Independence (22 page)

North told Parliament that his purpose was to uphold “the doctrine that every part of the empire was bound to bear its share of service and burthen in the common defense.” Revenue must be raised, and never more so than now, as the annual interest alone on the national debt totaled 1.8 million pounds. If the Americans persisted in denying the authority of Parliament, he went on, “we can enter into no negociation, we can meet no compromise.” But if the colonists through their assemblies should agree to contribute “their proportion to the common defense (such proportion to be raised [by each] … assembly … and disposable by parliament),” the government of Great Britain would “forbear … to levy any duty, tax, or assessment” on that colony. Furthermore, the colonial assemblies could raise the revenue by “any mode”—direct or indirect taxes, lotteries, land sales, whatever—they chose.
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North made clear that it was his intention to deal with each province separately. He never mentioned the Continental Congress. In fact, he categorically declared, “I am not treating with rebels.”
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He was advancing the doctrine that Crown and Parliament remained sovereign in every respect. The ministry and Parliament would make the key decisions. They would determine what constituted the common defense, how much revenue was to be raised annually, what percentage of the revenue would come from America, and how much was to be raised by each colony. Each colonial assembly would possess the authority only to decide how to raise the revenue that London had assigned as its quota. Parliamentary sovereignty remained at the heart of North’s proposal. Furthermore, as one of Dartmouth’s subministers remarked privately, under North’s plan the Americans would have “no security” for London’s lasting adherence to North’s plan “but our own good faith.”
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North’s so-called peace plan stirred remarkably little debate, though two MPs delivered especially striking speeches in opposition to the course the prime minister had outlined. Charles Pratt, 1st Baron Camden, spoke compellingly in the House of Lords. The sixty-two-year-old Camden had sat in two previous ministries. Though at times he had expressed his exasperation with the colonists, Camden never wavered in his opposition to the Declaratory Act. Over the past decade, he had opposed the stamp tax, Townshend Duties, Tea Act, and Coercive Acts. On March 16, with an air of doom dangling on every phrase, yet with greater clarity than was expressed by any other MP, Camden took the floor to warn against following the government’s belligerent course. The “true character” of what North had proposed, he began, was “violent and hostile.… [I]t is a Bill of war; it draws the sword” and will plunge the empire into “the calamities of civil war.” Before resorting to hostilities, he continued, “wise and good men” must ask “whether the war in which they are going to engage be just, practicable and necessary.” War with the colonists would be unjust, he declared. The colonists’ grievances were the outgrowth of the “oppressions you have accumulated on America.” Furthermore, North was taking Great Britain into a war that it might not be able to win. Indeed, Camden spoke of the “impracticability of conquering America.” The army, he said, could never “conquer a great continent of 1800 miles, containing three millions of people, all indissolubly united on the great Whig bottom of liberty and justice.” It was possible, though by no means certain, that a naval blockade could quash the American rebellion. Britain would go to war filled with “discontent and division,” whereas the Americans were “prepared to meet these severities [of war] and to surmount them” through “a union as renders her invincible.… They are allied in the common defence of every thing dear to them. They are struggling … in support of their liberties and properties, and the most sacred rights of mankind.”
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Camden was answered principally by Sandwich. Fifty-seven years old in 1775, the first lord of the Admiralty had been part of every ministry over the past eight years. In each, he had been a tenacious advocate for taking a harsh stance toward the colonial protestors. In 1775 Sandwich expected to lead the navy in the war that was about to begin, and it was a challenge that he relished. He anticipated no problems whatsoever from armed Americans. With an imperturbable air, Sandwich predicted that the “American heroes” would show themselves to be “egregious cowards,” much as their forebearers had done in the French and Indian War. The “very sound of a cannon” will “carry them off” in flight. “They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men,” he proclaimed.
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Edmund Burke once again was North’s principal adversary in the House of Commons. His long speech—it lasted nearly three hours—instantly gained a wider circulation than the address by Camden. “The proposition is peace,” Burke began. “Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations.… It is simple peace.” Peace, he went on, implies reconciliation, and reconciliation requires concessions by one side or the other. He urged that the concessions be made by Great Britain, for the “fierce spirit of liberty” that was characteristic of Americans would not permit them to surrender “what they think [is] the only advantage worth living for.” If North’s government refused to yield ground, Great Britain would lose its colonies. That would be disastrous for the mother country. One third of Britain’s overseas trade was with America, Burke observed, an amount equivalent to all of Britain’s trade only seventy-five years earlier. But if the government succeeded in reconciling with America, Burke went on, the colonists “will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance.”

Camden had not offered an unambiguous solution to the imperial crisis. Burke was more specific, though barely so. He urged the repeal of the Coercive Acts and all taxes, contending that sufficient revenue would come from America through the regulation of its trade. Taxation, he said, was the heart of the matter. Reconciliation could not occur unless the Americans were satisfied on this score. But what Burke offered was less than the Continental Congress had demanded. Burke knew that Congress had disavowed the Declaratory Act, but he refused to deny Parliament’s supremacy over the colonies. On the other hand, he knew of Galloway’s plan and he spoke of Irish and Welsh representation in Parliament, leaving the impression that he was suggesting that the colonists be represented, perhaps in an American branch. Great Britain must, he said, “yield as a matter of right, or grant as [a] matter of favour,” the admission of “
the people of our colonies into an interest in the Constitution
.” But he did not define the constitutional rights of the colonists. Once again, Burke left the impression that he was suggesting a federal system for the empire. The empire, he said, should consist of “the aggregate of many states under one common head,” with “the subordinate parts [having] many local privileges and immunities.”

