An American Union

Philadelphia, late 18th century

Philadelphia 1774  ∙  The Fairfax Resolves  ∙  First Things: Voting, American Rights, and the Galloway Plan  ∙  The Suffolk Resolves∙  The Association  ∙  The Declaration of Rights  ∙  A Petition to the King  ∙  On Independence and Revolution  ∙  Reactions in the Colonies  ∙  Reactions in England

The City of Brotherly Love

Philadelphia, 1774. The ‘city of brotherly love’ lie where the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers met. Its founder, William Penn, designed an immaculate grid of broad streets (most named after trees, such as Pine, Locust, and Laurel) with roomy parks, which gave the city an affluent atmosphere foreign to older towns where narrow streets twisted this way and that. Penn’s design, however, wasn’t merely for aesthetic purposes: the wide-open spaces and broad streets helped to prevent decimating fires. Philadelphia also boasted the first volunteer fire department along with the first fire insurance company called the Hand-in-Hand (both of which can be largely credited to Benjamin Franklin). The city – which claimed more than three thousand houses and a population of around thirty thousand – was viewed by many as the ‘capital’ of the American colonies and was internationally praised as one of the world’s most sophisticated and progressive cities. Visitors marveled at its wonders: paved ways (or ‘pavements’) made of broad stones reserved for ‘foot passengers’ ran along the sides of the street, enabling people to avoid the wagons, carriages, and horses of the road; whale-oil lamps (an innovation in which Benjamin Franklin played a part) lit the streets at night; and a patrolling police force monitored the city at all hours. The city boasted two libraries – The Library Company, founded by Franklin, and open to the public; and another founded by the Association of Carpenters – along with one of the most progressive ‘mental hospitals’ of its time, in which lunatics and other ‘loonies’ were kept in padded rooms. The State House – later known as Independence Hall – was the city’s pride and joy, a monstrous yet handsome building that contained apartments for visiting native American chieftains. Visitors often remarked on the cosmopolitan nature of the city’s inhabitants, for the city – despite its humble Quaker beginnings – had become a melting pot for all sorts of different people: there were Scotsmen, Irish, Dutch, Germans, and English; there were Quakers (of course), Methodists, Seven Day Adventists, Presbyterians, Congressionalists, Puritans, Moravians, Roman Catholics and Anabaptists (and even a small community of Jews). Most striking to visitors was the plain fact that these people, hailing from different cultures and religions and worldviews, lived side-by-side in peace not only as acquaintances but also as friends. The city truly was filled with ‘brotherly love.’

The Continental Congress – known today as the First Continental Congress, since, unbeknownst to the attendees at the time, there would be several – was slated to begin on 5 September. Though the calls for a new Congress first came from New York, and were then picked up and trumpeted throughout the colonies, such congresses weren’t rare: there had been one during the French and Indian War – the Albany Congress – and another during the Stamp Act Crisis. While those first Congresses centered around determining what action to take, this Congress, while certainly meeting to determine action, also had a philosophical undertone: the colonies, meeting together as one, would hash out their rights and nuance precisely how Parliament had breached them. While many colonies had already done this – Massachusetts and Virginia in particular – this would be the first time the colonies came together as a whole to do so. Benjamin Franklin had pushed for such a measure to Thomas Cushing in July 1773, writing, ‘[The] strength of an empire depends not only on the union of its parts, but on their readiness for united exertion of their common force.’ He hinted that war between Great Britain and the American colonies was a prospect and urged that a ‘GENERAL CONGRESS’ assemble posthaste to make ‘a full and solemn assertion and declaration of their RIGHTS… Such a step, I imagine, will bring the dispute to a crisis.’ And if it did, ‘all the world will allow that our proceeding has been honorable.’ As the scheduled date for the Congress approached, its detractors quivered over what might transpire; Thomas Gage informed Lord Dartmouth of the coming gathering, writing, ‘It is not possible to guess what a body composed of such heterogeneous matter will determine; but the members from [Boston], I am assured, will promote the most haughty and insolent resolves; for their plan has ever been by high-sounding sedition, to terrify and intimidate.’ As an aside he added that the patriots in other colonies were ‘strangely violent in [their] support of Boston.’ British officer Hugh Percy, watching the Philadelphia-bound Massachusetts delegates ride past the Boston Common in full view of drilling redcoats, predicted that ‘instead of agreeing to anything, they will all go by the ears at this Congress.’ But if he were wrong, ‘there will be more work cut out for the administration in America than perhaps they are aware of… I am certain it will require a great length of time, much steadiness and many troops, to re-establish good order and government.’

Twelve of the thirteen colonies ended up sending delegates to the First Continental Congress, resulting in fifty-six total delegates, twenty-two of whom were lawyers. Connecticut was the first to commission delegates: in early June, shortly after the Boston Port Act went into effect, the lower House of the Connecticut legislature ordered its chief committee of correspondence to choose delegates. Rhode Island followed suit shortly after, followed by South Carolina. Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and New Jersey had their official legislatures dissolved by royal governors, so their delegates were chosen by illegal provincial assemblies. Lord Dunmore of Virginia had dissolved the House of Burgesses, so an unofficial ‘convention’ named the delegates. In New York, the Assembly – torn between conservative and radical factions – couldn’t settle the matter, so local committees named their delegates. The only colony to abstain from dispatching delegates was Georgia, but this wasn’t because they disagreed with the idea of a Congress: rather, they were facing a Creek uprising on their northern frontier, and they didn’t want to cheapen British goodwill in case they needed redcoats to shoulder arms in their defense. 

Unlike modern congressmen, delegates to the First Continental Congress didn’t have any designated powers: they could only consult and discuss matters with their intercolonial colleagues to deduce the best ‘prudent and lawful measures’ to attain redress of grievances from King George III. The delegates had widespread convictions: for example, nearly everyone – minus, of course, some of the more diehard conservatives, who were certainly in the minority – agreed that Parliament had no power to tax the colonies. This idea had been launched nearly a decade earlier during the Stamp Act Crisis and had gained so much traction that it became a staple of patriot belief systems. Regulation of trade was the only authority Parliament had, and it had this authority ‘as a matter of expediency born of the complexity of empire;’ but as for acting overlord over colonial governments, it had no right. Many of the delegates believed that the British ministry, according to one anonymous New Yorker, was ‘bent on the establishment of an uncontrollable authority in parliament over the property of Americans.’ The Intolerable Acts only served to show Parliament’s true colors: what Americans had suspected all along had finally been brought out into the open. William Drayton of South Carolina read the writing on the wall: the issue had gone beyond unconstitutional taxation to whether Britain ‘has a constitutional right to exercise Despotism over America!’ 

