1775 (22 page)

British officials were outraged—and helpless. General Thomas Gage
wrote in 1769 that “Committees of Merchants at Boston, N. York, and Philadelphia contrive to exercise the Government they have set up to prohibit the importation of British goods, appoint Inspectors, tender Oaths to the Masters of Vessels, and enforce their Prohibitions by coercive Measures. In times less dissolute and licentious, it would be a matter of Astonishment, to hear that British manufactures were prohibited in British provinces, by an illegal Combination of People.”
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After Parliament largely repealed the Townshend duties, tensions eased. However, the First Continental Congress, in its response to the Coercive Acts, recommended a Continental Association to manage nonimportation, nonconsumption, and nonexportation. Section eleven of the resolution specified that enforcement would lie with a committee “chosen in every county, city, and town, by those who are qualified to vote for representatives in the legislature.”
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Thus were the
elected
foundations of the new revolutionary government put in place.

New England and the plantation provinces displayed the highest profiles of paper currency bickering, and the politics of indebtedness followed essentially the same geography. In Massachusetts, internal creditor-debtor regionalism came to the fore in the summer of 1774, when farmers throughout the province shut down the county courts. So, too, in Connecticut, where an earlier bankruptcy and currency debate during the late 1760s helped to fuel the takeover of the provincial government by Jonathan Trumbull and the radical Patriot faction, whose base was in the debt-burdened eastern counties.
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In 1766, Connecticut farmers in Wallingford and Windham called on judges to sit less frequently and urged relaxation of the debt laws. Three years earlier the province had enacted New England’s most debtor-friendly bankruptcy statute but had to repeal it after eight months.
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Predictably, debt-related and court-closing controversies reached their greatest intensity in tobacco country. In 1762, Virginia’s House of Burgesses passed bankruptcy legislation somewhat favorable to debtors, only to see it vetoed by the Privy Council at the request of British merchants. In 1765, during the Stamp Act crisis, many of Virginia’s local justices, mostly gentlemen and planters, unnerved British creditors and merchants simply by refusing to hear cases. In 1770, the House of Burgesses voted to curb Williamsburg’s so-called hustings (borough) court. This tribunal, friendly to merchants and traders, had a unique jurisdiction that allowed creditors to sue any Virginia debtor—not least burgesses and political visitors—who
could be caught within the capital’s boundaries. When the Privy Council vetoed the change, it was accused by the House of being in collusion with Scottish tobacco merchants.
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In early 1774, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson proposed that all payments on Virginia debt should stop; and by mid-1774, most county courts had closed their doors or were about to. According to Virginia historian Woody Holton, “Throughout the war, Virginia courts refused to try creditors’ suits against debtors, which prevented debtors from undermining white solidarity by attacking creditors, sheriffs, courthouses and jails.”
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Planters, lawyers, and officeholders in Maryland had worried about acute debt levels and currency shrinkage in 1765 and did again in 1772–1773, after credit and banking crises in Britain toppled dominoes up and down the Chesapeake. In late 1774, the Provincial Congress voted that “no merchant or factor who violated the Continental Congress’s nonimportation directives would be allowed to collect money owed him.” By mid-1775, the provincial convention specified that “a creditor desiring to sue for debt had to obtain a license from the local Committee of Observation.” In some areas, the militia had to be called in because “debtors openly attacked the jails, freeing persons taken into custody for defaulting on their payments.”
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To complete the tobacco province roll call, by 1773 debt-related legislation had also become a cause célèbre in North Carolina. The bill extended the so-called foreign attachment clause in order to maintain the ability of Carolinians to attach the property of nonresidents for debts owing to residents. London officials and Governor Josiah Martin, anxious to protect British merchants, sought to repeal the clause. The Assembly, however, preferred a stalemate that closed the courts for a year. Historian Greene underscored the animosity toward British creditors: “Of all the British restrictions in the years after 1763, North Carolinians found this one the most objectionable. Next to parliamentary taxation probably no other issue was so important in promoting the rise of Revolutionary sentiment in that colony.”
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Having established the centrality of tobacco, we must tie in another friction—the ever-expanding list of commodities that colonial producers were legally obliged to ship to Britain. Here, as in the currency and debt categories, some detail is essential.

