A Contest Appears to be Opened
That Dark and Bloody River ∙ The French & Indian War ∙ Writs of Assistance ∙ Pontiac’s Rebellion ∙ The Proclamation of 1763 ∙ Grenville’s Revenue and Currency Acts ∙ ‘The Sugar Act’ ∙ The Declaration of Rights ∙ ‘no taxation without representation’
The French and Indian War
At the turn of 1754 France laid claim to most of North America. France’s New World kingdom stretched west from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, and then south down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Spain claimed Florida, and thus the North American British colonies were wedged between France to the north and west, Spain to the south, and the Atlantic to the east. Great Britain’s claims along the eastern seaboard, from northern Massachusetts to southern Georgia, may have looked trivial on a map, but the British colonies’ population doubled and doubled again as immigrants flooded her ports. Neither France nor Spain could match the growth of the British colonies, but nor did they intend to – France used her North American territories as a base for the fur trade (fur apparel was all the rage in Europe) and Spain focused its attentions on Central and South America. The quarter million people who claimed the British colonies as home at the turn of the 18th century grew to one and a quarter million by 1750; by the outbreak of the War of Independence, the British population would have swelled to near two million people. The growing population meant the need for new land, and settlers looked west beyond the mist-capped Alleghenies to a mysterious, frightening, and alluring land called the Ohio – or, in Iroquoian speech, Something Big.New France had built an extensive trade network with the Indians of the Ohio interior, and British settlers and traders pushing through the Appalachian passes compromised New France’s trade. The British offered better goods at better prices, and many Indians were keen on trading with Englishmen. The French ordered the British to return east beyond the mountains; the British countered by claiming that they, not the French, had rights to the land. This was flimsy argumentation: the original Virginia charter claimed all land west of its Atlantic borders to the Pacific Ocean, but when the claims to the Pacific were made, it was suspected that a mere few hundred miles separated the Atlantic from the Pacific, and some early 17th century maps show the eastern coast of North America shaped much like Central America. As France claimed everything west of the Appalachians, there was an ‘overlap’ of claimed sovereignty, and neither government budged on the issue.
Tensions focused on the convergence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at ‘The Forks of the Ohio’; here began La Belle Riviere, ‘that beautiful river,’ stretching west from the Forks at modern Pittsburg, Pennsylvania to its juncture with the Mississippi. The British craved this water highway from which settlements could be built all the way to the Mississippi, but the French used the river as a trade route: the Indians of the upper Ohio Valley could trade with the French via outposts on the Great Lakes, and by taking the Mississippi down to the Ohio, French traders could monopolize trade with the southern Indians. The French knew that if British colonists began using the river to build settlements, their southern sphere of operations would be strangled by hotheaded settlers and competing traders.
The numbers of British colonists crossing the Alleghenies into the Ohio Country grew from a trickle to a flood, and the French responded by trying to ‘dam up’ the country: they built forts along their rivers and spent a pretty penny hoarding alliances with the Indians. These ‘Indians of the Interior’ favored the French, even though their goods were cheaper quality and more expensive than their English counterparts, because the French did something that the British didn’t: they respected the Indians’ claims to their sacred lands and didn’t destroy that land by burning forests, creating fields, and erecting cabins. With British settlers forcing their way through the Alleghenies, the French building forts, and the Indians of the Interior whetting their tomahawks, the stage was set for a confrontation. The Ohio Valley would become a land renown for bloodshed between French, British, and Native Americans; so much blood would be spilled in this foreshadowing of the ‘Wild West’ a century later that the Ohio River would become known as ‘that dark and bloody river.’
In the summer of 1753, the French started construction on three forts to solidify their claims to the Ohio. The Virginian government across the Appalachians saw this as nothing less than a French attempt to prevent Virginia from continuing settlement within its own chartered boundaries. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, gritted his teeth at these emboldened and, as he saw it, uncalled-for French projects. News of the French forts traveled across the Atlantic, and the English leaders feared this to be an attempt on the part of the French to inaugurate another war between the two powers. France had come out of the last war stronger than Great Britain, and British leaders determined that anything resembling a ‘backing down’ would only prompt the French to build more forts. The Crown authorized Dinwiddie to act against the French. Not only was he authorized to build forts in Virginian territory west of the Alleghenies (territory the French claimed as their own), but he was also authorized to fight back if the French sought to oppose the construction of the British forts.
The Crown sent him artillery and ammunition so that he could construct and defend the first new fort, and he set his eyes on the Forks of the Ohio; a fort thus situated would have access not only to the Indians up the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, but it would also be a priceless trade post with the Indians to the southwest who lived off the Ohio and its tributaries. His appetite for trade didn’t come at the hope of enriching Virginia’s treasury but, rather, at lining his own purse: he had a part in the Ohio Company, a land surveying and trading business established to develop the Ohio territory, and by putting the Ohio Company at the Forks, he’d stand to make a handsome profit. He wasted no time in putting together a fort-building expedition, but because he’d crossed the Virginia legislature over the issue of his pay rate, they weren’t about to give in to his demands without getting something in return. Dinwiddie first had to undergo a political expedition with the legislature to begin his military (and fiscal) expedition to the Forks.
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| a replica of Fort Necessity built on the battlefield |
Tensions between the European powers had been in delicate limbo since the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ending the War of the Austrian Succession less than a decade earlier, and Washington’s blunder in the dark forests of modern-day Pennsylvania served as the catalyst for the eruption of what some historians have considered the first true world war. The ensuing conflict, set ablaze by Washington’s foolishness, would plunge the world into conflict; all the major super-powers would struggle against one another in what’s been called The Seven Years War. Some of this fighting happened in North America, and this theater of the war has been called the French and Indian War. The next year, 1755, the British sent troops and supplies across the Atlantic to seize the interior from the French. The British were successful in taking the forts at the head of the Bay of Fundy, and they deported the Acadian French still living in Nova Scotia, which only hardened the resolve of the sympathetic Canadians. British victory in the north was offset by disaster in the west: an expedition to destroy the French at Fort Duquesne, led by General Edward Braddock, was all but annihilated in an ambush orchestrated by the French and their Indian allies. Braddock lost his life in the Battle of the Monongahela, and Washington took command, executing a hasty but orderly retreat alongside a British soldier named Thomas Gage. The expedition had come within ten miles of Fort Duquesne before being waylaid. Braddock’s defeat emboldened the Shawnee and Lenni Lenape, and these natives began attacking colonial settlements in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The frontier rolled back to within one hundred miles of Philadelphia as Indian savagery – or, at least, reports of such savagery – forced thousands to flee east for the coast to escape the tomahawk. In 1756 the French captured the British fort on Lake Ontario, and they followed up that victory with another in 1757 when they seized the British fort on Lake George.
