The March of Folly (33 page)

With feelings intense in Parliament over the Wilkes issue, Lord North’s policy was to keep American affairs out of the House of Commons, and for two years, owing to the lull in the colonies, he succeeded. This could have been a period of compromise and possible reunion if a positive effort had been made. The colonies were bent on redress of grievances and autonomy in their own affairs, not on independence. On the contrary, the Stamp Act Congress had asserted that they “most ardently” desired “perpetual continuance” of the ancient tie with Britain. Even the Massachusetts Assembly, the most aggressive in sentiment, had disavowed in 1768 “the most distant thought of independence,” claiming that the colonies “would refuse it if offered to them and would deem it the greatest misfortune to be obliged to accept it.” George III, Lord North, Hillsborough and the Bedfords, however, were not equipped for positive effort or creative government. In the lull, the sails of folly were furled for the moment—until the affair of the
Gaspée
in 1772.

The
Gaspée
was a British customs schooner under a bellicose commander, Lieutenant Dudington, who pursued his task as if he carried a personal warrant from the King to stamp out smuggling in the thousand isles and inlets of Narragansett Bay. Boarding and examining every ship he met, threatening to blow recalcitrant skippers out of the water, he aroused a lust for revenge in the Rhode Islanders that found its moment when his schooner ran aground below Providence. Within hours local seafarers organized eight boatloads of men who attacked the ship, wounded Lieutenant Dudington, put him and his crew ashore and burned the
Gaspée
.

As so often, Britain’s response started out sternly and ended feebly. The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General decided that the attack on the
Gaspée
was an act of war on the King and as such was treasonable, requiring the culprits to be sent to England for trial. First they had to be discovered. A Royal Proclamation offered a £500 reward and the King’s pardon to informants, and an imposing Commission of Inquiry consisting of the Governor of Rhode Island and the chief justices of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts and of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Boston was appointed to indict the suspects. This announcement revived every slumbering suspicion of a conspiracy against liberty. Rhode Island, together with Massachusetts the most intractable of the colonies, shook with cries of “Tyranny!” and “Slavery!” “Ten thousand deaths by the
haltar
and the
ax”
proclaimed the
Newport Mercury
in outraged italics, were preferable “to a miserable life of slavery in chains under a pack of worse than Egyptian tyrants.” No informants came forward; no suspects could be found although every neighbor knew who they were. After several hollow sessions in Newport, the Court of Inquiry in all their wigs and scarlet sheepishly adjourned, never to reconvene. One more chastisement went unexecuted, confirming the perception of Britain as both despotic in intent and ineffectual in execution.

The consequence was important because Rhode Island’s roars of protest caused a decisive step toward unity. Following a model created among the towns of Massachusetts, Virginia’s House of Burgesses invited the colonies to form Committees of Correspondence to consult on joint acts and methods of resistance. Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry served on Virginia’s Committee. This was the beginning of the development toward intercolonial union, which Britain remained confident could never occur and on whose non-occurrence her confidence rested. The Committees excited little attention—except in moments of confrontation, American affairs on the whole did not. The letters of Mrs. Delany, a well-connected lady and wife of an Anglican dean who corresponded actively throughout this period with friends and relatives in social and literary circles, do not notice America at all.

The two legal officers of the home government who were immediately responsible for the
Gaspée
order, Edward Thurlow, the Attorney-General, and Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General, were an unpleasant pair. Unmanageable as a schoolboy, expelled from Cambridge University for insolence and misconduct, surly and assertive in the law, Thurlow had a savage temper and reputedly the foulest mouth in London. He was nevertheless an impressive figure, although according to Charles James Fox his deep voice and solemn aspect proved him dishonest “since no man could be as wise as he looked.” His treatment of defendants in court was often offensive. In policy he was inflexible on the demonstration of British sovereignty over America and, although Lord North was known to hate him, the King eventually rewarded his firm support with appointment as Lord Chancellor and a barony to go with it. Equally coercive as regards America, Wedderburn was a Scot of voracious ambition who would use any means, suck up to or betray any associate, to gain advancement. “There was something about him,” said an acquaintance, “that even treachery could not trust.” Although despised by the King, he too eventually became Lord Chancellor.

