Conceived in Liberty (131 page)

Bailyn concludes that for executive dominance of the legislature, several preconditions had to exist: notably, the existence of an abundance of patronage and places; and a strictly limited franchise, “for the larger the voting population the greater the government’s difficulty in controlling elections.” England, with a mass of patronage at the disposal of the Crown, its severely limited franchise, and a plethora of “rotten” and “pocket” boroughs represented in Parliament, had these conditions in abundance in the eighteenth century. But, Bailyn points out, these preconditions for executive control and manipulation of the legislature were conspicuous by their absence in the American colonies. While the governors began with limited but yet extensive patronage powers, they were systematically stripped of them by royal prescription and, most importantly, by the alert and continuing pressure
of the Assemblies, which won for themselves ever-increasing powers of appointing executive and judicial officials. The Assemblies did so under the guidance of
Cato’s Letters
and other expressions of libertarian hostility to the deeply corrupting powers of executive patronage.

The Assemblies, in contrast to the Parliament, were moved to assert themselves to obtain such powers by virtue of the far greater representation and the far more extensive franchise in the colonies than in the mother country. There were no rotten or pocket boroughs in the colonies, and representation far more accurately proceeded proportionately to the growth and dispersion of population. Whereas the common forty-shilling land-ownership qualification for voting proved highly restrictive in Britain, it turned out to be highly permissive in the colonies; usually, from fifty to seventy-five percent of the adult male white population in the colonies was eligible to vote. Additional relative advantages enjoyed by the colonial legislatures were: the early growth of express and rigorous instructions by the towns and counties to their representatives, binding them to the will of the voters—a practice which scarcely existed in England; the impermanence of the tenure of the governors, in contrast to the lengthy tenure of the leading assemblymen; and the ability of the colonies to go over the heads of the governors to the authorities in Britain.
*

Adding to the virtual independence, by midcentury, of the colonies and their Assemblies was the determination of the British government not to enforce the myriad of mercantilist regulations passed by Parliament, controlling and restricting the trade and industry of the colonies.

*
Bernard Bailyn,
The Origins of American Politics
(New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 28–29.

*
Ibid.,
pp.
66–95.

The fundamental attitude of England toward its colonies was one of imperial domination, regulation, and exploitation for the benefit of the merchants and manufacturers of the imperial center. The basic mercantilist structure was built up by the Navigation Acts during the seventeenth century, even before Britain was in a position to attempt to enforce these regulations. The aim was to benefit English trade, and to supply the home country with raw materials, but always for the enhancement of the English merchant or manufacturer. The means was a growing network of restrictions and prohibitions, to be enforced by the arm of the state.

The Navigation Acts had begun with the Cromwellian Protectorate, as the Puritan Revolution began to be transformed into the counterrevolution, and eventually into a not very jolting Restoration of the Stuarts. The first acts of 1650–51 prohibited the export of colonial and non-European products to Britain in ships not owned or largely manned by Englishmen (or English colonists), and prohibited the export of European goods to the colonies in non-English ships that did not come from the producing country. The major aim of the acts was to crush the efficient and flourishing Dutch carrying trade, which provided unwelcome competition for English shippers.

The Navigation Act of 1660 greatly broadened the navigation laws by prohibiting in colonial trade all non-English or non-American ships manned by crews less than seventy-five percent English. An early addition also insisted that the ships must be English-built. Furthermore, the act erected a category of “enumerated articles”—the most important commodities in the colonial trade—which Americans could sell only to England or to another English colony. Thus, other European countries could not bid against English
purchasers or English shippers. Tobacco was the major commodity in the enumerated list, which also included sugar and indigo.

The next Navigation Act, the Staple Act of 1663, assured a monopoly of colonial trade to English merchants by prohibiting any import of European goods into the colonies that did not pass through England and pay English duties, and were not carried on English-built ships. (There were a few specified exemptions.) The extra tax also constituted a subsidy to English manufacturers in the colonial market by artificially burdening their foreign competitors.

