American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  Franklin was already the author of a lengthy defense of the key points that the First Continental Congress demanded as conditions of reconciliation, including the repeal of recent duties and taxes imposed without the consent of the provincial legislatures. Howe knew this, but hoped that Franklin might now reconsider, moderate his stance, and form some compromise plan that might be acceptable to both sides. Franklin’s holiday partying kept him from completing a draft by their next meeting, but Howe again stressed the need for reconciliation and went on at great length about “the infinite Service it would be to the Nation” and “the great Merit” to Franklin himself “of being instrumental in so good a Work.”

  But then Howe stuck the fork in. He said “he should not think of influencing me by any selfish Motive,” Franklin recalled, “but certainly I might with reason expect any Reward in the Power of Government to bestow.” Franklin, the wily chess player, recognized an out-and-out bribe when he saw it. “This to me,” he later wrote, “was what the French call Spitting in the Soup.”22

  But Franklin played out the game. He drafted a plan for resolving the crisis that carefully reiterated his prior arguments and the steps necessary “to cement a cordial Union, and remove, not only every real Grievance, but every Cause of Jealousy and Suspicion.” Franklin continued to play chess with Mrs. Howe and engage in discussions with Lord Howe after New Year’s Day, but subsequent to receiving Franklin’s steadfast missive, Howe admitted to his sister that any hope of working with Franklin “threatens to be attended with much greater difficulty than I had flattered myself.”23 Whatever else 1775 was to be, it would not be a good year for moderates.

  Chapter 2

  Drumbeats of Dissension

  As 1775 began, a great many British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic asked themselves, how had it come to this? What had led to such polarization? In truth, drumbeats of dissension had been increasing in intensity for more than a decade.

  It was not lost on observers on both sides of the Atlantic that a principal impetus for the original British settlement of North America had been the flight of citizens from religious persecution by the British government. But in the century and a half since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, enlightened reforms by Britain’s monarchy and Parliament had mitigated much of that suffering, and swelling immigration and trade had made for strong ties between Great Britain and its colonies. There was no better evidence of this than the enthusiastic colonial participation in the war for empire so recently waged by Great Britain against France.

  Called the Seven Years’ War in Europe, the struggle at times also involved Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Spain, but it was the Anglo-French phase in North America—there called the French and Indian War—that decided the fate of that continent. Thanks in no small measure to the sacrifices of British colonials—including a young George Washington—who ably fought for their mother country as well as for their own commercial interests, Great Britain expelled France from most of North America.

  But it had been a costly affair in terms of finances as well as blood. With a scratch of a pen on the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Great Britain won an empire that stretched from Canada to the Caribbean and on to Africa, India, and the Philippines. The royal treasury was suddenly saddled with the expense of administering these acquisitions as well as retiring a staggering war debt. Great Britain chose to pay these costs in part by imposing a series of increasingly onerous financial burdens on its American colonies, because they were far and away the most economically developed of its new overseas empire.

  Taxes to support Great Britain’s colonial administration and provincial infrastructure had long been a part of colonial life, but they had been levied by the legislative assemblies in each colony, which enjoyed some measure of representative government. Although a Crown-appointed royal governor presided over each province, voters—generally limited to white male property owners over the age of twenty-one—elected delegates to colonial legislatures to approve such business. As citizens of the British Empire and as royal subjects, these colonists considered themselves endowed with certain rights well established by Parliament—among them the right to representative government.

  THE FIRST MAJOR DISRUPTION TO this harmony came when Parliament passed the American Duties Act of 1764. Known as the Sugar Act, it placed tariffs not only on sugar but also on coffee, wine, and other imports to the American colonies. Ominously to some, including Boston importer John Hancock, the act also called for aggressive new enforcement measures to end smuggling and collect all taxes due. Minor tariffs were previously not unknown—a sixpence-per-gallon tax had been imposed on foreign molasses as early as 1733—but this new resolve to enforce them was a different matter. “The publication of orders for the strict execution of the Molasses Act,” the royal governor of Massachusetts noted, “has caused a greater alarm in this country than the [French] taking of Fort William Henry did in 1757.”1

  Egregious as these new tariffs were to colonial importers and consumers alike, they arguably flowed from Parliament’s power to regulate commerce. When Parliament passed the Stamp Act the following year, it went a step further and levied a direct tax on the use of paper. Any paper in the American colonies, including newspapers, advertisements in newspapers, licenses, legal documents such as wills and powers of attorney, and a host of other printed matter—even playing cards—was required to have a revenue stamp affixed certifying that the appropriate tax had been paid. Colonial reaction was predictable.

