1775 (48 page)

By contrast, during these same months, Patriot spokesmen could not have been declared in rebellion or called outlaw for insisting that Britain had no authority to lay taxes on them. Many Britons, including William Pitt, said the same thing because Americans had no voice in Parliament—their “virtual representation” being a joke. As for London’s fury over large-scale smuggling during the French and Indian War, and the consequent treasonlike allegation that American provisions shipped to the French Caribbean islands had prolonged the conflict, an obvious retort existed: Britons themselves had traded illicitly on a large scale with the French during that same war.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island, although agile practitioners, were amateurs alongside the eighteenth-century gangs of smugglers operating along the south coast of England—from Kent on the English Channel to Cornwall and the Scilly Islands. Even in the twenty-first century, this heritage remains so pervasive—the legend of smugglers’ inns like the Mermaid in Rye, the sea-facing old stone churches famous for once storing illegal goods—that the British Ordnance Survey has published a guide to “Smugglers’ Britain” and “over 250 Haunts and Hideouts From the Great Years of Contraband.” According to the author, “In the eighteenth century illegal trade across England’s coast mushroomed. A trade that previously existed as simple small-scale evasion of duty turned into an industry of astonishing proportions, syphoning money abroad, and channeling huge volumes of contraband into the southern counties of England. Even by modern standards, the quantities of imported goods were extraordinary. It was not uncommon for a smuggling trip to bring in 3,000 gallons of spirits…Illegally imported gin was sometimes so plentiful that the inhabitants of some Kentish villages were said to use it for cleaning their windows. And according to some contemporary estimates, four-fifths of all tea drunk in England had not had duty paid on it.”
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The four-fifths calculation probably exaggerates. In 1784 the government estimated that duty had not been paid on 7.5 million out of the 13 million pounds of tea consumed during the preceding year. The cost of all smuggling into Britain was estimated at £2 million—relative to a total government revenue of £12.5 million.
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During the early 1760s crackdown on North American smuggling, by contrast, the revenue at stake was probably no more than £100,000 to £200,000. As for patriotism, British admirals also lamented the daily flow of vital wartime information from English ports and ships to the French enemy across the Channel.

So why were the thirteen colonies, and New England in particular, the designated whipping post during the decade and a half before 1775? Why were 20 or 30 ships of the Royal Navy ordered to collect customs duties off the American coast instead of concentrating their force off smugglers’ coves in Kent, Sussex, Dorset, or Cornwall? Was it because British policy makers feared the American colonies—their ballooning population, their shipbuilding capacity (between one quarter and one third of British ships were American built), their markets, their western lands, their large numbers of skilled seamen, and their growing capacity to manufacture many of Britain’s own specialties? No such disaffection-cum-breakaway was possible along England’s southern coast, or for that matter in such smuggling centers of the British Caribbean as Jamaica and St. Kitts. London’s discriminatory treatment was not misplaced.

The American population, doubling every twenty-five years, was indeed expected to exceed Britain’s in two or three generations. Benjamin Franklin had said the Americans could learn to make most of what Britain manufactured in a short time. Edmund Burke had saluted Americans’ skill in their pursuit of fisheries. In France, foreign ministers from Choiseul to Vergennes privately discussed how splitting off America and its benefits to the empire was their surest way to dethrone Britain. In 1775 William Pitt, now Lord Chatham, took to the floor of the House of Lords to offer a caustic economic analysis: “the profit from the trade of the colonies, through all its branches, is two millions a year. This is the fund that carried you triumphantly through the last war…this is the price that America pays for her protection.”
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Such calculations encouraged King George’s fear of a domino effect should America be lost. If this particular worry was misplaced, the monarch and his ministers were generally correct to believe that the Americans were heading toward “independency.” True, most colonials who denied that did so in good faith, but they required the help of multiple illusions.

Besides overconfidence in the political and commercial muscle of nonimportation, too many Americans believed that the colonies’ importance to Britain would compel the huge concessions demanded. In reality, the more than 300 Commons seats won by supporters of Lord North in the October 1774 elections ensured support for hard-line policies at least through 1775 and 1776. North, much liked by the king, was in little danger of being dropped for another Whig ministry, especially one under the aging Pitt, a royal bête noire.

Back in 1774, when most Americans could contend with personal conviction
that independence was not a goal, many moderates and future Loyalists demonstrated a different naïveté. At the First Continental Congress, Pennsylvania’s Joseph Galloway had participated and proposed the alternative course of seeking an American Parliament, even though he would later describe Congress’s proceedings as “a declaration of war.”
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His belief probably reflected a confidence in the British Empire and an assumption that the king and Parliament would do their best on Americans’ behalf if approached reasonably and loyally. Indeed, many hopeful Loyalists went along with the Continental Association to promote an image of American unity in order to support hard economic bargaining—at least until January and February 1775, when escalating skepticism shattered the facade briefly constructed in Philadelphia.

By this point, of course, elements of the British government and much of the Patriot leadership in New England were preparing for combat, however much poor winter communications assured an information lag. When the details of Congress’s October slap in the imperial face reached London in December 1774, they quickly ended Cabinet uncertainty, convincing the Crown to reply in kind. To paraphrase Lord North, the American colonies want to cut off commerce with us, so we’ll cut off their access to the North Atlantic fisheries and stop their trade outside the empire—and naval enforcement will start in July. More than a few would-be Loyalists were left in the lurch.

In another twelve to eighteen months, British talk of prosecutions for treason had become less topical as both sides realized that the conflict had become a civil war, which demanded a different etiquette. The colonial economic ultimatums that led to British countermeasures had been a new kind of casus belli.