In the weeks and days before Congress opened, delegates began arriving to Philadelphia and were greeted with fanfare and celebration. While most delegates lodged in taverns, others stayed in the homes of well-to-do well-wishers or with friends. Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate, wrote to his wife that Philadelphia was ‘full of people from abroad’ and that all the lodgings were ‘full or taken up.’ Everyone was ‘in high spirits, if it is possible to be really so when the eyes of millions are upon us, and who consider themselves and their posterity interested in our conduct.’ John Adams, upon meeting the delegates of other colonies, most of the them for the first time, wrote a friend, ‘Here are fortune, abilities, learning, eloquence, acuteness, equal to any I have ever met with in my life. Here is a diversity of religions, educations, manners, interests, such as it would seem almost impossible to unite in one plan of conduct.’ One of those delegates whom Adams found mesmerizing was George Washington of Virginia; the historian Page Smith captures his sentiments: ‘[Washington’s] lack of airs, his candor and directness, his manner of weighing each sentence before he uttered it – he was cautious and reflective but never ponderous – his soberness and discretion, all these qualities in the Virginia militia colonel impressed the New Englanders. For his part, Washington, who had half-expected to encounter a group of radical agitators, was most reassured to meet the men from the Bay Colony. Even their appearance was reassuring. Samuel Adams looked a bit like a clerk in a mercantile house. Except for his dark, slightly protuberant eyes, which read faces as avidly as his cousin John read books, there was little about him to suggest the fiery revolutionist. John Adams looked very much like what he was – a short, stout provincial lawyer – and, carefully minding his tongue so as not to alarm Washington, he sounded both learned and eminently sensible. Cushing was a florid, handsome man, more cosmopolitan in his manners than his companions but equally reassuring in his temper. Washington and the Bostonians came away mutually impressed, and another very crucial link was forged between Massachusetts and Virginia – perhaps, in retrospect, the most crucial link of all.’ 

Washington was a good friend to have for the Massachusetts delegates; like them, he didn’t have high hopes for a conservative response to the colonial crisis. Months before the Congress, when considering the call for a general congress to decipher the best steps forward in acquiring relief from the Coercive Acts, he mused that he would certainly join in ‘a humble and dutiful petition to the throne, provided there was the most distant hope of success. But have we not tried this already? Have we not addressed the Lords and remonstrated to the Commons? And to what end? Did they deign to look at our petitions? Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us? Does not the uniform conduct of Parliament for some years past confirm this?... Is there anything to be expected from petitioning after this? Is not the attack upon the liberty and property of the people of Boston before restitution of the loss of the India Company was demanded, a plain and self-evident proof of what they are aiming at? Do not the subsequent bills (now I dare say acts), for depriving the Massachusetts Bay of its charter… convince us that the administration is determined to stop at nothing to carry its point? Ought we not, then, to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test?’ A few weeks later he wrote that Boston’s mischievousness didn’t warrant Parliament’s harsh reaction; because the callous measures weren’t needed, the Coercive Acts constituted ‘self-evident proofs of a fixed and uniform plan’ to lay internal taxes on the colonies. He wrote that Gage was acting more like a ‘Turkish bashaw’ than a governor. He pondered whether the general’s conduct since arriving in Boston ‘exhibited an unexampled testimony of the most despotic system of tyranny that was ever practiced in a free government?’

On 18 July, Washington met with George Mason and other high-rolling ‘Freeholders and Inhabitants’ of Virginia’s Fairfax County at the Alexandria courthouse. They cobbled together the ‘Fairfax County Resolutions,’ a political philosophy whose twenty-four resolves would shape American philosophy over the next couple years . Couched within these resolves was the settled conviction that Virginians, by virtue of their English ancestors who had founded the colony, had their English rights confirmed by royal charter, and by virtue of the laws of nature and of nations had all ‘the privileges, immunities and advantages’ enjoyed by all Englishmen. The resolves stipulated that they had the right to be governed by no laws except those to which they gave consent via freely-chosen representatives who themselves were affected by the laws along with their constituents. If this right were deprived of them, ‘or materially altered, the Government must degenerate into an absolute and despotic monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy, and the freedom of the people be annihilated.’ They held that because the colonists couldn’t be represented in Parliament, therefore Parliament had no right to enact laws outside the bounds of governing trade. Parliament’s schemes to thrust laws upon the colonists – particularly to extort money via taxes given absent their consent – were ‘diametrically contrary’ to the British Constitution and ‘totally incompatible with the privileges of a free people and the natural rights of mankind.’ These Parliamentary machinations would ‘render our own legislatures merely nominal and nugatory, and is calculated to return us from a state of freedom and happiness to slavery and misery.’ The Resolves succinctly encapsulated colonial grievances while acknowledging that the colonists took pride in being British subjects and had no desire for that connection with the mother country to be dissolved. The resolves promoted nonimportation of British goods in order to force Parliament’s hand in repealing the Coercive Acts. The widely-circulated Fairfax Resolves were embraced by patriots, and Washington – along with his fellow Virginian delegates – carried these convictions and ideas into the Congress. 

Voting, American Rights, and the Galloway Plan

The night before the inaugural day of the Congress, the delegates drank round after round giving raucous toasts. Many woke hung-over and miserable, but they didn’t miss a beat in assembling at Smith’s Tavern before marching to Carpenter’s Hall. The conservative Pennsylvanian delegate Joseph Galloway had advocated holding the Congress in the State House, but the more radical local factions won out in having the Congress held at Carpenter’s Hall (pictured here). Though Carpenter’s Hall was smaller than the State House, there were no royal arms present and thus nothing to symbolize the constricting reach of the British government. Galloway, no doubt, found this particularly galling (when Revolution broke out, Galloway would become a fierce loyalist opposed to both the war and independence). Congress began on 5 September and would last until 26 October; the Virginian Peyton Randolph was elected president of the Congress and Charles Thomson was named secretary. The delegates read their official commissions, and Randolph called the Congress to order. Over the next month and a half, delegates fiercely debated how best to respond to the Intolerable Acts and how to convince Parliament to back down. While Congress was in session about six hours a day, much of the deliberations took place after-hours in taverns. The thirty-nine-year-old John Adams remembered, ‘We go to Congress at nine and there we stay, most earnestly engaged in debates upon the most abstruse mysteries of state until three in the afternoon; then we adjourn and feast upon ten thousand delicacies, and sit drinking Madeira, Claret, and Burgundy till six or seven and then go home fatigued to death with business, company and care.’ As the alcohol flowed, toast after toast was given, and the toasts read like a who’s-who of British supporters of the American colonies; while the king and queen were often toasted, particular affections were bestowed upon General Conway, Lord Chatham, and the Marquis of Rockingham; John Wilkes, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Franklin, and Mr. Hancock. Catchy phrases became popular, too, such as, ‘May the cloud which hangs over Great Britain and the colonies bust only on the heads of the present ministry!’ and ‘May no man enjoy freedom who has not the spirit to defend it!’ When Congress was underway, locked in debates on the floor or in separate committees, ‘each question [was] discussed with a moderation, an acuteness and a minuteness equal to that of Queen Elizabeth’s privy council’ (or at least that was how John Adams remembered it). 

