The March of Folly (29 page)

How shall we assess the Stamp Act and its repeal? Although framed in the face of information assuring trouble, the policy behind the Act was not yet classic folly in the sense of mindless persistence in conduct clearly counter-productive. It was natural to want revenue from the colonies and natural to try to obtain it. Repeal likewise fell short of folly because it lacked a clearly available alternative. Enforcement was impossible; repeal unavoidable. It was inauspicious because Americans, no matter how joyful, could hardly escape the conclusion that parliamentary supremacy was vulnerable to riot, agitation and boycott. Yet the great majority at this time, apart from the few activists, had never contemplated rebellion or separation, and if no further British provocation had followed, combat might never have come to Lexington Common.

After a mistake so absolute as to require repeal, British policy-makers might well have stopped to reconsider the relationship with the colonies, and ask themselves what course they might follow to induce a beneficial allegiance on the one hand and ensure a secure sovereignty on the other. Many Englishmen outside government did consider this problem, and Pitt and Shelburne, who were shortly to come to power, entered office intending to calm the suspicions and restore the equanimity of the colonies. Fate, as we shall see, interfered.

Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation, had the King over their heads and were at odds with one another. It did not occur to them that it might be wise to avoid provocative measures for long enough to reassure the colonies of Britain’s respect for their rights while leaving their agitators no excuse. The riotous reaction to the Stamp Act only confirmed the British in their belief that the colonies, led by “wicked and designing men” (as stated in a House of Lords resolution), were bent on rebellion. Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

A new provocation emerged in the annual Quartering Act of 1766 for the billeting, provisioning and discipline of British forces. It carried a clause requiring colonial assemblies to provide barracks and supplies such as candles, fuel, vinegar, beer and salt for the regulars. Little thought would have been needed for Parliament to recognize that this would be resented as another form of internal taxation, as it immediately was in New York, where the troops were mainly stationed. Colonists saw themselves soon being required to pay all the costs of the Army in America at the “dictate” of Parliament. The New York Assembly refused to appropriate the required funds, causing wrath in Britain at such new evidence of disobedience and ingratitude. “If we
once lose the superintendency of the colonys, this nation is undone,” declared Charles Townshend to thunderous applause in the House. Parliament responded with the New York Suspending Act rendering acts of the Assembly null and void until it voted the funds. Mother country and colonies were off again in quarrel.

A political upheaval took place at this time when the King, having found cause to quarrel with Rockingham, obeyed the injunctions of Providence “to dismiss my ministry.” Immensely complicated negotiations brought in Pitt at the head of an ill-assorted ministry while the Rockinghams, insulted, moved into opposition. The new government contained more discordant opinions and characters than usual because Pitt, in a position to bargain hard for his terms and determined to command unfettered, deliberately put together a mixed group that he could dominate unbeholden to any “connexion.” The financial cost was high because holdovers had to be given handsome pensions to persuade them to make way for successors.

On the one hand, Shelburne was brought in as Secretary of State with responsibility for the colonies, Grafton and Conway were retained and Lord Camden, another of the Pitt circle, was named Lord Chancellor. On the other hand, the King’s agent, Lord Northington, was named Lord President of the Council, a place was found for Lord Bute’s brother, the unpredictable Charles Townshend became Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Earl of Hillsborough, as unfriendly to the colonies as Shelburne was the opposite, was added as President of the Board of Trade. Hillsborough was a compound of “conceit, wrong-headedness, obstinacy and passion,” according to Benjamin Franklin, whom he had treated rudely. The private disconnections of these people, more apparent then than now, inspired Burke’s elaborate sarcasm about “a piece of diversified mosaic; a tesselated pavement … here a piece of black stone, there a piece of white.…” Burke was, of course, a disgruntled Rockingham follower.

What opened the way to folly was not the mosaic but Pitt’s collapse. With catastrophic effect on his popular standing, he accepted a peerage and left the House of Commons to enter the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham. His decision was owed in part to a desire to avoid, because of his inferior health, the First Minister’s extra task of leadership of the House of Commons. The public reacted as if Jesus Christ had joined the money-changers in the temple. Celebrations of the hero’s return to office were canceled, bunting taken down from the Guildhall and pamphlets and lampoons gave themselves up to abuse. The Great Commoner was seen as having abandoned the
people, who felt him to be their representative; as having sold himself to the court for a coronet.

