’Twas hardly an opportune time for statesmen in London to make a new and
larger place for England’s authority in America, and yet that was what
they immediately attempted. Save Chatham and Burke and a few discerning
men who had neither place nor power, there was no longer any one in
England who knew, though it were never so vaguely, the real temper and
character of the colonists. ’Twas matter of common knowledge and
comment, it is true, that the men of Massachusetts were beyond all
reason impatient of command or restraint, affecting an independence
which was hardly to be distinguished from contumacy and insubordination;
but what ground was there to suppose that a like haughty and
ungovernable spirit lurked in the loyal and quiet South, or among the
prudent traders and phlegmatic farmers who were making the middle
colonies so rich, and so regardful of themselves in every point of gain
or interest? Statesmen of an elder generation had had a sure instinct
what must be the feeling of Englishmen in America, and had, with “a wise
and salutary neglect,” suffered them to take their own way in every
matter of self-government. Though ministry after ministry had asserted a
rigorous and exacting supremacy for the mother-country in every affair
of commerce, and had determined as they pleased what the colonies
should be suffered to manufacture, and how they should be allowed to
trade--with what merchants, in what commodities, in what bottoms, within
what limits--they had nevertheless withheld their hands hitherto from
all direct exercise of authority in the handling of the internal affairs
of the several settlements, had given them leave always to originate
their own legislation and their own measures of finance, until
self-government had become with them a thing as if of immemorial
privilege. Sir William Keith, sometime Governor of Pennsylvania, had
suggested to Sir Robert Walpole that he should raise revenue from the
colonies. “What!” exclaimed that shrewd master of men. “I have Old
England set against me, and do you think I will have New England
likewise?”
But men had come into authority in England now who lacked this stout
sagacity, and every element of sound discretion. English arms and
English money, they could say, had swept the French power from America
in order that the colonies might no longer suffer menace or rivalry. A
great debt had been piled up in the process. Should not the colonies,
who had reaped the chief benefit, bear part of the cost? They had
themselves incurred burdensome debts, no doubt, in the struggle, and
their assemblies would very likely profess themselves willing to vote
what they could should his Majesty call upon them and press them. But an
adequate and orderly system of taxation could not be wrought out by the
separate measures of a dozen petty legislatures; ’twere best the
taxation should be direct and by Parliament, whose authority, surely, no
man outside turbulent Boston would be mad enough seriously to question
or resist. It would, in any event, be wholesome, now the colonies were
likely to grow lusty as kingdoms in their roomy continent, to assert a
mother’s power to use and restrain--a power by no means lost because too
long unexercised and neglected. It was with such wisdom the first step
was taken. In March, 1764, Parliament voted it “just and necessary that
a revenue be raised in America,” passed an act meant to secure duties on
wines and sugars, and took measures to increase the efficiency of the
revenue service in America.
George Grenville was Prime-Minister. He lacked neither official capacity
nor acquaintance with affairs. He thought it just the colonists should
pay their quota into the national treasury, seeing they were so served
by the national power; and he declared that in the next session of
Parliament he should propose certain direct taxes in addition to the
indirect already in force. He saw no sufficient reason to doubt that the
colonies would acquiesce, if not without protest, at least without
tumult or dangerous resistance. It was a sad blunder. Virginia resented
threat and execution alike in such a matter as deeply as did litigious
Massachusetts. A long generation ago, in the quiet year 1732, when bluff
Sir Robert was Prime-Minister, there had been an incident which Governor
Keith, maybe, had forgotten. The ministry had demanded of Massachusetts
that she should establish a fixed salary for her governors by a standing
grant; but she had refused, and the ministers had receded. The affair
had not been lost upon the other colonies. That sturdy onetime royal
Governor, Alexander Spotswood, in Virginia, had noted it very
particularly, and spoken of it very bluntly, diligent servant of the
crown as he was, to Colonel William Byrd, when he came his way on his
“progress to the mines.” He declared “that if the Assembly in New
England would stand bluff, he did not see how they could be forced to
raise money against their will, for if they should direct it to be done
by act of Parliament, which they have threatened to do (though it be
against the right of Englishmen to be taxed but by their
representatives), yet they would find it no easy matter to put such an
act in execution.” No observing man could so much as travel in Virginia
without finding very promptly what it was that gave point and poignancy
to such an opinion. That quiet gentleman the Rev. Andrew Burnaby, Vicar
of Greenwich, was in Virginia in 1759, and saw plainly enough how
matters stood. “The public or political character of the Virginians,” he
said, “corresponds with their private one; they are haughty and jealous
of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the
thought of being controlled by any superior power. Many of them consider
the colonies as independent states, not connected with Great Britain
otherwise than by having the same common King and being bound to her
with natural affection.” Not only so, but “they think it a hardship not
to have an unlimited trade to every part of the world.” All this, and
more, Grenville might have learned by the simple pains of inquiry. One
had but to open his eyes and look to see how imperious a race had been
bred in the almost feudal South; and, for all they had never heard
revolutionary talk thence, ministers ought to have dreaded the leisure
men had there to think, the provocation to be proud, the necessity to be
masterful and individual, quite as much as they had ever dreaded the
stubborn temper and the quick capacity for united action they had once
and again seen excited in New England.
[Illustration: TAZEWELL HALL, THE HOUSE OF THE RANDOLPHS
(After a print in _Omitted Chapters of History in the Life and Papers of
Edward Randolph_.