Though the delegates agreed on a lot, they nonetheless had their differences. There was an ultra-conservative faction, spearheaded by Galloway and principally hailing from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, but they were in the minority. Even some of the staunchest opponents of Parliament seemed keen on hedging their bets, while some hot-headed patriots sickened their colleagues by going too far (South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden advocated dispatching the Massachusetts militia in an overwhelming military takeover of Boston, in which they would storm the Neck and force the redcoats to either surrender or perish). The more moderate delegates, who were in the majority, were (according to Adams) ‘fixed against hostilities and rupture except they should become absolutely necessary, and this necessity they do not yet see. They dread the thought of an action, because it would make a wound which would never be healed; it would fix and establish a rancor which would descend to the latest generations; it would render all hopes of a reconciliation with Great Britain desperate; it would light up the flames of war, perhaps through the whole continent, that might rage for twenty years, and end in the subduction of America as likely as in her liberation.’ Undercutting all the deliberations lie an atmosphere of tense suspense; in the dark of night, when the delegates’ minds roamed, they couldn’t help but ponder the road down which the Congress might take them; as Smith points out, ‘It is difficult for people living in a relatively stable society to imagine the anxieties that must be aroused when that order is imperiled. What is to happen to one’s children? Will the sons march off to war to be maimed or killed? Will daughters be raped by licentious soldiers? How will one’s family be fed and clothed? And all one’s cherished personal possessions – how will they fare in disorder and war? Would patriot leaders be taken to England and tried and hanged as traitors, their families and their fortunes proscribed?’ 

A preliminary issue to be tackled was how to vote on resolves. John Adams captured the problem in his diary: ‘If we vote by colonies, this method will be liable to great inequality and injustice, for five small colonies with one hundred thousand people in each may outvote four large ones each of five hundred thousand inhabitants. If we vote by the poll, some colonies have more than their proportion of members, and others have less. If we vote by interests, it will be attended by insuperable difficulties to ascertain the true importance of each colony. Is the weight of a colony to be ascertained by the number of inhabitants merely, or by the amount of their trade, the quality of their exports and imports, or by any compound ratio of both? This will lead us into such a field of controversy as will greatly perplex us.’ Patrick Henry of Virginia argued that votes be weighed according to several factors: a colony’s population, its wealth, and its imports and exports. When it became clear that this data simply didn’t exist, he retracted his motion and made a bold proclamation, declaring that the colonies now existed ‘in a state of nature,’ that government ‘was dissolved,’ and that the colonies were no longer distinct from one another: because of this, he could proudly say, ‘I am not a Virginian, but an American.’ His speech was both shocking and revolutionary: whereas colonists traditionally placed their first loyalty on their province and their next loyalty as Englishmen, now their primary loyalty was ‘America’ and their secondary loyalty their province. This idealistic pronouncement so deeply moved the delegates that they stopped their bickering and unanimously resolved that each colony have one vote. 

The next day, Congress opened with an inaugural prayer. There’d been consternation over who should offer the prayer, since the delegates represented a host of worldviews: there were Puritans and Presbyterians, Anglicans and Baptists, even deists and agnostics. The selection eventually squared upon Jacob Duche, a Philadelphian Anglican priest nominated by Samuel Adams. Duche read from the beginning of Psalm 35: 

    Plead thou my case, O Lord, with them that strive with me:

    and fight thou against them that fight against me.

    Lay hand upon the shield and buckler: and stand up to help me.

    Bring forth the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me:

           say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.

As the Congress officially got underway, the delegates faced two main questions: first, ‘What was the basis of American rights?’ and second, ‘How should they be defended?’ The Congress appointed subcommittees to begin hammering out the answers to these questions: one committee was tasked with defining colonial rights and listing ‘the several instances in which these rights are violated or infringed’ and to recommend how to go about acquiring redress; the other was tasked with taking ‘a view of all those acts of the British Parliament which affect our Trade and Manufacture.’ Right out of the gate, delegates couldn’t agree on the basis of colonial – or, rather, American – rights. The conservatives couldn’t stomach the idea that American rights were based upon the laws of nature; Galloway insisted that, ‘I never could find the rights of Americans, in the distinctions between taxation and legislation, nor in the distinction between laws for revenue and for the regulation of trade. I have looked for our rights in the laws of nature – but could not find them in a state of nature, but always in a state of political society.’ While he acknowledged that colonial rights emerged from the British Constitution, colonial charters, and common law, he feared giving them a basis in natural rights because such a foundation could justify a break from Great Britain: if the British government were squashing God-given natural rights, then lovers of liberty had every right – even, some might say, the responsibility – of disengaging from her despotism. Another conservative, James Duane, wanted to place the basis of American rights on colonial charters, which he defined as ‘compacts between the crown and the people, and I think on this foundation the charter governments stand firm… The privileges of Englishmen were inherent, their birthright and inheritance, and [the colonists] cannot be deprived of them without their consent.’ The Virginian Richard Henry Lee declared that American rights rested ‘on a fourfold foundation: on nature, on the British Constitution, on charters, and on immemorial usage.’ The debates swayed back and forth, and it wasn’t until 9 September that the Congress agreed that American rights were founded on the laws of nature, the British constitution, and colonial charters.

Galloway had lost on the basis of colonial rights, but he swallowed his shame and put forth an idea that would keep the colonies firmly in Great Britain’s fold while also protecting those rights. He first advocated the dispatch of commissioners to the British court, ‘a mode pursued by the Romans, Grecian, and Macedonian Colonies on every occasion of the like nature,’ and these commissioners would be tasked with compiling accurate information on the state-of-affairs across the Atlantic so that Americans needn’t rely on biased newspaper accounts and private letters. When this proposal was shot down – it was just ‘more of the same’ and no one thought it could be fruitful – he unveiled another idea: his ‘Galloway Plan’ was a constitutional revision that would establish a colonial Parliament elected by colonial legislatures. This ‘Grand Council’ (as he called it) would be America’s version of Parliament, and together with the English Parliament, it would legislate on the joint interests of Great Britain and her colonies, such as commerce. Both Parliament and the Grand Council would have to approve any new legislation, and local matters ought to be reserved for individual colonial legislatures. In Galloway’s estimation, if the primary issue was taxation without representation, instead of crying out against taxes, why not just get some representation? While many delegates found the plan to be of merit, it had its vehement detractors. One of these was Patrick Henry, who suspected that by adopting the Galloway Plan, ‘we shall liberate our constituents from a corrupt House of Commons but throw them into the arms of an American legislature that may be bribed by that nation which avows, in the face of the world, that bribery is a part of her system of government!’ Other critics feared that an American ‘Parliament’ couldn’t help but succumb to the same temptations as Parliament across the Atlantic. A vote went up to table the plan, and it passed by a slim margin: six colonies voted to table it whilst five others voted to continue debating its merits. 

The Suffolk Resolves

Joseph Galloway hadn't enjoyed any success thus far - American rights had been given their basis in natural law and his plan for an American ‘Grand Council’ had been ‘tabled’ (lofty language meaning it wouldn’t be picked up again) – and his fortunes made an even steeper turn for the worse when the Suffolk Resolves reached the floor for deliberation . The Resolves steered the Congress in a more radical direction, much to Galloway’s chagrin. At the end of August, the committees of correspondence from the counties of Worcester, Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk met at Faneuil Hall in Boston to orchestrate their response to the Massachusetts Government Act, which had basically revoked Massachusetts’ charter and turned the province into a Royal rather than Provincial colony. The convention resolved to urge all Massachusetts counties to close their courts and ‘quit government’ rather than submit to the enslaving nature of Parliament’s latest oppressions. The call went out, and by the first of October, seven of the nine mainland Massachusetts counties had done so. As each county ‘quit government,’ it issued resolves to explain its actions. Suffolk County – to which Boston belonged – crafted the most eloquent and far-reaching set of resolves between 6 and 9 September (though, ironically, it was Suffolk County whose courts alone remained open despite the resolutions, since the courts were supported by the muskets and bayonets of British troops). 

