I WILL BEGIN my short historical survey of the origins of the American War with a single short sentiment that was freely and continually expressed by all classes and conditions of our people both civil and military, and on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, throughout the conflict: that it was ‘a damned business, a very damned ugly business’. Yet I must in honesty add that, though the losses in lives and treasure that it entailed were in every way to be heartily regretted, yet the separation between the Crown and the Colonies must in the nature of things have come about at some time or other, and perhaps it was as well that it came when it did.
America, in her relation to Great Britain, was frequently presented at this time as a froward child who defied an indulgent parent. This figure was, however, in no sense apt: for America as a single consentient nation did not yet exist, and the diverse American provinces had each in turn finished with tutelage and put on the manly gown.
Now, there is nothing so absurd and so uncomfortable as when grown sons with families of their own are obliged from filial duty to stay under a father’s roof, to keep fixed hours, conform to quaint usages, and draw pocket-money instead of wages for whatever labour they perform on his estate. It galls their pride and retards their ambition. The old patriarch may tell them: ‘My sons, surely you are tolerably well off here? You can want for nothing in food, drink, clothing, or other comforts. I allow you each a wing of my mansion to yourself. I pay the tithes and the taxes on your behalf. There is sport enough in my coverts, and the labour that I require of you is light. The authority of my name is sufficient to protect you against all insult and danger. Where else in the world would you and your families find yourselves so well off as here, in this spacious and well-provided mansion? Are you so ungrateful then? Or what more can you want of me that I do not do? What restraint have I ever set upon you? I even – an unheard-of thing – have excused your attendance at family prayers. No, no! Be careful that you do not try my patience, my boys. And see, now it is past ten o’clock. Drink up your quart pots, kiss your mother, and off to bed you go with your wives, and pray let us have no more arguments.’
The sons have no answer to make, unless a low muttering that ‘every grown man has the right to live where and how he pleases, in independence.’ If they are men of spirit as their father is, sure as fate it will come to a quarrel in the end. This quarrel will blow out of some trifling domestic occurrence and the sons will perhaps have a poor enough case to present to the world. But they will push it to extremes, well knowing that the father must grow exasperated and stand on his authority when he finds that they are deaf to reason. For they fear that, unless they force the issue, they will become confirmed in their dull habit of dependence upon him, and forfeit all dignity of manhood. Their trouble is that a profound admiration for their father makes rebellion alike more difficult and more painful.
It is easy to be wise after the event. For my part I think that where quarrels are due they had best come soon. ‘Bear and forbear’ is an impossible counsel of domestic perfection. For a certain sort of son, complete independence is the only cure of his moods. Left to himself he will come, in time, to be a polished, respectable citizen of the world, and on civil terms with his father again.
So we come to the quarrel between the Crown and the American colonies. It may be objected that I cannot but be partial in judging the rights and wrongs of this case, seeing that seven of the middle years of my life were spent in America as a loyal soldier of King George after he had quarrelled with his revolted subjects. But I had cause to feel both respect and affection for the better people of America during those seven years, and would not therefore be willingly guilty of making any misrepresentation or suppression of fact that would aggravate an already bitter case. I may observe that I have in my time read a great number of American newspapers and pamphlets – printed in the war years on blue, yellow, brown, and black paper for lack of white – and listened to a large number of political conversations during the year and a half of captivity that I spent among them, and consulted numerous books since published in the United States. Especially I shall beware of sneers and airs of affected superiority as a Briton, in telling my tale. But where things were ill done on the American side I shall be no more ready to conceal them, from false delicacy, than if they had been done on ours.