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| The Battle of the Monongahela |
Except for victory in Nova Scotia, thus far Great Britain had been humiliated by the French, and a politician by the name of William Pitt swore he knew how to turn bitter defeat into sweet victory. The English people listened, and he focused on an ‘America First’ policy, redirecting the bulk of Britain’s efforts to ousting the French from North America. His program plunged Britain into massive debt, but he was able to turn the tide of war. In 1758 45,000 British troops (half regulars and half colonial volunteers) set their teeth against 6800 French regulars and 2700 French provincials aided by their Indian allies. The French colonies were worse off than numbers tell, for the last year had been bad for crops, they were on the brink of starvation, and they were all but abandoned by their government as France’s war effort focused on protecting her possessions in the Caribbean and fighting on the European continent.
Pitt’s gamble worked, and the spring of 1757 saw the war in the colonies shift in favor of the British. The French at Fort Duquesne were deserted by their Indian allies, and unable to withstand the massive onslaught of British troops marching their way, the French blew up the fort and fled north. The British rebuilt the fort and renamed it Fort Pitt after the newfound English hero William Pitt (the remnants of Fort Pitt can be visited in modern-day Pittsburg, Pennsylvania). That same year the British captured Louisbourg, opening the St. Lawrence for the capture of Quebec in 1759. With Quebec and Louisbourg in the sack, the British marched on Montreal in 1760, and overwhelmed by enemy forces, the Governor-General of New France had no choice but to surrender. The Seven Years War lasted for another three years, but the North American theater had all but reached its end. At the end of the war, the peace treaty put Canada in English hands, and the colonists rejoiced in the knowledge that France’s grip on the continent had been extinguished. They were confident that nothing but good years lay ahead of them as English subjects. But the war was expensive. Someone had to pay for it. And that meant taxes.
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| The Battle of Quebec 1759 |
Tensions between redcoats and provincials had been far from amicable during the French and Indian War. British regulars disdained provincials for their unreliability under fire in line formation, though the provincials’ expertise at fighting the French and Indians in the bush-fighting style of the Rangers was commendable. The strain between these two classes of warriors wasn’t helped by the fact that colonial merchants continued smuggling with the French during the duration of the conflict. Smuggling had been a facet of colonial life for decades, and many colonists saw smuggling as the only way to make a profit or to keep their heads above water. British mercantilist laws sought to enhance the wealth of England at the reduction of colonial prosperity. England had embraced an unofficial policy of ‘benign neglect’ toward colonial smuggling, but British officials were so incensed at the fact that colonists had continued indulging in illegal trade during the war that they sought to clamp down on smuggling with ‘Writs of Assistance.’ Commissioners of Customs requested these Writs; when granted by inferior courts, the Writs authorized customs officials to use general warrants to search for suspected smuggled goods. Sheriffs and constables were directed to assist the customs officer in their searches. The lawyer John Adams, reflecting on the Writs, wrote that they empowered customs officers ‘in breaking open houses, stores, shops, bales, trunks, chests, casks, packages of all sorts, to search for goods, wares and merchandize which had been imported against the prohibitions, or without paying the taxes imposed by certain acts of Parliament, called the Acts of Trade.’ The crux of the matter, evoking outrage among colonial merchants, was that specific search warrants weren’t required.
As the Seven Years War raged throughout the world (despite the French having been defeated in North America), colonial lawyers challenged the Writs of Assistance. In late February of 1761, the case against the Writs was tried in Boston. Chief Justice Sewall had unexpectedly died, so Governor Francis Bernard appointed Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson to serve as chief justice. This only added insult to injury since Hutchinson had no qualifications for the position. James Otis Jr., a young Massachusetts lawyer, argued that the Writs were illegal. The result was anticlimactic: the justices decided to suspend the case and seek judgment from London. That judgment came six months later: the Attorney General declared that the Writs, issued for the purpose of enforcing the Acts of Navigation, were legal. Otis’ appeals had come to nothing, but he would take the platform again, and soon.
John Adams, who had traveled to Boston from his home in Braintree, had dispassionately observed the proceedings and took notes in a journal. Reflecting on the case, he remarked in later years, ‘The views of the English government towards the colonies and the views of the colonies towards the English government, from the first of our history to that time, appeared to me to have been directly in opposition to each other, and were now by the imprudence of administration, brought to a collision. England proud of its power and holding us in contempt would never give up its pretensions. The Americans devoutly attached to their liberties would never submit, at least without an entire devastation of their country and a general destruction of their lives. A contest appeared to me to be opened, to which I could foresee no end, and which would render my life a burden and property, industry and everything insecure. There was no alternative left, but to take the side which appeared to be just, to march intrepidly forward in the right path, to trust in providence for the protection of truth and right, and to die with a good conscience and decent grace, if that trial should become indispensible.’
The Navigation Acts tell us much about how the crown understood its relationship to the colonies. The series of laws known as the Navigation Acts were a direct outflow of the mercantilist economic theory had dominated Europe for two centuries (though Adam Smith coined the term ‘mercantilism’ in his 1776 Wealth of Nations, the theory had been in operation since the late 1500s). Mercantilism has been called a sort of ‘naïve bullionism,’ and its ideals began to dominate European thought and trade long before Smith put a name to it. The economic theory of bullionism defined wealth by the number of precious metals a nation owned; such thinking drove Spain’s colonization of South and Central America. England sought gold in Virginia and failed (but tobacco exports turned failure into success). France went a different route: her bullion became copper and beaver furs from the New World. Mercantilism takes a different route than bullionism, putting the emphasis on the circulation of money through trade rather than on the packrat hoarding of gold and silver. Mercantilist thinkers advocated increasing national power and wealth by tightening government control over the national economy. Emphasis shifted from the accumulation of precious metals to building a favorable balance of trade, the development of agriculture and manufacturing, and the establishment of foreign trading monopolies.
In A New Economic History of America, historian Gerald Gunderson calls mercantilism ‘a philosophy of nation building, a series of economic controls intended to strengthen a country and its colonies against other antagonistic empires. A major tenet of this view was self-sufficiency: sources of supply – raw materials, agriculture, and industry – should be developed domestically, or in the colonies, to prevent interruptions by hostile foreigners. A large merchant marine was also deemed important. Cargo vessels of that era were designed to repel pirates and thus could be easily adapted to military roles during wars. Finally, the mercantilists were preoccupied with specie (gold and silver), then a universal foundation of money. Short on possessing gold mines, as Spain did, specie could be acquired with a ‘favorable’ balance of trade, that is, through earning foreign exchange by selling exports that brought in more money than as paid out by imports.’ Mercantilism arose as an attempt to gratify bullionism through unconventional means.
