Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (13 page)

Washington did not speculate on the political import for the empire if commerce dried up and colonies took to satisfying their needs themselves, but he was clearly aware that the relationships that sustained the empire were becoming of interest to Americans. The first “bad consequence” of the British action would see that “our Courts of Judicature will be shut up, it being morally impossible under our present Circumstances that the Act of Parliament can be complied with.”
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In 1765, Washington’s feelings about the empire were in flux. He had announced his dissatisfaction with the prices his tobacco brought almost from the time he first began shipping it to Robert Cary and others. He had trapped himself in a financial arrangement that found him scrambling to pay the debts he had incurred through his large appetite for British goods. The prospect of cutting back could not have
displeased him—the reasons would not be beyond his control—and a life of at least some frugality had its attractions.

The repeal of the Stamp Act in Parliament brought relief but—because the Declaratory Act accompanied the repeal—not complete satisfaction. Parliament’s declaration that it reserved the right to “bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever” could not have explained its action more clearly—it was repealing the stamp tax only in response to merchant insistence that financial disaster beckoned if it were enforced. American protests influenced some in Parliament, but as they came from colonists, inferiors who should be put in their place, most thought they could be disregarded.
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Washington wrote little about the repeal, beyond acknowledging the congratulations from Robert Cary and Company. The 1767 passage of the Townshend Acts, another attempt to raise revenue, in the form of duties on tea, painters’ colors, paper, and glass, banished whatever pleasure he had felt the year before and provided proof that the British government meant to put the colonies on another footing. If there was any doubt in Virginia about the danger the new statutes embodied, action in Massachusetts taught Virginians and colonists everywhere in America what the Townshend Acts implied for colonial liberty. The most vivid lesson the New England radicals sought to impart came in the form of a “circular letter” from the House of Representatives in Massachusetts, sent out in defiance of the secretary for the colonies, Lord Hillsborough. The letter bore in on constitutional questions, taking the standard position that only representative bodies could levy taxes on the people who elected them. The threat to liberty stood out as its main point. What made this assertion, indeed the entire “letter,” more powerful than the bare statement of colonial rights was that it came from a body that had defied orders from an imperial official who warned them not to write.
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Rioting in Boston had preceded the circular letter by almost a year. By the time Virginians took official notice, in a protest in April 1768 by the House of Burgesses against the Townshend duties, organization in Pennsylvania, New York, and Boston was far advanced. In the crisis of the Stamp Act, Virginia had taken the lead that Massachusetts and other parts of New England eagerly followed; in the next couple of years it was Virginia that fell into line, following, up to a point, the example set in the North. The House of Burgesses delivered a memorial
in opposition to the taxes, but neither it nor any other organized body in Virginia proposed that mobs riot or directly pressure customs collectors. The crowd in Williamsburg that had greeted George Mercer, the stamp distributor, on October 30, 1765, had not come to the town for such a purpose. It had gathered from all over the colony for the opening day of the House of Burgesses meeting. Several of the crowd’s members took advantage of the coincidence of the Burgesses meeting and Mercer’s arrival to pressure him to resign.

Washington was not in attendance when the Burgesses approved its first declaration against the duties. He soon made his approval known, and in April 1769, a year later, he indicated his agreement with plans for a nonimportation agreement. The plans established nonimportation as a tactic intended to lead British merchants to call for repeal in Parliament once more.

Action joined words the next year, a conjunction Washington encouraged and played an active part in forming. The stimulus seemed to have come from the northern colonies once again. Merchants in Boston and Philadelphia provided the model in agreeing among themselves that nonimportation associations offered the most effective means to bring grief to their fellow traders in England, who in turn could be expected to advocate repeal to Parliament. Washington carried the letters from four groups of northern merchants to a meeting of the Fairfax County Court in April 1769. There he talked with George Mason about the tactics of opposition, and the two men agreed on the principles of Virginian freedom. Such constitutional ideals had been at the center of their agreement ever since the crisis of the Stamp Act.
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The temperature of meetings against the Stamp Act had never achieved the level attained in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. Virginians of Washington’s persuasion who deemed the act unconstitutional were rarely in one another’s presence, and they also lacked an urban mob that could do the rough work of changing the minds of royal officials and their supporters. The Williamsburg group that forced George Mercer to resign his Stamp Act distributorship was an exception and acted with unusual force.
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By the time of the passage by Parliament of the Townshend Acts, in 1767, Virginians with few exceptions had returned to their quiet habits, and the pace of resistance barely matched the routines of ordinary
life. For Washington, the routines included such matters as recording his “Cash Accounts,” shipping tobacco from his York River plantations, reading and writing letters regarding his son, John Parke Custis, and calling together the veterans of the militia who had survived the disaster at Fort Necessity to report on his efforts to secure land for them. During these early years as a planter, he had also “ridden to the hounds,” as foxhunting was often called, entertained his neighbors and other visitors, played cards with friends, and participated in the usual ways in the social life of northern Virginia. But the crisis, slow as it was in coming, gradually intruded on the old and familiar.
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If the year 1768 offered no great excitement, it was followed by the fevers of 1769 and 1770. In those years, a new scheme for pressuring British merchants took form, in the hope that these worthies in turn would complain to Parliament in their behalf. Interrupting trade with the colonies was the action sought. Merchant groups in Philadelphia, Maryland (chiefly Annapolis), and Virginia furnished the power to start protest on its way. Washington thought that the tactic chosen—the nonimportation of certain British goods, tried once before—held promise in Virginia. The merchants wrote one another proposing joint action, an idea difficult to realize in a large colony such as Virginia, with little by way of concentrated settlement and with few means of communicating. In Virginia virtually every planter acted for himself in commerce, a one-man firm that imported goods not for customers but only for its own use. Of course, there were local merchants throughout the colony who kept shops and sold to others, sometimes in large numbers. But the usual pattern of trade across the Atlantic saw a planter ship tobacco of his own production and import goods for himself—not a retail trade. Washington at times pointed out that this made it difficult to enforce a ban on the importation of British commodities.

