Conceived in Liberty (161 page)

Colonial protests, general and specific, against a stamp tax came not only from official bodies but from private sources as well. Jared Ingersoll, an influential Tory lawyer from Connecticut and one of that province’s agents to England, warned Whately in the summer of 1764 that the people were “filled with the most dreadful apprehension” over any stamp tax. Ingersoll warned of the great difficulty that would be met in collecting a tax that was “in the opinion of most of the people contrary to the foundation principles of their natural and constitutional rights and liberties.” Even some of the wealthiest citizens, he added, threatened to emigrate in the event of such a tax. The other colonial agents joined in the advance agitation, but the protests only succeeded in hardening the Crown’s determination to put the annoying colonies in their supposedly appointed place. The agitation also made it easier to appeal to Parliament’s sensitivity to its own power and right to impose such a tax.

By early 1765 the year of grace was over, the colonists had presumably had time to absorb the shock, and the Crown was set to ram the hated stamp tax down the throats of the colonies. A last-minute attempt to head off the stamp bill occurred on February 2, at a conference between four official and unofficial colonial agents and George Grenville. The four agents—Charles Garth, MP, agent for South Carolina; Richard Jackson, now agent of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts; Benjamin Franklin; and Ingersoll—made a final try at appeasement by offering a self-imposed tax by the colonies. Jackson voiced a common and perceptive colonial fear that the Crown would be able to use colonial funds to support its armed forces and the royal governors in America, and thus free the governors from the Assembly control so precious to the colonies. Grenville replied with the same hocus-pocus and double-talk of the year before, now revealed as patently insincere.

But Benjamin Franklin proved indomitable in his determination to toady
to the Crown. Franklin had three alternative plans of his own devising to offer—each of which would have yielded to the principle of English taxation of the colonies, and each of which would also have aggrandized central imperial control at the expense of American home rule. One was a cute way to make a mockery of the principle of colonial self-taxation: to provide some colonial representation in Parliament. A second was to return to his imperialist and centralizing Albany Plan of 1754, which would have imposed a royally appointed American council to levy taxation on the colonies. A third plan—which Franklin strongly urged—called on Parliament to establish a single loan office in America to issue a common colonial paper currency, part of which would go to Britain as a hidden and therefore less provocative form of taxation on the colonies. In that way, centralization and imperial control in America could make giant strides; paper-money inflation would recover nicely from the hard blow of Parliament’s rather restrictive Currency Act of the previous year; and Franklin, if luck went his way, would have a healthy share in the lucrative contract for printing the new paper issues. Indeed, Franklin persuaded his old friend, former governor Thomas Pownall of Massachusetts, to propose the plan and to present it jointly with him to Grenville. Pownall and Franklin also eagerly offered their services in the well-paying task of putting their grandiose scheme into operation.

Thomas Pownall incorporated Franklin’s proposal into the second edition of his influential book,
The Administration of the Colonies,
originally published in 1764. In view of Pownall’s close collaboration with Franklin, it is instructive to note the views expressed in Pownall’s work on imperial-colonial relations. Pownall’s crucial objective was to reimpose imperial control by making the governors and other Crown officials independent of the elected assemblies for their salaries. Without such independence, the officials’ actions would remain subservient to the people of the colonies. The means to accomplish this end would be the levying of a British tax on the colonies, which tax could then be used to pay the salaries of the Crown officials. In that way, the American colonists themselves would be forced to pay for the subversion of their own rights by the British rulers. A neat trick indeed!
*

But Grenville scorned evasions and halfway measures. Sure of victory in Parliament and anxious to smash signs of self-reliance in the colonies, Grenville finally introduced a stamp bill into Parliament on February 6, 1765.

