by H. W. Brands
All was well, he continued, until an unnamed (but easily identified) minister determined to levy a stamp tax upon the Americans. The Americans naturally resented this imposition and resisted it, till Parliament wisely rescinded it. The rescission put the Americans in “high good humour,” but the ousted ministers in England who had designed the Stamp Act were resentful and eager for revenge. The objection of New York to quartering the king’s troops afforded a pretext for suspending the assembly there. This greatly alarmed all the people of America, who inferred that what was done to New York might be done to them.
Their alarm intensified from the concurrent introduction of a new set of taxes. The taxes themselves were less odious than the purposes for which they were designed, namely, to support governors, judges, and other royal officials, thereby freeing those officials from any dependence on the provinces in which they served. This was the critical point. The governors, judges, and the rest had no permanent interest in the colonies, typically being sent out from England for a few years, to return to England at the end of their service. Should they be relieved of even the necessity of looking to the provincial assemblies for their pay, there would be no influencing them in the least. Governors might well take to ignoring the assemblies entirely, perhaps not even calling them. “Thus the people will be deprived of their most essential rights.”
The colonists had other complaints. At the insistence of a handful of self-interested British merchants, they had been deprived of the right to issue paper currency of their own. Equally selfish parties benefited from prohibitions against the Americans’ producing nails, steel—even hats. “It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire, whether a subject of the King’s gets his living by hats on this side or that side of the water. Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favour, restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beavers to England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the charges of a double transportation.” No less galling was the long-standing practice of allowing the prisons of Britain to dump their human refuse upon American shores. For decades England had been availing itself of this opportunity to export its rogues and villains; just recently Scotland won this dubious distinction.
How were the Americans to respond? Could they conclude other than to look out for themselves by the only means in their power? Contravening no law, they simply decided not to import goods from Britain, the better to conserve the gold and silver they needed as currency, to avoid the taxes they had no part in designing, to lighten the burden British monopolies regularly exacted from them, to prepare for the day when a reenlightened Parliament and Crown would constitutionally request support rather than unconstitutionally extort it. “For notwithstanding the reproaches thrown out against us in their public papers and pamphlets, notwithstanding we have been reviled in the senate as rebels and traitors, we are truly a loyal people. Scotland has had its rebellions, and England its plots against the present royal family; but America is untainted with those crimes; there is in it scarce a man, there is not a single native of our country, who is not firmly attached to his King by principle and by affection.”
But something novel was expected: a loyalty to Parliament, a loyalty that extended to surrender of all Americans’ property to a body in which there sat not a single member of America’s choosing. This was not merely novel; it was unconstitutional, and it threatened mortal harm to the empire. “We were separated too far from Britain by the Ocean, but we were united to it by respect and love, so that we could at any time freely have spent our lives and little fortunes in its cause. But this unhappy new system of politics tends to dissolve those bands of union, and to sever us for ever.”
The anonymous Franklin, posing as a devoted supporter of Parliament, disowned these views for himself. “No reasonable man in England can approve of such sentiments.” They were, rather, “the wild ravings of the at present half distracted Americans.” Yet British self-interest required taking them into account. “I sincerely wish, for the sake of the manufactures and commerce of Great Britain, and for the sake of the strength which a firm union with our growing colonies would give us, that these people had never been thus needlessly driven out of their senses.”
Franklin’s distancing himself from the views of the American malcontents was a tactic of propaganda, aimed to avoid throwing his readers on the defensive. But it was also an indication of an honest ambivalence. Even while writing regularly on relations between the British government and the American colonies, he was unsure quite what those relations were or ought to be.
To his surprise, he received an education in the matter from a man he had until lately vehemently opposed. John Dickinson was a near-contemporary of William Franklin, and for a time their career paths ran parallel. Dickinson read law in Philadelphia at about the same time William did; he finished his legal education at London’s Middle Temple just before William. Both went into politics after a brief legal practice; each became a solid supporter of the status quo.
But where William’s appointment as royal governor of New Jersey placed him in league with Franklin, Dickinson’s election to the Pennsylvania Assembly put him opposite Franklin, for the status quo Dickinson supported was that of the province’s proprietary government. That Dickinson was an ardent advocate and facile writer merely made him, in Franklin’s opinion, the more dangerous. Consequently it was with some surprise that Franklin read a series of articles published by Dickinson in the Pennsylvania Chronicle starting in the winter of 1767–68, articles that comprised the most astute and incisive argument in print on the subject of relations between Britain and the American colonies.
Actually, the surprise came after the fact, for the “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” were published, like most of Franklin’s own pieces during this period, anonymously. Lord Hillsborough initially guessed that Franklin himself was the author. “My Lord H. mentioned the Farmer’s letters to me,” Franklin wrote William, “said he had read them, that they were well written, and he believed he could guess who was the author, looking in my face at the same time as if he thought it was me.” Franklin did not know who the author was, and did not discover Dickinson’s identity until some months later. By then he had arranged the republication of the “Letters” as a pamphlet in London, to which he appended an appreciative preface.
