The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (48 page)

By such proposals Apthorp made himself an easy target. Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of Boston's West Congregational Church, scored repeatedly off him in the skirmishes conducted in pamphlets and newspapers in the 1760s. Of all Mayhew's touches the tag he hung on Apthorp's

____________________

handsome house in Cambridge, the "Bishop's Palace," was one of the most effective.
⁹

The Bishop's Palace, a lordly name for a lordly behaving clergy, seemed apt. For the Anglican clergy behaved as if they lived in a land of heathen. At least this interpretation occurred to Congregationalists who were subjected to incessant efforts to convert them to the Church of England, as if they were unchurched. Thus, Mayhew's charge in 1763 that there was "a formal design to carry on a spiritual siege of our churches" simply stated the obvious as far as Congregationalists were concerned. Two years later in the midst of the upheaval over the Stamp Act, John Adams linked spiritual and secular assaults on American liberties -- "there seems to be," Adams wrote in the essays later called a
Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law
, "a direct and formal design on foot to enslave America."
¹⁰

During the remainder of the decade the attack on the Anglican clergy in the middle and New England colonies continued. By the early 1770s, however, though the uneasiness of the dissenters remained, the worst of the threat of the "foreign" clergy seemed to have been contained. The Anglicans had been exposed and no bishop had appeared. With no further evidence of the coming of bishops, even the most sensitive dissenter had difficulty keeping his attention on the threat.

As tensions over bishops uncoiled early in the 1770s, they gradually wound up again over the collection of Customs duties. Only the tax on tea remained from the Townshend duties, an irritating reminder that Parliament had not yielded its right to tax for revenue when it repealed the other duties. This irritation did not prevent colonial merchants from importing British goods or their customers from buying them. During the three years beginning with 1771, the colonies' imports from Britain reached £9 million in value, almost £4 million more than in the three years 1768-70. Boston merchants proved especially hungry for British goods and overcame their distaste for dutied tea sufficiently to bring in half a million pounds of the stuff.
¹¹

Still, illegal trade and Customs racketeering persisted despite the re-

____________________

sumption of legal commerce. In many ports, smuggling merchants and unfair collectors thrived together, as, for example, on the Delaware River where an illegal trade with the Dutch continued even after the Townshend duties were repealed. A prominent New Jersey collector was beaten by sailors in the autumn of 1770 when he imprudently tried to investigate a vessel off-loading its cargo into small boats in Delaware Bay. His son, who assisted him in the customshouse, received a coat of tar and feathers shortly after. A year later a Customs schooner captured a colonial vessel accused of smuggling but then was taken itself by a crowd which seems to have included several important merchants from Philadelphia. The crowd beat up the captain and the crew of the Customs schooner before stowing them in the hold. Before the night's work was completed, the schooner's prize disappeared with the crowd.
¹²

Merchants and Customs collectors formed an explosive mixture everywhere in the colonies. In Rhode Island, where they were especially practiced in the art of making explosions, they combined in the familiar way a year after the worst of the encounters along the Delaware. The usual antagonism furnished the background. Nothing seemed to dampen the enthusiasm of the two groups for getting at one another's throats. The Rhode Island merchants conducted a lively trade, most of it legal though their reputation for illegality was formidable.

The Royal Navy believed that the reputation conformed to the facts and, after losing two small vessels in Narragansett waters, assigned the
Gaspee
there in late March 1772. Her skipper, Lieutenant William Dudingston, seized several craft engaged in trade only to find himself threatened with arrest by the local sheriff. Dudingston's commanding officer, Admiral Montagu, attempting to shield him, wrote a foolish letter to the sheriff in which he threatened to hang as pirates any citizens who attempted to rescue "any vessel the King's schooner may take carrying on an illicit trade." Governor Joseph Wanton replied with a letter not calculated to reassure the navy about civilian concern for the enforcement of the Acts of Navigation. The charge that local citizens had proposed rescuing by force any trader taken by the
Gaspee
was, Wanton said, "without any foundation, and a scandalous imposition." And "as to your advice, not to send the sheriff on board any of your squadron, please to know that I will send the sheriff of this colony at any time, and to any place, within the body of it, as I think fit."
¹³

