The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (32 page)

Disquieting as the supercilious tone was, what lay beneath it appeared worse -- an uncomprehension of the American constitutional argument, or even a glimmer of suspicion that the Americans really believed in the principles they professed. Historians of the American Revolution sometimes argue that a lack of communication divided the British and their colonies. After all, the Atlantic Ocean lay between England and America, and getting information back and forth took months. When news arrived it was often out of date. There is some truth in this contention, but despite the slowness of ship crossings a surprising amount of knowledge was exchanged. In the case of the aftermath of the Stamp Act crisis, one might suggest that there was too much communication; surely the Americans who read the merchant letters published in the newspapers understood their meaning. And the American position had been amply laid out in Britain; yet few took it seriously or brought much sympathy to it.

The problem the British had was an inability to see that they had a problem -- despite the letters, petitions, and memorials of the previous year. Years of dominance over the colonies had deadened their sensitivities. In the seventeenth century when the colonies began to trade with the Dutch, Parliament confined their trade to British ports; and when the colonies showed a fancy for European goods, Parliament soon nipped it in the bud. Did the colonies threaten the market for English manufactures? Pass a statute stopping them. They were "our colonies," "our subjects," and, as George Mason noted, "our children"; Parliament the parents, the mother and father, and they should obey.

The colonists played their parts in this relationship with proper deference, in fact with willingness, for years. They connived at their own subordination: they were provincials, and provincials in the eighteenth century may have admired the metropolis, but they did not deceive themselves that they were its equals. They also resorted to the familial metaphors in describing their subordination -- England was the mother country and they were children owing deference. But there were distinct limits to these colonial attitudes, and in the crisis produced by the Stamp Act, Parliament and the Grenville ministry had blundered across those limits. The immediate aftermath revealed how few in Britain possessed the insight to see the full extent of this blundering.

The lingering suspicion of Britain did not quiet the bitter factionalism of American politics, and in fact in several colonies the defeat of the

Stamp Act permitted important shifts of local power. These alterations sometimes entailed the control of offices, sometimes of legislatures, and everywhere forced men to make clear their allegiances. More important, provincial politics now had an abiding issue which carried the potential of unifying the colonies: hostility to control from Britain.

Drastic changes in local alignments occurred where colonial politicians were able to exploit this issue, an event which depended largely on their ability to impute to the opposition support of ministerial policies. In Massachusetts the Otis faction had no trouble in smearing Governor Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson and their friends with the tar of the Stamp Act and for sucking up offices and patronage and disgorging them in bribes to supporters. Many of the charges were no smear, and Otis and company made the most of them. Their opportunity came in the elections held in May 1766, the first chance they had since the violence of the previous summer to rid the House and Council of, as they said, the enemies of the people. They opened their campaign in the
Boston Gazette
, their house organ, with an assortment of attacks. They charged the governor and the council with appropriating money to their friends without the consent of the House; they protested against the practice of "treating" (some delicacy made them use this word rather than "bribing") -- supplying the electorate with rum and wine in return for votes -- a practice, of course, only of the administration. They condemned anyone who had urged compliance with the Stamp Act or who referred to the "Sons of Liberty" without due respect -- Hutchinson's crowd choked on the name and suggested a more apt designation would be "Sons of Violence".
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These charges were offered for the edification of Sons of Liberty all over Massachusetts. Lest anyone miss the point, the
Gazette
published model instructions for representatives to the House and urged the towns to use them. Believing that at least thirty-two representatives had demonstrated their unfitness for office, the
Gazette
published their names with the suggestion that the best instruction for them would be retirement to private life.
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Governor Bernard detested unseemly behavior, especially in public and particularly at his expense. Thomas Hutchinson did not admire it either, but he had friends who took up his cause in the
Boston Evening Post
. The defense, however, worked under the handicap of respect for the truth, at least the truth so far as the Stamp Act was concerned.

