Independence (4 page)

Peace ushered in other problems. Great Britain was swamped with debt brought on by years of war. The national debt had doubled during the previous seven years. The debt's interest alone devoured approximately half of the government's annual revenue. Retiring the debt, it was believed, required an increase in taxes, and few in power in London wished to heap the “dreadful” load of taxation entirely on “the gentry and people” of the home islands. Simultaneously, the government hoped in the near future to open to settlement some of the territory it had won in the Peace of Paris. But it was widely believed that only the presence of the British army on America's western frontier would induce the Indians living in trans-Appalachia to relinquish their land to the Crown. Furthermore, as it was widely feared that the Treaty of Paris had ushered in another brief period of peace, many thought troops were needed in America to prevent France and Spain from avenging their recent humiliating defeats.
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Someone had to pay for keeping the army in America. That too meant new taxes.

Just as peace came, the king named George Grenville to head a new ministry. It was a surprise announcement. Though Grenville was fifty-one years old, had sat in Parliament for twenty-two years, and served in several cabinets, he was generally thought to be in the second tier of leaders. However, his greatest strength was supposed to be his grasp of finance, which at least partially accounted for his appointment. Grenville's cabinet rather quickly made five crucial decisions, though some of them—including the matter of American taxation—had been agreed to in principle by its predecessor, the ministry of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute.
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The government agreed to heavy new taxes on the citizenry living in the homeland in order to raise revenue for retiring the debt. It opted to leave seven regiments of infantry, or about 8,500 men, in America. It announced the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade migration to and the purchase of land west of the Appalachians until further notice. It enacted the Sugar Act in 1764 both to raise revenue and to tighten the screws on America's merchants. This legislation drastically reduced a prohibitory tariff on the importation of foreign molasses, making it considerably cheaper to import the foreign commodity. But there was a catch. The Sugar Act not only levied a duty on the foreign molasses; it also enhanced the means of enforcing imperial trade laws. Finally, in 1765 the ministry decided to do what it had never previously attempted in the 150 years of the empire's existence. Parliament imposed a direct tax on the colonists. It enacted the Stamp Act, which taxed permits, licenses, and newspapers, among other things. As historian Richard Archer put it, the mother country thought it “time to remind the colonists that they were colonists.”
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The Sugar Act did not create much of a stir throughout the colonies. It fell largely on the four New England provinces, the principal importers of molasses, which was a key ingredient in their rum production industry. Moreover, while the Sugar Act was certainly a tax, it was neatly camouflaged as a trade regulation measure. Nor were the colonists emotionally or intellectually prepared to protest in 1764. The foes of the Sugar Act in Massachusetts could not even induce the Bay Colony assembly to adopt a petition beseeching the king's assistance.
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The Stamp Act was a different matter. It was unmistakably a tax. Ministerial defenders forthrightly declared that Parliament possessed an unqualified right to tax the colonies. Parliament, they said, was the sovereign legislature within the empire and, as such, it “exercises a Power” which the colonial assemblies did not possess, “never claimed, or wished, nor can ever be vested with.”
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The ministry also maintained that it was only fair that the colonies pay for opening the West. After all, the British army had “constantly protected and defended them” from the Indians. Furthermore, without the sacrifice of countless British soldiers, the recent war could not have been won and the vast tracts of frontier lands previously claimed by the French and Spanish could never have been garnered for the benefit of the colonists.
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More quietly, the ministry moved to stiffen its supervision of American trade. Although no new legislation was enacted, imperial authorities contemplated the more systematic enforcement of century-old parliamentary legislation that restricted colonial trade to the British Empire and subjected foreign trade to imperial duties. Colonial merchants had often ignored the restrictions, seeking out lucrative markets wherever they happened to be. Evading the understaffed Customs Service had not been terribly difficult. All that changed in the mid-1760s, when London implemented the stringent regulations that first had been envisaged by Walpole's government twenty-five years earlier. In addition to drastically increasing the number of customs agents in colonial ports, the British government made it easier to prosecute trade violators by establishing four vice admiralty courts in North America.

Although one or two royal governors, and several colonists who happened to be in London at the time, cautioned that a stamp tax would provoke problems—it “would go down with the people like chopt hay,” a Connecticut official advised—the ministry ignored the warnings.
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It took only a few months in 1765 for the government to realize that it had provoked a tempest. Boycotts were organized against British trade in several port cities in an attempt to force the repeal of the tax. Mobs also spilled into the streets in nearly every large city and a few small towns. In some places the rioters acted with such unrestrained fury that they appeared to be driven by more than anger over a tax. In fact, they often were. The residents of Boston, for instance, had suffered a stunning array of tribulations during the five years before they ever heard of the Stamp Act. One of the worst fires in American history struck Boston in 1760, consuming many businesses and 10 percent of its dwellings. Three years later, hundreds perished when a smallpox epidemic broke out in this port city. Boston had additionally been hit with a severe postwar depression when the French and Indian War concluded, and the economic downturn arrived at a time when its residents groaned under extraordinarily heavy provincial taxes imposed to meet the Bay Colony's staggering war debt.
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If it was not enough for Bostonians to cope with the steepest tax increase in the British Empire after 1761, one imposed by their own colonial assembly, they now were confronted by the Stamp Act, a levy passed by a legislature three thousand miles away and in which they had no voice.

