Independence

by John Ferling

  Members of what in an instant had turned into an impassioned, unruly mob jeered and shouted curses at the soldiers. Some pelted the redcoats with snowballs and ice. Others recklessly dared the soldiers to open fire. “Come on you rascals, you bloody-backs, you Lobster Scoundrels; fire if you dare, God damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not,” hotheads shouted. Heavily outnumbered, the frightened soldiers were edgy. In such a belligerent, tension-packed atmosphere, the worst outcome was predictable.

  It took only a few minutes for a catastrophe to occur. No one ever knew exactly what happened, but the best guess was that a soldier, hit with a heavy chunk of ice, was knocked off balance, causing him to accidentally fire his musket. In an instant, other overwrought soldiers fired too. Some soldiers who had not yet discharged their weapons now presumed that, in the bedlam, they had failed to hear their commander’s order to open fire. They, too, emptied their muskets into the crowd. There was also the possibility, based on subsequent eyewitness accounts and the number of casualties, that civilians on the second floor of the Customs Building fired into the crowd.

  It had taken only an instant for these events to unfold, but in their wake, six in the crowd of agitators were wounded and five lay dead or dying in the bloody, trodden slush. Bostonians immediately called the incident a “massacre.” Some, like John Adams, ever after referred to what had occurred as the “slaughter in King Street.”60

  Long before it learned of the Boston Massacre, London was feeling the bite of the colonists’ trade embargo. British imports into America were sliced in half in 1769. The boycott in New York City, the second-busiest port in the colonies, shut out 80 percent of the goods normally imported into that colony. Eighteen months after the Townshend Duties became law, the American secretary confessed that the legislation could not be enforced. By early 1770 most members of the ministry had reached a similar conclusion. Though the colonists would not learn of the ministry’s action for another six weeks, three days before the Boston Massacre the cabinet voted to repeal the Townshend Duties, save for the tax on tea. Given the Americans’ thirst for the beverage, the tea tax was expected to raise twenty thousand pounds annually for the British treasury. Retaining that tax, Franklin reported, also afforded the government the means “for keeping up the claim of Parliamentary sovereignty.”61

  The government that rescinded most of the Townshend Duties had just come to power. The repeal, in fact, was very nearly the first step that it took. It was the government of Lord North. On March 2, six weeks after its formation, North’s ministry agreed to repeal the bulk of the Townshend Duties. Parliament rubber-stamped the decision within a few days. There is no evidence that North, who longed for reconciliation with America, ever planned to levy further taxes on the colonists. However, lest he send a signal of weakness, North rapidly purged those in his ministry who had favored the revocation of all American taxes, surrounding himself almost entirely with ministers who had strongly advocated both the Stamp Act and Townshend Duties. Given the composition of his ministry, and the fact that it had sought only a partial repeal of Parliament’s taxes, many in America feared that North’s government was solidly committed to taxing the colonists. Those concerns were disseminated by Americans in London, including the deputy governor of Maryland, who observed that everything pointed toward North “laying [additional] duties in America on some future occasion.”62

  Whatever North’s government stood for, there was no disputing that the American protest had, for the second time in forty months, compelled the British government to back down. In addition, as had happened during the Stamp Act crisis, those in American politics who were coming to be called Tories—because they had either defended British actions or opposed a hard-line resistance to London’s policies—paid a price. The faction in New York that had championed compliance with the Quartering Act and opposed the commercial boycott was swept from power in the elections of 1769. In Pennsylvania, the Assembly Party suffered staggering losses in the elections in 1770—retribution for its lukewarm support for the boycott and its long campaign for royal government, which few in the colony any longer found attractive. The evidence was overwhelming that there was widespread popular support in America for resisting parliamentary taxation and maintaining whatever slivers of autonomy the colonists had won.63

