Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

That what had passed in the Commons debates would for the most part prove poor prophecy should not surprise us; hope is, after all, the currency of popular politics, and a coin surprisingly hard to devalue. Most of all, however, the predictable disjunction between rhetoric and reality should not divert our attention (as it diverted the attention of the colonists themselves) from the much more interesting things that the rhetoric revealed about British assumptions concerning the colonies. Anyone who wanted to understand the grounds on which Great Britain’s political elite reasoned about America needed to look no further than Pitt’s great speech of January 14.

  If the Great Commoner was no profound thinker, he possessed the rarer ability to articulate common beliefs in compelling terms. During the war he had come to embody the dreams and fears of his fellow M.P.s and indeed the political nation as a whole, and in the repeal debates he similarly captured their understanding of the imperial relationship. These notions were not strictly logical, and thus did not take the form of an argument. Rather they consisted of three assumptions that, taken together, laid the foundation for virtually every possible British policy toward the colonies. First among them came Identity.

  “I rejoice,” Pitt had said, “that America has resisted.” America opposed Parliament, not Americans, much less the seamen and artisans and apprentices who had thronged the city streets, or the politicians who sat uneasily in the colonial assemblies, or the Sons of Liberty, or speculators and squatters hungry for new land, or any of the other segments of a diverse, fragmented populace. America had resisted: a place, a political and geographical abstraction that existed in the minds of British politicians but that had little to do with the social reality of the colonies, and even less to do with the self-understanding of colonists who resisted not because they thought of themselves as Americans, but as British subjects with Englishmen’s rights.

  Second was Sovereignty. “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.” That Parliament was sovereign, of course, was a truism; but in the curious advice that followed Pitt revealed what the cliché actually meant. Why gentlemen should sell their lands in Britain and flee to America if Parliament ceased to be sovereign over the colonies puzzles us today far more than it did M.P.s who assumed that sovereignty, the state’s right to tax and take life, was also the source of political and social order. Sovereignty as an ultimate power could not be divided, for to fragment sovereignty was to destroy it: logically, by creating the absurdity of imperium in imperio, a state within a state; realistically, by inviting civil war. It was unthinkable for Parliament to resolve the crisis in America by recognizing the colonial assemblies as its equal in matters of taxation and legislation, and merely bound by common allegiance to the king. To abdicate authority in this way would be the same as recognizing the corporation of the most miserable borough in Wales as the equal of the House of Commons and would instantly end Parliament’s supremacy in Britain. At best such an abdication would re-create the Dark Ages, when barons attacked each other at will under the gaze of an impotent king. At worst it would cast Britain into the state of nature itself, a Hobbesian war of every man against his neighbor. The only rational response to such nightmares would be, of course, to get the hell out: or, as Pitt wryly suggested, to sell one’s lands and move to America, where the English were still men enough to hold their property and liberty sacred.

  And last came Power itself. Pitt enunciated what was in effect an article of faith for the M.P.s when he said that “In a good cause, on a sound bottom, the force of this country can crush America to atoms.” It was only to remind them of his own role in creating this circumstance that he had added “I know the valour of your troops. I know the skill of your officers.” Every Englishman knew them. Great Britain led the world in naval and military power. A kingdom that could strip France of its empire and clip the wings of Spain as an afterthought could surely destroy America at will. The colonies posed no threat to such strength, except a moral one; which was why Pitt began by qualifying his assertion, “In a good cause.” Only indirectly—by “pull[ing] down the constitution with her”—could America harm Britain. Parliament alone could destroy political order in Britain, and it would inevitably do so if it persisted in trying to eradicate the rights of the colonists. Moral factors aside, the equation of power stood irreducibly in favor of the metropolis.

