The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (27 page)

These last two resolutions were offered by Grenville and accepted by the ministry. Their passage must have pleased him, though he could have been under no illusions that the House was disposed to take a hard line against the colonies. Still, on February 7, he offered a resolution calling for an address to the king informing him that the Commons would back him in enforcing the Stamp Act. Although this proposal went down to defeat 274 to 134, the debate was rough, with Grenville accusing the ministry of sacrificing the sovereignty of Britain to placate the colonies. Pitt hit the resolution hard, demonstrating, according to Horace Walpole, "the absurdity of enforcing an Act which in a very few days was likely to be repealed."
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The absurdity might produce the spilling of blood, according to Pitt, who argued that orders countermanding the instruction to enforce the Act might be delayed -- should enforcement and then repeal be approved. In the interval who knew what disasters this "absurdity" might produce?

Having beaten Grenville again, and having clearly established that Commons believed in its right to tax the colonies, the ministry now proceeded to demonstrate the inexpediency of levying this particular tax. The petitions presented by the merchants in January had prepared the way for a motion for repeal. There was a bad moment when the king seemed to back away from repeal, but Rockingham went to him and demanded his support. The king gave it -- grudgingly (and in the end about fifty of his "Friends" who sensed that his heart was not with the ministry voted against repeal). What remained for the ministry to do was to renew -- or establish -- in the minds of members the impression that economic ruin faced the nation if the statute remained on the books. This task appeared all the more difficult as the ministry came under especially bitter attack in the newspapers, attacks designed more to influence Parliament than the public.
Anti-Sejanus, the cover of James

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Scot, chaplain to the Earl of Sandwich, asked the most embarrassing question -- how did the ministry ever expect to collect taxes in America if it gave way on the stamp tax?
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The merchants paraded before Commons by the Rockinghams did not exactly answer this question. But these sad-eyed fellows made an impression as they appeared before the committee of the whole, dripping with pathos and full of the descriptions of present horrors, to be followed by worse if repeal failed. And to reassure the House that the Americans did not object to all taxes, and were really loyal subjects, the ministry called on the redoubtable Benjamin Franklin. Members of the ministry prepared themselves and Franklin for this examination, but, since they could not control the questioning, Grenville's supporters asked slightly more than half the questions. Franklin performed brilliantly, meeting the hostility of the Grenville group with patience and tact, and cultivating the impression that the Americans were nothing but loyal subjects much put upon by a tax destructive to their interests. He also used the questions to feed the fears of Parliament that Grenville's policies had begun a movement for economic independence in America. Repeal, however, he assured the House, would start the Americans consuming English manufactures once more. To the question "What used to be the pride of Americans?" he answered: "To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great-Britain." And to the question that followed -- "What is now their pride?" -- the reply was "To wear their old cloaths over again, till they can make new ones."
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Franklin's most masterful comments came in answer to a question similar to the one posed by Anti-Sejanus -- why should anyone expect them to pay taxes again if they succeed in escaping this one? In answer, Franklin made a distinction between internal and external taxes. The colonies, he told the House, objected only to internal taxes; they would willingly pay duties on trade to Britain in return for the protection the Royal Navy provided on the high seas. Franklin knew that some in England denied that there was any difference between the two sorts of taxes and reminded the House of it with a series of shrewd remarks to the effect that "At present they do not reason so, but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments."

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The ministry gave the House a week to consider this testimony along with the massive evidence from the merchants, and on February 21, Conway introduced the resolution to repeal the Stamp Act. This was the point to pull together the case against the Act. Conway did the job effectively, taking care to reaffirm once more that though the ministry believed in Parliament's right to tax the colonies, enforcement would produce civil war to the disadvantage of trade and to the advantage of such vulturous nations as France and Spain. The hard core around Grenville remained unconvinced and said so. Grenville himself, trying one last desperate measure, interrupted Conway to say that repeal of the Act was premature since reports that morning had arrived which indicated that the southern colonies were complying with the Act. A listener to Grenville styled this attempt as "dilatory finesse"; in less polite language it was pure fabrication. Conway in any case was not deflected and neither was repeal, which passed 276 to 168.
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By early March the resolutions which had been approved in February had been embodied in a Declaratory bill and a Repeal bill. After one more attempt by Pitt to remove the phrase "in all cases whatsoever," which described Parliament's claim to bind the colonies, both passed the House on March 4 with resounding majorities.
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The Commons sent the bills to the House of Lords the next day. The Lords too had listened to the addresses from the throne in December and January, and the Lords contained members who, like George Grenville, wished to reply with expressions of indignation at the "rebellion" in the colonies. Debate in the Lords included ferocious denunciations of the Americans and a few defenses of the American position that Parliament lacked the right to tax the colonies.

