Conceived in Liberty (158 page)

The merchants also reacted to the Sugar Act and the enforcement of mercantilist restrictions, by trying to encourage self-sufficiency in manufacturing in the colonies. This reaction at first was meant not as pressure on Britain to repeal the Sugar Act, but simply as a means of reducing dependence on a foreign trade that was now crippled. Wealthy merchants of New York and Boston formed associations and advanced capital for spinning factories and whiskey distilleries to replace rum, and planned to increase wool manufacture. Concerted movements arose in Boston, New York, New Haven, and Elizabeth to abstain from luxury imports and substitute American products. In Boston, an association formed by some councillors, representatives, and others, pledged a boycott of British manufactures and of the consumption of lamb, in order to help domestic woolens. Leading liberals in New York formed in late 1764 a Society for the Promotion of Arts, Agriculture, and Economy of New York City to promote these aims. Included among the founders was the eminent radical triumvirate of William Livingston, William Smith, Jr., and John Morin Scott, as well as Philip Livingston, Frederick Philipse, and James Duane. All these popular actions tended to unite the people against British legislation. The upshot of the trade restrictions, aided by the check on inflation imposed by the British Currency Act of 1764 in areas south of New England, was a severe business depression in the colonies. Evidences of severe depression appeared by the spring of 1764 in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Boston, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, Maryland, and Virginia. In Boston, the bankruptcy of Nathaniel Wheelwright, one of New England’s leading merchants, in January 1765 was a severe blow to business confidence. The Virginia planters, heavily indebted to English merchants, were in particularly bad straits, with the price of tobacco declining sharply.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, there were sporadic schemes to impose Anglican bishops upon the American colonies. The schemes had been bitterly resented by all the non-Anglicans in America, and even opposed by most of the Anglicans themselves, who were generally low church and happy to be governing themselves free of English control. The schemes had died down during the war with France, but even then Bishop Thomas Secker, who had assumed the post of archbishop of Canterbury in 1758, quietly laid plans to revive the scheme as soon as the war was over. His installment was the occasion for the Reverend Samuel Johnson of New York, a long-time advocate of an American episcopate, to join with a group of Anglican ministers in New York and New Jersey to petition for this innovation. Secker replied with the assurance that he had long had at heart the idea of American bishops. He added that the matter must remain in abeyance, but that the powerful Lord Halifax, president of the Board of Trade, was enthusiastic over the scheme.

As soon as the war was over, Secker launched his campaign. The Grand Design for imperial assumption of power over the colonies was well under way, Secker informed Johnson, and the time was therefore right for pushing the project for American bishops. The imperialistic Duke of Bedford was, not surprisingly, quite willing, but Secker continued in secrecy until plans could fructify.

It was in an atmosphere of fear and rumor engendered by these machinations that agitation against an American bishopric resumed in the colonies. The controversy burst to the fore in early 1763 when the great libertarian divine of Massachusetts, Jonathan Mayhew, was provoked by an Anglican
minister’s spirited defense of the Anglican Society for Preservation of the Gospel. The Reverend Mr. Mayhew’s famous reply “Observations on the Charter...” strongly attacked the SPG’s long-standing and dangerous agitation for an American episcopate. Against this scheme Mayhew thundered: “When we consider her [Church of England] enormous hierarchy ascending by various gradations from the dust to the skies,” and the threat “that all of us [will] be taxed for the support of
bishops
and their
underlings,”
can we avoid crying out:

Will they never let us rest in peace?... Is it not enough, that they persecuted us out of the old world? Will they pursue us into the new to convert us here?—c
ompassing sea and land to make us proselytes...
what other new world remains as a sanctuary for us from their oppressions, in case if we need?... Where is the Columbus to... pilot us to it, before we are... deluged in a flood of episcopacy?

