The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (17 page)

By the spring reports surfaced in England that Grenville had delayed in order to give the colonies time not only to furnish information but also to propose another mode of taxation. Thomas Whately, one of the Treasury secretaries, mentioned the possibility that Grenville was

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awaiting suggestions from America for less burdensome ways of raising money. The agents of Massachusetts and Virginia wrote their respective employers that Grenville might be inclined to leave matters to the colonies-so long as the money was eventually forthcoming. But these agents' reports, like Grenville's original announcement in March, had about them an air of mystery and even unreality: no sums of money were mentioned and no plans for apportioning tax burdens among the colonies -- each With its own legislature after all -- were offered.
²

To clear up the mysteries of Grenville's intentions, several agents asked him for a meeting. He obliged them on May 17, 1764, and they came away wiser, perhaps, but with very little information. When asked for a copy of the bill, Grenville replied that he could not supply one since it had not yet been drafted. When asked what would be taxed and at what rate, he replied vaguely that about the same things would be taxed as in Britain, but that he could say nothing about rates of taxation since they had not been decided. Nor did Grenville lay to rest speculation that his purpose in delaying the bill was to permit the colonies to suggest alternative modes of taxation. He neither confirmed nor denied that he would be receptive to fresh plans. Yet despite his coyness he did manage to convey knowledge of what he really wanted: approval in advance from the colonies of the general proposal. The objections he had seemed to welcome would be received -- or welcomed -only after the colonies gave their assent. To be sure, he would give colonial proposals for different sorts of taxation "all due consideration," but what he seemed to have in mind was taxation by Parliament.
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Understandably, the agents, and soon the colonial legislatures, found all this rather bewildering. And what made matters worse, and induced a certain skepticism about Grenville's sincerity in professing to give consideration to American views, was his failure to notify the colonial governors that he had decided to ask Parliament for a stamp duty. Ordinarily when decisions were made about the colonies, the usual procedure was for the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, acting on the orders of the ministry (or officially of the Privy Council), to pass the news to the colonial governors.
Information customarily was dispensed

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this way, though of course other means were employed as well. In this case, Grenville abandoned the normal procedures, though Thomas Whately asked several colonial officials about the nature of legal documents used in the colonies: these documents were to be subject to a tax.
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Whately had good reason to ask such questions, for he was charged by his chief to draw up the bill to be presented to Parliament. Whately, who had been admitted to the bar after attendance at Cambridge and study in the Middle Temple, possessed the technical qualifications to draft legislation. Moreover, he was intensely loyal to Grenville, and he believed in hard work for himself and not just for others. The ministry's ignorance of the details of colonial life was so great that considerable work proved necessary. Whately went about it with a dedication that must have gratified Grenville. Before he finished a rough draft suitable for the ministry's consideration early in December 1764, he had canvassed a variety of departments and officials, including the Board of Trade and its knowledgeable secretary John Pownall, the Customs commissioners, and the English Stamp Board. Whately also approached Americans and English officials in the colonies, though here his efforts may have been less systematic. John Temple, the surveyor general of Customs in the northern colonies, was consulted, as were lesser officials in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Whately also wrote at least one prominent private citizen in America, Jared Ingersoll in Connecticut. Ingersoll and Temple knew the colonists well and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Whately that the idea of an American stamp tax was a mistake. Ingersoll, a blunt-speaking Yankee and as far from radicalism as almost anyone in America, responded with particular directness to Whatley's questions about American attitudes. The minds of the Americans, he wrote in July 1764, "are filled with the most dreadfull apprehensions from such a Step's taking place, from whence I leave you to guess how easily a tax of that kind would be Collected; tis difficult to say how many ways could be invented to avoid the payment of a tax laid upon a Country without the Consent of the Legislature of that Country and in the opinion of most of the people Contrary to the foundation principles of their natural and Constitutional rights and Liberties." And, as other colonists had, Ingersoll added that if the colonists were asked to provide a portion of a revenue, they would do so willingly, but if even a moderate

