Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  They had good reason. Reports that arrived from America in November and December made it clear that the disorders there were both nightmarishly complex and not susceptible to solution by military means. Less as a matter of principle than of necessity, therefore, the leading figures among the duke of Cumberland’s ex-protégés abandoned their mentor’s preferred response. Rockingham was probably the first to understand that Britain confronted not one crisis in America, but a set of interrelated problems that only conciliation could resolve. A series of conferences in November—in which, typically, Rockingham consulted neither members of the Board of Trade nor any other government officials with colonial expertise, but rather the richest of the London merchants who traded to North America—convinced him that these problems could be understood, in terms of descending urgency, as economic, political, and institutional; and that they could be addressed accordingly. In December and January—again, typically, not in cabinet meetings but at a series of dinners and informal gatherings to which he invited Grafton, Conway, and others from inside the cabinet and out—Rockingham began to discuss the policies and tactics that his administration might pursue in seeking first to resolve the crisis, and then to begin restructuring imperial relations along less antagonistic lines.

  The first set of interrelated issues, of course, centered on the Stamp Act itself: a law that was not working and indeed could never be anything but a dagger in the empire’s heart. With virtual unanimity, the colonists had nullified the act, and in doing so had disrupted trade so severely that the great London merchants on whom Rockingham relied for advice were growing extremely anxious. The trade depression that had plagued them since the end of the war had plummeted to its bottom, and their American correspondents still owed them vast sums. If colonial commerce, or at least the regular collection of colonial debts, was not soon restored, financial catastrophe would ensue. Unless the colonists began to consume British manufactures again, workers in the industries that fed colonial markets—and those prominently included cloth-makers in Rockingham’s own Yorkshire—would be thrown out of work. Since the Spitalfields riots had lately demonstrated a close correlation between industrial unemployment and social disorder, the Americans’ refusal to import British goods posed a threat to more than just the bank balances of a few great merchants. At this most fundamental level of analysis, therefore, Rockingham came to see that the economic dimension of the Stamp Act provided the most favorable grounds on which to seek repeal. In a memorandum to himself on November 28, he noted that in the coming session it would be necessary “to avoid the discussion on the Stamp Act” until “Consideration of N[orth] A[merica] in the Commercial [context could] . . . be brought on” and the members of Parliament had been shown “the high Importance of the Commerce [with] N[orth] A[merica] . . . to the Mother Country.” 7

  And yet the Stamp Act was not merely a millstone around the empire’s economic neck, but an urgent political issue as well. Whether they appreciated it or not, the Americans whose protests made the act unenforceable had in effect denied parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies. Parliament’s authority therefore needed to be restored, and quickly. That much Cumberland had instinctively grasped, and the members of the Houses of Lords and Commons understood it no less viscerally. But Rockingham’s consultations with Secretary at War Barrington and with Conway, both of whom were in touch with General Gage, convinced him that force could not restore Parliament’s rule. The army was in the wrong place to impose order and lacked the strength to do so. Its gruesome losses to disease at the end of the war, casualties by the hundreds in Pontiac’s War, chronic starvation for funds and replacements, and the difficulties of recruitment in America had hollowed out His Majesty’s forces, leaving them capable of self-defense, but little more. Finally, weak as they were, most battalions were still dispersed across the conquered territories. In New England, where the riots had begun in late summer and where opposition to the Stamp Act blazed most fiercely, there were no troops at all. New York City had a modest garrison on hand at the time the act was to go into effect, but the reports that arrived in December demonstrated that, far from maintaining order, the redcoats’ presence had stimulated the worst rioting in America.

  As if all that were not enough, the Quartering Act had proven a grievous mistake. To the colonists it seemed yet another effort to tax and enslave them; to Gage it posed an insuperable obstacle to billeting troops in private homes, and thus to using them with maximum coercive effect. The necessary assertion of parliamentary sovereignty, Rockingham saw, would thus have to be only an assertion. He knew what risks he would run by relying on words, where Britain lacked swords to give them meaning. But his merchant tutors assured him that the Americans would reopen trade as soon as the Stamp Act was repealed, and Gage’s reports persuaded him that any attempt to use force would create an insurrection that the army could not suppress. In the absence of any alternative, words would have to suffice.

  Beyond these most pressing problems between America and the empire, Rockingham’s consultations eventually convinced him that every postwar effort to reform imperial governance had served only to exacerbate tensions and reduce trade. The American Currency Act had alienated the Virginians, who had since become leading agitators against the Stamp Act, and it had disturbed the rest of the colonies to the south of New England as well, stoking the mobs’ fury with economic anxiety and class antagonism. The American Duties Act, similarly, had failed to produce any substantial revenue but had very successfully created opposition to British authority within the colonial merchant community. The act’s complex customs provisions enraged shipowners, coastal merchants, and their numerous artisan allies in all the important American ports, encouraging them to participate in the emerging nonimportation movement.8