Dickinson’s letters denied the central argument Franklin had made in his testimony before Parliament, and again when writing as Benevolus: that a meaningful distinction existed between internal and external taxes. This was the wrong way to slice the taxing issue, Dickinson said. The distinction that mattered was between taxes designed for revenue and those designed for regulation. The latter were unavoidable in a mercantile empire and were constitutionally innocuous. The former, even if devised as external taxes upon imports, were illegitimate and insidious when levied, as the Townshend taxes were, without the consent of those required to pay them.
Dickinson’s letters provided the theoretical justification for colonial opposition to the Townshend acts. Most colonists had concluded that the acts were mischievous or worse, but they had struggled to find constitutional grounds for this conclusion. Dickinson discovered what they were looking for.
Franklin thought so, although he was fairly certain the Farmer would not have the last word. The problem, Franklin told William, was that even Dickinson’s distinction was philosophically suspect. Dickinson allowed Parliament the power to regulate the trade of the colonies but withheld the right to tax trade for revenue. Where did one draw the line between regulation and revenue? Was a sugar tax of one penny a tariff for regulation and a sugar tax of two pence a tariff for revenue? More important than where the line lay, who would draw it? “If Parliament is to be the judge, it seems to me that establishing such principles of distinction will amount to little.”
The fundamental problem was that any effort to subdivide sovereignty was almost certainly doomed to f
ail. Either Parliament was sovereign over the American colonies or it was not.
The more I have thought and read on the subject the more I find myself confirmed in my opinion that no middle doctrine can be well maintained, I mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us.
At this moment, in March 1768, Franklin reached what seemed the Rubicon of relations between Britain and the American colonies. Either Parliament was supreme in all areas pertaining to the provinces or it was supreme in none. “I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the former,” he told William.
Typically, however, Franklin declined to be dogmatic on this point, nor on the conclusions to which it logically led. If Parliament was supreme in nothing touching the colonies, then the colonies were perfectly justified—in theory—in resisting every effort by Parliament to legislate for them in any manner whatsoever. “Supposing that doctrine established, the colonies would then be so many separate states, only subject to the same King, as England and Scotland were before the Union.” Whether a union like that between England and Scotland should be effected between the American colonies and England would be a matter for Americans and English to decide. Franklin, still the British imperialist, favored a transatlantic union. “Though particular parts might find particular disadvantages in it, they would find greater advantages in the security arising to every part from the increased strength of the whole.” He realized, however, that the moment was not propitious. “Such union is not likely to take place while the nature of our present relation is so little understood on both sides the water, and sentiments concerning it remain so widely different.”
Two years earlier Franklin had parried a hostile question in Parliament suggesting that Americans’ denial of Parliament’s right to tax would logically lead to a denial of Parliament’s right to legislate; he had asserted that they did not so reason then but might be convinced if Parliament got pushy. He had spoken half humorously, in an effort to turn aside an uncomfortable query. But events were proving him right, against his own wishes. He had no desire to break up the British empire, but logic was leading in that direction. And emotion—the emotion of others, not yet himself—was encouraging logic.
Emotions were running high in England during the spring of 1768 on subjects besides the colonies. John Wilkes was back from France, and back in the thick of popular and Parliamentary politics. Defying his outlawry, Wilkes stood for Parliament from the City of London. He lost badly, finishing last in a field of seven, but blamed it on his late arrival. Unabashed, he hied off to Middlesex, where a seat was open and a cooperative opponent of the government gave him land enough to qualify to stand. Middlesex, like much of England during this season, was in a ferment from rising prices and falling wages. Silk weavers were striking; sailors refused to set sail; coal heavers dropped their shovels and raised their fists. Wilkes became an instrument of the popular distress, and disgruntled individuals discovered that the old cry of “Wilkes and liberty!” transmuted easily to “Wilkes and the coal heavers forever!” and the like.
Wilkes won handily, and on election night mobs of his supporters marched howling on London. King George called out the troops but himself stayed indoors; the troops proved sadly insufficient to their assignment. The Wilkites smashed windows at the house of London’s Lord Mayor, a known foe of their hero, and at houses of such other notables as Bute and Lord Egmont. The Duke of Northumberland was cowed into drinking Wilkes’s health; the Austrian ambassador, whose entire offense consisted of being caught in a coach on a street the rowdies made their own, was hauled out, thrown to his knees, and had “45” scrawled across the soles of his shoes.
Wilkes let the entertainment run its course before declaring, the following evening, that as the authorities were obviously incapable of keeping the peace, he and his friends would do so. A committee was appointed to patrol the streets; the group had special instructions to steer unruly persons—themselves included—away from St. James’s Palace, “that no insult or indecency might be offered to the King.”