____________________

A few weeks later on June 9, Lieutenant Dudingston, in eager pursuit of a craft he suspected as a smuggler, ran the
Gaspee
aground. Unable to free her, he was vulnerable to unfriendly boarders. They appeared that night, apparently including John Brown of the great Providence family, and took the
Gaspee
by force. Dudingston tried to resist and received a bullet in the groin for his trouble. The boarding party took their time in their work, first laying about them with handspikes when the
Gaspee
's crew tried to hold them off, then reading the ship's papers, finally taking off everyone and then burning the ship. Dudingston, put ashore by these gentle souls, nursed his wounds for a couple of days, only to be arrested by the sheriff for an earlier seizure of colonial cargo. Admiral Montagu eventually rescued him by paying a stiff fine imposed by a Rhode Island court. After that Montagu decided that Lieutenant Dudingston had outlived his usefulness and sent him back to England to explain to a court-martial the loss of the
Gaspee.
¹⁴

As things turned out, punishing Dudingston proved to be about as much as either the Admiral or the home government could do. Montagu tried to uncover the names of the leaders of the raiders who burned the
Gaspee
and may have succeeded but could not establish their guilt. The ministry had no better luck though it appointed a commission to investigate the affair. The commission met in January 1773 and returned a report in the summer declaring civil officials in Rhode Island free of guilt. Who was guilty it could not say.
¹⁵

The report ended the
Gaspee
affair in a legal sense, but the political results were longer lasting. The commission had been empowered to send persons it accused to England for trial along with witnesses and evidence. This arrangement violated the ancient English right of trial by a jury of one's peers. The news of what the ministry had authorized spread rapidly, and within a few weeks the colonial newspapers had pointed to its dangers. Not long afterwards, in 1773, the newspapers began to carry articles openly speculating on the timing of an American declaration of independence.
¹⁶

In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry, after learning of the ministry's version of a fair trial in the
Gaspee
affair, decided that a permanent organization was needed to maintain colonial vigilance.
The House of Burgesses agreed with them and in

____________________

March appointed a standing committee to correspond with other legislatures or their committees about activities deemed dangerous to America. This intercolonial committee of correspondence served as the model for others; and in another twelve months all the colonies, except Pennsylvania where Joseph Galloway blocked action, had followed suit.
¹⁷
That these committees existed proved to be more important than anything they did. They signaled an increasing awareness in America of a common cause. They also provided an example of common action.

That example was not easy to maintain in these years of drift. Virginia of course had pointed the way early in the conflict with Britain, most notably at the time of the Stamp Act crisis. But, like other colonists, Virginians returned with relief to normal occupations when threats to their liberties were eased. The others included Yankees in Massachusetts, fierce in the defense of freedom but also eager for calm. Not even Sam Adams could do much about the popular mood once the British ministry backed off.

The affair over the
Gaspee
helped to rouse some in Massachusetts, but in 1772 a local conflict yielded even more discontent. The issue was a familiar sort by the summer of 1772 -- who should pay the salaries of royal officials serving in the colony? The legislature saw the control of salaries as a means of controlling the officials, surely a misapprehension but one widely shared outside Massachusetts. The British government counted itself among those who believed that salaries could be an important weapon in the struggle for power, and in 1768 it sought to insulate Thomas Hutchinson from the worst of popular pressures by ordering that henceforth his salary as chief justice should be paid from Customs revenues. Two years later it decided to pay Hutchinson as governor and Andrew Oliver as lieutenant governor from the duty on tea, and in the summer of 1772 it added all the superior court justices.
¹⁸

The lengthening list of officials now out of the reach of popular influence set Sam Adams's teeth on edge. The Boston newspapers opened their columns to Adams and his friends, who lost no time in expressing their alarm at the growth of irresponsible power in Massachusetts. Adams also turned to the town meeting and guided that body into requesting

____________________