Mercantilism put power in the central government from fear the fear that societies lacking strong governments risked collapsing into feudal provincialism. The interests of businesses and workers were secondary to the interests of the nation and thus to the interests of the government. Such thinking paved the way for how England viewed the colonies not in terms of English outposts but as cash-cows to enrich trade. England didn’t embrace mercantilism alone: France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic did so, as well, although each in their own ways suited to their specific situations in global trade. At the heart of mercantilist thought lies the hard-sought favorable ‘balance of trade.’ When a nation’s exports exceeded its imports, that nation enjoyed a favorable balance of trade, or a trade surplus. If, however, imports exceeded exports, that nation was rutted in an unfavorable balance of trade, or a trade deficit. Mercantilism declared that when merchants of one country had to purchase products from merchants of another, the purchasing country was weakened while the selling country was strengthened. Mercantilism in England fleshed itself out in laws enacted by the crown and Parliament: high tariffs (trade taxes) on manufactured goods, networks of overseas colonies, and barring the colonies from trading with other nations. These policies certainly strengthened national wealth, but they did so at the expense of the colonies. It’s no surprise, then, that these strategies fostered colonial resentment and, in time, fueled a passion for independence.
Mercantilism declared that the interests of any colony were to be wholly subordinate to those of the mother country. Crown and Parliament saw the colonies as weapons in the continual ‘trade warfare’ with other world powers. As such, the colonies were to serve as export markets and as suppliers of raw materials to England. Tariffs were placed on imports; bounties (monetary gifts) were put on exports. What this meant in practice is that the colonists had to pay taxes for imports, and English merchants were given money from the government for exporting goods. The export of some raw materials was banned, and the Navigation Acts restricted England’s domestic trade to her and her colonies, cutting out foreign nations. The colonies were denied the right to manufacture; raw goods were sent across the Atlantic for manufacture in England, and then England shipped the goods back across the Atlantic to the colonies where the colonists had to pay taxes on the imports. Colonists were thus forced to buy England’s manufactures – and they then had to pay for the privilege of doing so.
It’s important to note that most of the exchanged wealth didn’t go to the crown but to the merchants involved in the trade. Mercantilism promoted a partnership between the central government and the nation’s merchants; in doing so, private power and private wealth bloomed, and the government received a pretty penny through duties and taxes. The government protected its merchants’ interests through trade barriers, subsidies to domestic industries to maximize exports and minimize imports, and via policies of regulation. This built up trade surpluses so that bullion would flow into England, and much of the wealth claimed by the central government went straight to the undying build-up of its Royal Navy, which in turn protected the colonies (because of their trade value) as well as the merchants ferrying goods back and forth across the Atlantic.
Parliament focused its first mercantilist legislation on the burgeoning colony of Virginia in 1621, declaring that Virginia had to ship its tobacco only to English ports and that the ships used to transport tobacco had to be English with English captains. The legislation further decreed that certain items could only be shipped to Britain or to other British colonies. Later mercantilist laws came to be known as The Navigation Acts; navigation laws were common in mercantilist nations, and such laws limited trade exports and imports to the country’s citizens, either in the homeland or in the colonial outposts. The goal was to increase the wealth of the nation’s merchant marine so as to dominate trade and, consequently, the circulation of bullion.
The first law enacted in relation to the colonies to be considered part of The Navigation Acts came in 1651. The infamous ‘thirteen colonies’ were not yet in existence, as many had yet to be founded. Those already established included Virginia, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware. Following the English Civil War, England became the Commonwealth of England, a republic with Parliament at the head. The end of the Eighty Years’ War in 1648 saw the Dutch winning their independence, and the Dutch Republic’s wartime efforts had garnished it with a vast merchant marine and a heavy hand in global trade. Spain’s defeat at the hands of the Dutch Republic resulted in the Spanish lifting their trade embargoes against the Dutch, which served to exponentially increase the Dutch Republic’s trading sphere. To counter the Dutch Republic’s newfound prominence in global trade, England sought to cut the Dutch out of her shipping. The Navigation Ordinance of 1651 (also known as the Act of 1651) banned foreign ships from transporting goods from outside Europe to England or to her colonies, and third-party ships were banned from transporting goods from a country elsewhere in Europe to England, as well. The Act didn’t specify which global power was in view – all foreign shipping was banned – but the Dutch were targeted, and they knew it, since they boasted one of the largest segments of Europe’s international trade, not to mention a good portion of England’s coastal shipping. The Act of 1651, not-so-subtly aimed at the Dutch, would become a point of contention leading to the outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War.
The Act of 1651 didn’t last more than a decade: when Charles II took the throne following the Restoration of 1660, all the Commonwealth laws were revoked as having been decreed by illegitimate, usurping powers. The Restoration government scrapped the Act of 1651, but because the act served England well, the government reworked the law and renewed it in the Acts of 1660 and 1663. These two acts were known shorthand as the Navigation Acts, and they remained in place for nearly two centuries. The navigation Act of 1660 added a twist to the Act of 1651: the English ships captained by English captains tasked with importing and exporting also had to have crews that were ¾ English or colonial. The Act further decreed that ‘[No] sugars, tobacco, cotton-wool, Indigoes, ginger, fustic, or other dyeing wood… shall be shipped, carried, conveyed, or transported from any of the said English plantations to any land, island, territory, dominion, port or place whatsoever, other than to such English plantations as do belong to his Majesty.’ The Molasses Act of 1704 added molasses to the list and was aimed at both restricting molasses from the hands of the Dutch and French and persuading Englishmen to drink rum (made from molasses) over against French-made brandy. The Navigation Act of 1663 (or the Act for the Encouragement of Trade) required all European goods bound for English colonies to be shipped through England first; in England, these goods would be unloaded, inspected, duties would be paid, and then the goods would be reloaded onto English or colonial ships. Enumerated commodities (such as sugar, rice, and tobacco, among others) had to be landed in England, where duties would be paid on them, before being shipped to other countries. This boosted the cost to the colonies as well as the time it took to ship goods. This legislation essentially meant that Parliament took over the import business, and this lined the pockets of shippers and merchants since materials had to be exported not once but twice if they were coming back to the colonies.
