The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (43 page)

One of the Townshend acts augmented the "bureaucracy." The use of this word is anachronistic, but the term then favored in America, "parasites," is not altogether fair, though it suggests how deeply the colonists detested the new officials who arrived to put the Townshend policies into effect. Among these officials none received more abuse than the American Board of Customs Commissioners, which had appointed a flock of officials in the Customs, all charged with the mission of tightening up the service and increasing his majesty's revenue.

Earlier attempts along these lines had failed. About the time the Sugar Act was passed in 1764, for example, twenty-five comptrollers were appointed to supervise the collectors of customs. New Customs districts were carved out in the hope of covering the complicated American coastline, and a vice admiralty court was established in Halifax. In a most ambitious try at reform, George Grenville gave those Customs officials who chose to reside in England while deputies did their work in America a choice between resigning or taking up their posts in person.
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Nothing seemed to work. Customs remained in disrepair, with collec-

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tors shirking their responsibilities, pocketing bribes, harassing traders, and yet not adding substantial sums to the king's revenue. The regulation of fees was particularly chaotic. Legislatures supervised them in several cases; more often, merchants and collectors agreed on a schedule. His majesty's purse was rarely fattened by these arrangements though collectors sometimes managed well.

The American Board of Customs Commissioners, designed to bring order and honesty, never performed as expected, nor did the new vice admiralty courts established by order in council the year after to stiffen the law. The board contained at least one able man, John Temple, but be was soon on the outs with the others; John Robinson was upright but stubborn and unimaginative; Henry Hulton had abilities but he did not bring them to bear; Charles Paxton disliked the colonists from that unfortunate day of arrival -- Guy Fawkes Day -- when he suffered the "indignity" of seeing his effigy burned. Little is known of Burch. Together the commissioners led a style of life that set them apart from the people they had to deal with, and together they never seemed to be able to conceive of any solution to their difficulties that did not involve the use of troops against the Americans.
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By itself the structure of American commerce would have challenged the talents of any officials sent to regulate it. From Quebec to Georgia there were hundreds of sites where ships might load and unload -- major harbors and ports, rivers, creeks, streams, inlets. In the 1760s and 1770s there were only forty-five to fifty Customs districts -- the number fluctuated slightly -- where official entry or clearance might be obtained. To be sure in several of these districts deputy collectors, tidesmen, and other officials worked far from the custornshouse, but in every district trade might be conducted unobserved by any officer. The dispersion of American business and agriculture, and the character of transport and shipping facilities, simply required that trade be carried on in scattered locations. A lumber and wood transporting vessel frequently had to pick up its cargoes at several places in New England, for example; the same type of ship in Georgia and the Carolinas might make several stops before its hold was full. Planters in the Chesapeake brought tobacco to creeks and rivers all around the bay, and ships sailed fifty miles up the York, loading tobacco, naval stores, bar and pig iron, hemp, and

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agricultural products. In 1770 the Rappahannock was navigable to Fredericksburg, about 140 miles upstream, by ships of sixty to seventy tons. And ships made their way up the other streams ringing the bay as well. John Williams, the inspector general of Customs for the Chesapeake, noted in 1770 that ships from all over western Europe and the West Indies loaded and unloaded along the Potomac, sometimes as far as sixty miles from any Customs officer. As for the port of Boston, where so much trouble originated, an official description in 1770 held that it "Begins at Lyn northerly, Proceeds Westerly and Southerly along Massachusetts Bay to Cape Cod . . . Round Cape Cod to the Harbour of Dartmouth . . . Also the Island of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Elizabeth Island." And the report added that no Customs officers served this area except at the port of entry and at Plymouth and Nantucket. These or similar conditions obtained in every district on the American continent and in the West Indies.
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Geography, an unconcentrated commerce, and an undermanned Customs service all conspired to offer opportunities for violating trade regulations, themselves none-too-enlightened in the Americans' opinion. No one knows how much evasion and smuggling occurred; Tory historians and Customs officials probably overplayed the extent of smuggling, and Whig historians and eighteenth-century Americans probably underplayed it. The systematic evasion of the Molasses Act and its successor, the Sugar Act of 1764, apparently stopped after 1766 when the reduction of the duty to one penny per gallon and its application to the production of the British West Indies as well as the foreign West Indies was made. Still, other goods were smuggled. For example, in the Rappahannock Customs district in Virginia seven ships and two snows entered from Bordeaux and other French ports "in ballast," as John Williams wryly noted, yet almost every store along the river sold French wines. These stores were also full of teas and foreign linens which were bought from ships returning from Scotland by way of Holland. Tea rarely appeared on the manifests and obviously was undeclared and smuggled. These examples are selected almost at random. Yet no one in the eighteenth century suggested that smuggling and evasion accounted for most American trade.
Everyone agreed that most commerce occurred within the law.
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The enforcement of the law by the newly created American Board of Customs Commissioners was another matter. Like all its predecessors the board failed to do what was expected -- tighten the service and bring in a substantial increase of revenue. Failure was bad for the Treasury, but what was worse was the conduct of the commissioners who further alienated the Americans, including formerly uncommitted or loyal merchants, small shippers, seamen, and other undifferentiated groups who had little in common except a belief in self-government.