  A unitary America, a sovereign Parliament, an invincible British military: this trinity of beliefs defined what amounted to a consensus among the men who ordered political life and exercised power in Britain, regardless of their specific views on colonial policy. But America had not resisted; a great many Americans had. What they had resisted was Parliament’s assertion of sovereignty over them—not because they denied Parliament’s authority, but because they believed that sovereignty asserted in absolute terms deprived them of their birthright of English liberty. As for the invincibility of British arms, the colonists, who never understated their own contributions to Britain’s victory over France, entertained other views. In truth America was more divided than Pitt and his contemporaries knew, Britain less omnipotent than they thought, and the rock of parliamentary sovereignty on which they assumed Britain’s constitution was founded might easily become the rock on which Britain’s empire would founder.

  The Stamp Act crisis had shown that, given sufficient provocation, the colonists could overcome deep internal divisions to resist Britain’s power—in the name of English liberty. The history of the crisis might reasonably have suggested that the empire’s authority could be sustained, not by proclaiming parliamentary sovereignty and lending credence to the fears that had brought the colonists together, but rather by celebrating the colonists’ British character and cultivating their emotional identification with the metropolis—and quietly letting America’s intramural conflicts resume their natural course. But that message could not be read by anyone dazzled by the illusion of British military hegemony, and few Britons cared to blink away the brilliant vision of victories at Québec and Havana in order to contemplate the gloomier sight of Indian warriors annihilating redcoat garrisons at Michilimackinac and Venango while holding Detroit and Niagara hostage.

  The simultaneous passage of the Declaratory Act and the Stamp Act Repeal resolved the crisis of empire without altering the trinity of beliefs on which British reasoning about America rested. Nor did the end of the crisis in any way reconcile colonial and British views of the imperial relationship—views the divergence of which had been made unmistakable by the combined pressures of war, depression, and George Grenville’s effort to bring order to the empire. Grenville’s program might lie in ruins, but all the problems he had tried to solve still stood, in forms reinforced by the passage of time, Indian rebellion, and the Stamp Act itself. The British government remained deep in debt and strapped for cash. Its army in the colonies was more expensive, and less effectual, than ever. The commercial depression had not ended, and public revenues, dependent on trade, would not increase until it did. The interior of North America remained ungoverned, and peace was sure to bring on a deluge of squatters that might well make it ungovernable. And finally, on top of everything else, the colonists’ enthusiasm for the empire, so powerful a cohesive force during the last years of the war and so apparently limitless at the war’s end, had been diminished by lingering, half-formed fears that in the highest circles of imperial power, men might yet plot to destroy the property and liberty of the colonists. Thus the Americans and their British kin had every reason to rejoice at the end of the Stamp Act crisis. But when at length they wiped the foam from their chins, their empire rang as hollow as the barrel that answered the last reveler’s wishful rap.

  CHAPTER 73

  Acrimonious Postlude THE COLONIES AFTER REPEAL

  1766

  CELEBRATIONS ASIDE, the repeal
of the Stamp Act brought little visible change to the colonies. During the winter and spring of 1766 the Sons of Liberty had served notice on judges and customsmen to and had done their best to see that merchants observed the nonimportation agreements but otherwise carried on as usual. Since business had been so bad anyway, the ships swinging idly at anchor and the unemployed sailors hunting for work marked the period of boycott as one different in degree, not in kind, from the preceding months. Beyond brief increases in local demand for alcohol and firecrackers, then, the news of repeal impinged little on economic life, and nonimportation ended without creating a surge in business activity. While official letters from Secretary Conway nourished hopes for the future by explaining that the ministry intended to liberalize trade within the empire, the merchants’ outlook remained dismal. The period of nonimportation had been too brief to clear shelves and warehouses glutted with British imports. With heavy debts to discharge and dull markets for their merchandise, most colonial traders continued to do what they had done before the crisis: dodge their creditors, press their debtors, and pray for better times.1 The most significant alterations to follow repeal therefore came not in the form of improved economic conditions, but rather in the exaggeration of internal political tensions. The provinces that showed the trend toward rancor and internal division most dramatically were the three that had led the way in protests and violence: Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia.