  North’s ministry largely ignored its American problem during the next three years. North may have been biding his time, waiting for the colonists’ boycott of tea to disintegrate, although such an explanation probably gives him more credit for system and savvy than he deserves. He was preoccupied by a crisis with Spain over the Falkland Islands during a portion of this time, a dustup that was successfully resolved, boosting North’s self-confidence. Much of his remaining time was consumed by the debt problem, and after a few years on the job, North was able to report that he was making headway toward getting Britain’s financial house in order, thanks in large measure to a new lottery he had introduced. Although London was not procuring much tax-based revenue from the colonies—the ongoing embargo had by 1772 reduced imports of tea by some 60 percent throughout the colonies and by nearly 99 percent in both New York City and Philadelphia—the ministry still showed no inclination to rekindle the troublesome matter of colonial taxation.64

  In the end, North inadvertently stumbled back into the American problem. By 1773 mismanagement had pushed the mammoth East India Company to the cusp of bankruptcy, a calamity that threatened to plunge Great Britain into a ruinous depression. North’s government chose to bail out the beleaguered company, loaning it 1 million pounds. To help the company meet its debt obligation, North’s government also secured passage of the Tea Act, a measure that vested the East India Company with a monopoly on tea sales in America and reduced the existing tax on tea. North’s thinking was that the cost of the company’s tea would be so cheap that no smuggler could compete.65

  North found what he had done to be distasteful, though only because he loathed the government’s intrusion into the affairs of a private enterprise. He appears to have never imagined that an American rebellion could blow up out of the Tea Act, especially because he saw the origins of the legislation as distinct from that which had produced the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties. But Franklin saw what North could not see. Before the colonists learned of the Tea Act, Franklin published in a London newspaper what may have been his most brilliant satire, a piece he titled “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.” To ensure the ruination of an empire, Franklin wrote, the mother country should send as governors to the colonies men who were “Prodigals who have ruined their Fortunes, broken Gamesters or Stock-Jobbers,” and when they have completed their “Mal-administration, Oppression, or Injustice,” they should be brought home and “reward[ed] … with Pensions.” That alone would not do, however. The parent state should additionally quarter troops among the Americans so that mobs might be provoked, restrict the colonists’ manufacturing and commercial abilities, and “harass them with novel Taxes.” Remember, too, he further advised, “to make your arbitrary Tax more grievous … by public Declarations importing that your Power of taxing them has no limit.” Finally, be sure to ignore the colonists’ entreaties for redress. Instead, “Suppose all their Complaints be invented and promoted by a few factious Demagogues, whom if you could catch and hang” it “shall work Miracles in favour” of your getting “rid of the Trouble of governing them … for ever.”66

  His biting essay notwithstanding, Franklin remained hopeful. Perhaps he clutched at straws, but it was more likely that he had been impressed with the steady restraint exhibited by North’s government during its first forty months in office. Franklin was also cheered by the departure of Lord Hillsborough as American secretary in the summer of 1772. Franklin had initially believed that Hillsborough’s “inclinations are rather favourable towards us.” He had been wrong. Hillsborough not only had been prone to malicious and ill-advised actions—by “my Firmness” the colonists will be “something mended,�
� he had boasted loudly—but also had treated Franklin with a callous snobbishness. Soon enough Franklin realized that both the royalization of Pennsylvania and his elevation to a subministerial post were dead letters so long as Hillsborough held his office. Ultimately, Franklin concluded that the boorish Hillsborough was a man given to “conceit, wrong-headedness, obstinacy, and passion” who was “fond of every one that can stoop to flatter him and inimical to all that dare tell him disagreable Truths.” But by the time of the Tea Act, Hillsborough was gone, forced out a year earlier by domestic enemies who believed his land policies in America were injurious to their speculative interests. He had been succeeded in August 1772 by the Earl of Dartmouth, who was quiet and genteel, reputed to be given to calm and rational deliberation, known to have been an advocate of the repeal of the Stamp Act, and, according to Franklin, generally believed to harbor “favourable Dispositions towards the Colonies.”67 If only the Tea Act could be weathered—and Franklin believed it could, provided the colonists responded judiciously—he was hopeful that Anglo-American differences could be resolved.