Mayhew’s stirring “Observations” performed the function of intensifying and polarizing the conflict, stirring interest and activity among his supporters and drawing bitter replies from several prominent Anglicans. Many of the replies called for a full-fledged Anglican establishment, while a rebuttal pamphlet by Archbishop Secker tried to be more moderate and to stress the simple administrative functions of American bishops. Jonathan Mayhew was unimpressed. Once they are here, Mayhew replied, the bishops will try to attain to the power of their English colleagues, and “ambition and avarice never want plausible pretexts, to accomplish their end.” A gradual plan for bishops was in the long run as grave a threat as an extreme one. Indeed, Mayhew wisely commented, “people are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once, but gradually, by one encroachment after another, as it is found they are disposed to bear them.” Furthermore, Mayhew expressed great distrust of the revival of “high-church Tory principles and maxims” under the new king, George III.

Jonathan Mayhew’s pamphlets in 1763 and 1764 on the Anglican question had a profound effect in rallying colonial opposition to an episcopal scheme and in sowing distrust of and hostility to English imperial projects. The treasurer of Massachusetts wrote of the unprecedented “general approbation and applause” greeting Mayhew’s “Observations.” John Adams, writing later of these events, testified to the importance of the controversy that began with Mayhew’s pamphlets:

It spread an universal alarm against the authority of Parliament. It excited a general and a just apprehension, that bishops, and dioceses, and churches, and priests, and tithes, were to be imposed on us by Parliament. It was known that neither king, nor ministry, nor archbishops, could appoint bishops in America, without an act of Parliament; and
if
Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches....

So influential were Mayhew’s writings, indeed, that the conservative, Calvinist Congregationalists, who had been hostile to Mayhew’s highly liberal views, now ranged alongside him and the other liberal Congregationalists and forged a new unity against the common danger.

So severe was the reaction that the frightened Archbishop Secker was soon willing to call off the whole thing. But the damage had been done. Furthermore, rumors tended to fly overseas of impending appointments of American bishops, thereby keeping America hostile and on the alert. Meanwhile, irritations against church and state accumulated in America. The Anglican governor of New York, James DeLancey, refused to allow Presbyterians and Lutherans to control their own property. And as early as 1761 the Crown had prohibited the emigration from England of any schoolteacher to New Hampshire who was not an Anglican and certified by the bishop of London.

A particular area of trouble with England over the Anglican establishment appeared during this period in the colony of Virginia. Of the seventy or so Anglican clergy in Virginia the bulk were moderate, liberal, and easygoing, in keeping with the low-church moderation of Virginia Anglicanism. In the western valley of Virginia, the local vestry—the important local political organ in that province—included Presbyterians and other Dissenters for many years, since the valley was almost exclusively Dissenter. Local vestries, furthermore, selected their ministers, who rapidly fell into the tolerant and liberal spirit of religion in Virginia.

A little knot of high-church Anglicans bitterly opposed this condition and strove to bring church and British control over ecclesiastical and other affairs of the colony. These men, largely English-born, clustered in and around the faculty of the College of William and Mary.

In the fall of 1755, Virginia passed the first of its Twopenny Acts. Since Virginia’s major currency was tobacco, its dues, contracts, and obligations were generally payable in that commodity or in more convenient warehouse receipts for quantities of tobacco. In such a system, a poor tobacco crop and a consequent rise in tobacco prices injured debtors and advantaged creditors. In 1755, a year of high tobacco prices, there was inaugurated a Virginia practice of fixing tobacco at an arbitrary price of twopence a pound—this at a time when the market price of tobacco was far higher than that. Virginians generally approved the measure because the main “creditors” or receivers of fixed obligations (in tobacco) were the tax collectors and the receivers of government fees. The Twopenny Act caused a welcome reduction in the real economic burden of taxation and government spending on the Virginians, and
did this precisely during a time of economic crises when such relief was most needed.

Government bureaucrats receiving fixed fees in tobacco lost a heavy wind-fall as a result of the Twopenny Act. Particularly affected were the Anglican parsons, who each received a fixed sum of a little over seventeen thousand pounds of tobacco per year. The knot of high-church ministers zealously protested the Twopenny Law; a small clique of parsons (including four professors at William and Mary) sent several bitter protests to the bishop of London. They were led by the Reverend John Camm of York County, a professor of divinity at William and Mary.

