Conceived in Liberty (177 page)

One by one the other colonies joined in the boycott movement. The grand jury and then all the freeholders of New Castle County in Delaware followed Philadelphia’s lead, at the end of August 1769. In New Jersey the Assembly, in mid-October, passed a vote of thanks to the noble conduct of the merchants and traders of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania for stopping the importing of British goods. Mass meetings in Essex County and at New Brunswick pledged nonimportation and a boycott of all nonsigners and violators. Connecticut merchants heeded the appeals of their fellow merchants from the large port cities. The merchants in New Haven agreed in mid-July 1769 to purchase no British goods, except for certain commodities excluded in the Boston and New York agreements. Violators were to be boycotted as “enemies of their country.” Merchants at Groton and New London followed suit in August. The farm-dominated Connecticut House, in mid-October, gave its enthusiastic approval of the nonimport agreements. The boycott was joined by the towns of Wethersfield and Norwich at the end of the year. Merchants and some other citizens from all over Connecticut met in late February 1770 and drew up a uniform agreement for the entire colony. Violators were to be boycotted whether they were individual merchants or entire provinces.

Two continuing recalcitrants were Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Of these Rhode Island, a leading mercantile center, was by far the more important. Rhode Island’s merchants took the golden opportunity to reap trade while their fellows were renouncing profits in behalf of principle. Thus, Rhode Island imports of British goods grew during 1769, and much new trade in these goods was conducted in western Massachusetts. Providence merchants and its town meeting, it is true, extended an old but loose nonimportation agreement. Newport merchants, however, were far more stubborn. Severe
pressure descended upon Newport from the other colonies: the Philadelphia Merchants Committee threatened to sever commercial relations; Boston shut off all trade with Newport; and Charleston was preparing to enter the fray. Even a nonimportation agreement drawn up by Newport merchants, at the end of October 1769, proved unsatisfactorily lax, and Philadelphia and New York merchants proceeded to boycott Newport. Finally, in late January 1770, Newporters surrendered and agreed to a strong nonimportation agreement.

By no means all Rhode Islanders, it should be noted, lagged behind in the resistance movement. As early as September 1767, an article in the
Providence Gazette
spoke eloquently of the natural rights of mankind, declaring it a self-evident truth that all were by nature equal in rights. The obligation to obey man-made laws rested on the consent of men. Therefore, it concluded, Parliament not only had no right to tax unrepresented Americans; it had no right to regulate them either. Leader of these logical advances in libertarian thought in Rhode Island was Silas Downer, a lawyer and a leader of the Sons of Liberty of Providence. In a speech to the Sons at the Providence Liberty Tree in July 1768, Downer, while admitting allegiance to George III, denied the right of Parliament to make
“any laws whatsoever
to bind us....” He went on to apply this principle, denouncing royal post office charges in America as a tax and therefore illegal. Moreover, Downer attacked the British laws of trade and manufacturing as violations of the natural rights of men.

At least one Rhode Island writer trenchantly called for extending the libertarian doctrine to one group often neglected by the Americans: Negro slaves. If the cry for liberty is sincere, why is not the principle extended to the Negro slaves at home, the writer challenged? The only way to prevent enslavement from abroad, he declared, was to end “that hellish practice of... enslaving another part of the human species,” for Negroes were surely Sons of Liberty, too.

New Hampshire’s failure to join the resistance had a simpler and far different cause. An agricultural province lacking a large trading town, this small royal colony was a virtual fief under the thumb of the Wentworth family. As merchants, landowners, and top executive officials in the province, this family, uniting formidable political and economic power, was able to dominate the affairs of New Hampshire for decades. At the apex of this cozy pyramid was Sir John Wentworth, the royal governor and the surveyor of the King’s Woods for all the colonies. Wentworth astutely named numerous new towns and counties in New Hampshire after his friends at the British court—for example, Rockingham, Grafton, and Hillsborough counties—and founded in 1770 a new college that he named after his friend the Earl of Dartmouth. Also in 1770, eight of the nine members of the appointed Council of New Hampshire, as well as a judge and a clerk of the superior court, were members of Governor Wentworth’s family. In this situation, no nonimport association could be formed in New Hampshire.

