American Tempest (9 page)

“There is so much magic in the sound of the word liberty,” Oliver argued, “that the discord of licentiousness very seldom vibrates on the ear . . . and hence arise many evils which . . . induce anarchy and every species of confusion. . . . As to a state of natural liberty existing . . . that there is any such state of existence among the human species remains at present to be proved.”
⁶

The division between those who argued for or against so-called natural rights split every class of American society, from the wealthiest merchants to nomadic frontiersmen. Frontiersmen were fierce in asserting their rights to poach on anyone's land to hunt for meat, skins, and fur, and many merchants were equally fierce in asserting their right to trade with whomever they chose and to profit from their trade without sharing a penny with the government—even if they had to smuggle goods into the country to avoid doing so. For American merchants, the right to make money was as basic to life in the New World as the right to breathe the air.

Peter Oliver. The future chief justice of Britain's Massachusetts Bay Colony, he was the son of one of Boston's merchant-aristocrats and, with his brother Andrew, inherited his father's merchant-banking house. They amassed a fortune supplying the Massachusetts militia with cannon during various wars with the French.
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Grenville's American Revenue Act sought to reduce the incentive to smuggle foreign molasses by reducing the duty from six to three pence a gallon. To compensate for the reductions, he placed new or slightly higher duties on non-British textiles, coffee, and indigo, and he doubled duties on all other foreign goods, including wines from Madeira, the Canary Islands, and France. The increased web of taxes provoked growing anxieties in the American merchant community, where all taxes represented tyranny and confiscation of private property. Grenville, however, responded that the American Revenue Act would extract only about £45,000 a year in annual revenues, or about two pence
a year
per capita—hardly an onerous burden.

To ensure collection of revenues, Parliament gave Grenville special powers to enforce the American Revenue Act, and he acted immediately
to reform the customs service, tighten ship inspection procedures, and ban ship owners and merchants from suing the customs service for illegal seizures. He placed the burden of proof for recovering seized ships and cargoes on merchants and ship owners, and he moved the vice-admiralty court to Halifax, forcing merchants whose cargoes or ships were seized to try to recover their property in a court far from home, where they had no influence.

After passing the American Revenue Act, Parliament resolved with little fanfare that “it may be proper to charge certain Stamp Duties in the said Colonies and Plantations.”
⁷
English lawyers, insurance firms, merchants, publishers, and stationers routinely affixed government stamps, for which they paid a nominal sum, on legal documents of all types, including liquor licenses and other permits, wills, bails, ships' papers, bills of lading, bills of sale, insurance policies, appointments to office, and articles of apprenticeship. Stamps also had to be bought and affixed to university degrees, wine containers, newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, publicly distributed leaflets, playing cards, and dice.

After resolving to consider the stamp tax, Parliament passed Grenville's second proposal for increasing American contributions to British costs in America: the Currency Act. The measure extended the ban on local currency in New England to the rest of the colonies and forced all but the wealthiest Americans—that is, those without a hoard of gold and silver coins—to rely on barter for day-to-day transactions.
⁸
An inefficient method of trade, barter often left would-be buyers without enough goods or the proper goods to trade for their needs, thus slowing the pace of trade and economic activity of the region. In effect, Grenville's two acts combined to send the American economy into decline, and in April 1763, 147 Boston merchants responded by organizing a “Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce within the Province of Massachusetts Bay” to monitor trade and try to influence Parliament to reverse Grenville's policies. As news of their activities spread to other ports, similar organizations emerged in New York, then Philadelphia. “They abhor every limitation of trade and duty on it,” New York Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden explained.
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In the months that followed, Otis sensed that British duties—and the higher costs of living they produced—represented an issue that would forge
a political bond between all merchants—wealthy or not. In August 1764 he published a pamphlet entitled
The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved
and raised the first public cry against taxation without representation, citing the Magna Carta as a guarantee that “the Supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his consent in person or by representation.”
¹⁰

Samuel Adams appended a declaration of his own to the Otis work, equating taxation to government confiscation of property and warning that the American Revenue Act and Currency Act were “preparatory to new taxations upon us. . . . If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid,” he suggested, “are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?”
¹¹

Both Adams and Otis, of course, conveniently overlooked the fact that few taxpayers in England had any representation in Parliament. Indeed, only one million of the nine million adult males in Britain were entitled to vote.
¹²

“In Britain, copyholders, leaseholders, and all men possessed of personal property only, choose no representatives,” explained one member of Parliament in defense of colonial taxation.