  Ironically, no one did more than Franklin to set the stage for the combustible environment in Boston that greeted the Tea Act. At the very end of 1772—some six months prior to the enactment of the Tea Act—Franklin had made a fateful decision. Someone who has never been identified passed along to him a purloined collection of letters exchanged in the late 1760s between Thomas Hutchinson, by now the royal governor of Massachusetts, and Thomas Whately, a member of Parliament and former undersecretary of the treasury. The missives were filled with volatile passages. Hutchinson had portrayed the popular leaders in Massachusetts as bent on fomenting rebellion, welcomed an unflinching British response to American provocations, and even asked for “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” within the Bay Colony. Given the passionate atmosphere in Boston and the antipathy that residents already felt toward Hutchinson, Franklin knew the letters would have an inflammatory effect.

  However, Franklin had convinced himself that the letters would demonstrate that the culprits responsible for imperial troubles were misguided and corrupt lower-level officials, the likes of royal governors and undersecretaries who steered well-intended ministers—such as Lord North—toward bad choices. He was convinced too that the continued presence of Hutchinson, who was widely hated in Boston, only made the already inflamed situation in the Bay Colony even more explosive. Publication of the letters, Franklin reasoned, would lead London to remove Hutchinson. Incredibly, Franklin seemed to believe that by passing along the stolen letters, he was paving the way for the final resolution of Anglo-American differences.68

  For all his brilliance as a scientist, essayist, businessman, and civic leader, Franklin the politician not infrequently made monumental mistakes. Dispatching the Hutchinson Letters was his most egregious blunder, both for his own personal fortunes and as a contributory factor to a landmark event in the American Revolution. Seldom has any thoughtful public figure acted on such flawed logic or demonstrated such a shocking lack of political savvy.

  Today, it is surprising that a powerful American resistance could be fashioned against a tax that had been in existence for six years and was even being reduced. But by this time many Americans had come to distrust the motives of the mother country. Noxious taxes, occupation by a standing army, and discriminatory commercial regulations had convinced many colonists that the policies pursued by the imperial government “evince[d] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” as the Declaration of Independence would eventually assert. Contrary to Franklin’s expectations, nothing was more important than the Hutchinson Letters—at least in Massachusetts—in confirming the colonists’ suspicions.

  Hutchinson’s pilfered correspondence was made public in Boston only weeks prior to the arrival of the first news of the Tea Act. The letters hit like a bombshell, causing many Bostonians to imagine a far-flung conspiracy among malevolent authorities—ranging from colonial officials in America to the ministry itself—to victimize the colonists. Many were now assured that the ultimate goal of these conspiratorial officials was tyranny, just as the leaders of the colonial protest had been saying for nearly a decade. Instead of rehabilitating North’s reputation, as Franklin had hoped would be the case, the letters convinced many Bostonians that by reducing the levy on tea, the ministry had treacherously schemed to find a way to get the colonists accustomed to paying imperial taxes. Once they acquiesced, the Bostonians thought, Parliament would impose a panoply of taxes on America.69 It followed, too, that in due time London would strip the colonists of all autonomy and abuse them in the same manner that it had long victimized the Irish.