By Courtesy of G. P. Putnam’s Sons)]
[Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE
(From an old print)]
It was not necessary to try new laws to see what the colonies would do
if provoked. The difficulty already encountered in enforcing the laws of
trade was object-lesson enough; and the trouble in that matter had grown
acute but yesterday. For long, indeed, no one in the colonies questioned
the right of Parliament to regulate their trade; but it was notorious
that the laws actually enacted in that matter had gone smoothly off in
America only because they were not seriously enforced. “The trade hither
is engrossed by the Saints of New England,” laughed Colonel Byrd, “who
carry off a great deal of tobacco without troubling themselves with
paying that impertinent duty of a penny a pound.” The Acts of Trade
practically forbade direct commerce with foreign countries or their
dependencies, especially in foreign bottoms; but ships from France,
Spain, and the Canary Isles came and went very freely, notwithstanding,
in colonial ports; for royal officials liked to enjoy a comfortable
peace and the esteem of their neighbors, and very genially winked at
such transgressions. Cargoes without number were sent to the Dutch and
Spanish West Indies every year, and as many brought thence, which were
undoubtedly forfeit under the navigation laws Parliament had been at
such pains to elaborate and enforce; and privateering as well as
smuggling had for long afforded the doughty seamen of Boston, Salem,
Charleston, and New York a genteel career of profit. Things had come to
such a pass that where business went briskly the people of the colonial
ports demanded as of right “a full freedom of illegal trade,” and broke
sometimes into riot when it was denied them. The Boston _News Letter_
had been known very courteously to mourn the death of a worthy collector
of his Majesty’s customs because, “with much humanity,” he had been
used to take “pleasure in directing masters of vessels how they ought to
avoid the breach of the Acts of Trade.” Sea captains grew accustomed to
very confidential relations with owners and consignees, and knew very
well, without official counsel, how to take the advice “not to declare
at the Custom-house”; and things went very easily and cordially with all
parties to the understanding.
In 1761 that understanding was of a sudden rudely broken and the trouble
began, which Grenville had the folly to add to. The Board of Trade
determined to collect the duties on sugar, molasses, and rum, so long
and so systematically evaded in the trade between New England and the
West Indies, at whatever cost of suit and scrutiny, and directed their
agents in Boston to demand “writs of assistance” from the courts, giving
them leave to enter what premises they would in search of smuggled
goods. There were instant exasperation and resistance. General
search-warrants, opening every man’s door to the officers of the law,
with or without just and explicit ground of suspicion against him, no
English subject anywhere would submit to; and yet these writs authorized
nothing less. Issued under a questionable extension to America of an
exceptional power of the Court of Exchequer, they violated every
precedent of the common law, no less than every principle of prudent
administration; and the excitement which they provoked was at once deep
and ominous. Sharp resistance was made in the courts, and no officer
ever ventured to serve one of the obnoxious writs. Such challenge of the
process was uttered by colonial counsel upon trial of the right,
moreover, that ministers would be without excuse should they ignore the
warning, so explicit and so eloquent of revolutionary purpose. It was
James Otis who uttered it. He had but the other day carried the royal
commission in his pocket as Advocate-General in his Majesty’s Court of
Admiralty; but he would not have scrupled, even as his Majesty’s
servant, he said, to oppose the exercise of a power which had already
cost one King his head and another his throne. To oppose in such a case
was to defend the very constitution under which the King wore his crown.
That constitution secured to Englishmen everywhere the rights of
freemen; the colonists had, besides, the plain guarantees of their own
charters; if constitution and charter failed, or were gainsaid, the
principles of natural reason sufficed for defence against measures so
arrogant and so futile. No lawyer could justify these extraordinary
writs; no King with an army at his back could ever force them to
execution.
Protest not only, but defiance, rang very clear in these fearless words;
and ministers must avow themselves very ignorant should they pretend
they did not know how Mr. Otis had kindled fire from one end of the
colonies to the other. But Grenville was resolute to take all risks and
push his policy. He did not flinch from the enforcement of the measures
of 1764, and in the session of 1765 calmly fulfilled his promise of
further taxation. He proposed that the colonists should be required to
use revenue stamps upon all their commercial paper, legal documents,
pamphlets, and newspapers; and that, at once as a general measure of
convenience and a salutary exhibition of authority, his Majesty’s troops
stationed in the plantations should be billeted on the people.
Parliament readily acquiesced. It was thus Grenville purposed
“defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing” the
colonies; but he came near losing them instead. The act was passed in
March; it was not to go into effect until November; but the colonists
did not keep him waiting until November for their protests. It was the
voice of a veritable tempest that presently came over sea to the ear of
the startled minister. And it was not the General Court of turbulent
Massachusetts, but the House of Burgesses of loyal Virginia that first
spoke the general indignation. Already in the autumn of 1764, upon the
mere threat of what was to come, that House had spoken very urgently
against the measures proposed, in a memorial to King and Parliament,
which, amidst every proper phrase of loyalty and affection, had plainly
declared it the opinion of his Majesty’s subjects in Virginia that such
acts would be in flat violation of their undoubted rights and liberties;
and the committee by which that memorial was drawn up had contained
almost every man of chief consequence in the counsels of the colony, the
King’s Attorney-General himself not excepted. But it was one thing to
protest against measures to come and quite another to oppose their
execution when enacted into laws. The one was constitutional agitation;
the other, flat rebellion--little less. It was very ominous to read the
words of the extraordinary resolutions passed by the Burgesses on the
30th of May, 1765, after the Stamp Act had become law, and note the tone
of restrained passion that ran through them. They declared that from the
first the settlers of “his Majesty’s colony and dominion” of Virginia
had possessed and enjoyed all the privileges, franchises, and immunities
at any time enjoyed by the people of Great Britain itself; and that
this, their freedom, had been explicitly secured to them by their
charters, “to all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and
born within the realm of England”; “that the taxation of the people by
themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them” was “a
distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, without which the
ancient constitution” of the realm itself could not subsist; “and that
his Majesty’s liege people of this most ancient colony” had
“uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being thus governed by their
assemblies in the article of their taxes and internal police,” had never
forfeited or relinquished it, and had seen it “constantly recognized by
the Kings and people of Great Britain.”
