Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  8. Rockingham’s analysis—which is to say, the analysis of the merchants whom he consulted—did not extend to the functioning of the Proclamation of 1763. This measure was failing to stabilize the backcountry and malfunctioning badly in Canada, where Yankee traders who had arrived after the war were in a state of virtual rebellion against a governor who, they claimed, favored Canadian papists in violation of the proclamation’s terms (Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 [Toronto, 1966], 36–55; and Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 [New York, 1968], 172–6).

  9. Langford, Rockingham Administration, 111–18, 200–12.

  10. Thomas, British Politics, 168–70; Langford, Rockingham Administration, 135–6, 141–3.

  11. “Authority” and “welfare”: speech from the Throne, 14 Jan. 1765, in Thomas, British Politics, 170. “A pepper-corn”: speech of Robert Nugent, Lord Clare, M.P. for Bristol, summarized in William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle, eds., Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, vol. 2 (London, 1838), 364. See also Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York, 1963), 267.

  12. Quotations from “Confidence is a plant of slow growth” to “the head of man”: Chatham Corr., 2:365–7. “Ought to be . . . erroneous policy”: summary of Pitt’s position by James West, quoted in Thomas, British Politics, 172.

  13. Quoted 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, 1961), 378.

  14. Pitt’s reply to Grenville, 14 Jan. 1766, in Chatham Corr., 2:369–73.

  15. Yorke and the Declaratory Act: Langford, Rockingham Administration, 151. Trecothick’s petition drive: ibid., 119–24; and Thomas, British Politics, 187–8.

  16. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 366; id., Rockingham Administration, 153–4; Thomas, British Politics, 189–90.

  17. Ibid., 191–5; Langford, Rockingham Administration, 154–6. Rockingham’s meeting with the king was only minimally reassuring. George preferred a modification of the Stamp Act to repeal and offered his support only if Rockingham refrained from making it public. He refused to countenance the dismissal of any minister—he was thinking of his friend Lord Northington, the lord chancellor—who broke with the administration’s policy. He then sent an account of the meeting to Northington, implying that he expected the ministry to fall. See the king to the lord chancellor, 3 Feb. 1766, in John Fortescue, ed., The Correspondence of King George the Third, from 1760 to December 1783, vol. 1, 1760 to 1767 (1927; reprint, London, 1967), 252.

  18. Thomas, British Politics, 195–9.

  19. Resolutions: quoted in Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 390–1. Grenville’s motion: Grenville to Hans Stanley, 6 Feb. 1766, in Thomas, British Politics, 206.

  20. Langford, Rockingham Administration, 175–8; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 392–3; Thomas, British Politics, 206–17 (quotation: Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Fox, 24 Feb. 1766, at 213).

  21. Summary of Trecothick’s testimony, ibid., 217–19.

  22. On the risk of social disturbance arising from unemployment, see Langford, Rockingham Administration, 182–5. The following summary of Franklin’s testimony derives from the version reprinted in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 13, January 1 through December 31, 1766 (New Haven, Conn., 1969), 129–59.

  23. The Examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, before an August Assembly, relating to the Repeal of the Stamp Act, &c. (Philadelphia, 1766).

  24. Nugent quotation: Franklin’s notes on the examination, quoted ibid., 159 n. 1. Vote: Thomas, British Politics, 233.

  25. Ibid., 240–1, 246–7; Langford, Rockingham Administration, 190–5; Gipson, Thunder-CloudsGather, 398–407. The House of Lords actually had a small majority in favor of using troops to enforce the Stamp Act, and its approval of the repeal bill looked doubtful because several powerful peers—notably the duke of Bedford and the earl of Sandwich—thought Rockingham too soft on the colonists. In the end a procedural issue determined the outcome. The Stamp Act had been a “supply bill”—a tax measure—which constitutionally could only be granted by the Commons; thus authority to repeal also lay solely with the Commons, and the Lords had only the duty of offering their advice (which they had done in debate) and consent (Langford, Rockingham Administration, 192–4).

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO: The Hollowness of Empire

  1. “Houses at night”: Annual Register, 1766, quoted in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 11, The Triumphant Empire: The Rumbling of the Coming Storm, 1766–1770 (New York, 1967), 3. “Many Barrels”: Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 May 1766. The Commons House of Assembly stipulated that Pitt should be depicted “in the Ciceronian character and habiliment” (Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham [New York, 1976], 345).

