Conceived in Liberty (175 page)

The first skirmish between the commissioners and John Hancock came in April 1768. He refused to let customs officials search his ship
Lydia,
and backed up this refusal with the presence of himself and numerous followers. The commissioners tried to bypass a jury trial in prosecuting Hancock, but the attorney general of Massachusetts ruled for Hancock and was upheld by the Treasury in England. Thwarted here, the board struck again on June 10: seizing Hancock’s sloop
Liberty
in Boston harbor for loading without a license, a regulation hitherto unenforced. Knowing that for months no seized vessel in New England had gone unrescued by the people, the customs men towed the
Liberty
out close to the British man-of-war
Romney.

To the people of Boston this act of oppression was the last straw. The Townshend taxes, the repression by the commissioners, the attempts by the British navy to impress Bostonians as sailors on the
Romney
—all fused to provoke mob action to defend their popular leader Hancock. In addition, the new customs regime was hated personally by Americans: one commissioner
was the execrated John Robinson, formerly of Rhode Island; another, Charles Paxton, was a friend of Hutchinson and an organizer of the customs board.

It was for Boston the time of the Stamp Act all over again. A mob threatened and set upon the customs officers, stoned their houses, and burned one of their pleasure boats. Leaflets were distributed urging the people to rise and clear the country of the customs officials. The commissioners promptly fled to Castle William and continued their operations from that privileged sanctuary.

Four days after this successful riot, James Otis led a tumultuous town meeting in Boston. The meeting demanded that every British naval commander in Boston be under the orders of the Massachusetts General Court, that the
Romney
be removed, that the customs board be dissolved, that impressments cease, and that anyone who sought British troops in Boston be branded a traitor and a disturber of the peace.

Impressments, incidentally, had been causing intensified bitterness and opposition in Boston during 1768. A Boston mob attacked boats from the
Romney
that were impressing fellow townsmen. Sailors were treated as criminals by the press gangs, and conditions and pay were poor on the naval vessels. The vice admiralty court went so far as to acknowledge that Americans who killed a British naval lieutenant during impressment, had killed in justifiable self-defense against an invasion of their persons.

The customs commissioners, it was true, had been driven temporarily out of Boston. But what about the
Liberty?
Under the protection of the
Romney,
Hancock’s ship was quickly tried in the vice admiralty court without benefit of jury, and condemned. But this was only the first step in the vindictive plan of the commissioners. The
Liberty
had been seized on a picayune technicality, but the commissioners were out to get Hancock personally. One of their officials, Thomas Kirk, suddenly changed his story and now told a wild tale of casks of Madeira wine being unloaded from the
Liberty
without payment of duty. Despite a lack of evidence or corroboration of this testimony, the Crown proceeded to try Hancock and five others for the alleged violation. Hancocok was jailed by the vice admiralty court and his bail set at the huge amount of three thousand pounds sterling. Hancock’s trial was launched at the beginning of November 1768.

British officialdom and the people of Massachusetts were now at the point of armed conflict, a point brought nearer by further requests for British troops to put down the Bostonians. News of the Boston resistance fanned the flames of an aggressive tough-line attitude towards the Americans. Tories thundered that measures must be taken to show “those braggarts their insignificancy in the scale of the empire,” and to reduce the great metropolis of Boston to “a poor smuggling village.” Even Lord Rockingham regarded Boston’s resistance as “most dangerous and offensive.” The fatal decision was made to send four regiments of troops to occupy Boston and to put down its virtual rebellion. Few yet had the courage or insight to call for escaping from Britain’s
dilemma by repealing the Townshend Act structure. Still, pro-American opinion among the English public was very much alive, and newspaper articles hailed the American “spirit of liberty” in “struggling against oppression” and unconstitutional coercion, and in fact mentioned that the bulk of the British people were wholehearted believers in the American cause. Furthermore, the eminent Whig Sir George Savile perceptively wrote Rockingham that “it is in the nature of things that [the]... colonies... must assume to themselves the rights of nature and resist those of law; which is rebellion.” And the great Newcastle remonstrated with Rockingham about coercing the colonies: “For my own part, whoever is for it, I must in conscience enter my protest against it; and I hope our friends will well consider before they give in to so destructive a measure.”

