Penguin History of the United States of America (26 page)

Of them all the most effective was Samuel Adams (1722–1803). He has been called the last of the Puritans. He might just as well be called the first of the politicians, or even the first democrat. He must be given more than a cursory comment.

He had a genuine vocation for politics, which was just as well, since he was incompetent at everything else. His father, a successful man of business, having seen his son reject both the ministry and the law as professions, lent him £1,000 to make a start in trade. Sam lent half of it to a friend, and was never repaid; the rest somehow vanished. On his parents’ death he inherited cash, real estate and a thriving brewery: ten years later he was again penniless. Elected tax-collector for Boston, he turned what was usually a lucrative post into a liability, ending up some £8,000 down in his account and more than suspected of being legally, if not morally, an embezzler. It was only by political manipulation that he kept himself out of jail. The causes of this string of failures are easy to find. Adams neglected business for politics; he was helplessly improvident and muddle-headed where money was concerned; above all, he was far too fond of making friends, far too unwilling to make himself unpleasant, either in exacting what was due to him or what was due to Boston, to be a successful tradesman, let alone an effective tax-gatherer. His second cousin John Adams reinforces the impression of excessive amiability by describing Sam as a man ‘of refined policy, steadfast integrity, exquisite humanity, genteel erudition, obliging, engaging manners’. No doubt there is exaggeration here: John Adams saw men, for good or ill, as he wanted them to be, and Sam was his ally as well as his cousin; but the description fits very well with what else we know of the elder Adams.

He was in everything extremely old-fashioned. He was a strict Calvinist in religion and made a cult of the founders of New England; he never had much time for the rising generation and was conservative even in dress (he wore a three-cornered hat to his dying day). In public life he modelled himself on the more disagreeably virtuous Romans of Plutarch, such as the elder Cato. In spite of the tax embezzlement, his personal integrity was never called in question: he could rightly say, when in his extreme old age he at last retired from politics, that he had never made a penny from office, and indeed it is usually hard to see what he lived on. In early life he was also conventionally patriotic. There was no better constitution than the British, except the Charter of Massachusetts. He saw it as his mission in life to preserve the good old ways, in fact: until he was over forty it would have seemed fantastically unlikely that one day Thomas Hutchinson would seriously ask whether there was ‘a greater incendiary in the King’s dominion or a man of greater malignity of heart’.

Adams’s views were for a long time much less important than his occupation.
For his talents made him the first of a long line of professional American politicians, or bosses.

He was a fluent and ingenious journalist, who knew, whether as chief contributor to the
Boston Gazette
or clerk to the House of Representatives, exactly how to draft articles, speeches or official papers in such a way as to further his ends. Even more impressive was his command of the other arts of democratic politics. Like many a later enthusiast of the Left, he had been born to his trade: his father, also an active politician, had secured his early admission to the Caucus Club of Boston, which, besides bequeathing its name to a long progeny of political organizations,
¹
was the original ‘smoke-filled room’ where, over tobacco and strong drink, the leaders of the Boston opposition fixed the business, especially the elections to office, that would come before the next town-meeting. It was through the Caucus Club that Sam Adams became, first, clerk of the market, then town scavenger and finally, as we have seen, tax-collector. It was at the club that he learned the arts of getting along with people (for which his pliability gave him a natural aptitude), arts which he could practise further in the taverns, where, his cousin John once remarked, ‘if you set the evening, you will find the house full of people drinking drams, flip, toddy, carousing, swearing, but especially plotting with the landlord to get him, at the next town meeting, an election either for selectman or representative…’. Something of a bigot, Sam Adams was nevertheless prepared to overlook any religious or moral failing in allies, or potential allies, if they voted right. Sam was ready to haunt taverns because, as John said, in taverns ‘bastards, and legislators, are frequently begotten’. It was there that he acquired the reputation of being the friend and spokesman of the meaner sort, for whom he had a genuine respect. He was not a Freemason, liking only those societies in which he was the ruling spirit; but he exploited his musical talents to found a musical society through which he could convert more Bostonians to his school of patriotism. He was not much of an orator or administrator: he left that side of the game to others. But his influence spread through the town by means which every subsequent generation of politicians would have recognized: he was building up a machine.

