THE APPROACH OF REVOLUTION
The ministers did persist, and there was revolution. Within less than
a year from those memorable autumn days of 1773 when the East India
Company’s ships came into port with their cargoes of tea, the colonies
had set up a Congress at Philadelphia which looked from the first as
if it meant to do things for which there was no law; and which did, in
fact, within less than two years after its first assembling, cut the
bonds of allegiance which bound America to England. The colonists did
not themselves speak or think of it as a body set up to govern them, or
to determine their relations with the government at home, but only as
a body organized for consultation and guidance, a general meeting of
their committees of correspondence. But it was significant how rapidly,
and upon how consistent and executive a plan, the arrangements for
“correspondence” had developed, and how naturally, almost spontaneously,
they had come to a head in this “Congress of Committees.” There were
men in the colonies who were as quick to act upon their instinct of
leadership, and as apt and masterful at organization, as the English on
the other side of the water who had checkmated Charles I.; and no doubt
the thought of independent action, and even of aggressive resistance,
came more readily to the minds of men of initiative in America, where
all things were making and to be made, than in old England, where every
rule of action seemed antique and venerable. Mr. Samuel Adams had been
deliberately planning revolution in Massachusetts ever since 1768,
the year the troops came to Boston to hold the town quiet while Mr.
Townshend’s acts strangled its trade; and he had gone the straight way
to work to bring it about. He knew very well how to cloak his purpose
and sedulously keep it hid from all whom it might shock or dismay or
alienate. But the means he used were none the less efficacious because
those who acted with him could not see how far they led.
[Illustration: BOYCOTTING POSTER]
It was he who had stood at the front of the opposition of the
Massachusetts assembly to the Stamp Act; he who had drafted the circular
letter of Massachusetts to the other colonies in 1768 suggesting concert
of action against the Townshend acts; he who had gone from the town
meeting in Faneuil Hall to demand of Hutchinson the immediate removal of
the troops, after the unhappy “massacre” of March, 1770; he who had led
the town meeting which took effectual measures to prevent the landing
of the tea from the East India Company’s ships. No man doubted that his
hand had been in the plan to throw the tea into the harbor. It was he
who, last of all, as the troubles thickened, had bound the other towns
of Massachusetts to Boston in a common organization for making and
propagating opinion by means of committees of correspondence. It was late
in 1772 when he proposed to the town meeting in Boston that the other
towns of the colony be invited to co-operate with it in establishing
committees of correspondence, by means of which they could exchange
views, and, if need were, concert action. The end of November had come
before he could make Boston’s initiative complete in the matter; and yet
the few scant weeks that remained of the year were not gone before more
than eighty towns had responded.
[Illustration: CIRCULAR OF THE BOSTON COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE]
It turned out that he had invented a tremendously powerful engine of
propaganda for such opinions and suggestions of action as he chose to put
upon the wind or set afloat in his private correspondence,—as he had, no
doubt, foreseen, with his keen appreciation of the most effectual means
of agitation. Here was, in effect, a league of towns to watch and to
control the course of affairs. There was nothing absolutely novel in the
plan, except its formal completeness and its appearance of permanence,
as if of a standing political arrangement made out of hand. In the year
1765, which was now seven years gone by, Richard Henry Lee had taken an
active part among his neighbors in Virginia in forming the “Westmoreland
Association,” which drew many of the leading spirits of the great county
of Westmoreland together in concerted resistance to the Stamp Act.
Four years later (1769) the Burgesses of Virginia, cut short in their
regular session as a legislature by a sudden dissolution proclaimed by
their royal governor, met in Mr. Anthony Hay’s house in Williamsburg and
adopted the resolutions for a general non-importation association which
George Mason had drawn up, and which George Washington, Mr. Mason’s
neighbor and confidant, read and moved. There followed the immediate
organization of local associations throughout the little commonwealth
to see to the keeping of the pledge there taken. Virginia had no
town meetings; each colony took its measures of non-importation and
resistance to parliamentary taxation after its own fashion; but wherever
there were Englishmen accustomed to political action there was always
this thought of free association and quick and organized coöperation in
the air, which no one was surprised at any time to see acted upon and
made an instrument of agitation.
[Illustration: NORTH AMERICA 1750, SHOWING CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF
EXPLORATION.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
[Illustration: GEORGE III]
What made the Massachusetts committees of correspondence especially
significant and especially telling in their effect upon affairs was
that they were not used, like the “Westmoreland Association” or the
non-importation associations of 1769, merely as a means of keeping
neighbors steadfast in the observance of a simple resolution of
passive resistance, but were employed to develop opinion and originate
action from month to month,—dilatory, defensive, or aggressive, as
occasion or a change of circumstances might demand. The non-importation
associations had been powerful enough, as some men had reason to know.
The determination not to import or use any of the things upon which
Parliament had laid a tax to be taken of the colonies,—wine, oil, glass,
paper, tea, or any of the rest of the list,—was not a thing all men
had thought of or spontaneously agreed to. Certain leading gentlemen,
like Mr. Mason and Colonel Washington, deemed it a serviceable means of
constitutional resistance to the mistaken course of the ministry, induced
influential members of the House of Burgesses to indorse it, and formed
associations to put it into effect,—to see to it that no one drank wine
or tea which had been brought in under Mr. Townshend’s taxes. There
was here no command of law,—only a moral compulsion, the “pressure of
opinion”; but it was no light matter to be censured and talked about by
the leading people in your county as a person who defied the better sort
of opinion and preferred wine and tea to the liberties of the colony.
Associated opinion, spoken by influential men, proved a tremendous engine
of quiet duress, and the unwilling found it prudent to conform. It was
harder yet for the timid where active committees of correspondence
looked into and suggested opinion. Men could give up their wine, or women
their tea, and still keep what opinions they pleased; but committees of
correspondence sought out opinion, provoked discussion, forced men to
take sides or seem indifferent; more than all, saw to it that Mr. Samuel
Adams’s opinions were duly promulgated and established by argument.