By late 1769, merchants of every province but New Hampshire had organized to support nonimportation agreements, of varying comprehensiveness and scope. How were they “enforced”?

The merchant associations generally appointed committees to watch over vessels and shipments, and to promote the public boycotts of offenders. In New York the boycott was remarkably effective: total imports from Great Britain to the port fell from over four hundred and ninety thousand pounds in 1768 to about seventy-five thousand pounds the following year. Once in a while, the overeager New York Sons of Liberty strayed beyond the colonists’ scrupulous limits of using strictly voluntary methods of pressure upon non-cooperating merchants. Thus, in the fall of 1769, a blend of boycott and mass intimidation induced the silversmith Simeon Cooley to flee New York; a jeweler, Thomas Richardson, confronted by a scaffold and a mob at the Liberty Pole, was forced to pledge his cooperation. The following June a transient noncooperating merchant named Hills had his goods seized and burned by a mob. Hills promptly fled New York. But these dishonorable instances were few and far between, and the Merchants Committee of Inspection denounced the mob action against Hills as the work of “lawless ruffians.”

Philadelphia’s record of compliance was remarkable, when one recalls that city’s original reluctance to join the boycott. The merchants’ main efforts were to weaken the agreements to the looser terms enjoyed by the Albany and Maryland merchants. Philadelphia imports fell from four hundred and forty thousand pounds to some two hundred and five thousand pounds the following year. No coercion or intimidation of the merchants appeared in Philadelphia. Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware also cheerfully complied with the
agreement and gave little trouble. Apart from the caldron of Boston, which will be treated below, only reluctant Newport in the northern colonies gave the nonimport movement much trouble. Indeed, there is evidence that even prominent members of the Newport Sons of Liberty, as well as the Merchants Committee itself, connived at virtually open violations of the nonimportation convenant.

Compliance with the boycott in the southern provinces was another story. The indifference or hostility of the merchants caused imports from Britain actually to increase during 1769, particularly in Virginia. The opposition of the British factors and their agents in Virginia forced the resisters to modify the boycott agreement, and attempts at enforcement by the Merchants Committees of Inspection or county associations were few and feeble. Enforcement efforts were far more successful in Maryland, where many more of the merchants were native-born and hence more enthusiastic about resistance. Too, and not unimportant, the Philadelphia merchants kept a watchful and suspicious eye upon their Baltimore confreres.

The boycott movement was not more successful in North Carolina and Georgia than in Virginia. The merchants ignored the provincial associations instituted by the North Carolina Assembly in late 1769. Finally, in early June 1770, the Sons of Liberty called a general meeting at Wilmington comprising many planters and others from six of the larger counties. The meeting agreed to boycott and publicly condemn all noncompliers with the agreement, and Merchants Committees of Inspection were selected in each county, concentrating on the towns of Brunswick and Wilmington. By the fall of 1770, enforcement had become effective as a result of these efforts.

In contrast to the strenuous if belated efforts at enforcement in North Carolina, Georgia made no attempt whatever to pressure compliance with the boycott. Fortunately, Georgia’s trade was so negligible that its desertion had little effect. Nevertheless, a general meeting of inhabitants of Charleston, at the end of June 1770, unanimously urged the total boycott of all trade with Georgia, which ought “to be amputated from the rest... as a rotten part that might spread a dangerous infection....”

The most interesting southern reaction, and one potentially explosive, to the problem of compliance occurred in South Carolina. There Christopher Gadsden and his vigilant band of radical-liberals stood alert to exert maximum pressure on reluctant merchants. These men, with their great ardor and zeal for liberty, were comparable only to the embattled libertarians of Boston. Like their comrades in Boston, the popular liberal forces of South Carolina confronted organized and articulate opposition, which was led by the wealthy young planter William Henry Drayton. Battling in the pages of the
South Carolina Gazette
during August 1769, Drayton denounced Gadsden as an advocate of enslavement masquerading as a libertarian; for private associations to brand noncompliers with the boycott as traitors, was a usurpation of the
function of the legislature. Here Drayton confused the vital distinction between voluntary and coercive actions, and hence between private and governmental actions. It was typically “conservative” for Drayton to believe that a state branding and punishing a man for treason was somehow legitimate and not really coercive, whereas
private
denunciation and peaceful boycott
were
illegitimately coercive. Also typically conservative, Drayton advocated jailing Gadsden for the latter’s views.