To begin, then: the people of the colonies planted in North America enjoyed almost every privilege and liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects at home, and were indeed by the various Royal Charters permitted to govern themselves by whatever laws, however odd, that it might please their provincial assemblies to frame – and many of them were mighty odd to our British way of thinking – so long as they did not conclude treaties with a foreign power. The allegiance that the colonists, or all but those of Massachusetts, gave the Crown for two centuries was spontaneous and unquestioning; and the whole American people, you may say roundly, thought it no more than justice that in return for the armed protection afforded their country by the British Army and Fleet, and for the monopoly of tobacco-manufacture, certain trade advantages should be required from them. The English, for example, prohibited the colonists, as they prohibited the Irish, to manufacture various goods in competition with themselves, or to purchase directly from foreign nations certain articles of commerce: England was to remain the sole provider and carrier as she had been at the first.
If any American thought that this bargain was unjust, he could find satisfaction in the thought that on his side it was being persistently evaded. England’s claim to engross American trade had not been enforced for a century; there was smuggling done on a vast scale along the whole of the American sea-board. Nor could it be reckoned a hardship that the competition of American manufacturers with the English should be restricted. There were a few small manufactories in the villages of New England that kept hands busy in the long winter months and filled the pedlar’s pack; but these were not provided against by the Acts of Trade. Nor were great manufactures for export in the English style ever seriously considered in America. In the first place, the success of such an enterprise must depend on there being a great number of poor people to do the work for small wages and long hours; but in those fortunate colonies there were (and still are) no industrious but unfortunate poor. Where land is cheap and rich, every man of energy who will work with his own hands can soon make an independency for himself as a farmer. Hired labourers or servants are therefore impossible to find but at very big wages; and the few there are know their value so well that the master must treat them most respectfully and indulgently, or down go their tools, on go their hats, and good-bye! As for slave labour, that could only be applied profitably to the raising and manufacture of tobacco in the Southern colonies. In the Northern ones, the severer climate made the clothing, housing, and feeding of negroes too great a charge on their masters, so that there were few black faces seen north of Maryland. These Acts of Trade had been in force for a century now, and acquiesced in as legally binding upon the colonies.
How was it, then, that the quarrel grew? The paradox that I have drawn above in the case of the restless sons and the patriarchal father holds here: that the quarrel proceeded from an increase rather than a diminution of admiration for Britain on the part of the colonies. One may not call it jealousy, for no American was ever guilty of so servile an emotion, but it was at least keen emulation – a desire to do deeds worthy of their blood, for which they would gain the credit in their own name, not merely as sons and allies of Great Britain.
The Americans were in general exceedingly proud of their British descent, and the name of an Englishman gave them an idea of all that was great and estimable in human nature: by comparison they regarded the rest of the world as little short of barbarian. By a succession of the most brilliant victories by sea and land – for which the bells rang and the people cheered as loudly in America as anywhere – Great Britain had recently subdued the united powers of France and Spain, the former nation outnumbering her in population by nearly four times, and the latter by three, and acquired possession of a vast extent of territory in both the Indies.
Since the contest with France had arisen on their account in 1757 and the Peace of 1763, by securing Canada to the British Crown, had freed the colonists from all fear of their ambitious French neighbours, they might well have been expected to add gratitude to respect. But gratitude is spontaneous and not forced, and the English were not always so considerate of the feelings of the freedom-loving American that this generous emotion was stirred.
It is certainly not true, as Dr Benjamin Franklin pretended, that ‘Every man in England seemed to consider himself as a piece of a Sovereign over America, seemed to jostle himself into the Throne with the King, and talked of Our Subjects in the Colonies.’ But certainly British soldiers would sometimes recall with too great satisfaction that, though a great number of Americans had fought alongside the English in these campaigns, it was only as skirmishers and auxiliaries: there being no American regiments of the line who could successfully oppose the trained forces of the French and Spanish in pitched battle or siege. Some even accused the Americans of cowardice; and there were stories current in the London clubs of a deprecatory and fantastic sort, of which the following will serve as an example. That at the siege of Louisburg, twenty years previously, the Americans placed in the van had run away without firing a shot; and that Sir Peter Warren, the British commander, had then posted them in the rear, assuring them that it was ‘the custom of generals to preserve their best troops to the last; especially among the ancient Romans, the only nation that ever resembled the Americans in courage and patriotism’.