Opposition to the bill in the Commons was mobilized by the hard-core Whigs. The Whigs did their best, but were demoralized by the recent death of their leader, the Duke of Devonshire, and by one of the periodic bouts of insanity of William Pitt, who held the narrow view that Parliament should
not impose
internal
taxation on the colonies. The early opposition was led by Alderman William Beckford, from the City of London, who alone and courageously denied the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. The others were content, doubtless for strategic reasons if no other, to deny the equity and expediency of the tax. The most eloquent and famous speech was delivered by the old Wilkite Colonel Isaac Barré. Barré had advocated no tax, or if a tax, at least the opportunity for the colonies to tax themselves. He had been answered by the renegade Whig Charles Townshend, who loftily and arrogantly asked: “And now will those American children planted by our care, nourished by our indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy... burden...?”

Barré now rose and spontaneously gave a superb and prophetic rebuttal, one soon to resound throughout the American colonies:

They planted by
your
care? No! Your oppression planted ‘em in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country—where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable... actuated by principles of true English liberty, they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own country, from the hands of those who should have been their friends.

They nourished by
your
indulgence? They grew by your neglect of ‘em: as soon as you began to care about ‘em, that was exercised in sending persons to rule over ‘em, in one department and another... sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon ‘em; men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them....

They protected by
your
arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defense, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and labourious industry for the defense of a country, whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument. And believe me, remember I this day told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompany them still.... The people I believe are as truly loyal as any subjects the King has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them, if ever they should be violated—but the subject is too delicate and I will say no more.

Beckford and Barré moved to block consideration of the bill, but were defeated by a vote of 245–49. The bill itself came to debate in mid-February, as several Whigs tried desperately to present petitions against the stamp tax. Rose Fuller, a West Indies merchant, presented a petition of London merchants reflecting their alarm at drastic action that might be taken by their American debtors; Charles Garth, agent for South Carolina, worked up a petition that he induced a few South Carolinians to sign; Richard Jackson presented
a Connecticut petition, but Parliament refused to hear any of them on the ground that the petitions questioned Parliament’s authority. No one dared to introduce the New York petition, which was deemed “dangerous” and “inflammatory”; but the petition of Virginia’s agent was submitted by a leading Whig, Sir William Meredith. Virginia’s right to petition was defended by General Henry Seymour Conway, a Wilkite and the Whig leader in Commons, who had been one of the main Pelham innocents “massacred” at the end of 1762. Conway was the brother of the influential Lord Hertford and related to the Walpole family. Conway recalled that the colonies had been asked by Grenville to submit their proposals, and then he proceeded to deny the right of Parliament to tax the colonies at all. But Parliament, led by the renegade Whig Charles Yorke, rejected the Virginia petition by a large majority.

The rest was mere formality. The stamp bill easily passed Commons on February 27, the House of Lords on March 8, and became the law of the land on November 1.

The Stamp Act imposed a comprehensive schedule of taxes on all manner of colonial legal and commercial documents and transactions. These included court actions, wills, contracts, licenses, leases, deeds and land grants, mortgages, insurance policies, ship clearings from ports, pamphlets, newspapers, dice, and playing cards. The highest tax was ten pounds for a license to practice law. Also extremely high was the tax of two shillings apiece for all newspaper advertisements—often amounting to a huge 200 percent tax. In addition, a steep tax of one-half penny was levied on each copy of the newspaper itself. All payments had to be made in English sterling or its equivalent, valued at the very high rate of five shillings sixpence per ounce of silver.

Almost every transaction of the colonies requiring the use of paper now had to carry an official treasury stamp. Or rather, all transactions must be conducted on officially stamped paper, which had to be purchased by the user from officially appointed distributors selected by the Crown’s Board of Stamp Commissioners. The corollary effect of this was to give the board a monopoly of the sale of all paper in the colonies.

The Stamp Act thus had a devastating impact on virtually the entire economic and social life of the colony; in short, on nearly everyone. No tax could have been better calculated to inflame nearly
everyone
in the colonies regardless of location or social position. The particularly heavy taxes on the legal and the newspaper professions, as well as the taxes on tavern licenses, were certain to mobilize the intense opposition of the most articulate opinion-molding groups in the colonies. Even Benjamin Franklin was alarmed, being sure that the new taxes would destroy half the circulation and advertising of the American newspapers. There were other ominous provisions in the act. For one thing, no newspaper or pamphlet could be published without bearing the name of the printer or author, obviously in order to intimidate critics of government
by forcing them to publicize their names. In another area, the Stamp Act imposed taxes on documents in ecclesiastical courts. The specter of an ecclesiastical court presided over by an Anglican bishop was thus conjured up to arouse the colonies.