The 1755 law was meant to be in force for ten months only, after which the crop crisis would be over. The most important of the Virginia twopenny laws was passed in the fall of 1758, amid a catastrophic drought that lowered Virginia’s tobacco production by nearly ninety percent. A fixed maximum price of twopence a pound was placed on tobacco for the following year.

The Tory faction of the Virginia establishment was embittered at the loss of its windfall gains (the market tobacco price had risen to sixpence a pound). Half of the Anglican clergy of the colony convened and with dispatch sent John Camm to England to plead their “Parsons’ Cause” for royal disallowance of the law. Camm took with him the ministers’ “Representation of the Clergy of the Church of England.” The “Representation” bitterly and incorrectly denounced the Twopenny Act as deliberately designed to injure the Anglican clergy, and angered the Virginians by warning that the royal prerogative was being violated by the colony. The Anglican clergy were thus urging a royal veto over the self-governing acts of the Virginians, and went from there to urge the
nullifying
rather than the mere setting aside of the law, so that the Twopenny Act would be null and void from the beginning. The importance of this stemmed from the short-term nature of the crisis and of the law; if it could be voided from the beginning, Virginia would be liable for a large retroactive salary to its established clergy.

The Virginia Assembly countered the appointment of Camm in early 1759, by appointing its own agent in London and selecting a Committee of Correspondence to carry on the struggle. The argument was now carried to England, where Virginians were further embittered by a vicious attack upon them by Bishop Thomas Sherlock of London (who had long been one of the prime movers in the scheme for an American episcopate). Sherlock leveled false accusations of a deliberate attack on the Virginia clergy, and then went on in a crescendo of calumny to charge the Virginia Assembly, in its passing of the Twopenny Act, with committing an act of “treason, and I do not know any other name for it in our law.” Sherlock went on to denounce the increasing number of Dissenters (largely Presbyterians) in the colony.

The Camm petition, aided by Archbishop Secker, traveled favorably
through the ranks of the British bureaucracy; finally, in August 1759, the Privy Council disallowed the two Twopenny Acts. It also went beyond this to order the Virginia governor not to sign in the future any such law that did not have a suspension clause delaying execution of the law until the king should approve—a serious threat to the self-rule of the colony.

The Crown had merely disallowed the Twopenny Act rather than nullified it from the start. The outcome of the dispute was therefore still unclear, a fact that would rankle Virginia-British relations for eight more years. The Reverend Mr. Camm and a few other Tory parsons immediately decided to sue in the courts for the missing back pay, and if these cases were won, total nullification would be a fact. The Virginia taxpayers would then be burdened with huge windfall salary payments to the established clergy. The Assembly and its Committee of Correspondence decided to back the vestries in the court cases, and its Committee of Correspondence warned that the royal decision called into question the powers of the Virginia legislature to make temporary laws “for the public weal.” The Assembly in late 1760 petitioned the Crown for power to pass such temporary measures, but in vain.

News of Bishop Sherlock’s bitter blast particularly infuriated Virginians and set off a pamphlet war in the colony. Two of Virginia’s leading planter oligarchs, Colonel Richard Bland, Jr. and Colonel Landon Carter, both burgesses and both Anglicans, attacked Sherlock and became involved in a series of exchanges with John Camm. The Bland family was intermarried with such eminent planter families as the Randolphs, and the Carters with the Randolphs, Byrds, and Harrisons. Bland’s pamphlet,
A Letter to the Clergy
(1760), was notable for a sardonic statement on the royal prerogative: “Like the King of Babylon’s decree, it may, for aught I know, almost force the people of the plantations to fall down and worship any image it shall please to set up....” Moreover, “as
solus populi est suprema lex...
every consideration must give place to it, and even these [royal] instructions may be deviated from with impunity....”