The famous Gadsden-Drayton debate finally led the people of Charleston to publish and distribute handbills in early September containing the names of the recalcitrants. (The original motto of the Charleston General Meeting establishing the boycott had been “Sign or Die,” but this proved to be braggadocio, as no attempt was ever made to go beyond boycott and public ostracism to such violence.) The leading nonsigners, aside from the inevitable royal officials, were Drayton, William Wragg, and John Gordon. Again, Drayton and Gadsden engaged in debate on the fundamental nature of liberty. Drayton asserted that the Gadsden liberals were “laying illegal restraints upon the free wills of free men” — that is, of the nonsigners. Gadsden retorted that the association violated not a single law and that free men had the right to associate—and hence
not
to associate—with whomsoever they pleased. Drayton replied by falling back on such cant as the old Tory doctrine of “conspiracy,” which supposedly made such boycotts punishable by law. Wragg was more explicit in pointing out that such boycotts should be as illegal as combinations of labor to raise wages. In his rebuttal, Gadsden transcended the preceding debate to proclaim the right of a people, where their rights have been invaded by government, to reassert their inalienable natural rights, those
“inherent
rights of
SOCIETY,
which
no climate, no time, no constitution, no contract
can ever destroy or diminish.”

Drayton did try to suppress the boycott at law. He could not go to the courts, for most of the judges (to say nothing of the juries) were signers of the association. And the South Carolina House summarily rejected his plea, which testified to the effectiveness of the boycott. Finally, the boycotters won. Drayton left in defeat for England in early January 1770, sailing, appropriately, on a ship carrying unsold boycotted goods back to Britain. Editor Peter Timothy of the
Gazette
thereupon exultantly listed among the unacceptable goods sailing back to Britain one “William Henry Drayton, Esquire.”

The Charleston General Committee, enlivened as it was by mechanics and planters, vigorously enforced the boycott, aided by the alert Merchants Committee of Inspection. Slaves imported by British traders were promptly sent back. Indeed, so effective was the boycott that total English imports in both Carolinas fell from over three hundred and five thousand pounds in 1769 to slightly over one hundred and forty-five thousand pounds in 1770.

Particularly significant was the nonimportation movement in Boston, for here the struggle for the boycott coincided with Boston’s necessarily more
acute conflict with the customs board and with the British army. The first town to organize the boycott, Boston had to face the hostility of the British customs officials and troops. They also had to face the effective organized opposition of John Mein, the Scottish publisher of the new newspaper, the
Boston Chronicle.
The
Chronicle
was not only the most typographically advanced paper in the country; it was also the only one to advance from weekly to semiweekly publication.

The
Chronicle
had recently begun as a newspaper above partisan stands in the political fray. But the customs board shrewdly saw an excellent opportunity for a propaganda coup and secretly set about subsidizing Mein’s paper. Mein profited handsomely from the subsidy of being the stationer to the customs board, and after a year his stationery—or rather his vitriolic championing of the Tory cause—was so appreciated that the board made him its sole supplier. Mein also had clandestine help in writing his material from William Burch of the customs board, and from the richly hated customs officer Samuel Waterhouse, whom John Adams denounced as “the most notorious scribbler... and libeller, in the service of the conspirators against the liberties of America.” Yet Mein jealously maintained in public that he was completely “unbiased” and not connected with the government.

The major confrontation between Mein and the liberals began in the spring of 1769. On May 8, the Boston Town Meeting praised the bulk of the merchants for abiding by the nonimportation agreement. In the next few weeks the Committee of Merchants of Boston, headed by John Hancock, helped to distribute thousands of handbills urging a boycott of the few merchants who had not complied. The list included three relatives—two sons and a nephew—of the leading Tory Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor of the province. (Another nephew of Hutchinson, later added to the list, quickly recanted his position.)