The penalties were severe. Unstamped evidence was inadmissible in any court. Violations could be tried in the colonial admiralty courts without trial by jury—and especially subject to prosecution were officials or lawyers not using stamps, and any sales of unstamped pamphlets or newspapers. In contrast, government officials sued for enforcing the Stamp Act could automatically collect triple damages from their victims! The vice admiralty courts, hitherto largely the concern of merchants, were now hated by all groups in America. Whereas the Navigation and Sugar acts could conceivably if tortuously be interpreted as dealing with the sea and therefore relating to admiralty courts, the stamp tax obviously could not. Thus, constitutional and economic questions, violations of political (and perhaps religious) rights, and economic prosperity, all merged in the Stamp Act into one comprehensive and massive assault on the liberty, property, and well-being of the colonists in America. Great Britain had smashed at America with a mailed fist. The die was cast. The colonists were faced with a fateful choice: abject submission or open resistance.

*
Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan,
The Stamp Act Crisis,
rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 83–84.

*
On Pownall’s goals and strategy, see Robert E. Brown,
Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691–1780
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 201–3. On Franklin’s plotting with Pownall, see Verner W. Crane,
Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), p. 109.

The time for mere protest had passed. The colonists were faced with a hard choice among a few stark alternatives. They could meekly submit and pay the stamp tax; but this, it soon developed, few Americans were prepared to do. Or, they could refuse to pay; but such refusal in turn could take two sharply contrasting paths. The conservative path was to keep within the law by simply ceasing to transact any business involving paper documents. But such a reaction, while “moderate” in the sense of remaining within the law, could only ruin the colony by bringing all trade and virtually all economic life to a halt. The only
practical
path was the radical one of outright defiance: to continue to carry on business, legal, and social life while ignoring the stamp law. Such a course was in effect mass civil disobedience; and civil disobedience to the broad scope of the stamp tax was tantamount to—revolution.

The colonies had some precious months before the law was to go into effect—time to work out their tactics and strategy, time to plan their reactions to the tax itself. The Stamp Act was passed in early March and received the inevitable signature of the king near the end of the month. The news reached America in April. The colonists had less than seven months to decide what to do.

All the conditions now existed in America for precipitating a revolutionary-crisis situation; in the midst of the rapidly accumulating, vast tinderbox of constitutional, economic, political, and even religious grievances, nothing could have been better calculated than a stamp tax to unify the bulk of the colonists against the British government and to spur the intense opposition of the opinion-molding groups in society. But now that the culminating blow had been struck, the final ingredient tossed in, one condition alone was still lacking: articulate leadership. This emphatically did
not
mean that leaders
were needed to
create
a revolutionary temper in the minds of the people. Contrary to the absurd conspiracy view of revolution, this is not the way that revolutions are or ever can be made. Ultimately, revolutions are mass phenomena, and cannot succeed without the support—indeed the active and enthusiastic support—of the great majority of the population. True, an existing government can indefinitely peg along in command of only the “support” of the passive resignation of the majority of its subjects. But the existing government
is already
in command of the power apparatus in society. In contrast, a revolution, an upheaval
against
the wielders of power, must command the active support of the great majority. Otherwise it will not even make a respectable showing, much less take and keep the reins of government. But the masses will not move, will not erupt, if they lack aggressive leaders to articulate their grievances and to point the path for them to follow. The leaders supply the necessary theoretical justification and analysis of the revolution’s short- and long-term goals. Unaided by leaders, the masses tend to accept each act of tyranny, not out of willing agreement, but from failure to realize that successful opposition can be mounted against the status quo. The articulation by the leaders is the final necessary spark that ignites the tinderbox of revolution.