Authors: John Ferling
Independence (11 page)
North’s government did not ignore the notion expressed by some newspaper essayists that the disorder in America was widespread. However, the ministry was convinced that Massachusetts was the epicenter of the colonial insurrection. It was additionally guided by an ancient axiom: Sever the head of the serpent and it will die. North’s government chose a strategy of divide and conquer, driven by the belief that “the other Colonies would leave them [Massachusetts] to struggle alone,” as one minister observed.
North sent the first piece of legislation, the Boston Port Bill, to Parliament on the afternoon of March 7, a sad, gray late-winter’s day. In presenting the measure, North charged that the Bostonians had been “the ringleaders of all the riots in America for seven years past.”
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Moreover, if the residents of “Boston … can set their faces against” one act of Parliament, he went on, “they might set their faces equally against all” parliamentary legislation until “we have no authority” in Massachusetts. He was taking this step, North added, to secure “the just dependence of the Colonies on the mother country.”
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He acted with the conviction that when confronted with coercion accompanied by the ominous threat of armed force, the radical demagogues in Massachusetts would back down or, more likely, be restrained by what he yet believed was the more prudent majority within the colonies. North did not believe that any colonies to the south of New England would assist their insurrectionary fellow colonists, and he was confident that there would be no war. North prayed that his adamant stand would resolve the American problem, or at least move it to the back burner for a very long time.
The
London Evening Post
reported that when North completed his presentation, “there was a perfect silence for some minutes.” If so, it was not because most members of Parliament shrank from punishing Boston. In fact, there was virtually no opposition to the bill, save from a handful of representatives of port cities who feared that closing the port of Boston would be injurious to the pocketbooks of their merchant constituents. Most MPs believed that London had no choice but to take a harsh stand. Even some who had opposed taxation, and were widely known in England as “friends of America,” endorsed the bill. For instance, Isaac Barré, who had gained a hero’s status in the colonies for his robust denunciation of the Stamp Act, gave his “hearty, and determinate” assent. “I like it, adopt, and embrace it cheerfully,” he said on the floor of the House of Commons.
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Parliament quickly enacted the Boston Port Bill. The three remaining Coercive Acts faced slightly more opposition, though each passed by a huge majority. At nearly the same time—in June 1774—Parliament enacted the Quebec Act. It was not part of the Coercive Acts, but news of its passage reached America nearly simultaneously with that of the ministry’s resort to coercion, and in Virginia it caused as great a stir as the steps taken against Massachusetts. The Quebec Act placed the region northwest of the Ohio River under the jurisdiction of the province of Quebec. Land speculators in Virginia—which included a substantial percentage of politically influential planters—knew in an instant that the Quebec Act severely curtailed their chances of making fortunes in the Ohio Country, a vast, verdant region that Virginia’s armies had helped to wrest from the French. No less a figure than Richard Henry Lee would label this legislation “the worst grievance” for Virginians.
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During the debates on the Coercive Acts, not a single member of the House of Commons denied that Parliament had the authority to tax the colonists. None questioned the limits of Parliament’s authority. Some expressed a sense of betrayal, remarking that they had voted for the Boston Port Bill after having been led to believe that the measures that would follow would be conciliatory. But nearly all who expressed reservations said they believed that Boston’s “provocation deserves the fullest arraignment.”
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A small opposition faction around Lord Rockingham, whose ministry had repealed the Stamp Act eight years earlier, argued that there should have been hearings before Parliament acted. Some in this faction said the measures went too far, and it was a Rockinghamite who delivered the lone memorable speech in the course of the debates.
On April 19 Edmund Burke spoke for two hours, addressing not so much the Coercive Acts as the matter of American taxation. His speech drew greater applause than any other in this session and was extolled in the press, with one journal praising him for having “distinguished himself in a masterly manner.”
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Burke was forty-five, portly and jowly, with dark wavy hair. A native of Ireland, he had come to London as a young man to study law and pursue a literary career. He soon abandoned his plans for a legal career, but he enjoyed some success as an essayist and historian. The modest notoriety that he gained as a writer led to his selection as Rockingham’s secretary, and that in turn facilitated his election to Parliament in 1765.
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Though active in the movement to repeal the Stamp Act, Burke had remained surprisingly quiet on the American question until North’s government introduced the Coercive Acts. Even then, Burke spoke only once in the debate on the Boston Port Bill, though he had said that the day the legislation was introduced was the day when the world knew that the prime minister “wish[ed] to go to war with all America.”
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Burke’s speech during the debate on the Coercive Acts was the first of three notable speeches he would deliver on the American question in a span of nineteen months. Each address would call for conciliation and, taken together, they won him a reputation in the colonies as America’s best friend in London. Burke was convinced that coercion would lead to war and that war almost certainly would result in the loss of the American colonies. To make matters worse, he thought the ongoing crisis with America was entirely avoidable. The Stamp Act protests a decade earlier, he said, had made it folly for subsequent ministries to seek to impose further taxes on the Americans. To do so was akin to setting a torch to dry grass. Besides, the taxes that Parliament had levied would have raised little revenue. They had been imposed primarily to make the point of parliamentary sovereignty. What Parliament achieved was not merely the provocation of “just alarm” among the colonists; London’s ill-advised policies had slowly, almost imperceptibly, put the colonists on the road toward union and nationhood.