Yet it was the Cabinet, in which Thurlow and Wedderburn had no place, that ordered the Court of Inquiry and the summons for trial in England, and it was “the good Lord Dartmouth,” as Hillsborough’s successor, who signed the order. In response to an attack on the state, they acted with every conviction of righteousness, and if it was the proper response from the ruler’s point of view, it was utter folly as practical politics. Given the known outrage at the idea of transporting Americans to trial in England, and the obvious unreality of expecting Rhode Islanders to mark their fellows for that fate, the mischief once more lay “in asserting a right you know you cannot exert.” This became
very openly apparent at Newport, the hub of coastal communication, from where the impression of the mother country as ineffectual quickly spread.

Lord Dartmouth, although a stepbrother of Lord North, with whom he had grown up and shared the Grand Tour, was an earnest friend of America, possibly as a result of his having joined the Methodists, whose missions and preaching in America were a major activity. Amiable and pious and said to be the model of the virtuous Sir Charles Grandison in Samuel Richardson’s novel of that name, Dartmouth was nicknamed the “psalm-singer.” He had served as President of the Board of Trade in the Rockingham ministry, though credited with very little administrative capacity. Lord North brought him in as Secretary of State for the Colonies when Hillsborough, as a result of an intrigue against him by the Bedfords for reasons of place, not policy, was forced to resign. Alone in the Cabinet as pro-American, Dartmouth “wishes sincerely a good understanding with the colonies,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “but does not have strength equal to his wishes” and while wishing “for the best measure is easily prevailed with to join in the worst.” Gradually, as American intransigence defeated his well-meant paternalism, he was to turn against conciliation in favor of repression.

At this point tea becomes the catalyst. The financial troubles and notorious abuses of the East India Company and its complex financial connections with the Crown had for years been a problem almost as intractable as Wilkes and are relevant here only because they precipitated the period of no return in the British-American quarrel. To evade the tea duty, Americans had been smuggling Dutch tea, reducing the sale of the Company’s tea by almost two-thirds. To rescue the Company, whose solvency was essential to London for an amount of £400,000 a year, Lord North devised a scheme by which the surplus tea piling up in Company warehouses could be sold directly to America, skipping England and the English customs duty. If the duty in America was reduced to 3d. a pound, the tea could be sold at 10s. instead of 20s. a pound. Considering the Americans’ known extraordinary fondness for tea, the lowered price was expected to overcome their patriotic resistance to paying duty. A million Americans reportedly drank tea twice a day, and according to one report from Philadelphia “the women are such slaves to it that they would rather go without their dinner than without a dish of tea.” Since the collapse of Non-Importation, restored trade, apart from tea, had mollified both sides and many people thought past troubles were now a bygone issue.
The Tea Act of May 1773 accordingly passed by Parliament with no expectation of another American outburst.

That the British were invincibly uninformed—and stayed uninformed—about the people they insisted on ruling was a major problem of the imperial-colonial relationship. Only some fifteen years had elapsed, Colonel Barré told Josiah Quincy, agent of Massachusetts, since two-thirds of the people of Great Britain were of the opinion that Americans were Negroes. Americans in London like Arthur Lee of Virginia, who had been partly educated in England and lived there for ten years prior to hostilities, and Henry Laurens, a wealthy merchant-planter of Charleston and future President of the Continental Congress, and such other South Carolina planters as Ralph Izard and Charles Pinckney associated mostly with merchants and men of the City. Although friendly with Burke, Shelburne and other partisans, they had no entrée into aristocratic society, which in turn knew nothing of them.

