Toward the end of the session, recalling the town’s instruction to promote cooperation between the various colonial assemblies, Otis suggested that Massachusetts sponsor an intercolonial conference to discuss the Stamp Act. No one knew exactly what to make of that idea, but no one could find anything illegal about it; and in the end even the governor approved. Thus it was, on June 8, just before adjourning one of the most confused sessions in its history, that the House of Representatives voted to send a circular letter to invite the other colonial legislatures to send delegates to attend a congress at New York in October—a gathering “to consider of a general and united, dutiful, loyal and humble Representation of their Condition to His Majesty and the Parliament; and to implore Relief.” Massachusetts’s own delegation would reflect the extreme tentativeness of the General Court. Two of the delegates, Timothy Ruggles and Oliver Partridge, were members of the governor’s council and had served as high-ranking provincial officers in the recent war; they were among the most conservative men in the colony. The third was James Otis. Not for nothing did Governor Bernard feel able to assure the Board of Trade that the Bay Colony’s delegation would “never consent to any undutiful or improper application to the Government of Great Britain.”4
Virginia’s House of Burgesses would also hesitate before it took action, and then would act in a fundamentally ambiguous way. Down to the very end of May, no burgess said anything at all about the Stamp Act. Two-thirds of them, anticipating an uneventful end to the session, had already gone back to their plantations on May 20 when a new man, elected to replace a Louisa County representative who had retired, took his place on a back bench. The House’s most junior member, Patrick Henry, was new to politics but not to public life. After six weeks of legal education and five years of practice, he had become one of the most successful attorneys in the province, a spellbinding advocate who flourished his reputation for oratory and his opposition to privilege like a sword.
Still a few days shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, Henry was shy of nothing else. New members ordinarily said nothing for a session or two, quietly deferring to their elders, and finally making a maiden speech on an issue carefully chosen for its lack of significance. Henry would have none of such becoming modesty and immediately took the floor to attack a bill, backed by the leadership of the House and the single most influential man in Virginia politics, John Robinson—a venerable figure who combined in his person the offices of secretary of the colony, treasurer, and speaker of the House. The bill that Robinson and his fellow grandees backed would have authorized the province to borrow £250,000 in London, secured by a tax that would run until 1795. Its ostensible purpose was to permit Virginia to retire its outstanding currency; but one provision quietly permitted indebted and cash-starved planters to borrow sterling from the public treasury, mortgaging their lands as security. Henry ridiculed the measure for its obvious self-interestedness, shocking the senior members of the House and contributing to its defeat.5 Henry’s next speech, however, would shock more than the few burgesses who lingered through the last, sweltering days of the session.
On May 29, its legislative business finished, the House resolved itself into a committee of the whole to discuss “steps necessary to be taken in consequence” of the Stamp Act. Henry immediately rose and introduced five resolutions, which he had written out, “alone, unadvised, and unassisted, on a blank leaf of an old law book.” The first four recited historical commonplaces with which no burgess disagreed, for they paraphrased similar ones in the previous year’s petitions. Virginia’s founders, Henry began, had “brought with them” English liberties in the seventeenth century; royal charters (secondly) had confirmed those rights; taxation by the consent of elected representatives was (thirdly) central to the survival of all such liberties; and the right of Virginians to lay taxes on themselves had “never been forfeited or yielded up, but hath been constantly recognized by the Kings and People of Great Britain.” The fifth resolution, however, struck another note. “Resolved Therefore that the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and sole exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony and that every Attempt to vest such Power in any Person or Persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.”6
This resolve, which not only denied Parliament’s right to tax Virginia but insisted that the attempt imperiled the liberty of all British subjects, sparked a debate so intense that even the preoccupied lieutenant governor, Francis Fauquier, took note. He had been attending to Indian diplomacy—he was hoping to prevent a war between the Overhill Cherokees and backwoodsmen beyond the Blue Ridge—and was as surprised as anyone in Williamsburg at the “rash heat” of the debates, in which “the Young, hot, and Giddy Members” had “overpowerd” the older, soberer burgesses. “Mr. Henry,” Fauquier reported to the Board of Trade a few days later, “carryed all the young Members with him” and succeeded in passing all five resolutions, albeit by margins of five votes or fewer; the “virulent and inflammatory” final resolve carried “by a single Voice.”7
Yet Fauquier, while momentarily taken aback, was not alarmed. As he explained to the Board, the debate would never have happened “if more . . . Representatives had done their Duty by attending to the end of the Session,” and he had at any rate undone the damage merely by keeping the House in session until May 31. Once Henry left for home on the evening of the thirtieth, nothing could prevent the more conservative members from moving a reconsideration of the resolves. Then it had been a simple matter to have “the 5th which was thought the most offensive . . . struck off.” With the regrettable business thus tidied up, Fauquier dissolved the House. His official report on the session made it clear that he thought the resolutions came to nothing more than grandstanding: a pettifogger’s effort to pump up a political career.8