  Open your Courts and let Justice prevail Open your Offices and let not Trade fail

  IN MASSACHUSETTS, the signs that the crisis would leave a bitter legacy appeared before the word of repeal arrived and became unmistakable thereafter. The political balance in the Bay Colony had weighed in favor of the court party since William Shirley’s administration, though ever more delicately so after the writs of assistance controversy. The Stamp Act changed that forever by giving the country party the leverage it needed to dislodge the court’s majorities in the assembly and council. Rough as previous confrontations had been, none equaled the campaign that preceded the spring elections of 1766. Country politicians accused Thomas Hutchinson and Francis Bernard of conspiring with Grenville to destroy colonial rights and published a list of thirty-two members of the House of Representatives who had been “contrivers, promoters, and executioners of the Stamp Act.” For the first time in the history of the Bay Colony, an attempt to organize a province-wide political campaign actually worked. Nineteen of the thirty-two targeted members lost to candidates aligned with the country party, which immediately used its majority in the House of Representatives to choose James Otis as speaker and Samuel Adams as clerk, and to purge the Governor’s Council of Hutchinson and his allies, replacing them with country party stalwarts. “Thus the Triumph of Otis and his Party [is] compleat,” observed John Adams, in Boston to attend the Election Day ceremonies. “But what changes are yet to come? Will not the other Party soon be uppermost?”2

  Governor Bernard did his best to tip the balance back into his favor by vetoing Otis as speaker and refusing to assent to the election of six councillors (including Otis’s father) whom he identified with the country party. But despite his vetoes and a “most nitrous, sulphureous Speech” to justify them, he would never make the court party uppermost again. The country party majority in the House of Representatives named one of Otis’s most prominent followers, Thomas Cushing, as speaker and got on with the business of opposition. Thereafter the country party behaved with greater discipline than any political bloc in Massachusetts in a quarter century; and that in turn opened a new era of frustration for a governor who had been a reasonably effective, if fussy, servant of the Crown.3

  Bernard’s troubles began in earnest the very next day, when he received official notice of the repeal of the Stamp Act and with it Secretary Conway’s directive to secure compensation for the victims of the previous year’s riots—which was to say, principally, Thomas Hutchinson. The governor still had not regained control of his temper when he informed the House of Representatives that Parliament expected it to compensate “the late sufferers by the madness of the people,” using language so intemperate as to accuse the legislators of treasonous intentions. The new leaders of the House, determined to teach Bernard a lesson in majoritarian politics, refused to cooperate. Only at the end of the year— after delaying the governor’s salary grant to the last minute and including an amnesty for all rioters in the act that authorized compensation for Hutchinson—did the representatives conclude that Bernard had been sufficiently chastised. 4

  Christmas Eve found Bernard sunk in gloom, writing a letter to the Southern secretary and complaining that “the demagogues who have got the lead, are determined to bring all real power into the hands of the people.” If they succeeded, he would be “reduced to the standard of a Rhode Island governor.” He did not intend to let that happen, he wrote; but for all his resolute words, Bernard also knew that he could no longer influence Bay Colony politics as he had when Thomas Hutchinson had commanded a legislative majority in his service. He probably did not understand the extent to which his troubles were of his own making.5

  Besides preventing the half-dozen most offensive new councillors from taking their seats, Bernard had stripped those members of the House of Representatives whom he identified with the country party of the offices in the militia that he controlled as commander in chief. By summarily depriving local notables of the commissions that symbolized their status, he made permanent enemies of dozens of moderates—men Hutchinson had been cultivating, in some cases, for years. In 1758, for example, Hutchinson had seen to it that Artemas Ward, a freshman representative from Shrewsbury with military ambitions, got the lieutenant colonelcy he wanted. As Hutchinson later recalled, “I thought I could bring [him] over [to the court party] by giving him a commission in the Provincial forces.” For that same reason, he supported Ward’s appointment as colonel of a Worcester County militia regiment the following year. During the Stamp Act crisis, Ward had tried to remain aloof; but his presence on a legislative committee with Otis and Adams made the governor jump to the conclusion that Ward had become a country party man. In fact, he was merely ambivalent, but Bernard soon cured him of it. On July 7, 1766, the governor dispatched a uniformed messenger to Shrewsbury with the curt notice that he had “thought fit to supersede [Ward’s] commission of Colonel,” thereby publicly humiliating a man whom he had no reason to alienate and negating eight years of Hutchinson’s careful effort. Ward would henceforth, unsurprisingly, firmly support the country party. So, for that matter, would ex-Colonel Jerathmeel Bowers of Swansea, ex-Colonel Joseph Gerrish of Newbury, ex-Colonel Josiah Quincy of Braintree, and several other, similarly situated country gentlemen, whose loss of militia rank only confirmed their constituents’ suspicion that the governor was a petty tyrant. Otis and Adams could have found no more able recruiter for their political machine than Francis Bernard.6

