Conceived in Liberty (162 page)

At first, the general reaction was, naturally enough, a kind of numb despair and grudging resignation. In the beginning the colonists simply assumed that they would have to pay the stamp tax; open defiance seemed hopeless and out of the question. Only one or two scattered incidents broke the general colonial reaction of stunned silence. Many newspaper printers sullenly sent each other wooden shoes “as a proper badge of the slavery the Stamp Act must reduce all printers in America to.” The first thing to break the “silent consternation” was an article in the liberal
Providence Gazette
of May 11 under the pen name of “A Plain Yeoman.” The
Gazette
was the organ of retiring Governor Stephen Hopkins and it has indeed been intimated that the Plain Yeoman was none other than Hopkins himself.

The Plain Yeoman carried the theory of the protesting Americans to a far higher pitch, which was to resound and take hold in later years. After denouncing the parliamentary invasion of the American right to be free of English taxation, and castigating parliamentary refusal to hear American protests, the author went straight to the British charge that Americans were seeking independence. Here Plain Yeoman expounded the new theory that the colonies were indeed not dependents of Britain or the British Parliament; instead, America and Britain were only equal common subjects of the king. “I know of no
dependence
in relation, only that we are all the common subjects of the same King....” The implication (though not yet openly asserted) was that Parliament had no right to impose any
legislation
—not merely taxation—upon the colonies.
*
The independence of not being taxed without consent
was to be maintained as part of the “birthright of all the King’s free subjects without distinction.”

The Plain Yeoman also leveled a brilliant blast against the argument of the Tories that various precedents already existed for parliamentary taxation of the colonists. He attacked the common legal notion that a precedent clearly establishes a point “whether the
precedent
be footed on justice and reason or on whim and arbitrariness.” And here he quoted, as Hopkins was wont to quote, from the witty and perceptive
aperçus
of Dean Jonathan Swift: “It is a maxim among these men [lawyers], that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made, even those which have, through ignorance or corruption, contradicted the rules of common justice, and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of
precedents,
they produce as authorities, and thereby endeavour to justify the most iniquitous opinions....”

The ringing article of the Plain Yeoman drew some attention in the colonies and was reprinted in such papers as the
Maryland Gazette,
but it remained for a brief time an isolated expression. Meanwhile, a leader was about to arise in Virginia who was destined to blow the whole explosive situation apart.

*
A previous statement of this position appeared—also in the
Providence Gazette
—during the Sugar Act protest of the preceding August.

Like other colonists, Virginians had no notion at first of how to meet the new situation; and by assuming that they simply
must,
they began to bear the new burdens with pacific resignation. The protests of the previous year had been unsuccessful; what was there now to do but submit? The powerful House of Burgesses, the elected lower house of the legislature, felt it could do nothing, and one by one the burgesses drifted back home as the House occupied itself with minor business. By the third week in May, only about a third of the burgesses remained, and a merchant of Falmouth, Virginia, reported that talk about the Stamp Act had “subsided much.” Into this sleepy situation stepped a new member just admitted to the House, the brilliant young lawyer and orator Patrick Henry, Virginia’s champion against the Anglican establishment in the Parsons’ Cause battle. Admitted to the House on May 20, Henry quickly mobilized the young members against the naturally conservative and staid elder statesmen of Virginia’s planter oligarchy.

In nine short days, Henry drafted and introduced five resolutions of vigorous protest against the Stamp Act. A furious debate ensued over the resolutions. The conservative and timid ruling planter oligarchy of the burgesses led by Speaker John Robinson, former Speaker Peyton Randolph, Judge John Randolph, Judge Wythe, Colonel Richard Bland, Edmund Pendleton, and Robert Carter Nicholas, furiously opposed the resolutions. Against them was arrayed a lesser group of landowners, to be sure, whose main distinction was relative youth and daring. Leading the Henry group were young Robert Munford and John Fleming. It was not that the older leadership in any sense favored the Stamp Act; it had led the protest of the year before and would not be particularly opposed to the revolutionary movement in later years. If
there was any “class struggle” involved here, it was largely a struggle of the “classes” of youth versus age, of daring versus a natural conservatism.

