Conceived in Liberty (160 page)

But the big question to be decided was the legality of general warrants. The Crown case rested on precedent; for nearly a hundred years it had issued similar general warrants against persons suspected of “seditious libel” against the government. Until Wilkes, their validity had not been challenged. Hardwicke and Newcastle regarded such warrants as perfectly legal. But Chief Justice Pratt was now increasingly taking the position that both general and specific warrants for seditious libel were illegal. The Whig-oriented city councils of London, Dublin, and Exeter voted their gratitude to Pratt for his new stand. In the end, Wilkes won his point and a significant victory for individual liberty; by 1765, Pratt was able to win over the bench and to rule such general warrants null and void.

As Wilkes piled up victories in the courts during 1763, he became the idol of the London populace. He was mobbed by cheering throngs, and the merchants and financiers of the City expressed ardent support for his cause. From the City of London to Surrey County and to English sailors at port, “Wilkes and Liberty” was the common cry.

In a short time John Wilkes had sparked a libertarian mass movement in England; the possibilities for the movement and for Wilkes himself were limitless. But Wilkes, besides a leader, was a man of personal irresponsibility of the kind fatal to the leadership of a great cause. And this flightiness was to lay him low. For as he prepared to bind and reprint the
North Briton,
he also blithely and frivolously decided to print for private circulation an obscene parody of Pope’s
Essay on Man,
which had been written a decade before. While Wilkes, in the autumn of 1763, was lightheartedly visiting in Paris, Philip C. Webb bribed Wilkes’ printer and fellow victim of the general warrant, Michael Curry, to turn over to him the proofs of the obscene
Essay on Woman.
The Crown now eagerly prepared to proceed against Wilkes for
obscenity and blasphemy, and at the same time to split and neutralize the Wilkite forces, especially the respectables who were sure to place aesthetics and propriety above the great principles of liberty. Ironically, the leading role in the prosecution was played by the Earl of Sandwich (successor to the deceased Egremont), who until recently had participated with Wilkes in the frequent orgies of a notorious and exclusive club, “The Monks of Saint Francis.” In mid-November, Sandwich, with enthusiasm, read the
Essay on Woman
aloud to the scandalized House of Lords. All the shocked respectables seized the opportunity to abandon a cause to which their devotion was at best questionable, and took turns in denouncing the harried Wilkes. Pitt’s denunciation was typical: the
North Briton
series was “unmanly and detestable” and Wilkes “did not deserve to be ranked among the human species.” Wilkes, in short, was the “blasphemer of his God and the libeler of his King.”

As the Crown had hoped, the irrelevant
Essay on Woman
was used to turn opinion against and to condemn Number 45 of the
North Briton
and to vanquish the Wilkite movement. Frederick Lord North of the Treasury led the attack for the government in the House of Lords, charging the
North Briton
with being false, seditious, insulting to royalty, and intending to excite the people to insurrection against the government. Wilkes objected only to the charge of falsehood. Thirty-five noble lords managed to hold their ground to vote for him. They included Temple, and the Whigs Devonshire, Grafton, and Portland. Pitt’s man Lord Shelburne naturally voted to condemn John Wilkes. The House of Commons condemned Number 45 as “false, scandalous, and seditious libel” by a vote of 273 to 111, and Parliament ordered it burnt by the common hangman.

The middle- and lower-class supporters of Wilkes, however, were not as easily swayed from principle by irrelevant aesthetics. At the appointed time of the burning on December 3, a large crowd of over five hundred Londoners gathered, pelted the sheriffs with wood, attacked their coaches (wounding the high sheriff), and rescued the
North Briton
from the bonfire. Instead, the mob burned a boot and a petticoat in the bonfire, items symbolizing the hated Lord Bute and the king’s mother, who had been a long-time friend of Bute. The Common Council of the City of London demonstrated its solidarity with Wilkes by pointedly refusing to thank the sheriffs for their part in the proceedings. And when the king went to the theater, instead of the customary applause there arose a general shout of “Wilkes and Liberty!” It was in the same month that Wilkes was awarded one thousand pounds damages from the Crown by a London jury—to the cheers of great London crowds and shouts of “Wilkes and Liberty!”

