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Offensive Acts
At sunset on May 9, 1768, the merchant ship Liberty sailed into Boston Harbor after a voyage from Portugal’s Madeira Islands, with a cargo of the islands’ fortified wine that the ship’s owner, the thirty-one-year-old John Hancock, often drank: “I like rich wine” he had recently written to a friend. At the Hancock Wharf, the tidesman Thomas Kirk boarded the Liberty to ascertain the duty on the cargo. He was wary on several counts. Although among the wealthiest of Bostonians, Hancock was known for his radical sympathies, to the point that many other merchants considered him a traitor to his class. Also, as an experienced smuggler, he might dispute the relatively new import duty on Madeira not reshipped from Great Britain—previously he and a gang of seamen had blocked Kirk’s fellow officers from access to the hold of his Lydia, suspected of containing dutiables, and when a lone officer sneaked aboard at night he was surprised below by men demanding to see his writ of assistance or search warrant. He had neither. Hancock had him seized, held over the side, and asked whether he really wanted to search the vessel. He said no, well aware of recent incidents in which customs officers were tarred and feathered, and Hancock advised that he was free to inspect but not to linger. He left the ship.
Regarding the Lydia, the colony’s attorney general had ruled: “Though Mr. Hancock may not have conducted himself so prudently or courteously as might be wished … it is probable that his intention was to keep within the bounds of the law.” On boarding the Liberty a month later, Kirk made sure to have proper papers. Hancock was not there, either attending to his duties for the town council or provincial congress, or at his palatial home atop Beacon Hill, or traveling in his gilded carriage. Aboard the Liberty Hancock’s representative offered Kirk a bribe to report fewer casks of Madeira. When Kirk did not accept, he was locked in the steerage. During the night he “heard a noise as of many people upon deck at Work hoisting out goods.” Released, he was warned not to say a word, and he didn’t: He reported the Liberty as carrying just twenty-five pipes (casks of 125 gallons each), a quarter of its capacity; Hancock paid the duty and that seemed the end of it—business as usual. Collusion was rife: In an article Stephen Hopkins, former governor of Rhode Island, accused Massachusetts officials of “shutting their eyes or at least of opening them no further than their own private interest required.”
A month later, as Hancock’s Liberty was being readied for another voyage, the HMS Romney entered Boston Harbor, and everything changed. The fifty-gun warship had been sent “to over-awe and terrify the inhabitants of this town into base compliance and unlimited submission,” according to a Boston newspaper. Its presence emboldened Kirk to recant his twenty-five-pipes report and to charge that Hancock had evaded import taxes. This gave the port commissioner reason to have a broad arrow painted on the Liberty’s mast, a sign of imminent seizure. The Romney’s marines approached in small boats and prepared to haul the Liberty away.
Hancock was not there, but three hundred to five hundred other men gathered at the pier to protest the seizure.
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Revolutions that produce lasting change, rather than just disruptions, cannot succeed without the participation of both the rich and the poor. The British seizing of the Liberty provided Americans with a specific object on which to act in unison, a rich man’s ship that poor men decided to defend. They ripped up paving stones and threw them at the marines.
They did so in part because Hancock had proved himself to be on their side when few other wealthy merchants were, and in part because of fear for their livelihoods—half the jobs in Boston depended on the foreign trade being carried on by Hancock and other merchants. Critics then and since have dismissed the pavestone throwers on the Hancock Wharf as a mob. But they were not the same sort of unruly group as those that sprang up in Europe and in Great Britain, those masses of the unemployed and the destitute who regularly rioted to obtain food. The American port protests of the 1760s, as documented in letters, diaries, and newspaper reports, reveal the participants as overwhelmingly from the working classes. The protesters did include black slaves and white indentured servants, but many more of them had some money or property. In terms of income the lowest members were the occasionally employed—the sailors, dockworkers, and manual laborers. Above them in income were the regularly employed craftsmen such as shoemakers, tailors, coopers, and weavers. The protests also usually included some who were even higher in income—what passed then for the middle class—artisan makers of cabinets, instruments, silverwork, and houses, and small entrepreneurs such as bakers, distillers, and chandlers.
Also of note is that these pavestone throwers were not knee-jerk antitaxers whose anger might purposefully be misdirected by a politician. They had long since acknowledged the need for taxes to fund such activities as keeping Native Americans at bay and constructing better roads. Their beef was with Great Britain for its attempt to once again levy taxes on Americans without American consent and despite American objections, for they believed that they had settled this matter by their 1765 protests against the Stamp Act, which had resulted in its rescinding.