These two navigation acts – the Acts of 1660 and 1663 – served as the bedrock foundation of England’s mercantilist relationship with the colonies. Further legislation throughout the 17th and 18th centuries sought to close loopholes, curb smuggling, and strengthen imperial enforcement of the laws. Colonial merchants resented the curtailing of their freedoms for the profits of the English merchants, and sometimes these colonial entrepreneurs turned to smuggling to avoid the onerous duties. English merchants griping about not being as rich as they could be didn’t sympathize with the colonial merchants who found themselves oftentimes scraping by; they insisted that these ungrateful colonists were too blockheaded to see how the navigation acts were for the good of the nation rather than for the good of each and every merchant (of course, it is easy to declare the virtuosity of a law if one is being enriched by it). The English merchants turned to Parliament and the crown for help in curbing colonial smuggling, but they didn’t find much aid. Because the national government made only a fraction of the wealth accrued through the acts (most of the money went to the merchants in bolstering the merchant marine), the government lacked the funds to enforce the acts against those circumventing them. Had the English government had financial backing, it’s unlikely they would’ve begun enforcing the laws with a high hand, anyway: France, England’s long-time enemy, also had territory in North America, and the English leaders knew it was but a matter of time before war against the French erupted on that continent, and they didn’t want the colonists bitter when it came time for them to take up musket and powder horn. Thus, an unspoken policy of salutary neglect developed as the English leaders turned a blind eye to smuggling, noting, of course, that the trade laws they did enforce weren’t by any means ‘easy’ on the colonists (they forced some people out of work). But those colonists negatively affected by the laws were in the minority, as colonial merchants comprised only one to two percent of the colonial population. These merchants may have enjoyed positions of power in colonial assemblies, but they couldn’t cultivate a ‘colonial voice’ to convince England to curb the acts. The vast majority of colonists found it easier to live within the system (if not more profitable to smuggle), and there were advantages in the Navigation Acts, not least of all the protection of colonial industry from foreign competitors (New England’s shipbuilding exploded through the roof, thanks in large part to the acts cutting out foreign shipbuilding competitors and forcing the merchant marine to look to New England for its timber). Nevertheless, the growing complaints from England’s merchant marine paved the way for The Act of 1696, which sought to restrain smuggling by authorizing colonial customs officials to seize unlawfully shipped goods and by decreeing that colonial merchants accused of smuggling were to be tried in special colonial courts without juries (since colonial juries tended to be sympathetic towards colonial smuggling).
Because the Navigation Act of 1633 was tailored more against European trade than trade in general, the colonists were able to get away with avoiding the English plantations. The greatest losers in the trade, then, were the English gentry who owned plantations in the West Indies; these gentry (who usually lived in England to avoid the awful heat and disease of the Caribbean and hired managers to work in their stead) petitioned Parliament and the crown to do something about the triangle trade, since they were losing money. Parliament paid attention to the British gentry, and for more than one reason. First, the British West Indies were England’s biggest trading partner, and because the Navigation Acts gave England a share in the wealth through tariffs and duties, the triangle trade indirectly affected England proper. Second, France remained England’s long-time enemy, and Parliament feared that by trading with French plantations rather than British ones, the colonial merchants were promoting the French islands over those of the British. Third, some in Parliament feared that the colonists were raising themselves too high, succeeding on their own initiative and outside the constraints of England, and they feared they could keep rising to a point of detached independence. Parliament acted to limit the trade and bring the British plantations back into the triangle; instead of making trade with foreign plantations in the West Indies illegal, they passed a prohibitively high tax on the colonies for the import of molasses from French islands (nine pence on every gallon of French West Indian rum, six pence on every gallon of foreign molasses, and five shillings on every hundredweight of foreign sugar). Thus, molasses from British plantations became cheaper than those from foreign ones weighed down by the tax, but because British sugar and molasses were still exorbitantly expensive, the colonists became emaciated as the British gentry stuffed themselves on gold. The high taxes would’ve dismembered New England’s economy if the colonies played by the rules; to prevent economic collapse, the colonial merchants turned to smuggling, and smuggling became more endemic than before. Customs officials were bribed by colonial merchants, and those who couldn’t be bribed were harassed and intimidated to the point of being rendered powerless.
Smuggling continued up through the French and Indian War, and many British soldiers who served in North America were alarmed and outraged at the apparent apathy of colonial merchants to Great Britain’s interests and their defiance in the face of its titanic Royal Navy. The Navigation Acts fostered a spirit of resentment in colonial merchants, and this resentment only intensified following the end of the French and Indian War. France was excommunicated from North America, and Great Britain, now rid of the French presence that served to foment their own salutary neglect but greatly in debt due to Pitt’s policies of waging (and winning) the Seven Years’ War, tightened its mercantilist acts as well as their enforcement: the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp and Quartering Acts of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, and the Tea Act of 1773; all these laws were mercantilist in nature, aimed at building national wealth at the expense of the colonies, and justified by the belief that the colonies owed this money because of the cost of waging the French and Indian War.
Historian Page Smith notes, ‘[The] colonists had to find ways to do as they wished – whatever was desirable, convenient, profitable, or, in their view, simply necessary – within the increasingly restrictive framework of laws and regulations promulgated by a body of men, indifferent, for the most part, to colonial needs and desires, whose notion was that the colonies existed and should exist, primarily if not exclusively, for the benefit of the mother country. The British, for their part, persisted in seeing the American colonies less as a collection of people whose needs should be attended to, than as the means by which the wealth and power of England could be enhanced. Colonial interests were, above all, subordinated to those of Englishmen in England.’
As the French in Montreal and at the frontier outposts began packing their bags for the trip up the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic, they couldn’t help but foster resentment among the Indians now living in British-occupied territory after having fought alongside the French. The majority of Indian tribes in northeast North America had taken up arms with the French; New France had put its focus on trade with the Indians rather than acquisition of Indian lands, and the pro-French Indians knew what the British had done to the Indian tribes of the east: the British robbed the Indians of their land, treated the natives as subhuman (often killing them for sport), and degraded their sacred lands by destroying forests to make room for croplands, inadvertently affecting the natural ecosystem and rendering game scarce. Indians were often forced into starvation as British traders scammed the natives.
With the French soundly defeated, English settlers began pouring into the Ohio territory, staking remote villages on Indian lands. William Johnson, superintendent of the northern Indians, and John Stuart, the same to the Indians of the south, agreed with British Colonel Henry Bouquet: the zealous wave of settlement could only end in a bloodbath. They sought the assistance of the Board of Trade (shorthand for ‘the Lords of Trade and Plantations’), a government committee in England that handled matters of trade relating to the colonies (it’s worth noting that the Board’s primary concern wasn’t the quality of life in the British colonies but ensuring that the colonies remained profitable for the mother country). The Board of Trade wrested control of the newly acquired lands from the hands of colonial governors, and any requests for land had to be sent across the Atlantic and be put before the Board. The Board had the final say in permitting or disallowing settlement.