In the Lords, with a smaller, less responsive audience, the new Earl had diminished effect as a speaker and lost his customary base in the larger house. His gout attacked in force; he grew peevish and sullen; his treatment of colleagues became rude and tyrannical. “Such language as Lord Chatham’s,” said General Conway, “had never been heard west of Constantinople.” In chronic pain, hurt by public condemnation and a sense of lost greatness, frustrated by the negative turn of events in America, he sank into depression, attended no Cabinet meetings, remained inaccessible, though not beyond communicating in an unbridled letter his wrath at “the spirit of infatuation that has taken possession of New York.… Their spirit of disobedience will justly create a great ferment here.… The late Stamp Act has frightened those irritable and umbrageous people quite out of their senses.”

Without its master, the tesselated Government fell into disorder. “Continuous cabals, factions and intrigues among the ins and outs,” reported Benjamin Franklin, “keep everything in confusion.” The Duke of Grafton, who had unhappily accepted the Treasury, for which he knew himself unfit, in order to leave Pitt free of administrative office, now at age 32 had to take over as acting chief. Feeling more than ever at a loss in that role, he would come to London “but once a week or once a fortnight to sign papers at the Treasury, and as seldom to see the King.” He postponed a Cabinet Council to attend the races at Newmarket and a second time because of entertaining a large house party at his estate. The vessel of government was left virtually unsteered. Lord Shelburne, who had begun to work through the colonial agents to restore colonial goodwill, fell out with his colleagues. Lord Camden, who apart from the law was something of a dilettante in politics, failed to speak out. There was no one able to restrain the most brilliant, most irresponsible member of the Cabinet, Charles Townshend.

“The delight and ornament of the Commons and the charm of every private society,” according to Burke, Townshend could make a stunning speech even when inebriated and had the intelligence and capacity that might have made him, according to Horace Walpole, “the greatest man of this age,” if his faults had only been moderate. But they were not. He was arrogant, flippant, unscrupulous and unreliable, given to reversing himself by 180 degrees if expedience beckoned. “Will Charles Townshend do less harm in the War Office or in the Treasury?” the Duke of Newcastle once asked when considering him for office.
Wanted for his abilities, he had filled various offices at the Board of Trade, the Admiralty and the War Office, interspersed with resignations and refusals to serve. “He studied nothing with accuracy or with attention,” wrote Walpole, “had parts that embraced all knowledge with such quickness that he seemed to create knowledge instead of searching for it” and with such abundant wit “that in him it seemed loss of time to think.” The dazzle of these talents concealed a meagerness of substance, as David Hume, for one, suggested in the phrase “He passes for the cleverest fellow in England.”

The spoiling fault was Townshend’s “immoderate passion for fame,” which may have had something to do with being a younger son and possibly with having notoriously scandalous parents who lived apart. The dissolute and eccentric father, 3rd Viscount Townshend, was in Walpole’s words to a friend, “not the least mad of your countrymen.” A further disability of the son was his being subject to falling fits, now thought to have been epilepsy, though described by Walpole rather casually: “he drops down in a fit, has a resurrection, thunders in the Capitol.…” Emulating Pitt without Pitt’s sense of direction, Townshend was determined “to have
no
party, to follow
no
leader, to be governed absolutely by my own judgment.” Judgment was unfortunately his weakest faculty.

While at the Board of Trade, where his several terms of service caused him to be regarded as the most knowledgeable on American affairs, he had been the first in 1763 to propose raising revenue from the colonies to pay for their defense and also to pay fixed salaries to colonial officials and judges, rendering them “no longer dependent upon the pleasure of any Assembly.” This was the bugbear of the colonies, seen as an unmistakable step toward suppression of their rights.

