Conceived in Liberty (157 page)

Virginia was also inspired by the Massachusetts circular letter of June 1764, and the House of Burgesses appointed a committee of notables of the province to draft a protest to England. The committee was headed by Peyton Randolph and included Richard Henry Lee, Landon Carter, George Wythe, Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, and Archibald Cary. The Virginia protest, sent in mid-December, asserted freedom from parliamentary taxation as a right, although the application of this freedom to
external
(as against internal) taxes was not clearly defined. The protest also moved to reject one solution that was already implicit in James Otis’s position: colonial representation in Parliament. This was an alternative to continuing colonial home rule most emphatically rejected by most Americans, and the Virginia resolves were the first to make this clear.

In a private letter, young Richard Henry Lee expressed sentiments portentous for the future. He asserted the “unquestionable right” of Americans to “the free possession of property,” and to laws and taxes made by their own representatives. He sensed a design by the mother country to “oppress North America with the iron hand of power, unrestrained by any sentiment, drawn from reason, the liberty of mankind, or the genius of their own government.” Finally, he warned that “possibly this step of the mother country, though intended to oppress and keep us low, in order to secure our dependence, may be subversive of this end. Poverty and oppression, among those whose minds are filled with ideas of British liberty,... may produce a fatal resentment of parental care being converted into tyrannical usurpation.”

The North Carolina House, during its October session, protested the imposition of taxes without colonial consent “and against what we esteem an
inherent right and exclusive privilege of imposing our own taxes....” The protest was drawn up by a committee headed by Thomas McGuire. No distinction was made between internal and external taxes, but the boldness of the stand was greatly vitiated by the fact that the protest was only addressed to the governor and that none was sent to England, even privately to the colony’s London agent.

The first southern assembly to protest the American Revenue Act was the South Carolina House, which, in August 1764, ordered its Committee of Correspondence to instruct its London agent to oppose any parliamentary tax as violating the “inherent right of every British subject not to be taxed but by his own consent or that of his representative.”

No official protests, apparently, emanated from New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware, and Georgia.

In addition to protesting the molasses duty, the colonists denounced the aggrandizement of the vice admiralty courts and the further weakening of the safeguards of trial by jury. They also protested other provisions for tighter enforcement of the trade laws. The creation of the new overall court at Halifax seemed particularly threatening: not only was the new court remote from friendly pressures by the merchants, and not only was a Briton instead of an American appointed to the post, but Halifax was costly to travel to and suffered from a shortage of lawyers to represent the accused. Accordingly, merchants in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York petitioned their assemblies for relief and complained of the new enforcement procedures. The pamphlet of Oxenbridge Thacher, a leading lawyer, placed particular stress on objection to the aggravated jurisdiction of the admiralty courts. The protest of the Massachusetts Council and House put it succinctly: “The extension of the powers of the courts of vice admiralty have... deprived the colonies of one of the most valuable of English liberties, trials by juries.”

Southern merchants were particularly disturbed at the red-tape regulations crippling the coastal trade and their protests were strongly backed by Lieutenant Governor William Bull of South Carolina.

After the Revenue Act came into force, merchants tried their best to avoid the regulations. Sometimes action was forceful indeed. In late November 1764, Robert Heron, a customs collector of Maryland, seized a ship with a cargo of molasses. The cargo was condemned in a vice admiralty court and duly advertised for auction sale at the local tavern. The owner of the condemned vessel, a chap named Graham, got the merchants to promise to boycott any purchase of the goods. And at the auction Graham assaulted Heron and threw him out of the tavern.

Such forcible measures were rare. But the temper of America was plain enough, so plain that the British officers thought it more prudent
not
to anger the colonists by taking cases to the general court in Halifax. As a result, Judge Spry languished at Halifax with little to do. As staunch a Tory as Governor Bernard of Massachusetts urged Britain to move the admiralty court from remote Halifax to the American mainland. Indeed, the Crown prepared to abolish the Halifax court and substitute three appellate vice admiralty courts, one each at Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, but the reorganization plans were lost in the furor over the Stamp Act.

