THE AMERICAN COLONIES.
[Sidenote: 1765--Grenville as Bute's successor]
Wilkes in exile had ceased to exist in the minds of the King's
Ministry. In Naples or in Paris he was as little to be feared as
Churchill in his grave. An insolent subject had presumed directly to
attack the King's advisers and indirectly the King himself, and the
insolent subject was a fugitive, a broken, powerless man. The young
King might well be pleased with the success of his policy. In
pursuance of that policy he had reduced the great fabric of the Whig
party to a ruin, and had driven the factious demagogue who opposed him
into an ignominious obscurity. To a temper flushed by two such
triumphs opposition of any kind was well-nigh welcome for the pleasure
of crushing it, and was never less likely to be encountered in a spirit
of conciliation. Yet the King was destined in the very glow of his
success to find himself face to face with an opposition which he was
not able to crush, and on which any attempt at conciliation was but so
much waste of time. The King's new and formidable opponent was his own
chief minister.
When Bute, perhaps in fear for his life, perhaps in despair at his
unpopularity, resigned the office he filled so ill, he hoped to find in
his successor Grenville a supple and responsive creature, through whom
Bute would still be as powerful as before. Bute had to taste a bitter
disappointment. Grenville's gloomy spirit and narrow mind unfitted
him, indeed, for the office he was called upon to hold, but they
afforded him a stubbornness which declined to recognize either the
authority of the favorite or the authority of the favorite's master.
By the time that Grenville had been two years in office the King hated
him as {72} bitterly as he had ever hated Pitt. If Bute was impotently
furious to find himself discarded and despised by his intended tool,
the King was still more exasperated to find that the King's servant
proposed to be the King's master. Grenville was a good lawyer and a
good man of business, but he was extremely dull and extremely tactless,
and he was at as much pains to offend the King as if he intended
offence. He was overbearing in manner to a monarch who was himself
overbearing; he badgered him with long rambling discourses upon his
royal duty; he deliberately wounded him in his two warmest affections,
his love for his mother and his regard for Bute. Grenville was right
enough in his objection to the undue influence of Bute, but his
animadversions came with a bad grace from the man who was to do as much
harm to England as Bute had ever done. As Grenville had triumphed over
Bute and driven him into the background, so he wished to triumph over
the Princess Dowager and deprive her of power. In 1765 the King fell
ill for the first time of that malady from which he was to suffer so
often and so heavily. As soon as he was restored to health he proposed
the introduction of a Regency Bill to settle satisfactorily the
difficulties that might very well arise if the heir to the throne were
to succeed before the age of eighteen.
[Sidenote: 1765--The King seeks to remove Grenville]
Grenville acted in the matter of the Regency Bill as if the dearest
wish of his heart were to flout the King's wishes and to wound his
feelings. The King wished, lest he should again be stricken with
illness while the heir-apparent was still an infant, to be given the
right to name a regent by will. Grenville and Grenville's colleagues,
who were now as jealous of the authority of Bute as any subscriber to
the _North Briton_, saw or professed to see in the King's proposal an
insidious scheme for placing little less than royal power within the
reach of the favorite. They made it impossible for the King to name
Bute by limiting his choice to the members of the royal family. But
they went further than this in affronting the King. They limited his
choice of a regent to members of the royal family, but they also
limited the number of {73} members of the royal family from whom he
might make his choice. They insisted that the name of the King's
mother, of the Princess Dowager, should not be included in the Bill.
It is difficult to understand how the King could ever have been induced
to consent to this peculiarly galling insult. It seems that Grenville
assured him, on entirely false premises, that if her name were
mentioned in the Bill the House of Commons would be certain to strike
it out. Preferring the private to the public affront, George
surrendered to his minister, only to find that his minister was
flagrantly misinformed. The friends of the Princess in the House of
Commons moved that her name should be written into the Bill, and they
carried their point in Grenville's teeth. Grenville had played the
tyrant and George had accepted the humiliation for nothing. George
tried at once to overthrow Grenville. In those days a king who
disliked a minister had a very simple and easy way of showing and of
gratifying his dislike. He could dismiss his minister without ceremony
and without question. Nowadays a minister depends for his power and
tenure of office upon the majority in the House of Commons, and a
sovereign would not think of dismissing a minister, or of doing
anything else than accepting formally the decision of the House of
Commons. But when George the Third was king the only check upon the
royal power of dismissing a minister lay in the possible difficulty of
finding another to take his place. This was the check George now met.
He wanted with all his heart to dismiss Grenville. He turned to
Cumberland of Culloden, and implored him to bring back Pitt and enable
him to get rid of Grenville. Cumberland tried and Cumberland failed.