[Illustration: GEORGE MASON]
Men thought for themselves in Massachusetts, and Mr. Adams was too astute
a leader to seem to force opinions upon them. He knew a better and more
certain way. He drew Mr. Hutchinson, the governor, into controversy,
and provoked him to unguarded heat in the expression of his views as
to the paramount authority of Parliament and the bounden duty of the
colonists to submit if they would not be accounted rebels. He let
heat in the governor generate heat in those who loved the liberty of
the colony; supplied patriots with arguments, phrases, resolutions of
right and privilege; watchfully kept the fire alive; forced those who
were strong openly to take sides and declare themselves, and those who
were weak to think with their neighbors; infused agitation, disquiet,
discontent, dissonance of opinion into the very air; and let everything
that was being said or done run at once from town to town through the
ever talkative committees of correspondence. He sincerely loved the
liberty to which America had been bred; loved affairs, and wanted nothing
for himself, except the ears of his neighbors; loved the air of strife
and the day of debate, and the busy concert of endless agitation; was
statesman and demagogue in one, and had now a cause which even slow and
thoughtful men were constrained to deem just.
The ministers supplied fuel enough and to spare to keep alive the fires
he kindled; and presently the system of committees which he had devised
for the towns of a single colony had been put into use to bring the
several colonies themselves together. Opinion began to be made and moved
and augmented upon a great scale. Spontaneous, no doubt, at first, at
heart spontaneous always, it was elaborately, skilfully, persistently
assisted, added to, made definite, vocal, universal,—now under the
lead of men in one colony, again under the lead of those in another.
Massachusetts, with her busy port and her noisy town meetings, drew the
centre of the storm to herself; but the other colonies were not different
in temper. Virginia, in particular, was as forward as Massachusetts.
Virginia had got a new governor out of England early in 1772, John
Murray, Earl of Dunmore, who let more than a year go by from his first
brief meeting with the Burgesses before he summoned them again, because
he liked their lack of submission as little as they liked his dark brow
and masterful temper; but he suffered them to convene at last, in March,
1773, and they forthwith gave him a taste of their quality, as little to
his palate as he could have expected.
[Illustration: SEAL OF DUNMORE]
[Illustration: EARL OF DUNMORE]
It was in June, 1772, while the Virginian burgesses waited for their
tardy summons to Williamsburg that his Majesty’s revenue cutter _Gaspee_
was deliberately boarded and burned by the Rhode Islanders. The Burgesses
had but just assembled in the autumn when the ominous news came that a
royal commission had been sent over to look sharply into the matter, and
see to the arrest and deportation of all chiefly concerned. Dabney Carr,
Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, young men all,
and radicals, members of the House, privately associated themselves for
the concert of measures to be taken in the common cause of the colonies.
Upon their initiative the Burgesses resolved, when the news from Rhode
Island came, to appoint at once a permanent committee of correspondence;
instruct it to inquire very particularly into the facts about this royal
commission; and ask the other colonies to set up similar committees, for
the exchange of information concerning public affairs and the maintenance
of a common understanding and concert in action. By the end of the year
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and South
Carolina had adopted the suggestion and set their committees to work.
[Illustration: THE ATTACK ON THE “GASPEE”]
Massachusetts, of course. This was Mr. Samuel Adams’s new machinery
of agitation upon a larger scale. Adams himself had long cherished
the wish that there might be such a connection established between
the colonies. In the autumn of 1770 he had induced the Massachusetts
assembly to appoint a committee of correspondence, to communicate with
Mr. Arthur Lee, of Virginia, the colony’s agent in London, and with the
Speakers of the several colonial assemblies; and though the committee
had accomplished little or nothing, he had not been discouraged, but had
written the next year to Mr. Lee expressing the wish that “societies”
of “the most respectable inhabitants” might be formed in the colonies
to maintain a correspondence with friends in England in the interest
of colonial privilege. “This is a sudden thought,” he said, “and drops
undigested from my pen”; but it must have seemed a natural enough
thought to Mr. Lee, whose own vast correspondence,—with America, with
Englishmen at home, with acquaintances on the continent,—had itself,
unaided, made many a friend for the colonies over sea at the same time
that it kept the leading men of the colonies informed of the opinions
and the dangers breeding in England. But Mr. Adams’s town committees
came first. It was left for the little group of self-constituted leaders
in the Virginian assembly, of whom Richard Henry Lee, Mr. Arthur Lee’s
elder brother, was one, to take the step which actually drew the colonies
into active coöperation when the time was ripe. It was, in part, through
the systematic correspondence set afoot by the Virginian burgesses
that something like a common understanding had been arrived at as to
what should be done when the tea came in; and the lawless defiance of
the colonists in that matter brought the ministers in England to such
a temper that there were presently new and very exciting subjects of
correspondence between the committees, and affairs ran fast towards a
crisis.
[Illustration: LORD NORTH]
Teas to the value of no less than eighteen thousand pounds sterling
had been thrown into the harbor at Boston on that memorable night of
the 16th of December, 1773, when “Captain Mackintosh,” the redoubtable
leader of the South End toughs of the lively little town, was permitted
for the nonce to lead his betters; but what aroused the ministers and
put Parliament in a heat was not so much the loss incurred by the East
India Company or the outcry of the merchants involved as the startling
significance of the act, and the unpleasant evidence which every day
came to hand that all the colonies alike were ready to resist. After
the tea had been sent away, or stored safe against sale or present
use, or thrown into the harbor, at Philadelphia, Charleston, New York,
and Boston, as the leaders of the mobs or the meetings at each place
preferred, there was an instant spread of Virginia’s method of union.
Six more colonies hastened to appoint committees of correspondence, and
put themselves in direct communication with the men at Boston and at
Williamsburg who were forming opinion and planning modes of redress.