Spoken as it was in protest against actual legislation already adopted
by Parliament in direct despite of all such privileges and immunities,
this declaration of rights seemed to lack its conclusion. The
constitutional rights of Virginians had been invaded. What then?
_Resolved_, therefore, “that his Majesty’s liege people, the inhabitants
of this colony, are not bound to yield obedience to any law or ordinance
whatever designed to impose any taxation whatsoever upon them, other
than the laws or ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid,” and
“that any person who shall, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain”
the contrary “shall be deemed an enemy of his Majesty’s colony.” Such
had been the uncompromising conclusion drawn by the mover of the
resolutions. What other conclusion could any man draw if he deemed the
colonists men, and proud men at that? But the Burgesses would not go so
far or be so explicit. They feared to speak treason; they were content
to protest of their rights, and let the issue bring conclusions to
light. It had been hot fighting to get even that much said. The men
hitherto accepted always as leaders in the House had wished to hold it
back from rash and heated action, and there had been bitter debates
before even those significant premises for a revolutionary conclusion
had been forced to adoption. Old leaders and new, young men and old
alike, had willingly united in the memorial of 1764; but now that the
Stamp Act was law, conservative members shrank from doing what must look
so like a flat defiance of Parliament. Only young men would have had the
audacity to urge such action; only very extraordinary young men would
have had the capacity to induce the House to take it. But such young men
were at hand, their leader as veritable a democrat as had ever taken the
floor in that assembly.
Patrick Henry was not of the aristocracy of the colony. Good Scots blood
ran in his veins, quickened by the lively strain of an old Welsh stock.
His father came of a race of scholars, and, good churchman though he
was, knew his Livy and his Horace better than his Bible. His mother came
of a vivacious line of easy-going wits and talkers, which but a touch
more of steadiness and energy might any day have made famous. His father
had served his county of Hanover very capably and acceptably as
surveyor, colonel, magistrate, and his uncle had been beloved as the
faithful pastor of quiet parishes. But they had been no long time in the
colony; they lived back from the tide-water counties where the real
aristocracy had its strength and supremacy; they were of that middle
class of yeomen-gentlemen who love liberty but do not affect rank. “A
vigorous aristocracy favors the growth of personal eminence even in
those who are not of it, but only near it,” and these plain men of the
middle counties were the more excellent and individual in the
cultivation of their powers by reason of the contact. But there was a
touch of rusticity, a neglect of polish, a rough candor of speech, about
them which set them apart and distinguished them sharply enough when
they came into the presence of the courtly and formal gentlemen who
practised the manners of London in the river counties. Patrick Henry, at
any rate, must have seemed a very rustic figure to the Burgesses when he
first came to take his seat amongst them on a May day in 1765. He was
known, indeed, to many. This was the man, they must have known, who had
won so strange a verdict from a jury two years ago in the celebrated
parsons’ case at Hanover court-house, against the law and the evidence.
But his careless dress and manner, his loose, ungainly figure, his
listless, absent bearing, must have set many a courtly member staring.
For such men as Washington, indeed, there can have been nothing either
strange or unattractive in the rough exterior and unstudied ways of the
new member. Punctilious though he was himself in every point of dress
and bearing, Washington’s life had most of it been spent with men who
looked thus, and yet were stuff of true courage and rich capacity
within. The manner of a man could count as no test of quality with him.
His experience had covered the whole variety of Virginian life. He was
an aristocrat by taste, not by principle. And Patrick Henry had, in
fact, come to the same growth as he in essential quality and principle,
though by another way. Henry’s life had been wilful, capricious, a bit
haphazard, Washington’s all the while subject to discipline; but both
men had touched and seen the whole energy of the commonwealth, knew its
hope, could divine its destiny. There was but one Virginia, and they
were her children. It could not take long to bring them to an
understanding and comradeship in affairs.
It was characteristic of the new member that he should step at once and
unhesitatingly to a place of leadership when debate of the Stamp Act
stirred the House, and that he should instantly sweep the majority into
his following with a charm and dash of eloquence that came like a
revelation upon the quiet assembly. He was but twenty-nine years old,
but he had spent all his life in learning how the world went, and by
what manner of speech it was moved and governed. He had roamed the woods
with no thought but for sport, or a quiet hour with a book or his fancy
in the shade of the trees. He had kept a country store, and let gossip
and talk of affairs of colony and country-side take precedence of
business. Finally he had turned with a permanent relish to the law, and
had set himself to plead causes for his neighbors in a way that made
judges stare and juries surrender at discretion. In everything he had
seemed to read the passions of men. Books no less than men, the chance
company of an old author no less than the constant talk of the
neighborly land he lived in, seemed to fill him with the quick
principles of the people and polity to which he belonged, and to lend
him as inevitably every living phrase in which to utter them. The
universal sympathy and insight which made his pleasantry so engaging to
men of every stamp rendered his power no less than terrible when he
turned to play upon their passions. He was not conscious of any audacity
when he sprang to his feet upon the instant he saw the House resolved
into committee to consider the Stamp Act. It was of the ardor of his
nature to speak when conviction moved him strongly, without thought of
propriety or precedence; and it was like him to stand there absorbed,
reading his resolutions from a fly-leaf torn from an old law-book.
