Conceived in Liberty (192 page)

On May 19 a public mass meeting of the inhabitants of the city and county
met to act on the nominations made at the merchants’ meeting of three days before. The conservative merchants demonstrated their dominance by making their leader—and chairman of the new committee of correspondence—Isaac Low, chairman of the meeting. Aside from agreeing to add one radical to the committee, the conservatives swept the meeting. Whereupon Governor Cadwallader Colden was moved to write exultantly to the Earl of Dartmouth that the new Committee of Fifty-one was made up of some of the wisest and most prudent citizens of New York.

The decision of how to reply to Boston’s appeal was now in the hands of New York’s conservatives, who decided to use Providence’s call for a general congress—meant to implement the boycott—as a tactic for delaying any effective action. The new Committee of Fifty-one therefore answered Boston on May 23 that all action should be postponed until an interprovincial congress could be held. Boston vainly replied by urging immediate nonintercourse with Britain rather than wait many months for a congress; but New York was adamant. It was such responses as New York’s that drove the Boston radicals to endorse the Solemn League and Covenant, by which the masses could impose a total boycott over the heads of recalcitrant merchants.
*

The Committee of Fifty-one tried to prod new committees of correspondence from the New York towns into being, but the few that did appear—in Suffolk County, Orange County, and Cumberland County—urged the radical Boston program of immediate boycott.

To counteract the conservative coup, the radicals held their own meeting, denounced the Port Act, urged an immediate nonimportation agreement, and named their own committee of correspondence. The Sons of Liberty also countered the Committee of Fifty-one by creating a new Committee of Mechanics to operate as a center of radical pressure.

A similar conservative victory had occurred at the same time in the other major port of Philadelphia. The strong group of conservatives wished to confine American protest to a timorous petition of grievances to Great Britain. On the other hand, the radicals, led by the Philadelphia iron manufacturer and distiller Charles Thomson, wished to heed Boston’s appeal. When Paul Revere brought Boston’s letter, the radical leaders—Thomson, already known as the “Sam Adams of Philadelphia,” and the young Quaker Thomas Mifflin—called a public meeting for the next day, May 20, and tried desperately to enlist the great John Dickinson in their cause. But it often happens to pioneers in a revolutionary movement that the movement’s dynamic advance leaves them behind in a kind of crabbed
cul-de-sac.
Such had recently been
happening to Dickinson, who caviled at the Boston Tea Party and at the bold resistance movement required by current conditions. At the meeting of May 20, Thomson and Mifflin urged an immediate declaration making common cause with Boston; instead, Dickinson and Joseph Reed gained the day with an unhappy bit of stalling, pleading with the governor for a special session of the Assembly to petition for redress of grievances. Furthermore, the committee of correspondence selected by the meeting to answer Boston was also dominated by the conservative forces. In its letter to Boston of May 21, the Philadelphia committee showed itself even more conservative than New York: it had the bad taste to denounce the Tea Party, it pressed Massachusetts to compensate the East India Company, it called for varying the boycott plan by reserving it for a last resort, and it urged that a general congress be strictly confined to petitioning the Crown. The letter was drawn up by the highly conservative and Tory Anglican minister Dr. William Smith, head of the College of Philadelphia. This response also contributed to Boston’s adoption of the Solemn League and Covenant.

The only recourse left to the Pennsylvania radicals was to exploit the governor’s rejection of the petition for a special session of the Assembly. When the expected rejection was announced, radicals forced a new committee of correspondence upon the old committee by calling a meeting of two hundred angry mechanics (artisans) for June 9. This artisan pressure forced the old committee to call a general mass meeting of Philadelphia City and County for an enlarged committee on June 18. But the conservatives moved skillfully behind the scenes to control the mass meeting in advance: the caucus selected a new committee comprising the old committee and twenty-seven representatives of religious sects in the city. The proposed committee was strongly under the control of the conservatives, who cleverly chose the eminent John Dickinson to be chairman, and thus to serve as a front man for their designs. The meeting proved easily amenable to manipulation by the conservative-religious caucus. The handpicked Committee of Forty-three was selected, and an intercolonial congress proposed to petition for redress of grievances. No mention was made of Boston’s appeal for a boycott of Great Britain. During the next three weeks, most counties in Pennsylvania created committees of correspondence and obediently adopted the Philadelphia resolution for an interprovincial congress.