One collector, however, had no scruples about the wisdom of hauling defendants to Halifax. He was John Robinson, the new collector of customs in Rhode Island. Robinson’s turn toward Halifax was prompted by a legendary record of heroic obstruction by Rhode Islanders in the colonial courts. Rhode Island indeed proved a thorn in Britain’s side from the time the new enforcement policy went into effect. When Robinson first arrived in the colony from England in the spring of 1764, he sternly refused to play by the old lax rules of colonial officials, and therefore did not accept a huge annual seventy-thousand-pound bribe from the merchants for allowing them continued freedom of trade. Instead, Robinson began a rigorous enforcement of the trade laws. However, he soon found himself blocked in the courts, even in the local admiralty court.

Enforcement troubles in Rhode Island began promptly. The Assembly forbade the governor from swearing in any customs officials. And after John Temple, surveyor general of the Customs at Boston, seized the ship
Rhoda
at Newport for engaging in illegal trade, a party of citizens loaded the cargo at night and put the ship to sea. The
Rhoda,
incidentally, was owned by a judge of the Rhode Island Superior Court.

In a more important case, John Robinson, in the spring of 1764, seized a vessel and a cargo of sugar that had in turn been seized by a British naval officer. Robinson took the cargo to Rhode Island’s admiralty court, which superbly thwarted the collector by selling the sugar back to its owner at a low price, and somehow never collecting the amount. In March 1765, moreover, Robinson and his deputy, John Nicoll, seized the vessels
Wainscott
and
Nelly
for possessing illegal molasses, and took the case to the Rhode Island Admiralty Court. The judge, John Andrews, and the prosecutor or king’s advocate, James Honeyman, were both native Rhode Islanders and both highly sympathetic to the merchants; they did their best to thwart the whole proceeding. Witnesses were not summoned and were permitted to escape, Honeyman refused to attend the trial, and finally Judge Andrews acquitted both of the ships.

When Robinson and Nicoll complained to England of this treatment, Judge Andrews retaliated swiftly, suing the customs officers in common-law court for defamation. Judge Andrews won the case and proceeded to sue Robinson for complaining to the governor. Such cases being typical in Rhode Island, the judge and the king’s advocate effectively stymied the royal customs officials in that province.

When, therefore, John Robinson seized the ship
Polly
in April 1765 for smuggling molasses, he should not have been surprised to receive the full treatment—from populace and judiciary alike. In fact, here was an excellent example of cooperation in obstruction between the citizens of Rhode Island and neighboring Massachusetts. The vessel was seized at Dighton, on the Massachusetts side of Narragansett Bay. The first step for Robinson and his aides was to have a crew bring the
Polly
to Newport to be condemned in court. But they could find no one in Dighton to serve on such an obnoxious voyage. That night a large group of citizens carried away the whole cargo and grounded the sloop. Robinson’s two aides found it healthier not to interfere, and when warned by the local justice of the peace of further rebellious action by the mob, they scurried back to Newport. And a crew sent by Robinson to bring the
Polly
to Newport was sent fleeing back by a turbulent crowd of about a hundred people.

Hearing the news of the popular resistance, John Robinson gathered an armed force of British soldiers and marines, and marched to meet the rebellion at Dighton. In Massachusetts, the local justices of the peace refused to grant him writs of assistance and warned him that the “whole country” would defeat his “handful of men.” At Dighton, Robinson found that his prize capture, the
Polly,
had been run aground, stripped of sail rigging and other equipment, and her bottom drilled full of holes.