Pitt was in one of those paroxysms of illness which seem to have
completely overmastered him. He was almost entirely under the
influence of Temple. Temple's detestation of Bute reconciled him to
Grenville's policy when he found that Grenville seemed to share that
detestation. Temple persuaded Pitt to refuse. Cumberland came back to
the King to tell of his failure. There was nothing to be done.
Grenville had to be kept on. If the enforced association {74} did not
make the sovereign and his minister better friends, if both smarted
under a sense of humiliation and defeat, it is scarcely surprising that
the stubbornness of both was intensified in cases where their
stubbornness was pitted not against each other, but against a common
obstacle. Such a case was then in existence.
[Sidenote: 1765--The American colonies]
Three thousand miles away the wealth and power of England was
represented by a number of settlements occupying a comparatively narrow
strip of territory on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American
continent. The American colonies were the proudest possessions of the
British Empire. Through generation after generation, for more than two
centuries, English daring and English courage had built up those
colonies, reclaiming them from the wilderness and the swamp, wresting
them from wild man and wild beast, fighting for them with European
power after European power. They were a source of wealth, a source of
honor, and a source of strength to England. They were cheaply bought
with the brave lives that had been given for them. It is hard to
realize that any sovereign, that any statesman could fail to see how
precious a possession they were, or how unwise any course of action
must be which could tend in any way to lessen their affection or to
alienate their support. Yet such a sovereign was upon the throne and
such a minister was by his side.
Mr. Willett, senior, in "Barnaby Rudge," explains to his friends that
his absent son Joe is away in "the Salwanners in America, where the war
is." Mr. Willett's knowledge and appreciation of the American colonies
represents pretty well for profundity and accuracy the knowledge and
appreciation of the majority of the English people in the times
contemporary with, and indeed long subsequent to, the quarrels between
the old country and the new. To the bulk of the British people America
was a vague and shadowy region, a sort of no-man's land, peopled for
the most part with black men and red men, and dimly associated with
sugar-planting and the tobacco trade. Its distance alone made it seem
sufficiently unreal to those whose way of life was not drawn by
business or {75} by politics into association with its inhabitants.
The voyage to America was a grimly serious adventure, calling for
fortitude and triple brass. The man was indeed lucky who could make
the passage from shore to shore in six weeks of stormy sea, and the
journey generally took a much longer time, and under the same
conditions of discomfort and of danger that attended on the voyage of
the "Mayflower." The vast majority of Englishmen concerned themselves
as little with America as they concerned themselves with Hindostan.
Both were British possessions, and as such important, but both were too
far away to assume any very substantial reality in the consciousness of
the bulk of the English people. Of the minority who did possess
anything that can be called knowledge of the American colonies, the
majority imbibed its information from official sources, from the
reports of governors of provinces and official servants of the Crown.
These reports were for the most part as reliable for a basis on which
to build an intelligent appreciation as the legends of the Algonquins
or the myths of the Six Nations.
If the English knowledge of the American colonies had been a little
more precise it would have run to this effect. The colonies of the New
England region were mainly peopled by a hardy, industrious, sober,
frugal race, still strongly Puritanical in profession and in practice,
and knowing but little of the extremes of fortune. Neither great
poverty nor great wealth was common among those sturdy farmers, who
tended their own farms, tilled their own land, lived upon their own
produce, and depended for their clothing and for most of the
necessaries of life upon the work of their own hands. A slender
population was scattered far asunder in lonely townships and straggling
villages of wooden houses, built for the most part in the formidable
fashion imposed upon men who might at any time have to resist the
attacks of Indians. Inside these villages the rough, rude justice of
the Puritan days still persisted. The stocks and the pillory and the
stool of repentance were things of the present. A shrewish housewife
might still be made to stand at her cottage door with {76} the iron gag
of the scold fastened upon her shameful face. A careless Sabbatarian
might still find himself exposed to the scorn of a congregation, with
the words "A wanton gospeller" placarded upon his ignominious breast.
Inside those wooden houses a rude simplicity and a rough plenty
prevailed. The fare was simple; the labor was hard; simple fare and
stern labor between them reared a stalwart, God-fearing race. Its
positive pleasures were few and primitive. Husking-bees, quiltings, a
rare dance, filled up the measure of its diversions. But the summer
smiled upon those steadfast, earnest, rigorous citizens, and in the
wild and bitter winters each household would gather about the cheerful
fire in the great chimney which in some of those cottages formed the
major part of the building, and find content and peace in quiet talk
and in tales of the past, of the French and Indian wars, and of their
ancestors, long ago, in old England. Those same great fires that were
the joy of winter were also one of its troubles. Once lit, with all
the difficulty attendant upon flint and steel and burnt rag, they had
to be kept alight from morning till night and from night till morning.