  These underlying problems flourished like weeds in the postwar depression and would not be rooted out by the repeal of the Stamp Act, but were virtually certain to grow large enough to choke off colonial goodwill once the repeal had been secured. To deal with them, Rockingham— again on the advice of his merchant friends, and in a typically chaotic way—began contemplating measures to abolish the Currency Act, reduce regulations on trade within the empire, modify the American Duties Act to lower duties on foreign molasses, and increase the amount of silver coin available for circulation in America by opening avenues of legitimate trade with the Spanish and French Caribbean. He knew, however, that all such efforts would have to await the resolution of the economic and political aspects of the Stamp Act crisis. And even at the beginning of January, how the crisis could be resolved was far from obvious.9

  Cantonment of the Forces in N. America 1766. This map, showing the distribution of regular units c. January 1766, illustrates Britain’s dilemma in dealing with the Stamp Act riots: virtually all of Gage’s men were still in Canada, the Floridas, and beyond the Proclamation Line. Only a few were available where he needed them most. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  In the first weeks of 1766, as Parliament prepared to reopen after its Christmas recess, Rockingham had finally concluded that repeal was imperative. Grafton and Conway agreed. But Rockingham still had not been able to bring himself to lay down his views as policy, and he knew that several of his colleagues—particularly the Crown’s leading law officers, Lord Chancellor Northington and Attorney General Charles Yorke—strongly favored enforcement over conciliation. Until Pitt finally made his impossible demands for joining the administration, Rockingham clung to the hope that he could avoid making policy altogether, much less devising plans for the empire’s long-term future. Only on January 11 did he decide to break off discussions with Pitt; and that was just three days before Parliament convened. Thus while the indecisive marquess had at length made the issues at stake clear to himself, his ministry entered the parliamentary session as much in the dark as ever, with neither a publicly articulated goal nor any internal consensus. The ministry’s tactics, as they gradually surfaced in confusion and f
luster during January’s debates, would depend less on Rockingham’s leadership in the House of Lords or on Conway’s ability to manage the Commons than on two adventitious factors: the oratory of William Pitt and the actions of the merchant community. Together, Pitt’s pursuit of notoriety and the merchants’ pursuit of self-interest nudged the administration in directions of which Rockingham approved, even though he found it impossible to say so in public. 10

  Parliament opened on January 14, as always, with the speech from the throne, the address by which the monarch (in theory) and the ministry (in fact) set the session’s agenda. In this case, because the Rockinghams had not yet agreed upon their own policy, the king merely asked the Commons to resolve the Stamp Act crisis in some way consistent with both the “authority of the British legislature” and “the welfare and prosperity of all my people.” So broad a mandate allowed the M.P.s to construe the king’s wishes according to their own desires. In response a series of speakers from Grenville’s opposition faction and from among the King’s Friends called for the enforcement of the Stamp Act. It was, they argued, no longer a matter of revenue, but of right. The colonists denied Parliament’s lawful authority, which must now be asserted, regardless of expense: “a pepper-corn, in acknowledgment of the right,” one speaker thundered, was “of more value, than millions without it.” Against this chorus only a single speaker, one of Pitt’s minor allies, called for repeal. On the Treasury bench, Conway and his colleagues fidgeted in silence. Then William Pitt stood and launched into a long speech in which he made his own views—until that moment mysterious—explicit.11

  Announcing that he spoke only for himself, and not for a ministry he distrusted (“confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom”), Pitt affirmed that since “the Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England,” they deserved honorable treatment, not abuse, from their mother country. Parliament’s sovereignty over the colonies was indeed complete, he continued, but it was absurd to think that sovereignty gave Parliament the right to levy an “internal” or direct tax on the colonists. Taxes were the free gift of the Commons, and American commoners “would have been slaves” if they had acquiesced in the late administration’s fumbling tyrannies. “Virtual representation,” by which Grenville had tried to justify the confiscation of the colonists’ property, was the lamest of rationalizations, “the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of man.” The Stamp Act, he concluded, “ought to be totally and absolutely repealed as an erroneous policy.”12

  Conway, relieved to find himself on the same side as his idol, piped up to thank Pitt on behalf of the ministry that Pitt had just said he could not trust. The Great Commoner doubtless valued Conway as the rhinoceros values the tick-bird, but whatever smile flickered as he acknowledged the secretary’s tribute vanished as George Grenville rose to ridicule Pitt’s effort to distinguish between internal and external taxation. The Stamp Act, Grenville declared, was wholly consistent with Parliament’s sovereignty. As for the colonists, they border on open rebellion; and if the doctrine I have heard this day [Pitt’s distinction between internal and external taxation] be confirmed, I fear they will lose that name to take that of revolution. The government over them being dissolved, a revolution will take place in America. I cannot understand the difference between external and internal taxes. . . . That this kingdom has the sovereign, the supreme legislative power over America, is granted. It cannot be denied; and taxation is a part of that sovereign power. . . . Protection and obedience are reciprocal. Great Britain protects America; America is bound to yield obedience. If not, tell me when Americans were emancipated? . . . The nation has run itself into an immense debt to give them their protection; and now [that] they are called upon to contribute a small share toward the public expence, an expence arising from themselves, they renounce your authority, insult your officers, and break out, I might almost say, into open rebellion.13

  Pitt had already spoken, and under the rules of the House should not have been able to reply. But his brother-in-law had touched a nerve and, brushing aside the canons of debate (“I do not speak twice. I only finish”) as the chamber “resounded with cries of Go on! Go on!” Pitt answered in the greatest extemporaneous speech of his career.