Thus, Boston’s appeal for immediate and total nonintercourse with Britain had been shunted aside by the victorious conservative forces of New York and Philadelphia, who instead took up and perverted Providence’s proposal for a general congress. The conservatives had two aims in mind: to delay any action for the many months’ time necessary to call and hold a congress; and, second, to limit the congress to a peaceful—and innocuous—petition of Great Britain and to keep it from such radical measures as a total boycott. The desperate response of the Boston radicals was the Solemn League and Covenant,
calling for a general public boycott of Britain to override the merchants and the local governments. But while many towns of Massachusetts approved the covenant, other towns of the province, including Marblehead, Salem, Charles-town, and Springfield, decided to wait for the congress as did most of the towns in Connecticut.

It was swiftly evident to the Boston leaders that the covenant could not be pushed through immediately, and that the conservatives had at least achieved their objective of delay. The Boston radicals were unyielding in matters of principle; but they were eminently adaptable and realistic in matters of tactics. And so they quickly cut their losses and decided to join the movement for an intercolonial congress. The official call for the congress accordingly came from the Massachusetts Assembly on June 17; the “Continental Congress” was to meet at Philadelphia on September 5. The great struggles within the American revolutionary movement were now to be waged for the soul of the Continental Congress.

Meanwhile, the pressing emergency was the shutdown of the port of Boston by the nearby British fleet. Generous donations of food and supplies from all the colonies kept the Bostonians from acutely suffering from the British blockade. The passage of the later Coercive Acts helped to radicalize American opinion still further, and the Boston Committee of Correspondence urged civil disobedience against the invalid abrogation of the Massachusetts charter and the innovation of a royally appointed Council. The new councillors found themselves beset by American mobs and by social ostracism, and they were soon forced to flee to Boston and the arms of General Gage. The judges and sheriffs newly appointed by Gage also soon joined their Tory colleagues. In addition, the general threat to the liberty of the other colonies from the Coercive Acts appeared to be reinforced by the Quebec Act, which also seemed to raise the old specter of “popery.”

*
John C. Miller is completely in error when he asserts at length that the New York, and Philadelphia, conservatives were here reacting against the Solemn League and Covenant. For these meetings, calling for postponement until a congress should open, took place several weeks
before
the covenant was drawn up. In truth, the covenant was a reaction against the conservative decisions in New York and Philadelphia. See John C. Miller,
Origins of the American Revolution
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 363ff.

From mid-June until the opening of the Congress, the major struggles were waged over the selection of delegates in the various colonies and the lining up of support for or opposition to a total boycott of trade with Great Britain. Massachusetts’ delegates were chosen by the Assembly on the day of the call, June 17, and in defiance of General Gage. Makeup of the delegates, including Sam Adams and John Adams, as well as the conservative Thomas Cushing, ensured Massachusetts’ leadership of the radical forces in the Congress.