It was this activity which, perhaps, led him to the misjudgement that was to have so profound an influence on the course of American history. When things began to go wrong, Adams and the other patriots looked about for someone to blame, and, following the lead of James Otis, blamed it all, as we have seen, on the secret machinations of Hutchinson. They suspected Hutchinson of the sort of underground activity they were so good at themselves. It was long before Adams accepted that the chief difficulty was with London, and still longer (not until January 1776) that he accepted that
independence was the only remedy; but years and years previously he and the others had torn Massachusetts apart in their vendetta against the Hutchinsons and Olivers; the feud strengthened the tendency, on both sides, to see everything in the most lurid colours; and several times (above all during the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party crises) events were given a marked turn for the worse, or at least the more violent, by the suspicions and passions of the patriot party, which Adams assiduously and sincerely fostered.

Yet he was, in one sense, no leader. He thought that the job of a politician was to advise the people, to acquiesce in majority decisions, to try to carry them out. In this rather passive notion we can see a reflection of Adams’s own character. We can also see a foreshadowing of one of the chief doctrines of nineteenth-century party politics.

Adams was not the sort of man to initiate trouble, though there was no saying how far he would go if he thought that citizens’ rights were being endangered. A man of such purely local influence was not likely to cause much trouble when times were quiet, trade good and the British not obviously oppressing the Americans, however tiresome he might make himself to the Governor of Massachusetts. Once more it took events initiated in London to arouse America.

In the summer of 1766, despite their success in repealing the Stamp Act, the Rockinghams fell from power, largely because they were pushed by William Pitt. He had first refused to join their administration, and then induced his followers to withdraw from it. The Rockinghams, at odds with everyone else (especially Grenville and the waning power of Bute), could find no other support and were duly superseded by the Great Commoner. He had large ideas of his mission, as formerly. This time he would rescue the King from faction by setting up the ‘able and dignified ministry’ that George desired – a ministry based on solid royal support and his own imperious authority. He would be the patriot minister of a patriot king, in fact, and smash the selfish bonds of faction which entangled all other politicians. This done, he would engineer a grand alliance between England, Prussia and Russia as a counterbalance to the Bourbon powers’ family pact; and he would solve the country’s financial problems by plundering the East India Company as it had plundered Bengal. All that was needed to ensure success was a totally subservient government. By filling the Cabinet with weaklings, satellites and odd-men-out he thought he had secured this
desideratum
.

It was all fantasy. Pitt was too old and ill to carry out the duties of one of the great executive offices: instead he took the sinecure job of Lord Privy Seal and transferred to the House of Lords, as Earl of Chatham, thus abandoning the Commons where he had always found the basis of his power. The shift was more important as a confession of weakness than anything else. Still, it diminished his popularity and authority in both England and America. Next, it turned out that Prussia and Russia could
not be interested in a British alliance, and that it was far more difficult to settle the affairs of the East India Company than Chatham assumed. The financial problem remained very pressing, but Chatham was not well suited to grapple with it – he had always left money matters to Newcastle in his first ministry. Budgets and estimates were not his style: as Horace Walpole remarked unkindly, ‘the multiplication table did not admit of being treated in epic’. By early 1767 the administration was already far into shoal-water.

Chatham ought not to have taken office. Physically broken, he could not do the work. And then he went mad. His associates, from the King down, found it almost impossible to believe or accept, but it was true. After months of desperate struggle he succumbed: in March 1767 he disappeared from society for more than two years, unable to bear human contact or apply his mind to business of any sort.