That’s how it was supposed to work, anyhow: but the Board of Trade, isolated from the colonies by three thousand miles of churning, frothing, and stormy Atlantic, lacked the power to enforce the new regulations. Settlers, anxious to prosper on the new lands, disavowed royal law and continued pouring unabated into the Ohio Territory. All the while French holdovers dallied in leaving, hoping to incite the Indians into a renewed burst of violence against the English. Some Frenchmen promised that a renewed war could bring France back to the continent; the Indians would rather live with France than England, or with both, since they had become adept at playing the two empires off one another. Being subservient to the British, the worst of the two evils, was the least desired outcome. The French used English encroachments onto Indians lands to their advantage, and General Jeffrey Amherst, appointed Commander-in-Chief of North America , only played into the Frenchmen’s hands: he saw the Indians as savages, and he decreed that the old practice of placating Indians by giving them diplomatic presents had to cease. This served as a ‘last straw,’ and in May of 1763, the Indians rose up against the English.
An Ottawa Indian known to the English as Pontiac delivered the first strike at Detroit, besieging but not capturing the fort. More strikes were made at English-held outposts across the frontier. The quick succession of strikes had the look of orchestration, and so the uprising became known as ‘Pontiac’s Rebellion.’ In a span of two months, the frontier in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania had been consumed by fire and blood. Indian raiding parties took up musket and tomahawk against the encroaching white settlers. Men, women, children, and infants: all were declared trespassers, and all were treated accordingly. All British military posts west of the Forks of the Ohio were captured, with the sole exception being Fort Detroit, which languished under Pontiac’s siege. Colonel Bouquet, who had both feared and prophesied such a violent uprising, marched towards Fort Detroit, relieving the besieged garrison after a costly battle at Bushy Run. Bouquet’s eventual success came on two fronts: Johnson and Stuart bribed most of the Iroquois to betray their alliance with Pontiac and persuaded the southern tribes to remain neutral; and Bouquet spread smallpox among the Indians by handing out contaminated blankets. Pontiac’s Rebellion, though squashed, showed the officials in England what could happen if the Indians weren’t treated well. In October of 1763, Grenville’s ministry sought to reduce the tension by the Proclamation of 1763. Grenville became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1763; an agent of business interests, his gods were finance and a well-balanced budget. He lamented Pitt’s excessive spending and felt burdened to undue his policies which had thrust the nation into ridiculous debt.
Outrage gripped the colonists: thousands of settlers were being told to abandon their hard-earned new lives and cross back across the Appalachians to a land where they had nothing waiting and little opportunity. Many colonists had purchased land west of the Appalachians and, though they hadn’t yet uprooted and staked out new lives, they weren’t reimbursed for losses accrued. Furthering the gall, colonial veterans of the French and Indian War had received land grants west of the mountains as payment for their volunteer services during the war, and now the Crown was preventing them from taking their due. Droves of settlers ignored the Proclamation, and western colonial assemblies shouted that their charter rights had been violated. Political lobbying would result in readjusted boundaries in 1768 and 1770, but the British ministry refused to dissolve the boundary itself. Pontiac’s Rebellion had been too costly, and Grenville knew that if the Indians rebelled again, the price would be paid by England and fought by British soldiers.
The Proclamation of 1763 was but the first step in Grenville’s scheme for paying off Britain’s debt and securing her enlarged North American territory. The Seven Years War, despite touch-and-go beginnings, had been a smashing victory for Great Britain and Frederick the Great of Prussia. The 1763 Treaty of Paris opened great vistas for this blazing world power: Great Britain controlled all North America east of the Mississippi; Canada ; several islands in the West Indies; and large parts of India. But victory had been costly: Pitt’s policies had swollen the public debt to 136 million pounds. The nation not only needed to pay off the debt, but it also had to pay on the interest accruing at a nauseating rate. It only made sense that the American colonists would help bear the burden, and they wouldn’t be doing it alone: English citizens in the mother country felt their purses tighten, and they rioted against it.
The Revenue Acts of 1764
In lieu of Pontiac’s Rebellion, Grenville (pictured here to the left) declared that ten thousand troops under the North American Commander-in-Chief would be stationed in North America and the West Indies, though most were to be utilized in securing British claims in the Caribbean. This declaration came as the first of two blows against the colonists: radicals insisted that the real purpose of Grenville’s ‘Standing Army’ wasn’t to protect colonists from Indian raiding parties but to intimidate ‘His Majesty’s loyal, dutiful, and affectionate subjects.’ Benjamin Franklin, stationed in England as the colonial agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, told his English counterparts that small frontier garrisons widely spread throughout the frontier couldn’t prevent Indian incursions; he pointed out how British regular troops had floundered against Indian tactics in the French and Indian War. He insisted that Rangers, small bands of colonial fighters who fought in the bushwhacking style of the Indians but who had been disbanded in 1761, were the key to standing up against Indian raiding parties.The second blow came with Grenville’s declaration that the colonists themselves would pay for his controversial ‘Standing Army.’ Grenville’s policies already taxed Englishmen heavier than they’d ever been taxed before, and he didn’t expect the American colonists to pay the whole cost of stationing troops on the continent. He saw the defense of the frontier primarily as an imperial benefit rather than a colonial one, and the American taxes proposed to Parliament reflected this conviction: the cost of the ‘Standing Army’ would be around 200,000 pounds a year, and while Great Britain would pay the major share, 78,000 pounds were to be drawn from the colonies. Besides all this, the average debt born by colonists was eight shillings per person, compared to eighteen pounds per person in England proper. The way Grenville, and most Englishmen, saw it was that the American colonists still had a much easier go of things.
