by Nick Bunker
If that system were changed, it was argued, the principles embodied in the charter would be undermined. A governor paid directly by the British could choose to ignore the will of the people. Worse still, a precedent would be established. Soon all the officials in the colony would become little better than hirelings of the king or, as Samuel Adams put it with his gift for understatement, “pimps, parasites, panders, prostitutes and whores.” Even judicial salaries might be funded in the same way. Once on the imperial payroll, the judges would be answerable only to the authorities in London. Did Lord North intend to pay the justices directly, making them hirelings too? At the end of September 1772, news arrived in Boston that the British meant to do just that.16
A month or so before Lord Hillsborough resigned, he had asked the Treasury’s permission to pay the five most senior judges in Massachusetts from the proceeds of the tea tax. During the meeting in July at which he heard the report about the Gaspée, North signed the relevant order. It is hard to say whether he knew just how provocative this was. He certainly wished to curb the power of the colonial assembly. But, as so often, Lord North might have been acting from short-term political motives. At this moment, he was embroiled in the cabinet crisis. In a vain effort to hold his team together, he might simply have chosen to placate a colleague, Lord Hillsborough, whom he did not wish to lose.
Whatever North’s intentions were, the news caused an uproar in Boston, leading to the tirades in the press of early October. A few weeks later another ship arrived with the reports about the Gaspée commission of inquiry. It seemed that Rhode Island and Massachusetts had been targeted for persecution by the Crown. Trial by jury and the independence of the judiciary: these were two sacred principles, closely linked to each other, both of which the British seemed determined to subvert. On October 24, the story about the Gaspée commission ran in the Boston press. Four days after that, a town meeting assembled at Faneuil Hall, chaired by Hancock, to prepare a response to this impending crisis. It took three weeks to write, but the document that emerged came close to being a revolutionary manifesto.
Drafted by a committee including Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, it is usually known as the Boston pamphlet. It was formally adopted on November 20 by another town meeting with about three hundred people in attendance: a good turnout for a place the size of Boston. Although the pamphlet ran to little more than forty pages, in large print with wide margins, it would be hard to exaggerate its importance. Not because it contained anything new by way of theory: it leaned very heavily on the work of John Locke, dating from the 1680s, and even quoted him verbatim. The pamphlet’s originality lay elsewhere: in its daring and in the use to which it was put. Because the pamphlet was short, clearly written, and carefully divided into numbered sections, nobody could fail to understand it. The opening section begins with an uncompromising statement of what the authors call “the Natural Rights of the Colonists as Men.” In a single paragraph of fewer than sixty words, the pamphlet sets them out precisely.17
The first law of nature is self-preservation: that is to say, human beings have a duty to seek their own welfare. But if that is so, then it follows that men and women must also have rights, because, if they did not, they would be unable to preserve themselves as the law of nature dictates. Human beings have a right to all those things without which self-preservation is impossible. They have a right not only to life, to liberty, and to property, the pamphlet says, but also to defend those rights when they are under threat. From these simple principles, the pamphlet developed a point-by-point critique of the defects inherent in the British regime. In all, it listed twelve grievances against the colonial system: twelve ways in which the empire had put property, life, and liberty in danger.
They included not only taxation without consent but also General Gage’s standing army, the judges’ salaries, the Gaspée inquiry, and the rules of trade that handicapped the American economy. Right at the top we find the most fundamental grievance of all, and here the pamphlet bordered on sedition. The authors entirely rejected the Declaratory Act. “The British Parliament have assumed the powers of legislation for the colonies in all cases whatsoever, without obtaining the consent of the inhabitants,” they said, and this, according to them, was intolerable and wrong.
It would also be hard to exaggerate how hazardous the situation in Boston was becoming for the British. Far from having a coherent policy for bringing America to heel, Lord North and his colleagues had very little policy at all. Small, tired, and demoralized, the Colonial Office had just acquired in Lord Dartmouth a new and perhaps a naive secretary. The western wilderness was on the way to being lost, and so was the battle with the smugglers. In any event, the king and his ministers were preoccupied elsewhere. However dearly they wished to tighten their grip on America, their approach was patchy and piecemeal.
And yet Lord North had managed to convince the people of Boston that he was bent on their subjugation. The pamphlet said exactly that. Written to appeal to the widest possible readership, it was swiftly disseminated. While it was in preparation, Samuel Adams and his colleagues organized the new Boston Committee of Correspondence. The committee sent the pamphlet to like-minded friends and allies throughout the colony. As many as fifty other towns in Massachusetts joined the network, exchanging ideas with Boston: towns such as Pownalborough, which was about to issue its own outspoken denial of British authority. Six months before the Tea Party, the people of Pownalborough were already dropping hints about resistance to the Crown by force of arms.
It seems likely that the pamphlet was intended to push Thomas Hutchinson into some extreme response. If so, it was entirely successful. In the wake of the Gaspée affair, the governor believed that London wished him to stand firm against sedition. For this Lord Dartmouth was largely to blame. Uncertain what line to take, he tended to reply to Hutchinson’s letters with vague statements of principle that led the governor to believe that the British would support whatever steps he took. And so, in the first week of 1773, he braced himself for action of the kind he thought Dartmouth wished to see.
