Penguin History of the United States of America (25 page)

By the New Year, then, the imperial government was confronted with an acute problem. The Stamp Act had been effectively nullified, to use a term with a long future.
²³
Except in Georgia, and there not for long, no stamps had been distributed; the Sons of Liberty in the various colonies (for the name had spread with the agitation) had effectively superseded the regular administrations; life was otherwise proceeding in its normal, unstamped channels;
²⁴
and there was simply not force enough available to compel obedience to the law. (We can now see that to have tried would merely have precipitated the War for Independence nine years earlier.) Common sense suggested that the Grenville programme must be abandoned: Whitehall and Westminster would have to climb down. It was easier for them since George III had got rid of Grenville in July.

The new ministry, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham and composed of men sympathetic to the colonies, soon came to the view that there was nothing for it but repeal.

Unhappily there was no way of disguising the fact that this was a humiliation for Britain: one much resented in the proud Parliament. Many were the warnings that to give way on the Stamp Act was to necessitate giving way on everything else; the scarecrow of a colonial bid for independence, which had been alarming ministers since the beginning of the century, flapped again. And for once the prophets of doom were right. The choice, in all ugliness, was between war and abdication: there was no room for compromise. To such a pass had Grenville’s statesmanship reduced the
great Empire. The Act was repealed, on 18 March 1766, and London church bells rang out in joy; but first a Declaratory Act was passed, stating that nothing had changed, that Parliament had an absolute right and power to do what it liked with the colonies whenever it chose. This was of course a face-saver, and, it may be thought, an unconvincing one; but the Rockinghams could not have persuaded Parliament to swallow repeal without it. Ministers’ chief fear seems to have been that war with the colonies would necessarily involve a renewal of war with France and Spain (again, an accurate foreboding); they also encouraged the merchants of England to petition Parliament for repeal, on the grounds that trade was being ruined by American non-importation (and it was in fact in a parlous condition). Thus the English were furnished with two good practical excuses for climbing down, and the question of principle was side-stepped; but as the Declaratory Act showed, the matter was not as simple as men of good will wanted it to seem.

For questions had been raised on both sides of the Atlantic to which there were, in eighteenth-century terms, almost certainly no answers. The richer colonists, reared on the traditions of the Glorious Revolution, and indeed on the tradition of the Cromwellian Revolution before that, injured or annoyed by many misguided British policies and feeling themselves to belong to mature societies, with a limitless future, refused to be held in leading strings any more. ‘No taxation without representation’ was a cry that expressed more than it said: it was really an insistent refusal to be governed without proper consultation by a remote and frequently incompetent, if well-meaning, mother country. The poorer colonists were, we may hazard, sick of being oppressed in the name of an empire, citizenship and international trade which brought them little perceptible benefit. Both parties, though suspicious enough of each other, could unite over the good old sentiment that ‘Britons never never never shall be slaves’, and slavery, it seemed, was what the Britons’ government had in store for them. Day by day that government seemed more and more like the tyrannous regimes of Charles I and James II, and pamphlets poured from the presses to enforce the parallels. It would have taken, in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, some extraordinary gesture of generosity and reform to win back the confidence of the colonists in the British Parliament.

Such a gesture was impossible. The statesmen of Westminster had no desire to tyrannize anybody, but equally they had no desire to upset the applecart in which they had ridden so happily for so long. Like the American upper and middle classes, they faced a challenge from below. The Wilkes affair, during the years leading up to the Revolution, was bringing political institutions under serious attack in England as well as in her colonies, and it was probably impossible to reform Parliament and the imperial government along lines equitable enough to satisfy the colonies without having to make similar concessions at home. This the oligarchs were in a position to refuse to do. They fought off reform as long as they could; some
are fighting a rearguard action still.
²⁵
In the Declaratory Act they nailed their colours to the mast:

The said colonies and plantations in
America
have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of
Great Britain
… the King’s majesty by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons of
Great Britain
, in parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of
America
subjects of the crown of
Great Britain
, in all cases whatsoever.
²⁶

No argument here; no appeal to Whig or Revolution principles; indeed, in one of the debates on repeal Lord Mansfield, the eminent lawyer, went so far as to deny that ‘no taxation without representation’ applied even in England itself.

The peers and squires who governed the realm also feared that concessions to the colonies must ultimately lead to independence, independence to economic ruin, and economic ruin to the end of Britain’s greatness. They could not, in fact, abandon the logic of mercantilism, and in so doing threw themselves across the natural development of the times. Even Grenville, in his clerk’s way, had seen that the Empire must change and adapt to survive: his mistake was in the changes that he favoured. But after the Declaratory Act and the fall of the Rockingham ministry (which took place in June 1766) this salutary attitude was forgotten. The British people persuaded themselves that concessions to the Americans ultimately meant their own ruin; and on that ground, on the sole principle of self-defence, they took their public stand. Their attitude was pathetically unrealistic, as the Americans could see. In the end it made war inevitable.

What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.

John Adams, 1815

I know it is expected that the more determined the Colonies appear, the more likely it will be to bring the Government here to terms. I do not believe it.

Thomas Hutchmson, London, 1774

Governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Declaration of Independence
, 1776

Repeal was even more welcome to the Americans than to the English. Dr Franklin sent his wife fourteen yards of pompadour satin in celebration. The Sons of Liberty in Boston resolved to display ‘such illuminations, bonfires, pyramids, obelisks, such grand exhibitions and such fireworks as were never before seen in America’. The New York assembly voted the erection of an equestrian statue of George III and a statue in brass of William Pitt. Countless ministers hurried into their pulpits to preach sermons of thanksgiving. And then everyone tried to get back to normal as fast as possible.