Back in 1765 the Boston-based protesters of the Stamp Act could have more accurately been called a mob, as they burned a few mansions of the wealthy and threatened to torch fifteen more. Even then, however, their rage had not been inchoate but based on their realization that the purpose of the Stamp Act was not the regulation of commerce, the ostensible aim of all previous Navigation Acts. They saw the Stamp Act as an attempt to force the colonies to pay retroactively for the British having provided military protection during the French and Indian War.
It is a characteristic of the arrogant—and in that era the British were routinely in-your-face arrogant—to believe that anyone opposing them is dumb, incompetent, or has a short memory. The American colonists who actively opposed the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, named for Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the exchequer, who fashioned them for Parliament, were neither dumb nor ignorant, and they did not need very long memories to recognize that their difficulties had begun with the accession to the throne of George III in 1760. The end of the French and Indian War in 1763 had exacerbated those problems, as had the British government’s realization that it had expended a great deal of money on that war and needed to recoup £2.5 million. Americans had already laid out plenty in property and poll taxes to fund American militias’ operations, taxes that had been kept in force after the war to defray their allotted share of Great Britain’s prior military expenses. By 1765, Americans had paid in so routinely and in so stalwart a manner that they had already retired £1,765,000 and were on schedule to retire the remainder of the £2.5 million. A British MP had even cited their terrific repayment record to justify enacting the Stamp Act, arguing that the payment record was evidence of Americans being prosperous enough to bear additional taxes.
Prosperous enough? Today we do not generally think of our colonial forebears as having been prosperous, certainly not when their lives are juxtaposed to our own luxury-filled lives, but in the 1760s, and in comparison with most of Europe, they were. Nor do we think of them as willing to be taxed—but the slogan “No taxation without representation” did not mean that the protesters were antitax; rather, it meant that they wanted a say in what taxes were levied. Massachusetts’ colonists, for instance, paid property taxes that were several multiples more than comparable ones in Great Britain, which were themselves higher than all others in Europe.
It is when the arrogant think they are being the shrewdest that they are the most oblivious to reality. The British MPs believed they had been very canny in structuring the Stamp Act so as to avoid an American backlash against their port officials, the usual collectors of taxes: The Stamp Act would be administered by the colonists themselves—they would need to buy stamps to make legal all their commercial documents, including newspapers. The MPs omitted from their calculations that the need for colonial cooperation in administering the Stamp Act gave the colonists leverage to resist it.
John Hancock’s understanding of that vulnerability changed his life, commencing his transformation from an ordinary, if quite wealthy, colonial merchant into a leader of the resistance. News of the act’s impending imposition came to him while he was still in mourning for his uncle and mentor, who had died just a year earlier. His response was immediate, and it went against his economic interests: “I have come to a Serious Resolution not to send one Ship more to Sea, nor to have any kind of Connection to Business under a Stamp,” he wrote to his firm’s London supplier. “I am Determin’d … to Sell my Stock in Trade & Shut up my Warehous Doors & never Import another Shilling from Great Britain.… I am free & Determined to be so & will not willingly & quietly Subject myself to Slavery.” He appended a note to a copy: “This Letter I propose to remain in my Letter Book as a Standing monument to posterity & my children in particular”—just then, he had no children—“that I by no means Consented to a Submission to this Cruel Act, & that my best Representations were not wanting in the matter.” His ensuing actions spoke as forcefully: He made common cause with the leaders of the resistance—lawyer James Otis, brewer and former tax collector Samuel Adams, and physician Joseph Warren, men whom most Boston merchants considered below them socially.
But then, those other wealthy merchants were almost all Tories, as were most of the wealthy throughout the colonies in 1765. In every age the wealthy tend to be fundamentally conservative, in the sense of opposing any alteration of the pattern that has made and is sustaining their fortunes. In Boston this fundamental truth became apparent as some of the merchants warned the would-be resisters against making the sort of over-the-top protests of the Stamp Act that London might deem too rebellious.
Hancock was then just as loyal a British subject as his more Tory-minded commercial colleagues, and as well aware as they of having benefited from the status quo. But along with a few other fairly wealthy merchants in port cities up and down the American Atlantic coast, he did become involved in active resistance to the Stamp Act, uniting with considerably poorer neighbors against the status quo to a degree that only a few years earlier even the most fervent of rabble-rousers had not imagined would be possible.
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Underlying the status quo in the 1760s in America was the hundred-plus-year-old system of commerce created by and still regulated by the British Navigation Acts. The original 1651 act had been fashioned to prevent France, Spain, and the Netherlands from poaching on Great Britain’s colonial markets and from destroying the fledgling colonial economies. Judging that initial intent admirable, the colonists did not protest when additional acts were promulgated. These included a decree that goods entering or exiting a British colony could only be carried in British or British colonial ships, and others that specified which goods the colonists could and could not export, what they could and could not manufacture, and that they must pay for British imports only in specie or in bills of exchange.