  Coordinated resistance to the Tea Act was possible because an infrastructure of protest had been fashioned since 1765, at least in the principal cities. Operating through organizations such as the Sons of Liberty, which sported networks that reached from harborside barrooms to the richly paneled offices of affluent merchants, the popular leaders listened, managed, taught, manipulated, and planned. With time, they grew more adroit at organizing and provoking. They learned how to turn out crowds and how to control them once they were in the streets, and they found writers with a keen eye for cant who were capable of giving just the right twist to British policies and actions. These polemicists cast everything done by British officials in a bad light. This is not to suggest that those who followed the popular leaders were unthinking automatons. More and more Americans now questioned whether their vital interests could be secured under the current imperial structure. Increasing numbers of colonists wished to have greater control over their destiny, and steadily more of the best educated and the affluent were growing restive with the limitations for advancement that they faced simply because they were colonists. By 1773 many Americans had come to think along the lines of Samuel Adams, who had recently written that it was “the Business of America to take care of itself.”70

  Nor was it solely the residents of the large port cities who had grown disaffected with imperial conditions. Many Chesapeake planters longed to market their tobacco in free markets outside the British Empire. Others, both the wealthy and hordes of land-hungry farmers, some of whom had fought in the French and Indian War to win the trans–Appalachian West for Anglo-America, had grown restive waiting for London to open that lush domain for settlement and speculation. The Tea Act took effect near the tenth anniversary of the Peace of Paris, yet after all that time the lands across the mountains remained nearly as closed to American settlement as they had been when they belonged to France. Nor should it be forgotten that many yeomen in the Carolina and Georgia backcountry, the Scots-Irish in particular, were descendants of immigrants who had fled British victimization, whether economic or religious. To say that they were resentful of London’s long reach would be an understatement.71

  If the nascent American resistance was to succeed, the colonists had to demonstrate a common front against London. Colonists throughout the length and breadth of the land had to realize that opposition to parliamentary taxation, even a growing disenchantment with many imperial policies and practices, was widespread. Early in 1773, just prior to the passage of the Tea Act, Richard Henry Lee in Virginia had taken the lead in inducing the House of Burgesses to open an intercolonial correspondence. The idea, as Thomas Jefferson later recalled, was to foster an “understanding with all the other colonies to consider the British claims as a common cause to all, & to produce an unity of action.” Once adopted, Virginia shared information with colonial assemblies throughout America. Within a few months each colony, save Pennsylvania, had its own committee of correspondence and “lovers of liberty in every province”—Lee’s characterization—were coming to understand that Americans from New England’s rugged coastline to the pine barrens of the Lower South felt threatened by the encroaching policies of Parliament.72

  The colonists learned of the Tea Act in September, more than two months prior to the arrival of the first ship that brought dutied tea across t
he Atlantic. From the start, there was a gathering sense in some quarters that this was an epochal showdown. Here, yet again, was another attempt by Parliament to tax them. What is more, the act gave the East India Company monopoly rights in selling the tea, a dangerous precedent that could threaten free trade. Then, too, there was an air of deceit about this law. As the existing tax on tea was lowered, many saw the Tea Act as a sleight of hand to draw the colonists into paying only a light duty. If the maneuver succeeded, the colonists in no time would become accustomed to paying this parliamentary tax; ensnared, they would be ripe for further taxation.

  Given months to prepare, those who opposed parliamentary taxation were ready when the tea ships approached the port cities. Confronted by angry mobs, the captains of the Nancy and the Polly, the tea ships bound for New York and Philadelphia, respectively, turned for home without attempting a landing. The London made for Charleston, but when it docked, the local Sons of Liberty seized the cargo, preventing its sale. In Boston, outrage took a different and more destructive form. Late on a frigid, jet-black Saturday night toward the end of November, the Dartmouth, carrying 114 chests of tea, slipped into Boston Harbor and tied up at dockside while the city’s residents slept. When the Boston resistance leaders learned the next day that the tea ship was in port, it was too late to seize the dutied cargo, unless they wished to risk a confrontation with customs officials and possibly British soldiers. Things only got worse for the radical leaders in Boston. A week later a second tea ship, the Eleanor, arrived and docked, and after another ten days the brig Beaver entered Boston Harbor with still more of the East India Company’s tea. (A fourth tea ship, the William, ran aground at Provincetown on Cape Cod, but its 58 chests of tea were saved and fell into the hands of the Customs Service.)73