  To make matters worse, events of the summer convinced Bernard that the mobs and certain smuggling merchants, having tasted power the year before, were now determined to defy the laws of trade. If the scale was less massive than in 1765, Bernard worried over reports arriving from Maine in August that a Falmouth mob had besieged two customs officers with stones and clubs while a second crowd hustled away the sheriff and a third liberated contraband goods lately seized from a smuggler. Bernard was, if anything, more alarmed to find that no one would come forward when he offered a fifty-pound reward for information. Yet whatever worries he experienced on Falmouth’s account faded as Boston produced an even more outrageous incident.7

  It began routinely on September 23 when an anonymous informer alerted customs officers that Daniel Malcolm, a sea captain, minor merchant, and smuggler, had stowed several casks of uncustomed wine in his cellar. The next day, armed with a writ, two customsmen and a deputy sheriff called on Captain Malcolm, who declined to grant them access to a locked storage room in his cellar. Since he declined with a pistol in each hand and a sword at his belt, the officers left to gather
reinforcements. When they returned with the sheriff in tow, they found perhaps four hundred men and boys blocking the street in front of the captain’s house. The sheriff called on the crowd to disperse; the crowd waited for the sheriff to go home; the sun set; the writ expired; and Malcolm hauled out wine by the gallon to thank his supporters for their help. Soon the crowd dispersed, sloshing with the evidence. Bernard thought that James Otis was behind it all and furiously collected depositions to forward to London. The Boston town meeting (James Otis, moderator) demanded copies on grounds that unspecified parties had “Designs” to represent Boston “in a disadvantageous Light to his Majesty’s Ministers” as an excuse to ask for troops to enforce customs laws at bayonet-point. 8

  The confrontation collapsed almost immediately under the weight of its own absurdity. Bernard could not prove that Malcolm had ever hidden contraband wine, and the town meeting merely sent its own version of the episode to the colony’s agent, to be used if the necessity arose. The Malcolm affair was, in this sense, just one more squall in Boston’s busy teapot. But in two other ways it was more significant. In the first place, Bernard’s conviction that Otis and his supporters wanted to subvert the laws of trade and navigation was no fantasy. In the second, both the governor and his antagonists showed themselves capable of jumping to conclusions about each other’s motives that stopped only inches short of paranoia.

  Beginning in December 1765, Otis (writing as “Hampden” in the Boston Gazette) had published essays maintaining that British restrictions on colonial trade constituted an indirect but quite real tax on American commerce. Insofar as any regulation of trade restricted the merchant’s ability to dispose of his property, he argued, it infringed on his rights; insofar as any exaction—including an excise charged to the manufacturer—added to the price of any import in American markets, it was a tax; and insofar as Americans had no representation in Parliament, all such taxes were illegitimate. Nor, Otis continued, were the sums in question inconsequential: by monopolizing colonial markets and imposing overgrown customs and excise establishments on the economy, the British added as much as 50 percent to the cost of manufactures. “What American peazant before the late regulations,” Otis demanded, referring to the American Duties Act of 1764, “ever dreamt his dearly bo[ugh]t coarse coat . . . was taxed half its cost to those who live and die in the ease, luxury, and prodigality of Great Britain? Now they know.” 9