  In Virginia, Patrick Henry, a twenty-nine-year-old attorney just elected to the House of Burgesses, went so far as to suggest that only the Virginia legislature held the “sole exclusive Right and Power to lay taxes” within the province, and he refuted any measure of compliance with the act. In but a preview of the divisive debates to come, conservative members from Virginia’s Tidewater region were aghast at Henry’s insolence, while liberal delegates from the western reaches of the colony heartily applauded it. Years later, when Henry’s defiant words on another occasion stirred patriot souls, he would be misquoted with historical hindsight and hyperbole as having said, “If this be treason, make the most of it.”2

  In Massachusetts, the legislature immediately called for representatives from the disgruntled colonies to coordinate a response to the Stamp Act. Twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies (New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia did not participate) met in New York City in mid-October of 1765. But what really got the attention of the British government was the outpouring of protests from a broad spectrum of the colonial population. Many not only signaled their refusal to buy stamps when the act became effective on November 1, they also boycotted British imports.

  “What used to be the pride of the Americans?” Benjamin Franklin was asked when called before the House of Commons to testify on the Stamp Act and the resulting boycott. “To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain,” the best-known colonial in London replied evenly. “What is now their pride?” he was asked. “To wear their old clothes over again,” Franklin answered, “till they can make new ones.”3

  Dr. Franklin was already well versed in such gamesmanship, but his reading of the underlying determination of certain colonials was sound. Before the year was out, lawyer John Adams confided to his diary that the powers in London “are determined to inforce the Act… [but] will find it a more obstinate War, than the Conquest of Canada and Louisiana.”4

  William Smith Jr., another young lawyer and assemblyman in New York who helped draft petitions asking Parliament to reconsider the Stamp Act, was more blunt. He noted that by refusing even to consider the arguments of the New York petitions, Parliament could expect nothing “but discontent for a while, and in the end open opposition.” This single stroke, Smith maintained, “has lost Great Britain the affection of all her Colonies.”5

  By the following spring, thanks in no small measure to a damning denouncement of the measure in the House of Commons by former prime minister William Pitt, Parliament
grudgingly repealed the Stamp Act. But this did little to erase a lingering bitterness, especially in light of other tax burdens placed on the colonies. By 1768, in an effort to quell antitax demonstrations, British regulars began to be concentrated in key cities, including Boston. While there were many flare-ups over the next five years—physical as well as verbal—events reached an exclamation point on the dark, moonless night of December 16, 1773. The issue was tea, but not entirely the taxation of it.

  TO GET AROUND ALMOST A decade of tariffs on tea, colonial merchants’ lucrative smuggling operations with the Dutch West Indies flourished. There were also many in the colonies who simply paid the tariff and quietly drank British tea. Then, in May of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, a statute that at its core was designed as a government bailout of the floundering British East India Company. The company had a surplus of tea, commodity prices were falling, and to prop up the entire operation, Parliament gave the company a monopoly on the tea trade in the colonies and also retained its threepence-per-pound tariff.

  Truth be told, not much of substance changed. One could still buy smuggled Dutch tea on the black market or continue to buy English tea and pay the duty. But then the propagandists took over. The very fact that the East India Company now had a monopoly and was collecting a tariff for the government was evidence to some that Parliament was once again doing whatever it chose with no consideration of, let alone input from, the colonies.

  What made the politically charged situation ironic was that, given the glut of tea in East India Company warehouses, prices actually came down. According to the late historian John C. Miller, “There seemed excellent prospect, therefore, that this cheap tea would ‘overcome all the Patriotism of an American’ and that the colonists would hail [Prime Minister] Lord North as one of the great benefactors of thirsty humanity.”6

  Many colonists didn’t embrace that view, however, and for once, Boston lagged behind New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston in its outrage. Citizens leading the anti-tea charge in those cities included a strong faction of smugglers who stood to lose the most in profits should cheap tea glut the market. In New York and Philadelphia, East India Company ships laden with tea were eventually turned away amid threats of violence, and in Charleston, unloaded tea was left to rot in a warehouse for nonpayment of duties.7

  In Boston by late October, the local consignees of the East India Company, who happened to include two sons of Massachusetts royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, took the offensive by pointing out the inconsistency of suddenly protesting the tea tax after years of paying it, particularly when colonists were still paying duties on sugar, molasses, and wine, “from which more than three quarter parts of the American Revenue has and always will arise.”8

  As in Philadelphia and New York, those who shouted the loudest in opposition had distinct financial interests at stake. Boston importer John Hancock declared that if the Tea Act were not opposed, “We soon should have found our trade in the hands of foreigners [i.e., Englishmen]… nor would it have been strange, if, in a few years, a company in London should have purchased an exclusive right of trading to America.”9

  For the better part of three weeks, Boston merchants wrestled with the question of whether East India Company tea on board three ships would be unloaded or returned to England. When Governor Hutchinson refused permission for the ships to sail out of port and ordered the tea unloaded, Samuel Adams announced to a public meeting on the evening of December 16 that “there was nothing else they could do to save their country.” There was, of course, more that could be done, and these were in fact code words for action. By midnight, thinly disguised “Indians,” encouraged if not actually led in person by Adams and Hancock—this has always been a matter of debate—were dumping tea into Boston Harbor. “This destruction of the Tea,” confided Samuel’s second cousin John Adams to his diary, “is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences.”10 It did.