Probably Wilkes could still have remained and forged a successful libertarian mass movement. But wounded in a political duel, deliberately provoked by an enemy in Parliament, and knowing that Parliament was about to expel
him, Wilkes, at the end of December, again showed his irresponsibility by departing the country for France. With Wilkes gone, his enemies could now proceed at will. In January he was expelled from Parliament; in February he was found guilty of blasphemy and seditious libel by a grand jury in printing the essay and reprinting the
North Briton;
and on November 1, 1764, while still in France, he was declared an outlaw. And with Wilkes gone, the great Wilkite movement in England necessarily collapsed, at least for the time being. Many Wilkites were dismissed from public office, including the Whigs Colonel Isaac Barré and General Henry Conway. But Wilkes and his cause still remained high in the hearts of the people. When the liberal Whig Edmund Burke was elected to Parliament two years later, the people toasted “Burke and Wilkes” and “Wilkes and Liberty.” And though Wilkes himself was gone, the people could and did take revenge on his tormentors: Sandwich was generally derided; the informer Michael Curry was scorned as a renegade and blacklisted by all the master printers; and Philip Webb lost his post at the Treasury in mid-1765 as a direct result of his ill fame in the persecution of John Wilkes.

The sudden flowering of the Wilkite movement had a profound influence on the accumulating tensions between Britain and the American colonies. There were many reasons for this. For one thing, the bursting forth of the Liberty and Property agitation against the cider tax, merging into the Wilkes and Liberty movement, articulated the grievances of the colonies—against taxation and against invasions of liberty. In short, the Whig ideals of liberty and property were under attack for citizens in England, as well as in the colonies—and under attack by the same imperial Tory government. In fact, the same persons—the Grenvilles, the Halifaxes, the Jenkinsons, etc.—were reviled as despotic at home as well as abroad. In brief, the Tory oligarchy was busy aggrandizing the royal prerogative against the liberty and property of the people at home and abroad. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Americans should eagerly follow and be inspired by the Whigs and radicals of England. Second, the theorists most cherished by the Americans (Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, the Commonwealthmen) were precisely the patron saints of radical Whiggism and had been for a century. Third, the radical Whigs reciprocated American interests and staunchly championed American liberties in English politics. And fourth, the particular tactics, especially the spirited mob actions by the English of London and of the West Country, also provided inspiration to Americans of what direct
mass
action could accomplish, above and beyond mere legalistic petitioning of Parliament or the Crown. Fuse these current examples of revolutionary mass action in England with those of the great colonial revolutions against English tyranny in the middle and late seventeenth century, and an explosive mixture was at hand. In short, what the Marxists call the “objective conditions” and the “subjective conditions” for any American revolution were
now virtually imminent. The “objective conditions” were a crescendo of despotic actions by Great Britain striking hammer blows against “constitutional,” economic, and individual rights and liberties of Americans. The “subjective conditions” were nurtured by their own revolutionary traditions, by the libertarian ideals common to the English Whigs and themselves, by the inspiring example of the libertarian Whig rebellion in the home country, and by an increasing willingness of the American people to embark on mass civil disobedience, and on even more violent forms of revolutionary overthrow of tyrannical British rule.

Upon introducing the American Revenue Act in Parliament in March 1764, George Grenville strongly hinted that a stamp tax on the colonies might become necessary. He asked for postponement of any such tax for a year, but still induced Parliament to resolve that it “may be proper” to levy the tax. By doing this, Grenville carefully paved the way for a stamp tax the following year, prepared the colonies for the severe blow, and put Parliament on record of its constitutional right to levy such a tax. In this way, he shrewdly brought Parliament’s strong sense of its own unchecked prerogatives into play while presumably allowing time to soften the blow for the colonies.