  The gentleman tells us, America is obstinate; America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest. I come not here armed at all points, with law cases and acts of parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dog’s ears, to defend the cause of liberty: if I had, . . . I would . . . have shown that, even under former arbitrary reigns, parliaments were ashamed of taxing a people without their consent, and allowed them representatives. . . .

  I am no courtier of America; I stand up for this kingdom. I maintain, that the parliament has a right to bind, to restrain America. Our legislative power over the colonies is sovereign and supreme. When it ceases to be sovereign and supreme, I would advise every gentleman to sell his lands, if he can, and embark for that country. When two countries are connected together, like England and her colonies, without being incorporated, the one must necessarily govern; the greater must rule the less; but so rule it, as not to contradict the fundamental principles that are common to both. If the gentleman does not understand the difference between external and internal taxes, I cannot help it; but there is a plain difference between taxes levied for the purpose of raising a revenue, and duties imposed for the regulation of trade, for the accommodation of the subject; although, in the consequences, some revenue might incidentally arise from the latter.

  The gentleman asks, when were the colonies emancipated? But I desire to know when they were made slaves. . . . I will be bold to affirm that the profit to Great Britain from the trade of the colonies, through all its branches, is two millions a year. This is the fund that carried you triumphantly through the last war. The estates that were rented at two thousand pounds a year, threescore years ago, are at three thousand pounds at present. Those estates sold then from fifteen to eighteen years’ purchase; the same may now be sold for thirty. You owe this to America; this is the price America pays for her protection. And shall a miserable financier come with a boast that he can bring a pepper-corn into the exchequer, to the loss of millions to the nation? . . .

  A great deal has been said without doors of the power, of the strength, of America. It is a topic that ought to be cautiously meddled with. In a good cause, on a sound bottom, the force of this country can crush America to atoms. I know the valour of your troops. I know the skill of your officers. . . . But on this ground, on the Stamp act, when so many here will think it a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up my hands against it.

  In such a cause, your success would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man. She would embrace the pillars of state, and pull down the constitution along with her. Is this your boasted peace? Not to sheathe the sword in the scabbard, but to sheathe it in the bowels of your countrymen? . . .

  The Americans have not acted in all things with prudence and temper. The Americans have been wronged. They have been driven to madness by injustice. Will you punish them for the madness you have occasioned? . . .

  Upon the whole, I will beg leave to tell the House what is really my opinion. It is, that the Stamp-act should be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately; that the reason for the repeal should be assigned, because it was founded on an erroneous principle. At the same time let the sovereign authority of this country be asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, and be made to extend to every point 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.14

  The debate boomed on, but Pitt’s speech had already given the ministry its cue and its courage—and indeed virtually ratified
the legislative strategy that Rockingham had decided upon but lacked the confidence to propose. As at the height of his influence a half-dozen years before, Pitt had captured the admiration of that largest and most refractory group in the Commons, the backbench independents. Now Grenville’s party, Bedford’s faction, and the Friends of the King and Bute could raise any hue and cry they wished; if Pitt could hold the support of the independents, the ministry would have its chance to repeal the Stamp Act. Thus in a series of informal meetings over the next ten days, Rockingham at last brought himself to advocate the course he had contemplated since November. His ministry would assert, as strenuously as possible, Parliament’s sovereignty over America; then it would press the case for repealing the Stamp Act on the grounds of economic expediency.

  In the last week of January, Rockingham therefore asked his hard-line attorney general, Charles Yorke, to devise a declaration of parliamentary supremacy that would leave no doubt about the legal subordination of the colonies, and he turned to his merchant friends to organize support for repeal as a measure of economic necessity. Both Yorke and the merchants were well ahead of him. Since late December the attorney general had argued that whether the ministry opted to pursue enforcement or repeal, it needed first to secure parliamentary approval for resolutions condemning the colonists’ violence and unequivocally declaring Parliament’s sovereignty; indeed, he had already identified the model for such a declaration in the Dependency of Ireland Act of 1719. Since December, too, the leading figure among the London merchants who traded to North America, an ex-Bostonian named Barlow Trecothick, had headed a great petition drive to testify to the distressed state of trade with America and to document the damage that the Stamp Act had done to the British economy. Before the end of January, the merchants of London and the outports, as well as manufacturers from the cities of the north, had sent no fewer than twenty-four petitions to the House of Commons, all blaming the Stamp Act for the hard times they were suffering, and all pleading for relief.15