Now, the French being gone from Canada, the colonists felt less dependent upon the British than ever before. They believed that they could treat the former savage allies of the French – the Ottawa, Wyandot, and Algonquin Indians – with contempt; and that, because of the degeneracy of the Spanish nation, the Spanish posts in the Havana and New Orleans threatened little danger to themselves. Indeed, they counted themselves the unchallenged masters of the whole American continent and began to cherish large ideas of their coming greatness. My Uncle James, indeed, at the time when the peace terms were published in 1763 greatly lamented that Canada had now passed to the British Crown, for he said that with the removal of the French there would now be no check upon the ambitious and restless Americans; he would have favoured, instead, taking from the French the rich sugar island of Guadaloupe.
The American condition was, in truth, remarkably flourishing. Trade had prospered almost beyond belief in the midst of the distresses of a war in which they were so immediately concerned. They had paid themselves in two sorts of money: in English by supplying provisions to our troops, and in French by selling contraband to the enemy. Their population continued on the increase, despite the ravages and depredations of the French and Indians. They were a spirited, active, and inventive people, especially the residents of New England, and saw no limits to their future undertakings. As they entertained the highest opinion of their own value and importance and the immense benefit that the British derived from their connexion with America, they believed themselves entitled to every benefit and mark of respect that could be bestowed on them. And though, as I say, they were permitted to pass what laws they pleased for their own provincial government; though the Church of England exercised no authority over them; and though the existing arrangements of trade between themselves and Great Britain worked greatly to their advantage; they began to view the supremacy of the Crown with a suspicious eye.
So it was that the old game of befooling and thwarting the King’s representatives – the regal Governors of the colonies – was taken up with increased zest by many of the Colonial Assemblies, especially in the North. This they were in a position to do, though the Governor had the power of absolute veto upon the laws that the Assemblies would pass, for they held the purse-strings. Unless he assented to their measures they would withhold his salary. There was always great mistrust between the Governor and the Legislature, even when a compromise seemed desirable. The Governors would not pass the laws that were wanted, without being sure of the money, nor the Assemblies give the money, without being sure that the laws would be allowed. The rather indecent bargain-and-sale proceedings that ensued were the rule rather than the exception.
These Governors were accused of being idle and haughty persons and of bringing in their trains a set of worthless rascals who paid their debts with the perquisites of office and gave the colonies nothing of value in return. That we in Great Britain cheerfully bore with the very same concomitants of monarchy did not concern the Americans. My jailers during my captivity were never weary of telling me that their fathers had left the Old World to escape from these monstrous inequalities of fortune and station there prevalent, which they would not allow to be foisted on them in the New. Certainly, America had served for several reigns as a wilderness into which to banish all the factious people who would not conform peaceably to established religious practice – Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Papists – the liberality of the early provincial charters having been baits to these troublesome folk to emigrate. But that some at least of their parents had come over, not of their own free will, but by order of a magistrate and in chains, I was always too delicate or too cautious to observe. (True it is, that in the sixty years preceding the Revolution no fewer than forty thousand felons had been transported to America from Great Britain, besides a number of persons kidnapped by the ‘spirits’ of the seaport towns and conveyed there against their wills to be sold on arrival as ‘redemptioners’.)
A deal of loose talk was current in the Northern States about the New World’s natural superiority in grandeur to the Old. Dimensions were compared, always favourably to America. Beside the wide Hudson’s River, or the wider St Lawrence, the Severn was no more than a creek and the Thames a poor ditch; the biggest forest in England would seem no more than a coppice if set beside those of the northwestern parts of America; and how many times would the whole United Kingdom fit into the space of a single one of the greater colonies? ‘A dwarf claiming sovereignty over a giant,’ they said in Boston – Boston being the original seminary of all American malcontents and revolutionaries. Calculations were made as to how soon the population of the American colonies, which doubled itself every thirty years by natural increase, would overtake that of England: this time was expected to be reached about the year 1810. Then how foolish a case that would be, with a great and vigorous nation forced to bow to the superior wisdom of a smaller and weaker, that lived three thousand miles away!
