6. The tun was the unit from which most other English standard measures descended (the pipe, or butt, was a half tun; the puncheon, a third; the hogshead, a quarter; the tierce, a sixth; the barrel, an eighth); in 1700 Parliament defined a tun as holding 252 “wine gallons.” The wine gallon, one of two official English gallons, measured 231 cu. in., eventually became the standard U.S. gallon. Cask volumes, of course, varied according to the bulge and height, the depth at which the head was set, and so on. For the most complete conceivable discussion of British measures and variations in usages from the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, see John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, vol. 2 (New York, 1989), 768–878.
7. On the new duties, see Thomas, Politics, 47–8; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 226; and Bullion, Measure, 100–4.
8. Molasses and rum prices are those at Boston in 1762, from McCusker, Rum and Revolution,2:1078, 1080; adjusted to sterling according to the rates in id., Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 142. On the openness of the trade, Thomas Hutchinson observed: “Such indulgence has been shewn . . . to that branch of illicit trade [in French molasses], that nobody considered it as such.” As he went on to explain, the real cause of the smuggling was the poor compensation of customsmen, who were, generally speaking, the deputies of nonresident officials: “they are quartered upon for more than their legal fees [i.e., their employers charged them more than they could collect], & . . . without bribery & corruption, they must starve” (Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, 17 Sept. 1763, quoted in Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 208).
9. Quotation: Nathaniel Ware to Grenville, 22 Aug. 1763; reprinted in Bullion, Measure, 221. Ware noted that the Molasses Act’s sixpence sterling duty could theoretically be collected, if provincial excise taxes levied on rum—wartime measures to finance the costs of raising provincial troops—could be eliminated. In Massachusetts, the leading rum distiller in the colonies, the provincial tax on rum was approximately sixpence per gallon and was indispensable to discharging the colony’s war debt. Were rum to be subjected to an additional tax by the exaction of the full Molasses Act levy, Ware warned, “that Trade must Totally fail.”
10. Morgan, Crisis, 41–2; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 208–22; Bullion, Measure, 78–98, 220–3; Thomas, Politics, 47–50.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE: The Currency Act
1. Except where noted, the following discussion derives from Joseph Ernst, Money and Politicsin America, 1755–1775: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), 43–88, 376; and Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 62–6. For information on exchange rates to supplement Ernst’s graphs, see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 211.
2. Julian Hoppit, “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39 (1986): 49–50.
3. The Currency Act appears in David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 649–50; quotation from 649.
4. On reimbursements in proportion to wartime expenditures, see Jack Greene, “The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered,” in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, eds., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London, 1980), 98. The continental colonies as a whole expended £2,568,248 on the war and received £1,086,769 from Parliament as “free gifts”—42.3 percent of the total. The six colonies most heavily engaged in prosecuting the war—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—bore 88.5 percent of the expense, expending a total of £2,271,804. Parliament eventually reimbursed these provinces £949,023, or 41.8 percent. Connecticut, for reasons that probably had to do with its assembly’s compliant attitude and its agent’s speed in submitting accounts, received a disproportionate share of the reimbursement funds: £231,752, or 89.2 percent of its expenditures. If it is excluded from the calculation as an anomaly, parliamentary reimbursements to the remaining five colonies totaled £717,271, covering 35.7 percent of expenditures.
My point in arguing counterfactually that an alternative scheme of colonial defense might have averted problems that later arose is not to maintain that such a measure would have worked easily had it been proposed—there would inevitably have been problems with an army in which all officers were British and all enlisted men American—but merely to emphasize that nothing like it ever was proposed; and hence to point up the limitations in British thinking about the colonies’ capacity to defend themselves.
5. On the backward-looking character of British policy, see esp. John Murrin, “The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy,” Reviews in American History 1 (1973): 307–18.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO: Postwar Conditions and the Context of Colonial Response
1. On the character and timing of the downturn, see William S. Sachs, “The Business Outlook in the Northern Colonies, 1750–1775” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1957), 107–13; Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 126–33; and Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 95–7, 168–80. On its British and macroeconomic context, see Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 52–3. Except as specified, the ensuing discussion follows these accounts.