No sooner had Robinson arrived in Dighton than he was arrested and sued for three thousand pounds in damages by Job Smith for seizing his vessel, the
Polly,
and its cargo. The suit would eventually be superseded by justification for probable cause in vice admiralty court, but meanwhile Robinson was taken to Taunton, Massachusetts, to the jeers and threats of the populace. Without friends to stand bail, Robinson was forced to spend the night in jail until bailed out by John Temple; meanwhile, Robinson ranted that the “wretch” Smith was “deserving of the severest treatment that the law could inflict.”

At Taunton it was again justices of the peace who obstructed Robinson’s efforts at enforcement. Finally, Robinson called on a British warship and reseized the
Polly.
Backed strongly by Temple, he then lashed out at the Rhode Islanders by taking the case to court at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Not only remote, Halifax was in a militarily held domain as well.

Resentment in the colony also piled up against the British fleet, both for its enforcing activities and for impressing colonial seamen into the royal fleet. The impressment issue burst forth in the summer of 1764. Three crew members of the British naval schooner
St. John
came ashore and stole some pigs and chickens from Newport citizens. The Newporters were incensed to find that the sheriff, rowing out to arrest the thieves, was prevented from boarding the
St. John.
The same day, one of the ship’s impressed seamen managed to escape to Newport, and the
St. John
sent out an armed party to recapture him on the charge of “desertion.” This outrage was too much for the people of
Newport. When the armed party landed, a Newport mob promptly seized the commanding officer—giving him a little taste of impressment-in-reverse—and stoned and drove off the rest of his men. In retaliation for the warship’s defiance of the civil sheriff, two members of the Rhode Island Council ordered the gunners at the fort to shell the
St. John
as it left port that day, and fifty other Newporters enthusiastically joined in the firing. Such incidents polarized the conflict on both sides. Thus the Rhode Island Council chastised the gunners for not trying conscientiously to sink the warship. In the meanwhile, Captain Richard Smith of the Royal Navy was urging the British government to use this act of insurrection as “a means of a [coerced] change of government in this licentious republic.”

At about the same time, the British schooner
Chaleur
impressed some fishermen off Long Island in New York. The
Chaleur
’s master was threatened with death if the men were retained, and so the victims were released the next day. Notwithstanding, a New York City mob seized a boat from the
Chaleur
and burned it ceremoniously in front of city hall. Thus, the impressment issue kindled opposition to Britain in the colonies.

The explosive issue of impressment, or at least forced conscription, into the navy was also involved in a clash off New England in December 1764. Officers of the British warships
Cygnet
and
Jamaica
forcibly boarded a passenger ship off New England, looking for deserters from the navy. The passengers rose to their own defense and managed to throw several of the officers overboard. The fight ended when an officer ran through one of the passengers with his sword, a finale that incensed the citizens of Newport when the
Cygnet
put into port shortly afterward.

A more directly rebellious act by Newporters against the Crown over impressment occurred in the spring of 1765. The royal ship
Maidstone
had arrived at Newport at the end of the previous year, and proceeded to conscript colonial sailors at a furious pace. Indeed, the
Maidstone
men even broke an agreement not to seize Newport townspeople. Trade was crippled out of fear of losing crews to impressment, and fishermen refused to venture forth about their business.

Peaceful persuasion and protest having failed, the people of Newport decided to take positive measures to defend life and property against these outrages by England. On June 4, the
Maidstone
officers impressed the full crew of a ship; a furious mob of five hundred seized one of the
Maidstone
’s boats and burned it completely. Lieutenant Jenkins of the royal vessel was seized by the crowd and almost killed until cooler and more timorous heads prevailed. A few weeks later, the
Maidstone
finally bowed to pressures coming from the masses, up to and including Governor Samuel Ward, and released all the impressed and kidnapped Rhode Islanders.

The British officials—the
Maidstone’s
captain and the customs officers—wrote to England complaining of the fomenting of violent resistance to England
by the Rhode Island officials, who, being democratically elected, would be turned out of office if they behaved otherwise. The attack on the
Maid-stone
stemmed from the lawlessness of the people and “from the principles of the constitution of the government, which is the most popular that can be formed.”