The highlight of the debates was a fiery speech by Patrick Henry, who impressed young Thomas Jefferson as appearing “to me to speak as Homer wrote.” Henry cited the principles of English liberty and self-taxation as the fortress of freedom. Finally, Henry darkly and courageously laid down this famous warning: “Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell,” and, as for George III, “he did not doubt that some good American would stand up, in favor of his country.” Speaker Robinson indignantly exploded that this was “treason,” as indeed it was to anyone who deemed the British king a proper sovereign thus “betrayed.” Robinson also denounced the other members of the House for not stopping Henry’s treasonable remarks earlier. Henry, seeing that tactically he had gone too far, apologized, protested his loyalty to the king, and attributed the error to his passionate interest in “his country’s dying liberty.” When other burgesses then moved to accept Henry’s apology, Robinson finally dropped his clear threat to proceed against the young representative.

Although the five resolutions—the “Virginia Resolves”—were voted upon separately by the burgesses, they actually formed a coherent and related whole. The first two of Henry’s resolutions merely asserted the rights of every Virginian to the time-honored liberties and privileges of Britons. The third resolution declared the vital principle of self-taxation by the colonists as essential to the British constitution. The fourth resolution pressed the colony’s right to be governed solely by laws passed by their own consent and approved by the royal governor; in short, it denied the right of Great Britain to govern the colony’s internal matters. All of these resolves were passed by the House of Burgesses on May 30 by a vote of 20 to 17. The fifth resolution was more sharply edged but was actually implied in the third. It resolved that therefore the “General Assembly of this colony have the
only and sole exclusive
right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony” (emphasis added). Any attempt to place that power elsewhere “has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom. A bitter debate raged around this final, action resolution, which passed by the narrowest of margins, 20 to 19, with Speaker Robinson anxiously ready to vote nay should the vote be a tie.

The Henry radicals then offered two culminating resolutions. The sixth flatly declared that Virginians were therefore not obliged to obey laws not enacted by their Assembly—an evident call for civil disobedience to the stamp tax—whereas the seventh went so far as to label anyone maintaining the right of Parliament to tax the colonies a traitor and an enemy to the colony of Virginia. If the far milder fifth resolve could pass by only one vote, it is no surprise that these two were handily defeated.

At this point, Patrick Henry, thinking that the five resolves were safely
passed, made the grave tactical error of leaving for home. Taking advantage of Henry’s departure, the old guard, on the next and final day of the session, moved to rescind all of the resolves and did manage to expunge the vital fifth resolution.

The conservatives had been able to defeat the sixth and seventh resolves and to expunge the fifth from the record of the House of Burgesses, but they were not able to keep any of them from the minds and hearts of the American people. News of the seven Virginia Resolves spread like wildfire through the colonies, providing the needed spark that aroused them from their stolid resignation to active resistance to the hated Stamp Act. By mid-June copies of the Resolves were being passed around in Philadelphia. From there they were sent to friends in Newport, and on June 24 the
Newport Mercury
became the first newspaper to publish these rousing and exciting resolutions. The other colonial papers quickly picked up the news from the
Mercury
and reprinted the Resolves.