It seemed no doubt a precious piece of audacity in the eyes of the
prescriptive leaders of the House to hear this almost unknown man
propose his high recital of Virginia’s liberties and his express
defiance of Parliament--in tones which rang no less clear and confident
upon the clause which declared “his Majesty’s liege people” of the
colony in no way bound to yield obedience, than in the utterance of the
accepted matter of his premises. Debate flamed up at once, hot, even
passionate. The astounding, moving eloquence of the young advocate, his
instant hold upon the House, the directness with which he purposed and
executed action in so grave a matter, stirred the pulses of his
opponents and his followers with an equal power, and roused those who
would have checked him to a vehemence as great as his own. The old
leaders of the House, with whom he now stood face to face in this
critical business, were the more formidable because of the strong reason
of their position. No one could justly doubt that they wished to see the
Old Dominion keep and vindicate her liberty, but they deemed it folly to
be thus intemperately beforehand with the issue. Almost to a man they
were sprung of families who had come to Virginia with the great
migration that had brought the Washingtons, in the evil day when so many
were fleeing England to be quit of the Puritan tyranny--royalists all,
and touched to the quick with the sentiment of loyalty. ’Twas now a
long time since Cromwell’s day, indeed; generations had passed, and a
deep passion for Virginia had been added to that old reverence for the
wearer of the crown in England. But these men prided themselves still
upon their loyalty; made it a point of honor to show themselves no
agitators, but constitutional statesmen. It made them grave and deeply
anxious to see the privileges that were most dear to them thus violated
and denied, but it did not make them hasty to quarrel with the
Parliament of the realm. They had intended opposition, but they feared
to throw their cause away by defiance. ’Twas as little wise as dignified
to flout thus at the sovereign power before all means had been exhausted
to win it to forbearance.
It was not the least part of the difficulty to face the veteran Speaker,
John Robinson, so old in affairs, so stately in his age, so gravely
courteous, and yet with such a threat of good manners against those who
should make breach of the decorous traditions of the place. But the men
chiefly to be feared were on the floor. There was Richard Bland, “wary,
old, experienced,” with “something of the look,” a Virginian wit said,
“of old musty parchments, which he handleth and studieth much,” author
of a “treatise against the Quakers on water-baptism”; with none of the
gifts of an orator, but a veritable antiquarian in law and the
precedents of public business, a very formidable man in counsel. Quiet
men trusted him, and thought his prudence very wise. George Wythe was no
less learned, and no less influential. Men knew him a man of letters,
bringing the knowledge of many wise books to the practice of affairs,
and set great store by his sincerity, as artless as it was human, and
sweetened with good feeling. It made Randolph and Pendleton and
Nicholas, the elder orators of the House, seem the more redoubtable that
they should have such men as these at their elbows to prompt and steady
them. And yet they would have been formidable enough of themselves.
Edmund Pendleton had not, indeed, the blood or the breeding that gave
his colleagues prestige. He had won his way to leadership by his own
steady genius for affairs. He read nothing but law-books, knew nothing
but business, cared for nothing but to make practical test of his
powers. But he took all his life and purpose with such a zest, made
every stroke with so serene a self-possession, was so quick to see and
act upon every advantage in his business of debate, and was withal so
transparent, bore himself with such a grace and charm of manner, was so
obviously right-minded and upright, that it meant a great deal to the
House to hear him intervene in its discussions with his melodious voice,
his cool, distinct, effective elocution. Robert Carter Nicholas added to
like talents for business and debate a reverent piety, a title to be
loved and trusted without question, which no man ever thought to
gainsay. And Peyton Randolph, with his “knowledge, temper, experience,
judgment, integrity” as of a true Roman spirit, was a sort of prince
among the rest. No man could doubt he wished Virginia to have her
liberties. He had gone over sea to speak for her in Dinwiddie’s day,
though he was the King’s attorney, and had lost his office for his
boldness. But there were traditions of loyalty and service in his
breeding which no man might rightly ignore. His father before him had
won knighthood and the royal favor by long and honorable service as his
Majesty’s attorney in the colony. Pride and loyalty had gone hand in
hand in the annals of a proud race, and had won for the Randolphs a
prestige which made it impossible Sir John’s son should very long be
kept from the office he had so honorably inherited. And so Peyton
Randolph was now once again the King’s attorney. It was not as the
King’s officer, however, but as an experienced Parliamentary tactician,
a trained debater, a sound man of affairs, that he had set himself to
check Henry in his revolutionary courses.
Henry found himself, in truth, passionately set upon. Even threats were
uttered, and abuse such as proud men find ill to bear. They cried
“Treason! treason!” upon him when he dared declare the King would do
well to look to the fate of Cæsar and Charles the First for profitable
examples. But he was not daunted a whit. “If this be treason, make the
most of it,” was his defiance to them. One ally who might have stood
with him, had he known, was absent. Richard Henry Lee would have brought
to his support a name as ancient and as honorable as any in the colony,
and an eloquence scarcely less than his own. But, as it was, he was left
almost alone, and won his battle with no other aid than very plain men
could lend by vote and homely utterance. The vote was very close, but
enough. Randolph flung out of the House, muttering in his heat that he
“would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote.” Henry, taking
the triumph very simply, as was his wont, and knowing his work for the
session done, quietly made his way homeward that very day, striding
unconcernedly down Duke of Gloucester Street, chatting with a friend,
his legs clad in buckskin as if for the frontier, his saddle-bags and
the reins of his lean nag slung carelessly over his arm.