Fatally, Hutchinson made the error of attacking Samuel Adams and his allies on the philosophical battlefield where they were strongest. A wiser man would have fudged the issue, offered some bland reassurance, and waited for the fuss about the judges to die down. Instead, the governor did what came naturally to a Harvard graduate. On January 6, when he opened a new session of the colonial assembly, Hutchinson delivered his own long speech about fundamentals. The town meetings in Boston were illegal, he told them, and the publication of the pamphlet was a crime. Worst of all, its authors understood nothing about the empire. So the governor gave the assembly a lecture on the constitution. No line could be drawn, said Hutchinson, between the supremacy of Parliament and the complete independence of America.18
While his logic might have been impeccable, his timing was appalling. In politics, many words are better left unsaid. By speaking so plainly, the governor wrecked any hope of reconciliation. On January 26, the House of Representatives gave its reply: a dogged reiteration of the Boston pamphlet. Most outrageously, they denied that Parliament could make laws for the colonies without their free consent. They began to draw up a petition to George III calling for an end to the plan to pay the judges from the tea tax. Much later, speaking privately in 1775, Lord North identified this as the moment when, in effect, the people of Massachusetts declared their independence. It was also the point at which John Hancock aligned himself forever with Boston’s most outspoken radicals.
In order for the American Revolution to begin, a broad coalition had to be created across the province, united in hostility toward Great Britain. The alliance would need to include not only the people who attended the church at Brattle Square but also storekeepers, mechanics, laborers, and the unemployed. In addition, it would have to encompass the farmers from the interior. The farmers, not the people of Boston, had to supply the military vanguard of the revolution, because the town was simply too small to be de
cisive. Boston accounted for less than 6 percent of the colony’s population.
By the spring of 1773, this alliance was close to completion, with John Hancock the man most likely to lead it. No one had shown more firmness than Hancock in the defense of liberty, wrote Samuel Adams in April. He said that in a letter to his friend Arthur Lee in London, which he asked Lee to give to John Wilkes. And it was there, in London, that the next step was taken down the road to war.19
At last, Lord North was ready to show his hand with regard to Bengal. He was about to announce his plan to rescue the East India Company in exchange for a package of reforms. He secured its passage through Parliament at a time when, suddenly, he found himself basking in glory. Without firing a shot, the cabinet ministers achieved something in which every Briton could take pride: they put the French to shame. In a triumphant mood that lasted until the end of the year, the king and his ministers blundered into their clash with the colonies.
* * *
* A brilliant mathematician, Price was also a nonconformist clergyman, and he kept in close touch with like-minded friends in New England, especially at Yale University. In 1776 he published an outspoken book defending American liberty. His error about the British population arose from what seemed to be convincing evidence: a fall in the birthrate in London, and a decline in receipts from the taxes on windows, ale, and beer. Actually these were statistical blips—in reality, population growth was beginning to accelerate—but his arguments were taken very seriously at the time. In April 1781, Yale conferred honorary doctorates on two men: Richard Price and George Washington.
Chapter Nine
THE BOSTON TEA PARTY: PRELUDE
Your conduct has given the greatest satisfaction.
—GEORGE III TO LORD NORTH, 17731
It took only an hour or so on April 26, 1773, for the House of Commons to agree that the East India Company could send its surplus tea to America. No vote was taken. The members of the opposition were far too few to have any hope of defeating the measure.
Briefly and with little energy, the Rockingham Whigs pointed out that if the tea sailed to the colonies with the threepenny tax still in force, the Americans would resist its importation. “If he doesn’t take off the duty, they won’t take the tea,” said their leader in the Commons, William Dowdeswell, a man already dying of either cancer or tuberculosis. His most vocal supporters in the debate were the agitated Scotsmen George Johnstone and his brother Pulteney, who wanted to end the tax on tea entirely and gave the same warning of potential unrest.
Old Jacobites they might be, but the Johnstones counted Adam Smith among their closest friends. As the free-market economist might have done, they denounced the tea duty as an affront to what they called “the plain principles of commerce.” If it were abolished, consumption in the colonies would soar, and the smugglers would be eliminated. But Lord North gave that argument short shrift. Yes, he wanted to end the illegal trade in tea from Holland, but for the good of the empire he had to think of politics as well as money. “I am unwilling to give up that duty upon America upon which the colonial salaries are charged,” he told the Commons. Americans could not expect any more concessions while “the temper of the people there is so little deserving.” At that point the man keeping shorthand notes broke off. What else Lord North said is not recorded.2
After an even easier passage through the House of Lords, the Tea Act became law on May 10. With that, the issue faded from the stage of British politics. Only sketchy reports appeared in the press, and Benjamin Franklin hardly noticed them. In his next letter to America he did not mention the episode at all. Nor did Edmund Burke when he wrote to the colonial assembly in New York in July. Neither man recognized the significance of what had taken place.