So we come to the hullabaloo raised in America after the Peace of 1763. Then, since the national debt of Great Britain had been much increased by the expenses of the war and a multitude of extraordinary taxes were now being levied at home, as upon window-panes and wagon-wheels, it was thought equitable that Americans should contribute a trifle to the common stock, in the interests of their own security from invasion. Duties were therefore laid on all articles imported into the colonies from the French and other islands of the West Indies, the amounts to be paid in specie to the Exchequer of Great Britain. The colonists warmly remonstrated, asserting that they had hitherto furnished their contingent in men and money by the vote of their Colonial Assemblies; and that the British Parliament, in which they were not represented, had no right to tax them further. No attention was paid to these complaints, and they soon retaliated by forming associations to prevent the use of British manufactures until they should obtain redress.
This agitation was still in progress when the Red Indian, Pontiac, secretly knit up a confederacy of those Northern tribes who had formerly favoured the French, to which were added those of the West who wished for revenge, as having been dispossessed of their hunting-grounds by the sturdy and ruthless American backwoodsmen. Pontiac and his allies made a simultaneous attack upon our weak border posts in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, and took scalps of nearly every one of the defenders. Lord Jeffery Amherst, who commanded our forces in America, found himself woefully short of troops: for after the Peace a quantity of British regiments had been disbanded and the few still stationed in America had fallen very low in strength. There had been costly expeditions sent to the Havana and Martinique, where the fever took off thousands of poor fellows. The Indians therefore were able to continue their ravages upon the borders of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, with increasing boldness and violence. Yet when Lord Amherst appealed to each of the colonies for local levies to assist him in his march against Pontiac’s main forces, he met with a shabby enough response from almost every Assembly.
Partly it was that Lord Amherst, who soon resigned his command in disgust and sailed home, was held like the rest of our officers in America to have too haughty a way with the provincials. In the Canadian campaign he had seldom or never called the American colonels to a council of war, so that they knew no more of what was afoot than their own sergeants. Partly it was that a long-standing suspicion and jealousy existed between the colonies; so that if one colony held back from contributing to the common interest, the others felt no obligation to be any more active. But the chief reason why the provincials in general were so lukewarm was that they regarded soldiering as an unprofitable occupation in these roaring times and best left to the English, should they be martial-minded enough to undertake it. The provinces of Massachusetts and Connecticut made conditions which amounted to a refusal; Rhode Island did not deign to reply; New Hampshire excused herself; Pennsylvania would not send a single man; New York and New Jersey voted a mere thousand men between them – but two-thirds of these might not pass across their borders; Virginia had already sent men to her own frontier and could spare no more, so the Assembly pleaded.
It was two years before Pontiac’s power was broken. By this time the colonies had grudgingly raised between them something better than two thousand men (of whom three hundred immediately deserted) to accompany the British punitive expedition. The most useful fighters were a few score of frontiersmen from Virginia; but the Virginian Assembly refused to pay their expenses and tried to fasten the cost personally upon the Colonel of the Sixtieth Regiment with whom they had marched. The King’s men bore the chief brunt, and won, unsupported, the only pitched battle of this Indian war, that of Bushy Run. They felt more than a little resentment when they recalled that in the days of greatest peril to the colonies sixty invalids of Montgomery’s Highlanders had to be dragged from hospital and conveyed in carts to the weakly-held frontier forts – because free-born Americans refused to make the war any concern of theirs.
Now for the famous Stamp Act. It seemed clear enough that, if left to their own resources, the colonies would be unable to agree upon secure measures of defence against depredations of Indians in their rear, or possible naval raids of French or Spanish upon their front and flanks. Fifteen thousand men was reckoned by the King’s military advisers to be the lowest figure necessary for the protection of his possessions from Hudson’s Bay to the West India Islands, and it seemed reasonable that the colonies should pay a part at least of the maintenance of these troops, having been such great gainers from the late war.