What props you up is often what holds you down. The Navigation Act regulations did foster the growth of America’s economy, but only in narrow configurations. American trees suitable for ship masts, potentially worth a great deal to a Europe almost denuded of such trees, could be sold only for British use and at a low price; American indigo, rice, and livestock could not be sent to Great Britain, which had plenty from its own farms, but could profitably be sent to British Caribbean colonies, which because of the same regulations were not producing enough food of their own; and American wheat and tobacco, although craved by Europe, had to first be taken to Great Britain for reexport. (A later tweak to this law allowed direct shipping of such crops from America to Europe if carried in a British vessel.)
Among the Navigation Acts system’s most detrimental effects was embedding slavery into the American economy. In the 1760s two-thirds of American exports consisted of tobacco, rice, and indigo—crops that were profitable only with slave labor. One of every six Americans was a slave. Virginia’s ratio of slaves to free people was 1 to 1, and South Carolina’s was 2 to 1. Beyond slavery’s exploitation and degradation, it exacted less obvious costs. As Virginia planter and slave owner George Mason was contending, just then, America’s overdependence on slave labor was diminishing the number of skilled whites coming to America, resulting in lands west of the Alleghenies remaining unproductive.
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Peyton Randolph was the king’s attorney general for Virginia, and led the Virginia House of Burgesses when its speaker was absent. He was the scion of a family that had been at the forefront of Virginia affairs for generations, and that included Thomas Jefferson, a recent graduate of William & Mary, and the equally young John Marshall, another lawyer. Randolph had been in the House of Burgesses since 1748, and in 1765, while he did not like the Stamp Act, he was not inclined to take too radical a stance against it. At the request of like-minded colleagues he introduced a rather mild set of objections to it for the burgesses to send to London. But to Randolph’s surprise and dismay, the young lawyer Patrick Henry outmaneuvered him. Henry introduced a far more fiery set of resolutions and, taking advantage of a mostly empty chamber, managed to get them passed. Randolph, temporarily in the chair, fumed, but then began to see the necessity of a more potent protest against British overreaching. Shortly Randolph resigned as the king’s attorney, was elected speaker of the House of Burgesses, and became increasingly radicalized.
Farther south, in Charleston, South Carolina, another longtime loyal British subject and beneficiary of the Navigation Acts system, merchant and plantation owner Henry Laurens, mused on his situation: “I go to church and come home again, to the House of Assembly and return to my habitation, avoiding disputes about tenets, refined politics, and party. At home I am always cheerful and never sad.” Although he shared with Hancock, Washington, and Randolph a love of luxury, wine, and the esteem of fellow citizens rich and poor, he saw no need to seek political power or be more involved in governance than was needed to maintain his social station. Charleston’s aggregate wealth was then greater than that of any other American city. “In grandeur, splendor of buildings, decorations, equipages, numbers, shippings, and indeed in almost everything, [Charleston] far surpasses all I ever saw or expected to see,” Bostonian Josiah Quincy, Jr., John Adams’s law partner, would shortly write home.
Laurens was the son of a saddle maker and tack seller who had died in 1747. Expanding a modest inheritance into a substantial fortune—four plantations, merchant enterprises, and the like—he became quite a character; even an admiring biographer admits that Laurens was too “cocksure about the rightness of his contentions, and his egoism was something a little too much in evidence.” After amassing considerable wealth from selling slaves, he stopped slaving in the mid-1760s and concentrated on his plantations, which were doing well enough to enable him to send his sons to be educated in London and to make plans to follow them there. His detractors included Christopher Gadsden, a middling-successful merchant who was among the most radical men in South Carolina. But while Samuel Adams and Hancock had become allies, and Randolph and Patrick Henry were beginning to see more eye to eye, Gadsden and Laurens were not yet on the same side. Their differences came to the fore as they awaited the arrival of the stamps: While Gadsden exhorted the mechanics and dockworkers to resist unloading these when they arrived, Laurens expressed dismay at Stamp Act riots in Boston and New York and touted the stamps’ imminent arrival in Charleston as “a glorious opportunity of standing distinguished for our loyalty” while awaiting the act’s inevitable rescinding. The stamps reached the city, and the governor sequestered them. A Gadsden-inspired crowd thought Laurens had the stamps and came angrily to his door. Laurens said he did not have them and would not sign an oath that he did not know who did. “I am in your power,” he advised the visitors. “You are very strong and may if you please barbicu me—I can but die.” After the visitors found no stamps, they left, giving him three cheers. Nine days of rioting followed, and the stamps were returned to London. Gadsden then led the call to convene the Stamp Act Congress, the first attempt to coordinate colonial action. Laurens did not attend.
