Chapter 2

Drumbeats of Dissension

As 1775 began, a great many British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic asked themselves, how had it come to this? What had led to such polarization? In truth, drumbeats of dissension had been increasing in intensity for more than a decade.

It was not lost on observers on both sides of the Atlantic that a principal impetus for the original British settlement of North America had been the flight of citizens from religious persecution by the British government. But in the century and a half since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, enlightened reforms by Britain’s monarchy and Parliament had mitigated much of that suffering, and swelling immigration and trade had made for strong ties between Great Britain and its colonies. There was no better evidence of this than the enthusiastic colonial participation in the war for empire so recently waged by Great Britain against France.

Called the Seven Years’ War in Europe, the struggle at times also involved Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Spain, but it was the Anglo-French phase in North America—there called the French and Indian War—that decided the fate of that continent. Thanks in no small measure to the sacrifices of British colonials—including a young George Washington—who ably fought for their mother country as well as for their own commercial interests, Great Britain expelled France from most of North America.

But it had been a costly affair in terms of finances as well as blood. With a scratch of a pen on the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Great Britain won an empire that stretched from Canada to the Caribbean and on to Africa, India, and the Philippines. The royal treasury was suddenly saddled with the expense of administering these acquisitions as well as retiring a staggering war debt. Great Britain chose to pay these costs in part by imposing a series of increasingly onerous financial burdens on its American colonies, because they were far and away the most economically developed of its new overseas empire.

Taxes to support Great Britain’s colonial administration and provincial infrastructure had long been a part of colonial life, but they had been levied by the legislative assemblies in each colony, which enjoyed some measure of representative government. Although a Crown-appointed royal governor presided over each province, voters—generally limited to white male property owners over the age of twenty-one—elected delegates to colonial legislatures to approve such business. As citizens of the British Empire and as royal subjects, these colonists considered themselves endowed with certain rights well established by Parliament—among them the right to representative government.

THE FIRST MAJOR DISRUPTION TO this harmony came when Parliament passed the American Duties Act of 1764. Known as the Sugar Act, it placed tariffs not only on sugar but also on coffee, wine, and other imports to the American colonies. Ominously to some, including Boston importer John Hancock, the act also called for aggressive new enforcement measures to end smuggling and collect all taxes due. Minor tariffs were previously not unknown—a sixpence-per-gallon tax had been imposed on foreign molasses as early as 1733—but this new resolve to enforce them was a different matter. “The publication of orders for the strict execution of the Molasses Act,” the royal governor of Massachusetts noted, “has caused a greater alarm in this country than the [French] taking of Fort William Henry did in 1757.”¹

Egregious as these new tariffs were to colonial importers and consumers alike, they arguably flowed from Parliament’s power to regulate commerce. When Parliament passed the Stamp Act the following year, it went a step further and levied a direct tax on the use of paper. Any paper in the American colonies, including newspapers, advertisements in newspapers, licenses, legal documents such as wills and powers of attorney, and a host of other printed matter—even playing cards—was required to have a revenue stamp affixed certifying that the appropriate tax had been paid. Colonial reaction was predictable.

In Virginia, Patrick Henry, a twenty-nine-year-old attorney just elected to the House of Burgesses, went so far as to suggest that only the Virginia legislature held the “sole exclusive Right and Power to lay taxes” within the province, and he refuted any measure of compliance with the act. In but a preview of the divisive debates to come, conservative members from Virginia’s Tidewater region were aghast at Henry’s insolence, while liberal delegates from the western reaches of the colony heartily applauded it. Years later, when Henry’s defiant words on another occasion stirred patriot souls, he would be misquoted with historical hindsight and hyperbole as having said, “If this be treason, make the most of it.”²

In Massachusetts, the legislature immediately called for representatives from the disgruntled colonies to coordinate a response to the Stamp Act. Twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies (New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia did not participate) met in New York City in mid-October of 1765. But what really got the attention of the British government was the outpouring of protests from a broad spectrum of the colonial population. Many not only signaled their refusal to buy stamps when the act became effective on November 1, they also boycotted British imports.