Only Pennsylvania held off. The tea had been shut out at Philadelphia,
as elsewhere, but the leaders of the colony were not ready yet to follow
so fast in the paths of agitation and resistance. Members of Parliament
hardly noticed the exception. It was Boston they thought of and chiefly
condemned as a hot-bed of lawlessness. Not every one, it is true, was
ready to speak quite so plainly or so intemperately as Mr. Venn. “The
town of Boston ought to be knocked about their ears and destroyed,” he
said. “You will never meet with proper obedience to the laws of this
country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” But, though few
were so outspoken, no doubt many found such a view very much to their
taste, excellently suited to their temper.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF HUTCHINSON’S HISTORY]
At any rate, the ministers went a certain way towards acting upon it.
In March, 1774, after communicating to the House the despatches from
America, the leaders of the government, now under Lord North, proposed
and carried very drastic measures. By one bill they closed the port of
Boston, transferring its trade after the first of June to the older port
of Salem. Since the headstrong town would not have the tea, it should
have no trade at all. By another bill they suspended the charter of the
colony. By a third they made provision for the quartering of troops
within the province; and by a fourth they legalized the transfer to
England of trials growing out of attempts to quell riots in the colony.
News lingered on the seas in those days, waiting for the wind, and the
critical news of what had been done in Parliament moved no faster than
the rest. It was the 2d of June before the text of the new statutes was
known in Boston. That same month, almost upon that very day, Thomas
Hutchinson, the constant-minded governor whom Samuel Adams had tricked,
hated, and beaten in the game of politics, left his perplexing post and
took ship for England, never to return. Born and bred in Massachusetts,
of the stock of the colony itself, he had nevertheless stood steadfastly
to his duty as an officer of the crown, deeming Massachusetts best served
by the law. He had suffered more than most men would have endured, but
his sufferings had not blinded him with passion. He knew as well as
any man the real state of affairs in the colony,—though he looked at
them as governor, not as the people’s advocate,—and now went to England
to make them clear to the ministers. “The prevalence of a spirit of
opposition to government in the plantation,” he had already written them,
“is the natural consequence of the great growth of colonies so remote
from the parent state, and not the effect of oppression in the King or
his servants, as the promoters of this spirit would have the world to
believe.” It would be of good omen for the settlement of difficulties if
he could make the ministers see that the spirit which so angered them was
natural, and not born of mere rebellion.
[Illustration: GENERAL GAGE]
[Illustration: STOVE IN THE HOUSE OF BURGESSES, VIRGINIA]
Mr. Hutchinson left General Gage governor in his stead,—at once governor
and military commander. Gage was to face a season of infinite trouble,
and, as men soon learned, did not know how to face it either with
patience or with tact and judgment. The news of Boston’s punishment and
of the suspension of the Massachusetts charter, of the arrangements for
troops, and of the legal establishment of methods of trial against which
all had protested,—and, in the case of the _Gaspee_ affair, successfully
protested,—had an instant and most disturbing effect upon the other
colonies, as well as upon those who were most directly affected. The
ministers could not isolate Massachusetts. They were dealing with men
more statesmanlike than themselves, who did not need to see their own
liberties directly struck at to recognize danger, though it was not yet
their danger. They had protested in the time of the Stamp Act, which
affected them all; this time they protested even more emphatically
against measures aimed at Massachusetts alone. What was more significant,
they had now means at hand for taking action in common.
Virginia, no doubt, seemed to the ministers in England far enough away
from Massachusetts, but her Burgesses acted upon the first news of what
Parliament was doing,—a month before the text of the obnoxious acts had
reached Boston. In May, 1774, they ordered that June 1st, the day the
Boston Port bill was to go into effect, be set apart as a day of fasting
and prayer,—prayer that civil war might be averted and that the people
of America might be united in a common cause. Dunmore promptly dissolved
them for their pains; but they quietly assembled again in the long room
of the Raleigh Tavern; issued a call thence to the other colonies for a
general Congress; and directed that a convention, freely chosen by the
voters of the colony as they themselves had been, should assemble there,
in that same room of the Raleigh, on the first day of August following,
to take final measures with regard to Virginia’s part in the common
action hoped for in the autumn. The next evening they gave a ball in
honor of Lady Dunmore and her daughters, in all good temper, as they had
previously arranged to do,—as if nothing had happened, and as if to show
how little what they had done was with them a matter of personal feeling
or private intrigue, how much a matter of dispassionate duty. They had
not acted singularly or alone. Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts
herself had also asked for a general “Congress of Committees.” The
Massachusetts assembly had locked its doors against the governor’s
messenger, sent to dissolve it, until it had completed its choice of a
committee “to meet the committees appointed by the several colonies to
consult together upon the present state of the colonies.” It was chiefly
because Massachusetts called that the other colonies responded, but the
movement seemed general, almost spontaneous. Virginia and Massachusetts
sent their real leaders, as the other colonies did; and September saw a
notable gathering at Philadelphia,—a gathering from which conservatives
as well as radicals hoped to see come forth some counsel of wisdom and
accommodation.
[Illustration: JOHN ADAMS]
Every colony but Georgia sent delegates to the Congress. Not all who
attended had been regularly elected by the colonial assemblies. The
Virginian delegates had been elected by Virginia’s August convention,
a body unknown to the law; in some of the colonies there had been no
timely sessions of the assemblies at which a choice could be made, and
representatives had accordingly been appointed by their committees
of correspondence, or elected directly by the voters at the town and
county voting places. But no one doubted any group of delegates real
representatives,—at any rate, of the predominant political party in
their colony. In New York and Pennsylvania the conservatives had had the
upper hand, and had chosen men who were expected to speak for measures
of accommodation and for obedience to law. In the other colonies, if
only for the nonce, the more radical party had prevailed, and had sent
representatives who were counted on to speak unequivocally for the
liberties of the colonies, even at the hazard of uttering words and
urging action which might seem revolutionary and defiant.