If a fire went out it was a woful business to start it again with the
reluctant tinder-box. There was, indeed, another way, an easier way,
of going round to a neighbor and borrowing a shovelful of hot embers
wherewith to kindle the blackened hearth. But in villages built for
the most part of wood this might well be regarded as a dangerous
process. So the law did regard it, and to start a fire in this lazy,
lounging fashion was penalized as sternly as any breach of the Sabbath
or of public decorum, and these were sternly punished. Drunkenness was
grimly frowned down. Only decent, God-fearing men were allowed to keep
taverns, and the names of persons who had earned the reputation of
intemperance were posted up in those taverns as a warning to the host
that he should sell such men no liquor. In Connecticut tobacco was
forbidden to any one under twenty years of age, unless on the express
order of a physician. Those who were over twenty were only allowed to
smoke once a day, and then not within ten miles of any dwelling.
{77}
[Sidenote: 1765--American colonial customs]
In spite of their democratic simplicity, even the New England colonists
had their distinctions of rank as clearly marked as among the people of
old England. The gentry dressed in one fashion; the working classes
dressed in another. The family rank of students determined their
places in the lists of Harvard College and Yale College. In Boston,
the chief New England town, life was naturally more elaborate and more
luxurious than in the country places. Ladies wore fine clothes and
sought to be modish in the London manner; gentlemen made a brave show
in gayly colored silks and rich laces, gold-headed canes and costly
snuff-boxes. Even in Boston, however, life was simpler, quieter, and
sweeter than it was across the Atlantic; there was Puritanism in its
atmosphere--Puritanism and the serenity of learning, of scholarship, of
study.
There was much more wealth in the province of New York; there was much
more display in the southern colonies. New York was as famous for its
Dutch cleanliness and its Dutch comfort as for its Dutch windmills that
twirled their sails against the sky in all directions. There was store
of plate and fine linen in New York cupboards. There were good things
to eat and drink in New York households. Down South the gentlefolk
lived as gentlefolk lived in England, with perhaps a more lavish
ostentation, a more liberal hospitality. They loved horses and dogs,
horse-racing and fox-hunting, dancing, music, high living, all things
that added to the enjoyment of life. Their servants were their own
black slaves. The great city of the South was Charleston, the third of
the colonial cities. The fourth and last was Philadelphia, the "faire
greene country town" of Penn's love, the last in our order, but the
first in size and splendor, with its flagged sidewalks that had made it
famous throughout the American continent as if it had been one of the
seven wonders of the world, with its stately houses of brick and stone,
its avenues of trees, its fruitful orchards and sweet-smelling gardens.
The people of Philadelphia had every right to be proud of their city.
Communication was not easy between one colony and {78} another, between
one town and another. But neither was it easy in England. For the
most part the conditions of life were much the same on one side of the
Atlantic as on the other. The whole population, white and black,
freeman and slave, was about two million souls. They were well-to-do,
peaceable, hard-working--those who had to work, good fighters--those
who had to fight, all very willing to be loyal and all very well worth
keeping loyal. It was worth their sovereign's while, it was worth the
while of his ministers, to know something about these colonists and to
try and understand natures that were not at all difficult to
understand. Had they been treated as the Englishmen they were, all
would have been well. But the King who gloried in the name of Briton
did not extend its significance far enough.
[Sidenote: 1765--Friction with the American colonists]
It is not easy to understand the temper which animated all the King's
actions towards the American colonies. They were regarded, and with
justice, as one of the greatest glories of the English crown; they were
no less a source of wealth than of pride to the English people. Yet
the English prince persisted in pursuing towards them a policy which
can only be most mildly characterized as a policy of exasperation.
