The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (16 page)

The
Polly's
owner lived in Taunton, Massachusetts, eight miles away, a distance Robinson walked in the sheriff's custody, followed by a jeering mob. The next two days he rested in jail because no one would put up bail for him. By the time his friends in Newport heard of his plight and got him out, he was a very bitter man.

Robinson, literal-minded, stubborn, upright man that he was, also managed to bungle, though he wished desperately to be a good official. Whatever his faults, he seems not to have been guilty of the legal harassment practiced by other Customs officials and especially by the navy. Parliament in passing the Sugar Act had not intended that the navy seize the small craft that plied the waters of every port, carrying small cargoes from one side to another. These boats -- barges, dories, and the like -- were not fit for the open seas, and did not stray from inland waters. Parliament had not intended that their skippers fill out papers -cockets, as the lists of cargo were called -- or post bonds. The naval officers did not understand Parliament's intentions, or did not care overly about them, and began seizing these small craft on the Delaware River, in the ports of New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Providence, Newport, indeed wherever they could. A number of naval officers saw in the Act and in their instructions to enforce it an opportunity to fill their pockets with colonial prize money; the illegal cargoes they captured were condemned and sold and the navy claimed its share. With this inducement these naval commanders did not trouble themselves with the niceties of Parliamentary intentions or with protests by colonials that they were being "legally" exploited.
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Merchants in the colonial ports retaliated, of course, and proved quite ingenious at making life miserable for the navy. They saw to it that no pilots were available when ships of the Royal Navy entered port, and they offered high wages to sailors the navy hoped to recruit. And when the chance appeared they incited small crowds to harass impressment parties or other groups of naval personnel isolated on shore.
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These encounters were relatively petty and represented small-scale organization. The merchants also attempted to organize in a larger way. Boston's merchants, who had met informally for several years before any of this, began to discuss common problems in carrying on their

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businesses. In April 1763, as rumors of plans for the extension of the molasses duties reached them -- a full year before the passage of the Sugar Act -- they gathered themselves into a Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce and commissioned fifteen of their number to serve as a standing committee to draw up a "State of Trade," an analysis which would provide the basis of the argument that the tendency of the molasses duties was to impair the trade of the colonies, the sugar islands, and of England itself. The "State of Trade," replete with impressive statistics and commercial data, held that molasses "will not bear any duty at all," thus combining technical analysis with a prediction of commercial disaster.
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Boston merchants sent several of their number to meet with similar groups from Salem, Marblehead, and Plymouth, and before long all these associations submitted memorials to the General Court asking that an official protest against the duties be sent to the English ministry. And early in the next year, 250 copies of the "State of Trade," issued as
Reasons Against the Renewal of the Sugar Act
,
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were sent to the colony's agent in England, with orders to distribute them and to protest against the proposed duties.

Merchants in other colonies also began to act in the last months of 1763. The Rhode Islanders, fully aware of the economic consequences of the proposed legislation, took action without any prompting from Boston. Governor Hopkins, a merchant himself and closely associated with Providence business, engaged in writing "An Essay on the Trade of the Northern Colonies of Great Britain in North America" for the newspapers, found the Boston document especially valuable. The merchants in Providence supplied further data on Rhode Island trade, and the governor then drafted a "Remonstrance" against the extension of the molasses duties which the legislature, sitting in special session, sent to England. Merchants in New York City met in January 1764, urged the colony's legislature to protest, and also contacted their business associates in Philadelphia, who then organized.
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These organizations did not speak with a single voice. Most concentrated on the inequity of the Act and its potentially disastrous effects on trade. What Parliament had failed to recognize was that the New