In the plantation colonies, Patriots were concerned about the burdens of enumeration—mostly on tobacco, but also on rice. New Englanders were
incensed by parliamentary legislation that targeted the so-called Triangular Trade—the selling of fish and provisions in the French West Indies, from which ships could bring back molasses to New England, in order to produce rum, a major Yankee industry. Molasses was only the by-product of an enumerated commodity (sugar), but during the 1760s, as we will see, the British government decided to curb New England’s access to its supplies in the West Indies.

The escalating agenda of imperial commodity management over a century tells us a lot about mother-country motivation. The early enumerated list—sugar, tobacco, indigo, dyestuffs, and other tropical and subtropical crops stereotypically associated with empire—was relatively uncontroversial. It had been bluntly stated and was generally accepted in the existing American colonies. So, too, for British insistence, in the name of maritime power, on controlling and receiving North America’s output of ships, spars, and naval stores like tar and pitch, as well as the Crown’s right to mark and cut “king’s trees”—the tallest, straightest, and thickest northern pines needed for masts by the Royal Navy. Copper, hemp, rice, and whale oil were added during the early part of the eighteenth century.

Accepting these prescriptions went to the core of what Britain expected from colonies. Even into 1773–1774, the best-known pro-American voices in Parliament—Pitt’s and Burke’s, for example—brooked no dissent. In consequence, most American leaders believed that attacking the basic trade laws would only confirm British charges of designs for independence. As late as 1775, Benjamin Franklin suggested that the colonies would be willing to reaffirm the Navigation Acts, because that was not where their complaints lay.
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In fact, Franklin’s information was out of date. Additions made to the enumerated list in the quarter century after 1750 were generally unpopular. Iron and lumber were enumerated in 1764, as was potash (an essential chemical for textile processing). With respect to iron and lumber, Parliament’s motives were dual: to undercut American potential for manufacturing but also to channel more profit through British middlemen. The Revenue Act of 1764 added coffee, pimentos, raw silk, whale fins (used in women’s corsets), and more to the list. In several cases, London’s motives included preempting the trade in items that colonial Americans sold to pay for goods to be smuggled back from Holland.

Even enumeration of tobacco, the most important North American export, was slowly becoming less acceptable. By the late 1760s, many Virginians
were starting to doubt the crop’s future and were shifting to wheat. As political realists, most Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina growers felt that they could not openly oppose enumeration, but that did not bespeak acceptance of Britain’s monopoly.

Virginia historian Holton has taken the undercurrent of Chesapeake unhappiness with British treatment of tobacco back to the seventeenth century: “The Navigation Acts and the resulting depression in the tobacco market,” he noted, “were repeatedly blamed for social unrest in subsequent decades, especially during Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), the largest insurrection in Virginia history, and the 1682 plant-cutting riots. But London’s recrimination persuaded tobacco growers that criticism of the Navigation Acts was hopeless.”
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As early as 1740, the House of Burgesses had petitioned the Privy Council for “free export of their Tobacco to foreign Markets directly,” which was denied. By contrast, as Virginians knew, in 1730 Carolina rice growers had been allowed to export directly to southern Europe, although other enumerated exports had to go through Britain. In 1739, the sugar colonies, even better connected in London, had been permitted to export sugar directly to Europe.
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Tobacco growers felt mistreated, and between 1764 and 1766, indictments of the system’s unfairness were voiced by Virginians Richard Bland, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, and Arthur Lee. In 1774, critical resolves were voted by Fairfax and Albemarle county conventions. Richard Henry Lee pointedly denounced Britain’s tobacco policies at the First Constitutional Congress, although the Congress itself took no position. Thomas Jefferson in turn authored the pointed condemnation approved by Virginia’s third convention in 1775: that the Crown had failed to offer Virginians “a free trade with all the world.”
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Until 1774. most tobacco growers confined themselves to indirect complaints. One favored tactic was to emphasize how Parliament’s various plans to tax the colonies, besides being unconstitutional, were unjust and unwise because the burdensome trade system already represented a massive burden and de facto tax on American production. Maryland lawyer Daniel Dulany, later a Loyalist, set out the first arithmetic in his famous 1765 pamphlet
Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes.
“From Virginia and Maryland,” said Delany, “are exported
communibus annis
90,000 hogsheads of tobacco to Great Britain of which it is supposed 60,000 are then exported. But these colonies not being permitted to send their tobacco immediately to foreign markets…in proportion to their demands, the re-exported
tobacco pays double freight, double insurance, commission and other shipping charges.” To make matters worse, “If the colonies were not restrained from directly importing foreign commodities they would, it is presumed, pay less for them, even by 50 percent, than they do at present.”
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Returning to enumeration, Dulany concluded that tobacco growers would have received an additional £3 per hogshead (some £180,000) had they been allowed to ship elsewhere without going through Britain. On top of which, Britain imposed duties totaling nearly £400,000 a year on tobacco coming into the kingdom, which planters argued that they paid.
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Britain was collecting tobacco-related proceeds through multiple pockets.