The bonds between the popular libertarian causes in England and those in America, and in their respective struggles against the British government, were in fact greatly strengthened during the critical year 1768. For 1768 saw the resumption of the libertarian Wilkite movement in England, and its attendant rioting inspired and strengthened the American and especially the Bostonian will to resist, just as the English cider tax rebellion had helped to inspire the stamp tax resistance in the colonies.

John Wilkes had been fretting in exile in Paris since the end of 1763. Wilkes was unable to persuade the sympathetic but shaky Rockingham ministry to let him back into England; it had enough troubles without him on the scene. Rebuffed coldly by Chatham, Wilkes took the bull by the horns and boldly returned to England in early February 1768, to find a highly receptive climate among the people. Unhampered by the Crown, Wilkes stood for Parliament from the City of London, backed by Sir William Baker, Newcastle’s friend and an alderman, and by numerous craftsmen, with the cry of “Wilkes and Liberty!” Defeated in London, the bulk of the liberal votes having gone to their spokesmen Beckford and Trecothick, Wilkes decided to run from Middlesex County in the general elections of late March 1768. His leading supporters in the election were the Reverend John Home, and the counsel at his trial in the old
North Briton
days, Serjeant John Glynn, MP. The inspired public rode in hundreds of coaches, bedecked in blue and carrying “Wilkes and Liberty” cards, out to Middlesex to campaign. The eager Wilkites were anxious to be peaceful, but were confronted by a crowd supporting the Tory incumbent Sir William Proctor. Armed with placards proclaiming “No Blasphemers” and “No French Renegade,” and hurling insults, the crowd briefly scuffled with the Wilkites. At the Middlesex election, Wilkes led the
poll by a sizable majority. The joyous Wilkite masses celebrated by rioting for two straight days in London and Westminster, chalking every door with “Number 45” and breaking the windows of the leading Tories, including Lord Bute. Particularly roughly treated was the house of Wilkes’ old enemy Thomas Harley, now lord mayor of London, whose windows were broken to the shouts of “Wilkes forever!” Among those arrested as leaders of the mob were Matthew Christian, a wealthy gentleman from the West Indies, and Robert Chandler, a London teabroker. Notwithstanding the arrests, the Wilkites continued to riot and to control the streets for several nights thereafter.

The sudden resurgence of John Wilkes and the mass libertarian movement posed a critical problem to the politicians of Great Britain. How should they react to the Wilkite movement? The range of opinion was what ought to have been expected. The new turn of events was favored by the Whig leaders. The Duke of Richmond hailed Wilkes’ election as demonstrating to the administration that “though they may buy Lords and Commons,... yet they are not so much approved of by the Nation.” The venerable Duke of Newcastle agreed, and wrote that “Wilkes’ merit is being a friend to Liberty; and he has suffered for it.” His old friend Earl Temple was still favorably disposed. And such as the Duke of Grafton and Lord Chatham shrewdly favored a royal pardon for Wilkes (still under the old sentence of outlawry) and letting him take his seat in Parliament, thus quelling the Wilkite agitation. But the right wing of the government—the Bedfords, including Lord Hillsborough, and the king himself—wanted full punishment for the rebel Wilkes.

The decision on how to handle Wilkes came before the government at the same time, April, that it was confronted with the Massachusetts letter against the Townshend Act. The British government saw the radical-libertarian philosophical link between the two rebellions, and the instinct of the dominant Tories was to maximize royal power by crushing both.

Not receiving a royal pardon, John Wilkes was tried for escaping punishment for his old offense. When the Tory judge Lord Mansfield imprisoned Wilkes without bail on April 27, the London crowd liberated Wilkes, but he put on a disguise to sneak back into prison in order to obey the royal command. In reaction to the arbitrary imprisonment, the Wilkite mobs rioted continuously for two weeks, especially outside the prison where Wilkes was being held. The prison lobby was demolished to the shouts of “Wilkes and Liberty!” But Wilkes himself at one point persuaded the crowd to disperse.

On May 10 Parliament opened, and a large crowd gathered in front of the House to demand that Wilkes be allowed to assume his rightful seat. In St. George’s Fields a huge crowd of twenty to forty thousand people from all over London gathered ominously in front of Wilkes’ prison. Wilkes’ old enemy Robert Wood, undersecretary of state, had persuaded the secretary, Viscount Weymouth, to put a troop of infantry and cavalry into the Fields that day.