“What used to be the pride of the Americans?” Benjamin Franklin was asked when called before the House of Commons to testify on the Stamp Act and the resulting boycott. “To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain,” the best-known colonial in London replied evenly. “What is now their pride?” he was asked. “To wear their old clothes over again,” Franklin answered, “till they can make new ones.”³

Dr. Franklin was already well versed in such gamesmanship, but his reading of the underlying determination of certain colonials was sound. Before the year was out, lawyer John Adams confided to his diary that the powers in London “are determined to inforce the Act… [but] will find it a more obstinate War, than the Conquest of Canada and Louisiana.”⁴

William Smith Jr., another young lawyer and assemblyman in New York who helped draft petitions asking Parliament to reconsider the Stamp Act, was more blunt. He noted that by refusing even to consider the arguments of the New York petitions, Parliament could expect nothing “but discontent for a while, and in the end open opposition.” This single stroke, Smith maintained, “has lost Great Britain the affection of all her Colonies.”⁵

By the following spring, thanks in no small measure to a damning denouncement of the measure in the House of Commons by former prime minister William Pitt, Parliament grudgingly repealed the Stamp Act. But this did little to erase a lingering bitterness, especially in light of other tax burdens placed on the colonies. By 1768, in an effort to quell antitax demonstrations, British regulars began to be concentrated in key cities, including Boston. While there were many flare-ups over the next five years—physical as well as verbal—events reached an exclamation point on the dark, moonless night of December 16, 1773. The issue was tea, but not entirely the taxation of it.

TO GET AROUND ALMOST A decade of tariffs on tea, colonial merchants’ lucrative smuggling operations with the Dutch West Indies flourished. There were also many in the colonies who simply paid the tariff and quietly drank British tea. Then, in May of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, a statute that at its core was designed as a government bailout of the floundering British East India Company. The company had a surplus of tea, commodity prices were falling, and to prop up the entire operation, Parliament gave the company a monopoly on the tea trade in the colonies and also retained its threepence-per-pound tariff.

Truth be told, not much of substance changed. One could still buy smuggled Dutch tea on the black market or continue to buy English tea and pay the duty. But then the propagandists took over. The very fact that the East India Company now had a monopoly and was collecting a tariff for the government was evidence to some that Parliament was once again doing whatever it chose with no consideration of, let alone input from, the colonies.

What made the politically charged situation ironic was that, given the glut of tea in East India Company warehouses, prices actually came down. According to the late historian John C. Miller, “There seemed excellent prospect, therefore, that this cheap tea would ‘overcome all the Patriotism of an American’ and that the colonists would hail [Prime Minister] Lord North as one of the great benefactors of thirsty humanity.”⁶

Many colonists didn’t embrace that view, however, and for once, Boston lagged behind New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston in its outrage. Citizens leading the anti-tea charge in those cities included a strong faction of smugglers who stood to lose the most in profits should cheap tea glut the market. In New York and Philadelphia, East India Company ships laden with tea were eventually turned away amid threats of violence, and in Charleston, unloaded tea was left to rot in a warehouse for nonpayment of duties.⁷

In Boston by late October, the local consignees of the East India Company, who happened to include two sons of Massachusetts royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, took the offensive by pointing out the inconsistency of suddenly protesting the tea tax after years of paying it, particularly when colonists were still paying duties on sugar, molasses, and wine, “from which more than three quarter parts of the American Revenue has and always will arise.”⁸

As in Philadelphia and New York, those who shouted the loudest in opposition had distinct financial interests at stake. Boston importer John Hancock declared that if the Tea Act were not opposed, “We soon should have found our trade in the hands of foreigners [i.e., Englishmen]… nor would it have been strange, if, in a few years, a company in London should have purchased an exclusive right of trading to America.”⁹

For the better part of three weeks, Boston merchants wrestled with the question of whether East India Company tea on board three ships would be unloaded or returned to England. When Governor Hutchinson refused permission for the ships to sail out of port and ordered the tea unloaded, Samuel Adams announced to a public meeting on the evening of December 16 that “there was nothing else they could do to save their country.” There was, of course, more that could be done, and these were in fact code words for action. By midnight, thinly disguised “Indians,” encouraged if not actually led in person by Adams and Hancock—this has always been a matter of debate—were dumping tea into Boston Harbor. “This destruction of the Tea,” confided Samuel’s second cousin John Adams to his diary, “is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences.”¹⁰ It did.