When George was still both a young man and a young king, the relations
between the mother country and her children across the Atlantic were,
if not wholly harmonious, at least in such a condition as to render
harmony not merely possible, but probable. The result of a long and
wearing war had been to relieve the colonists directly from one and
indirectly from the other of their two greatest perils. By the terms
on which peace was made the power of France was broken on the North
American continent. The French troops had been withdrawn across the
seas. The Lilies of France floated over no more important possessions
in the new world than a few insignificant fishing stations near
Newfoundland. A dangerous and dreaded enemy to colonial life and
liberty could no longer menace or alarm. As a consequence of the
withdrawal of the French troops the last united attack of the red men
against the white was made and failed. {79} The famous conspiracy of
Pontiac was the desperate attempt of the Indian allies of France to
annihilate the colonists by a concerted attack of a vast union of
tribes. The conspiracy failed after a bloody war that lasted for
nearly two years. Pontiac, the Indian chief who had helped to destroy
Braddock, and who had dreamed that all the English might as easily be
destroyed, was defeated and killed; his league was dissipated, and the
power of the red men as a united force broken for good. Under such
conditions of immunity from long-standing and pressing perils, due in
the main to the triumph of British arms, the colonists might very well
have been expected to regard with especial favor their association with
England. If there had been differences between the two countries for
long enough, no moment could have been apter for the adoption of a
policy calculated to lessen and ultimately to abolish those differences
than the moment when the weary and wearing Seven Years' War came to its
close. A far-seeing monarch, advised and encouraged by far-seeing
statesmen, might have soldered close the seeming impossibilities and
made them kiss. Had the throne even been filled by a sovereign
slightly less stubborn, had the throne been surrounded by servants
slightly less bigoted, the arrogant patronage of the one part and the
aggressive protestation of the other part might have been judiciously
softened into a relationship wisely paternal and loyally filial. The
advantage of an enduring union between the mother country and her
colonies was obvious to any reasonable observer. A common blood, a
common tongue, a common pride of race and common interests should have
kept them together. But the relations were not amicable. The colonies
were peopled by men who were proud indeed of being Englishmen, but by
reason of that very pride were jealous of any domination, even at the
hands of Englishmen. The mother country, on the other hand, regarded
the colonies, won with English hands and watered with English blood, as
being no less portion and parcel of English soil because three thousand
miles of stormy ocean lay between the port upon the Severn and the port
upon {80} the Charles River. She came to regard as mere ingratitude
those assertions of independence which most characteristically proved
the colonies to be worthy of it and of her. The theory of the absolute
dominion of England over the American colonies might have died a
natural death, a harmonious settlement of grievances and adjustment of
powers might have knitted the two peoples together in an enduring
league, if it had not been for George the Third.
[Sidenote: 1765--England and her colonial governors]
The mind of George the Third was saturated with a belief in his
personal importance; the heart of George the Third was exalted by the
determination to play a dominating part in the country of his birth and
the history of his reign. The hostility to the exercise of home
authority latent in the colonies irritated the King like a personal
affront. To resist or to resent the authority of the Government of
England was to resist and to resent the authority of the sovereign who
was determined that he would be to all intents and purposes the
Government of England. If the relationship between England and America
had been far happier than George found it at the time of his accession,
it probably would not long have preserved a wholesome tenor. But the
relationship was by no means happy. The colonial assemblies were for
the most part at loggerheads with the colonial governors. These
governors, little viceroys with petty courts, extremely proud of their
power and self-conscious in their authority, generally detested the
popular assemblies upon whom they were obliged to depend for the
payment of their salaries. Their dislike found secret expression in
the letters which it was the duty and the pleasure of the colonial
governors to address to the Home Government. The system of colonial
administration in England was as simple as it was unsatisfactory. At
its head was a standing committee of the Privy Council which had been
established in 1675. This committee was known at length as "The Lords
of the Committee of Trade and Plantations," and in brief and more
generally as "The Lords of Trade." It was the duty of the colonial
governors to make lengthy reports to the Lords of Trade on the {81}
commercial and other conditions of their governorships. It was too
often their pleasure to supplement these State papers with lengthy and
embittered private letters, addressed to the same body, making the very
most and worst of the difficulties they had to deal with in their work.
The colonies, as represented in these semi-official communications,
were turbulent, contumacious, discontented, disrespectful to viceregal
dignity, rebellious against the authority of Great Britain. These
communications informed the minds of the Lords of Trade, who in their
turn influenced those who were responsible for the conduct of the
King's Government. Thus a vicious system, acting in a vicious circle,
kept alive an irritation and fostered a friction that only increased
with the increasing years. It had always been the worst feature of
England's colonial policy that she was ever ready to accept with too
little question the animadversions of the governors upon the governed.
The Lords of Trade accepted the communications of the colonial
governors as gospel truth, and as gospel truth it was taken in its turn
by the ministers to whom it was transmitted and by the monarch to whom
they carried it. The general public were as ignorant of and as
indifferent to the American colonies as if they were situated in the
mountains of the moon. The major part of the small minority that
really did seek or desire information about America gained it from the
same poisonous sources that inspired the Government, and based their
theories of colonial reform upon the peevish epistles, often mendacious
and always one-sided, which fed the intelligences of the Lords of
Trade. The few who were really well informed, who had something like
as accurate an appreciation of the colony of Massachusetts as they had
of the county of Middlesex, were powerless to counteract the general
ignorance and the more particular misconception. It was the cherished
dream of authority in England to bring the colonies into one common
rule under one head in such a way as to strengthen their military force
while it lessened their legislative independence. It now seemed as if
with the right King and the right Ministry {82} this dream might become
a reality. In George the Third and in George Grenville prerogative
seemed to have found the needed instruments to subjugate the American
colonies.