Grenville tried to cover his tracks and assume a mask of benevolence by hinting to, but never officially informing, the Americans that he was willing to listen to alternative modes for the colonists to raise the money themselves. But preparations for a stamp tax proceeded apace. We have already seen the leading role of Henry McCulloh in drafting a proposed stamp act in late 1763, and now Grenville assigned Thomas Whately, secretary of the treasury, the task of drawing up the bill. In this task, Whately was aided by McCulloh. Too, Grenville was particularly enchanted with the idea of a stamp tax; it would be uniform throughout the colonies, affecting not only merchants in seaport towns but farmers as well. Moreover, it would be in a sense self-executing, since instead of search and seizure for contraband goods, every document and paper would require a specially stamped paper the citizen would have to buy himself. As early as August 1764, the Earl of Halifax, the powerful secretary of state for the Southern Department, sent a circular letter to all the colonial governors announcing the parliamentary resolution for a potential stamp tax, and asking for a list of instrumentalities and transactions that
might require a stamp. On the basis of the replies, Whately prepared a detailed list of stamp duties, and the list was approved by the Treasury Board in mid-December. The die for a stamp tax had been cast. Most of the proposed rates were lower than those of the English stamp tax, since the rates could later be raised after the Americans had become accustomed to the tax. But the taxes on entry into college and to the bar were far higher than in England (the taxes for matriculation and college degrees were set at two pounds in America, but two shillings in England; for entry to the bar, ten pounds in America and six pounds in England). Whately’s reason for setting such high rates in America was brutally frank: “It would be better indeed if they were raised... considerably in order to keep mean persons out of those situations in life which they disgrace.”

While these preparations were secretly under way, the colonies did their best to explore Grenville’s hint that he would forgo a stamp tax if the colonists were willing to raise an equivalent sum themselves. But when Grenville met with the colonial agents in mid-May 1764, he pushed aside the crucial question of how much he wanted the colonies to pay to England. Dismissing the possibility of self-taxation, he proposed instead that they simply give their advance approval to the stamp tax. So much for the sincerity of the Grenville offer! When Israel Mauduit, representing Massachusetts, gently asked how the colonies could possibly give advance approval to a bill they knew virtually nothing about, Grenville answered that the details were unimportant since the bill was to follow the model of the stamp tax in England. It was clear that Grenville was interested only in securing an advance blank check from the colonies, and not in soliciting any colonial criticism of his plan.

Yet the bemused colonial agents could not bring themselves to face the iniquity of George Grenville, and they clung to the hope that his hinted offer had been genuine. The Boston members of the Massachusetts Assembly asked Governor Bernard for a special session to forestall an English stamp tax by imposing one themselves. Bernard realized that no such alternative tax could be enacted until the Crown decided how much it wanted the colonies to pay—a disclosure it kept refusing to make. In fact, many of the colonies, including Franklin-Galloway—dominated Pennsylvania, signified a willingness to tax themselves any sum that might be requested. But the Crown, of course, never bothered to make such a request. Grenville’s state of mind at this point has been acutely summed up by the Morgans:

It is evident... that Grenville was determined upon a stamp tax. Though he was willing to make magnanimous gestures, he had no intention of allowing the colonies to prevent passage of his measure.... They would not thwart him by levying a substitute tax themselves; by withholding the necessary information he made sure of that. Nor would he be troubled by the objections: thanks to his foresighted resolution he could safely predict Parliament’s unsympathetic reaction here. Grenville must have felt comfortably
satisfied with all his maneuvers. He made it useless for the colonies to attempt any action to avert the tax, and yet he had carried out his interview so smoothly, and expressed his affection for the colonies so convincingly, that the agents did not perceive... the hopelessness of their efforts.
*

In addition to a few pathetic efforts to appease Grenville by offering to tax themselves, many colonies sent protests against any projected stamp tax along with their reactions to the Sugar Act. The Connecticut resolution of May—June 1764, selecting a committee of protest, singled out a stamp tax as the gravest threat on the horizon. The South Carolina House’s instruction of protest, in August, against the American Revenue Act singled out a stamp tax for special hostility. And the Rhode Island legislature’s protest of November was confined to “stamp duties and other internal taxes.”