As the day wore on, the huge crowd and the troops confronted each other, each growing more restive. The crowd managed to paste on the prison walls a poem including the line: “Venal judges and Ministers combine, Wilkes and English liberty to confine.” When the paper was torn down on magistrates’ orders, the crowd became more radical, shouting not only, “Give us the paper” and, “Wilkes and liberty forever,” but also, “No Wilkes, no king!” “Damn the king, damn the government, damn the justices,” and, “This is the most glorious opportunity for a revolution that ever offered.” At this point Justice Samuel Gillam read the riot act to the crowd, which responded with a volley of stones. One hit Gillam, and he ordered the soldiers to pursue the stone-thrower. The soldiers did not catch the assailant, but managed to kill William Allen, an innocent bystander. Finally, the soldiers were ordered to fire into the crowd, killing five or six and wounding fifteen—an act of brutality that became widely known as the “Massacre of St. George’s Fields.” Many of those shot were innocent bystanders. One policeman wrote that the soldiers “seemed to enjoy their fire; I thought it a great cruelty.”

The massacre did not succeed in repressing the people’s movement. Two of the magistrates implicated in the massacre had their houses pulled down, but the magistrates called the troops into play and dispersed the crowd. Throughout the metropolis, houses of leading Tories and anti-Wilkites were attacked. The next day several thousand sailors were posted before Parliament. With the encouragement of Parliament, the magistrates redoubled their repression, arresting thirty-four persons for participating in the riots. Of these, however, only a half-dozen were convicted and sentenced. Of those arrested the great bulk were of the poorer classes, mostly laborers and the rest artisans.

Grand juries tried their best to strike blows for the people against the government. The jurors tried to indict the troops responsible for the murder of the innocent man mistaken for a stone-thrower, and indeed indicted Justice Gillam for “willful murder,” but these culprits were all acquitted.

The charge of outlawry against Wilkes was dropped on technical grounds. But on June 18, Lord Mansfield, surrounded by troops, ordered Wilkes to serve a twenty-two month imprisonment on a variety of minor charges. The Wilkite movement was now in good shape. It had the memory of the authentic martyrs of St. George’s Fields, and it had a leader whose continuing imprisonment was a standing reproach to the government and a standing inspiration and rallying point to the popular libertarian cause.

The Massacre of St. George’s Fields and the incarceration of John Wilkes were a goad and an inspiration to the liberal movement in America. As early as the first Wilkite agitation in 1763, Americans recognized their kinship to liberty and their enmity to the tyranny of British rule. In commemoration of Colonel Barré’s famous pro-American speech in Parliament against the Stamp Act, Pennsylvanians named a new town Wilkes-Barré in honor of the two heroes. Now on June 6, 1768, a committee of the Boston Sons of Liberty,
including John Adams, Benjamin Church, Joseph Warren, and others, wrote to the “Illustrious Patriot” Wilkes as “the Friends of Liberty, Wilkes, peace and good order.” The Bostonians hailed Wilkes’ fight for the true British constitution, commended John Dickinson’s pamphlet to his attention, and sent a monetary token of their esteem. On July 19, Wilkes significantly replied from prison that his dedication to liberty had no local confines, and that he was “a friend to universal liberty.” Wilkes warmly commended Dickinson’s “generous and rational...
Farmer’s Letters,
in which the cause of freedom is perfectly understood,” and never so ably defended. Such was the beginning of a more formal linkage between the libertarian movements in Britain and America, and of a voluminous correspondence between John Wilkes and the Boston Sons.

The American press had closely followed the events of Wilkes’ European exile, and followed still more closely the drama of his return, imprisonment, and rioting by the people. In New London, Connecticut, in August 1768, the popular toast was, “May we never want [lack] a Wilkes and may Wilkes never want liberty.” The speeches of Wilkes and his supporters were included among the radical ideas propagated by Adams, Otis, and the other popular leaders in America. The harsh treatment meted out to Wilkes and his followers helped intensify the feeling of resentment in America against the Crown. The Wilkite uprising also greatly raised American hopes, for any American resistance to British troops would be much aided by any distraction provided by the London radicals.