[Illustration: PEYTON RANDOLPH]
The Assembly had adopted Henry’s declaration of rights, not his
resolution of disobedience, and had softened a little the language he
would have used; but its action seemed seditious enough to Fauquier, the
Governor, and he promptly dissolved them. It did little good to send
Virginians home, however, if the object was to check agitation. The
whole manner of their life bred thought and concert of action. Where men
have leave to be individual, live separately and with a proud
self-respect, and yet are much at each other’s tables, often in vestry
council together, constantly coming and going, talking and planning
throughout all the country-side, accustomed to form their opinions in
league, and yet express each man his own with a dash and flavor of
independence; where there is the leisure to reflect, the habit of joint
efforts in business, the spirit to be social, and abundant opportunity
to be frank withal, if you will--you may look to see public views form
themselves very confidently, and as easily without assemblies as with
them. Washington had taken no part in the stormy scenes of the House,
but had sat calmly apart rather, concerned and thoughtful. He was not
easily caught by the excitement of a sudden agitation. He had the
soldier’s steady habit of self-possession in the presence of a crisis,
and his own way of holding things at arm’s-length for scrutiny--“like a
bishop at his prayers,” a wag said. He had a soldier’s loyalty, too, and
slowness at rebellion. His thought, no doubt, was with the
conservatives, whatever may have been the light that sprang into his
quiet eye when Henry’s voice rang out so like a clarion, calling
Virginia to her standard; and he went home, upon the dissolution, to
join and aid his neighbors in the slow discussion which must shape
affairs to an issue.
“The Virginia Resolutions” had run like a flame through the
colonies--not as the Burgesses had adopted them, but as Henry had drawn
them, with their express threat of disobedience. Nor was that all.
October, 1765, saw delegates from nine colonies come together in New
York, at the call of Massachusetts, to take counsel what should be done.
Every one knew that Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, the only
colonies absent from the “congress,” would have sent delegates too had
their Governors not prevented them by the dissolution of their
Assemblies before they could act on the call. A deep excitement and
concern had spread everywhere throughout the settlements. Not only did
the impending enforcement of the act engross “the conversation of the
speculative part of the colonists,” as Washington wrote to Francis
Dandridge in London; it promised to engross also the energies of very
active, and it might be very violent, men in many quarters, and it began
to grow evident that some part of government itself would be brought to
a standstill by its processes. “Our courts of judicature,” declared
Washington, “must inevitably be shut up; for it is impossible (or next
of kin to it), under our present circumstances, that the act of
Parliament can be complied with ...; and if a stop be put to our
judicial proceedings, I fancy the merchants of Great Britain trading to
the colonies will not be among the last to wish for a repeal of it.” The
congress at New York drew up nothing less than a bill of rights and
immunities, and sent resolutions over sea which arrested the attention
of the world. The Virginian Assembly despatched like papers for itself;
and Richard Henry Lee, when he had assisted to draw its memorials,
hastened home to form in his own Cavalier county a “Westmoreland
Association,” whose members (four Washingtons among the rest) bound
themselves by a solemn covenant to “exert every faculty to prevent the
execution of the said Stamp Act in any instance whatsoever within this
colony.” The ministry could not stand the pressure. They gave way to
Lord Rockingham, and the act was repealed.
Meanwhile Washington, his calm temper unshaken, was slowly coming to a
clear vision of affairs in all their significance. Fox-hunting did not
cease. He was much in the saddle and at table with the Fairfaxes, whom
nothing could shake from their allegiance, and who looked with sad
forebodings upon the temper the colony was in. It was proper they should
speak so if they deemed it just, and Washington had no intolerance for
what they urged. But George Mason, the neighbor whom he most trusted,
was of a very different mind, and strengthened and confirmed him in
other counsels. Mason was six years his senior; a man, too, cast by
nature to understand men and events, how they must go and how be guided.
They conferred constantly, at every turn of their intimate life, in the
field or in the library, mounted or afoot in the forests, and came very
deliberately and soberly to their statesman’s view. Randolph and
Pendleton and Wythe and Bland had themselves turned, after the first
hesitation, to act with ardent men like Lee in framing the memorials to
King, Lords, and Commons which were to go from the Burgesses along with
the resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress in New York; and Washington,
who had never hesitated, but had only gone slowly and with his eyes
open, with that self-poise men had found so striking in him from the
first, came steadily with the rest to the at last common purpose of
resolute opposition. The repeal of the act came to all like a great
deliverance.
Governor Fauquier had deemed it his duty to dissolve the Assembly upon
the passage of Henry’s resolutions, but he had acted without passion in
the matter, and had kept the respect of the men he dealt with. He was
not a man, indeed, to take public business very seriously, having been
bred a man of fashion and a courtier rather than a master of affairs. He
loved gay company and the deep excitement of the gaming-table, not the
round of official routine. Affable, generous, elegant, a scholar and
real lover of letters, he vastly preferred the talk of vivacious women
and accomplished men to the business of the General Court, and was a man
to be liked rather than consulted. Washington, always admitted to the
intimacy of official circles at Williamsburg, very likely relished the
gallant Fauquier better than the too officious Dinwiddie. It was,
unhappily, no portent to see a man still devoted to dissipation at
sixty-two, even though he were Governor of one of his Majesty’s colonies
and a trusted servant of the crown; and Fauquier’s gifts as a man of wit
and of instructed tastes made his companionship no less acceptable to
Washington than to the other men of discernment who frequented the
ballrooms and receptions, ate formal dinners, and played quiet games of
cards during the brief season at the little capital. It did not
seriously disturb life there that the Governor upheld the power of
Parliament to tax, while the Burgesses strenuously opposed it.
Washington, for one, did not hesitate on that account to be seen often
in friendly talk with the Governor, or to accept frequent
[Illustration: GEORGE MASON]
invitations to the “palace.” He was of the temper which has so
distinguished the nobler sort of Englishmen in politics: he might regard
opposition as a public duty, but he never made it a ground of personal
feeling or private spite. In a sense, indeed, he had long been regarded
as belonging to official circles in the colony, more intimately than any
other man who did not hold office. He had been put forward by the
Fairfaxes in his youth; men in the Council and at the head of affairs
had been his sponsors and friends from the first; he had been always,
like his brother before him, a member of one of the chief groups in the
colony for influence and a confidential connection with the public
business. It was even understood that he was himself destined for the
Council, when it should be possible to put him in it without seeming to
give too great a preponderance to the Fairfax interest, already so much
regarded in its make-up.