It was noteworthy and significant how careful a selection had been
made of delegates. No doubt the most notable group was the group of
Virginians: Colonel Washington; that “masterly man,” Richard Henry Lee,
as Mr. John Adams called him, as effective in Philadelphia as he had been
in the House of Burgesses; Patrick Henry, whose speech was so singularly
compounded of thought and fire; Edmund Pendleton, who had read nothing
but law books and knew nothing but business, and yet showed such winning
grace and convincing frankness withal in debate; Colonel Harrison,
brusque country gentleman, without art or subterfuge, downright and
emphatic; Mr. Bland, alert and formidable at sixty-four, with the steady
insight of the life-long student; and Mr. Peyton Randolph, their official
leader and spokesman, whom the Congress chose its president, a man full
of address, and seeming to carry privilege with him as a right inherited.
Samuel Adams and John Adams had come from Massachusetts, with Mr. Cushing
and Mr. Paine. South Carolina had sent two members of the Stamp Act
Congress of 1765, Mr. Christopher Gadsden and Mr. John Rutledge, with
Mr. Edward Rutledge also, a youth of twenty-five, and plain Mr. Lynch,
clad in homespun, as direct and sensible and above ceremony as Colonel
Harrison. Connecticut’s chief spokesman was Roger Sherman, rough as a
peasant without, but in counsel very like a statesman, and in all things
a hard-headed man of affairs. New York was represented by Mr. John Jay,
not yet thirty, but of the quick parts of the scholar and the principles
of a man of honor. Joseph Galloway, the well-poised Speaker and leader
of her House of Assembly, John Dickinson, the thoughtful author of the
famous “Farmer’s Letters” of 1768, a quiet master of statement, and Mr.
Thomas Mifflin, the well-to-do merchant, represented Pennsylvania. It
was, take it all in all, an assembly of picked men, fit for critical
business.
[Illustration: ROGER SHERMAN]
Not that there was any talk of actual revolution in the air. The seven
weeks’ conference of the Congress disclosed a nice balance of parties,
its members acting, for the most part, with admirable candor and
individual independence. A good deal was said and conjectured about
the “brace of Adamses” who led the Massachusetts delegation,—Samuel
Adams, now past fifty-two, and settled long ago, with subtle art, to
his life-long business, and pleasure, of popular leadership, which
no man understood better; and John Adams, his cousin, a younger man
by thirteen years, at once less simple and easier to read, vain and
transparent,—transparently honest, irregularly gifted. It was said they
were for independence, and meant to take the leadership of the Congress
into their own hands. But it turned out differently. If they were for
independence, they shrewdly cloaked their purpose; if they were ambitious
to lead, they were prudent enough to forego their wish and to yield
leadership, at any rate on the floor of the Congress, to the interesting
men who represented Virginia, and who seemed of their own spirit in the
affair.
[Illustration: JOSEPH GALLOWAY]
[Illustration: JOHN DICKINSON]
There was a marked difference between what the Congress said aloud, for
the hearing of the world, and what it did in order quietly to make its
purpose of defeating the designs of the ministers effective. At the
outset of its sessions it came near to yielding itself to the initiative
and leadership of its more conservative members, headed by Joseph
Galloway, the trusted leader of the Pennsylvanians, a stout loyalist, but
for all that a sincere patriot and thorough-going advocate of the legal
rights of the colonies. He proposed a memorial to the crown asking for
a confederate government for the colonies, under a legislature of their
own choosing, very like the government Mr. Franklin had made a plan for
twenty years ago in the congress at Albany; and his suggestion failed of
acceptance by only a very narrow margin when put to the vote. Even Edward
Rutledge, of South Carolina, who spoke more hotly than most men for the
liberties of the colonies, declared it an “almost perfect plan”; and
the Congress, rejecting it, substituted no other. It turned, rather, to
the writing of state papers, and a closer organization of the colonies
for concert of action. Its committees drew up an address to the King,
memorials to the people of Great Britain and to the people of British
North America, their fellow-subjects, and a solemn declaration of rights,
so earnest, so moderate in tone, reasoned and urged with so evident
and so admirable a quiet passion of conviction, as to win the deep and
outspoken admiration of their friends in Parliament and stir the pulses
of liberal-minded men everywhere on both sides of the sea.
So much was for the world. For themselves, they ordered a closer and
more effective association throughout the colonies to carry out the
policy of a rigorous non-importation and non-consumption of certain
classes of British goods as a measure of trade against the English
government’s policy of colonial taxation. It recommended, in terms which
rang very imperative, that in each colony a committee should be formed
in every town or county, according to the colony’s local administrative
organization, which should be charged with seeing to it that every one
within its area of oversight actually kept, and did not evade, the
non-importation agreement; that these committees should act under the
direction of the central committee of correspondence in each colony;
and that the several colonial committees of correspondence should in
their turn report to and put into effect the suggestions of the general
Congress of Committees at Philadelphia. For the Congress, upon breaking
up at the conclusion of its business in October, resolved to meet again
in May of the next year, should the government in England not before that
time accede to its prayers for a radical change of policy. Its machinery
of surveillance was meanwhile complete. No man could escape the eyes
of the local committees. Disregard of the non-importation policy meant
that his name would be published, and that he would be diligently talked
about as one who was no patriot. The Congress ordered that any colony
which declined to enter into the new association should be regarded as
hostile to “the liberties of this country.” Samuel Adams himself had not
had a more complete system of surveillance or of inquisitorial pressure
upon individual conduct and opinion at hand in his township committees
of correspondence. In the colonies where sentiment ran warm no man could
escape the subtle coercion.
[Illustration: PEYTON RANDOLPH]
Such action was the more worthy of remark because taken very quietly,
and as if the Congress had of course the right to lead, to speak for
the majority and command the minority in the colonies, united and acting
like a single body politic. There was no haste, no unusual excitement,
no fearful looking for trouble in the proceedings of this new and quite
unexampled assembly. On the contrary, its members had minds sufficiently
at ease to enjoy throughout all their business the entertainments and
the attractive social ways of the busy, well-appointed, cheerful,
gracious town, the chief city of the colonies, in which there was so
much to interest and engage. Dinings were as frequent almost as debates,
calls as committee meetings. Evening after evening was beguiled with
wine and tobacco and easy wit and chat. The delegates learned to know
and understand each other as men do who are upon terms of intimacy;
made happy and lasting friendships among the people of the hospitable
place; drank in impressions which broadened and bettered their thinking,
almost as if they had actually seen the several colonies with whose
representatives they were dealing from day to day; and went home with a
cleared and sobered and withal hopeful vision of affairs.
