OTIS AND HENRY 649 modified them. But they created a tremendous impression, and were described by John Adams as the first step on the road to revolution.1 In Virginia, also, a recent episode had brought odium upon Church and State. Resentment against the exercise of the royal prerogative had been stirred by the exciting rhetoric of a great orator, who having failed in business had taken to the law. Patrick Henry, destined to be the force which drove Virginia into rebellion, now first revealed his powers and his detestation of British rule. He had not a good case. The stipends of the clergy had hitherto been paid in fixed quantities of tobacco. In 1755, when tobacco was scarce and the price therefore high, the Assembly enacted that they should be paid in money. When the price was low, they had received no compensation. The act was very justly annulled. But the tithe-payers ignored the royal veto. The clergy brought actions to recover the sums out of which they had been defrauded. They were defeated by the eloquence of Henry, who denied the validity of the veto and told the juries that the action of the British Government was an instance of tyranny which dissolved the political compact. Clearly the time was at hand when the prophecies of Turgot and Vergennes might be realised. "Colonies", the former had declared, "are like fruits which remain on the tree only till they are ripe. America, as soon as she can take care of herself, will do as Carthage did." Vergennes, after the Peace of Paris, foretold that Great Britain would call upon the colonies to share the burden she had incurred on their behalf, and that they, no longer needing her protection, would answer by declaring their independence.2 In these circumstances it was the business of good statesmanship to see to it that the calls of the two loyalties of which we have spoken did not clash, and that the bonds of the old home and the new home across the seas should not be subjected to the strain of a crisis, in which economical self-interest was joined to the defence of a vital constitutional principle. It is obvious enough now that the time had come for a relaxation of trade restrictions and a withdrawal of political interference, or for giving to the colonies a share in the regulation of the common concerns of the Empire as many people, including practical administrators like Governor Pownall and political philosophers like Adam Smith, thought possible. The Americans had reached a stage of growth which involved a change of relationship. In the light of experience which was not theirs, it is easy to see that it was imperative that statesmen should find a new formula for their new age, and provide an escape from tutelage without forcing the adolescent to leave home. Unfortunately the idea of an empire held together by a federal union of States and united by freedom was wholly strange to the imperial nations of the eighteenth century. Devolution of 1 Tudor, William, Life of James Otis, chaps. v-vii. Bancroft, G., Hist. U.S. 1, 525. sovereignty was almost inconceivable to them. Dr Johnson's dictum that "in sovereignty there are no gradations" was deemed indisputable. Logically and historically perhaps it was. For the modern compromise on the point-the conception of a gradual development of self-governing to practically independent sovereign States within an empire—had not been formulated, and possibly but for the lesson taught by the revolt of the American colonies might never have been reached. Thomas Pownall, indeed, an ex-colonial governor of large experience, had glimpses of the modern imperial ideal when he urged the conception of Great Britain, "not as a Kingdom of this Isle only" with colonial appendages, but "as a grand marine dominion... united into one Empire";1 and Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations projected an empire wherein the colonies would enjoy equality in status, burden and opportunity with the mother country. That ideal is implicit in all the demands of the colonies during the ensuing period. But they themselves did not realise it. As late as 1775 they were declaring that they would be content with a return to the status quo of 1763.2 Shelburne at the last hoped for a federal union. The alternative seemed to be the enforcement of subservience. Parliament was as jealous of its honour and as tenacious of its authority as the King. A long stride in political understanding had to be taken before the British people could look upon their countrymen in the colonies as one with themselves in rights as in race; as equal fellow-subjects of the Crown across the seas. As it was, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, "every man in England seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the throne with the King, and talks of our subjects in the Colonies". In spite of the domination of the mercantile theory and the policy of restricting the Plantations to the production of raw materials for British manufactures, the mother country cannot be regarded as treating them merely as milch cows kept for her profit. In