The first flurry of differing views and conflicting purposes among the
Virginian leaders had passed off. The judgment of high-spirited men
everywhere sustained Henry--gave him unmistakable authentication as a
leader; put all public men in the way of understanding their
constituents. Some were bold and some were timid, but all were animated
by the same hope and purpose, and few were yet intemperate. “Sensible of
the importance of unanimity among our constituents,” said Jefferson
afterwards, looking back to that time when he was young and in the first
flush of his radical sentiments, “although we often wished to have gone
faster, we slackened our pace, that our less ardent colleagues might
keep up with us; and they, on their part, differing nothing from us in
principle, quickened their gait somewhat beyond that which their
prudence might of itself have advised.” Patrick Henry was received to
the place he had earned; and although the older leaders resumed that
sway in counsel to which their tried skill and varied experience in
affairs fairly entitled them, there was no longer any jealous exclusion
of new men. Henry’s fame crept through the colonies as the man who had
first spoken the mind not of Virginians only, but of all just men, with
regard to the liberties of Englishmen in America. Before a year was out
Richard Bland himself, parchment man and conservative that he was, had
written and published a pamphlet entitled “An Inquiry into the Rights of
the British Colonies,” which said nothing less than that in all that
concerned her internal affairs Virginia was “a distinct, independent
state,” though “united with the parent state by the closest league and
amity, and under the same allegiance.” A colony “treated with injury and
violence,” he exclaimed, “is become an alien.” When antiquarians and
lawyers, fresh from poring upon old documents, spoke thus, there were
surely signs of the times.
The government at home kept colonial sentiment very busy. Even Lord
Rockingham’s government, with Burke to admonish it, coupled its repeal
of the stamp duties with a “declaratory act” which sought to quiet
controversy by giving the lie direct to every argument urged against its
authority in the colonies. “Parliament has power to bind the colonies in
all cases whatsoever,” was its round assertion:--“a resolution for
England’s right to do what the Treasury pleased with three millions of
freemen,” cried Chatham. Though Rockingham’s government would not act on
that right, its successors would without scruple; and they were soon
about it, for Rockingham’s ministry retained office scarcely a
twelvemonth. Grenville was, indeed, discredited; but Grafton and
Townshend were as bad, as stubborn in temper, as reckless in policy. The
year 1767 saw taxes proposed and enacted on glass, paper, painters’
colors, and tea imported into the colonies, with a purpose to pay fixed
salaries to the crown’s officers in the colonies out of the proceeds;
and the contested ground was all to go over again. To show their temper,
the new ministers suspended the legislative powers of the Colonial
Assembly in New York for refusing to make provision for troops quartered
upon the colony. To complete their fiscal arrangements they presently
created a custom-house and board of revenue commissioners for America.
It was an ominous year, and set opinion forward not a little in the
colonies.
The House of Burgesses broke, at its next session (1768), into fresh
protests and remonstrances, and there was no one to restrain or rebuke
it. Fauquier was dead, and gone to his reckoning; the reins of
government were in the hands of gentle John Blair, President of the
Council, a Virginian every inch, and with never a thought of checking
his fellow-colonists in the expression of their just opinions. The
autumn brought Lord Botetourt, the new Governor-General, who came in
showy state, and with genial display of courtly manners and good
feeling; but his arrival made little difference. The Burgesses smiled to
see him come to open their session of 1769 with pageant of coach and
six, brave display of royal insignia, and the manner of a sovereign
meeting Parliament; and turned from him almost in contempt to denounce
once more the course of the ministers, argue again the rights of
America, declare they would draw the colonies together in concerted
opposition, and call upon the other colonies to concur with them alike
in their principles and in their purpose. Botetourt came hot foot to
dissolve them; but they only shifted their place of meeting, gathered
again at the private house of Mr. Anthony Hay, and there resolved no
longer to import the things which Parliament had taxed in despite of
them. George Mason had drawn the resolutions, at Washington’s request,
and Washington himself presented them.
Mason’s thought had hastened very far along the path of opposition under
the whip of England’s policy; and Washington’s quite as far. The
government had not only sent troops to Boston and dissolved every
Assembly that protested, but had advised the King to press prosecutions
for treason in the colonies, and, should there be deemed sufficient
ground, transport the accused to England to be tried by special
commission. It was this last measure that had provoked the Burgesses to
their hottest outburst. “At a time when our lordly masters in Great
Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of
American freedom,” wrote Washington to Mason, with a sudden burst of
passion, “it seems highly necessary that something should be done to
avert the stroke, and maintain the liberty which we have derived from
our ancestors.... That no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment, to
use a-ms in defence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good and
evil of life depends, is clearly my opinion. Yet a-ms, I would beg leave
to add, should be the last resource.” Addresses to the throne and
remonstrances to Parliament had failed: it remained to try “starving
their trades and manufactures,” to see if that at last would arrest
their attention. No doubt even that would prove of little avail; but it
was at least peaceable and worth the trial. The next month, accordingly,
he got unhesitatingly to his feet in the private meeting of the
Burgesses at Mr. Hay’s and moved George Mason’s resolutions; nor did he
forget to subscribe his quota to the fund which was to defray the
expenses of the “association” there formed.