It was well to have their views so steadied. Events moved fast, and with
sinister portent. Massachusetts could not be still, and quickly forced
affairs to an issue of actual revolution. Before the Congress met again
her leaders had irrevocably committed themselves to an open breach with
the government; the people of the province had shown themselves ready to
support them with extraordinary boldness; and all who meant to stand with
the distressed and stubborn little commonwealth found themselves likewise
inevitably committed to extreme measures. The Massachusetts men not only
deeply resented the suspension of their charter, they denied the legal
right of Parliament to suspend it. On the 9th of September, 1774, four
days after the assembling of the Congress at Philadelphia, delegates
from Boston and the other towns in Suffolk County in Massachusetts had
met in convention and flatly declared that the acts complained of, being
unconstitutional, ought not to be obeyed; that the new judges appointed
under the act of suspension ought not to be regarded or suffered to
act; that the collectors of taxes ought to be advised to retain the
moneys collected, rather than turn them into General Gage’s treasury;
and that, in view of the extraordinary crisis which seemed at hand, the
people ought to be counselled to prepare for war,—not, indeed, with any
purpose of provoking hostilities, but in order, if necessary, to resist
aggression. They declared also for a provincial congress, to take the
place of the legislative council of their suspended charter, and resolved
to regard the action of the Congress at Philadelphia as law for the
common action of the colonies.
It gave these resolutions very grave significance that the Congress
at Philadelphia unhesitatingly declared, upon their receipt, that the
whole continent ought to support Massachusetts in her resistance to
the unconstitutional changes in her government, and that any person
who should accept office within the province under the new order of
things ought to be considered a public enemy. Moreover, the Suffolk
towns did not stand alone. Their temper, it seemed, was the temper of
the whole colony. Other towns took action of the same kind; and before
the Congress at Philadelphia had adjourned, Massachusetts had actually
set up a virtually independent provincial congress. General Gage had
summoned the regular assembly of the province to meet at Salem, the new
capital under the parliamentary changes, on the 5th of October, but had
withdrawn the summons as he saw signs of disaffection multiply and his
authority dwindle to a mere shadow outside his military lines at Boston.
The members of the assembly convened, nevertheless, and, finding no
governor to meet them, resolved themselves into a provincial congress and
appointed a committee of safety to act as the provisional executive of
the colony. The old government was virtually dissolved, a revolutionary
government substituted.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON STOPPING AT AN INN ON HIS WAY TO CAMBRIDGE]
The substitution involved every hazard of license and disorder. A people
schooled and habituated to civil order and to the daily practice of
self-government, as the people of Massachusetts had been, could not,
indeed, suffer utter demoralization or lose wholly and of a sudden its
sobriety and conscience in matters of public business. But it was a
perilous thing that there was for a time no recognized law outside of
the fortifications which General Gage had thrown across Boston Neck,
to defend the town against possible attack from its own neighbors.
Town meetings and irregular committees took the place of officers of
government in every locality. The committees were often self-constituted,
the meetings too often disorderly and irregularly summoned. Everything
fell into the hands of those who acted first; and inasmuch as the more
hot-headed and violent are always at such times the first to act, many
sober men who would fain have counselled restraint and prudence and
the maintenance so far as might be of the old order, were silenced or
overridden. The gatherings at which concerted action was determined
upon were too often like mere organized mobs. Men too often obtained
ascendency for the time being who had no claim upon the confidence of
their followers but such as came from audacity and violence of passion;
and many things happened under their leadership which it was afterwards
pleasant to forget. No man of consequence who would not openly and
actively put himself upon the popular side was treated with so much as
toleration. General Gage presently found Boston and all the narrow area
within his lines filling up, accordingly, with a great body of refugees
from the neighboring towns and country-sides.
[Illustration: THE LIBERTY SONG
The LIBERTY SONG. _In Freedom we’re born, &c._
Come join hand in hand brave Americans all,
And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call.
No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim,
Or stain with dishonour America’s name.
_In Freedom we’re_ born _and in Freedom we’ll_ live,
_Our purses are ready._
_Steady, Friends, Steady._
_Not as Slaves, but as Freemen our money we’ll give._
Our worthy Forefathers—Let’s give them a cheer
To Climates unknown did courageously steer;
Thro’ Oceans, to deserts, for freedom they came,
And dying bequeath’d us their freedom and Fame.
_In freedom we’re_ born _&c._
Their generous bosoms all dangers despis’d,
So highly, so wisely, their _Birthrights_ they priz’d;
We’ll keep what they gave, we will piously keep,
Nor frustrate their toils on the land and the deep.
_In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._
The Tree their own hands had to liberty rear’d;
They liv’d to behold growing strong and rever’d,
With transport they cry’d, “now our wishes we gain,
For our children shall gather the fruits of our pain.”
_In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._
Swarms of placemen and pensioners soon will appear
Like locusts deforming the charms of the year;
Suns vainly will rise, Showers vainly descend,
If we are to drudge for what other shall spend.
_In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._
Then join hand in hand brave Americans all,
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall;
In so Righteous a cause let us hope to succeed,
For Heaven approves of each generous deed.
_In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._
All ages shall speak with amaze and applause,
Of the courage we’ll shew in support of our laws;
To die we can bear—but to serve we disdain,
For shame is to Freedom more dreadful than pain.
_In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._
This bumper & crown for our Sovereign’s health,
And this for Britannia’s glory and wealth;
That wealth and that glory immortal may be,
If she is but just—and if we are but Free.