Meanwhile, Lord North seemed to be invincible again. After such a gloomy winter, the political climate had steadily improved. True, the economy remained fragile, with credit still almost impossible to obtain. In the textile trades and in London, the slump continued, while bread remained expensive, leading to strikes and more riots by the hungry and the unemployed. Even as North announced the Tea Act, a few miles to the east the weavers and the men who shoveled coal were gathering in their hundreds to protest against the price of a loaf. But the panic in the markets had subsided, and gold had begun to flow back into the Bank of England. In the spring, North’s budget speech went wonderfully well, with another healthy surplus to report. The stock market rose to a peak not seen since 1768.
Lord North had also made excellent progress with his plan to rectify the corrupt administration of Bengal. At last the egregious Colebrooke had followed so many other bankers into insolvency, white waistcoat and all, and lost his seat on the East India Company’s board. The company found a new chairman, a loyal supporter of the cabinet called Henry Crabb Boulton. Even so, it took seven difficult weeks, beginning in late April, for North to pass his Regulating Act for India. But with Boulton’s help he eventually won every debate: in the Commons, in the Lords, and in the stockholders’ meetings at East India House. Henceforth, Bengal would have a governor-general and judges chosen by the cabinet and the king. In return, the Treasury would lend the company the money it needed. The deal to save it from collapse was finally done in the last week of June, and at last the financial crisis was resolved.
Against this background, it was only too tempting to see New England as a little local difficulty of scarcely more consequence than the interminable wrangling in South Carolina. During the whole of 1773, America was never mentioned once in any of the scores of letters that passed to and fro between Lord North and George III. Their gaze was turned elsewhere, toward the Baltic and the Mediterranean. They were about to win a famous victory that warmed the nation’s heart.
During the spring and early summer, while the plan for the tea drew ever closer to fruition, once again Great Britain stood on the brink of hostilities with France. War scares were frequent, but this one ranked as by far the most serious since the Falklands affair three years earlier. Although it ended well for Lord North, success had ambiguous consequences. It made the British overconfident, leaving them temporarily strong but even more isolated diplomatically. In due course, this would have grave implications for their strategic position in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean.3
The war scare arose indirectly from the Swedish revolution of 1772. In Stockholm the young king Gustav III had led a military coup against his Parliament, with the open support of Louis XV. At that the Russians began to rattle their sabers, warning of preemptive action if France attempted to make Sweden a vehicle for its own ambitions in the Baltic. Soon enough, reports reached the British that the French were arming their fleet, not on their country’s Atlantic coast, but in the southern harbor of Toulon. It appeared that they meant to attack a Russian squadron that Catherine the Great had sent to the Aegean as part of her grand design to dismantle the Ottoman Empire.
Were France and Russia about to go to war? If so, then a general European conflict seemed the likely outcome, something that would place the interests of Great Britain in grave danger. The British wanted neither France nor Russia to emerge as the dominant power on the Continent, but while the Russians might still be won over with diplomacy or gold, the French could never be trusted. And so it was against them that British efforts were directed.
On April 24, two days before the Commons debate on the Tea Act, Lord Sandwich ordered a frigate out of Gibraltar to follow every move the French might make. Fireships were prepared to enter Toulon if necessary and burn their fleet at its moorings. At home the Royal Navy began to make ready for sea, either to scare the French into retreat or to sink them if need be.
At the outbreak of any war in the period, a race for mobilization occurred, a race that the British always had to win. Their foreign policy depended on the navy as an instrument of deterrence. This could only be credible if they could deploy it swiftly in a situation such as this. But for reasons of economy, in peacetime the bulk of the fleet was laid up in dock
with masts and sails stowed onshore and with only skeleton crews. The French, it was estimated, had 74 ships in their line of battle, while the British had nearly 130. But many of these were under repair, only 80 or so were fit for action, and in theory even these might need four weeks to be ready to sail.
All eyes were on Lord Sandwich, who had worked so tirelessly to prepare for a crisis of precisely such a kind. For their part, his officers were spoiling for a fight. To lead his task force to the Mediterranean, Sandwich made an excellent choice: Charles Saunders, the sailor who had landed General James Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. “If I sail, there will be a war,” said the admiral, and for once the seamen of the Channel ports flocked to the colors without a press gang to round them up. Two days after receiving his orders, Admiral Saunders had ten ships at sea.4
For three weeks the nation remained in suspense, while the newspapers beat the patriotic drum. And then a dispatch arrived from Paris saying that the French had thought again and ordered their fleet to stand down. Only six months earlier, Frederick the Great had been calling the British feeble and irresolute. Now even the skeptical Prussian had to admit that they had stood their ground. And then, far from offering an olive branch, the British chose to teach the French another lesson. Lord Sandwich had a taste for spectacle—in Handel’s Messiah, he liked to play the timpani—and so in his moment of glory he invented something new: an immense display of naval might. With the diplomatic corps invited to attend, the king would review the fleet at Spithead, with a front seat reserved for the ambassador from France.