  NEWS OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY reached England on January 19, 1774. Lord North’s government and most in Parliament coalesced more strongly than ever around their long-sung theme: if the supremacy of the Crown and Parliament over affairs in America was not asserted, the government’s absolute control would be lost, and Great Britain might just as well abandon its colonies. This, of course, Lord North had no intention of doing.

  Instead, Parliament passed a quartet of laws meant to punish the province of Massachusetts and enforce its proper subordination. Great Britain would call them by the shorthand term Coercive Acts, while to most colonials they were the Intolerable Acts—a difference far greater than semantic that showed the depth of the underlying divide.

  The first of these acts, the Boston Port Act, closed the port of Boston to all meaningful commercial traffic, effectively shutting down most of the business of the seaport. Two administrative measures severely limited any semblance of local government in the province, even requiring royal approval to hold town meetings and designating royally appointed sheriffs to empanel juries. Finally, the Quartering Act of 1765, which required local authorities to provide provisions and housing for troops in public accommodations and empty buildings, was expanded to permit the quartering of troops in private dwellings. Now the Redcoats would not just march by, they would sit down to dinner with you.

  Boston, whose direct act of the destruction of tea was being punished, recoiled, but so, too, did the other colonies. In Farmington, Connecticut, almost one thousand people gathered to resolve that “blocking up the port of Boston, is unjust, illegal, and oppressive; and that we, and every American, are sharers in the insults offered to the town of Boston.” Similar resolutions in Philadelphia decried the port closure as “unconstitutional; oppressive to the inhabitants of that town; [and] dangerous to the liberties of the British colonies.”11

  Virginia was not yet ready to shed blood in the defense of Massachusetts, but the House of Burgesses expressed “Apprehension of the great Dangers to be derived to British America, from the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston” and ordered a day of fasting and prayer. One of those delegates wrote to a neighbor later that summer from Mount Vernon. “For my own part,” said George Washington, “I shall not undertake to say where the line between Great Britain and the colonies should be drawn; but I am clearly of opinion, that one ought to be drawn, and our rights clearly ascertained.”12

  THE FIRST CONCERTED STEP IN drawing that line came when delegates from all the colonies except distant Georgia convened in Philadelphia on Monday, September 5, 1774, for what came to be called the First Continental Congress. The date is not much celebrated by history, but it is nonetheless a landmark in the evolving cooperation between the individual colonies. “It is,” wrote delegate John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren’s husband, James, in anticipation, “to be a school of political prophets, I suppose, a nursery of American Statesmen.”13 Besides the Adams cousins and Robert Treat Paine from Massachusetts, the assembly included John Jay and Philip Livingston from New York, Joseph Galloway and John Dickinson from Pennsylvania, and George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry from Virginia.

  Henry lost no time in making his voice heard, but, as with the Stamp Act debate almost a decade before, his sentiment was again a little premature—declaring a spirit of unification that most of the delegates did not yet share. “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders are no more,” Henry thundered. “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”14

  Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania, for one, thought Samuel Adams and his cohorts were far too radical for their own good. If the assembly followed Adams’s star, the only acceptable destination would be independence. Galloway favored colonial representation in Parliament, but, recognizing that was a pipe dream, he promoted what would essentially be a second-tier Parliament in America. The colonial assemblies would elect its members, and while the individual colonies would oversee their internal affairs, this “Grand Council” would work with P
arliament on matters affecting them all, including the contentious issue of taxation. In such a way, Galloway hoped to convince all but the most radical that “British sovereignty was compatible with colonial freedom” without the recourse of revolution.15

  While the Congress debated these diverse ideas, there came to Philadelphia some rather startling news from Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which contained Boston. Though the Massachusetts legislature had been dissolved under the Intolerable Acts and no town meetings were allowed without royal assent, delegates had nevertheless met secretly and quite illegally in county conventions. The Suffolk assembly overwhelmingly approved a series of resolutions drafted by Joseph Warren, a doctor and member of Boston’s committee of correspondence. Collectively, the resolutions arrived in Philadelphia as “the Suffolk Resolves,” hand-delivered to the congress by messenger Paul Revere.

  Invoking the reasons their forebears had left England for the New World in the first place, the men of Suffolk County minced no words from their first sentence on: “Whereas the power but not the justice, the vengeance but not the wisdom of Great Britain, which of old persecuted, scourged, and exiled our fugitive parents from their native shores, now pursues us, their guiltless children, with unrelenting severity.”16

  Damning the Crown’s past heavy-handedness and the recent tyranny of the Intolerable Acts, the Suffolk Resolves also took Parliament to task for the just-passed Quebec Act, which many judged to be the final straw. On its face, the Quebec Act had very little to do with punishing an insolent Boston; only its timing and the reaction to it meant it would be lumped together with the Intolerable Acts in colonial minds. Designed by Parliament as an attempt to limit the spread of radicalism in the colonies, the Quebec Act tightened the noose around Boston and all the colonies.