What Parliament's defender failed to mention, however, was that Britain's unrepresented majority had not forfeited representation voluntarily. Generations of population shifts from rural districts into port cities
had left 140, or 30 percent, of Parliament's more than 450 districts as underpopulated “rotten boroughs,” with each district's vote in Parliament controlled by only one or two major landowners. Fifty districts were “pocket boroughs,” where the elected member of Parliament was “in the pocket” of a single landowner who could rule his district like a tyrant and usually voted as such in Parliament, without regard to the interests of any other Englishman. Indeed, the bloc of MPs from rotten and pocket boroughs often formed a conspiracy of tyrants when voting on important issues in Parliament—especially social issues involving expanded popular rights and privileges.

Adams's fears that Grenville's laws would spawn new taxes proved prescient. In April 1765 Grenville asked Parliament to convert its resolution for a stamp tax into law. With the Molasses Act and the American Revenue Act, the Stamp Tax would be the third set of taxes on Americans that Parliament would enact without American consent. More provocative than earlier taxes, it was the first direct tax that would affect almost every American. Americans could avoid paying indirect taxes by simply not buying goods on which the cost of duties had been added. There was no way to avoid paying a direct tax.

The Stamp Act was to take effect the following November 1 and extend England's own seventy-year-old stamp tax to the colonies. The tax raised about £300,000 a year in Britain, and Grenville estimated it would yield about £60,000 a year in America, at a cost of less than a shilling a day per capita, or less than three hours' earnings a year for a skilled artisan. When added to the £45,000 to be raised from the American Revenue Act, stamp tax collections would bring total American tax revenues to about £105,000 a year, or almost one-third of the costs of maintaining Britain's army in America. Although it seemed innocuous, it would prove one of the most disastrous calculations in Grenville's storied career.

Although Grenville correctly calculated the negligible costs of the tax to the average consumer, he failed to recognize the costs to three of America's most influential groups: merchants, publishers, and lawyers. Merchants would have to buy and affix stamps to every purchase order, remittance, and receipt; publishers to every newspaper, pamphlet, and circular they printed; and lawyers to every legal document they issued. Granville's Stamp
Act would not only unite three of the most powerful, otherwise nonallied groups in America, it would teach them for the first time the power of united action against government—no matter how big or powerful.

Although America's merchants voiced few objections to Britain's maintaining defensive military garrisons, they objected to paying for British troops to man and maintain them. Indeed, Andrew Rutledge, an influential South Carolina rice planter, suggested raising £100,000 for South Carolina on its own to support four regiments of American militiamen on the frontier. Other colonist leaders agreed that the forces should be American rather than British. Even some English military leaders doubted the value of British troops in America. Colonel Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent of the Northern Indians, told the Board of Trade in 1762 that although frontier forts might prove effective “in retarding the progress of an army, they can in no wise prevent incursions by Indians, who need not approach the forts in any of their inroads, and can destroy the inhabitants and their dwellings with very little risk.”
¹⁴

By summer 1765 some colonists suspected that Grenville's motives for expanding British military presence in America was not to fight Indians but to police and control colonists. Anger began to build when General Thomas Gage, the New York–based commander in chief of British forces in America, all but confirmed those suspicions by asking Parliament to pass a Quartering Act, requiring civil authorities in the colonies to supply barracks and provisions for British troops.

In Boston, John Hancock, whose uncle's merchant bank had become New England's largest enterprise, grew so annoyed he wrote to his agent in London, all but ordering him to lobby against passage of the Stamp Act. Breaking ranks with Boston's small circle of merchant-aristocrats, Hancock called the act “very cruel.” He warned that British merchants would ultimately pay a higher price for the stamp tax than American merchants. “We were before much burdened. We shall not now be able much longer to support trade, and in the end Great Britain must feel the effects of it. I wonder the merchants and friends of America don't make a stir for us.”
¹⁵
Hancock warned the royal governor: “I am determined as soon as I know that they are resolved to insist on this act to sell my stock in trade and shut up my warehouse doors.”
¹⁶

Although the friends of America were indeed ready to “make a stir,” the conspiracy of tyrants in Parliament refused to budge. They believed that American merchants were profiting at their expense and they intended to snatch a share of those profits—regardless of the eventual cost in human misery and lives.