The Vital Role of the Continental Association and Its Committees

Too much of this has been forgotten. Tens of millions of Americans have visited Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall, the well-maintained and hallowed building where the First Continental Congress met, worked, and voted. But there are few, if any, plaques in Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, or any other town singling out a room or building occupied in 1774 or 1775 by the local committee of inspection or public safety. These were the first institutions of independent local government in the future United States.
They ought to merit the attentions of political archaeologists, if not official historic preservation commissions.

The scope of their economic activity, already hinted, ranged from clearing ship departures to setting prices, investigating merchants, and deporting malefactors. In many places, regulation of the economy impinged on cultural practices; and elsewhere it edged toward military procurement and munitions management. In decrying purchases of unnecessary luxuries, extravagant clothing, cheap gewgaws, and types of conspicuous ceremony like costly funerals, the Association sought to harness Puritan morality to reduce wasteful spending and debt. George Washington and other supportive Virginians perceived a covert benefit. Patriotic boycotts of luxuries, including expensive clothing, would give debt-burdened gentlemen a face-saving way to cut outlays they could no longer afford. In the new cultural milieu, even planters accepted committee rulings against dancing classes, balls, entertainments, billiards, and their beloved horse races.
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Economic regulation overlapped with war preparation, in turn, when committees found themselves inventorying or seizing citizens’ muskets, approving saltpeter collections, enjoining harbor or river pilots from aiding the British, setting militia pay, and hiring carpenters to build river obstructions or gun carriages. Local committees often had to call out the militia and direct its local operations.

The most informed assessments of what it all meant have come from the handful of chroniclers who immersed themselves in the subject matter, organization, calendar, and politics of the Continental Association between October 1774 and the winter of 1775–1776. To call this a “hidden history” of the early Revolution is an exaggeration. But that is principally because it is not really hidden, merely too little studied.

Bluntly put, the effectiveness of the new committee structure confirmed the First Continental Congress’s positioning of the Continental Association as a “counter-coercive” response to Britain’s spring 1774 Coercive Acts, albeit neither friend nor foe used that characterization at the time. One unhappy appreciation came from Virginia’s Dunmore, who observed that Virginians gave “the Laws of Congress…marks of reverence which they never bestowed on their legal Government, or the laws proceeding from it.”
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In Pennsylvania, the authoritative study of Revolutionary committees in that city took particular note of two with commercial origins—the Association’s enforcement structure in Philadelphia and the United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures. Taken together, the
importance of these two suggested that “the role of patriotic commercial associations in the coming of the Revolution may well deserve the attention commonly accorded political clubs and factions.”
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The long-run importance of the Association, argued historian Ammerman, lay in “the provision calling the election of committees to enforce the trade boycott. Because approval and enforcement of the Association were placed in the hands of local groups rather than provincial assemblies of congresses, these committees became the regulatory agencies of the First Continental Congress.”
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Nor did they have much supervision during the hectic early months of 1775. No common law and no constitution applied. “It was not until after the outbreak of the war,” adds another chronicler, “that any serious effort was made to supervise local committees and by then the Association was no longer the central issue.”
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Almost a century ago, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., dwelt on the post–April 19 shift of many of these enforcement units into what he called a second or “defense” stage. Here the committees displayed an increasingly military preoccupation. Besides loyalty oaths and measures, these functions included military discipline and nonexportation of items needed in wartime. Scores of committees, including those in the major ports, adopted prohibitions against exports to Nova Scotia, Quebec, Newfoundland, and other colonies that were profitably provisioning the British Army in Boston.
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On July 15 the Second Congress quietly authorized private individuals or firms to export American produce, tobacco, or food—“the non-exportation agreement notwithstanding”—in return for munitions. Although July’s decision was not publicized until October, it signaled that trade was now on a wartime basis.
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In terms of the unfolding American Revolutionary economy, the year 1775 was a period of fortunate and necessary optimism, yet these hopes were in many ways unjustified. Without that brave confidence, without that clutch of illusions—naïve assumptions based on a supposedly unstoppable North American reservoir of manpower, an expected great surplus of grain and livestock, and a predicted flood of trade and support from Europe despite a British blockade—the ambitious rebels who launched the Revolution in 1774 and 1775 might not have dared. By 1779 and 1780, Britain’s naval chokehold together with rampant inflation had left the new nation’s economy at a nadir. However, this book is entitled
1775,
not
1780.
The Revolution succeeded, luckily, because several years of economic bravado preceded the era of disillusionment.

F
ew aspects of how the Revolution unfolded in the late spring, summer, and autumn of 1775 are more intriguing—and less adequately pursued—than the multiple avenues of attack opening from New England and New York to Canada. By October and November, British governors and generals feared that rebel forces might well succeed in taking the citadel of Quebec.

The shift of intentions in Congress between mid-May and the end of June was a stormy prelude. The psychological drive of the New Englanders is hard to overstate, but when word reached Philadelphia on May 17 that Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Green Mountain irregulars had taken Ticonderoga and Crown Point, the initial reaction of middle-colony moderates, especially New Yorkers, was apprehension, based partly on fear of a British counterattack. Congress hemmed and hawed through the rest of May. But by the end of June, American invasion plans were taking shape, and the weight of evidence was that many French Canadians and some northern Indian tribes were amenable.
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Although the British government
had built alliances with Quebec’s Catholic hierarchy and local French seigneurs, Governor Carleton in Quebec had misread the French peasantry. They did not want to be under the thumb of the clergy and gentry and were open to an American incursion.