[Sidenote: 1765--Trade restrictions upon the colonies]
Many of the grievances of the colonies were grave enough. If some of
the injuries that England inflicted upon her great dependency seem
petty in the enumeration, a number of small causes of irritation are no
less dangerous to peace between nations than some great injustice. But
lest the small stings should not be enough, the Government was resolved
that the great injustice should not be wanting. The colonists resented
the intermittent tyranny and the persistent truculence of the most part
of the royal governors. The colonists resented the enforced
transportation of criminals. The colonists resented the action of
Great Britain in annulling the colonial laws made to keep out slaves.
It is melancholy to reflect that the curse of slavery, for which
Englishmen of later days often so bitterly and so rightly reproached
America, was unhappily enforced upon a country struggling to be rid of
it by Englishmen who called themselves English statesmen. The
colonists resented the astonishing restrictions which it pleased the
mother country to place, in what she believed to be her own interest,
upon colonial trade. These laws commanded that all trade between the
colonies should be carried on in ships built in England or the
colonies. This barred out all foreigners, especially the Dutch, then
the chief carriers for Europe. They compelled the American farmer to
send his products across the ocean to England. They forbade the
exportation of sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, indigo, ginger,
dyeing-woods to any part of the world except to England or some English
colony. They only allowed exportation of fish, fur, oil, ashes, and
lumber in ships built in England or the colonies. They forced the
colonists to buy all their European goods in England and bring them
over to America in English vessels. They prohibited the colonial
manufacture of any article that could be manufactured in England. They
harassed and minimized the trade between one colony and another. No
{83} province was permitted to send woollen goods, hats, or ironware to
another province. Some of the regulations read more like the rules of
some Turkish pashalik than the laws framed by one set of Englishmen for
another set of Englishmen. In the Maine woods, for instance, no tree
that had a diameter greater than two feet at a foot above the ground
could be cut down, except to make a mast for some ship of the Royal
Navy.
Bad and bitter as these laws were in theory, they did not for long
enough prove to be so bad in practice, for the simple reason that they
were very easy to evade and not very easy to enforce. The colonists
met what many of them regarded as an elaborate system for the
restriction of colonial trade by a no less elaborate system of
smuggling. Smuggling was easy because of the long extent of sea-coast.
Smuggling was lucrative, as few considered it an offence to evade laws
that were generally resented as unfair. When the Sugar Act of 1733
prohibited the importation of sugar and molasses from the French West
Indies except on payment of a prohibitory duty, the New England
colonists, who did a thriving trade in the offspring of the union of
sugar and molasses, rum, found themselves faced by a serious problem.
Should they accept the Act and its consequential ruin of their trade or
ignore it, and by resorting to smuggling prosper as before? Without
hesitation they decided that their rights as Englishmen were assailed
by the obnoxious imposition, and they turned to smuggling with the
light heart that is conscious of a heavy purse. The contraband trade
was brisk, the contrabandists cheerful, and so long as England made no
serious attempt to put into operation laws that the genial and
business-like smugglers of the Atlantic sea-coast regarded as
preposterous nobody complained, and international relations were
cordial. But the situation was not seen with so bright an eye by the
British merchant. He witnessed with indignation the failure of the
attempt to monopolize the commerce of the colonies to his own
advantage, and he clamored for the restoration of his fat monopoly.
His clamor was unheeded while the great war {84} was running its
course. But with the end of the war and the new conditions consequent
upon the advent of a new King with a brand-new theory of kingship and
prerogative, the situation began to change.
The colonial policy of George Grenville's Administration might be
conveniently considered under three heads. The Ministry was resolved,
in the first place, to enforce Acts of Trade which smuggling had long
rendered meaningless in the American colonies. The Ministry was
resolved, in the second place, to establish a permanent garrison of
some ten thousand men in America. The Ministry was resolved, in the
third place, to make the colonists pay a third of the cost of keeping
up this garrison by a direct taxation. It was easy enough for
Grenville to formulate the three ministerial purposes, but it was not
very easy to give them any effect. The colonists resented and the
colonists resisted all three proposals. If they were technically wrong
in their resentment at the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they were
reasonable in their reluctance to accept the proposed garrison, and
they were justified by every law of liberty and of patriotism in
resisting with all the strength at their command the proposed scheme of
taxation.
[Sidenote: 1765--James Otis and John Adams]
The English Government began its task by a rigorous attempt to enforce
the Acts of Trade. Grenville had made up his narrow mind that the
colonies should be compelled to adhere to the conditions which obliged
them to trade with England only for England's principal manufactures.