Grenville’s ministry cobbled together a plan to raise the 78,000 pounds: a three-pence-per-gallon duty would be placed on molasses, among other items exported to Britain. These duties would be imposed or levied on a list of goods ranging from ‘foreign white or clayed sugars’ to silks and calicoes from Persia, China, and East India. A duty of seven pounds would be exacted for every ton of Madeira wine. Coffee, whale fins, skins and hides, raw silk, and potash would be regulated as well. Grenville hoped these slight duties wouldn’t encumber the colonists while raising the revenue needed to help pay for his ‘Standing Army.’ On 5 April 1764, the Revenue Act passed in Parliament and, approved by the king, became law. The Currency Act declared that negotiable bills of credit – which every colony had been issuing as a normal medium of exchange – would no longer be considered legal tender in legal transactions, least of all as payment on the duties demanded by what the colonists would call ‘The Sugar Act.’ The Currency Act prohibited the colonies from printing paper money. Because many American businesses were engaged in credit sales with England, they were crippled when financial crises gripped London in the 1760s and 1770s. British merchants, burdened by the financial crises, called in their debts. Because of the inability to generate any form of liquid currency due to the Currency Act, American businesses were often ruined and the colonial economy fractured. The Currency Act ignored the fact that very little hard money circulated in the colonies; indeed, much of colonial trading was by bartering. In the Chesapeake, debts and wages were often paid in tobacco or in notes that could be exchanged for tobacco. In the Carolinas, rice served the same function. Merchants who came across hard money didn’t send it back into colonial circulation but used it to pay customs duties and to pay off debts to their London banks. The Currency Act, though paling in historical significance to the Sugar Act, deepened the colonial depression, and many colonists believed Grenville’s aim was to turn them into beggars as British traders and merchants gorged themselves on Americans.
When in The Closet (an oak-paneled apartment behind the Throne Room that served as the royal operations center), George III made up for his awkward public presence with a cunning, clever approach to politics; instead of fighting Parliament to get his way, the young king showed an adeptness at exploiting the government setup. By using bribery and political awards, he gained control of over two hundred votes in the House of Commons. An example of George III’s prowess at bribery: as Thomas Gage struggled to wrestle with chaos in Boston in 1774, England was gripped in the political fervor of a general election. Increasingly bad news in America emboldened George’s opponents. George dissolved Parliament and used the time to buy his power in the Commons by taking money from the Secret Service Fund (a fund usually used to pay spies) and spending over 70,000 pounds in bribes. As a result, he purchased key members in the Commons, and he coached Parliament to do his bidding.
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As Grenville advocated employing thousands of troops for the purpose of defending Great Britain’s greatly-expanded Empire, George III had his own reasons to seek the same. Many of the officers in the armed forces directly supported him, and a hefty number of regimental colonels had seats in Parliament. With peace at hand after the Seven Years War, the king knew many would be disbanded, much to their chagrin; and with disbandment there may also be a slipping away of some of his parliamentary support. George stood by Grenville, and, besides, the cost of funding the soldiers in North America would only be a meager price to pay for the American colonists.
But in America, things were seen somewhat differently. The Revenue Act came at a bad time for the colonists: an economic depression following the cessation of hostilities against the French had deepened by 1763. Although the depression could easily be understood in light of how warfare boosted business while peace drained it, the colonists blamed the depression not on simple economic theory but on the new imperial measures being levied against them (more than one Englishman would point out that the depression began before the new imperial measures came into being, but such matters were inconvenient to disgruntled colonists struggling to eek out a living). Colonial unhappiness was only exacerbated by the fact that for the first time in their memory, Great Britain was actually enforcing the Navigation Acts. The period of ‘salutary neglect’ had run its course, and beginning in the summer of 1763, Grenville’s ministry tightened the reigns to make sure duties were paid and smuggling curbed.
This tightening began when Grenville’s ministry ordered Customs collectors to report to their colonial posts or to vacate their offices. Most collectors lived in England, raking in money from their positions of status and leaving the dirty work to deputies who gorged themselves on bribery from colonial merchants. From a merchant’s perspective, bribery was cheaper than paying the duty, and it enabled merchants to keep themselves from being pushed out of the trade altogether. Thomas Hutchinson, who loathed smugglers, noted with irony that without bribery, the Customs collectors would starve; despite his distaste of smugglers, he understood why deputy collectors accepted bribes that far exceeded their measly salary. Following Grenville’s declaration, many of the Customs collectors resigned their posts rather than live in the colonies three thousand miles away. Their replacements were made of steel wool, and merchants found it hard to bribe them in the new atmosphere of enforcement.
Grenville’s next step in tightening the enforcement of the Navigation Acts was to send someone to enforce them: naval vessels set off from England to patrol American ports and uphold the mercantilist laws. These naval vessels were to seize small craft, such as barges and dories, that were traveling from one side of the harbor to the other. The Navy seized small craft in the ports of New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Providence, and Newport, and they combed the Delaware River. Clever royal skippers sought to line their pockets with colonial prize money made off these captured cargoes; furthering the corruption, if a ship carrying illegal cargoes was seized, those seizing the vessel would be rewarded, and the commissioner and royal governor received prize money as well. These rewards created a breed of naval officers intent on devouring smugglers (with little regard to whether the captured smugglers were, indeed, smugglers). Royal Navy officers were told to ‘act in the capacity of the meanest revenue officers’, and they were empowered to board and search any ship suspected of carrying contraband. In the same vein as the Writs of Assistance, specific search warrants weren’t required. If Navy officers boarded a ship and found contraband, they were authorized to seize the ship and order her owners and master to appear before a Vice-Admiralty court where a judge would decide guilt or innocence. These Vice-Admiralty courts embittered colonial merchants: colonial courts were stocked with jurors sympathetic to smuggling, but Vice Admiralty courts did away with juries; the judge who rendered verdict and decided penalties was a royal appointee who was already biased against the defendant. Indeed, those going to trial before a Vice Admiralty court were presumed to be guilty unless, perhaps, they were able to prove otherwise.
Merchants fought these roving naval officers as best they could. When Navy vessels came into port, the Navy would look about town for sailors to recruit. The merchants strove to beat them to the punch, paying higher wages so that the Navy couldn’t find the men it needed to perform its duties. The Navy was reduced to using impressment gangs, and the merchants responded by inciting small crowds to harass the Navy sailors. Across the eastern seaboard, 1764 saw a slew of clashes between merchants and the Royal Navy, the stories of which were printed and reprinted in colonial newspapers. In the late spring in New York City, William Mumford questioned a merchant’s papers. A band of the city’s merchants arrested him for debt and paraded him through the city streets where a mob pelted him with filth. He was jailed and released only when he swore to vacate the city.
Rhode Island, long considered a ‘den of smugglers,’ saw more protests against the Royal Navy than any other port city. Rhode Island imported over a million gallons of molasses a year to be used in rum distilleries. The Revenue Act’s three-pence-a-gallon would’ve produced a revenue of more than fourteen thousand pounds each year. A clairvoyant Rhode Islander noted that the revenue would amount to ‘more than was ever in [the colony] at one time: this money is to be sent away, and never to return; yet the payment is to be repeated every year… Can this possibly be done?... There is surely no man in his right mind believes this possible!’ The Rhode Islanders knew it wasn’t possible, and so they had no choice but to continue smuggling with an extra dose of fearful caution. The Newport Mercury, a Rhode Island newspaper, reported in December that a British lieutenant boarded a vessel suspected of smuggling; a crewmember supposedly attacked him with a broad-axe, and sidestepping the blow, the lieutenant thrust his sword into the attacker. In the ensuing fight, several members of the British party had been thrown overboard. Tensions escalated (furthered by reports of royal sailors stealing chickens and sending out pressgangs), and when the British vessel St. John attempted to sail out of Newport, the harbor batteries fired on her under orders from two civilian councilors.