Not every witness would have agreed. Thomas Jefferson, a twenty-two-year-old student from the College of William and Mary who had listened to the debates from the hallway outside the chamber, would surely have taken exception. He thought he had heard something extraordinary—even though he was not quite sure what it was. As much swept away by the tide of Henry’s oratory as were the hot and giddy burgesses who voted for the resolutions, Jefferson experienced the debate not as an exposition of colonial rights but as a kind of high moral theater. Later he would realize that he could recall little of what Henry had said; only that the debate had been “most bloody” and the speaker of the House furious. Just so: that was how Henry intended it. He had built his career not on abstract reasoning but on his ability to sway juries by appealing to them in the emotional, extemporaneous mode of evangelical preaching. When Henry inveighed against the Stamp Act as an infringement of the rights and liberties of Virginia Englishmen, therefore, he was enacting a moral position, not explicating a set of political principles. 9
Patrick Henry had all the vehemence of Otis but employed it to better effect because he understood his task as persuasion, not exposition. Lacking the technical knowledge that drove Otis to take his stand amid impenetrable thickets of logic, Henry freely cast the debate as a contest between right and wrong. To tax an Englishman without his consent was to deprive him of his rights, to reduce him to slavery. Virginians were Englishmen, and only tyrants would seek to make them slaves. From principles so simple, anyone with common sense—anyone whose judgment had not been corrupted by his lust for power or taking of a placeman’s filthy salary—could draw his own conclusions. If such ideas ceased to resonate in the House of Burgesses once Henry had departed and calmer colleagues repealed his final ringing resolve, they would reverberate long and loud outside the assembly hall. From the time that copies of the Virginia Resolves began to circulate outside Williamsburg, ordinary men would begin to draw conclusions from which sophisticated politicians shrank in fear.
CHAPTER 69
Mobs Respond
SUMMER 1765
THE VIRGINI
A GAZETTE did not find the Burgesses’ proceedings news-worthy, so the first newspaper to print the Virginia Resolves was the distant Newport Mercury, on June 24. Other newspapers followed suit, reprinting either the Mercury’s version or the slightly different one that ran in the July 4 issue of the Maryland Gazette. Neither account drew on the official journals of the House, and neither editor probably understood that the Burgesses had retained only the first four innocuous resolutions, repealing the fiery fifth. Certainly no reader of the Mercury or the Gazette, or of any newspaper that reprinted their stories, could have known that the sixth and seventh resolutions printed alongside the rest were utterly spurious and may not even have been debated. To this day no one knows who wrote them, or how they made their way into print alongside the other five. All that is really clear is that the newspaper accounts convinced readers everywhere that Virginia’s legislators had taken a bold stand in defense of colonial rights.
Resolved, That his Majesty’s liege People, the Inhabitants of this Colony, are not bound to yield Obedience to any law or Ordinance whatever, designed to impose any Taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the Laws or Ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid.
Resolved, That any Person, who shall, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain, that any Person or Persons, other than the General Assembly of this Colony, have any Right or Power to impose or lay any Taxation on the People here, shall be deemed an Enemy to this his Majesty’s Colony.1
Soon after this wildly inaccurate version of the resolves appeared, opposition to the Stamp Act began to overflow the channels of normal politics. Between the middle of August and the end of the year, the protests of ordinary colonists would astonish anyone who had thought (like Grenville or Franklin) that the Americans would knuckle under to parliamentary taxation, and perplex everyone (including Gage and the colonial governors) who had to respond, once it became clear that Americans would not submit.
The stimulus to resistance came from Williamsburg, but Boston was where talk first gave way to deeds. A handful of artisans and lesser merchants there had been meeting for some time past as a social club—long enough, at any rate, to invent a name for themselves, the “Loyal Nine.” They were solid but far from eminent Bostonians. Among the club’s two distillers, two brass-founders, merchant, jeweler, painter, ship captain, and printer, only two men were Harvard graduates. Three held town offices, but none had ever served in the General Court. Their politics aligned them with the country party, but after the Virginia Resolves became known in town, they seem to have soured on politicians generally. We get a hint of their mood from a column that Benjamin Edes, the printer among them, published in his newspaper, the Boston Gazette, on July 8.
The People of Virginia have spoke very sensibly . . .: Their spirited Resolves do indeed serve as a perfect Contrast for a certain tame, pusillanimous, daub’d insipid Thing, delicately touch’d up and call’d an Address; which was lately sent from this Side the Water, to please the Taste of the Tools of Corruption on the other. . . . We have been told with an Insolence the more intolerable, because disguis’d with a Veil of public Care, that it is not prudence for us to assert our Rights in plain and manly Terms: Nay, we have been told that the word RIGHTS must not be once named among us! Curs’d Prudence of interested designing Politicians!2
In this frame of mind, the Loyal Nine embarked on a course that would soon deprive prudent politicians of the ability to dilute Massachusetts’s resistance to the Stamp Act. They decided to raise the biggest mob in the history of Boston and use it to force the designated stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver, to resign.