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Neither Hutchinson nor Bernard had urged its passage; Hutchinson had deplored it in private. Announcing their opposition long after the event left their critics unmoved -- indeed in control of the battlefield.
The Boston Evening Post
attacked as well as defended, and its victim, James Otis, took a savage lashing in its columns. Otis
Brief Remarks on the Halifax Libel
, which had revealed a rather different emphasis on Parliament's power from his
Rights of the Colonies
, drew particular scorn for its "inconsistencies and
Prevarications
." And Otis himself received rough handling as a "double-faced Jacobite Whig" and as a
"slight of hand-man."
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None of this saved Bernard's supporters from taking a drubbing at the polls. Nineteen of the thirty-two representatives chosen for purging were defeated. In Massachusetts the new House and the outgoing Council chose the new Council, and in the May election four incumbents -JudgePeter Oliver, Secretary Andrew Oliver (who had been slated to be the stamp distributor), Attorney General Edmund Trowbridge, and Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson -- were removed. All were notorious as plural officeholders and friends of the administration, and all, except Trowbridge, were related to one another by blood or marriage. A fifth councillor, Benjamin Lynde, a judge of the superior court, resigned before he could be dispatched. Bernard vetoed the popular supporters chosen in the place of these comfortable old standbys, and he vetoed the election of James Otis as speaker of the House. But Bernard was in a much weakened position and he knew it.
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In Massachusetts the governor at least survived; in Connecticut, where the office was elective, the governor, Thomas Fitch, did not. Fitch had contributed to his own defeat in spring 1766 by swearing the previous November to enforce the Stamp Act. Failure to take the oath would have cost Fitch £1000 in a fine, but he was a stubborn man who probably would have taken the oath whether or not the fine existed. He and several members of the Connecticut Council were turned out of office when the Sons of Liberty succeeded in identifying them with the Stamp Act. These men had to carry the dead weight of Jared Ingersoll around their necks. Like them, Ingersoll was an Old Light and an opponent of the ambitions of the Susquehannah Company in the Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania. The Sons of Liberty, mostly New Light, of course, and in the case of those from New London and Windham counties eager to maintain the claims of the Susquehannah Company, hung Ingersoll

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on them and thereby linked Old Light religion to advocacy of the Stamp Act, an unfair equation and a damaging one because so widely believed.
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When the elections approached in 1766, the Sons of Liberty, dominated by contingents from Windham and New London counties, organized a colony-wide meeting in Hartford in late March. The first order of business was innocuous, a resolution to maintain correspondence with Sons of Liberty in other colonies. After this was accomplished the convention went into closed session, an action which caught some delegates from western counties by surprise. Windham and New London delegates soon revealed their purposes -- the nomination of a slate of candidates for governor, deputy-governor, and the Council (the lower house was already safely in popular hands). After much discussion, an adjournment of a day, and more debate, the convention decided to limit its slate to governor and deputy-governor and avoid endorsements of councillors, since a wholesale overturning might "make too great an Alteration in the Body Politick at once." The Sons delivered on their promises in May when William Pitkin, who was deputy-governor, replaced Fitch as governor, and Jonathan Trumbull was chosen in Pitkin's stead.
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Elsewhere the aftermath of the Stamp Act in provincial politics was less clear -- as in New Jersey, Maryland, and the Carolinas -- or delayed -as in New York, which had no election in 1766. Rhode Island, savage in its resistance to the Stamp Act, had no important royalist factionor willing surrogates once Thomas Moffat and Martin Howard and their cohorts departed. The Tory Junto had never shown anything more than a nuisance value at any rate and could not be discharged from offices they never held.
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Pennsylvania presents the strangest case of all. Neither of the two old alignments -- the Quaker and Proprietary parties -- had opposed the Stamp Act strenuously. The Quakers, led by Benjamin Franklin in pursuit of royal government to replace the much despised proprietor, had muted their discontent -- they could not expect the Crown to revoke the charter if they led riots against ministerial policy. Hence they remained quiet -as did the Proprietary party, also hoping that their loyalty would help prevent the Crown from revoking their charter rights.
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By mid- 1766 something approaching a fresh political alignment had emerged from fragments of these two groups -- the Presbyterian party, a group especially fearful of the importation of an Anglican bishop. The Declaratory Act had aroused those fears, for it seemed to imply that the colonies could claim no protection against episcopacy. The party was a coalition -- and still incomplete in 1766 -- of Presbyterians, Quakers, Germans, and Scotch-Irish. The party's main contingent of recruits, the mechanics of Philadelphia and the farmers of the West, did not align with it for another two years.

Altogether the Stamp Act had at least temporarily united several sorts of colonial groups, even though it could not subdue the factionalism of colonial politics. By late spring 1766 the Act was an issue of the past, but the suspicions it had aroused of British purposes in America lingered, suspicions reinforced by still unresolved grievances. There were the restrictions on colonial trade, in particular the duty on molasses which, though reduced to one penny per gallon, was collected on all molasses imported into the colonies -- even that from the British West Indies. There were currency restrictions in the mid-1760s that seemed to cramp the trade of New York merchants more than others. At any rate, the New Yorkers complained the loudest. There was the ministry's request to compensate the victims of the Stamp Act riots which occasioned predictable fights between governors and legislatures.
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