The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (14 page)

A look at the national debt in 1763 would have sent any minister's heart down into his shoes. As of January 5, 1763, according to Exchequer accounts, the funded debt amounted to £122,603,336 -- an enormous sum. Moreover, it carried an annual interest of £4,409,797. A year later the debt was almost £7,000,000 larger, and by January 1766, six months after Grenville left office, it had increased another £7,000,000.
¹⁵

Financing the interest on the debt was a problem that absorbed a good deal of attention; and retiring it, or even a part of it, seemed at times out of the question. Trade was depressed in Britain when Grenville took office, the consequences of the end of the war and the decline of heavy expenditures. Levying more taxes, or increasing existing ones, was not an attractive solution: ordinary Englishmen had grown restive under the burdens of supporting an overstuffed government and a glorious war. And well they might. Land had long been heavily taxed and no relief seemed in sight. A landowner, of course, might consider himself fortunate; by conventional social opinion he was one of the chosen of the Lord. Virtue, to say nothing of the right to vote, resided in him. So perhaps he should not mind too much when his money was spent advancing the nation's interest and glory throughout the world. But what of the poor man solaced only by beer and tobacco? Beer was heavily hit during the war and made to return over half a million pounds a year. Tobacco too was made to pay, and many other things as well: newspapers, sugar, paper, linen, advertisements. The poor did not feel the taxes on all these items, but the gentry and some of the middling sort did, and on houses, deeds, offices, brandy, and spirits, most of which paid 25 percent of their value. If a man owned a house, he not only paid a tax on it, but on every window in it; if he decided to take the air in his carriage, perhaps fleeing the tax collector, he rode with the depressing knowledge that the carriage too was taxed.
¹⁶

Englishmen took most of the squeeze on their purses quietly, though by the end of the war they were sometimes outraged to the point of protest. In Exeter in May 1763, for example, shortly after the coming of peace, there were demonstrations against the cider tax which had just passed through Parliament despite much opposition. Apples decorated with crepe were hung over most church doors, which bore the inscription, "Excise the first fruits of Peace."
The same day a procession

____________________

of several thousand people formed in the streets: "1st a man riding on an ass, and on his back this inscription; 'From Excise and the Devil, good Lord deliver us.'" A string of apples hung in crepe was placed around the ass's neck, and thirty or forty men accompanied the beast. Each man carried a'white wand, with an apple also in crepe at the top. Then came a cart with an effigy of Lord Bute hanging from a gallows. Following came a cider hogshead, carried by men dressed in mourning, and thousands of people "ballooing and shouting" through the streets. The figure of Bute was eventually consigned to a bonfire where it burned to the cheers of the crowd.
¹⁷

This demonstration was one of many in the Cider Counties; it was symptomatic of the feeling against existing taxation and evidence of what might come with tax increases. The message was not lost on Grenville, who in any case believed that troops stationed in America, ostensibly for the protection of Americans, ought to be financed by Americans. He found few who disagreed with him in Parliament and none in the ministry. The question, however, was how best to extract money from the Americans who were notorious for their ability to evade Customs duties and for their reluctance to contribute to their own defense.

George Grenville did not intend to collect money from the colonies to help retire the enormous debt the government carried, or even the interest on it. But he did think that they should help support the troops provided for their defense; he did not propose that they should bear all of the charges for troops stationed in America, however. American defense was of interest to the empire -- not just to Americans -- and so Britain herself would help carry the burdens of keeping troops in the wilderness. Indeed, according to estimates of what the cost would be -something over £200,000 per year for twenty battalions on the mainland and in the West Indies -- Britain would pay the major share.
¹⁸

Grenville's ministry decided to impose certain taxes on the colonies for revenue which Treasury experts reported would return only £78,000 per year. This sum, the Treasury argued, could be raised by reducing the old duty of 6d per gallon on foreign-produced molasses imported into the colonies to 3d The Treasury and Grenville made these calculations on the assumption that this new duty could be collected.
That assumption was a very large one indeed.
¹⁹

____________________

Collecting customs duties in America had not been one of Britain's glorious successes in the eighteenth century, nor had enforcement of any of the trade regulations that the colonials decided to evade. Grenville knew the melancholy history of such efforts; the Board of Trade, Customs, and the Treasury all told it to him. There had been something approaching systematic violation of the old Molasses Act for thirty years, as colonial merchants bribed collectors to look the other way when they smuggled in molasses from the French and Dutch West Indies. The going rate in 1763 was about a penny and a half per gallon, though occasionally the smuggling merchants paid less in out-of-the-way ports. During the French and Indian War violation of the acts regulating trade seems to have become more common. War usually warps normal standards and practices, and so far as trade was concerned, normality entailed breaking the law. The Americans claimed they had good reason to act as they did: their distilleries in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Philadelphia needed molasses for rum; their farmers who grew grain and raised cattle, and their bakers and butchers who processed these products, needed markets to sell them. The British West Indies did not, perhaps could not, produce the molasses required to keep distilleries going, the rum flowing, and the trade active, so the colonists had to turn to foreign producers. And, in fact, merchants in half a dozen colonies sent lumber, barrel staves, fish, beef, pork, bacon, horses, and a miscellany of other products into the West Indies for molasses. Distilled into rum, it was consumed locally and traded in the fisheries, sent to Africa, and to other places as well. Almost all of this produce of New England and middle colonies farms was barred from Britain, and wheat was subject to heavy duties. The law was askew here and could be enforced only at the expense of a complicated set of exchanges at the heart of the colonial economy. The law which established the prohibitive duty on foreign molasses had passed at the instigation of British West Indies planters, several of whom sat in Parliament and who made their opulence count.
²⁰