_In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._]
It gave those who led the agitation the greater confidence and the
greater influence that the ministers of the churches were for the most
part on their side. The control of Parliament had come, in the eyes of
the New England clergy, to mean the control also of bishops and the
supremacy of the Establishment. Now, as always before, since the very
foundation of the colony, the independence of their little commonwealths
seemed but another side of the independence of their churches; and none
watched the course of government over sea more jealously than the Puritan
pastors.
Not only those who sided with the English power because of fear or
interest,—place-holders, sycophants, merchants who hoped to get their
trade back through favor, weak men who knew not which side to take and
thought the side of government in the long run the safer,—but many a man
of dignity and substance also, and many a man of scrupulous principle who
revered the ancient English power to which he had always been obedient
with sincere and loyal affection, left his home and sought the protection
of Gage’s troops. The vigilance of the local committees effectually
purged the population outside Boston, as the weeks went by, of those
who were not ready to countenance a revolution. There was, besides,
something very like military rule outside Boston as well as within it.
The provincial congress met, while necessary, from month to month, upon
its own adjournment, and, prominent among other matters of business,
diligently devoted itself to the enrolment and organization of a numerous
and efficient militia. Local as well as general commanders were chosen;
there was constant drilling on village greens; fire-arms and ammunition
were not difficult to get; and an active militia constituted a very
effective auxiliary in the consolidation of local opinion concerning
colonial rights and the proper means of vindicating them.
It is the familiar story of revolution: the active and efficient
concert of a comparatively small number controlling the action of
whole communities at a moment of doubt and crisis. There was not much
difference of opinion among thoughtful men in the colonies with regard to
the policy which the ministers in England had recently pursued respecting
America. It was agreed on all hands that it was unprecedented, unwise,
and in plain derogation of what the colonists had time out of mind been
permitted to regard as their unquestioned privileges in matters of local
self-government. Some men engaged in trade at the colonial ports had, it
is true, found the new policy of taxation and enforced restrictions very
much to their own interest. The Sugar Act of 1733, which cut at the heart
of the New England trade with the French West Indies, and which Grenville
and Townshend had, in these last disturbing years, tried to enforce,
had, it was said, been passed in the first instance at the suggestion
of a Boston merchant who was interested in sugar growing in the British
islands whence the act virtually bade the colonial importers take all
their sugar, molasses, and rum; and no doubt there were many in all the
American ports who would have profited handsomely by the enforcement of
the law. But, however numerous these may have been, they were at most but
a small minority. For a vast majority of the merchants the enforcement
of the acts meant financial ruin. Merchants as well as farmers, too,
were hotly against taxes put upon them in their own ports by an act
of Parliament. They were infinitely jealous of any invasion of their
accustomed rights of self-government under their revered and ancient
charter. Governor Hutchinson himself, though he deemed the commands of
Parliament law, and thought it his own bounden duty as an officer of the
crown to execute them, declared in the frankest fashion to the ministers
themselves that their policy was unjust and mistaken.
But, while men’s sentiments concurred in a sense of wrong, their
judgments parted company at the choice of what should be done. Men of a
conservative and sober way of thinking; men of large fortune or business,
who knew what they had at stake should disorders arise or law be set
aside; men who believed that there were pacific ways of bringing the
government to another temper and method in dealing with the colonies,
and who passionately preferred the ways of peace to ways of violence
and threatened revolution, arrayed themselves instinctively and at once
against every plan that meant lawlessness and rebellion. They mustered
very strong indeed, both in numbers and in influence. They bore, many of
them, the oldest and most honored names of the colony in Massachusetts,
where the storm first broke, and were men of substance and training and
schooled integrity of life, besides. Their counsels of prudence were
ignored, nevertheless,—as was inevitable. Opinion formed itself with
quick and heated impulse in the brief space of those first critical
months of irritation and excitement; and these men, though the natural
leaders of the colony, were despised, rejected, proscribed, as men craven
and lacking the essential spirit either of liberty or of patriotism.
It was, no doubt, a time when it was necessary that something should
be done,—as well as something said. It was intolerable to the spirit
of most of the people, when once they were roused, to sit still under
a suspension of their charter, a closing of their chief port, the
appointment of judges and governors restrained by none of the accustomed
rules of public authority among them, and tamely utter written protests
only, carrying obedience to what seemed to them the length of sheer
servility. It happened that there had gone along with the hateful and
extraordinary parliamentary measures of 1774 an act extending the
boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River and establishing
an arbitrary form of government within the extended province. It was a
measure long ago planned. Its passage at that time had nothing to do
with the ministers’ quarrel with the self-governing colonies to the
southward. But it was instantly interpreted in America as an attempt to
limit the westward expansion of the more unmanageable colonies which,
like Massachusetts, arrogated the right to govern themselves; and it of
course added its quota of exasperation to the irritations of the moment.
It seemed worse than idle to treat ministers who sent such a body of
revolutionary statutes over sea as reasonable constitutional rulers who
could be brought to a more lawful and moderate course by pamphlets and
despatches and public meetings, and all the rest of the slow machinery
of ordinary agitation. Of course, too, Samuel Adams and those who acted
with him very carefully saw to it that agitation should not lose its
zest or decline to the humdrum levels of ordinary excitement. They kept
their alarm bells pealing night and day, and were vigilant that feeling
should not subside or fall tame. And they worked upon genuine matter.
They knew the temper of average men in the colony much better than their
conservative opponents did, and touched it with a much truer instinct
in their appeals. Their utterances went to the quick with most plain
men,—and they spoke to a community of plain men. They spoke to conviction
as well as to sentiment, and the minds they touched were thoroughly
awakened. Their doctrine of liberty was the ancient tradition of the
colony. The principles they urged had been urged again and again by every
champion of the chartered liberties of the colonies, and seemed native to
the very air.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF JOSEPH HAWLEY]
If not constitutional statesmen, they were at least the veritable
spokesmen of all men of action, and of the real rank and file of the
colonists about them,—as Patrick Henry was in Virginia. John Adams had
read to Henry, while the first Congress was sitting in Philadelphia,
Joseph Hawley’s opinion that what the ministers had done made it
necessary to fight. “I am of that man’s opinion,” cried the high-spirited
Virginian. That was what men said everywhere, unless imperatively held
back from action by temperament, or interest, or an unusual, indomitable
conviction of law-abiding duty, upon whatever exigency or provocation. It
is not certain that there could be counted in Massachusetts so much as a
majority for resistance in those first days of the struggle for right;
but it is certain that those who favored extreme measures had the more
effective spirit of initiative among them, the best concert of action,
the more definite purpose, the surest instinct of leadership, and stood
with true interpretative insight for the latent conviction of right which
underlay and supported every colonial charter in America.