Rising concern about the Navigation Acts was not confined to tobacco growers. South Carolina rice planter Henry Laurens, later president of the Continental Congress, claimed in 1769 that “the Navigation Acts subjected him to a much greater tax than any person of equal fortune on the other side of the Atlantic [paid].” Massachusetts conservative Thomas Hutchinson privately argued against the Stamp Act on the same basis. The Duke of Grafton in 1766 told the House of Lords that “it is said America is not taxed. I answer they pay taxes in taking your manufactures.
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Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the memoir writer and future Tory, called the purchase of English goods under the mercantilist system “the taxes that we pay.” One historian noted that “in 1766, George Mercer, who had tried unsuccessfully to enforce the Stamp Act in Virginia, told a parliamentary committee that even if Virginians had bought the stamped paper, it would have cost them much less money than the Navigation Acts already did.”
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So long as Chesapeake growers muted their trade complaints, British demands for new taxes—the 1764–1773 parade of levies and duties imposed by Parliament—constituted the prime visible zone of friction. But by 1774, antitax sloganry like “no taxation without representation” was losing its centrality. By 1775, few Patriot leaders still saw merit in the idea of North American representation in a corrupt Parliament 3,000 miles distant. Debate was shifting into a new and broader context: the rearrangement or breakup of existing economic and imperial relationships.

Molasses, Rum, and Smuggling

A second clutch of resentments, pivoting on British customs policy, maritime regulation, and antismuggling enforcement, had also come to the fore, principally in New England. A decade earlier, faced with the Royal Navy
being given antismuggling responsibilities, the multiple injuries of the Sugar Act, the rise of admiralty courts, punitive customs enforcement, and suchlike, New Englanders—being more belligerent than genteel Virginians—had replied on occasion with cannon, boarding parties, and boat burnings.

This discord went back to the last years of the French war. American vessels had continued to trade with the French West Indies in the late 1750s and early 1760s, even though the provisions, lumber, and livestock they carried to islands like Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in return for French West Indies molasses indirectly supported the French war effort. Ships and merchants from Philadelphia and New York, including many subsequent Loyalists, had participated along with New Englanders. However, as imperial policy toughened, the remedies chosen—writs of assistance in 1761, the Revenue Act of 1762, the Customs Act of 1763, the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the Townshend Acts of 1767—struck hardest at New England, particularly Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Historians specializing in pre-Revolutionary issues like trade, admiralty court, customs, and customs revenue have explained what colonial ire this barrage of legislation produced. Hundreds of pages of detail were involved. Unfortunately, little maritime angst can be captured in a page or two of commercial explanation. We will see in
Chapter 7
how some prominent historians argue that even in the 1760s Americans were developing a belief in British ministerial conspiracy. New Englanders could—and many did—take the evolution of customs policy as evidence of manifest hostility.