The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (47 page)

After the troops left, popular leaders shifted their attention to getting early trials. Here they encountered the judges of the superior court who, recognizing that a fair trial would not be obtained in the mood of the town, delayed judicial action until the autumn. By that time although popular fevers had subsided they remained capable of surging upward again. With public peace apparently secured, the trials began.

John Adams, full of honest conviction that every Englishman deserved a fair trial, not to mention self-righteous satisfaction at taking on an unpopular case, defended Preston. The court heard many witnesses who gave a bewildering variety of testimony -- and found Captain Preston innocent. The soldiers also escaped punishment, but two who were found guilty of manslaughter and pleaded benefit of clergy were branded and released.
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Although the remaining months of 1770 offered up no further violence in Boston, the angers and the hatreds that had come to the town since 1765 did not disappear. Similar feelings elsewhere in America took fresh life from the killings in Boston. The Massacre -- it was called that almost immediately -- compelled attention all over again to the question of what British power was doing in America. The legitimacy of that power had been questioned since 1765; now apparently it had given one sort of answer to questioners of its purposes.

The constitutional issues dividing Britain and her American colonies had been clear since 1765. A number of Americans had attempted to clarify them for their countrymen and for the king and Parliament.

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Ibid.,
312-14.

They had succeeded in America and failed in Britain. Still, they and most of their countrymen hoped for a resolution within the old constitutional order. The crisis set up by the Townshend acts and the conversion of a major city into a garrison town had made the constitutional questions all the more urgent. The gravest implications of the British case had been clear for some time; as the House of Representatives of Massachusetts pointed out the next year -- "A Power without a Check is subversive of all Freedom." 66

Unchecked power destroyed freedom and lives in Boston. The bitterness felt by the victims understandably made calm review of the political theory underlying Anglo-American relationships hard to sustain. In the next few years, however, the Americans would continue to think about the British constitution. They inevitably also thought much about themselves. A few years before, William Pitt, a man much admired in the colonies, had reminded Parliament that the Americans were "the sons, not the bastards of England." Experience made many Americans wonder at Pitt's formulation. Recent history culminating in the Massacre was leading them to the discovery that perhaps they were the bastards of England -- and the legitimate children of America.

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BF Papers
, XVIII, 149.

On the first day of January 1771 Samuel Cooper, the minister of the Brattle Square Church in Boston, wrote his friend Benjamin Franklin that "There seems now to be a Pause in Politics". Cooper offered this assessment not primarily because the agitation about the Massacre and the trials of Preston and the soldiers appeared over but because, as he explained, "The Agreement of the Merchants is broken", a reference to the decision of the Boston merchants in the preceding October to give up nonimportation.
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The merchants had acted after they learned that Parliament had approved a bill repealing all the Townshend duties except the one on tea. A new ministry headed by Lord North had decided on this action. North's government had taken over from Grafton's early in 1770 and soon after had decided to extricate itself from colonial disputes. North possessed a peaceful temperament, a spirit that would be harshly bruised in the next twelve years. Even when aroused, North had little taste for conflict; he wanted only to serve his king. Thus he acted to remove the causes of strife with a sense of genuine relief. He also led Parliament to modify the Currency Act which had troubled New York. That colony now would be allowed to issue bills of credit which might be used to pay public -- though not private -- debts. Altogether it was an enlightened measure, further evidence that a reassuring colonial policy might be in the offing.
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In reality, for most of the next three years the government paid little attention to the colonies. It had expected nonimportation to collapse and certainly had not intended to signal that it approved resistance to efforts to tax the colonies. Like the ministries before it, North's had no doubts about Parliament's right to do just about anything it wanted to do in America. North was content to let colonial affairs drift, as long as they drifted quietly.

Drift would not have displeased most Americans had they been convinced that Parliament had given up its old claims to powers to drive them where it desired. Most agreed with Samuel Cooper that the new ministry had the opportunity of adopting mild measures without looking weak, and should it "Place us on the old Ground on which we stood before the Stamp Act, there is no Danger of our rising in our Demands." But everyone knew that the Declaratory Act remained on the books -and so did the tax on tea.
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Despite the lingering sense of menace that these statutes imparted, the atmosphere in 1771 was different largely because no great issue had replaced the Townshend duties. Not that, below the surface of politics, issues did not exist which twisted men's desires for calm. In North Carolina and Georgia, for example, the assemblies and the governors struggled with one another, a common circumstance but one which produced more than the expected rancor because mutual trust had almost vanished in the previous five years.
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In South Carolina the governor and assembly fought over an issue closely related to the conflicts of the recent crises. The dispute had begun near the end of 1769 when the assembly appropriated £ 1500 "for the support of the just and constitutional rights and liberties of the people of Great Britain and America." This sum was to be sent to the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, an English group organized to press the claims of John Wilkes to a seat in Parliament. Because of procedures which had grown up since the 1740s, the governor, William Bull, was unable to stop it. Bull did inform his English superiors who, shocked, soon instructed him that he was not to consent to money bills that did not designate the money for specific purposes. The English officials clearly aimed to get the governor of South Carolina on a footing