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tax were laid by Parliament, he would not predict "what Consequences may, or rather may not follow?"
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Whately had not expected to receive warnings that a stamp tax might invite unhappy reactions in America, and he brushed them aside. Grenville could not have been disturbed by these responses, even though he had indicated that the one argument he would not listen to was a challenge of Parliament's right to tax, an argument Ingersoll and others, in letters and petitions, were making. Such arguments actually played into Grenville's hands. If there was anything intolerable to a good Parliament man, it was to be told that the Parliament lacked the right to do what it wanted to do. The colonial agents in England realized that what they were instructed to say in defense of colonial rights would only produce the result it was calculated to avoid -- the passage of the stamp bill. But what could they do? English merchants trading to America were made uneasy by the conflict that was taking shape before their eyes, but they too hesitated to make the colonial constitutional case.
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Just before Parliament convened in February 1765, the agents, now desperate, sent four of their number to meet one final time with Grenville. They were an impressive group -- Benjamin Franklin, already famous for his electrical experiments, worldly-wise and a little cynical; Jared Ingersoll, fresh from America, tough-minded and fundamentally very conservative; Richard Jackson, a member of Parliament and agent for Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania; and Charles Garth, another member of Parliament, agent for South Carolina, shrewd and quick-witted. Grenville received them with kindness and early in the meeting said that he regretted giving the Americans so much uneasiness, but he thought it only fair that they help pay for their own defense and that he knew no better way than by a tax levied by Parliament. The agents repeated what by now must have been familiar to everyone -that the Americans preferred to tax themselves. Richard Jackson made the reasons for this preference absolutely clear by arguing that a tax by Parliament would subvert representative government in America. Fed by a Parliamentary tax on the colonies, the royal governors there would

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have no reason ever to convene the local assemblies. Grenville of course denied that he had any such intention in mind, and he denied furthermore that any such thing would take place.
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At about this point in the meeting Grenville asked the agents if they "could agree upon the several proportions Each Colony should raise," if the colonies were permitted to raise the money through the assemblies.
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The question has been called "fatuous," and in a sense it was.
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The Grenville ministry itself had the responsibility of establishing such proportions, and it had had a year to do so, assuming, of course, that it had any interest in the answer. If there was any doubt that it had no such interest and no intention of allowing the colonies to tax themselves to support the troops in America, the question served to dispel it. Grenville knew that and doubtless asked the question, silly as it seemed, in order to disabuse the agents of any hope that they could deflect him from his course.

To persuade Grenville to give up the idea of a stamp tax was beyond the agents and everyone else. On February 6, 1765, he brought the resolution of 1764 before the Commons; the debates and the votes that followed demonstrated the imprudence of principled opposition. Although only William Beckford denied on the floor of Commons Parliament's right to tax, that right was clearly uppermost in the minds of most members. Anger against the colonials for presuming to challenge Parliament's absolute sovereignty was so widespread that opponents to the proposed tax phrased their arguments very carefully -- but not carefully enough.
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Nothing that was said changed many votes. And the most eloquent defense of the American case, made in a speech by Colonel Isaac Barré, may actually have stiffened Parliament's resolve to tax. Barré's outburst came in response to a sardonic complaint by Charles Townshend: "And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength and Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute

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¹⁰
Bernhard Knollenberg,
Origin of the American Revolution, 1759-1766
( New York, 1960), 223.

⁷
Jared Ingersoll wrote an account of the meeting to Governor Fitch of Connecticut, Feb. 11, 1765,
Fitch Papers
( Connecticut Historical Society,
Collections
, 18 [ Hartford, Conn., 1920]), II, 324-25.

⁸
Ibid.

⁹
Edmund S. Morgan, "The Postponement of the Stamp Act",
WMQ
, 3d Ser., 7 ( 1950), 372. I have followed this article closely in reconstructing the early history of the stamp bill.

their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?" 11 Barré's reply was explosive:

They planted by your Care? No! your Oppressions planted em in America. They fled from your Tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable Country -- where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human Nature is liable, and among others to the Cruelties of a Savage foe, the most subtle and I take upon me to say the most formidable of any People upon the face of Gods Earth. And yet, actuated by Principles of true english Lyberty, they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own Country, from the hands of those who should have been their Friends.