in Leipzig or Berlin lived in cold and damp apartments, shoddily built, from which they could watch West German television and compare a Trabant with a BMW. While Honecker and his comrades spouted nonsense about their achievements, the East German economy faltered and then shrank. By 1988 even an official poll showed that less than a third of the people “were proud to be citizens of a socialist state.” A year before the wall came down, the regime was already precarious, as its subjects withdrew the last, grudging degree of respect.2
A similar process of alienation occurred in Massachusetts in the decade before the war. By the autumn of 1772 large sections of the population had become convinced, unfairly or not, that Lord North and the king were intent on their enslavement. Even at times when the British did nothing, the divide between the mother country and New England seemed to widen all the more. Long before the fighting started, it became almost routine for men and women at the grass roots to deny the sovereignty of the Crown. Take, for example, a place called Pownalborough, hidden away in the woods in what is now the state of Maine.
At that time it was the seat of Lincoln County, Massachusetts, with a white colonial courthouse still to be seen today. A front
ier town built on the site of a military post, Pownalborough grew swiftly after the treaty of 1763 made the area safe against the Indians and the French. By the time of the revolution as many as fourteen hundred people lived hereabouts. Six months before the Boston Tea Party, the townspeople issued their own declaration of independence. “Allegiance is a relative term,” they said in a letter to their fellow patriots in Boston. “Our forefathers as soon as they landed here considered themselves as beyond the Supreme Authority of the Crown of England.”3
If the citizens were so radical in a remote location where people never saw a redcoat, what were they saying in Boston, where the empire was far more conspicuous? At a time when allegedly all was quiet, in fact a visitor would find the most forthright expressions of discontent: for instance, in the Boston Gazette of October 5, 1772. The newspaper gave three pages to a tirade against Thomas Hutchinson and the system he represented. “Is it not high Time for the People of this Country explicitly to declare whether they will be Freemen or slaves?” the writer inquired.
For the British, it was tempting to dismiss this kind of thing as empty rhetoric. For many years the Gazette had been running outspoken columns by Samuel Adams, full of the same sort of language, which the governor dutifully sent to his superiors. But on their arrival in Whitehall, articles such as these raised difficult questions that historians have been trying to answer ever since. In an age when opinion polls and focus groups were yet to be invented, who could tell what the American people really thought? Were the views contained in the Gazette widely held in New England? Or did the newspaper speak merely for a handful of extremists?
The British could not say for sure. It was even harder for them to read the mind of Massachusetts than it was for Benjamin Franklin to understand the cabinet. While a hawk like Lord Sandwich believed that all Americans were rebels by nature, his colleague Lord Dartmouth preferred to give them the benefit of the doubt. In his eyes the revolution arose from a conspiracy by devious men allied with Adams who used the wiles of propaganda to seduce their neighbors into treason. Neither minister considered another possibility, which seems to have been the truth: that even men and women temperamentally inclined to be loyal had begun to see the British Empire as something they could do without.
The sheer size of Massachusetts, with at least 300,000 inhabitants, makes it hard to believe that anyone could fool a majority into disobedience. The speed with which resistance came to a head in 1774 shows that the movement was broad and popular and not a mere conspiracy by Adams and his friends. There were many reasons why disaffection had become widespread, and sometimes they were very local and specific. In Maine, for example, at places like Pownalborough the farmers resented the way the Royal Navy took their best trees to serve as masts for battleships. But elsewhere, even people without a local grievance ceased to believe in the colonial system. It became ever harder to argue that the empire served a useful purpose.
Like the Honecker regime in East Germany, the king and his ministers lost the respect of their subjects because they failed to honor their side of a bargain. Never a very subtle creed, East German socialism promised to provide equality, security, and material well-being, with—in the long run—a higher standard of living than that of the West. As time went on and capitalism refused to collapse, the pledge made by the Communist state seemed ever more unlikely to be honored. The nation also became more unequal, since only the party apparatchiks could hope to prosper as the economy declined. By 1989 the situation seemed to be terminal, and so respect for the government disappeared entirely. The same thing occurred in Boston during the 1770s. In the eighteenth century, the people of Massachusetts believed that they had their own deal with the British Crown, but by 1772 it appeared to be breaking down. The authorities either could not or would not deliver their side of the imperial bargain.
In Massachusetts the colonists had always seen the empire as a contract between themselves and the Crown: a contract freely entered into by both sides. Far from being abstract or metaphysical, it existed in black and white, written down in the charter of the colony granted eighty years earlier by King William III. Like the similar charter applying to Rhode Island, in places it was loosely worded, leaving it open to rival interpretations. Even so, Bostonians such as Samuel Adams and his kinsman John had no doubt about its fundamental purpose. The charter was supposed to promote their liberty and their prosperity. If the British failed to abide by its terms, the people of Massachusetts were entitled to seek redress by whatever means they chose.