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enjoyed by governors in other colonies. Bull tried to comply with these instructions but the way had become slippery for governors of South Carolina. The best he could do was to withhold his approval of actions taken by the assembly. The result was deadlock -- no annual tax bill passed into law after 1769, and no legislation of any kind after February 1771.
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Far to the north, another sort of conflict persisted, though by the early 1770s it had lost some of its corrosiveness. It would not disappear entirely, however, until Americans declared their independence, because it concerned religious freedom -- in particular the freedom of Protestant sects from Anglican domination. In reality, there probably was little possibility that the Church of England would ever control religious life in the colonies. The dispositions of most Americans, those of English stock as well as the new immigrants, tended toward either evangelicalism or an unstructured arminianism or liberalism. Bishops and hierarchies had no appeal for the faithful, and establishments of any persuasion were attracting increasing criticism.
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Yet bishops, who did not exist in America, furnished the center of the religious controversy. Because at a distance, bishops seemed especially malignant. Their remoteness freed the fancies of dissenters who long before the Revolution professed to dread their coming and warned against attempts by the Anglican clergy -- especially the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel whose commission ostensibly was to spread the light to the Indians -- to insinuate themselves into the centers of education and religion in America.

One of the more lurid revelations of Anglican intentions was made in New York just before the French and Indian War. The defender of liberty in this case was William Livingston, a recent graduate of Yale and a man of no very strong religious beliefs. In 1753 as King's College (later Columbia) took shape, Livingston smelled a plot by Anglicans in New York to make the college their own. Livingston did not want the college under the control of any church or sect. Anglicans outnumbered all other groups on its board, and Anglicans agitated for a royal charter. To prevent them from seizing control, Livingston resorted to the press in 1753 and began to issue
The Independent Reflector
, a monthly magazine modeled on the
Independent Whig
of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Livingston chose his model well -- the anticlericalism of the
Independent Whig
had a wicked bite to it, a characteristic

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of particular utility in the struggle with the Anglicans of New York City. In the pages of the
Independent Reflector
two tactics emerged. The first was an appeal to the most prominent dissenting groups in the colony, among them Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Dutch Reformed. The second was to plead the larger implication of what at first sight appeared to be a provincial struggle over a pathetic little colonial college. That implication was political: religious and civic freedom could not really be separated, and therefore the apparently open Anglican intention to control only the college actually concealed a larger design to master church and state.
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The Anglicans eventually won the fight for King's, won at least the presidency, which one of their own, Dr. Samuel Johnson, held until 1763. But Livingston won too, for the struggle in the press alerted a large dissenting constituency in New York and undoubtedly helped ready it for the conflicts leading to independence. And during the 1760s, when rumors spread that an Anglican bishop was on the way to America, dissenting ministers in New York joined colleagues to the north in organizing opposition.

The rumors found their most avid audience in New England. There -especially in Boston and Cambridge -- rumors could be attached to substance. The Reverend East Apthorp, the Anglican pastor in Cambridge, was surely a substantial figure when he arrived with Governor Francis Bernard in 1760. Apthorp, who had not reached his thirtieth birthday, soon married Elizabeth Hutchinson, daughter of Judge Eliakim Hutchinson, a wealthy merchant and a warden and vestryman of King's Chapel. Marrying into the Hutchinsons did not exhaust Apthorp's bright ideas, and shortly after his arrival he began announcing them in the local newspapers. For example, he proposed that Harvard introduce Anglican services into its commencement. Apthorp made this suggestion in such innocence as to make it appear as arrogance. His proposal that the Harvard Board of Overseers add Anglicans to its number revealed either ignorance of the religious realities in New England or a sublime taste for the fantastic. In any case the response was predictable, a series of savage attacks in the newspapers on Apthorp and all his schemes.
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