The Suffolk Resolves opened with a damning diagnosis of the current situation: it was ‘the vengeance but not the wisdom of Great Britain, which of old persecuted, scourged, and exiled our fugitive parents from their native shores, now pursues us, their guiltless children, with unrelenting severity.’ Because the English government had ‘to us bequeathed the dearbought inheritance’ of English liberty, it was the peoples’ obligation ‘to transmit the glorious purchase, unfettered by power, unclogged with shackles, to our innocent and beloved offspring.’ In nothing short of lofty and borderline egotistical language, the document asserted:

On the fortitude, on the wisdom and on the exertions of this important day, is suspended the fate of this new world, and of unborn millions. If a boundless extent of continent, swarming with millions, will tamely submit to live, move and have their being at the arbitrary will of a licentious minister, they basely yield to voluntary slavery, and future generations shall load their memories with incessant execrations. On the other hand, if we arrest the hand which would ransack our pockets, if we disarm the parricide which points the dagger to our bosoms, if we nobly defeat that fatal edict which proclaims a power to frame laws for us in all cases whatsoever, thereby entailing the endless and numberless curses of slavery upon us, our heirs and their heirs forever; if we successfully resist that unparalleled usurpation of unconstitutional power, whereby our capital is robbed of the means of life; whereby the streets of Boston are thronged with military executioners; whereby our coasts are lined and harbors crowded with ships of war; whereby the charter of the colony, that sacred barrier against the encroachments of tyranny, is mutilated and, in effect, annihilated; whereby a murderous law is framed to shelter villains from the hands of justice; whereby the unalienable and inestimable inheritance, which we derived from nature, the constitution of Britain, and the privileges warranted to us in the charter of the province, is totally wrecked, annulled, and vacated, posterity will acknowledge that virtue which preserved them free and happy; and while we enjoy the rewards and blessings of the faithful, the torrent of panegyrists will roll our reputations to that latest period, when the streams of time shall be absorbed in the abyss of eternity.

There followed nineteen resolves. The first four laid out the case for the Suffolk Resolves themselves: they began in the first Resolve by expressing their due loyalty to the king, writing that they ‘cheerfully acknowledge the said George the Third to be our rightful sovereign, and that said covenant is the tenure and claim on which are founded our allegiance and submission.’ They then moved to the crux of the matter: it was their duty to defend their liberties (Resolve Two) in the face of illegal, unjust laws levied against them by Parliament (Resolve Three), and thus the appropriate response was civil disobedience: ‘no obedience is due from this province to either or any part’ of the unjust Parliamentary laws (Resolve Four). Resolves Five through Fifteen answered the unspoken question, ‘What will civil disobedience look like in practice?’ It meant that ‘no regard ought to be paid [to crown-appointed officers] by the people of this county’ (Resolve Five); however, anarchy wasn’t the answer, and so anyone who embraced anarchic living – particularly in refusing to abide by civil laws – ‘ought to be considered as cooperating with the enemies of this country.’ (Resolve Six). The seventh Resolve ordered no taxes to be paid to the county treasury so long as it remained in royal hands, and the eighth Resolve announced that those chosen by Gage for placement on the governing council needed to resign, and any who didn’t would ‘be considered by this county as obstinate and incorrigible enemies to this country.’ Resolves Nine through Twelve dealt with the linchpin on which civil disobedience would rest: the threat of force. Gage’s fortification of Boston and his activities in depriving the citizens’ of their right to defense was condemned (Resolve Nine), and the need for security was evidenced in the Quebec Act (Resolve Ten); in light of this, it fell upon the people of Massachusetts to act in their own defense, and to this end a call went out for the reworking of colonial militias. Colonial militias weren’t anything new, but under the Suffolk Resolves they would undergo a democratic revolution: officers ‘judged of sufficient capacity for that purpose, and who have evidenced themselves the inflexible friends to the rights of the people’ were to be elected, and the militias were to ‘acquaint themselves with the art of war as soon as possible, and do, for that purpose, appear under arms at least once every week’. These stipulations in Resolve Eleven were given clear focus in the twelfth Resolve: the militias weren’t being reorganized and trained to defend against Native American incursions or hostility from neighboring colonies but to get themselves in shape for a possible confrontation with the mother country: ‘That during the present hostile appearances on the part of Great Britain, notwithstanding the many insults and oppressions which we most sensibly resent, yet, nevertheless, from our affection to His Majesty, which we have at all times evidenced, we are determined to act merely upon the defensive, so long as such conduct may be vindicated by reason and the principles of self-preservation…’ Thus, for the first time, armed resistance to Great Britain wasn’t only speculated but to be prepared for.

In the thirteenth Resolve, Suffolk County vowed to arrest crown officers and hold them with good treatment if Gage ever followed through on his orders to arrest patriot leaders. The fourteenth Resolve committed the county to nonimportation and nonconsumption of British goods, and the fifteenth Resolve aimed to offset any hardships incurred by the people of Massachusetts by promoting ‘arts and manufactures.’ The sixteenth Resolve called for a Massachusetts Provincial Congress to meet and pave the way forward in the midst of Parliamentary enslavement, and the seventeenth Resolve was a submission to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The eighteenth Resolve condemned violent acts and protests against Great Britain:

That whereas the universal uneasiness which prevails among all orders of men, arising from the wicked and oppressive measures of the present administration, may influence some unthinking persons to commit outrage upon private property; we would heartily recommend to all persons of this community, not to engage in any routs, riots, or licentious attacks upon the properties of any person whatsoever, as being subversive of all order and government; but, by a steady, manly, uniform, and persevering opposition, to convince our enemies, that in a contest so important, in a cause so solemn, our conduct shall be such as to merit the approbation of the wise, and the admiration of the brave and free of every age and of every country.

The final resolve issued a warning: if Massachusetts were to come ‘under fire’ from Great Britain, she would call for help from her fellow colonies. If Gage aimed to punish Suffolk County, he would be stirring up a hornet’s nest.

When Payton Randolph finished reading the Resolves, Carpenter’s Hall burst at the seams with cheering. The Massachusetts delegates found themselves swamped in handshakes and back-slaps, and the Congress unanimously voted to approve the Suffolk Resolves. On 18 September the Congress commended the people of Suffolk for their ‘wisdom and fortitude’ in opposing ‘these wicked ministerial measures.’ Though taking a firm stand alongside Suffolk County, they nonetheless made sure to warn against armed hostility against the British soldiers in Boston, ‘as far as possibly can be consistent with their immediate safety, and the security of the town.’ John Adams wrote in his dairy that night, ‘This was one of the happiest days of my life. In Congress we had generous, noble sentiments, and manly eloquence. This day convinced me that America will support Massachusetts or perish with her.’

