A History of Britain, Volume 2 (65 page)

So it was inevitable that George Grenville, who succeeded the deeply unpopular Bute as First Lord of the Treasury in August 1763 (to the express disadvantage of Pitt, who had been approached for a return), should turn his tidy mind to the challenge of having the American empire – which he supposed could best afford it – pay for the costs of its own defence. The logic of it must have seemed incontrovertible. Had not British America benefited immeasurably from the war? Had not money poured into its trade and industries from the mother country during the campaigns? Were not its prospects, with the immense territory of Canada added, bright? But now there had to be some sort of reckoning. First, the basic, self-evidently dependent relationship of the colonies to the home country, in which the former existed to supply Britain with raw materials while consuming its manufactures, needed to be restated and reinforced. Whatever Benjamin Franklin thought, no illusions should be held that Britain would tolerate, much less encourage, the growth of American manufactures that might compete with its own, nor would it look kindly on foreign countries that did so, least of all France and Spain, and their colonies. Secondly, if the costs of defending the American empire were not to become uncontrollable, the region of settlement had to be limited to lands east of the Appalachians; lands further to the west must henceforth be reserved to the Native Americans, without whose goodwill continuing and expensive trouble would be guaranteed. Thirdly, it seemed only equitable that the American colonies, for whose benefit it was constituted, should pay for their own defence through some form of additional revenue.

Just what those revenues should be deeply exercised the fastidious Grenville. On looking through the books of the American customs and excise he was appalled to discover that their operating costs were much heavier than their yield. The conclusion was certainly not to abolish them, but to impose a new substantial duty on the foreign commodity most in demand in America. And that, of course, was French sugar, in particular the Caribbean molasses needed for distilling into the ubiquitous American food staple – rum. (British Caribbean molasses was inadequate in supply and high in price.) Grenville's proposed duty was sixpence a gallon. When protests – especially loud from the rum-happy New England colonies – were voiced, he cut it in half but backed it up by aggressive, quasi-military customs enforcement. In 1761, at the height of the Seven Years' War, when trading with the enemy was deemed a form of economic sabotage, ‘writs of assistance' had been used to search and try smugglers in vice-admiralty courts (since colonial ones seemed reluctant to convict them). Now, to the anger and dismay of the commercial communities in Boston and New York – where smuggling was a way of life – those courts were to be continued in peacetime.

The trouble for Grenville – did he but know it – was that he was making trouble for the best-read smugglers in the world. And what they read was history: English history, the epic history of English liberty, the very same history that Grenville himself had so innocently admired in the park at Stowe. Inside the reading clubs of Boston and Philadelphia, and in the Societies for Encouraging Commerce, the crackdown on contraband, the heavy hand of the customs men and the special jurisdiction of the ‘vice-admiralty' courts all triggered instant memories of Star Chamber. To resist them was to summon the noble shade of Hampden to defend the imperishable rights of free-born Britons. ‘If our Trade may be taxed, why not our lands?' asked speakers at the Boston Town Meeting in the spring of 1764, scenting the whiff of tyranny. ‘Why not the produce of our lands and everything we possess or make use of? This . . . strikes at our British privileges which, as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our fellow subjects who are natives of Britain.'

And if the Sugar Act (1764) goaded them to complaint, Grenville's second really bright idea – a stamp tax to be imposed on paper used for all manner of articles from playing cards and newspapers to legal documents, broadsheets and advertisements – was the imperial equivalent of Charles I raising his standard at Nottingham. Grenville congratulated himself on the genius of the stamp tax because, unlike customs duties, it was, he thought, self-administering, free of onerous and abrasive searches. The duty would be paid on pre-stamped paper before it was used for
whatever purpose. The bill had its first reading in the Commons (before a half-empty House) in early February 1765, and Grenville announced that it would not come into force until November to give time for representations from the colonies. Since, for all their grumbling, most of the colonies had in the end swallowed the Sugar Act, Grenville was still confident that the Stamp Act (1765) would be accepted as well. He had estimated it might bring in £100,000 in the first year, much more in later years. He certainly could have had no idea that he had just inaugurated the beginning of the end of British America.

But then Grenville, like most of his contemporaries in Britain, even those who imagined themselves well read, broad-minded and well travelled, really knew pitifully little about the reality of the American colonies. Those few Americans (like Franklin) with whom they had occasion to come into contact in London were, by definition, those who had the strongest affinity with Britain. Those with whom they had official business as governors in Boston or Williamsburg usually told them what they wanted to hear: indeed often encouraged them in taking a hard line with the colonists to discourage the signs of insubordination and presumptuous liberty they had noticed during the recent wars. When the politicians in London imagined America they imagined, largely, English men and women obediently transplanted. Sometimes they imagined Scots and Presbyterian Irish – but then those countrymen had served the Empire well in its army. Very seldom did they think of about 80,000 Pennsylvania Germans, 40,000 New York and Hudson Valley Dutch, and many other populations – Quakers, Jews, African slaves – all of whom made America a much more heterogeneous, much less Anglo-pinko place than could be imagined at Westminster.