Wilkes’s libel conviction still hung over his head, but the government was too terrified to arrest him. The ministers were certain this would simply loose the mob again. Although Wilkes offered to surrender peacefully, he was rebuffed by the Lord Chief Justice, who wanted nothing to do with him; Wilkes finally had to insist on his right as an Englishman to be arrested. With great reluctance, the sheriff accepted him into custody—only to see his reluctance corroborated when Wilkes’s followers hijacked the vehicle carrying him, cut free the horses, and then, to the amazement of all, put themselves in the shafts and traces and pulled the vehicle forward. Coach and team rumbled along the Strand and past Temple Bar before halting for refreshments at the Three Tuns Tavern, where Wilkes thanked his friends for their support but excused himself to proceed to prison afoot.
Conditions grew only more unruly with Wilkes behind bars. Actually, the bars on his room at the prison in St. George’s Fields were more notional than real: the prisoner entertained guests of both sexes, including a seemingly endless train of young women who found Wilkes even more fascinating as a convicted criminal than he had been as a mere rake. Admirers sent cases of wine, butts of ale, countless hams, pheasants, turtles; from Maryland (the cause of Wilkesian liberty resonated across the Atlantic) arrived forty-five hogsheads of tobacco, which contributed their share to the further fouling of London’s atmosphere.
Outside the prison thousands demonstrated against Wilkes’s confinement. On May 10 the crowd swelled to perhaps twenty thousand, shouting, gesticulating, threatening authorities and passersby alike. The nervous authorities attempted to disperse the mob, but as the justice was reading the Riot Act, a hurled stone struck him. He summoned the troops that had been standing nearby and set them upon the crowd. In the melee that followed, some half dozen civilians were killed and many more wounded. The “St. George’s Fields Massacre,” as it was immediately labeled, triggered additional violence across London and environs. Wilkes was one theme of the window-smashing and house-wrecking but not the only one. Unemployed artisans shouted for work; sailors swung staves for cheaper bread; coalers demanded better beer. The defiance of authority revealed a common opinion, expressed variously, that hanging was better than starving. The upper classes held their breath. “We are glad if we can keep our windows whole, or pass and repass unmolested,” wrote Horace Walpole. “I call it reading history as one goes along the street…. I do not love to think what the second volume must be of a flourishing nation running riot.”
Franklin watched with astonishment. “The scenes have been horrible,” he wrote William in April.
London was illuminated two nights running at the command of the mob for the success of Wilkes in the Middlesex election; the second night exceeded any thing of the kind ever seen here on the greatest occasions of rejoicing, as even the small cross streets, lanes, courts, and other out-of-the-way places were all in a blaze with lights, and the principal streets all night long, as the mobs went round again after two o’clock, and obliged people who had extinguished their candles to light them again. Those who refused had all their windows destroyed.
The damage done to property (and the cost of the candles) had been computed at £50,000; the cost to the morale of the law-abiding citizenry was still higher. “’tis really an extraordinary event,” Franklin said, “to see an outlaw and exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing, come over from France, set himself up as candidate for the capital of the kingdom, miss his election only by being too late in his application, and immediately carrying it for the principal county.” Wilkes’s hoodlums had terrorized not only London but far out into the countryside. Franklin had been to Winchester, more than sixty miles from London, and seen their scrawled “45” and other evidence of their passage the entire way.
As the anarchy persisted, so did
Franklin’s astonishment. “This capital, the residence of the King, is now a daily scene of lawless riot and confusion,” Franklin wrote in May.
Mobs are patrolling the street at noon day, some knocking all down that will not roar for Wilkes and liberty; courts of justice afraid to give judgment against him; coalheavers and porters pulling down the houses of coal merchants that refuse to give them more wages; sawyers destroying the new sawmills; sailors unrigging all the outbound ships, and suffering none to sail till merchants agree to raise their pay; watermen destroying private boats and threatening bridges; weavers entering houses by force, and destroying the work in the looms; soldiers firing among the mobs and killing men, women and children; which seems only to have produced an universal sullenness that looks like a great black cloud coming on, ready to burst in a general tempest.
Nothing remained to hold the chaos at bay. “All respect to law and government seems to be lost among the common people, who are moreover continually enflamed by seditious scribblers to trample on authority and every thing that used to keep them in order.”
Wilkes symbolized a system beset by cynicism and corruption. Electioneering had become little but bribery and boozing. “There have been amazing contests all over the kingdom,” Franklin recorded, “£20 or 30,000 of a side spent in several places, and inconceivable mischief done by debauching the people and making them idle, besides the immediate actual mischief done by drunken mad mobs to houses, windows, &c.” No less discouraging than the fact of the corruption was the insouciance that informed it. “’tis thought that near two millions will be spent in this election. But those who understand figures and act upon computation say the Crown has two millions a year in places and pensions to dispose of, and ’tis well worth while to engage in such a seven years lottery though all that have tickets should not get prizes.”