As if probing for the perfect footnote to the Suffolk Resolves, on 11 October Congress wrote a letter to Thomas Gage in Boston, excoriating him for fortifying the town, dismembering her communication with the rest of Massachusetts, and for his redcoats’ alleged ‘indignities’ upon the townsfolk. They warned him (as if the events of September had somehow gone right over his head), ‘These enormities committed by a standing army, in our opinion unlawfully posted there in a time of peace, are irritating in the greatest degree, and if not remedied, will endanger the involving all America in the horrors of a civil war!’ 

Gage, in modern colloquialisms, would have likely replied, ‘No shit!’ 

The revolutionary nature of the Suffolk Resolves wasn’t lost on him nor on the British government across the Great Pond. When a copy of the Suffolk Resolves reached England on 13 December, Wedderburn denounced it as pure treason; when news came that the Philadelphian Congress had given the Resolves their stamp of approval, astonishment was the rule of the day. Lord Dartmouth wrote Gage that he was ‘thunderstruck’ by the news; it was ‘actual revolt’ and showed ‘a determination in the people to commit themselves at all events to open rebellion.’ Parliamentarian Edmund Burke saw the writing on the wall, later declaring it a catalyst towards the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. 

Penultimate Concerns

The rest of September found the Congress embroiled over how to go about winning a reprieve from Parliament. New York’s John Jay admitted there were only three options: ‘negotiation, suspension of commerce, or war.’ Though conservatives argued that the answer was to be found in heartfelt petitions to the king, and the most vehement radicals advocated outright war against the redcoats in Boston, most delegates turned to that which had worked before: economic pressure. The majority of delegates shared a belief – rooted in past victory – that economic pressure could force Parliament to the bargaining table. Samuel Chase of Maryland pushed not only for nonimportation but also nonexportation, in which the colonies would neither accept product from the Empire but also refuse to give product to the Empire; he voiced his opinion that a ‘total non-import and non-export to Great Britain and the West Indies must produce a national bankruptcy [of Great Britain] in a very short space of time.’ South Carolina’s Thomas Lynch agreed: ‘I believe the Parliament would grant us immediate relief. Bankruptcy would be the consequence if they did not.’ Christopher Gadsden stood and announced, ‘By saving our own liberties, we shall save those of the West Indies. I am for being ready, but I am not for the sword.’ This was an odd statement, given his earlier proposition of storming the redcoats in Boston. ‘The only way to prevent the sword from being used,’ he said, ‘is to have it ready… Boston and New England can’t hold out – the country will be deluged in blood if we don’t act with spirit. Don’t let America look at this mountain, and let it bring forth a mouse!’ Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut wasn’t so confident, stating that it was ‘well and good’ to debate economic pressure, but they mustn’t forget that the British ‘have now drawn the sword in order to execute their plan of subduing America, and I imagine they will not sheath it.’ In a prophetic foreboding, he added, ‘Next summer will decide the fate of America.’ Nonetheless, he believed that if they were to rely on economic pressures, they would have to go full force or not at all: nonimportation had worked in the past, but it would take nonimportation and nonexportation to get the job done this go-around: ‘To withdraw all commerce with Great Britain at once would come upon them like a thunderclap.’ 

As to nonimportation, there was little debate: it had, after all, worked twice before. The delegates enumerated those items that would no longer be imported into the colonies – including the slave trade – and established that nonimportation from Britain and Ireland would begin on the first of December. Nonexportation was a much harder sell, because the southern colonies relied on exports for survival. Though the colonies north of the Delaware River could do well without exports, the same didn’t hold true for those of warmer climates. The Virginia delegates had been given strict instructions not to curb exports before 10 August 1775, since by that time Virginia’s tobacco harvest would have been cured and sent to market; South Carolina didn’t want nonexportation applied to their rice and indigo, staple products that were shipped to Britain and whose proceeds kept the plantation gentry out of the red. After much haggling the South Carolinians agreed that they’d allow nonexportation to be applied to indigo so long as they could still export rice. 

On 20 October the Congressional delegates signed an agreement on trade restrictions. This agreement came to be known as ‘The Association,’ and it was patterned on measures first hammered together at Williamsburg. Nonimportation of British goods would begin on the first of December (though nonconsumption of East India Tea Company tea began immediately). Nonexportation wouldn’t begin until nearly a year later, on 10 September 1775; reasons for the delay were three-fold: first, to allow the southern colonies to export their principal harvests so as to avoid dire financial straits; second, so as ‘not to injure our fellow-subjects in Great Britain, Ireland, or the West Indies;’ and third, to give the British ministry an opportunity to back down and repeal the Intolerable Acts before the economic noose tightened. If Parliament acquiesced, nonexportation wouldn’t go into effect; if they dallied or dug in their heels, the crippling effects of a year of nonimportation would be exponentially multiplied. The Association called for a committee ‘in every county, city, and town’ to be elected; these ‘Association Committees’ were tasked with enforcing the rules of the Association. They were empowered to inspect customs-house logs and to make public the names of offenders; those not abiding by Congress’ Association would be dubbed ‘the enemies of American liberty’ and were to be socially ostracized by their communities. The congressional delegates then promised to ‘encourage frugality, economy, and industry, and promote agriculture, arts and the manufactures of this country, especially that of wool… to discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horseracing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions or shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.’ Such frugality and economic independence would be vital if the colonies were to thrive amidst nonimportation and (possibly within a year) nonexportation. 

Nearly a week before delegates signed The Association, they came out with a Declaration of Rights , a synopsis of sorts declaring that colonial rights were founded upon the laws of nature, the British constitution, and colonial charters. Though the colonies would ‘cheerfully consent’ to the regulation of ‘our external commerce’ – for such regulation was seen to be in ‘the mutual interest of both countries’ – they left no ambiguity in asserting that they could not be taxed by Parliament. Their arguments were nothing new: because they weren’t represented in Parliament, Parliament could not lawfully lay taxes upon them. The Declaration emphasized that their beef was with Parliament and not the king: the delegates asserted their allegiance to George III, but they couldn’t in good faith accept ‘Acts of Parliament’ that violated their God-given English liberties. These liberties included the exclusive right to dispose of their own lives, liberty, and property; the possession of all freedom and immunities of natural-born Englishmen; the right to participate in their legislative councils; the right to trial by a jury of their ‘peers of the vicinage’; and the right to peacefully assemble to consider their grievances and to petition in the king (the last one, of course, specifically had to do with the gathering of the Congress). The Declaration resolved that ‘the keeping [of] a standing army in these colonies, in times of peace, without the consent’ of the local legislatures was against the law, and that the government appointments made by the crown to provincial councils was unconstitutional, dangerous, and corroded freedom. The Declaration gave a ‘short-list’ of those Parliamentary measures that violated colonial rights and liberties and then, in a final flourish, announced that nonimportation would begin on 1 December 1774, laid bare the threat of nonexportation in the future, and promised that a message to ‘the people of Great Britain and the Province of Quebec, and a memorial to the inhabitants of British America’ would be crafted, along with a petition to the king. Parliament would receive no letters, for to send them one would be an acknowledgment of their authority over the colonies.