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In the wake of the repeal of the Stamp Act in early 1766, Baron Johann de Kalb was sent by France to America to reconnoiter the British colonies’ readiness to revolt; he reported an uprising as unlikely since the repeal had taught the Americans that “their value to the mother country is their best safeguard against any violation of their real or imagined privileges.”
That fall thirty London merchants signed an open letter to Hancock and Boston’s merchants, warning them not to further bite the hand that fed them, since the Navigation Acts system, “framed on liberal principles,” was still working to “reciprocal advantage.” On that point the addressees might have agreed. But then the writers contended that the system was “relieving the colonies from injudicious restrictions and severe duties,” so Americans should “prevent, by every possible means, foreign states from sharing in the advantage of your commerce and thereby depriving Great Britain of the means to afford you instances of her paternal protection.” Americans should also not interfere “with the manufactures of the mother country, either by furnishing her rivals with raw materials, or by the encouraging of similar manufacturing among yourselves.”
Just then, sales in America of British-manufactured clothing, furnishings, ceramics, woolens, hats, and complex iron tools were so lucrative, and American addiction to these products was so strong, that Parliament viewed the connection as infinitely exploitable. But its limits were rapidly being approached. Jefferson would shortly write that an American was “forbidden to make a hat for himself of the fur which he has taken perhaps on his own soil [which constituted] an instance of despotism to which no parallel can be produced in the most arbitrary ages of British history.” And William Pitt the Elder warned the Commons: “The kingdom … has always bound the colonies by her regulations and restrictions in trade, in navigation, in manufactures—in every thing except that of taking their money out of their pockets, without their consent.” With the Stamp Act, it was doing that, too.
The Scottish economist Adam Smith realized that such rapacity would lead to an American revolt and eventually to independence. As he was writing in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which would not be published until 1776, he labeled the system produced by the Navigation Acts mercantilism, and asserted that the American part of it had brought Britain’s trade to a “splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have obtained.” American colonial trade produced five million pounds a year, one-third of Great Britain’s total foreign trade, and its cargo-carrying businesses employed forty thousand British seamen in two thousand ships.
Smith’s confidence that America would become independent was based on American colonists’ having already surpassed Britons in per capita income—seventy-eight pounds per year compared with the British fifty per year—and on their being more regularly employed and their earnings able to purchase more of the necessities of life. The labor market was one key to this prosperity, Smith asserted, as the paucity of skilled labor in America forced up wages, and the other key was the remarkable fecundity of Americans’ farms and fisheries. As a result there were proportionately fewer poor people in America. In Boston 7 percent of the populace was deemed poor, while 29 percent owned no taxable property, but in London and in Paris the figures were twice that, a third of these cities’ populations being deemed poor and an additional third hovering on the edge of poverty.
Still, America had plenty of poor people. The truly impoverished included the half million black slaves and a quarter of all whites, those who possessed little or no property and had only enough food to prevent starvation. Then there were the working poor, such as sailors and fishermen who were seldom on land, dockworkers who lived in rented barracks, and itinerant laborers who had no income when the weather shut down their work. Yet the lives of America’s poor were closer in character to the lives of their richer neighbors than were those of the European poor to the château dwellers along the Loire and the Rhine. In New Jersey the wealthiest 10 percent of the populace held six times the amount of property as the lowest 10 percent, but in Europe that ratio was forty times as much. Significant wealth in America was in the hands of about fifteen thousand out of three million people—that is, given an average family size of five, in the hands of three thousand wealthy men—the 1 percent of that era.
The biggest gulf in wealth in America was between the coastal cities, which contained nearly all the wealthy colonists, and the vast interior sections, where 90 percent of the populace lived and were poorer—although they were not as poor as American mythmaking has characterized them. The majority of American rural residents engaged in subsistence-plus farming, a term that does not mean existing on the edge of poverty but rather farming that produces enough for the resident family plus a bit more that can be sold or bartered. In northern areas, the surplus was 16 percent more than subsistence, and in southern ones, 30 percent more because slaves did the labor. And as a scholar of the period writes, except in the South the surplus “was based to a great extent on the ability of women in the household” to produce it. In the Northeast that meant dairy production, and in the Mid-Atlantic, spinning and weaving. Since rural communities lacked currency with which to make transactions, surplus could not be turned into cash; instead it was manufactured into goods for barter. That system was so advanced that in a western Massachusetts hamlet on the eve of the Revolution, regularly bartered products included rye, corn, flaxseed, lambskins, firewood, shoe-leather, butter, straw hats, shingles, hemlock boards, soap, cider, vinegar, cheese, oats, mutton, beans, tallow, lard, veal, flour, and honey.
Copyright © 2019 by Tom Shachtman