Boston had not one but two mobs in the 1760s: loose aggregations of laborers, apprentices, lesser artisans, sailors, blacks, and others of “the lower sort,” who lived in the North and South Ends of the town. These groups enjoyed an annual day of exuberance and carnival each November 5, when Boston commemorated the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Bostonians knew this most English of holidays as Pope Day, not Guy Fawkes Day, because the local celebrations had come to focus on elaborate effigies of the pope and the devil, and the ritual brawl between the North Enders and the South Enders over which mob would have the honor of burning them. The Pope Day contests may have begun as manly scrimmages, but by the mid-1760s they had evolved into skull-cracking, limb-breaking affrays involving as many as four thousand men and boys.
Levels of Pope Day violence had escalated over time because members of mobs began using clubs and brickbats as well as their fists, and also because they created formalized command structures, with “captains” and subordinate leaders to direct each mob’s actions. Thus when the Loyal Nine decided to take the Stamp Act protests into the streets, they were able to approach two men—Ebenezer Mackintosh, the twenty-eight-year-old shoemaker who captained the South End mob, and Henry Smith, the shipwright who headed the North Enders—with great experience in organizing crowd actions. The greatest challenge lay not in getting Mackintosh and Smith to bring their men out, but convincing them to forget their rivalry long enough to make Oliver resign. This was not easy to do, but the Loyal Nine finally persuaded the two leaders to take joint action on August 14.3
On that Wednesday morning nobody passing Deacon Elliot’s Corner on High Street could have missed the pair of effigies dangling from a big elm tree’s limb.4 One was the figure of a man, with signs affixed identifying it as “A.O,” the “Stamp-Man.” The other inspired more curiosity, but members of the gathering crowd explained to one another that an old boot, bottomed with a new “green-vile” sole and topped with a figure of the devil, made a pointed comment on the earl of Bute, George Grenville’s soul, and the motive force behind the Stamp Act. Before the day was out these images attracted as many as five thousand men, women, and children, a crowd that for the most part remained in a festive mood. In the afternoon, however, when the sheriff screwed up enough courage to try cutting the effigies down, he found himself so roundly threatened that he hustled off to warn the governor of an impending riot.
At evening three thousand men, taking directions from Ebenezer Mackintosh, made good on the sheriff’s prediction. Cutting down the images, they paraded three-quarters of a mile to a small brick structure Andrew Oliver had recently built at his wharf. Calling it the Stamp Office, they tore it down in a matter of minutes; then, carrying its timbers as fuel for a bonfire, they marched on to Oliver’s house. They paused long enough to behead his effigy and throw stones through his windows before ascending the nearby Fort Hill, where they “stamped” the figures to bits and burned them. Then they went looking for the Stamp-Man himself.
They did not find Oliver that night—he had taken refuge with friends—and so they demolished the interior of his house instead, drinking up the contents of his wine cellar while they turned his carriage, furniture, wainscoting, and privy to matchwood. The enthusiasm with which they destroyed Oliver’s property suggests that as the evening wore on the members of the crowd acted less in response to direction from above than according to their own lights. Men who might work all year and earn less than fifty pounds—supposing they were fully employed, as in the midst of a depression few could have been—reacted furiously when they saw how luxuriously a wealthy merchant lived; and no one needed to explain that he would grow even richer on shillings to be extracted from their own thin purses, once the Stamp Act went into effect. Since by midnight whatever restrained the mob’s behavior came entirely from within, the Loyal Nine may have felt as much relief as Oliver when the rioters dispersed.
The next day, several gentlemen visited Oliver and urged him to resign, pointing out that at least his house still stood—but would not long do so if he tried to execute his commission as tax collector. Oliver, who had not yet received the documents appointing him and could not resign what he did not have, agreed to refrain from collecting any duties once the stamps arrived and promised to write to London asking to be excused from the distributorship. That evening, when a second crowd gathered on Fort Hill and lit another bonfire, Oli
ver sent word renouncing his appointment. The crowd gave him three cheers before dispersing.
Andrew Oliver’s surrender solved his own immediate problem but deepened Governor Bernard’s perplexities. Bernard had been unable to maintain order on the fourteenth. When he ordered the colonel of Boston’s militia regiment to raise his men and disperse the mob, the colonel only “answered, that it would signify nothing, for as soon as the drum was heard, the drummer would be knocked down, and the drum broke; [and] added, that probably all the drummers of the Regiment were in the Mob.”5 At that Bernard, never devoted to heroic gestures, ordered his servants to hide the silverware and row him out to Castle William. He spent that night and the next watching bonfires flare on Fort Hill, knowing that unless the city calmed down on its own, he dared not leave the safety of the fort.
To become a kind of prisoner in this way was humiliating enough, but Bernard worried even more about the fragility of civil order in the province. He was the king’s direct representative, yet the riots had shown that he governed Massachusetts at the sufferance of Boston’s mob. His lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, had actually been chased through the streets on the night of the fourteenth after he dragged the sheriff out to read the riot act to the mob. It was true that he and the sheriff had run fast enough to save everything but their dignity from harm; but as Bernard well understood, Hutchinson’s boldness had served only to single him out for future harassment. Just how much danger the lieutenant governor was in, and just how tenuous the control of His Majesty’s government had grown, would only become clear as the next week passed and the Loyal Nine—or perhaps, by now, Mackintosh and the mob independently—decided what steps to take next.
Crucible of War Page 77