return for the restraints imposed upon their trade and manufactures, Great Britain gave freely in exchange. She provided naval and military protection and military stores; she fought for their preservation and extension; she gave bounties to encourage the industries included under the heading of naval stores; she supplied money for religious establishments and in aid of Protestant emigrants; she presented the tobacco colonies with a monopoly in tobacco at the expense of the home farmer. She had incurred a great burden of debt as the result of her efforts largely on their behalf. Politically and commercially she gave her colonies greater freedom than did any other imperial nation. The elder Mirabeau wrote of the English as the most enlightened of the people of Europe in their conduct in the New World". The fundamental error Great Britain now made was not so much 1 Pownall, Thomas, Administration of the Colonies, pp. xv, 19. COLONIAL SEPARATISM 651 that she did what was done by all other empires of the period, nor even that she asserted a sovereignty to which all British people alike were subject. It lay in the assertion of that sovereignty in a way which put the colonies in a state of inferiority, whilst their trade was controlled for the benefit of their fellow-subjects in England. The colonies were placed in the position "not so much of a State in federation as of a conquered State". The very liberality of the institutions to which the mother country had accustomed them prepared them to rebel against that condition. Naturally, too, the wholesale evasion of commercial laws which ran counter to the feeling and interests of the country, had accustomed the people to the defiance of British authority. The really critical part of the Revenue Act of 1764 lay in the steps taken for enforcing it and the observance of the Acts of Trade. The right of the mother country to control colonial trade was universally admitted. But restrictions of trade were bound to cause irritation, producing sooner or later political reactions. No political reaction of the first magnitude could take place so long as only the might of Great Britain stood between the colonists and absorption or expulsion by the aggressive power of France. By the irony of fate, the results of the prodigious effort made by Great Britain to remove that menace led directly to the measures which called into active being the latent demand of the American colonies for practical independence, and drove them first into resistance and then into unity. For as yet the spirit of colonial separatism reigned supreme. Franklin himself emphasised their mutual jealousy and their resistance to the idea of a union even for their common defence against the French and Indians. He ridiculed, therefore, the idea of their uniting against their own nation, which "they all love much more than they love one another"." "Nothing", wrote the traveller Burnaby, "can exceed the jealousy and emulation which they possess in regard to each other."3 Both he and Otis expressed their convictions that, if left to themselves, civil war would rage from one end of the continent to the other. We have seen that the Government's policy embraced three measures: the strict enforcement of the trade laws, and, in the absence of quotas of men and money raised by the colonies for their own protection, the establishment of British troops in America, and the raising of a revenue there by an imperial tax to contribute towards their support. So long, however, as the Acts of Trade were enforced, the Americans could reasonably maintain that their contribution to imperial defence was to be found in the advantage derived by Great Britain from control of the colonial trade. There the matter might well have been left. Unfortunately, the idea of a standing army was naturally 2 Franklin, Works, IV, 41. 1 Seeley, J. R., Expansion of England, chap. iv. * Burnaby, A., Travels in N. America; Pinkerton, Voyages, XIII, 752. repugnant to the colonists, not only because they retained the traditional English objection to anything of the sort, but also because they feared, probably with reason, that it might be used for enforcing closer British control over their affairs. Unfortunately, too, the tax imposed, although it was intended, not to produce a revenue for Great Britain, but solely to be a contribution towards necessary colonial objects, gave grounds for raising the great constitutional principle of "no taxation without representation", a principle so dear to the hearts of Englishmen that even Lord Camden, in a moment of aberration, described it as a "law of nature". It provided the opponents of British rule and all who were feeling the pinch of that baleful system of commercial restrictions, which aimed at securing a monopoly of manufactures and of colonial trade to the mother country, with an opportunity of joining issue on the ideal ground of a battle for freedom against oppression. The ground was the same as that upon which the struggle against the Stuarts had been fought the struggle in which the American colonies