Not that normality was synonymous with tranquillity. The vigour of colonial life had from the start led to contentious politics. Even if the imperial government had behaved with the utmost circumspection and wisdom, the increasing maturity of American society must have brought about
de facto
independence before the end of the century. It would simply not have been possible to keep the colonies in tutelage indefinitely. Nor could the separation have been accomplished wholly without friction. The question before
historians is only whether there also had to be violence and a complete break, and the answer tends to be no, in theory. Seen in this light, the Stamp Act crisis, like later ones, was merely a needlessly acute phase in a chronic disease. When it had passed, the patient was not healed, but she was more manageable.

In New York, for example, a fresh controversy immediately took the stage, but was eventually compromised. Among Grenville’s measures had been the Quartering or Mutiny Act of 1765. This had been passed in response to the urgent pleas of General Thomas Gage (1721–87), the Commander-in-Chief in North America, who was plagued by problems of disciplining, quartering and transporting his troops in the existing defective state of the law. Peace having come, Americans who had been quite cooperative in wartime would, Gage thought, grow contumacious. ‘It will soon be difficult in the present Situation,’ he grumbled, ‘to keep Soldiers in the Service.’ He was probably an alarmist, but nevertheless an Act was passed providing that, where there were no barracks, the colonial governments were to quarter the soldiers in taverns, uninhabited houses, barns or other such buildings; provide them with bedding, fuel, pots and pans, candles, vinegar and salt, and with a ration of small beer, cider or rum. It was one of Grenville’s better laws, for he had had the sense to consult the colonial agents, including Franklin, and they had seen to it that the Act contained ample provision for preventing and correcting any abuses. As a result the law was quietly accepted in most of the colonies.

New York, however, made a fuss. The assembly was quite willing to look after the soldiers, who came in very useful just then, for there were agrarian riots in Dutchess County: threats were actually being made to burn New York city to the ground. As a British officer noted in his diary, ‘Sons of Liberty great opposers to these Rioters as they are of opinion no one is entitled to Riot but themselves.’ At the root of this affair was a dispute about land-titles between New York and Massachusetts. The army gained no kudos in the latter province for interfering on the side of the former. And the Quartering Act made even New York ungrateful. It seemed to be another attempt to tax the colonists unconstitutionally. Accordingly the assembly resisted it for over a year, and finally, in June 1767, passed a Billeting Act (renewed annually thereafter) which, while doing all that Parliament had required, studiedly did not mention Parliament’s role, thereby implicitly denying the Parliamentary right to tell the colonial assemblies what laws to pass. The government prudently ignored this silent challenge, and was rewarded when, in 1770, New York applied for (and got) Parliament’s consent to an issue of paper money, thus acknowledging Parliamentary supremacy. In both cases good sense prevailed. By comparison it mattered little that (also in 1770) one Alexander McDougall, a New York Son of Liberty, being imprisoned for publishing what the assembly called ‘a false, seditious and infamous libel’, was dubbed by his fellow-radicals ‘the Wilkes of America’. This was not going to bring about a civil war.

Nor was it originally of revolutionary significance that the popular party in Massachusetts Bay exploited its success in the Stamp Act crisis to consolidate its power. As Thomas Hutchinson remarked, ‘Power, once acquired, is seldom voluntarily parted with.’ The radicals’ prospects of retaining it for long were not, after repeal, very good. They still had a majority in the Council and the House of Representatives, but there was now no urgent issue with which to stir up the crowd and induce solid citizens to overlook their excesses. It seemed likely that at the 1767 elections the conservatives would make large gains: they might even win a majority, as they had regularly done until 1765. The only political question of importance was that of compensating Hutchinson and the other victims of the mob. None dared openly deny the equity of this, but few were willing to do it just because Parliament had ordered it (as part of the repeal measures). On the other hand failure to obey would alienate the friends of the colonies in England and embarrass William Pitt, who had just formed a new administration. A complicated struggle followed, much like that concurrently proceeding in New York, the upshot of which was that Hutchinson got his compensation under an Act of the Massachusetts assembly (the General Court) which was in British eyes outrageously unconstitutional and was accordingly disallowed by the Privy Council. But by the time that news reached Boston, Hutchinson had been paid, so the matter was allowed to drop. In the same conciliatory vein Governor Bernard decided to overlook some small-scale rioting which had prevented searches by customs officers in Boston and in Falmouth, Maine (then a part of Massachusetts). The outlook for agitators seemed poor.

This was scarcely a matter for grief. It is impossible to feel unqualified respect for the self-styled ‘patriot’ leaders of Massachusetts. Even the best of them, plump and passionate John Adams (1735–1826), was, rather evidently, a young lawyer and politician on the make, who, with a notable capacity for self-deception, hero-worshipped James Otis and whitewashed his other associates, while looking on Thomas Hutchinson as little better than a fiend. As to the other leaders, James Otis had been alarming his friends with insane symptoms for some years before a cut over the head in a tavern brawl with a conservative sent him really mad in 1769. Otis, even when sane, was self-tortured, never happy in the role of patriot, unable to reconcile himself with the conservatives. There can be no doubt of his brilliance – he furnished many of the best arguments used by the patriots in the years to come. He was frequently a restraining influence on his associates. But he was also, when the demagogic mood was on him, a reckless liar, as in his statement that the Stamp Act had been concocted in Boston, that he knew the very room in Governor Bernard’s house where it had been conceived, the time, and the company responsible. Such fantasies served only to inflame the mob, and so did Otis’s occasionally wild language, as when he denounced the members of the House of Commons as ‘a parcel of button-makers, pin-makers, horse jockeys, gamesters, pensioners, pimps
and whore masters’. John Hancock (1736–93), Boston’s richest merchant (and arguably its leading smuggler), seems, throughout his career, to have been a mixture of vanity, pique and cowardice. His chief use to the patriots was his wealth and social standing: he made opposition smart.