There should be no more smuggling from Spanish America, no more
smuggling from the West Indies. To enforce this determination, which
deprived the colonists at a blow of the most profitable part of their
trade, the Government employed certain general search warrants, which,
if strictly legal in the letter, were conceived in a spirit highly
calculated to goad a proud people into illegal defiance. They goaded
one proud man into active protest. A distinguished servant of the
Government, James Otis, the King's Advocate, resigned his office in
order that he might be at liberty to denounce the Writs of Assistance.
{85} Otis may have been technically wrong in resisting the Writs of
Assistance, but it can scarcely be questioned that as a philosophic
politician, who was devoted to the interests of his countrymen, he was
ethically in the right. Otis was thirty-six years old; he was known to
his compatriots as a graduate of Harvard, an able lawyer, a zealous
student of classical literature, and an author of repute on Latin
prosody. The issue of the Writs of Assistance converted the respected
and respectable public servant into a conspicuous statesman as hotly
applauded by the one side as he was execrated by the other. A single
speech lifted him from an esteemed obscurity to a leading place among
the champions of colonial rights against imperial aggressions. The
assemblage which Otis addressed, which Otis dominated, was forever
memorable in the history of America. "Otis was a flame of fire." The
words are the words of one who was a young man when Otis spoke, who
listened and took notes as the words fell from Otis's lips. "With a
promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid
summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal
authorities, a prophetic glance of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid
torrent of tempestuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him. Then
and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the
arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child
Independence was born. Every man of an immense crowded audience
appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take up arms against Writs
of Assistance."
The youth who took notes of the words of Otis, and who was inspired by
them with the desire to rise and mutiny, was destined to play even a
greater part in the history of his country. If Otis was one of the
first to assert actively, by deed as well as by word, the determination
of the colonies to oppose and, if needs were, to defy the domination of
England, John Adams was the first to applaud his action and to
appreciate its importance. In 1763 John Adams was no more than a
promising young lawyer who had struggled from poverty and hardship to
regard and authority, and who had wrested from iron Fortune a great
{86} deal of learning if very little of worldly wealth. Short of
stature, sanguine of temperament, the ruddy, stubborn, passionate small
man had fought his way step by step from the most modest if not the
most humble beginnings, as zealously as if he had known of the fame
that was yet to be his and the honor that he was to give to his name
and hand down to a long line of honorable descendants. If the
ministers who weakly encouraged or meanly obeyed King George in his
frenzy against America could have understood even dimly the temper of a
race that was rich in sons of whom John Adams was but one and not the
most illustrious even to them, there must have come dimly some
consciousness of the forces they had to encounter, and the peril of
their policy. But the Ministry knew nothing of Adams, and knew only of
Otis as a mutinous and meddlesome official. Otis and his protest
signified nothing to them, and they would have smiled to learn that
young Mr. Adams, the lawyer, believed that American independence was
born when Mr. Otis's oration against Writs of Assistance breathed into
the colonies the breath of life that was to make them a nation.
[Sidenote: 1765--Taxation without representation]
If Otis voiced and Adams echoed the feelings of the colonists against
Writs of Assistance and the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they
might no less eloquently have interpreted the general irritation at the
proposed establishment of a permanent garrison on the continent. The
colonists saw no need of such a garrison so late in the day. When the
Frenchmen held the field, when the red man was on the war path, then
indeed the presence of more British soldiers might have become welcome.
But the flag of France no longer floated over strong places, no longer
fluttered at the head of invasion. The strength of the savage was
crippled if not crushed. The colonists had nothing to fear from the
one and little to fear from the other foe. They thought that they had
much to fear from the presence of a British garrison of ten thousand
men. This British garrison might, on occasion, be used not in defence
of their liberties, but in diminution of their liberties. The
irritation against the proposed garrison might have {87} smouldered out
if it had not been fanned into a leaping flame by the means proposed
for the maintenance of the garrison. Grenville proposed to raise
one-third of the cost of support from the colonies by taxation. No
proposal could have been better calculated to goad every colony and
every colonist into resistance, and to fuse the scattered elements of
resistance into a solid whole. More than two generations earlier both
Massachusetts and New York had formally denied the right of the Home
Government to levy any tax upon the American colonies. The colonies
were not represented at Westminster--could not, under the conditions,
be represented at Westminster. The theory that there should be no
taxation without representation was as dear to the American for America
as it was dear to the Englishman for England. Successive English
Governments, forced in times of financial pressure wistfully to eye
American prosperity, had dreamed, and only dreamed, of raising money by
taxing the well-to-do colonies. It was reserved to the Government
headed by Grenville, in its madness, to attempt to make the dream a
reality. It is true that even Grenville did not propose, did not
venture to suggest that the American colonies should be taxed for the
direct benefit of the English Government. He brought forward his
scheme of taxation as a benefit to America, as a contribution to the
expense of keeping up a garrison that was only established in the
interests of America and for America's welfare. In this spirit of
benevolence, and with apparent confidence of success, Grenville brought
forward his famous Stamp Act.