Despite the high-flown language that the Boston patriots often employed, there was nothing rarefied about their view of the empire. In order to fulfill the terms of the contract, the British were expected to provide tangible benefits of four different kinds. Defense came first, economics came second, and the two were closely intertwined. Especially in New England, the Americans relied on maritime trade, but they could not guarantee its safety by themselves. For that they needed the Royal Navy. Second, they expected Great Britain to remain their closest economic partner by keeping its doors wide open to Americans with goods to sell. In both cases, the colonies expected the empire to promote their well-being by making the Atlantic a safe, reliable sea on which to sail.
For similar motives, they turned to George III for a third reason: to provide the gift of justice at times when the colonies required an impartial arbitrator from outside. As they grew, boundary disputes between them became ever more frequent. It was commonplace, and not only in Vermont, for rival claims to land to drive a wedge between one province and another. Here again, the Crown ought to be useful. By supplying wise counsel, surveying the land, and giving an unbiased opinion, perhaps the king or his emissaries could prevent these squabbles from taking a violent form.
Last, the Americans expected Great Britain to give them a guarantee of liberty, civil and religious, of the kind they believed the British enjoyed at home. Again, their concept of freedom had nothing mysterious about it. It was embodied in the Bill of Rights enacted by Parliament in London in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution against King James II. Trial by jury, the right to bear arms, free elections to Parliament, and free speech when it assembled: all of these were made sacrosanct. The monarch could have a standing army, but only if Parliament gave its consent; he could make no laws without its approval, and taxation always required a vote by the House of Commons. It was taken for granted in America that the same rights extended to Americans as well. Indeed, in this respect they were more British than the British. In the colonies people endlessly rehearsed the revolutionary principles of the 1680s, long after the point when in England they had become a tired cliché. Most eloquently, John Adams restated them in the document known as the Braintree Instructions, drawn up as part of the protests against the Stamp Act.
If these were the benefits the colonists expected from the empire, then by 1772 the British seemed unable to supply them. The boundary disputes in Vermont were a case in point. Although Whitehall received long reports about the situation in the valley, the officials could offer no solution. Their dithering about the wilderness placed another question mark over their competence. In Boston the press reported the loss of Fort de Chartres and ran stories from London about the cabinet’s disarray. Once again the British had failed to reach a firm decision about the settlement of the Ohio country. Everything was fuzzy and confused, with no sign of a robust policy toward the western frontier.
Nor did the empire’s military might appear as awesome as once it had. In the army led by General Gage, desertion was frequent, with nearly 10 percent of each regiment going absent each year. During the opening battles of the war, it would soon become obvious that the British suffered from poor training and indiscipline, but signs of this were already visible during the occupation of Boston between 1768 and 1770. While Americans did not want a standing army on their soil, the one they did have might be too weak to defeat the Bourbons if the need arose. As for the navy, everyone knew that the king had twice as many warships a
s the French. But after the financial crash, could he afford to keep them afloat?
The crisis in the markets had left a deep impression. In the columns of the press in Boston, it evoked a new skepticism about the mother country. “The resources of this Country are incomparably superior to those of its parent,” said the Gazette in its diatribe in October. “ ’Tis matter of notoriety, that the Staples of Great Britain are comparatively few, and that her Commercial Resources are contingent and precarious.” Statements such as these were a gross exaggeration—while Britain was in economic trouble, the recession was temporary, and the nation that launched the Industrial Revolution was not a country in decline—but we can see why Americans might form such a view. Benjamin Franklin held the same opinion. In London he counted among his friends the Welsh actuary Richard Price, who believed—honestly, but mistakenly—that Britain’s population was dwindling away, as a consequence of poverty, disease, and decadence.*
If that were so, then it was hard to see how Great Britain could indefinitely finance its enormous national debt. In American eyes, the British seemed to face a dismal future. The newspapers in London often said the same thing. And this perception—that the British were weak and all but insolvent while America was going from strength to strength—could only make the colonies more restless.
Above all, the Americans had come to doubt Great Britain’s commitment to liberty. Time and again, the king and his ministers appeared to be chipping away at the edifice of freedom. The Stamp Act and the Townshend duties had shown that Parliament had no qualms about imposing taxes in the colonies against the will of the people. When it sent the redcoats into Boston and left them there for eighteen months or more, the government behaved in an overbearing fashion that its own citizens at home would never tolerate. The British reaction to the Gaspée raid looked like yet another affront to the principles for which the empire was supposed to stand. By appointing a commission to investigate the affair, with the powers to haul the culprits back to London, Lord Dartmouth appeared to be removing the right to trial by jury. How could a Rhode Islander receive a fair hearing at Westminster in front of a panel chosen for its loyalty to the king? It would set a fearful precedent, one that might make freedom a thing of the past.