NEWS OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY reached England on January 19, 1774. Lord North’s government and most in Parliament coalesced more strongly than ever around their long-sung theme: if the supremacy of the Crown and Parliament over affairs in America was not asserted, the government’s absolute control would be lost, and Great Britain might just as well abandon its colonies. This, of course, Lord North had no intention of doing.

Instead, Parliament passed a quartet of laws meant to punish the province of Massachusetts and enforce its proper subordination. Great Britain would call them by the shorthand term Coercive Acts, while to most colonials they were the Intolerable Acts—a difference far greater than semantic that showed the depth of the underlying divide.

The first of these acts, the Boston Port Act, closed the port of Boston to all meaningful commercial traffic, effectively shutting down most of the business of the seaport. Two administrative measures severely limited any semblance of local government in the province, even requiring royal approval to hold town meetings and designating royally appointed sheriffs to empanel juries. Finally, the Quartering Act of 1765, which required local authorities to provide provisions and housing for troops in public accommodations and empty buildings, was expanded to permit the quartering of troops in private dwellings. Now the Redcoats would not just march by, they would sit down to dinner with you.

Boston, whose direct act of the destruction of tea was being punished, recoiled, but so, too, did the other colonies. In Farmington, Connecticut, almost one thousand people gathered to resolve that “blocking up the port of Boston, is unjust, illegal, and oppressive; and that we, and every American, are sharers in the insults offered to the town of Boston.” Similar resolutions in Philadelphia decried the port closure as “unconstitutional; oppressive to the inhabitants of that town; [and] dangerous to the liberties of the British colonies.”¹¹

Virginia was not yet ready to shed blood in the defense of Massachusetts, but the House of Burgesses expressed “Apprehension of the great Dangers to be derived to British America, from the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston” and ordered a day of fasting and prayer. One of those delegates wrote to a neighbor later that summer from Mount Vernon. “For my own part,” said George Washington, “I shall not undertake to say where the line between Great Britain and the colonies should be drawn; but I am clearly of opinion, that one ought to be drawn, and our rights clearly ascertained.”¹²

THE FIRST CONCERTED STEP IN drawing that line came when delegates from all the colonies except distant Georgia convened in Philadelphia on Monday, September 5, 1774, for what came to be called the First Continental Congress. The date is not much celebrated by history, but it is nonetheless a landmark in the evolving cooperation between the individual colonies. “It is,” wrote delegate John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren’s husband, James, in anticipation, “to be a school of political prophets, I suppose, a nursery of American Statesmen.”¹³ Besides the Adams cousins and Robert Treat Paine from Massachusetts, the assembly included John Jay and Philip Livingston from New York, Joseph Galloway and John Dickinson from Pennsylvania, and George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry from Virginia.

Henry lost no time in making his voice heard, but, as with the Stamp Act debate almost a decade before, his sentiment was again a little premature—declaring a spirit of unification that most of the delegates did not yet share. “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders are no more,” Henry thundered. “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”¹⁴

Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania, for one, thought Samuel Adams and his cohorts were far too radical for their own good. If the assembly followed Adams’s star, the only acceptable destination would be independence. Galloway favored colonial representation in Parliament, but, recognizing that was a pipe dream, he promoted what would essentially be a second-tier Parliament in America. The colonial assemblies would elect its members, and while the individual colonies would oversee their internal affairs, this “Grand Council” would work with Parliament on matters affecting them all, including the contentious issue of taxation. In such a way, Galloway hoped to convince all but the most radical that “British sovereignty was compatible with colonial freedom” without the recourse of revolution.¹⁵

While the Congress debated these diverse ideas, there came to Philadelphia some rather startling news from Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which contained Boston. Though the Massachusetts legislature had been dissolved under the Intolerable Acts and no town meetings were allowed without royal assent, delegates had nevertheless met secretly and quite illegally in county conventions. The Suffolk assembly overwhelmingly approved a series of resolutions drafted by Joseph Warren, a doctor and member of Boston’s committee of correspondence. Collectively, the resolutions arrived in Philadelphia as “the Suffolk Resolves,” hand-delivered to the congress by messenger Paul Revere.