From the beginning, the Crown had great difficulty in enforcing these acts, and the American colonists happily participated in the ancient English tradition of extensive smuggling. The later blocks of the Navigation Act structure consisted of attempts to counteract these evasions and enforce the regulations. The Plantation Duty Act of 1673 tried to crack down on the practice of one colony shipping tobacco to another (for instance, Virginia to Maryland, or North Carolina to Boston), the second colony then freely reexporting the staple to Europe. The new act provided that the colony must pay the English import duty on all shipments of enumerated goods from one colony to another, and also prohibited their reexport. The act also provided for colonial royal customs collectors, of whom the redoubtable Edward Randolph was an outstanding early example.

The climactic Navigation Act came in 1696. It provided for tightened enforcement of previous acts, including giving customs officials the right of forcible entry in search for violations, and the creation of vice admiralty courts without jury trials for violators, thus trying to circumvent the tendency of American juries not to convict smugglers. Furthermore, in 1705, the list of enumerated articles was lengthened to include rice, molasses, timber, and naval stores, plus many other items. Copper and fur were added in 1722.

To supervise the workings of the imperial structure and to administer the colonies, the Crown established several important agencies. The continuing operating head was the Board of Trade, newly revivified in 1696, with eight paid and active members and allied to the English merchants. During its first twenty years, the board pursued an energetic course, but by the early 1720s, it had succumbed to the happy and deliberate indolence of the Walpole administration in England. In 1714, Queen Anne, a high Tory possessed of reactionary instincts, died and was succeeded to the throne by George I. With King George, the Whigs came securely to power, and in 1722 Robert Walpole entered upon a long tenure as the king’s chief minister. Walpole, moderately liberal and pacific, headed a centrist Whig oligarchy. Walpole wanted only to govern in peace and quiet, to keep government meddling low-key, and to let natural social forces bring prosperity to England. He was
wise enough to know that an inactive and sluggish—and therefore harmless—government implied an active and thriving citizenry.

Under Walpole not only did the Board of Trade become quiet and inactive, but also the once powerful Privy Council became an innocuous and virtually honorary body. The colonies were governed by one of Britain’s two secretaries of state—the secretary of state for the Southern Department. His foreign duties included not only all the colonies but France and southern Europe as well. Under Walpole’s rule, the American colonies found to their delight that the numerous mercantile regulations, prohibitions, and dictates were simply not being enforced. One reason was Walpole’s happy instincts for letting men be free to administer their own affairs, as well as his insight that colonial trade needed to be let alone rather than regulated and restrained. Another reason was the heavy burdens laid upon the secretary of state. The third was Walpole’s inspired choice for secretary of state for the South. This was young Thomas Holies Pelham, Duke of Newcastle.

Willing and eager to leave the colonies alone so long as he could control the patronage of his office, Newcastle pursued a policy of what was later happily conceptualized by Edmund Burke as “salutary neglect.” Under Newcastle, delighted Americans found that the onerous regulations, restrictions, and charges upon them were simply not being attended to. Newcastle brought the activists of the British colonial administration to despair as messages piled up on his desk unread and unheeded. Newcastle has too often been written off as a dolt by historians. Better would be the explanation that he was close to the moderately liberal Whig intellectuals of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where Master John Newcome kept alive a tradition of civil liberty and of Locke and Newton. Newcome’s nephew, Bishop Samuel Squire—also an historian, and educated at St. John’s—became Newcastle’s chaplain and private secretary. Particularly beloved in the colonies was John Lord Monson, president of the Board of Trade in the 1740s, who magnificently refused even to submit colonial business to higher authorities or to make any recommendations whatever on colonial affairs.

