The Wars Between England and America. Theodore Clarke Smith

DISRUPTION OF THE EMPIRE, 1773–1776

      When the news reached England that the people of the town of Boston had thrown the tea of the East India Company into the harbour, the patience of the North ministry, already severely strained, reached an end. Its members felt—and most of the English people felt with them—that to submit to such an act of violence was impossible. Every consideration of national dignity demanded that Boston and its rioters should be punished, and that the outrage done to the East India Company should receive atonement. Hitherto, they said, the contumacious colonists had been dealt with chiefly by arguments, reproofs, and, as it seemed to most Englishmen, with concessions and kindnesses which had won only insult and violence.

      It was resolved to make an example of the delinquent community; and the first step was to humiliate its representative, Benjamin Franklin. Ever since 1765 he had been residing in England, respected as a philosopher and admired as a wit, bearing a sort of diplomatic character through his position as agent for the assemblies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. In close {52} association with the Whig opposition, he was undoubtedly the best-known American, and among the most influential. Now, in 1774, having to present a petition from Massachusetts to the Privy Council for the removal of Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, Franklin found it an awkward feature of the case that the colony's charges were based on private letters which he himself had in some way acquired and sent to Boston. The Court party determined to crush him, and at the hearing put forward Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General—a typical King's Friend—who passed over the subject of the petition to brand Franklin in virulent invective as a thief and scoundrel. Amidst general applause, the petition was rejected as false and scandalous, and Franklin was dismissed from his position of colonial Postmaster-General.

      When Parliament met, it was instantly made clear that the sole idea controlling King, Cabinet, and the majority of Members was to bring the Massachusetts colonists to their senses by severe punitive legislation. The Whig opposition did not attempt to defend the destruction of the tea; but it spared no effort to make the Ministers see the folly of striking at effects and ignoring causes. In a masterly speech of April 19, 1774, Burke showed that the insistence on submission regardless of the grievances and of the nature {53} of the colonists was a dangerous and absurd policy, and Pownall and Chatham repeated his arguments, but without avail. The Ministerial party saw no danger, and felt nothing but the contempt of an irritated aristocracy. The original ideals of a general colonial reform were now lost sight of; the men responsible for them had all passed off the stage; Grenville, Townshend, and Halifax were dead, and North, careless and subservient to George III, Hillsborough, Suffolk, Sandwich, and Rochford—all noblemen, and in many cases inefficient—did not see beyond the problem of coercing noisy and troublesome rioters, indistinguishable from the followers of Wilkes. Over and over again they reiterated that the colonists' resentment was not to be feared, that they would submit to genuine firmness, that they were all cowardly and dared not resist a few regular troops. Lord George Germaine earned the thanks of Lord North by declaring that the colonists were only "a tumultuous and noisy rabble," men who ought to be "following their mercantile employment and not attempting to govern." Not a gleam of any other statesmanship appears in any of the Ministerial speeches than that displayed in the determination to exact complete submission.

      There were passed, accordingly, by the full Ministerial majority, five measures known as {54} the Coercive Acts, or, in America, as the Five Intolerable Acts. The first one punished Boston by closing the port to all trade until the offending town should recompense the East India Company for the tea destroyed. The next altered the government of Massachusetts Bay by making the councillors appointive instead of elective, by placing the appointment and removal of all judicial officers entirely in the hands of the governor, by placing the selection of jurors in the hands of the sheriffs and prohibiting town-meetings—apart from the annual one to elect officers—without the governor's permission. A third Act authorized the transfer to England for trial of British officers charged with murder committed while in discharge of their duties. A fourth Act re-established the system of quartering troops.

      The fifth Act reorganized the province of Quebec, whose government, under the Proclamation of 1763, had proved defective in several respects. The legal institutions of the new colony were not well adapted to the mixed French and British inhabitants, and the religious situation needed definition. The Quebec Act altered the government of the province by the creation of an appointive council, authorized the Catholic Church to collect tithes, and allow the French to substitute an oath of allegiance for the oath of {55} supremacy. Moreover, French civil law was permitted to exist. At the same time the boundaries of the province were extended into the region west of the mountains so as to include the lands north of the Ohio River.

      With the passage of these Acts, the original causes for antagonism were superseded. The commissioners of customs might have enforced the Navigation Acts indefinitely; the objectionable Tea Act might have stood permanently on the statute-book; but, without a more tangible grievance, it is not easy to conceive of the colonists actually beginning a revolution. The time had now come when a more serious issue was raised than the right of Parliament to collect a revenue by a tariff in the colonies. If Parliament was to be allowed to crush the prosperity of a colonial seaport, to centralize a hitherto democratic government created by a royal charter, and to remove royal officers from the scope of colonial juries, it was clear that the end of all the powers and privileges wrung from royal or proprietary governors by generations of struggle was at hand. Yet the striking feature in this punitive legislation was that the North Ministry expected it to meet no resistance, although its execution, so far as the government of Massachusetts was concerned, rested on the consent of the colonists. There was, under the British {56} system, no administrative body capable of carrying out these laws, no military force except the few regiments in Boston, and no naval force beyond a few frigates and cruisers. The mere passage of the laws, according to North and to Lord Mansfield, was sufficient to bring submission.

      Nothing more clearly shows the profound ignorance of the Tory Ministry than this expectation, for it was instantly disappointed. At the news of the Acts, the response from America was unanimous. Already the colonial Whigs were well organized in committees of correspondence, and now they acted not merely in Massachusetts but in every colony. The town of Boston refused to vote compensation, and was immediately closed under the terms of the Port Act. Expressions of sympathy and gifts of provisions came pouring into the doomed community; while public meetings, legislatures, political leaders and clergymen, in chorus denounced the Acts as unconstitutional, cruel, and tyrannous. The Quebec Act, extending the Catholic religion and French law into the interior valley under despotic government, was regarded as scarcely less sinister than the Regulating Act itself.

      Under the efficient organization of the leaders a Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in October, 1774, to make united {57} protest. This body, comprising without exception the most influential men in the colonies, presented a clear contrast to Parliament in that every man was the representative of a community of freemen, self-governing and equal before the law. The leaders did not regard themselves in any sense as revolutionaries. They were simply delegates from the separate colonies, met to confer on their common dangers. Their action consisted in the preparation of a petition to the King, addresses to the people of England, the people of Quebec, and the people of the colonies, but not to Parliament, since they denied its right to pass any such laws as those under complaint. The Congress further drew up a declaration of rights which stated sharply the colonial claims, namely, that Parliament had no right to legislate for the internal affairs of the separate colonies. It also adopted a plan for putting commercial pressure on England by forming an Association whose members pledged themselves to consume no English products, and organize committees in every colony to enforce this boycott. The leaders in the body were destined to long careers of public prominence—such men as George Washington, Lee, and Patrick Henry of Virginia, Rutledge of South Carolina, Dickinson of Pennsylvania, Jay of New York, Samuel and John Adams of {58} Massachusetts. They differed considerably in their temper, the Massachusetts men being far more ready for drastic words and deeds than the others; but they held together admirably. If such protests as theirs could not win a hearing in England, it was hardly conceivable that any could.

      Meanwhile the situation gave signs of being more explosive in reality than the respectful words of the Congress