Burke had spoken in a statesmanlike manner. From the outset, he knew that his speech was futile. He and the others who responded to North, he said privately, “spoke in opposition … more for the acquittal of their own honour, and discharge of their own consciences … than from any sort of hope” of success. But while Burke provided a breath of fresh air, he in fact proposed nothing more concrete than a return to pre-1763 practices. Typically, however, he closed with a flow of splendid rhetoric:

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians, who have no place among us … and who … [are] far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire.… Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.… We ought to elevate our minds with the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American Empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges will make it all it can be.

Burke’s warning that Great Britain must offer conciliatory terms or risk the loss of its American colonies fell on deaf ears. The House of Commons rejected his proposal by nearly a four-to-one vote.
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Thereafter, both houses went along placidly, overwhelmingly endorsing North’s program. Once they had acted, David Hartley, who had been Dartmouth’s intermediary to Franklin before Christmas, literally had the final word in Parliament’s debate on conciliation. Parliament had chosen war, he said. Had it “pursued a plan of equity and justice,” peace and the British Empire might have been maintained.
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No one listened, and not solely because of Hartley’s reputation as an uninspiring and verbose orator. (Behind his back, colleagues called him the “dinner bell.” When he spoke, many MPs left the chamber for a repast.)
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In this instance, Hartley’s effort went unheard because, in truth, North’s government, and its commanding majority in Parliament, had decided on war a full year earlier unless the Americans accepted absolute parliamentary supremacy. Once word of the Continental Congress’s action reached London, Britain’s recourse to the use of force was never in question. Despite what most knew to be the possibility—even the likelihood—of military difficulties, ministry and Parliament marched into hostilities persuaded that humbling the colonists would not be a formidable task. Not for the last time would a government underestimate its enemy as it took its people into the costly, bloody wasteland of war.

During the six months that separated the First and Second Congress, including the three months spent by North’s government arriving at its American policy, the colonies put in place the Continental Association, the mechanism for enforcing the stoppage of trade with the mother country. Here and there, bitter battles were fought over adherence to the boycott that Congress had adopted, though in the end only Georgia failed to immediately create a provincial Association committee. In New England and Virginia the boycotts adopted in the spring and summer never ceased operation, while elsewhere most of the Association committees were up and running sometime during the winter. In its first month of operation, before the bugs were ironed out, the New York City committee seized and sold imports that brought only 350 pounds in auctions. A few months later a royal official in the colony lamented that the boycott was ironclad and “ever rigidly maintained in this place.”
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Occasionally, a congressman served on an Association committee. John Adams, for instance, was already a member of the Board of Selectmen in Braintree, Massachusetts, which was given responsibility for enforcing the boycott in the village. Adams’s committee superintended the embargo and regulated prices brought on by the scarcities caused by the boycott. In addition, it published the names of violators so that “all such foes to the rights of British America may be publickly known and universally Contemned as the enemies of American liberty and thence forth We respectively will break off all dealings with him or her.”
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Some Association committees instituted loyalty oaths. Those who signed the oath pledged their willingness to abide by the boycott. Those who refused to take the oath were designated as Tories. This was the first instance in the colonial protest that an entire segment of the population was readily identifiable as Loyalists or Tories, and the first time too that those who were seen as hostile to the popular cause were placed under surveillance. In some locales Tories were disarmed. In rare instances they were incarcerated. Nearly everywhere Tories were forced to resign from public office. In some villages throughout Massachusetts, the local Association committee denied Loyalists admittance to worship services, though the Boston Committee of Correspondence inveighed against that practice. Many committees compelled Tories to make public apologies for their transgressions. Shots were fired into the home of one outspoken Tory in Taunton, Massachusetts, though no one was injured.
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When General Gage sought to recruit Loyalists into a newly formed Tory “Corps of Infantry,” Massachusetts militiamen in Bristol County, about forty miles south of Boston, turned out on April 10 and rounded up those who volunteered. They were stripped of their weapons, and eleven men who had signed on to soldier for the king were imprisoned in an abandoned salt mine.
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As in England, the colonies witnessed an explosion of pamphleteering during the winter of 1775. Pamphlets defending and attacking British policies had appeared in America since Parliament’s initial attempt to tax the colonists, but never had so many tracts been issued by both sides in such a brief period. With war hanging in the balance, most of these publications assumed a strident, urgent tone rarely seen before. A wave of pamphlets attacking the First Continental Congress appeared first. Most of the authors were Anglican clerics and one, Jonathan Boucher, the priest of Saint Barnabas Church in Prince George’s County, Maryland, was an acquaintance of Colonel Washington and the former tutor of his stepson. Several who condemned Congress’s actions were lawyers, including Jonathan Sewall and Daniel Leonard in Massachusetts and Galloway in Pennsylvania.