The next evening he attended the “Queen’s Birth-Night” at the palace
with the same naturalness of demeanor and frankness of dealing towards
the Governor as before. Botetourt was not all show and gallantly, but
was a genuine man at bottom. He had come to Virginia thinking the
colonists a pleasure-loving people who could be taken by display and
cajoled by hospitality: he had been told they were such in London. But
he knew his mistake almost as soon as he had made it; and was prompt,
even while he upheld prerogative, to do what he could to deal with them
in a liberal and manly spirit. He had acquiesced very heartily at the
outset of his administration in a decision of the Council that writs of
assistance could not legally be issued in Virginia,--for the process had
been tried there too. He made such representations with regard to the
state of the colony to the ministers at home as were both just and wise;
was assured in reply that the ministers were willing to make every
necessary concession; pledged his word in Virginia that there should be
a substantial change of policy; and died the sooner (October 15, 1770)
because the government would not, after all, redeem his promises. “Your
Governor is becoming very popular, as we are told here,” wrote Arthur
Lee to his brother, from London, “and I have the worst proof of it in
the increased orders for fineries from the ladies.” Virginians did not
find it easy to break an immemorial habit in order to starve the English
trades and manufactures; and it was more than once necessary to urge and
renew the non-importation agreements alike among the Burgesses and
merchants at Williamsburg and by means of local associations throughout
the colony. But Washington was punctilious to observe to the letter the
agreements he had himself proposed. Again and again he bade his
mercantile agents in London assist him to guard against any inadvertent
breach of them: not to send him the articles Parliament had picked out
for taxation in the colonies.
Life still continued to go, it is true, with something of the old
sumptuousness at Mount Vernon. It was in June, 1768, that Colonel
Washington ordered a new chariot, “made in the newest taste, handsome,
genteel, and light, to be made of the best seasoned wood, and by a
celebrated workman,” which was to cost him, fittings and all, £133. For
all he grew uneasy lest the colonies’ disagreement with England should
come at last to a conflict of arms, he pushed his private interests with
no abatement of thoroughness or self-possession, as if there were no
fear but that things would long enough stand as they were. He had not
run surveyor’s lines for Lord Fairfax, or assisted to drive the French
from the Ohio, without seeing what fair lands lay upon the western
rivers awaiting an owner; and, though there was still doubt how titles
were to be established in that wilderness, he took care, through the
good offices of an old comrade in arms, at least to be quietly
beforehand with other claimants in setting up such titles as might be
where the land lay richest and most accessible. “A silent management”
was what he advised, “snugly carried on under the guise of hunting other
game,” lest there should be a premature rush thither that would set
rival interests a-clashing. A strange mixture of the shrewdness of the
speculator and the honesty of the gentleman--claims pushed with privacy,
but without trickery or chicane--ran through his letters to Captain
Crawford, and drew as canny replies from the frontiered soldier.
Business gave way often to sport and pleasure, too, as of old, when
politics fell dull between sessions. Now it was the hunt; then a gunning
party in the woods; and again a day or two aboard his schooner, dropping
down the river, and drawing the seine for sheepsheads upon the bar at
Cedar Point. Even politics was mixed with diversion. He must needs give
a ball at Alexandria on the evening of his election to the House which
was to meet Lord Botetourt, no less than on other like occasions, of
whatever kind the business of the Assembly was likely to be. He did not
lose his passion for fine horse-flesh, either, at the thickest of the
plot. In 1770 he was with Governor Eden, of North Carolina, at the
Jockey Club races in Philadelphia, no doubt relieved by the news that
all but the tea tax had been repealed. The next year it was the races in
Annapolis that claimed him; and in 1773 Jacky Custis held him again at
Philadelphia on the same errand. It was wholesome to be thus calmly in
pursuit of diversion in the intervals of trying business. It bespoke a
hearty life and a fine balance in the man.
There was one matter to which Washington felt it his bounden duty as a
soldier and a man of honor to devote his time and energies, whether
politics pressed or not. A grant of two hundred thousand acres of the
western lands had been promised by the government of the colony to
those who enlisted for the war against the French and Indians in 1754;
but nothing had ever been done to fulfil the promise, and Washington
undertook to act as agent for his comrades in the business. In the
autumn of 1770, accordingly, he turned away for a space from the
deepening trouble in the east to plunge once more into the western ways
and search out proper tracts for the grant along the reaches of the
Ohio. ’Twas a two-months journey, for he did not stop till he had gone
close upon three hundred miles beyond Fort Pitt. And when he was home
again no one in the government who could lend a hand in the matter got
any peace from the stirring, thorough man until the business was put
finally into shape. There was a tidy profit in the grant for himself;
for his own share was large, and he providently bought, besides, the
shares of others who were unwilling to spend or co-operate in the
matter. But there were months upon months of weary, unrequited service
for his comrades, too, given with hearty diligence and without grudging.
Their portions were as well placed as his own, they were to find, when
it came to the survey. He came off from the business very rich in
western lands--buying the Great Meadows, among the rest, for memory’s
sake--but richer still in the gratitude and admiration of the men for
whom he had labored.