This new vexation combusted with the Bostonians' pent-up frustrations. The result was a wanton spree of mob violence and destruction in the summer of 1765. In place after place, mobs hanged in effigy high-ranking British political figures, looted and destroyed records of pending customs cases, and laid waste to the property of some stamp collectors and royal officials. That a rampaging throng in Boston tore down the residence of the comptroller of customs in Massachusetts was deplorable, but not especially astounding. Nor was it particularly startling that a frenzied crowd wreaked great damage to the home and well-manicured grounds of Massachusetts's stamp collector. That it demolished the elegant Boston mansion of Thomas Hutchinson, Massachusetts's lieutenant governor, was more surprising. Possibly, the mob turned its sights on Hutchinson, a native-born son of the Bay Colony who had chosen to serve London, because he was thought of as a traitor to his fellow Americans. (“Bone of our Bone, born and educated among us!” John Adams would rant about Hutchinson years later over another matter.)
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Virginia was one of the few places that did not experience cruel and frenzied mob violence, but it witnessed decisive protest nonetheless. Twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry took the lead in Virginia in rallying opposition to Parliament's tax. One of ten children born to a Scottish immigrant who had married into a prominent Virginia family, young Henry was raised in Hanover County, near the frontier. After four years of formal education, and further tutoring by his father, Henry at age fifteen was put to work as a clerk in a general store. Sometime around his twenty-first birthday, Henry opened his own crossroads store. When it failed, he opened another. When that foundered as well, he went to work as a barkeep in his father's tavern. But Henry wanted more. In 1760, at age twenty-four, he taught himself enough law in a few weeks to open his own practice. Possessed of a fast mind and a silver tongue, Henry flourished as a backcountry attorney. Within five years he was a member of the House of Burgesses. He was sworn in as an assemblyman in May 1765, less than a week before word of the Stamp Act arrived in Williamsburg. When news of Parliament's levy reached the Virginia capital, Henry refused to be silenced by his status as a newcomer. He joined in the debate over how Virginia should respond to the tax. On only his ninth day as a burgess, Henry delivered an electrifying speech, the only one from the debate that is now remembered. Numerous versions of what Henry said have come down to posterity, but according to popular legend, he defiantly stated: “Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third …” He got no further before he was interrupted by loud cries of “Treason! Treason!” Henry paused for a moment. But, unflappable as always, he proceeded by observing that the king “may profit by their example! If this be treason, make the most of it.”

Patrick Henry by George Bagby Matthews, after Thomas Sully. Among the early advocates of American resistance, Henry introduced the Virginia Resolves in the House of Burgesses in 1765. Chosen to be part of the Virginian delegation to Congress, he resigned in the spring of 1775. He was never a leader on the national stage as he had been in Virginia. (U.S. Senate Collection)

If Henry's exact words are in question, there is no doubt that following his stirring speech he introduced a series of resolutions, several of which were quickly approved by the House of Burgesses. The Virginia Resolves stated that the earliest settlers “brought with them … all the Liberties, Privileges, Franchises, and Immunities … held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the People of Great Britain.” Their charters, moreover, confirmed that they were entitled to all rights and liberties enjoyed by those “abiding and born within the Realm of
England
.” A “distinguishing characteristick of British Freedom,” the Resolves added, was that taxes might only be levied by “the People … themselves, or by Persons chosen by themselves to represent them.” From the beginning the English colonists had enjoyed these rights, none of which they had ever “forfeited or yielded up.”

These resolutions soon were published in nearly every colonial newspaper. Before the spring and summer ended, the Virginia Resolves had been adopted nearly word for word by almost every colonial assembly in America. The point of view embraced by the colonists was believed to be an expression of ideology that traced its heritage to the ancient English constitution, and in fact every official set of American resolutions denounced the Stamp Act as unconstitutional. Parliament, it was asserted, had no legal authority to tax the colonists, for the Americans were not, and could not be, represented in that faraway body. What is more, the colonial assemblies alone could lawfully tax the colonists. Any taxes levied by any other than the colonial assemblies were not just illegal; they were also a violation of the colonists' rights and an irrefutable threat to their liberty. Indeed, the colonists saw a linkage between taxation and liberty. Taxation was a manifestation of government's power, and if that authority was wielded improperly or unconstitutionally, it could destroy all rights and liberty. Americans had embraced a constitutional position from which they would never depart so long as they remained British subjects. In October, seven colonies sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress, a rare intercolonial assembly that met in New York. It adopted a similar statement concerning the British constitution: Parliament had no authority to levy taxes in America.
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Officials in Great Britain did not know, but feared, that the Stamp Act was a transformative event for many Americans. Their fears were well-founded. There were colonial activists, like Patrick Henry, who sensed that their constituents were restive under London's new colonial policies. There were also those, like Richard Henry Lee, who took note when a Johnny-come-lately such as Henry was catapulted overnight to a position of leadership when he denounced those policies. There were lessons to be learned as well from the lot of those who defended parliamentary taxation. Not only was there the destruction of Hutchinson's estate to consider, but there was also the fact that nineteen members of the Massachusetts assembly who had spoken on behalf of the Stamp Act were defeated for reelection in the fall of 1765.
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The Stamp Act did far more than reshape the fortunes of a few politicians, however. The Stamp Act, and the protests that followed, was the salient moment when many Americans for the first time contemplated the second-class status of both colonies and colonists within the British Empire. Of course, all had long known that there were limits to how far a colonist could rise. An American might win election to his provincial assembly, but no colonist could hold a seat in Parliament. There was next to no chance that a colonist might become a royal governor or be named to an important imperial board. No colonist had ever held an office in a British ministry, much less become the prime minister. No colonist had ever been appointed as an ambassador to another country. It was difficult for a colonist to secure a commission in the British army or the Royal Navy, and advancement was problematical for anyone who did. An American might become a field officer in his colony's army, but he would be outranked by the lowliest officer in the British army.