The new First Lord of the Treasury, therefore, Mr George Grenville, began considering ways and means. He consulted first with the London agents of the various Colonial Assemblies. He pointed out to them that the Acts of Trade and Navigation were being consistently evaded by the Americans. Even with the addition of the new duties, against which such indignant protests were being raised, the amount of revenue brought in did not pay one-third the cost of its collection! Would not the Colonial Assemblies, since these new duties displeased them, suggest an alternative method of raising money for American defence? But no answer came.
It may be noted that the famous Dr Benjamin Franklin, agent for Pennsylvania, then privately approved the quartering of British troops in the colonies as a reasonable measure, and as a security not only against foreign invasion but intestine disorder – for armed conflict between the various colonies, in disputes over land, was always threatening. The generality of Americans, however, held that, since no immediate danger seemed to hang over America, and since they had supplied several militia regiments in the late war, for the expulsion of the French from Canada, their obligations were now at an end. It was also held unjust that their militia officers, however extensive their experience of war might be, still ranked junior to the rawest officer from England who held a commission from His Majesty. But the main impediment to a favourable reply, when Mr Grenville raised this question, was that no two American Colonial Assemblies were ever known to agree, and therefore it would have been impossible, even had the principle of contribution been admitted, to fix the proportions of money that each colony should pay into the common fund for American defence.
The Government then, since the agents did not answer, saw no other alternative but to enforce the Trade and Navigation Acts by a tightening of the preventive system, to pass a Bill for the quartering of troops in America, and to pay the resultant expenses by new imposts in the form of stamp-duties. In the year 1765 the Quartering Act and its more famous companion, the Stamp Act, were passed.
The Stamp Act provided for the annual raising of £100,000, the whole of which was to be spent in America for defraying the costs of that country’s defence. Since the population of America was something above two millions all told – exclusive of negroes and Indians – this amounted to a monthly charge of less than one penny a head. Yet what a howl went up! The loudest mouthed and most energetic dissentients in America were always to be found in Boston and the province of Massachusetts generally. The people of Massachusetts had once enjoyed a far more liberal charter than the present, but it had been withdrawn from them for their frequent defiance of the Crown, and their intolerant killing, whipping, and jailing of harmless Baptists and still more harmless Quakers. Massachusetts was a very litigious province as well, and the numerous irregular lawyers of Boston, who were demagogues to a man, chanced to be hurt in the pocket by this Act: for the new stamp-duties were (as had long been the case in England) applied not only to newspapers, pamphlets, playing cards, and dice but to all legal documents, nor might any but the regular lawyers now ratify documents with the stamps.
These lawyers roused the town mob to the most striking demonstrations of displeasure. On the limb of a large tree, as one came into Boston from the country, were hung two effigies, one designed for the Stamp Master and the other for a jack-boot, with a head and horns peeping out at the top. Great numbers of enthusiasts, both from town and country, flocked to see it. In the evening these poor, foolish effigies were cut down and carried in procession with shouts of, ‘Liberty and Property for Ever. No Stamps!’ But what became of them after, I do not know. The mob went next to the house of Mr Oliver, the Chief Justice of the colony, beheaded him in effigy, broke his windows and burned down a new building of his which lay adjacent. A few days later they also broke the windows of the Deputy Registrar of the Court of Admiralty, and entering into his house destroyed his official books and papers and much of his furniture. They served the Comptroller of Customs similarly, and drank his cellar dry in addition. As for the Governor himself, Mr Hutchinson, they wholly wrecked his mansion and not only carried off from it all his plate, furniture, and clothing, but scattered or destroyed the collection of historical documents that he had been thirty years at making. These mobs consisted, not of people of substance, but of a rabble who were as unqualified to vote in their provincial assemblies as the lawyers who stirred them up now were to discharge their assumed profession. They were, in fact, the forerunners and exemplars of the Sans-culotterie who, guided by a similar school of lawyers, were the smoke and flame of the subsequent Revolution in France.