Apart from the Navigation Acts, other imperial restrictions on the colonies were designed to cripple any threatened growth in manufactures that might compete successfully with English firms. As woolen factories began to develop in New England and on Long Island in effective competition with English woolens, England passed the Wool Act in 1699, viciously prohibiting any exportation of raw wool or of finished woolens to any other colony—or to England. Woolen goods in this period constituted the largest single item (over one-half) of British exports to the American colonies, and the British manufacturers were anxious to shore up their position. Although it is easier to enforce restrictions on manufacturing than on the more mobile commerce, and although the Wool Act blighted the development of
American woolens, the industry was still able to grow. In 1702, the Board of Trade grumbled about English wool workers being “enticed” to America to work at the more efficient and therefore higher-paying woolen firms there. During the War of the Spanish Succession, a shortage in the available supply of English cloth led Americans to manufacture their own woolens, especially in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To escape the provisions of the Wool Act, the colonists often drove their sheep to and from the place of woolen manufacture, since carrying the wool itself out of a colony had been outlawed.

In 1732, Parliament, under pressure of marginal and inefficient felt hat-makers in London, moved to crush nascent hat manufacturers in the Northern colonies. The Hat Act (1) prohibited the export of hats from one colony to another; (2) restricted the people allowed to make hats to those who had been apprenticed for seven years; (3) limited the number of apprentices in each hat firm to two; and (4) prohibited Negro apprentices. Fortunately, the act was only sporadically enforced. In fact, Martin Bladen of the Board of Trade ranted that the colonies were “running into all sorts of manufactures, which must be stopped.” Bladen went so far as to propose that people acquitted of violations in colonial courts be retried in England, but, fortunately, this extreme suggestion was not followed.

During the same year, Parliament outlawed the export of hops from the colonies to Ireland, in reaction to American hops competing successfully with the English in the Irish market. Before this, in 1722, beaver skins, furs, and copper had been placed on the enumerated list, thereby at least partially crippling the New York fur trade, over a third of which exports had been to the European continent. In 1736, four years after the Hat Act, Parliament struck savagely at the growing colonial manufacture of canvas (sailcloth), decreeing that all future ships built in the colonies must be constructed with sails of British-made cloth only.

The Iron Act of 1750 was a compromise between two groups of English manufacturers, each seeking a conflicting set of special privileges. The iron industry, second only to the woolen industry in importance to the English economy, was divided into two groups: the iron masters, who smelted pig and bar iron from iron ore; and the finished-iron manufacturers, who transformed pig and bar iron into nails, machinery, etc. The economic interests of the two groups in public policy clashed squarely: the iron masters were alarmed at the rapid emergence of bar-iron production in the Northern colonies after 1735, and with bitterness they called for prohibitive tariffs on the importation of pig iron and even the total suppression of the American iron industry. In this demand they were joined by English iron-mine owners and by forest owners who sold charcoal as fuel in the iron-smelting
process. On the other side were the finished-iron producers, who wanted to encourage American bar- and pig-iron production by admitting its products duty-free, but to prohibit finished-iron manufacturing in the colonies. They were joined by the English shipowners, who wanted to encourage the two-way transatlantic traffic of pig iron for finished products.

Finally, the latter group triumphed completely with the Iron Act of 1750. The act admitted colonial pig and bar iron duty-free but prohibited any increase in finished-iron manufacturing, including slitting mills (to make nails), plating mills (to make sheet iron) or steel furnaces (to make steel). Fortunately, the Iron Act too was not very rigorously enforced. The iron industry continued to grow in the colonies, the urban finishing mills as well as the rural “plantation” blast furnaces for smelting ore into pig iron, and forges for converting pig into bar iron. The colonists, moreover, continued to finish most of their own bar iron. Ironworks were built in every colony but Georgia; the heaviest concentrations soon emerged in Pennsylvania around the Philadelphia area. However, the largest plants, each a large-scale investment of $250,000, were the Principio works in Maryland and the works of Peter Hasenclever in New Jersey, the bulk of which was blast furnaces and forges for pig and bar iron. By the eve of the American Revolution, American production of pig and bar iron had exceeded the output of all of Great Britain.