The delegates hammered out the petition to the king in late October. The petition outlined colonial grievances and stated that their afflictions had caused His Majesty’s subjects to ‘fly to the foot of his Throne and implore his clemency for protection against them.’ They were unabashed in their declaration of loyalty: ‘We ask but for Peace, Liberty and Safety. We wish not a dimunition of the prerogative, nor do we solicit the grant of any new right in our favour. Your Royal Authority over us, and our connection with Great Britain, we shall always carefully and zealously endeavor to support and maintain.’ It’s difficult for us moderns to understand how the colonists could still revere the king after all that had happened in the last decade; this is because we are steeped in Enlightenment thought and western values with their rejection of monarchial ideas. In the 18th century, however, such Enlightenment ideas were still gaining steam, and their very notions were abhorrent to many. The king was seen as ‘above the fray,’ a benevolent father-figure who justly deserved all love and loyalty. As historian Page Smith notes, the colonists could lambast Parliament and the king’s ministers with all their fury while simultaneously professing heartfelt allegiance to George III: ‘Loyalty to the monarch allowed them to believe that their actions were not the actions of rebels and traitors but of true Englishmen; for did they not preface every inflammatory document with the most sincere and humble affirmations of their loyalty to him?... The strange nature of the English kingship in the middle years of the eighteenth century allowed them to continue to live a kind of double life – loyal revolutionaries of His Majesty, George III.’ In the tumultuous days of the Stamp Act Crisis, colonial loathing focused on Parliament and the king’s ministers, so that the king was pictured as an ‘unwitting prisoner of evil ministers, a creature apparently at once wise, just, and by implication blind to his subjects’ interests’(according to the historian Robert Middlekauff). Scarcely anyone could bear the thought that the king had a hand in what was afoot; at best, he was blind to it, and his eyes needed to be opened – hence the obsession with petitions to the king. All things being equal, however, by 1774 the colonists had taken a dangerous step: though they didn’t implicate the king in Parliament’s measures, they dared whisper that he had made mistakes. 

Independence: The Unthinkable Thought

The Congressional delegates left Philadelphia in a torrential downpour, but not before enjoying ‘a most elegant entertainment’ at City Tavern where they offered the toast ‘May the sword of the parent never be stained with the blood of her children.’ An Irishman recently arrived to the city remarked in a letter to a friend, ‘It is said that such an august body as formed our late Congress never before was convened together, nor was there ever before a subject of such importance in its consequences to be considered by any part of the world, come under the notice of any part of the world – the spirit of resistance is universal, and those men that composed the Congress were the real representatives of the people, therefore their resolves and opinions are those of all America.’ The Irishman esteemed the Congress as taking a drastic step, but just how drastic was it? As it was, not very drastic at all; the historian Page Smith notes, ‘In practical fact, [the Congress’] achievements, measured in any realistic terms, were very modest. They had spent an inordinate amount of time talking about how to provide some relief for the embattled Bostonians and turn back the progressive erosion of colonial liberties. Their remedy – nonimportation and nonconsumption with a threat of nonexportation – was woefully inadequate to the disease. There was not the slightest prospect that it would succeed. Perhaps the only substantial achievement of the Congress was to have come together, to have established a basis, at least among the bolder delegates, of mutual understanding and trust. The British would be much more impressed (though still insufficiently) by the demonstration of colonial unity offered by the fact that the Congress had convened, and that it had drawn together many of the ablest men in the various colonies, than by anything that happened.’

Though the American colonies would declare independence in just under two years, the very thought of a rupture from England lie very far from many peoples’ minds; indeed, the vast majority of the delegates – a group which excluded, of course, South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden and Massachusetts’ Samuel Adams – abhorred the idea. One afternoon when Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Dr. Shippen of Philadelphia met with the Massachusetts delegates, they asked the Bostonians if they intended independence as their sought-after endgame. John Adams coolly replied, ‘There is no man among us that would not be happy to see accommodation with Britain.’ Robert Paine backed him up: ‘Independence? A hundred times no!’ Samuel Adams kept his mouth shut. When the loyalist Daniel Leonard accused radicals of pushing for a break from England, John Adams rejoined that if Leonard spoke of ‘[an] independent republic in America or a confederation of independent republics,’ the accusation was ludicrous; in fact, no other accusation could be ‘a more wicked or a great slander on the Whigs.’ Adams insisted that ‘there is no man in the province among the Whigs, nor ever was, who harbors a wish of that sort… The Whigs acknowledge a subordination to the King in as strict and strong a sense as the Tories. The Whigs acknowledge a voluntary subordination to Parliament, as far as the regulation of trade.’ 

The repulsiveness of the idea of independence at this juncture in American thought mustn’t be underestimated. The First Continental Congress met not to lay out a plan for dissolving the colonies’ bonds with England but for restoring those bonds so that they were tassels of harmony rather than chains of enslavement. The concept of ‘revolution’ didn’t track with the delegates; only be reading backwards into history do we start to skew the purpose of the Congress and the motivations of those involved. Smith captures this perfectly: ‘Today revolutions are old hat. In many countries revolutions are an almost yearly occurrence; we use the word “revolution” as casually as we pick up a spoon. We have revolutions in dress, in morals, in reading habits; we have “revolutionary” new shaving creams, razor blades, and underarm deodorants. But in the eighteenth century, the word as we most commonly use it today had hardly been discovered. Its ordinary meaning was the turn of a circle, of a wheel on its axis, the “revolutions” of the celestial bodies in their fixed orbits. Today there are only a few “colonies” left. Nearly every colony has thrown off, by one means or another, at least the direct control of the nation that held it as a colony. In the eighteenth century no such thing had happened, nor was it imagined by most people that it could happen. So while the colonists, both individually and collectively, yearned for “independence,” it was a social and, if you will, a psychological, not a political, independence that they yearned for. They wished most sincerely and devoutly to sit “every man under his own fig tree and under his vine,” but they wished to sit there as Englishmen shaded by the might and majesty of the British Empire, sustained by a benevolent Father-King who wished only food for them. George III was not, to be sure, the ideal father. But there are no ideal fathers on earth, only in heaven, and George had to do.’

Responses in the Colonies

When the Congress' measures became public, New Jersey’s Governor William Franklin read the writing on the wall: England was left with ‘no other alternative than either to consent to what must appear humiliating in the eyes of all Europe, or to compel obedience to her laws by military force.’ Gage in Boston, upon reading a copy of the resolves, wrote Dartmouth that ‘the proceedings of the Continental Congress astonish and terrify all considerate men.’ While patriots toasted the delegates and cheered their steadfast resolves, loyalists decried the Declaration of Rights as nothing short of treasonous venom. Many loyalists had supported the Congress in the thin hope that the conservatives would triumph over their radical brethren, and when the resolves were spread through roadside inns and town taverns, they couldn’t help but be repulsed, especially when it came to the Association: they charged (rather rightly) that the high-handed and all-powerful Associations had gleefully embraced the same dictatorial powers that the radicals condemned in Parliament. In place of contending with their rightful sovereign, now Americans had to deal with ‘their High Mightiness, the MOB.’ Congress’ measures produced ‘the utter subversion of all law, and the total destruction of all liberty.’