The mobs of the other colonies did not lag far behind Boston in their excesses. At Newport in Rhode Island they burned the houses of two gentlemen who had in conversation supported the right of Parliament to tax the Americans. In Maryland the effigy of the Stamp Master, on one side of which was written ‘Tyranny’, on the other ‘Oppression’, and across the breast, ‘Damn my Country, I’ll get Money’, was carried through the streets from the jail to the whipping-post and from thence to the pillory. After suffering many indignities, this effigy was first hanged and then burned. Similar outrages and frolics took place in New York and Connecticut. On the day that the Act became law there were mock-funerals of Liberty in several towns, church bells tolled mournfully, minute-guns were fired and flags flew at half-mast.
Nor had the mob alone been the instrument of colonial discontent. The respectable General Assembly of Virginia had passed resolutions strongly protesting against the right of England to lay taxes on America. Of this Assembly, the famous George Washington was a member and a zealous speaker on the text: ‘No taxation without representation.’ But the boldness and novelty of these resolutions, when they were first presented to the Assembly, affected Mr Randolph, the Speaker, to such a degree that he struck upon the table with his gavel and cried out, ‘Treason! Treason!’
It may be thought remarkable that the Virginians, who were the most aristocratic people of America, should have allied themselves with the libertarians of Boston in this protest against taxation. It would indeed have been remarkable, had the flourishing condition continued in which the province found herself when the war ended: for revolution is never made by affluent men. But peace commonly brings unemployment, as the energies that were devoted to destruction are relaxed and cannot at once be converted to constructive ends. Money is scarce, trade stagnates, merchants fail to meet their obligations and men tramp the country in search of employment that is nowhere to be had. All this took place after the Peace of 1763. The prosperity of Virginia was so closely linked to that of England that there were many bankruptcies among the planters; for the London market being glutted with tobacco, which few could afford to smoke or chew, the price of that commodity had fallen alarmingly. The employer of free labour has this advantage over a slave-owner, that he can at least turn his workmen adrift in difficult times: whereas the slave-owner must either house and feed his or sell them in a falling market.
Another cause of great discontent in Virginia and the South in general was that the planters did not receive a proper return for their crop even in the best of times: with British profits, charges for freight, commissions and taxes, the price of British goods sent to America in exchange for tobacco was, it was said, six times their real value. George Washington was just such a planter who had fallen into difficulties from these complicated causes: however, by a rich marriage he was protected against utter ruin. He was also one who, though a Colonel of Militia, and a soldier of experience in the Indian wars, had taken it ill that as an American he could not be granted a higher rank in the British Army than that of Captain, and had quitted the Service in a huff. To a man of his condition the Government’s choice of such a time to tax America for the purposes of quartering an army on her soil was, of course, most offensive.
On the matter of taxation and representation the British Government took the following view: owing to the preservation without change of our ancient electoral system, certain decayed Cornish boroughs, for example, of a few houses apiece, still return forty-two members to Parliament between them – while great new cities, such as Birmingham and Manchester, have no members at all. Yet Birmingham and Manchester are virtually, it was held, represented by their manufacturers whose interest controls votes in other boroughs; and it was the same with the American merchants, who were indirectly a great power in the British Parliament. Why should Boston and Philadelphia be more tenderly treated than Birmingham and Manchester, cities of rather greater size than themselves?
To which the common American replied: that if the men of Birmingham and Manchester wished to live as slaves, that was their own affair: it did not suit the free populations of America.
To which the answer came again: ‘If you would be free, then take concerted measures for your own defence, tax yourselves as you were first requested through your agents – do not burden Great Britain with the business. There can be no more proper a time than now for this mother-country to leave off feeding out of her own vitals the children whom she has nursed up. For, by your own showing, they are arrived at such maturity as to be well able to provide for themselves.’