However, when it came to offering a solution to the American quandary, Burke had few innovative ideas. His views, in fact, were the essence of orthodoxy. He called for the repeal of the Tea Act but did not question the Declaratory Act, which, after all, had been conceived by the Rockingham ministry when it repealed the Stamp Act. Like his fellow Rockinghamites, Burke defended the supremacy of Parliament; he merely wished for its authority to be exercised in ways that the Americans could tolerate. In this speech, Burke asked that Parliament “leave America … to tax itself,” save for times of dire imperial emergencies. Parliament must instead be “content to bind America by the laws of trade.” The trade laws were the “corner stone” of the empire, for they safeguarded and advanced the commerce of all its inhabitants. Should the mercantile laws be the principal imperial regulatory measures, Burke concluded, Anglo-American ties would endure. And if Great Britain spurned coercion in favor of the “old ground,” Burke was “persuaded the Americans [would] compromise,” and that “subordination and liberty [would] be sufficiently reconciled.”
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But only about 20 percent of those in Parliament sided with him. No mood existed for compromise or conciliation.
In the dark mood of retribution that gripped London, Franklin, once the most venerated colonist, fell from grace. Little compassion for Americans could be found in England in 1774, and when Franklin was identified as the guilty party behind the Hutchinson Letters incident, the decision was made not just to ruin him but also to publicly humiliate him.
Franklin’s role in the affair came to light at Christmas 1773, when Thomas Whately’s brother challenged to a duel a bureaucrat whom he believed responsible for having put the letters in Samuel Adams’s hands. Unwilling to permit the possible death of an innocent man, Franklin confessed to having sent the letters to America. He was widely vilified in the British press as a duplicitous hypocrite and traitor. Franklin’s act of passing along the stolen letters of Hutchinson and Whately was worthy of Britain’s enmity, but he did not deserve the embarrassing public shaming that followed.
On January 29, nine days after news of the Boston Tea Party reached London, Franklin was summoned to a meeting of the Privy Council for a scheduled hearing on Massachusetts’s request that Governor Hutchinson be recalled. The session was held in the Cockpit, an indoor amphitheater within the government complex known as Whitehall. The hall was packed with officials and spectators who came with a carnival thirst for revenge, taking every seat in the gallery that encircled the lower floor of the chamber. If Franklin arrived expecting to testify on Massachusetts’s solicitation, he was greatly mistaken. He was not permitted to speak. Instead, while many in the madly vindictive audience jeered and laughed, Franklin, now sixty-eight years old, was forced to stand for an hour and listen to reproaches against his character made in the most vitriolic manner by Britain’s solicitor general, Alexander Wedderburn.
Wearing a coat of spotted Manchester velvet and, as tradition dictated, a white wig, Franklin stood to the left of a large fireplace and faced a table occupied by thirty-five high officials, including Lord North. Wedderburn stood at the table between two privy councillors. From time to time in the course of his harangue, Wedderburn accentuated his points by pounding sharply on the table. Franklin, Wedderburn charged, was “not a gentleman; he was in fact nothing less than a thief.” Having stolen the letters for “the most malignant of purposes,” Franklin had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men.” From this day forward, the solicitor general added, “Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him and lock up their escritoires. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters.” Franklin, he went on in a scornful tone, was “the true incendiary,” the “first mover and prime conductor” of the sedition that had bubbled to the surface in Massachusetts. Franklin, Wedderburn charged, had been driven by “secret designs.” He had cherished the hope of bringing about American independence and creating “a Great American Republic.”
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Throughout his ordeal, Franklin, according to one observer, “stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear during the continuance of the speech.”
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Franklin may have concealed his feelings, hoping to cheat the howling crowd from still further merriment at his expense, but he never forgot the debasement he had suffered. From that day forward, retribution against Great Britain’s rulers would be a driving force behind the public policies that he pursued, much as it had been for his tormentors on that day in the Cockpit.
Lord North was appalled by the vindictive behavior of his colleagues and subsequently apologized in private to Franklin. But the first minister offered no excuses for the immeasurably harsh Coercive Acts. “Now is the time … to proceed with firmness and without fear,” he declared.
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Franklin was finished in Great Britain and so too, he suspected, were America’s ties to the British Empire. In his testimony eight years earlier on behalf of repealing the Stamp Act, Franklin had warned that Britain “will not find a rebellion” in America, but it “may indeed make one.”
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That time had arrived, he now believed. He no longer urged restraint on the colonists. Instead, late in February 1774 he wrote a long piece for the
Boston Gazette
detailing the “Bull-baiting” to which he had been subjected in the Cockpit. He closed with a warning:
“Behold Americans where matters are driving!”
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CHAPTER 3
“D
EFENDERS OF
A
MERICAN
L
IBERTY
”
S
AMUEL
A
DAMS,
J
OSEPH
G
ALLOWAY, AND THE
F
IRST
C
ONTINENTAL
C
ONGRESS