had been cradled. "What we did", wrote Jefferson on a subsequent occasion, "was with the help of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over for the Revolutionary precedents of those days."2 The burden of the stamp tax was grossly exaggerated in America. Actually the amount expected to be raised was very small, and it was partly offset by the concessions mentioned above. But Hampden was imprisoned for refusing to pay a 20s. tax. If the stamp tax was an insignificant imposition, that was a good reason for not imposing it; it was not a reason for submitting to it. 4 There was nothing new in the idea of taxing the colonies for their own defence and the support of their civil government. It had been proposed, for instance, by George Vaughan, a native of New Hampshire and agent for that province, as early as 1715.3 In 1717 and 1722 Archibald Cumings, customs officer at Boston, had submitted a plan which included a stamp tax, and in 1728 Sir William Keith, ex-LieutenantGovernor of Pennsylvania, had made a similar suggestion.5 What was new, was its adoption. Walpole, in 1739, had dismissed such a project with the observation that it had always been the object of his administration to encourage the commercial prosperity of the colonies, and that the greater their prosperity, the greater would be the demand for English manufactures. He showed a wisdom in advance of his generation. Indeed, it is possible that if the Wealth of Nations had appeared thirty years before it was actually published-in 1746 instead of in 1776-the argument of Adam Smith might have borne fruit in time. The argument, that is, that Great Britain derived nothing but loss from the monopoly of trade, to maintain which was 1 Parl. Hist. xvi, 178. 3 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1715, no. 389 (i). 5 Short Discourse on the present state of the Colonies. 2 Jefferson, T., Memoirs, 1, 6. 4 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1717, no. 486. • Annual Register, 1765, p. 25. EFFECTS OF GRENVILLE'S MEASURES 653 the principal object of the dominion she exercised over her colonies. But the fruit of that profound argument was long in ripening. Its acceptance was rendered difficult by the attitude of all the other nations who monopolised their colonial trade, and by the evident success of the Trade and Navigation Acts in building up the maritime power both of Great Britain and her colonies, and in crippling her commercial rivals, France and Holland. On the other hand, Smith agreed with Grenville that each part of the British Empire ought to support its own civil and military establishments and shoulder its share of the burden of imperial defence. Still more unfortunately, the proposal for the stamp tax followed upon the reimposition of the Sugar Act and it was accompanied by measures for stopping the wholesale smuggling by which the Acts of Trade and Navigation had been evaded. This involved the cessation of the illicit trade with the foreign West Indies and the Spanish colonies of America. But that trade, besides providing a market for their superfluous lumber and provisions, was the main source from which the Americans had obtained the ready money needed for payments to England in order to make good the adverse balance of trade normal with young colonies, which are necessarily large importers, and in their case augmented by those very Acts of Trade. Stimulated by long-term credits and inflated issues of paper currency, there had recently been an orgy of importation, so that British merchants were owed some five millions of pounds by 1775. This indebtedness was mentioned by Jonathan Boucher as an incentive to rebellion.1 At the same time it was enacted that the money raised by the duties in America should be paid in hard cash into the British Exchequer. By another Act3 the issue of paper money was prohibited. The effect of all these measures, taken together, was to deal a severe blow to American trade, and to create a greater demand for ready money whilst drying up the sources from which it could be obtained. Combined with the sugar tax, they were sufficient in themselves to create grave discontent and to raise in the minds of many the question "By what constitutional right can the British Parliament so restrain the American people?" The imposition of the stamp tax and the declaration in the preamble of the Revenue Act that it was "just and necessary to raise a revenue in His Majesty's Dominions in America for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same", presented them with a constitutional grievance which could be used as a stalking horse for opposition to all those irksome measures and British rule itself. For it was not taxation without representation which stirred the national conscience to the defence of smuggling, but the suppression of smuggling which Boucher, Jonathan, Views of the causes and consequences of the American Revolution (1797); Van Tyne, C. H., England and America, p. 55; cf. Chalmers, G., Hist. of Colonial Currency, pp. 18, 416. 4 Geo. III, cap. 34. 2 3 5 Geo. III, cap. 12. |