Townshend now revived both ideas, carelessly, almost without planning. When he introduced his budget in January 1767 calling for a continuance of the land tax at 4s., it raised great rumbles of discontent among the country members. Ever eager to be popular, he said the tax could go back to 3s. if the Government did not have to spend over £ 400,000 on the administration of the colonies. At this, Grenville, unmoved by the fate of his Stamp Tax, promptly suggested that the budget could be cut if the colonies were assessed the greater part of the cost of their defense and administration. As if to say “No problem,” Townshend, to the astonishment of his ministerial colleagues, jauntily “pledged himself to find a revenue in America sufficient for the purposes that were required.” He assured the House he could do it “without offense” to the Americans, meaning by external taxes,
while at the same time saying that the distinction between external and internal was “ridiculous in everybody’s opinion except the Americans’.” By this time the Americans themselves had rejected the distinction at the Stamp Act Congress and in public discourse, but American opinion was not a factor on which Townshend bothered to inform himself.

Given the prospect of lightening their own taxes, the House blithely accepted Townshend’s assurance, the more willingly because they had been impressed by Benjamin Franklin’s curiously complacent testimony during the Stamp Act hearings that the colonies would not object to external taxes even for revenue. Prodded by the discarded Rockinghams and the Bedfords on the right,
^*
who wished to embarrass the Government, the country members carried a motion to reduce the land tax from 4s. to 3s. in the pound, thus depriving the Government of about £500,000 a year and facing the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the necessity of making good on his pledge.

Without consulting his Cabinet colleagues or giving them any notice of his intention, Townshend proposed a series of customs duties on imports into America of glass, paint, lead, paper and all grades of tea for the stated purpose not of controlling trade but of raising revenue. The expected return according to his own calculations was £20,000 from the tea duty and a little less than £20,000 from the rest, altogether £40,000, amounting to a tenth of the total cost of governing the colonies and less than a tenth of the loss from the reduced land tax. For this pittance, which would barely reduce and would very likely add to the national deficit by costing more to collect than it would bring in, Townshend was ready to wreck what repeal of the Stamp Act had been intended to gain. As with most follies, personal self-interest paralyzed concern for the greater interest of the state. In Chatham’s absence, Townshend saw a way open to make himself First Minister and, toward that end, a way to enhance his stature in the House of Commons, fame’s “chosen temple,” as Burke called it.

His proposal seems to have dumbfounded his colleagues in the literal sense of striking them dumb. Although raising revenues from the colonies, Grafton admitted, was “contrary to the known decision of every member of the Cabinet,” and the Chancellor’s unilateral action “was such as no Cabinet will, I am confident, ever submit to,” the
Cabinet in fact submitted. When Townshend threatened to resign unless allowed to carry out his pledge, the Cabinet, in the belief that his departure would bring down the Government, meekly acquiesced. As it has ever been, staying in office was the primary thought.

Parliament in its prevailing frame of mind was happy to teach the Americans another lesson, no matter that the last one had boomeranged. In May 1767 the Revenue Act embodying the Townshend Duties passed both Houses easily without a division, that is, without need to count votes. As if deliberately trying to be provocative, Townshend wakened America’s phobia in the preamble to the Act, which announced that the proceeds were to be used for raising revenue to help meet the cost of the colonies’ defense and “for defraying the cost of the administration of justice and support of the civil list.” Without this statement, his duties might well have raised no storm. Folly had now set sail.

How could it have happened? Townshend himself was a reckless self-aggrandizer; the real responsibility lay with Government and Parliament. The Duke of Grafton’s excuse in his memoirs that only Chatham had the authority to dismiss Townshend and that “nothing less could have stopped the measure” is frail. A united Cabinet with any sense of the responsibility of government could simply have accepted the threatened resignation and taken its chances of survival. The Parliament of England, Europe’s oldest representative assembly in national experience, could have given thought to possible consequences before rushing into enactment. Even the Rockinghams raised no voice to halt the measure. “The friends of America are too few,” wrote Charles Garth, agent for South Carolina, “to have any share in a struggle with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.” Irate articles in the press and indignant paipphlets were demanding that the ingrate colonies be made to recognize British sovereignty. Rather than conciliate the Americans, Government and Parliament were in a mood for a rap on the knuckles. The Townshend Duties fitted right in.