Nor from the fastness of Westminster could they imagine the electrifying intensity of local politics in towns like Philadelphia and Boston. In Boston, 2500 men out of a total population of some 16,000 were entitled to vote at the Town Meeting, whose sessions at Faneuil Hall were rowdily eloquent. Pitt and his generation liked to imagine themselves so many Ciceros. But Boston really was the size of the optimum face-to-face neo-Athenian democracy imagined by Rousseau in the 1760s; and its orators – James Otis, Sam Adams, Josiah Quincy and John Hancock – believed they were so many Demostheneses. Least of all did it really occur to the likes of Grenville and the Whig politicians that somehow the liberty-canon of British history might actually be turned against them – that they would now be cast as Laud and Judge Jeffreys – and that one day some young Virginian would be trawling through the Declaration of Rights of 1689 for a list of accusations to level at King George III.

And in truth that day was still far off. But the fact that Boston, especially, was a book-crazy, news-hungry, astonishingly literate (70 per cent for men, 45 per cent for women), habitually litigious place, with a strong religious disposition to see the world in terms of the embattled forces of good and evil, doomed the Stamp Act from the beginning. The city prided itself on its civic culture: its grammar schools and colleges, gazettes and libraries. And its educated leaders made conscious efforts to reach a popular audience. John Adams, for instance, wrote his articles on the errors and iniquities of British administration in the
Boston Gazette
under the pseudonym ‘Humphrey Ploughjogger.' This was the kind of thing that would have been meat and drink to shopkeepers like Harbottle Dorr who read the
Gazette
avidly, scanned its woodcut illustrations and made copious commentaries about the stories that fed his indignation. With a population of 16,000 it was also a city small enough to place a high value on the transparency of politics. John Adams spoke for many in 1765 when he insisted that ‘the people have a right, an indisputable, unalienable right, an indefatigable right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers.' To such Bostonians, the Stamp Act seemed to announce not just an illegal tax but also a gag on the production and distribution of free political information. Yet for all these glaring sources of grievance, no one, least of all the Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Justice of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson (who always had his doubts about the wisdom of the Stamp Act), had the slightest inkling of what was about to happen.

It is true that he ought to have been worried about being hanged in effigy at the ‘Liberty Tree' on 14 August 1765. But Hutchinson was used to symbolic demonstrations of hatred. On the 26th the action became much more physically immediate. A riot of extraordinary savagery tore apart his elegant house in Boston, including its cupola, and threw his manuscript history in the dirt. Had he not fled on the desperate pleading of his daughter, the incensed crowd would probably have torn him apart too. There was a long tradition of rowdy, drunken street fighting in Boston, especially when rival gangs from the North and South End celebrated ‘Pope's Day'(5 November) with their annual, violent football match. But on this occasion, and on Pope's Day 1765, crowds of tanners, dockers, seamen and carpenters who lived around the harbour combined forces, and with very specific targets in mind: Hutchinson and the distributor of the stamps, his brother-in-law Andrew Oliver. The mob had evidently been mobilized by men like the twenty-eight-year-old cobbler Ebenezer Mackintosh, but he in turn would have been listening to, if not actually taking instructions from, a secret group called the ‘Loyal Nine'
who had decided that only physical resistance would stop the introduction of the stamps.

The ‘Loyal Nine' were in their turn taking their cue from men who were by no means roughneck mob-raisers, but articulate, resolute politicians who knew exactly what they were doing. In Boston they included the merchant James Otis and the ex-tax collector and brewer-maltster Samuel Adams. Their own instincts for dramatic resistance had been fired by the ‘Virginia Resolves' moved by a young orator, Patrick Henry, who had compared the introduction of the stamps to the most iniquitous Roman tyranny; by blessings for their cause awarded from the pulpit by Jonathan Mayhew; and, from far off, by the report of an extraordinary speech given in the House of Commons on the day of the Stamp Act's first reading by Isaac Barré, half of whose face had been blown off on the Heights of Abraham. Fixing his one eye and mutilated cheek on Charles Townshend, who had just asserted the ‘undoubted' right of parliament to tax the colonies on the grounds that they had been ‘planted', ‘nourished' and ‘protected' by Britain, Barré opened up with a withering counter-attack, replacing the official version of selfless British paternalism churlishly repudiated with an altogether different history of the relationship between mother country and colonies. He thundered:

Stirred by this conviction that the most hallowed principles of
British
liberty were at stake, the Stamp Act protests spread throughout almost all the colonies, forcing the distributors of the stamps to have serious second thoughts about the wisdom of their commission. Grenville had also succeeded in provoking a rare example of inter-colonial cooperation, at the Stamp Act Congress convened in October 1765 in New York to discuss measures to be taken. The delegates shied away from physical resistance but adopted a policy (already mooted in Boston) of boycotting imports of British luxury goods, on which so many incomes in the already
disturbed home economy depended. In July Grenville's government fell – although for reasons unconnected with the American crisis. The Rockingham administration, which replaced him, was disposed, but not yet committed, to repeal (which even Thomas Hutchinson in Boston was urging). In the winter of 1765–6 debates of immense significance, attempting to grapple with the relationship between Britain and America, took place in parliament for the first time.