1775 (47 page)

Participation was more haphazard in the relatively lukewarm middle colonies. Enforcement at the county level was the norm in Pennsylvania—nine of its eleven elected such committees. A few committees were chosen by towns or districts. That suggested a probable colony-wide total of about 500 committeemen.
²³
Philadelphia, the colony’s major port, for its part, was inspected and supervised in 1775 under the aegis of the Committee of Sixty-six, increasingly representative of artisans and small entrepreneurs at the expense of the old Quaker mercantile establishment.

New Jersey, mixing county and township members in the Pennsylvania manner, filled more than 500 committee positions. Two of Delaware’s three counties, Newcastle and Kent, established Committees of Inspection to enforce the Association, but Tory-leaning Sussex might not have.
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The conspicuous nose thumbing, as we have seen, came in New York: “Only three of thirteen counties responded favorably to the Association, efforts in three others to adopt it were suppressed, and most devastating of all, seven counties ignored it entirely.”
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Some of these scoffers were responding to rival Loyalist associations, which contrarily put forward the “undoubted right to liberty in eating, drinking, buying, selling.”
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In the South, county committees were the rule. Meetings in Virginia opened by approving the Association, and then proceeded to elect an enforcement committee. Fifty-one are known to have chosen groups, ranging in size from 6 members to 69. Separate boards were elected in three large towns: Williamsburg, Norfolk, and Fredericksburg. All in all, Virginia had some 1,100 freeholders busy watching local commerce and morality.
Maryland had almost as many inspectors and regulators—900—despite its much smaller population and complement of just 16 counties. The number of Marylanders serving rose sharply during 1775. In part, explained one leader, that represented political outreach: “It would engage ye. Country People more warmly if gratified in a more Numerous Appointmt. among them.”
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North Carolina’s records are less revealing. However, support for the Association and participation in its local enforcement bulked largest in the eastern tidewater region, especially in the tobacco centers and seaport counties, including Edenton, New Bern, and Wilmington, coupled with Piedmont strength in the Scotch-Irish centers of Mecklenburg and Rowan counties.
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Anyone doubting that the Wilmington-New Hanover Committee of Public Safety, for example, was the effective “governing body” of the lower Cape Fear region between November 1774 and the spring of 1776 has only to read its published minutes.
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Its functionaries did everything from setting the price of salt to banning trade with Newfoundland and deporting “inimicals”—the old English Civil War term for enemies of the cause.

Only in South Carolina, in January 1775, did a colony-wide Patriot organization opt to appoint the local committees and specify the enforcement guidelines. This made sense because the existing Charleston-based General Committee, eager to broaden Patriot outreach, decided to have its first Provincial Congress elected from new districts that expanded the participation of an alienated backcountry. The new backcountry delegates had no experience with parliamentary procedures—niceties like seconding, amending, and recommitting—but the Patriot leadership wanted to bring them into vital decisions, including the mechanics of implementing nonexportation. Three months earlier the Congress in Philadelphia had made concessions to rice exporters but left out indigo planters. The new Provincial Congress would have to work a compensation arrangement for angry indigo producers, many of them small growers in the backcountry.
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The political economics of trade policy were pervasive.

However, before we move on to the rapidly crystallizing circumstances of British trade retaliation and Parliament’s imposition of the maritime equivalents of outlawry, it is necessary to revisit the still-untested political economics of the nonexportation of crops. In contrast to New England and the middle colonies, plantation Patriots were playing a high-stakes game: a commercial and political gamble on withholding tobacco, rice, and indigo crops from their mandated English markets.

The Export Weapons: Tobacco and Rice

If any of Virginia’s leading tobacco planters predicted in 1774 what nonexportation was likely to bring about by 1776 or 1777, their answers have not come down to posterity. But in 1774 tobacco as a crop arguably profited Britain’s monopoly more than it profited Old Dominion growers, and it was those circumstances that made cured leaf the colonies’ prime trade weapon.