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE: Acrimonious Postlude: The Colonies after Repeal

  1. “Open your Courts”: Placard posted before the Massachusetts Province House, Dec. 1765[?], quoted in John J. Waters Jr., The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 157. Hopeful letters, dismal prospects: Conway to Francis Bernard, 31 Mar. 1766, quoted in John Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 94. Business went on as usual in all the major ports by the clearing of ships on unstamped paper, since it very soon became clear that without trade the economy would totally collapse. Virginia’s surveyor general of customs was the first to allow coastal shipping to clear port without stamps, on 2 Nov. 1765; followed by Newport on 22 Nov.; Philadelphia, 2 Dec.; Boston, 17 Dec.; Annapolis (Maryland), 30 Jan. 1766; Savannah, sometime in Feb.; and Charleston, 4 Feb. Judges were more reluctant than customs officials to operate without stamps, and most merely granted continuances (which did not require stamps) from session to session through the spring term of 1766. Nonetheless, at least two court systems opened before news of the repeal reached the colonies, and operated with unstamped documents: the inferior courts in Massachusetts, on 13 Jan. 1766; and the entire court system of Maryland, on 8 Apr. 1766 (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], lxxiv–lxxv).

  2. “Contrivers”: quoted in Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 193. “Thus the Triumph”: entry of 28 May 1766, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 1, Diary 1755–1770 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 313. This account follows Jensen, Founding, 193–8; William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981), 172–5; and Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 11, The Triumphant Empire: The Rumbling of the Coming Storm, 1766–1770 (New York, 1967), 13–38. The twenty-eight-member Governor’s Council, which functioned as the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature, was elected by joint vote of the incoming representatives and the outgoing council members, with the consent of the governor. The governor could veto obnoxious appointments (and occasionally did), but the composition of the Council always remained in the control of the House of Representatives. Purges of the Council by the House were all but unknown: the election process (by secret ballot) was difficult to control, and coordination among the representatives highly uncommon. See Robert Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods: An Essay on Eighteenth-Century Politics (Boston, 1971), 221–9.

  3. Quotation: John Adams Diary, 29 May 1766, 313. Bernard’s power to affect appointments to leadership posts in the House was closely confined by the terms of the Massachusetts charter. Such executive weakness impressed contemporaries as one of the leading defects of the Bay Colony’s constitution. See Zemsky, Merchants, F
armers, and River Gods, 221–9; and Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1967), 131–3.

  4. Gipson, Coming Storm, 17–25; Jensen, Founding, 196–7. The grant of amnesty blatantly trespassed on the prerogative powers of the governor—and the Crown. Bernard understood the unconstitutional character of the act but assented to it on 9 Dec., because he knew the House would not otherwise make the grant. It was a shrewd move: the Privy Council later disallowed the act, thus solving the constitutional problem—after the “sufferers” had been compensated.

  5. Bernard to the earl of Shelburne [secretary of state for the South], 24 Dec. 1766, ibid., 197.

  6. James F. Smith, “The Rise of Artemas Ward, 1727–1777: Authority, Politics, and Military Life in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1990), 96, 120, 148–52, 166–7. “I thought I could”: Hutchinson to Thomas Pownall, 7 June 1768, quoted at 167. “Thought fit to supersede”: John Cotton, deputy province secretary, to Ward, 30 June 1766; quoted ibid., 153. The governor’s messenger presented the notice to Ward while Ward was helping his fellow parishioners construct a new meeting house at Shrewsbury. Town tradition held that Ward read the message aloud to those present; then he told the messenger to tell the governor that he considered himself “twice honored, but more in being superseded, than in being commissioned” because in taking away his office Bernard had shown “that I am, what he is not, a friend to my country.” Ward’s response (if it was in fact so eloquent) could scarcely have been better calculated to shore up his status—so abruptly threatened—as Shrewsbury’s leading citizen and public mediator. It also tied him permanently to the country party. As Smith observes of the incident, “From this moment on he would have no choice, if he hoped to maintain his local standing, but to oppose [Bernard,] the man whose peevishness had exposed him so unexpectedly on that summer’s day” (ibid., 154). On Hutchinson’s frustrations with Bernard, see esp. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 45–7.

  7. Gipson, Coming Storm, 34–5.

  8. Ibid., 36–7; Jensen, Founding, 278; Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York, 1970), 51–4. Writs of assistance operated only during daylight hours. The fear of military intervention was eminently rational: a principal duty of the army in the British Isles was to arrest smugglers and to break up coastal wrecking gangs. See Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1991), 153–4; and Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (Totowa, N.J., 1978), 23, 32, 35, 62, et passim.

  9. Boston Gazette, 23 Dec. 1765; quoted in Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots, 92.

  10. “The distinction” and “the merchants”: Bernard to Shelburne, 22 Dec. 1766, quoted in Gipson, Coming Storm, 34.

  11. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots, 25–107.

  12. Thomas Doerflinger’s analysis of the divided and fundamentally apolitical character of the Philadelphia merchant community during most of the postwar era corrects the view that emphasizes radicalism among traders—a point also applicable to Boston, albeit with a few significant exceptions, especially John Hancock. See id., A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), esp. 180–96.

  13. On conspiratorial thinking and its implications, see Bernard Bailyn, “A Note on Conspiracy,” in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 144–59; and Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (1982): 401–41.

  14. Except as otherwise noted, the following account derives from Jensen, Founding, 211–14; Gipson, Coming Storm, 45–65; and John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 250–8.