Invoking the reasons their forebears had left England for the New World in the first place, the men of Suffolk County minced no words from their first sentence on: “Whereas the power but not the justice, the vengeance but not the wisdom of Great Britain, which of old persecuted, scourged, and exiled our fugitive parents from their native shores, now pursues us, their guiltless children, with unrelenting severity.”¹⁶

Damning the Crown’s past heavy-handedness and the recent tyranny of the Intolerable Acts, the Suffolk Resolves also took Parliament to task for the just-passed Quebec Act, which many judged to be the final straw. On its face, the Quebec Act had very little to do with punishing an insolent Boston; only its timing and the reaction to it meant it would be lumped together with the Intolerable Acts in colonial minds. Designed by Parliament as an attempt to limit the spread of radicalism in the colonies, the Quebec Act tightened the noose around Boston and all the colonies.

In the aftermath of the French and Indian War, Parliament had passed the Proclamation of 1763, a document that drew a line roughly along the crest of the Appalachians and forbade permanent settlement west of it. The western boundaries of the existing colonies—many of which had been thought to extend westward to… well, no one was quite sure—were now given a finite demarcation, and British lands west of that line, just won from France, were designated a vast Indian reserve. Even hard-won Fort Duquesne, rechristened Fort Pitt and quickly morphing into Pittsburgh, was west of the line. The truth of the matter was that this settlement prohibition was rarely enforced, and for a decade it did little to deter men like George Washington and others who had land interests there.

But now the Quebec Act gave much of this vast reserve—all British land north of the Ohio River and westward to the Mississippi—to the province of Quebec. It and Nova Scotia were in fact Great Britain’s fourteenth and fifteenth colonies in North America. This destroyed the westward expansion schemes of the other thirteen colonies—but there was more. The Quebec Act restored French civil law in the province of Quebec and gave full tolerance to the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church. To British colonials the intent was clear: the recently vanquished French in Quebec were being treated better than they were.

Put in its most crude terms, a young Alexander Hamilton noted, “a superstitious, bigoted Canadian Papist, though ever so profligate, is now esteemed a better subject to our Gracious Sovereign George the Third, than a liberal, enlightened New England Dissenter, though ever so virtuous.”¹⁷

Some American propagandists conjured up ridiculous plots that had the pope dividing up the colonies, but the real threat was not in Rome. Rather, it lay along the borders with Quebec, where Frenchmen now appeared to be aligned with the British in London. In a debate in Parliament, Lord North readily acknowledged that if the king’s unruly colonies could not be brought to obedience by present forces, it was “a necessary measure to arm the Roman Catholics of Canada, and to employ them in that service.”¹⁸

The Intolerable Acts had been directed against Massachusetts, but now, by seeming to threaten the rights and religion of all colonies, the Quebec Act inadvertently went a long way toward unifying them. The protests of moderates like Joseph Galloway were swept aside and the full text of the Suffolk Resolves placed before the Continental Congress on September 17. The delegates voiced their support for the “firm and temperate conduct” of Massachusetts to date and approved the Suffolk Resolves as submitted. They trusted that the united efforts of the colonies would convey their convictions “of the unwise, unjust, and ruinous policy of the present administration” and encourage the introduction of “better men and wiser measures.”¹⁹

When John Adams heard the outcome of the vote, he was elated. “This Day convinces me,” he wrote in his diary, “that America will support Massachusetts or perish with her.”²⁰

MORE THAN MERELY VOICING MORAL support for Boston and Massachusetts, the First Continental Congress debated significant—some said drastic—action. As the colonies had learned from the Stamp Act crisis, there was power in unity of purpose and action, particularly if it struck a financial nerve. The question was whether or not the colonies would once again endorse the nonimportation of British goods and, if so, whether they would be able to enforce it.