In New York the radicals, now centered in the Committee of Mechanics, prepared to do battle over delegates with the conservative Committee of Fifty-one. At a meeting of the latter committee on July 4, the radicals’ proposal for a concurrent choice of delegates by the two committees was beaten by a two-to-one majority, and the Committee of Fifty-one thus gained the exclusive privilege of naming delegates. Nominated as delegates were four staunch conservatives: Isaac Low, James Duane, John Alsop, and the very young lawyer John Jay, as well as the middle-of-the-road merchant Philip Livingston. The embittered radicals struck back and called a meeting of their own on July 6, at which Boston was energetically supported and the forthcoming Congress urged to agree to nonimportation. The radical pressure forced a general mass meeting of July 7 to vote to poll all the taxpayers, freeholders, and freemen of New York City on the delegates, under joint supervision of the two rival committees. The radicals were to run leaders Alexander MacDougall and Leonard Lispenard against Alsop and Duane. But the Committee of Fifty-one immediately reneged on the agreement to hold a general election, and eleven radical members of the committee heatedly resigned the next day. Ignoring the radicals, the committee resolved on July 13 to keep the original
slate of five, and instructed them not to call for a boycott. But the public meeting called by the committee for July 19 bitterly overruled the Committee of Fifty-one, created a new committee of ten radicals and five conservatives, and substituted two radicals, “unexceptionable friends of liberty,” for Livingston and Duane. But the Committee of Fifty-one again scorned a public meeting, this time one called by itself, and now pressed forward plans for a general election. The conservatives managed to defeat radical resolutions at a public meeting of July 25 and went ahead with a public election of delegates on July 28. In exchange for the rather feeble statement by the five candidates that a “faithfully observed” general nonimportation agreement seemed to be the most effective measure for the Congress to take, the radicals suddenly capitulated, and the five conservative choices were unanimously selected as delegates from the city and county of New York.

Of the thirteen other counties of New York province, six took no action at all in securing representation in the Congress, while four counties (Albany, Westchester, Dutchess, Ulster) gladly authorized the conservative city delegates to act for them. Only three counties proceeded to elect delegates of their own: Suffolk and Orange counties, where the towns had supported a boycott, and Kings County, where two liberal citizens selected one of their number to be the delegate from the entire county.

Thus, New York’s internecine struggle resulted in a largely conservative delegation. Pennsylvania’s problems, however, were rather different. The Committee of Forty-three, to be sure, was largely in conservative hands, under the middle-of-the-road chairmanship of John Dickinson. But in Pennsylvania, much farther right than these conservatives was the arch-Tory faction headed by the wily and powerful Speaker of the House Joseph Galloway. To Galloway, all popular resistance going beyond humble petitioning of Parliament was rank anarchy. Galloway similarly insisted that the delegates to the Congress be chosen by the legally constituted provincial Assembly; any other method would be popular and hence revolutionary—and not subject to the control of Joseph Galloway. To combat the Galloway threat and also to push its own extralegal case, the Committee of Forty-three decided on June 27 to call a convention of county committees to advise the Assembly on a choice of delegates. Such a convention, not subject to the undemocratic weighting of representation in behalf of the eastern counties, was bound to be more radical than the Assembly.

An extralegal and hence revolutionary provincial convention of county committees was called by the Committee of Forty-three for July 15. Press controversy raged, meanwhile, over the Boston boycott proposal, and a radical artisan-and-trader meeting in Philadelphia urging a boycott was ignored by the Committee of Forty-three. The Pennsylvania Convention, meeting on July 15–20 under the guidance of John Dickinson and the committee, labored mightily to bring forth a mouse. Boycott was urged as only a last resort after
petitioning, but any boycott agreed upon by the Congress would receive full support. Pennsylvania delegates were instructed to ask for redress of the various American grievances, in return for which Americans would pay an annual revenue to the king and pay all damages to the East India Company. In response to this highly tame resolution the Galloway faction denounced the illegal convention as “setting up anarchy above order...
THE BEGINNING OF REPUBLICANISM.”
Galloway ignored the tortured pleas of the convention and selected delegates exclusively from the Assembly itself; but the liberals managed to add Dickinson to the list late in the proceedings of the Assembly.

In New England the radicals had little trouble in dominating the selection of delegates. In Connecticut, delegates were chosen by the Assembly’s committee of correspondence. In Rhode Island, they were chosen by the General Assembly. Looking forward to a “firm and inviolable union of all the colonies,” Rhode Island chose Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward, leaders of the two hostile political factions in the province, as its two delegates. But this gesture of unity was to be overshadowed by the apparent desire of Ward and Hopkins to disagree with each other on all vital matters. As to New Hampshire, when Governor Wentworth prevented the House from choosing delegates, the representatives called an extralegal convention of the towns to choose the delegates from that colony.