2. In New York, the rate of exchange of province currency against sterling began to climb in late 1760. Starting in the mid-160s, it passed 180 in the spring of 1761, then hovered in the 182–190 range until late 1765. In Philadelphia, the rate rose from the mid-150s to 170 at the end of 1760, briefly touched 180 in mid-1762, and then oscillated between 178 and 170 until the fall of 1765. In Boston the rate jumped from 127 in May 1760 to 135 by the end of the year, bounced up to 145 in April 1761, and then gradually fell to 133 by late 1764—a level it maintained for the next five years. See the tables in John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and Amer ica, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 186, 165, 142.
3. Sachs, “Business Outlook,” 113–26.
4. Ibid., 126–30; Koehn, Power, 52–3.
5. Philadelphia and New York bankruptcies: Sachs, “Business Outlook,” 131–3; Egnal, Mighty Empire, 131–2; Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, 56–7. The case of Thomas Riche: ibid., 49, 82, 133, 146–8.
6. Like all generalizations about the colonies, this one needs to be qualified. Not all regions suffered alike, or in precise synchrony. The recession barely touched the South Carolina low country in the 1760s. Virginia’s tobacco economy would bottom out in 1764, begin to recover in 1765, and improve significantly until suffering more reversals at the end of the decade. As we will see below, the Philadelphia dry goods sector would remain in serious trouble throughout the decade, but provision traders would suffer most severely only in 1764–68, thus providing some respite for Philadelphia business as other northern merchants were slipping into trouble, and brightening its outlook in 1769, when Philadelphia would lead the northern port towns in the recovery. Despite local exceptions and countertrends, however, most colonies and colonists (and particularly the northern ports and the most commercialized agricultural regions) experienced the 1760s as a decade of real and persistent economic dislocation. The resulting social strain carried significant consequences for colonial political life and helped impart an antagonistic character to colonial-metropolitan relations.
7. Boston: John Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 65–75, 285 n. 17;
Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 254. New York: Sachs, “Outlook,” 132–7 passim (quotation from John Watts to Scott, Pringle, Cheape and Co., 5 Feb. 1764, at 136); Nash, Crucible, 250, 497 n. 83. Philadelphia: Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, 173–7; Nash, Crucible, 255; Egnal, Mighty Empire, 132.
8. Winifed Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992), 109 (table 8, “Weighted Index of on-the-Farm Prices Received by Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855”); id., “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” Journal of Economic History 39 (1979): 975–1001.
9. Disruptions in tobacco markets: Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), 588–677; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985), esp. 125–32. Quotation: George Washington to James Gildart, 26 Apr. 1763, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 7, January 1761–June 1767 (Charlottesville, Va., 1990), 201. Most of the ordinary-quality tobacco grown by small and middling planters in the Chesapeake, unlike the sweet-scented premium leaf that the gentry grew for the London market, was bought by resident Scottish factors, or storekeepers, and shipped to correspondents in Glasgow, Whitehaven, and on the Clyde, who reexported it to France under contract with the state monopoly. The French crown needed the revenues it derived from the tobacco monopoly so badly that it allowed this trade to continue during the war; wartime conditions and restrictions, however—British tobacco ships had to return in ballast, insurance rates were extremely high, and so on—radically diminished the profits to be made by tobacco planters themselves.
10. On Washington as a representative planter responding to the recession of the 1760s, see Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 3, Planter and Patriot (New York, 1951), 71–118; and Breen, Tobacco Culture, 147–50, 208–9.
11. The returns planter speculators realized on land sales to yeomen farmers have not yet been quantified, but the great planters clearly used their position as burgesses to make grants of land to syndicates that they themselves comprised (e.g., the Loyal Company and the Ohio Company), and from which they made speculative profits. Gentry surveyors like Peter Jefferson and George Washington aggressively pursued land acquisitions as individuals, while gentleman landholders sought to dominate the real-estate and rental markets wherever they could. The ability to control access to freehold land reinforced gentry social dominance, even in frontier counties where access to land was comparatively easier than in the tidewater. Thus any contraction in speculation carried social and cultural as well as economic consequences for the planter elite. See Turk McClesky, “Rich Land, Poor Prospects: Real Estate and the Formation of a Social Elite in Augusta County, Virginia, 1738–1770,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 48 (1990): 449–86.