But the Americans: ‘The supposed danger does not exist, or is much exaggerated: if the French or Spanish invade our country we will turn them out easily enough, we reckon, and without your aid.’ The hotter-mouthed among them cried, ‘We want none of your lazy, foul-mouthed soldiery, hirelings of oppression, quartered upon us, nor of your arrogant, evil-living officers, instruments of a tyranny worse than death itself.’
Mr Pitt the Elder, who had ruled England in the glorious days of the French wars, was now out of office, suffering from a suppressed but deep-seated gout. This affection prevented him from making any great parliamentary exertions, and was even generally agreed to have impaired his powers of reason, though diminishing little from his fluency as an orator. At the third reading of the Stamp Bill he had warmly taken up the cudgels for the Americans, while tolerantly deprecating the turbulence of the Boston mob. His speech, spoken with great animation, paid witness rather to his continued warmth of heart than to his continued sagacity as a statesman. He declared that he rejoiced that America had resisted the despotic threat to her liberty which this Bill conveyed. Yet he did not suggest by what alternative means the necessary fund for America’s defence was to be raised. Nor would he explain in what sense the old-established Acts of Trade, one or two of which he had himself sponsored, were any less despotic in intention than this Stamp Bill – unless it was that they were more easily evaded by the lawless American people than this might prove to be.
The irony of the situation lay in this: that the American boast, to be able to defeat the French and Spanish armies if they invaded the colonies, was taken seriously neither by the British nor by the Americans themselves. Yet it now appears evident that it could have been made good, to judge by the fearful mauling that our armies encountered at their hands when we attempted the same thing.
The Stamp Act was soon repealed, in consequence of a petition to the King and to the Houses of Lords and Commons by a Continental Congress: to which novel institution all the American colonies sent representatives. That the petition was granted was, some will say, evident proof that virtual representation in our Parliament was more effective than the actual representation of any English city. Had Old York or Old Boston shown such ill temper over the stamp-duties as their namesakes across the Ocean had done, it would have been a matter for the constabulary and armed forces to settle without delay, nor would any Mr Pitt have pleaded for indulgence towards them.
The withdrawal of the Stamp Act was presented as a pure act of royal benevolence, and a Declaratory Act was at the same time passed, maintaining the authority of the British Parliament over the colonies, without any reserve.
Yet the mischief was now done, for where England had yielded once she might be expected to yield again. The problem of finding funds for the defence of America and of the West India Islands, on which the colonies were dependent for a great part of their trade, remained unsettled. Mr Pitt became the Earl of Chatham, accepted power for a while, grew worse of the gout and being unable to attend to colonial affairs, left his Chancellor of the Exchequer to act as he pleased in the matter. Now, the compromise tacitly agreed upon between England and America, at the close of the Stamp Act dispute, was that Parliament would refrain at least from imposing internal taxation, which was to be left to the Colonial Assemblies to manage, stamp-duties being counted as internalities. To the principle of external taxation, in the sense covered by the Trade Acts, the colonists gave a grudging consent; though to be sure, as an Irish Member of Parliament put it, there seemed but little difference in effect, whether money was to be taken from the coat-pocket or the waistcoat-pocket. This Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Townshend, therefore felt himself at liberty to crack on whatever external duties he pleased, and on various goods, among them tea, that had hitherto passed free of tax. Nor was the expected increase in revenue to be devoted to the quartering of troops in America, but to a fund for the regular payment of colonial governors and judges. Mr Townshend very properly explained to Parliament that in a country where lawlessness abounded and justice was often a matter of favour, the persons in chief legal authority must now be raised above the temptation to venality. But to the Americans it seemed that these fees were a bribe to the Governors and judges to settle all questions to the advantage of the King’s friends. The associations formed to refuse English imported goods grew stronger than before, so that the value of such goods fell by a million pounds sterling in a single year. The mob grew still more turbulent, especially that of Boston and New England generally; and even the Loyalists began to think that America should now be treated with the former ‘salutary neglect’ that gave these low people no excuse for their outrages. To press for the payment of taxes which never could cover the cost of collection seemed like burning down a barn in order to roast an egg.