The colonists viewed the Revenue Act, and its subsequent enforcement via the Royal Navy, as an offensive and arbitrary act. Any colonist engaged in commerce might be charged as a smuggler, regardless of evidence, and be forced to journey to Halifax, Nova Scotia – which took a lot of money and a lot of time – to appear before his accuser and a more-than-partial judge, both of whom stood to profit if the accused were declared guilty. If smugglers had enough to worry about, the honest merchant suddenly found himself overwhelmed in duties, fighting through a sea of red tape, and hoping that someone with a grudge against him didn’t make false accusations to the Navy. As the merchants fought back in their own ways (not least in Rhode Island!), colonial governments wrestled with the Revenue Act from a political perspective; it wouldn’t be long before a simple, succinct phrase turned into an oft-repeated jargon loaded with angry sentiment and political baggage: ‘No taxation without representation!’
1764: Escalating Tensions
The infamous slogan 'No Taxation Without Representation' didn’t feature as prominently in the days of the Sugar Act as one might expect, though its roots were deepening. Most complaints didn’t focus on the political aspects of the Revenue Act so much as its negative economic effects. Some colonists did, however, see past their emptied purses to a weightier matter at hand. The firebrand Samuel Adams declared that any taxes imposed on the colonists ‘without their having a legal representative where they are laid’ reduced the colonists ‘from the character of free subjects to the miserable condition of tributary slaves.’ In January of 1765 the colonial newspaper The Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser printed an essay written by a correspondent in Rhode Island who attacked the Sugar Act. The writer from Rhode Island captured what was becoming a common feeling in the colonies, and not least in the port cities: that ‘beyond doubt… the British subjects in America, have equal rights with those in Britain; that they do not hold those rights as a privilege granted them, nor enjoy them as a grace and favor bestowed; but possess them as an inherent indefeasible right; as they and their ancestors were freeborn subjects, justly and naturally entitled to all the rights and advantages of the British constitution.’ The essayist noted that the climate across the Great Pond had changed. ‘The British ministry,’ he wrote, ‘whether induced by a jealousy of the colony, by false informations, or by some alteration in their system of government, we have no information; whatever hath been the move’ now determined to ‘limit, restrict, and burden’ colonial trade, going so far, even, as to impose ‘internal taxation’ in the form of a duty of stamps! The Stamp Act, which would be hotly debated in Parliament in February, would only add fuel to the fire beginning to rage in the colonies.
Colonial sentiment regarding their rights as British subjects flowed from an understanding of the British Empire as if it were still in the throes of the English Civil War, Parliament’s revolt against the injurious prerogatives of the Crown, and the Glorious Revolution of 1689. The Glorious Revolution gave birth to The Declaration of Rights, a formal document in which William of Orange and his wife Mary accepted limitations on their royal rule that Parliament had snatched from the Stuart kings in the English Civil War. The Declaration of Rights was accompanied by The Bill of Rights, which set in concrete lettering the rights that Englishmen claimed and which they felt had been lost under the reigns of the Stuart kings. These rights included the right of trial by a jury of one’s peers in one’s ‘vicinage’ or neighborhood (the Vice Admiralty courts in Nova Scotia transgressed this right), freedom of speech and assembly, the right to just and equal laws, freedom from self-incrimination, freedom of worship (unless, of course, you were Catholic), and (of particular interest to the colonies) the declaration that no Englishman could henceforth be taxed without his consent, as channeled through his elected representative in the House of Commons. The English Civil War had taught the colonists that the rights of a free people had to be fought for, and that old titanic struggle in the mother country had been met with success not just once but twice (in the Commonwealth of England and the Glorious Revolution). Because the political instability in the days of the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Glorious Revolution meant that being on the wrong side of the winning power meant losing one’s head, the colonies had swelled with dissidents fleeing England – and many of them ended up in the American colonies. Thus the ideologies of this period of England’s history remained cemented in colonial minds, and with the Revenue Act being enforced, and with whispered rumors of yet another Act to be made on stamps, such sentiments only blossomed and spread.
Across the Atlantic in England, the days of the Glorious Revolution were but a memory, and the political system was a far cry from what many colonists thought it to be. Colonists who had never been to England (of which were the vast majority) believed England’s politicians to be decent men interested in preserving English rights; those colonists who had been to England knew that English politics were rife with corruption, self-advancement, and marked by a total disregard for the poor and the urbanites. As colonial sentiments regarding their rights as Englishmen traveled across the Atlantic, exasperated British officials sighed in annoyance. One official quipped, ‘Ask a colonist for some money to help protect his borders against the French and Indians, and he will deliver you a lengthy lecture on his rights.’ The death-knell of such idealism may have sounded long ago in Great Britain, but the rising voices of names now revered in American history would grow over the coming years to foster an atmosphere of resentment towards Parliament and, eventually, outright revolution.
In the early months of 1765 nine colonial legislatures sent messages to England through their governors or agents. They argued that Parliament had abused its power to regulate trade; the British planters in the West Indies, most of whom were gentry in England, would benefit from the enforcement of the Acts of Trade and the Revenue Act, but, they argued, neither the colonies nor England would benefit. Most legislatures were wise enough to avoid the subject of Parliament’s right to taxation, but two volatile legislatures (those of New York and North Carolina) went so far as to deny Parliament’s right to levy anything akin to the Revenue Act absent representation. New York argued that ‘an exemption from the burden of ungranted, involuntary taxes, must be the grand principle of every free State. Without such a right vested in themselves, exclusive of all others, there can be no liberty, no happiness, no security; it is inseparable from the very idea of property, for who can call that his own, which may be taken away at the pleasure of another? And so evidently does this appear to be the natural Right of Mankind, though subject to the payment of a fixed periodical tribute, never were reduced to so abject and forlorn a conclusion, as to yield to all the burdens which their conquerors might at any future time think fit to impose. The tribute paid, the debt was discharged; and the remainder they could call their own.’ The clamor from the colonies grew in England, and one editorial in the London Public Ledger urged that Parliament ‘must take off every restriction which has been laid upon [colonial] commerce; we must grant [the colonies] an open, uninterrupted trade; and, instead of treating them as rivals or enemies in traffic, encourage them as brothers and friends.’