Although the northern and middle colonies produced enumerated commodities that they planned to hold back from Britain—iron, masts for the Royal Navy—none were local economic mainstays. In the southern colonies, by contrast, tobacco—and in the subtropics, rice—were the principal crops. Tobacco alone accounted for 90 percent of the value of combined Virginia and Maryland exports to Britain and represented three quarters of the two colonies’ combined worldwide exports. Rice and indigo, taken together, represented fourth fifths of what South Carolina and Georgia shipped across the Atlantic.

During the summer of 1774, and then during the September-October deliberations in Congress, plantation-colony spokesmen had emphasized key points. First, they would be taking a larger risk in the common cause than the other eight colonies. Second, their individual commitments were necessarily interrelated: Maryland and North Carolina would not withhold their own tobacco if Virginia, the principal producer, was not participating. South Carolina would not hold back rice and indigo if the tobacco producers were not keeping back their leaf.

This inevitably gave Virginia, already the largest and most respected of the thirteen, unequaled leverage. The Virginia Convention, in drawing up its own Association in August, had proposed that nonexportation not start until August 10, 1775. Suggestions from other colonies that nonexportation commence immediately, as even some southerners preferred, were simply unacceptable. Tobacco-crop curing and marketing considerations ruled out speed. The crop cut and hung to dry in autumn 1774 would not be ready for delivery until the next spring. Tobacco production required a unique fifteen-month cycle: seeding in January, cutting in September, curing, stripping, and stemming during the autumn, then prizing or packing the tobacco into barrel-like hogsheads, which were moved to the public warehouses and inspected in January. Shipment to Britain came only in the spring, in a seasonal rhythm that had become part of Virginia culture.
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The delegates in Philadelphia had acquiesced. Nonexportation to Britain would not commence until September 10, 1775, thereby allowing the tobacco colonies to sell and deliver their all-important 1774 crop. As for rice growers—mostly South Carolinians but also Georgians and a few North Carolinians from Cape Fear—they, too, had until September to ship to Britain. However, as a further concession, Congress authorized rice planters,
after
September, to ship to all of Europe, mostly destinations hitherto barred by the British Acts of Trade and Navigation. Even beyond the effrontery of withholding enumerated commodities, the regulatory props of mercantilism were starting to fall.

Until 1770, the idea of withholding exports to Britain and the British West Indies had been more banter than serious deliberation. Back in 1769, Virginia’s George Mason had raised the idea of not exporting tobacco to help pressure Parliament to repeal the Townshend Acts. In 1770, growers in both Maryland and Virginia formed local associations not to sell below a certain price.
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The decisive spur to challenge the system came from the British financial crisis of 1772. Its devastating effects, first felt by English and Scottish merchants, soon undercut the price of Chesapeake tobacco. By one calculation, it swooned from 2.4 pence per pound (Virginia currency) in October 1772 to 1.5 pence per pound in June 1773. Because tobacco could be stored, persisting oversupply from bumper crops in 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 made matters worse.
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As we have seen in
Chapter 4
, one solution discussed by Chesapeake growers was withholding leaf to force the price up. Some smallholders took the storage approach, warehousing their crops for better demand. In 1774, when Britain responded to the Boston Tea Party by passing the Coercive Acts, canny planters saw a new political opportunity: withholding tobacco exports could become part of a plan to force Britain to repeal those punitive measures. Events now put a patriotic gloss on actions to end the tobacco glut and raise prices.
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Indebtedness, a fact of commercial life in the plantation colonies, became a second preoccupation. Growers did not want to shut off their tobacco, rice, or indigo shipments to British merchants while local courts still remained open to creditor suits for debt recovery. To backstop nonexportation, then, various degrees of simultaneous court closure would be necessary in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Conservatives were wary, but in practice a considerable amount of court closing was achieved, often indirectly through failure to pass judicial enabling legislation or under the
Association by Patriot enforcement committees forbidding most debtrecovery cases.
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Through 1775 and into 1776, tobacco nonexportation was a political and financial success. By the eve of Lexington and Concord, prices in Virginia had risen 60 to 80 percent from their 1774 lows, through a convergence of favorable circumstances. Growers unwilling to ship their leaf in many cases could not be sued in closed or unwilling courts. Buyers in Europe pushed up prices, assuming that the shipments in the spring and summer of 1775 would be the last.
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But good fortune was only temporary. Circumstances soured as the Restraining Acts of early 1775 were followed by the more sweeping Prohibitory Act at year’s end. In 1776, the British naval blockade grew increasingly effective in blocking sales to European buyers. The early prosperity nurtured by the Association—through high tobacco prices, new issuance of paper money, the stimulus of war mobilization, and subsidies to encourage new industries—gave way to growing inflation and disillusionment. In a sense,
rage militaire
and economic self-congratulation wore off together.