Virginia’s stirring example to the other colonies was not just the mild first four resolutions, but the entire seven, including the dramatic and fiery last three. The colonists, taking their cue from the
Newport Mercury
and all the other newspaper accounts, were under the firm impression that
all seven
resolutions had been passed by the House of Burgesses. This misunderstanding came about by a supreme irony: Joseph Royle, the reactionary editor of Virginia’s only newspaper, the
Virginia Gazette,
was so offended by even the mild first four resolutions that he refused to print any of them. As a result, the papers in the other colonies could only receive their information unofficially, and Henry and his radicals, in a masterstroke of tactics, took care to feed all seven resolutions to the press as if they all had passed the House. As the Morgans have phrased it: “Henry and his friends, having failed to secure passage of their most radical items in the House of Burgesses, were able to get them passed unanimously in the newspapers....”
*

The Virginia Resolves, aided by the Henrician codicils, were important less for themselves—that is, as protests by a colonial assembly—than as a clarion call to the American people. For in the final analysis, the colonial assemblies, protest all they might, could do nothing to defeat the stamp tax. And this would have been true even if the assemblies had taken the unlikely step of moving not to enforce the tax and moving to withhold the salaries of the judges who did so. For the enforcement officials were mostly royal officials, beyond the power of assemblies; especially out of reach were admiralty judges and customs officers. To be defeated now, the stamp tax would therefore have to be
nullified
by the direct action of the American people—by mass civil disobedience. The tax, in short, could not be actually resisted in the assemblies; it could only be resisted and nullified
in the streets.
Assembly resolves would be important now only as a call to revolutionary mass action.

*
Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan,
The Stamp Act Crisis,
p. 132.

The vital question, then, was what the reaction of the
people
of the several colonies would be to Patrick Henry’s trumpet call. A preponderance of the people were clearly delighted. Most of the colonists found out about the Virginia Resolves by early July. By mid-August, Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts was warning the Crown that “two or three months ago I thought that this people would submit to the Stamp Act without actual opposition.... But the publishing of the Virginia Resolves proved an alarm bell to the disaffected.” And the British general Thomas Gage, stationed in New York, called the Resolves, “The signal for a general outcry over the Continent.”

But if most of the people were awakened and stirred by Henry and Virginia, who would lead them? For the masses cannot act without some form of organization and articulate leadership.

No help, of course, could be expected from the arch Tory and opportunist, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, predictably, adjusted meekly and easily to the Stamp Act: “We might as well have hindered the sun setting... let us make as good a night of it as we can.” Franklin proceeded to make a good night of it indeed. Having happily filled the colonial post office with his relatives, he advised his fellow colonial agents to get themselves or their friends appointed as stamp masters, the Crown officers in charge of distributing the stamps in the colonies. Acting on this advice, Jared Ingersoll, Connecticut’s agent in London, accepted the post of Connecticut stamp master, and Franklin was able to get his henchman, John Hughes, appointed stamp master in Pennsylvania. Franklin’s reaction, on reading the Virginia Resolves, is therefore not at all surprising. Denouncing the rashness of the Virginia leaders and the
madness of the populace, Franklin advised Hughes to act as a faithful and loyal servitor of the Crown in enforcing the stamp tax. And Franklin’s friend and ally in dominating Pennsylvania politics, Joseph Galloway, wrote many newspaper articles in favor of the Stamp Act.

If no help was to be expected from such Tories as Franklin in rallying popular opposition to the Stamp Act, what of the popular liberal leaders? A grave problem was the defection of erstwhile and future radical-liberal leaders. Thus, stunned and temporarily alienated by the bold courage of Henry’s Resolves, Alexander McDougall and John Morin Scott of New York, generally radical leaders of that colony, pronounced the Resolves to be treasonable.

But the major blow to the libertarian cause came in Massachusetts. There James Otis, Jr., long-time leader of the Boston liberals and sparkplug of American protest, began to defect from the liberal cause. Otis showed increasing signs of deviousness and instability, and perhaps of the insanity that was to plague him in later years. It is true that as early as June 8, when Massachusetts received word of the Stamp Act, Otis proposed that the Massachusetts Assembly send a circular letter to the other colonial assemblies inviting them to a general congress to be held in New York in October to ask Britain for relief. But, on the other hand, in May Governor Bernard had happily reported to the Crown that Otis “now repents in sackcloth and ashes” for writing
The Rights of the Colonies,
and that a new pamphlet of Otis’s humbly begs Britain’s pardon for his former stand.