  15. “After the expense”: assembly resolve, in Gipson, Coming Storm, 46. “Set the Demand aside”: Gage to Conway, 21 Dec. 1765, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1931),

  77. Gage’s expectations: same to same, 6 May 1766, ibid., 89.

  16. Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 298–347.

  17. “The Montresor Journals,” ed. E. D. Scull, New-York Historical Society, Collections 14 (1881): 363 (entry of 1 May 1766). On the rioting of winter and spring 1766, see Kim, Landlord and Tenant, 367–89, and the contrary interpretation of Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (Baltimore, 1981), 36–71; also Dixon Ryan Fox, Yankees and Yorkers (New York, 1940), 147–51.

  18. Quotations: Gage to Conway, 24 June 1766, Gage Corr., 1:95. Gage’s motives: ibid., and same to same, 15 July 1766, ibid., 99.

  19. Quotations: Brown to Gage, 30 June 1766, and Clarke to Gage, 29 July 1766, in Shy, Toward Lexington, 219, 220.

  20. Ibid., 219–21.

  21. “Burnt and destroyed”: “Geographical, Historical Narrative, or Summary. . . .” [Lansdowne MSS.], quoted ibid., 222. “Affair has not been transacted”: earl of Shelburne to Moore, 11 Dec. 1766, quoted ibid., 223.

  22. Jensen, Founding, 212–14; quotation, Moore to the secretary of state for the Southern Department, 20 June 1766, at 213.

  23. Assembly to the governor, 13 Nov. 1766, ibid., 214.

  24. Except as otherwise noted, the following account derives from Jensen, Founding, 198–205; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 3, Planter and Patriot (New York, 1951), 142–3, 146–50, 165–72; and Joseph Ernst, Money and Politics in America,1755–1775: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), 175–96 (the only account that coherently estimates the scandal’s economic impact). On Lee’s character and finances, see Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York, 1980), 164–200, esp. 195–7.

  25. There was one notable exception to this generalization, which illustrates another dimension of the scandal’s disordering impact on gentry lives and relationships. Robinson had sunk ten thousand pounds into lead mines his father-in-law, John Chiswell, operated on the upper New River, a tributary of the Kanawha, west of the Allegheny height of land (and hence beyond the Proclamation Line). Robinson’s death left Chiswell a de facto bankrupt; drunk and enraged, he murdered a creditor, Robert Routledge. He was arrested, but justices of the peace who were also his business partners released him—an abuse of power that disturbed many who feared for the honor of the gentry class. Chiswell died soon thereafter, a broken man. (See Carl Bridenbaugh, “Virtue and Violence in Virginia, 1766, or The Importance of the Trivial,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 76 (1964): 3–29; Ernst, Money and Politics, 187 n. 43.)

  26. T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 168.

  27. Virginia Gazette (Rind), 26 July 1770, quoted ibid., 170.

  28. Quoted ibid., 176.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR: The Future of Empire

  1. On Johnstone’s career, see Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Johnstone, George”; on the tangled history of command and precedence of civilian and military authorities, see John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 181–4; on the military dimensions of the dispute, ibid., 283–5; and on the larger context, Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 210–31.

  2. Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 (Toronto, 1966), 30–44. See also Gipson, New Responsibilities, 163–76; Shy, Toward Lexington, 287–8; and Walter S. Dunn Jr., Frontier Profit and Loss: The British Army and the Fur Traders, 1760–1764
(Westport, Conn., 1998), 165–6. At least part of the antagonism between the American merchants and Murray was ethnic in origin. Dunn points out that Murray, a Scot, tended to treat Scots merchants most favorably, and particularly those Scottish officers who had remained in Canada and gone into the fur trade after the war.

  3. “The exertion”: Gage to Capt. James Murray, 5 May 1767, in Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 319. “Double the Number”: George Croghan to Sir William Johnson, 18 Oct. 1767, ibid.

  4. Shy, Toward Lexington, 229; Gage to Shelburne (Southern secretary), 13 June 1767, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 142–3. Gage’s reluctance to press the issue probably also reflected his reaction to being reprimanded for using regulars to kick Yankee intruders off New York estates; since Virginia and Pennsylvania both claimed the area, by expelling Virginia squatters he might be censured for putting the army at the service of the Penn family, as he had with the Hudson Valley patroons.

  5. On Croghan’s diplomacy, which kept open communications between Fort Pitt and Fort de Chartres, see White, Middle Ground, 436–47; and Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 238. (Croghan evidently bought the gifts he needed for this condolence diplomacy from Baynton, Wharton and Morgan, in which he was a silent partner; suggesting yet again that the wind never blew so ill as to waft George Croghan no good.) “Cost him more trouble”: White’s summary of Croghan to Gage, 15 June 1766, in Middle Ground, 347 n. 65. “Under no Laws”: Capt. James Murray to Gage, 16 May 1767, ibid., 344. “Those who have injured them”: Gage to Murray, 28 June 1767, ibid., 320 n. 9. On the alarming rise in frontier violence and retaliation, see Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of the Revolution (New York, 1993), 183–6; and Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 240.