The Tory Jonathan Sewell, once John Adams’ close friend, condemned the Congress as ‘a pack of banditti’ whose actions had made the ‘breach with the parent state a thousand times more irreparable than it was before.’ The congressional delegates had become the ‘sly favorers of an American Republic,’ and in the Association they created ‘a venomous brood of scorpions to sting us to death.’ The loyalist Samuel Seabury of New York wrote that the Congress had ‘erected itself into the supreme legislature of North America,’ and by doing so it had run roughshod over not only the British government but also the colonial assemblies it claimed to esteem: ‘Virginia and Massachusetts madmen met at Philadelphia, have made laws for the Province of New York, and have rendered our Assembly useless.’ Another Tory from Boston, Harrison Gray, chimed in, decrying the Congress as a blasphemous, ungodly endeavor: ‘[The] opposition made to [the right of Parliament to tax the colonies] is inconsistent with our profession of Christianity, with the loyalty we owe to our Sovereign, and the reverence and respect that is due to the British Parliament.’ The Reverend J.B. Chandler saw the Congress as the first step towards death and devastation in the colonies; he wrote in a widely-circulated pamphlet, ‘[Even] a final victory [over Great Britain] would effectually ruin us: as it would necessarily introduce civil wars among ourselves, and leave us open and exposed to the avarice and ambition of every maritime power in Europe or America. Until one part of the country shall have subdued the other, and conquered a considerable part of the world beside, this peaceful region must become, and continue to be, a theater of inconceivable misery and horror. [The Americans are] without fortresses, without discipline, without military stores, without money. These are deficiencies which it must be the work of an age to remove; and while they continue, it will be impossible to keep an army in the field… It is not in the power of all the friends of Congress to introduce what deserves the name of discipline into any of the colonies to the southward of New England, and the New Englanders could only be half-disciplined and kept in the field until the appearance of the British or the rumor of a small-pox epidemic caused them to flee for their lives.’ 

The loyalist Daniel Leonard attacked the committees of correspondence as ‘the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent that ever issued from the eggs of sedition.’ His old friend John Adams countered that ‘almost all mankind have lost their liberties through ignorance, inattention, and disunion. These committees are admirably calculated to diffuse knowledge, to communicate intelligence, and promote unanimity… The patriots of [Massachusetts] desire nothing new: they wish only to keep their old privileges. For one hundred and fifty years they had been allowed to tax themselves and govern their internal concerns as they thought best. Parliament governed their trade as they thought fit. This plan they wish may continue forever.’ He noted (with a hint of warning) that the ‘noblemen and ignoblemen [of England] ought to have considered that Americans understand the laws and politics as well as themselves, and that there are six hundred thousand men in [America], between sixteen and sixty years of age; and therefore it will be very difficult to chicane them out of their liberties by “fictions of law”… no matter upon what foundation.’ 

As Association committees sprang into existence, the American colonies turned into a sectarian battleground between patriots and Tories. Historian Ray Raphael writes, ‘Crossing regional boundaries and class distinctions, the association, as it came to be called, became the voice, and force, of revolutionary America… No village, family, or individual would remain unaffected by the political, social, and economic convulsions sweeping the colonies.’ The Congress had voted the Association sweeping powers – calling them dictatorial powers isn’t far from the truth – and the committees tasked with enforcing nonimportation and nonconsumption went about their duties with gusto. From Maine to Georgia, no less than seven thousand men – renowned patriots the lot of them – were elected to make sure Congress’ pills were swallowed smoothly. These committees would, in the words of Benjamin Booth, ‘rule us as with a rod of iron.’ By the end of the year, the committees had effectually overtaken royal government: they determined what patriotic living looked like, praised those in compliance, and doled out punishments upon those who refused to get in line. Over the next two years, they would assume more and more responsibilities; in New York, as Raphael notes, the Association committees oversaw fire fighting, chimney inspections, the repair of bridges and water pumps, the operation of ferries, road maintenance, the licensing of taverns, the administration of jails, mediation of civic disputes, and even setting town clocks. The reach of the committees were so deep that Lord Dunmore of Virginia reported in late 1774 that ‘There is not a justice of the peace in Virginia that acts, except as a Committee-man.’ Josiah Martin, Governor of North Carolina, confessed that his colony’s government was ‘absolutely prostrate, impotent, and that nothing but the shadow of it is left.’ One loyalist foresaw that the Association, now tasked with inspecting customs houses, would soon move on to inspecting ‘your tea canisters and molasses jugs, and your wives and daughters’ petty-coats!’ The Tory Anne Hulton of Boston begrudgingly noted that, ‘There’s no magistrate that dare or will act to suppress the [Association’s] outrages.’ 

Perhaps the most outrageous of the Association’s actions was the method of enforcing nonimportation and nonconsumption. Jonathan Sewell reported that the patriots were in a virtual ‘state of nature’, in that they ‘swear and drink, and lie and whore and cheat, and rob, and pull down houses, and tar and feather, and play the devil in every shape, just as the devil and their own inclination lead them, and yet they cry out for liberty.’ Decrying the loss of liberty due to Parliamentary overreach, the committees decided to enforce their brand of resistance by depriving those who thought differently from their own liberties. Tarring and feathering became the primary tool used to force compliance with Congress’ edicts; Raphael notes, ‘Tarring and feathering, however crude and sadistic, fostered a sense of political involvement for the common people of the times, allowing them to participate – and prevail – in public affairs. The pot of tar at the bottom of a liberty pole: two potent symbols that went hand in hand. Buttressed by a sense of righteousness and feeling secure in their numbers, plain farmers, laborers, seamen, artisans, apprentices, teenagers, and servants helped to determine the course of events. Many could not vote, but they could all engage in “out-of-doors” politics, a term denoting any form of civic activity that was not officially sanctioned by law: caucuses, conventions, committees, or street mobs. The vigor with which the association was enforced, and the vitality of the military mobilization that followed, were due in part to the obvious pleasure ordinary people took in exercising their newfound powers.’ 

Responses in England

When news of Congress' resolves reached England, reactions were mixed: while the country gentry – those of power and estates – scoffed at the resolves and condemned the American delegates as traitors, many middle- and lower-class Englishmen celebrated it. An English journal called Crisis supported the American cause, and when two sheriffs and the local hangman tried to publicly burn copies of the journal in the Royal Exchange, their bonfire was doused and they were ‘stoned’ by dead cats and dogs. This reaction evidenced a shift in mood among England’s middling classes; Page Smith writes, ‘While a preponderance of those classes in England who had a public voice – the country gentry, the greater part of the merchants, and most of the great lords – supported the measures taken against the Americans, among the voiceless masses of England, Ireland, and Scotland there was a very different feeling. They did not write pamphlets or letters to the newspapers, they did not speak in Parliament or give expression to their feelings in script or print, for they were largely illiterate. They voted the only way they knew how: substantial numbers refused to enlist in the army or navy to serve against the Americans, who, they felt instinctively, were fighting their battle.’ It isn’t surprising, then, that most politicians campaigning in 1774-1775 endorsed a conciliatory approach to matters with the American colonies. 