And not only every colonial charter, but the constitution of England
itself. The question now raised, to be once for all settled, was, in
reality, the question of constitutional as against personal government;
and that question had of late forced itself upon men’s thoughts in
England no less than in America. It was the burden of every quiet as
well as of every impassioned page in Burke’s _Thoughts on the Present
Discontents_, published in 1770. The Parliament of 1774 did not represent
England any more than it represented the colonies in America, either
in purpose or principle. So ill distributed was the suffrage and the
right of representation that great centres of population had scarcely a
spokesman in the Commons, while little hamlets, once populous but now
deserted, still returned members who assumed to speak for the country.
So many voters were directly under the influence of members of the House
of Lords, as tenants and dependants; so many members of the House of
Lords were willing to put themselves and the seats which they controlled
in the Commons at the service of the King, in return for honors and
favors received or hoped for; so many elections to the Lower House were
corruptly controlled by the court,—so full was Parliament, in short, of
placemen and of men who counted upon the crown’s benefactions, that the
nation seemed excluded from its own councils, and the King acted as its
master without serious let or hinderance.
The Whig party, which stood for constitutional privilege, was utterly
disorganized. Some Whigs had followed Chatham to the end, despite his
uncertain temper, his failing health, his perverse treatment of his
friends; some had followed, rather, the Marquis of Rockingham, whose
brief tenure of power, in 1766, had been but long enough to effect the
repeal of the odious Stamp Act; but nothing could hold the divergent
personal elements of the party together, and there was no place for a
party of principle and independence in an unrepresentative Parliament
packed with the “King’s friends.” Ministries rose or fell according
to the King’s pleasure, and were Whig or Tory as he directed, without
change of majority in the Commons. “Not only did he direct the minister”
whom the House nominally obeyed “in all matters of foreign and domestic
policy, but he instructed him as to the management of debates in
Parliament, suggested what motions should be made or opposed, and how
measures should be carried.” The Houses were his to command; and when
Chatham was gone, no man could withstand him. Persons not of the ministry
at all, but the private and irresponsible advisers of the King, became
the real rulers of the country. The Duke of Grafton, who became the
nominal head of the government in 1768, was not his own master in what he
did or proposed; and Lord North, who succeeded him in 1770, was little
more than the King’s mouthpiece.
Thoughtful men in England saw what all this meant, and deemed the
liberties of England as much jeoparded as the liberties of America. And
the very men who saw to the heart of the ominous situation in England
were, significantly enough, the men who spoke most fearlessly and
passionately in Parliament in defence of America,—statesmen like Chatham
and Burke, frank soldiers like Colonel Barré, political free lances like
the reckless John Wilkes, and all the growing company of agitators in
London and elsewhere whom the government busied itself to crush. It was
the group gathered about Wilkes in London who formed, under Horne Tooke’s
leadership, the famous “Society for supporting the Bill of Rights,” with
which Samuel Adams proposed, in his letter to Arthur Lee in 1771, that
similar societies, to be formed in the several colonies in America,
should put themselves in active coöperation by correspondence. Those who
attacked the prerogative in England were as roundly denounced as traitors
as those who resisted Parliament in America. Wilkes was expelled from the
House of Commons; the choice of the Westminster electors who had chosen
him was arbitrarily set aside and annulled; those who protested with
too much hardihood were thrown into prison or fined. But each arbitrary
step taken seemed only to increase the rising sense of uneasiness in the
country. The London mob was raised; rioting spread through the country,
till there seemed to be chronic disorder; writers like “Junius” sprang
up to tease the government with stinging letters which no one could
successfully answer, because no one could match their wit or point;
an independent press came almost suddenly into existence; and because
there was no opinion expressed in the House of Commons worthy of being
called the opinion of the nation, public opinion formed and asserted
itself outside the Houses, and began to clamor uncomfortably for radical
constitutional reforms. Mr. Wilkes was expelled the House in 1769, just
as the trouble in America was thickening towards storm; and long before
that trouble was over it had become plain to every man of enlightened
principle that agitation in England and resistance in America had one and
the same object,—the rectification of the whole spirit and method of the
English government.
[Illustration: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS]
George III. had too small a mind to rule an empire, and the fifteen
years of his personal supremacy in affairs (1768-1783) were years
which bred a revolution in England no less inevitably than in America.
His stubborn instinct of mastery made him dub the colonists “rebels”
upon their first show of resistance; he deemed the repeal of the Stamp
Act a fatal step of weak compliance, which had only “increased the
pretensions of the Americans to absolute independence.” Chatham he
called a “trumpet of sedition” because he praised the colonists for
their spirited assertion of their rights. The nature of the man was not
sinister. Neither he nor his ministers had any purpose of making “slaves”
of the colonists. Their measures for the regulation of the colonial
trade were incontestably conceived upon a model long ago made familiar
in practice, and followed precedents long ago accepted in the colonies.
Their financial measures were moderate and sensible enough in themselves,
and were conceived in the ordinary temper of law-making. What they did
not understand or allow for was American opinion. What the Americans,
on their part, did not understand or allow for was the spirit in which
Parliament had in fact acted. They did not dream with how little comment
or reckoning upon consequences, or how absolutely without any conscious
theory as to power or authority, such statutes as those which had
angered them had been passed; how members of the Commons stared at Mr.
