Independence (4 page)

Still others warned that the descendants of the Puritans, radical Protestants who had migrated to New England in the seventeenth century to escape the Church of England, would not rest until they were entirely free of Great Britain. New England Yankees, it was said, were merely waiting for the right moment to act. Some writers saw the spectacular population growth in the colonies as a threat. They predicted a revolt for American independence when the colonists outnumbered the inhabitants of the parent state.

Not everyone who ruminated on the matter thought independence was probable. Economists and spokesmen for the mercantile sector often ridiculed those who prophesied American independence. They stressed the commercial benefits that the colonists derived from being part of the empire and insisted that proper trade policies would choke off separatist inclinations.

Many English and Europeans crossed the Atlantic to visit North America during the eighteenth century, and several wrote of America’s flora and fauna and of the living conditions and cultural practices in the far corners of the colonies. Many could not resist the temptation to ask the colonists whether they believed America would someday break away from the mother country. The colonists invariably answered that independence was inevitable, although all said the break lay in the distant future, a generation or two removed, possibly even a century down the road.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Americans—mostly colonial businessmen engaged in transatlantic commerce—who wrote on the question of American independence said it was unlikely. Nearly all, in fact, extolled the mutual benefits of the imperial relationship and argued that the Americans were happy to be part of the British Empire.
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In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin, the best-known colonist, took up the matter of the striking growth of America’s population. In two thoughtful and widely read essays, Franklin forecast with amazing accuracy that by the mid-nineteenth century America’s population would surpass that of the mother country. When that occurred, the imperial capital should be moved from London to Philadelphia, he said, perhaps tongue in cheek. While never predicting that America’s swelling population would lead to independence, Franklin did offer pithy counsel to the imperial rulers. A “wise and good Mother,” he wrote, would loosen her grip on her maturing offspring, lest tight restraints “distress … the children” and “weaken … the whole Family.”
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In the glow of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which recognized the Anglo-American triumph in the Seven Years’ War (sometimes called the French and Indian War), the colonists appeared to think of themselves as blessed to be British subjects. Americans reveled in the glorious peace, which drove the French from North America and Spain from Florida. Great Britain was left in possession of every square foot of territory from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. Many Americans shared their king’s pride at “glory[ing] in the name of Britain.” They also dreamed of sharing in the coming prosperity they believed would flow from the spoils of victory. Not a few hailed their “indulgent Mother” and praised Great Britain as the freest nation on the planet.
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Joyous colonists named towns after British heroes. Massachusetts sent a donation to London to help cover the expense of erecting a memorial to a British officer who had fallen in the conflict. When word arrived in 1760 of the sudden death of the king, George II, the colonists mourned. The following year they rejoiced with heartfelt celebrations at the news of the coronation of the new king and queen, George III and Charlotte. As the decade of the 1760s got under way, several royal governors reported that the colonists were loyal and happy. No one captured America’s spirit better than Jonathan Mayhew, perhaps the most influential cleric in Boston. He saw colonists and parent state linked in “a mighty empire (I do not mean an independent one) in numbers little inferior to the greatest in Europe, and in felicity to none”
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The colonists did not know that sometime around 1740 officials serving in Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry had begun to consider steps to expand and tighten Britain’s control over its distant colonies. The officials were all too aware that many American merchants engaged in a lucrative illegal trade, ignoring Parliament’s century-old commercial regulations and diverting some of their profits into non-British pockets. Rightly or wrongly, Walpole’s ministers also believed that America was inexorably drifting toward independence. London was distracted by domestic woes and repeated wars, and its administrative control over the colonies had long been lax. The result, these brooding officials concluded, was that the colonists—three thousand miles away and for generations left to their own devices—had grown steadily more autonomous. Unless checked, the ministers convinced themselves, the colonies would continue to drift apart from the parent state, both politically and culturally, until America could no longer be kept within the empire. To stop this putative slide toward American independence, these ministers wished to tighten London’s grip on the colonies as soon as circumstances permitted.
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However, wars with France and Spain in the 1740s and 1750s, including the Seven Years’ War, posed roadblocks to the imposition of more rigorous control of the colonists. But with the Peace of Paris, which finally ended nearly twenty-five years of warfare, there was nothing to prevent London from exerting greater control over its American colonies.

Like their predecessors, Britain’s postwar ministers were concerned about America’s drifting away from London’s control, a worry that took on an additional urgency once France had been removed from the picture in America. Many in London had believed that the French presence, and the threat it had posed, had kept the northern colonies, and especially New England, in line. The Yankees, it was often said, had known that they needed London’s protection if they were to be secure. That no longer was the case. In the bright glow of peace, many in the ministry felt that Great Britain not only could act to resolve its potential colonial problem but also that it must act.

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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