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England and middle colonies did not pay for imports from Britain simply by exporting locally produced commodities. Rather, they imported molasses from the French West Indies, turned it into rum, which was exchanged for slaves from Africa, who were commodities in a complex trade with the southern colonies and, again, the West Indies. Fish, horses, meat, grain, and bread were also carried to the French and British West Indies. These exchanges produced money as well as molasses, "credit" -- usually in the form of notes or bills of exchange -- which was used in the trade with Britain to pay for British manufactures: clothes, hardware, tea, furniture, beer, and necessities, as well as luxuries of all sorts.
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Understandably, colonial legislatures, which began sending off petitions and memorials in the autumn of 1764, also bore in on the economic consequences of the statute. By late in the following winter, nine had sent messages to England through their governors or their agents. All argued or implied that Parliament had abused its power to regulate trade. The British planters in the West Indies would surely benefit from the stoppage of exchanges with the French islands, but neither the mother country nor the colonies on the mainland would.
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If these legislatures, like the colonial merchants, seemed to be of one mind about the results for trade that the Sugar Act would produce, they were less sure in speaking of the rights involved. None of the nine conceded Parliament's "right" to tax for the purpose of raising a revenue in America, but only two -- New York and North Carolina -forcefully denied the right. The General Assembly of New York confessed its "Surprize" that Parliament would consider such an "Innovation" and reported their "Constituents" claimed "an Exemption from the Burthen of all Taxes not granted by themselves." For such "an Exemption from the Burthen of ungranted, involuntary Taxes, must be the grand Principle of every free State. Without such a Right vested in themselves, exclusive of all others, there can be no Liberty, no Happiness, no Security; it is inseparable from the very Idea of Property, for who can call that

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his own, which may be taken away at the Pleasure of another? And so evidently does this appear to be the natural Right of Mankind, that even conquered tributary States, though subject to the Payment of a fixed periodical Tribute, never were reduced to so abject and forlorn a Condition, as to yield to all the Burthens which their Conquerors might at any future Time think fit to impose. The Tribute paid, the Debt was discharged; and the Remainder they could call their own." And the New Yorkers made explicit their "disdain" of claiming "that Exemption as a Privilege. They found it on a Basis more honourable, solid and stable, they challenge it, and glory in it as their Right."
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North Carolina's legislature also resisted the Sugar Act as an encroachment upon their "right" to tax themselves. Perhaps some especially forceful -- and foresighted -- individual drove these protests through the legislatures of New York and North Carolina. Neither colony offered leadership later on, and these statements of rights seemed aberrant somehow. For the Americans in countinghouses; and legislatures, if not exactly confused, were at the least unclear about what they were up against. They had not had to face a Parliament committed to taxing them for revenue. They had enjoyed rights without having to think about them. Unexamined rights may always be something of a luxury. The Americans were soon to think so.
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Of course, not many Americans had become involved in the struggles over the Sugar Act. And those who did were, for the most part, securely at the top of colonial society -- merchants and representatives in colonial legislatures. Occasionally these men had found support among men less powerful than themselves. In the crisis that would occur over the Stamp Act, these leaders were to turn to such men more frequently and in the process to examine their rights more closely. Their example proved edifying to these others -- artisans, shopkeepers, workers of various sorts. Quite clearly, what had begun at the top did not end there.

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While the colonists conducted operations against the duties on molasses, the most thoughtful among them worried about the possibility that still another tax would be levied on America. They owed the worry to George Grenville, who on March 9, 1764, the day he introduced the proposals for the new molasses duties, warned that to meet the national expenses "it may be proper to charge certain Stamp Duties in the said Colonies and Plantations."
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Grenville did not say much more about what he had in mind except that he would postpone introducing the necessary legislation until the colonies had an opportunity to offer objections. But the objections should not include challenges to Parliament's right to tax the colonies; it had the right as far as Grenville was concerned, and he did not mean to be subjected to arguments to the contrary.

Grenville learned before the year was out that a disposition not to listen would not still angry American voices. At first, though, as rumors of a stamp tax reached the colonies, the Americans did not protest but instead asked for information about the duties. The reports reaching the colonies all suffered from a lack of precision, from second- and sometimes third-hand observations, and from a general vagueness. Grenville had told so little that not much distortion seeped into these accounts. What seems surprising at first sight is that he was not inclined to tell more.