The Perils of Treasonomics

The assumption of mercantilist and imperial thinking was that colonies existed to support the political economy of the mother country. Such a viewpoint underpinned the Coercive Acts. Even the best-known American sympathizers in Parliament—William Pitt, Lord Rockingham, and Edmund Burke—accepted the necessarily subordinate nature of the colonial relationship. Whatever new theories Adam Smith might publish in 1776 in
The Wealth of Nations,
the views of George III, Lord North, and the Cabinet in 1774 and 1775 remained old school. The king himself believed that the North American colonies were critical to the British Empire, much as American “domino” theorists of the 1960s believed defeat in Vietnam threatened America’s world position.
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Against this psychological backdrop, a belligerent Continental Congress was demanding huge and implausible concessions: no British taxation in America, an end to duties on everything from wine and tea to sugar and molasses, repeal of the Quebec Act (and its bar to American westward expansion), and little or no London control over colonial trade save where Americans might consent. Only if these demands were agreed to would Congress drop its agenda of nonimportation, nonconsumption, and
nonexportation. To British Cabinet members, this amounted to criminal rejection by Americans of their colonial status. However, Britain being a nation that abided by its own laws, the Crown’s legal officers faced recurring difficulty in identifying workable circumstances for individual treason prosecutions. The necessary evidence would be hard to obtain.

Hopeful searches of the law books, however, went back a decade. Prosecutions had been weighed over boycotts against the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts, the attack by Rhode Islanders on the revenue cutter
Gaspee
in 1772, and the Tea Party in 1773.
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No prosecutions were actually brought, although the Coercive Acts can be regarded as a massive legal as well as economic sanction against Boston.

The actions of the First Continental Congress prompted even greater indignation. First, Massachusetts and New England were declared in rebellion. In December 1774, an informal meeting took place between Lord North and the Crown’s chief legal officers, Thurlow and Wedderburn, who deemed the proceedings of Congress “criminal to a great degree” and found the Suffolk Resolves containing “treason and rebellion in every line,” but recommended waiting for more information from General Gage before acting.
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A few months later Parliament passed the Restraining Acts. Finally, in December 1775, Lord North proposed and passed the Prohibitory Act, declaring the colonies outside of royal protection, which could be considered as an economic outlawry or “group treason” statute.

The treason law, under which British law officers failed to bring meaningful action, dated back to Henry VIII and referred to a king.
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What many Americans were embarking upon in 1774, though, could be thought of as “treasonomics”—a rejection of their subservient colonial role in the imperial economy. This fell short of “waging war against the king.” Most of the plotters would have been happy to remain nominally under the king so long as Parliament could be more or less emasculated. Naïve politically, this was fortuitous legally. No British treason statute covered a war colonists might wage against Lord North or Parliament; witness the repeated 1774–1775 expressions of disdain for “ministerial forces” or the “Parliamentary army” occupying Boston.

Even so, Congress’s declaration ending American commercial subservience arguably justified a royal decision to vacate the imperial relationship and to name the wayward colonies outlaws. The Association was not just a tougher replay of the colonies’ two earlier importation boycotts. To echo the words of historian Merrill Jensen at the beginning of this chapter, the Association was an unprecedented mechanism for economic coercion.