Defiance of the Molasses Act had begun virtually with its passage in 1733. Other sorts of violations -- sending enumerated goods to Europe and importing European goods directly without stopping in Britain -had also occurred early in the eighteenth century. The war opened tempting opportunities and evasion seems to have increased -- through bribery, fraud, and corruption.
Britain tried to stop this trade but failed until

____________________

the Royal. Navy found it possible to detach a significant number of ships for the job. At one point in 1756, when smuggling seemed especially prevalent, Governor Robert Hunter Morris of Pennsylvania, an official determined to stop the trade of Philadelphia merchants with the enemy, resorted to breaking into local warehouses late at night with his bare hands in the hope of discovering contraband. Four years later, in 1760, the British navy got things under control and pretty well stopped the smuggling. In that year merchants in Philadelphia lost thirty vessels with cargoes valued at £100,000 to the navy.
²¹

What worked against smuggling late in the war could not be continued in peacetime -- for one reason, smugglers operated differently after the war ended -- and in any case Grenville's ministry wanted trade to return revenue for the support of the troops in America. Shortly after Grenville took over from Bute, he evidently decided, on the basis of advice from Treasury officials, that molasses might be taxed for revenue. Before the act was pushed through Parliament, however, Grenville took other steps to tighten up the customs service. On the advice of the Customs Commission in July 1763, he ordered Customs collectors to report to their posts in the colonies, or to vacate their offices. This order produced an epidemic of heartburn among the collectors, most of whom resided in England enjoying fat salaries, while their deputies collected bribes in American ports. The collectors fancied life in England, not in the American provinces, and understandably a number resigned rather than assume their responsibilities some three thousand miles away.
²²

After cutting out the deadwood, Grenville turned to the main business of getting a revenue act through Parliament. This he did with surprising ease, surprising, considering that the Americans were unrepresented in Parliament, an agency which took its beginnings from the right of the people to be taxed only by their own representatives. No one reminded the members of this old right as they passed a statute imposing various duties which were intended to produce a sizable revenue. No one noted that taxes in England had always been the free gift of the people. The Revenue Act of 1764, or Sugar Act as it was popularly called, used these words, a traditional formula which set off no reaction in Parliament. The lack of opposition within Parliament can be explained in several ways -- the political temper of Parliament is the most obvious and, in a sense, the most important.
The leaders without office in Parliament

____________________

were Newcastle and Pitt; they and others feared disagreements among themselves. The American issue threatened to create such divisions. Moreover, they -- indeed all the opposition to Grenville -- were tired and demoralized after their losing the struggle with his ministry over general warrants. This fight had ended in February 1764. Invigorated by his victory, Grenville introduced the Sugar bill, which sailed past the opposition without encountering even an opposing breeze. By April 5, 1764, it was law.
²³

Stripped down to essentials and in the nontechnical language Americans understood, the Sugar Act did more than lower the tax on foreign molasses to three pence per gallon. That was its key provision, but the act included others as important. It imposed other duties, several to regulate trade as well as to return revenues; it enumerated goods which could only be shipped to Britain, among them lumber, one of the most valuable items in colonial trade. As productive of outrage among colonials as any of the Act's provisions were those establishing procedures for compliance and enforcement. Merchants and ship captains now had to take great care in securing proper manifests and in listing cargo aboard their ships. They were required in most cases to obtain these papers before they loaded and unloaded their cargoes. If they did not, they would be liable to prosecution under the statute. Prosecutions might take place in colonial courts of record, as they always had under the Navigation Acts, but they might also occur in vice admiralty courts at the discretion of the officials enforcing the Customs regulations. The rub here came in the character of the courts: colonial courts heard cases with the help of juries, and juries composed of colonials did not regard smuggling or other violations with unfriendly eyes. Vice admiralty courts, on the other hand, did not use juries, and the judge who rendered decisions and fixed penalties was a royal appointee. What made this arrangement more unfair, in colonial minds at least, was that the supposed offender came into a court which presumed not that he was innocent but that he was guilty. Establishing his innocence was his problem, and even if he succeeded, he was out the cost of the action and could not sue to recover damages or expenses.
²⁴