The tone of the Public Ledger didn’t represent most English sentiment towards what was perceived as ‘spoiled whining’ from the colonies. Most English folk didn’t think much of the colonies, if they thought of them at all. Yes, the colonies factored large in the minds of British merchants, but only insofar as they served to profit the merchants themselves. A good colony, in the British merchants’ eyes, was one that was grateful for belonging to England and cooperative with Parliament’s mercantilist programs that directly benefitted British merchants. As Londoners’ ears perked up with the growing news of colonial dissent, they saw the colonists as bratty children who ought to be grateful for their place in world affairs. Some Englishmen accused the colonists of being the ‘scum or off-scouring of all the nations,’ or ‘a mongrel breed of Irish, Scotch, and Germans leavened with outcasts and convicts,’ even as ‘a hotchpotch medley of foreign enthusiastic madmen.’
More forward-looking Englishmen felt a twinge of anxiety as they looked across the Atlantic to colonists who were lightly taxed, wealthy compared to most Englishmen, and constantly growing in numbers. One prophesied that ‘in the nature of things, [the colonists must] aspire at a total independence, unless we are beforehand with them, and wisely take the power out of their hands.’ Many Englishmen, especially those in political office and close to Parliamentary leaders and to the king himself, saw it a necessity ‘to stop those provinces in their career to opulence and importance,’ or else ‘the Seat of Royal Residence may be transferred from St. James to Faneuil Hall and the devoted Island made a pivotal Province of its Provinces!’ John Adams in 1756 had speculated just such an eventuality; he wrote to a friend that history recorded a great swathe of nations that had risen ‘from contemptible beginnings’ to spread their influence ‘till the whole globe is subjected to their sway… When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly effects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place.’ He speculated that the ceaseless immigrations to the colonies ‘may transfer the great seat of [power] into America.’ Anticipating the expelling of the French from Canada, he had prophesied that the only way for Great Britain ‘to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us… Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men in each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each other’s influence and keep the country [in equilibrium].’ Such patterns of thought were growing in the minds of Englishmen, and hushed Parliamentary sessions were aimed at determining how to quell the growing colonial unease.
They planted by your care? No! Your oppression planted them in America! They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country, where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable, and among others to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most subtle and I take upon me to say the most formidable of any people upon the face of God’s earth. And yet, actuated by principle of true English liberty, they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with those they had suffered in their own country, from the hands of those who should have been their friends. They nourished up by yourindulgence? They grew by your neglect of them! As soon as you began to care about them, in one department and another, who were perhaps the deputies to deputies to some member of those house, sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon them, men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest seats of justice, some, who to my knowledge were glad of going to a foreign country to escape being brought to the bar of a Court of Justice in their own. They protected by yourarms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defense, have exerted a valor amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defense of a country, whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument. And believe me, remember this day I told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany them still. But prudence forbids me to explain myself further. God knows I do not at this time speak from motives of my party. What I deliver are the genuine sentiment of my heart.
Barre’s speech stunned the House, but his words fell on deaf ears. Parliament remained rooted in their convictions, even refusing to hear the petitions from the colonial assemblies. The Stamp Act had been postponed last session to allow time for the colonies to respond to the proposal; a frustrated Whig leader, General Seymour Conway, mused, ‘This time [to the colonial assemblies] has been given. The representations are come in from the colonies, and shall we shut our ears against that information, which, with an affection of candor, we allotted sufficient time to reach us? From whom, unless from themselves, are we to learn the circumstances of the colonies, and the fatal consequences that may attend the imposing of this tax?’ His words, like Barre’s, were rejected as just so much noise, and when the Stamp Act went to a vote, the Act passed. Half of those who voted for its passing did so because they were convinced the colonies had a responsibility to bear the cost of their own defense; the other half, wearied from all the debate on the floor and ready for it to be over so they could move on to other things, voted to put it behind them. The efforts of the latter, while rewarding in the moment, would come back to haunt them.
Additional Notes:
[1] Negotiations during the formation of the Treaty of Paris met differing opinions regarding whether Canada should be held by the British or returned to the French. The Duke of Bedford saw the French presence in North America as advantageous to Britain’s relationship with her colonies: the French presence, along with their Indian allies, would keep the colonies dependent upon Great Britain for protection. William Pitt’s opponents argued, in line with the Duke of Bedford, that the absence of the French menace from the North American continent would cause the Americans to act more independently; arguing on the side of Pitt, Benjamin Franklin asserted that a union of the American colonies to oppose Great Britain wasn’t ‘merely improbable but impossible without the most grievous tyranny and oppression… while the government is mild and just, while important civil and religious rights are secure such subjects will be dutiful and obedient.’ Pitt and Franklin argued that an enlarged British territory in North America would contribute to Great Britain’s imperial ambitions and provide a flood of raw materials to England, increasing the country’s maritime prowess. History would tell whether Bedford or Pitt were right; Thomas Hutchinson, serving in Massachusetts during the tumultuous pre-Revolutionary era, wrote a decade after the French and Indian War, ‘Before the peace of 1763 I thought nothing so much to be desired as the cessation of Canada. I am now convinced that if it had remained to the French none of the spirit of opposition to the Mother Country would have yet appeared and I think the effects of it worse than all we had to fear from the French and Indians.’
[2] In 1763 the annual interest was just under 4.5 million pounds. Within the next year, it raised to around 11 million pounds.
[3] Englishmen in the mother land paid far more taxes than the colonists overseas: for every shilling a colonist paid in taxes, the average Englishman paid twenty-six! This disparity factored into why many Englishmen viewed the cries of the colonists over taxes as ‘spoiled whining.’
[4] In May of 1763 citizens in Exeter, England protested Parliament’s ‘Cider Tax.’ Apples laced with crepe adorned church doors bearing the inscription, Excise the first fruits of Peace. Thousands filled the streets in a grand procession; at the head of the procession rode a man on a donkey, with a sign affixed to his back: From Excise and the Devil, good Lord deliver us. Apples hung in crepe around the donkey’s neck, and thirty-odd men wielding white wands crested with crepe-adorned apples guarded the donkey. Then came a cart bearing an effigy of Lord Bute hanging from the gallows; behind him came a cider hogshead borne by men dressed in clothes of mourning. Cheered on by impassioned spectators, the men threw Bute’s effigy into a roaring bonfire. Englishmen protested the new taxes, even rioting against them; and the American colonists would soon follow suit.
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