There were statesmen in England who saw with scarcely less indignation
than the Americans themselves, and with even more dismay, the unfolding
of the colonial policy of the Government. These protested against the
intolerable weight of the duties imposed, and arraigned the folly
which, by compelling these duties to be paid in specie, drained away
the little ready money remaining in the colonies, "as though the best
way to cure an emaciated body, whose juices happened to be tainted, was
to leave it no juices at all." They assailed the injustice that
refused {88} to recognize as legal tender any paper bills of credit
issued by the colonies. Politicians, guided by the intelligence and
the inspiration of Burke, applauded the Americans for their firmness in
resolving to subsist to the utmost of their power upon their own
productions and manufactures. They urged that it could not be expected
that the colonists, merely out of a compliment to the mother country,
should submit to perish for thirst with water in their own wells. And
these clear-sighted politicians saw plainly enough that such blows as
the Government were aiming at America must in the end recoil upon Great
Britain herself. They appreciated the injury that must be done to
British commerce by even a temporary interruption of the intercourse
between the two countries. But bad as the restrictive measures were in
their immediate, as well as in their ultimate consequences, worse
remained behind. The proposed Stamp Act scarcely shocked Otis or Adams
more directly and cruelly than it shocked the soundest and sanest
thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic. Words which certainly
expressed the thoughts of Burke declared that the approval, even with
opposition, given to such a measure as the Stamp Act, the bare proposal
of which had given so much offence, argued such a want of reflection as
could scarcely be paralleled in the public councils of any country.
The King's speech at the opening of Parliament on January 10, 1765,
gave unmistakable evidence of the temper of the monarch and of the
Ministry. It formally expressed its reliance on the wisdom and
firmness of Parliament in promoting the proper respect and obedience
due to the legislative authority of Great Britain. The Government was
resolved to be what it considered firm, and it undoubtedly believed
that a proper show of firmness would easily overbear any opposition
that the colonists might make to the proposed measure. The Stamp Act
was introduced, the Stamp Act was debated upon; in due time the Stamp
Act passed through both Houses, and in consequence of the ill health of
the King received the royal assent by commission on March 28, 1765.
The first foolish challenge to American loyalty was formally made, and
{89} America was not slow to accept it. It may be admitted that in
itself the Stamp Act was not a conspicuously unfair or even a
conspicuously unreasonable measure. It was a legitimate and perfectly
fair way of raising money from a taxable people. It was neither
legitimate nor fair when imposed upon unrepresented colonists. But if
it had been the sanest and most statesmanlike scheme for raising money
ever conceived by a financier, it would have deserved and would have
received no less hostility from the American people. The principle
involved was everything. To admit in any degree the right of Great
Britain to impose at her pleasure a tax upon the colonists was to
surrender in ignominy the privileges and to betray the duties of free
men. Any expectations of colonial protest that the Ministry may have
allowed themselves to entertain were more than fulfilled. Colony after
colony, great town after great town, great man after great man, made
haste to protest with an emphasis that should have been significant
against the new measure. Boston led the way. Boston's most
distinguished citizen, Boston's most respected son was the voice not
merely of his town, not merely of his State, but of the colonial
continent. Ten years later the name of Samuel Adams was known, hated,
and honored on the English side of the Atlantic.
[Sidenote: 1765--Samuel Adams]
Samuel Adams was one of those men whom Nature forges to be the
instruments of revolution. His three-and-forty years had taught him
much: the value of silence, the knowledge of men, the desire to change
the world and the patience to bide his time. A few generations earlier
he might have made a right-hand man to Cromwell and held a place in the
heart of Hampden. On the very threshold of his manhood, when receiving
his degree of Master of Arts at Harvard, he asserted his defiant
democracy in a dissertation on the right of the people of a
commonwealth to combine against injustice on the part of the head of
the State. The badly dressed man with the grave firm face of a Pilgrim
Father was as ready and as resolute to oppose King George as any Pym or
Vane had been ready and resolute to oppose Charles Stuart. He had at
one {90} time devoted himself to a commercial career, with no great
success. He was made for a greater game than commerce; he had the
temper and he gained the training for a public life, and the hour when
it came found that the man was ready. When the citizens of Boston met
to protest against the Stamp Act Samuel Adams framed the first
resolutions that denied to the Parliament of Great Britain the right to
impose taxes upon her colonies.
[Sidenote: 1765--The opposition to the Stamp Act]
If Massachusetts was the first to protest with no uncertain voice
against the Stamp Act, other colonies were prompt to follow her
example, and to prove that they possessed sons no less patriotic.