Edward Gibbon, a Parliamentary member who had just begun work on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was on the side of the scoffers: ‘I am more and more convinced that we have both the right and power on our side, and that though the effort may be accompanied with some melancholy circumstances, we are now arrived at the decisive moment of persevering or losing forever both our trade and Empire.’ Another scoffer – and one who was much more vitriolic – was Samuel Johnson, whose Taxation no Tyranny, An Answer to the Resolution and Address of the American Congress, upheld Parliament’s case and defended the idea that ‘he who accepts protection, stipulates obedience;’ because British arms had ‘always protected the Americans, we may, therefore, subject them to government.’ All throughout the Empire, British subjects were ‘governed by English laws, entitled to English dignities, regulated by English counsels, and protected by English arms’ – and in all these cases, Parliament had the power to legislate and rule. Because the Americans refused to abide by these basic facts of what it meant to be an Englishmen – they embraced the liberties but shunned the responsibilities – they must, by Johnson’s reasoning, be forced to come to terms with reality, though with ‘the least injury possible to their persons and possessions.’ If they refused to be brought to their senses, he suggested that the British government ‘give the Indians arms, and teach them discipline, and encourage them now and again to plunder a plantation.’ Such a recommendation was shocking in its own accord, but ever one for the Shock Factor, he went a step further: not only should the native Americans be armed, but place muskets and swords in the hands of America’s black slaves, as well! To arm a group of people deprived of their freedom would be something which ‘surely the lovers of liberty cannot but commend.’ His recommendation received mixed reviews (to put it bluntly): many Englishmen recoiled at the thought, and one editorial asked how a proper English heart could ‘conceive such ideas, even in jest, what horror! – But the virulent spirit of an inveterate Tory can calmly contemplate the idea of savages turned loose upon the friends of freedom – he can imagine himself the huntsman of the Indian pack – hallooing forward his bloodhounds to carnage.’ Johnson was slandered as ‘a sycophantic slave, a mercenary reptile, the bookworm, the tool of traitors.’ This isn’t to say he didn’t have his supporters:  John Wesley, noted as being the first important religious figure to lock arms with abolitionists, borrowed some of Johnson’s ideas in his 1775 Calm Address to our American Colonies. Emboldened by his staunch supporters, Johnson carried his vitriol against the patriots even further: he condemned them as ‘a race of convicts [who] ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.’ He said he loved all people ‘except an American’ (an ironic statement, given that he had many American friends, though he considered his friends to be outliers of the general case that the Americans were ‘rascals, robbers, and pirates’ whom he’d willingly burn and destroy). When someone pointed out that ‘we are always most violent against those whom we have injured,’ Johnson went into an apoplectic fit of rage and shrieked a string of epithets that, according to one contemporary, must’ve been hard across the Atlantic.

While England’s leading gentry determined that the patriots must be resisted with force if necessary, British merchants weren’t so keen on picking up the sword. Many merchants had barely recouped their losses over the last two waves of nonimportation when the third came, and plenty of merchants had already gone under: according to some contemporaries, over three hundred merchant ships lie tied up between London Bridge and the Lime-House with brooms affixed to their masts, signifying that they were for sale by merchants who’d floundered due to nonimportation. The Congress hadn’t only embraced nonimportation and nonconsumption but was also promising nonexportation if Parliament didn’t back down; thus the future seemed bleaker than ever for British merchants, and so they flooded Parliament with petitions to repeal the Coercive Acts before England plunged into a depression the likes of which none had ever seen. Colonial opponents decried those petitioning merchants as ‘cats paws for the American rebels’ who had ‘humbly submitted to be handled in the same contemptible manner by the Bostonian monkeys twice since.’ They were charged with kowtowing to the patriots by caring for their own survival over what was best for the nation. Birmingham merchants led the vitriol against petitioning merchants, but they in turn were branded as ‘Birmingham Knaves’ who wanted outright conflict in America so that they could line their pockets by providing arms and supplies to both rebels and redcoats. 

When Parliament’s opened in January 1775, the first subject up for debate was how to deal with the American colonies who had gone so far as to hold a Congress and set up Association committees and economic measures disastrous to English commerce. The Earl of Chatham praised the ‘papers transmitted to us from America,’ extolling ‘their decency, firmness, and wisdom… For myself, I must avow that in all my reading and observation – and it has been my favorite study – I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of the world – that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general Congress at Philadelphia… This glorious spirit [of resistance to taxation] animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defense of their rights as men, as freemen.’ He declared that the ‘American Cause’ was ‘an alliance of God and nature’ that was founded upon principles ‘immutable, eternal – fixed as the firmament of heaven.’ The idea that such a spirit could be extinguished was ludicrous; nor could ‘such a national and principled union be resisted by the tricks of office, or ministerial maneuver…’ It was but a matter of time before this tumultuous season entered a new stage of outright conflict ‘unless these fatal acts are done away; it must arrive in all its horrors, and then these boastful ministers, spite of all their confidence, and all their maneuvers, shall be forced to hide their heads.’ But for all this, the ministers wouldn’t ‘stir a step; they have not a move left; they are check-mated.’ The only reasonable solution was conciliation: ‘With a dignity becoming your exalted situation, make the first advances to concord, to peace and happiness; for that is your true dignity, to act with prudence and justice. That you should first concede is obvious, from sound and rational policy. Concession comes with better grace and more salutary effect from superior power; it reconciles superiority of power with the feelings of men, and establishes solid confidence on the foundations of affection and gratitude.’

Edmund Burke agreed with Chatham: ‘The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.’ He gave six reasons why England couldn’t micromanage the colonies: the reasons stemmed ‘from these six capital sources: of descent, of form of government, of religion in the northern provinces, of manners in the southern, in education, of the remoteness of situation from the first mover of government, from all these causes a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up.’ He continued, ‘It has grown with the strength of the people in your colonies, and increased with the increase of their wealth; a spirit that unhappily meeting with an exercise of power in England, which, however lawful, is not reconcilable to any ideas of liberty, much less with theirs, has kindled the flame that is ready to consume us.’ So long as England made good on its supposed devotion to liberty, ‘the people will turn their faces to you.’ He endeared Parliament not ‘to entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your crockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of the mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member… All this I know well enough will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who no place among us; a sort of people who believe that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine.’

Many other friends of America took their stand in promoting reconciliation with the estranged colonies. They decried the Coercive Acts as tyrannical and unjust and insisted that they wouldn’t succeed in their principal aim of bringing the colonies to heel; indeed, they warned, the acts, if not repealed, could only lead to England’s ruin. This ruin wouldn’t only be economical – due to the Association’s pogroms – but would be a philosophical ruining that would cut even deeper, for if England, known for eschewing devotion to liberty, were in fact the ones trampling over it, England’s reputation in the wider world would be forever tainted long after any economic recovery. Nevertheless, the Parliament majority was in North’s pocket, and the Coercive Acts would not be repealed: Parliament would now bow down to an American convention of wanna-be statesmen playing at politics. If force were needed to bring the colonies in line, then force would be the dish the colonists would swallow.