12. Distilling and the Great Dismal Swamp venture: Freeman, Planter and Patriot, 116–17, 100–3. Mississippi Company: Articles of Agreement, 3 June 1763, Papers of Washington, 7:219–25.
13. Croghan’s mission: Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 203; Yoko Shirai, “The Indian Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1730–1768: Traders and Land Speculation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985), 151–98. Croghan, Franklin, and the Illinois Company: Samuel Wharton to Franklin, 23 Nov. 1764, in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 9, January 1 through December 31, 1764 (New Haven, Conn., 1967), 476–7. Croghan’s persistence: Wainwright, 253–5, 305–10.
14. On Lyman and the Military Adventurers, see Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 204–5, 210–11; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), 484–8; and esp. [Albert C. Bates, ed.], The Two Putnams: Israel and Rufus in the Havana Expedition of 1762 and in the Mississippi River Exploration of 1772–73 with Some Account of the Company of Military Adventurers (Hartford, 1931), 1–20.
15. Bailyn, Voyagers; id., The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986), 7–66.
16. A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), esp. 168–83.
17. Quotation: Laurens to Richard Oswald and Co., 15 Feb. 1763, quoted in Egnal, Mighty Empire, 147–8. On the character of South Carolina’s prosperity and the mild effects of the recession, see ibid., 147–9. In yet another instance of the smallness of the Anglo-American trading world and the powerful effects on it of the war, it is worth noting that Laurens’s correspondent, Oswald, was part of a group of once-marginal, once-provincial British merchants that parlayed military contracts and government contacts into great wealth and postwar political clout. They had acquired formerly French slave-trading stations at bargain-basement rates, and at the end of the war they supplied Africans to the West Indies and the mainland. For a keen appreciation of how war and slavery offered matchless opportunities to those able to seize them, see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York, 1995).
18. On New Jersey, see Thomas L. Purvis, Proprietors, Patronage, and Paper Money: Legislative Politics in New Jersey, 1703–1776 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986), esp. 168–71, 229–45. On Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York: Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973) 3–17; Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 140–278; John M. Murrin, “Political Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British North America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), esp. 432–47.
19. Egnal, Mighty Empire, 191–8; Main, Political Parties, 8–9.
20. Virginia: Egnal, Mighty Empire, 217; Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 95–7; Main, Political Parties, 11. Massachusetts: William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981), 158–75.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE: An Ambiguous Response to Imperial Initiatives
1. Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York, 1963), 43 (quotation from Francis Bernard, Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America [1774]).
2. John Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 83–4. Quotations: “Boston instructions to its delegates in the Massachusetts Legislature,” David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 663–4 (hereafter cited as Am. Col. Docs.).
3. Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 82–4; Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York, 1980), 3–50. See also William M. Fowler, Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (New York, 1997).
4. Jensen, Founding, 85–7; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 51–3. The Rights of the Colonies Asserted and Proved is reprinted with commentary in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1775, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 419–82, quotation at 454. For commentary on the pamphlet, see esp. Bailyn’s introduction, ibid., 409–17; and id., Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 176–81; also Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 262–5.
5. Hutchinson objects, privately: Malcolm Freiberg, Prelude to Purgatory: Thomas Hutchinson in Provincial Massachusetts Politics, 1760–1770 (New York, 1990), 71–7; Bernard Bail
yn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 62–4. Quotation: Bernard to Halifax, 10 Nov. 1764, in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 235 n. 30.
6. The North Carolina Assembly also registered a protest against the American Duties Act as a violation of colonial rights, but it did so only locally, in the form of a message to Governor Arthur Dobbs. It could have been known in Britain only if the governor transmitted it, which he seems not to have done. See Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 57; A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 148–60; Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), 364.
7. On James De Lancey’s political power, see Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 171–8. On Colden, see ibid., 152–5; and Milton M. Klein, “Prelude to Revolution in New York: Jury Trials and Judicial Tenure,” in id., ed., The Politics of Diversity: Essays in the History of Colonial New York (Port Washington, N.Y., 1974), 154–77. Quotations are from John Watts to Monckton, 10 Nov. 1764, Watts to Isaac Barré, 19 Jan. 1765, and Robert R. Livingston to Monckton, 23 Feb. 1765, ibid., 168.
8. Petition to the House of Commons, 18 Oct. 1764; in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 8–14.
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