Pamphlets and petitions, Dickinson’s
Letters
, Jefferson’s
Summary View of the Rights of British America
and many other polemics on issues and sentiments of the colonies were published in London, but the peers and country squires hardly read them. Special agents like Josiah Quincy were more often than not refused hearings in the Commons on one technical ground or another. “In
all
companies I have endeavored to give a true state of the affairs of the Continent and of the genuine sentiments of its inhabitants,” Quincy wrote home, but he added no assurance of a successful effort. Fixed in the preconception of “our inherent pre-eminence,” in Hillsborough’s phrase, Englishmen held to the view of Americans as uncouth obstreperous trouble-makers, regardless of the example in their midst, among others, of Benjamin Franklin, as variously talented and politically sophisticated as anyone in Europe, and thoroughly dedicated to the goal of reconciliation.

The attitude of America’s friends was also wide of the mark. Rockingham thought of Britain as the parent and the colonies as “the children [who] ought to be dutiful.” Chatham shared this view, although if either had visited America, attended the colonial assemblies, experienced the mood of the people, he might have come away with some remedial knowledge. It is an astonishing fact that, apart from Army and Navy officers, no minister of a British government from 1763 to 1775, much less before or after, ever visited the trans-Atlantic provinces upon which they felt the empire depended.

They were more determined to maintain a firm hold because they believed that the Americans were bent on rebellion and their independence would mean England’s ruin. Chatham’s insistence on conciliation
was based on his fear that if America were driven to resistance by force and the empire were lost, France or Spain would acquire it and “if this happens, England is no more.” Losing that tremendous stake, she would be cut off from development as a world power. Murkily, the King had something of this in mind when he wrote, “We must get the Colonies in order before we engage our neighbors.”

In another sense, too, Chatham felt, as many did, that England’s fate was tied to the colonies, “for if liberty be not countenanced in America, it will sicken, fade and die in this country.” That was the argument of liberty. The argument of power held that if untaxed, the colonies would attract many English skilled workmen and manufacturers to settle there, would prosper and eventually dominate, leaving old England “A poor deserted deplorable Kingdom.” Letters to the press worried this theme, some predicting that America would soon surpass in population the mother country “and then how are we to rule them?” or even become the seat of empire after two centuries. If Americans outnumbered Englishmen, stated the
St. James Chronicle
on Christmas Eve 1772, then only natural interest and friendship in some form of commonwealth could keep America attached to Britain, so that united they might “defy the world in arms.”

The Tea Act proved a startling disappointment. Instead of happily acquiescing in cheap tea, Americans exploded in wrath not so much from popular feeling as from agitation inspired by the merchants, who saw themselves eliminated as wholesalers and their trade ruined through underselling by the East India Company. Ship owners and builders, captains and crews, whose livelihood was in smuggling, also felt threatened. Political agitators, delighted to have a cause again, accommodated them. They raised the horrid cry of “Monopoly” about to grip America by a company notorious for its “black, sordid and Cruel Avarice.” If established in tea, it would soon extend to spices, silks, chinaware and other commodities. Once India tea was accepted in America, the 3 d. duty would “enter the bulwark of our sacred liberties” and would accomplish Parliament’s purpose of taxation for revenue; nor would its authors desist “till they have made a conquest of the whole.”

Peace-makers in the colonies hoped to arrange return of the tea ships before any cargo was unloaded and duty paid. This was accomplished in ports other than Boston by raising the threat of mobs and frightening the Company’s consignees into resigning as purveyors to the retail grocers. In Boston, two of the consignees were sons of Governor Hutchinson, who had come to believe in a firm stand against the agitators. They stood ready to take delivery. The first tea ship
docked at a Boston wharf on 1 December 1773, followed by two more. Because unloaded cargoes after a stated period were liable to seizure by customs commissioners for nonpayment of duty, the patriots suspected the commissioners would sell the confiscated cargo under the counter for revenue. To forestall them and perhaps also to intimidate any hopeful purchasers, they boarded the ships during the night of 16 December and in the enterprise to be known forever after as the Boston Tea Party, slashed open the tea chests and dumped the contents into the water.