After these preliminaries were got out of the way, the Declaratory bill was quickly approved; the Repeal bill received its last reading on March 17 and the next day the king gave his assent.

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My penny is as much my own as the King's ten pence is his: if the King may defend his ten pence, why not Selden his penny?

John Selden, member of Parliament during the struggles with Charles I, a learned lawyer whose work was used by the seventeenth-century opposition to the king, was only a minor hero to colonial pamphleteers and intellectuals. His name graced their writings far less often than Milton's, Sidney's, or Locke's. Yet his maxim -- "My penny is as much my own as the King's ten pence . . ." -- was quoted during the crisis over the Stamp Act and for good reason: it captured the importance of property in this crisis.
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On the surface the Americans' preoccupation with their property -more particularly their determination to resist the levy of taxes on it -seems petty, demeaning, poor stuff with which to make a revolution as they were soon to do with the cry "no taxation without representation." Their concern with property, indeed their obsession with it, should not be dismissed easily; they meant what they said, and they felt more than they could express about the importance of property. Their understanding of property, in fact, was profoundly embedded in their thinking not only about the nature and purposes of political society, but also about the character and meaning of liberty itself.

Although the intellectuals -- the planters, lawyers, ministers, and others who wrote about public policy -- generally agreed that political society had its ultimate origins in the divine will, they believed that its purposes were the preservation and regulation of property. It had been formed by agreement or compact among property owners for these purposes.

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This theory had already had a long life in political speculations, though the Americans learned of it from John Locke
Two Treatises of Government
. Locke had used the word "property" in at least two ways, one to mean material possessions, things, land; and another to refer to "lives, liberties, and estates."
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Property in material possessions arose through the mixing of one's labor with things -- cultivating or improving the land, for example. By lives, liberties, and estates as property, Locke seems to have intended that the word "property" represent one's rights -- man's freedom and his equality and his power to execute the law of nature. Like man's material possessions, these rights are separate or distinguishable from himself: man can alienate them, can give them up. But a person's consent is required if his rights are to be alienated, just as it is when he surrenders material possessions. In fact, as Locke described slavery and freedom, slavery existed when consent was not required, when one's person or one's property was subjected to the arbitrary and absolute will of another.

Property in the Lockeian scheme of things conferred political character, or being, on a man. A slave has no political rights because he has no property -- that is, he has not liberty in himself and he has no material possessions. Jonathan Mayhew, the Congregationalist pastor of the West Church in Boston, insisted during the crisis over the Stamp Act that the tax threatened "perpetual bondage and slavery." He defined slavery in terms indebted to the narrower definition of property by Locke: slaves -- he said -- are those "who are obliged to labor and toil only for the benefit of others; or what comes to the same thing, the fruit of whose labor and industry may be
lawfully
taken from them without their consent, and they justly punished if they refuse to surrender it on demand, or apply it to other purposes than those, which their masters, of their mere grace and pleasure, see fit to allow." But Mayhew invoked the broader definition of property -- lives, liberties, and estates -- in explaining that freedom entailed "a natural right to
our own,
" a premise he offered as the "general sense" of the colonies.
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Mayhew might well have based these statements on political practice in the colonies, for the Americans were Lockeians by experience as well as by persuasion or general opinion. In societies where families for the most part had not been able to entrench themselves on the basis of ancestry or lineage -- society was much too mobile for that -- wealth

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