Burke’s passionate protests and high-pitched arguments of constitutional
privilege; how unaffectedly astonished they were at the rebellious
outbreak which followed in the colonies. And, because they were surprised
and had intended no tyranny, but simply the proper government of trade
and the adequate support of administration throughout the dominions of
the crown, as the ministers had represented these things to them, members
of course thought the disturbances at Boston a tempest in a teapot, the
reiterated protests of the colonial assemblies a pretty piece of much
ado about nothing. The radical trouble was that the Parliament really
represented nobody but the King and his “friends,” and was both ignorant
and unreflective upon the larger matters it dealt with.
[Illustration: PAGE FROM THE DIARY OF JOSIAH QUINCY]
It was the more certain that the promises of accommodation and peaceful
constitutional reform which the supporters of the government in America
so freely and earnestly made would be falsified, and that exasperation
would follow exasperation. The loyal partisans of the crown in the
colonies understood as little as did the radical patriotic party the real
attitude and disposition of the King and his ministers. The men with
whom they were dealing over sea had not conceived and could not conceive
the American point of view with regard to the matters in dispute.
They did not know whereof Mr. Burke spoke when he told them that the
colonial assemblies had been suffered to grow into a virtual independence
of Parliament, and had become in fact, whatever lawyers might say,
coördinated with it in every matter which concerned the internal
administration of the colonies; and that it was now too late to ask or
expect the colonists to accept any other view of the law than that which
accorded with long-established fact. Mr. Burke admitted that his theory
was not a theory for the strict lawyer: it was a theory for statesmen,
for whom fact must often take precedence of law. But the men he addressed
were strict legists and not statesmen. There could be no understanding
between the two sides of the water; and the loyalists who counselled
submission, if only for a time, to the authority of the ministers, were
certain to be rejected among their own people. The spirit of American
affairs was with the patriots, and would be with them more and more as
the quarrel thickened.
[Illustration: PROCLAMATION OF THE KING FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF THE
REBELLION]
It thickened fast enough, and the storm broke before men were aware how
near it was. While winter held (1774-1775), affairs everywhere grew
dark and uneasy, not only in Massachusetts, where Gage’s troops waited
at Boston, but in every colony from Maine to the Gulf. Before the end
of 1774 the Earl of Dunmore reported to the government, from Virginia,
that every county was “arming a company of men for the avowed purpose of
protecting their committees,” and that his own power of control was gone.
“There is not a justice of peace in Virginia,” he declared, “that acts
except as a committee-man”; and it gave him the graver concern to see the
turn affairs were taking because “men of fortune and pre-eminence joined
equally with the lowest and meanest” in the measures resorted to to rob
him of authority.
[Illustration: GAGE’S ORDER PERMITTING INHABITANTS TO LEAVE BOSTON]
To the south and north of Virginia, counsels were divided. Those who
led against the government in North Carolina had good reason to doubt
whether they had even a bare majority of the people of their colony at
their back. Every country-side in South Carolina, for all Charleston was
as hot as Boston against the ministers, was full of warm, aggressive,
outspoken supporters of the King’s prerogative. The rural districts of
Pennsylvania, every one knew, were peopled with quiet Quakers whose very
religion bade them offer no resistance even to oppressive power, and of
phlegmatic Germans who cared a vast deal for peace but very little for
noisy principles that brought mischief. Many a wealthy and fashionable
family of Philadelphia, moreover, was much too comfortable and much
too pleasantly connected with influential people on the other side of
the water to relish thoughts of breach or rebellion. Virginians, it
might have seemed, were themselves remote enough from the trouble which
had arisen in Massachusetts to keep them in the cool air of those who
wait and will not lead. But they were more in accord than the men of
Massachusetts itself, and as quick to act. By the close of June, 1775,
Charles Lee could write from Williamsburg, “Never was such vigor and
concord heard of, not a single traitor, scarcely a silent dissentient.”
As the men of the several counties armed themselves, as if by a common
impulse, all turned as of course to Colonel Washington, of Fairfax, as
their natural commander; and no one in Virginia was surprised to learn
his response. “It is my full intention,” he said, “to devote my life and
fortune to the cause we are engaged in.” On the 20th of March, 1775,
the second revolutionary convention of Virginia met at Richmond, not at
Williamsburg; and in it Mr. Henry made his individual declaration of war
against Great Britain. Older and more prudent men protested against his
words; but they served on the committee on the military organization of
the colony for which his resolutions called, and Virginia was made ready.
Here our general _authorities_ are still Bancroft, Hildreth,
and Bryant; David Ramsay’s _History of the American
Revolution_; the last volume of James Grahame’s _Rise and
Progress of the United States of North America_; John Fiske’s
_American Revolution_; Thomas Hutchinson’s _History of
Massachusetts_; John S. Barry’s _History of Massachusetts_;
Richard Frothingham’s _Rise of the Republic of the United
States_; Justin Winsor’s _The Conflict Precipitated_, in the
sixth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of
America_; and the twelfth chapter of W. E. H. Lecky’s _History
of England in the Eighteenth Century_. To these we now add
Frank Moore’s _Diary of the American Revolution_; George
Chalmers’s _Introduction to the History of the Revolt_; Timothy
Pitkin’s _Political and Civil History of the United States_;
and the fourth volume of John Richard Green’s _History of the
English People_. Here, also, the biographies of the chief
public men of the period must be the reader’s constant resource
for a closer view of affairs, particularly the _Lives_ of
such men as John and Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Franklin,
Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Jefferson, the Lees, George
Mason, James Otis, Timothy Pickering, and Washington.
The chief _sources_ that should be mentioned are the _Debates
of Parliament_; the _Annual Register_; the _Proceedings_ and
_Collections_ of the Historical Societies of the original
States; Peter Force’s _American Archives_; Jared Sparks’s
_Correspondence of the Revolution_; Hezekiah Niles’s
_Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_; _Copy of
Letters sent to Great Britain by Thomas Hutchinson_, reprinted
in _Franklin Before the Privy Council_; P. O. Hutchinson’s
_Life and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_; and the published
speeches, letters, and papers of the leading American and
English statesmen of the time.