What to do about such a problem? In April 1769, Washington and his neighbor George Mason, both justices of the peace in Fairfax County, put their heads together at a regular meeting of the county’s court in Alexandria. Neither man was given to excess in emotion or expression, but in this meeting they agreed that a protest against the Townshend taxes should be drafted, and in the process the colonial
constitutional position be explained once more. The Stamp Act, though dead, remained fresh in their minds.

Mason did most of the writing of the resolutions, which embodied the reasons for protest and the recommendations for action designed to bring repeal of the statutes. On May 16, 1769, Washington, now in Williamsburg for a meeting of the House of Burgesses, voted in favor of the resolutions, along with all others in the body. The governor, Lord Botetourt, did not attempt to dissuade the House and instead dissolved it on the spot, whereupon its members simply walked down Duke of Gloucester Street and met in the Raleigh Tavern. There, Speaker Peyton Randolph formed a committee charged with establishing a nonimportation association for Virginia and named Washington to this committee.
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A man as accustomed to giving orders as Washington had been for many years might not be expected to be an ideal committeeman. Committees usually work by consensus and compromise, and this one in May operated under instructions to devise a scheme to thwart the will of Parliament, an institution at the heart of the British Empire with enormous power and little patience with opposition outside its walls. Washington joined the opposition with no doubts about the propriety of extralegal moves against the power and glory that Parliament manifested.

Over the course of the next year, he watched this effort to clamp down on imports of English goods slide away from its original purpose as planters, merchants, and others discovered ways of bringing in such goods. By June of 1770 he and apparently most of his colleagues in the Burgesses had had enough of such backsliding. Tighter enforcement of non-importation rules seemed called for, and Washington proposed a new association, which would require Virginia counties to form inspection committees with the authority to act against violators. The Burgesses adopted the plan, and Washington went back to Fairfax County determined to carry out the wishes of his colleagues, something he did as a member of an inspection committee.
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Washington had led, as well as followed, in this attempt at resistance. There was no hint of weakness, no note of indecision in anything he did in these years. He listened to George Mason, who had most of the ideas about what should be done in the face of actions that most burgesses and most planters considered unconstitutional. And
he acted decisively, and though he had none of Mason’s eloquence, he explained clearly his own reasons for resisting British measures.

By summer of the next year, 1771, the trial at stopping imports had fallen apart, and Washington gave it up. News of the repeal by Parliament of the taxes on all items except tea finished off what had been only a partially successful attempt. Elsewhere in the colonies, success came easier, and the effects were felt sufficiently in Britain to persuade Parliament to give up much of its original program.
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The pace of disaffection in Virginia slowed considerably in the three years following the retreat of the British government from the Townshend Acts. Washington, like most thoughtful planters in these years, went about his usual business; he had little leisure time, given the demands made on him by his business, as well as by his family and community, which seemed to turn to him with increasing requests for help. He said little in his letters about his conviction that Parliament and the ministry had resolved to get their way in disregarding an old constitutionalism that had recognized American liberties as the same as the liberties of subjects at home.

He said little but thought much. He had decided, in the crisis over the Stamp Act, that there was something afoot in Britain, most likely a conspiracy to revoke the essential rights Americans had enjoyed under the British constitution. “Oppressive” had been an adjective he used to describe British action, and in his statements following the passage of the Townshend Acts he expressed an understanding of the imperial system as one that embodied mercantilism in economic life and liberty in the governance of the colonies. All of that seemed at risk in the new measures, and nothing indicated that the British government had yielded its underlying plans even in repealing most of the statutes passed by the ministry of Charles Townshend.
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Had Washington been asked in 1773, before the upheaval opened up by the Boston Tea Party, if he foresaw war and revolution ahead, he likely would have denied any such prospects. If he had then been asked if he was satisfied with the definition of the British constitution that Parliament and the ministry seemed to hold, he would have said no and then described the political environment as threatening American self-government and American liberty. But until he was aroused to
action early the next year by the Intolerable Acts—the American term for legislation passed by Parliament in spring 1774 in response to the Tea Party—he took no action and urged none.

Washington had referred to Virginia’s protests in the 1760s as “the cause,” meaning an organized defense of the rights of free men. The cause at that time apparently did not imply a movement that led to rebellious acts such as had occurred in Boston and other northern cities and towns. To be sure, there had been the small-scale “riot” that forced George Mercer to resign his commission as stamp distributor for Virginia, and there was coercion on a small scale to force some recalcitrant merchants to honor the nonimportation movement. But all in all, the most dramatic moments had come early on in the House of Burgesses, when Patrick Henry had presented the Virginia Resolves. Since then, there had been protest and organized boycott and nonimportation, but for the better part of three years—between 1771 and 1774—there had been little change, little open alienation or estrangement.

Washington resembled other planters who thought about such matters, matters of political liberty and the health of the imperial system. But he remained quiet—at least publicly—in the Burgesses, the county, and the vestry, all of which offered venues for expression. Nor did he write often about his underlying uneasiness about the colonies’ relations with the British government.