Although the commissioners arrived in an atmosphere soured by recent events and although undoubtedly imbued with the administration's suspicions of Americans, their own corporate ethic finally betrayed them. At least two of them, Paxton and Hulton, clearly saw their mission as political as well as administrative, and Robinson may well have felt the same way. The entire board indeed left behind evidence that they conceived of their task as somehow to reform American politics as well as the Customs. The men they hired, or caused to be hired, deputy collectors, searchers, tidesmen, and an official coast guard with twenty vessels and crews, understandably came to their posts in an uncompromising spirit -- the colonial merchants, traders, and sailors were not simply businessmen and workers, they were evaders, smugglers, adversaries all. And for the unscrupulous and the greedy among the Customs service, the Americans were plums, ripe for the plucking.
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If the spirit of the service was pernicious, the new laws and regulations opened the way for abuse. The Sugar Act and Townshend's Revenue Act of 1767 supplied the key provisions for what has been called "customs racketeering." Under the dispensation of these statutes, bonds were to be given before any goods destined for trade outside the colony were loaded; all decked vessels and any vessel more than two leagues from shore had to carry clearance papers and bonds; every vessel engaged in trade outside its colony was to carry cockets listing every item of cargo aboard; the shipper or master had to enter his vessel at the customshouse before breaking bulk (any landing of cargo was interpreted as breaking bulk); and in vice admiralty courts ships and goods which had been seized were considered property of the Crown unless their owner claimed them. To do so he had to establish his innocence. And he paid all costs on the ruling -- usually given -- that there was "probable cause" for seizure.

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Unwittingly the army reinforced the resolve of all sorts of Americans to resist further encroachments upon colonial rights. The army made itself known in unhappy ways in three places. Its effects were least heavily felt in South Carolina in spring 1769 when a regiment with supporting artillery put into Charleston on its way to a permanent station in St. Augustine. There were barracks already in existence in Charleston which the troops could use. Supplies were another matter, and the Commons House of the assembly refused to approve an appropriation for them despite a request from General Gage. It had not asked for the troops, the House stated, but should the Parliamentary statutes laying a revenue upon the colonies be repealed, it would honor those requisitions that "appear to us just and reasonable or necessary." This line of reasoning silenced Gage, and the South Carolinians continued to maintain an easy distance from compliance with the Townshend policies, even when confronted by the army.
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After a short period of defiance the New York assembly had complied with the Quartering Act of 1765, and thereby angered many citizens including the Sons of Liberty. Troops had been stationed in New York City in the spring of 1766; their presence did not arouse widespread outpourings of joy. Indeed the kindest term of address used to the soldiers' faces in August seems to have been "rascal." The New Yorkers felt some justification for this rude behavior: the troops had cut down the liberty tree on the common. To one of the soldiers the tree was simply a pine post," but post, pole, or tree, it was a cause for a brawl between several thousand New Yorkers and the troops. No one was killed in that fray, though many were wounded. There were annual riots thereafter as the Sons of Liberty put up liberty poles and the soldiers hacked them down. But no one was killed.
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No one was killed, that is, until January 1770. By that time New York was snugly in the nonimportation movement; the DeLanceys and the Livingstons were striving to look more patriotic than the other, and the Sons of Liberty and the troops had just about had their fill of one another. The inevitable explosion came the night of January 16, after the Sons had publicly urged that no one give off-duty soldiers employment.
During the evening several soldiers chopped down the

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