Virginia was as vehement and as vigorous in opposition as
Massachusetts. One speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses made the
name of Patrick Henry famous. Patrick Henry was a young man who tried
many things and failed in them before he found in the practice of the
law the appointed task for his rare gifts of reasoning and of
eloquence. A speech in Hanover Court House in defence of the people
against a suit of the parish clergy gave him sudden fame. As grave of
face as Samuel Adams, as careless of his attire, tall and lean, stamped
with the seal of the speaker and the thinker, Patrick Henry at
nine-and-twenty was already a very different man from the youth who
five years earlier seemed destined to be but a Jack of all trades and
master of none, an unsuccessful trader, an unsuccessful farmer, whose
chief accomplishments in life were hunting and fishing, dancing and
riding. The debate on the Stamp Act gave him a great opportunity. As
he addressed his words of warning to the stubborn sovereign across the
sea his passion seemed to get the better of his prudence and to tempt
him into menace. "Caesar," he said, "had his Brutus, Charles the First
his Cromwell." He was going on to say "and George the Third," when he
was interrupted by angry cries of "Treason!" from the loyalists among
his hearers. Patrick Henry waited until the noise subsided, and then
quietly completed his sentence, "George the Third may profit by their
example. If this be treason, make the most of it." The words were not
treasonable, {91} but they were revolutionary. They served to carry
the name of Patrick Henry to every corner of the continent and across
the Atlantic. They made him a hero and idol in the eyes of the
colonists; they made him a rebel in the eyes of the Court at St.
James's.
Massachusetts had set an example which Virginia had bettered;
Massachusetts was now to better Virginia. If Virginia, prompted by
Patrick Henry, declared that she alone had the right to tax her own
citizens, Massachusetts, inspired by James Otis, summoned a congress of
deputies from all the colonial assemblies to meet in common
consultation upon the common danger. This congress, the first but not
the last, memorable but not most memorable, met in New York in the
early November of 1765. Nine colonies were represented at its
table--Massachusetts, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York. The
congress passed a series of resolutions, as firm in their purpose as
moderate in their language, putting forward the grievances and
asserting the rights of the colonies.
But the protests against the Stamp Act were not limited to eloquent
orations or formal resolutions. Deeds, as well as words, made plain
the purpose of the American people. Riots broke out in colony after
colony; the most and worst in Massachusetts. Boston blazed into open
revolt against authority. There were two Government officials in
Boston who were especially unpopular with the mob--Andrew Oliver, the
newly appointed collector of the stamp taxes, and Chief Justice
Hutchinson. A scarecrow puppet, intended to represent the obnoxious
Oliver, was publicly hung upon a tree by the mob, then cut down,
triumphantly paraded through the city to Oliver's door, and there set
on fire. When the sham Oliver was ashes the crowd broke into and
ransacked his house, after which it did the same turn to the house of
Chief Justice Hutchinson. Oliver and Hutchinson escaped unhurt, but
all their property went through their broken windows and lay in ruin
upon the Boston streets. Hutchinson was busy upon a History of
Massachusetts; the manuscript shared the fate of its {92} author's
chairs and tables, and went with them out into the gutter. It was
picked up, preserved, and exists to this day, its pages blackened with
the Boston mud. Many papers and records of the province which
Hutchinson had in his care for the purpose of his history were
irretrievably lost.
The next day the judges and the bar, assembled in their robes at the
Boston Court House, were startled by the apparition of a haggard man in
disordered attire, whom they might have been pardoned for failing to
recognize as their familiar chief justice. In a voice broken with
emotion Hutchinson apologized to the court for the appearance in which
he presented himself before it. He and his family were destitute; he
himself had no other shirt and no other clothes than those he was at
that moment wearing. Part even of this poor attire he had been obliged
to borrow. Almost in rags, almost in tears, he solemnly called his
Maker to witness that he was innocent of the charges that had made him
obnoxious to the fury of the populace. He swore that he never, either
directly or indirectly, aided, assisted, or supported, or in the least
promoted or encouraged the Stamp Act, but on the contrary did all in
his power, and strove as much as in him lay, to prevent it. The court
listened to him in melancholy silence and then adjourned, "on account
of the riotous disorders of the previous night and universal confusion
of the town," to a day nearly two months later.
It was a thankless privilege to be a stamp officer in those stormy
hours. Most of the stamp officers were forced to resign under pressure
which they might well be excused for finding sufficiently cogent. In
order to make the new law a dead letter the colonists resolved that
while it was in force they would avoid using stamps by substituting
arbitration for any kind of legal procedure. With a people in this
temper, there were only two things to be done; to meet their wishes, or
to annihilate their opposition. It is possible that Grenville might
have preferred to attempt the second alternative, but by this time
Grenville's power was at an end.
{93}