Yet this shattered man remained prime minister! Nothing more strikingly illustrates the fragility and incompetence of the old order. The government of England was still a personal, not a party matter. The King depended on Chatham to rescue him from the tyranny of such faction leaders as Grenville and Rockingham, who proposed to deal with the alleged undue influence of Bute over the King by wielding such an influence themselves; and given the constitutional and political realities of the mid-eighteenth century, George was wholly justified in propping up Chatham as long as possible, in self-protection. The country might not have been any better governed if the factions had succeeded in their attempts to ‘storm the Closet’ – that is, force themselves on the King. Besides, in the last resort they could not do so, as they always started to quarrel about the spoils. So, until George could find a better shield, Chatham, with his darkened mind, was safe in office. It was a hopeless way to rule an empire.
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Had the ministry been strong enough to replace Prime Ministerial with Cabinet government, its chief’s collapse might not have mattered. Cabinet government is just as viable as Prime Ministerial, and was an art well understood in eighteenth-century England. Unhappily, Chatham’s Cabinet, without Chatham, was second-rate. It had been put together in defiance of party principles and looked like a stretch of crazy paving (to compress one of Burke’s most famous flights of invective). Chatham thus left a gap indeed.

It might have been filled by Lord Shelburne (1737–1805), one of the Secretaries of State, the ablest of the Chathamites; but he was universally disliked and distrusted. So a stormy petrel – Charles Townshend, the ‘splendid shuttlecock’ – Chancellor of the Exchequer – eloquent, brilliant, unstable, untrustworthy – was able, for a few months, to dominate the administration, with disastrous consequences for England and America.

Townshend (1725–67) is a figure to whom it is difficult to be fair, and most historians have not tried. His faults and his talents were equally glaring. Horace Walpole, at various times, hit him off best: ‘His figure was tall and advantageous, his action vehement, his voice loud, his laugh louder. He had art enough to disguise anything but his vanity.’ Walpole noticed that in eloquence, energy and unpredictability Townshend had much in common with Chatham, and explained that, in his great war ministry,

Pitt did not choose to advance a young man to a ministerial office, whose abilities were of the same kind, and so nearly equal to his own. Both had fine natural parts; both were capable of great application: which was the greater master of abuse could not easily be determined: and if there was something more awful and compulsive in Pitt’s oratory, there was more acuteness and more wit in Charles Townshend’s.

Pitt’s distrust of Townshend continued: he did his best to keep him out of his 1766 ministry, and, just before his own collapse, tried to replace him with Lord North. He had every reason. If he himself was an impossible master, Townshend was an impossible subordinate. He was in flat disagreement with Chatham on the East India question and agreed with Grenville about America. As Chatham declined, Townshend successfully sabotaged his policies by his energy, ability and hot-tempered threats to resign. He was no more loyal to his colleagues than he was to their chief. By the late summer of 1767 nobody trusted him any more; his future was highly unpromising; there was nothing for him to do but die, which he duly did, leaving his private affairs in great disorder.

Yet in the act of policy for which alone he is now remembered Townshend acted, though with his usual flamboyance, more as a statesman and less as a showman than in anything else he attempted. He had served a long apprenticeship in American affairs at the Board of Trade, and where colonial questions were concerned, was a champagne version of Grenville. He had always been an exponent of imperial centralization, criticizing the Albany Plan, for example, because it would have developed a devolved federal structure in North America. He was too intelligent to accept the distinction between internal and external taxation which had eased the way to the repeal of the Stamp Act, and, like all other British politicians, upheld the principles of the Declaratory Act. Then, as Chancellor of the Exchequer he was sharply aware of the financial problems that, the Stamp Act and the raid on the East India Company both having failed, were as pressing as ever. It was true, of course, that Chatham was identified in the public mind, both in England and the colonies, as America’s staunchest friend, and that no ministry bearing his name could decently abandon his policy for Grenville’s; but what was that to Townshend? He saw his opportunity, and took it. On 26 January 1767, Grenville, who was now fixated with the idea that America should be taxed, introduced a motion to that end in the House
of Commons. The motion was defeated, but Townshend, replying for the government, accepted the principle involved by announcing ‘that he knew the mode by which a revenue might be drawn from America
without offence’
. Shelburne rightly commented that such a speech was not the way to make anything go down well in North America; but worse was to come. A month later the opposition carried a motion to reduce the land-tax by a shilling in the pound: ‘The joy in the House of Commons was very great,’ Grenville recorded, ‘all the country gentlemen coming round Mr Grenville, shaking him by the hand, and testifying the greatest satisfaction.’ Now the fat was in the fire: for it was reckoned that the government needed more than £400,000 a year to pay for overseas military establishments in North America alone.