Meanwhile events darkened ominously. A new administration had been
formed in England under Lord North, and had begun its government by
repealing all the taxes of 1769 except that on tea. But it was
Parliament’s right to tax them that the colonists were fighting, not the
taxes themselves, and one tax was as hateful as a hundred. The year had
been marked in sinister fashion, moreover, by a broil between townsmen
and troops in the streets of Boston, in which arms had been used and men
slain, and in the heated imaginations of the colonists the affair had
taken on the ugly aspect of a massacre. The year 1771 went quietly
enough for Virginians. Botetourt was dead, and that good merchant of
York, William Nelson, President of the Council, sat in the place of
authority throughout the year. Although the whole country refused the
taxed tea, the attention of the ministers, as it happened, was fixed
chiefly upon Massachusetts, where trade centred at a growing port and
opposition had a local habitation. In Virginia there was no place to
send troops to, unless the whole country were occupied, and so long as
Mr. Nelson was acting Governor, Colonel Washington could go without
preoccupation to the races, and gentlemen everywhere follow their own
devices in the quiet counties. There was rioting--rebellion, even--in
North Carolina, so uneasily did affairs go there; but Governor Tryon was
a soldier as well as a despot, and did not need to trouble his neighbors
about that. It was not until the first months of 1772 that Virginians
began to read plain signs of change in the face of their new Governor,
John Murray, Earl Dunmore--a dark and distant man, who seemed to the
Virginians to come like a satrap to his province, who brought a soldier
with him for secretary and confidential adviser, set up a fixed
etiquette to be observed by all who would approach him, spoke abruptly
and without courtesy, displayed in all things an arbitrary temper, and
took more interest, it presently appeared, in acquiring tracts of
western land than in conducting the government of the colony. The year
of his coming was marked by the secret destruction of the
revenue-schooner _Gaspé_ in Rhode Island, and by many significant flaws
of temper here and there throughout the colonies; and 1773 saw affairs
at last come to a crisis.
Dunmore had summoned the Burgesses to meet him upon his first coming,
but had liked their proud temper as little as they liked his, and was
careful not to call them together again till March, 1773, though he had
promised to convene them earlier. There was instant trouble. In view of
the affair of the _Gaspé_, Parliament had again resolved upon the trial
of malcontents in England, and the Burgesses were hot at seeing the
sentiments of the colonies so flouted. Conservative men would still have
waited to try events, but their fellow-members of quicker pulse were
diligent to disappoint them. Leadership fell to those who were bold
enough to take it; and Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Dabney Carr,
and Thomas Jefferson, radicals all, drew together, a self-constituted
committee of guidance. Evening after evening they met in a private room
at the Raleigh, with now and again one or two other like spirits called
into counsel, to consult what should be done. Richard Henry Lee proposed
that the colonies should be invited to join Virginia in appointing
committees of correspondence, through which to devise steady concert of
action, and that Virginia’s committee, to be appointed at once, should
be instructed to look into the character of the new court of trial
lately established in Rhode Island. Dabney Carr was directed to move the
resolutions, and the eloquence of Lee and Henry won for them an instant
and hearty acceptance. Dunmore promptly dissolved the Assembly, and
Washington
[Illustration:
Thomas Jefferson Patrick Henry
R. H. Lee F. L. Lee
IN THE OLD RALEIGH TAVERN]
was free to set out for New York to place Jacky Custis at King’s
College, lingering on the way in Philadelphia to see the races, and pick
up the talk of the hour during half a dozen evenings at the rooms of the
Jockey Club, at the balls and assemblies of the gay town, and at the
hospitable tables of his friends.
The opening of the year had found Washington in a very genial humor, his
letters touched with pleasantry and gossip. “Our celebrated fortune,
Miss French, whom half the world was in pursuit of,” he wrote, in
February, to Colonel Bassett, “bestowed her hand on Wednesday last,
being her birthday (you perceive, I think myself under a necessity of
accounting for the choice), on Mr. Ben Dulany, who is to take her to
Maryland.... Mentioning of one wedding puts me in mind of another”--and
so through the news of Miss More, “remarkable for a very frizzled head
and good singing,” and the rest of the neighborhood talk. But the year
turned out a very sad one for him. He had been scarcely ten days back
from New York when Patsy Custis, whom he loved as his own daughter,
died. It called forth all the latent Christian faith of the thoughtful,
steadfast man to withstand the shock. And Master Jack Custis, the girl’s
wayward brother, gave him little but anxiety. He would not study, for
all Washington was so solicitous he should have the liberalizing outlook
of books, and be made “fit for more useful purposes than horse-racer,”
and though he was but twenty, could hardly be induced to see the year
out at college before getting married.
It was no doubt very well that public affairs of the first consequence
called Washington’s mind imperatively off from these private anxieties,
which could not but be dwarfed in the presence of transactions which
threatened to shake the continent. As the year drew on, the government
in England undertook to force cargoes of the East India Company’s tea
into the ports. When all resisted, and Boston, more forward even than
the rest, threw three hundred and forty odd chests of tea into the
harbor, acts passed Parliament giving dangerous increase of power to the
Governor of Massachusetts, and directing that Boston port be closed to
all commerce on and after the first day of June; and it became evident
that vigorous action must be taken in response. The Burgesses in
Virginia (May, 1774) resolved that June 1st should be set apart as a day
of fasting and prayer--prayer that civil war might be averted and the
people of America united in a common cause. Again Dunmore dissolved
them; but they gathered in the long room of the Raleigh tavern, and
there resolved to urge a congress of all the colonies, and to call a
convention for Virginia to meet at that place on the first day of August
to take action for the colony. They showed no spleen towards the
Governor. Washington dined with him the very day of the dissolution,
spent the evening at the palace, even rode out with him to his farm on
the following morning and breakfasted there; and the Burgesses did not
fail to give the ball they had planned in honor of Lady Dunmore and her
daughters on the evening of the day they had held their meeting in the
“Appolo room” at the Raleigh. But there were fasting and prayer on the
1st of June; the convention met on the first day of August; very
outspoken resolutions were adopted; and Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry
Lee, Patrick Henry, Richard Bland, Edmund Pendleton, George Washington,
and Benjamin Harrison were directed to attend the congress of the
colonies appointed to meet in Philadelphia on the fifth day of
September. When the time came for the journey, Henry and Pendleton
joined Washington at Mount Vernon. It must have been with many grave
thoughts that the three companions got to horse and turned to ride
through the long August day towards the north.
PILOTING A REVOLUTION