The earlier boycott in response to the Stamp Act and other tariffs had largely run its course by 1770. Not only had the Stamp Act been repealed in 1766, merchants who honored the embargo had increasingly seen that it benefited the pockets of importers who ignored the ban without much regard for the cause of American freedom.

Now, however, the Continental Congress was determined to curry wide popular favor for a trio of agreements forbidding the importation of British goods, the exportation of colonial crops to the British Isles, and the consumption of British goods that might arrive in North America via whatever circuitous route an importer might devise. Measures supporting all three issues were passed in October of 1774 and came to be called the Continental Association. The ease with which the nonimportation and nonconsumption measures passed showed how quickly moderates such as Joseph Galloway had been overshadowed by the radical members of the assembly.

Indeed, one of the few controversies that arose during the drafting of the nonimportation agreement, which was to take effect December 1, 1774, was whether to include French wine imported via Great Britain. Madeira, higher in alcoholic content than French wine and available from Portugal’s Madeira Islands, saved the day. “I drank Madeira at a great Rate [instead of wine],” boasted John Adams, “and found no Inconvenience in it.”²¹

The exportation ban was more problematic because it affected the middle and southern colonies disproportionately. Major rice exports to Great Britain from South Carolina, for example, were far more important to that colony’s economy than lumber exports were to New England. Virginia had similar concerns when it came to the 1774 tobacco crop now curing for next year’s delivery. The delegates resolved this matter by postponing the implementation date of the nonexportation provision until September of 1775, after which most of that summer’s crops would have been shipped. When this still wasn’t good enough for South Carolina, rice was excluded from the exportation ban altogether.

As for enforcement, the delegates bypassed the suspect merchants and importers and asked the general populace to pledge itself to the nonconsumption agreement. If the citizenry united in not consuming British products, there would be little incentive for importers to break the nonimportation measures. Nonconsumption compliance would be “encouraged” by local committees of compliance. The irony to some was that these local committees, invariably spearheaded by the more radical among the populace, inspected importers’ bills of lading and merchants’ ledger books with a fervor that surpassed the most stringent methods of royal customs officers. Some rebel sympathizers and most of those loyal to Great Britain asked themselves what the difference was between being told what to do by Parliament and the Crown and being governed by the sweeping edicts of the First Continental Congress.²²

Loyalist Samuel Seabury, the Episcopal rector of a church in Westchester County, just north of New York, put it bluntly. Writing as A. W. Farmer, a pseudonym for “a Westchester farmer,” Seabury taunted his rural neighbors, exhorting them to “do as you please” in supporting local committees “chosen by half a dozen fools in your neighborhood,” but warned that if they opened their doors to such a mob, it would next be inspecting “your tea canisters, and molasses-jugs, and your wives’ and daughters’ petty-coats.”²³

But women could play an important role in determining whether the nonconsumption mandates succeeded or failed. While only a very few upper-class men wrote pamphlets and engaged in legislative debates, everyone—men and women—could join the political campaign against Great Britain by adjusting their eating, drinking, and sartorial habits. Since the choice of whether to boycott the marketplace and make or mend at home was largely domestic in nature, women were essential—perhaps even more than equal—partners in the rank and file’s support for the nonimportation and nonconsumption provisions. Christopher Gadsden, a leading merchant in Charleston, South Carolina, readily conceded that “without the assistance of our wives” it would be impossible for the boycott to succeed.²⁴ More than one woman may have thought that ironic as she listened to pleas for equality and freedom that did not extend to her.

HAVING PASSED A BOYCOTT OF trade with Great Britain, the First Continental Congress used its final days to delineate the rights of “the English Colonies in North America.” Voicing words and sentiments that would foreshadow future declarations, the delegates proclaimed they were “entitled to life, liberty, and property.” And they reminded their brethren across the Atlantic that “at the time of their emigration from the mother country, [our ancestors had been] entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects within the realm of England.”²⁵ How could Englishmen enjoy those rights while denying them to others of the common tree?

As to the anticipated reaction of Great Britain to these words, as well as to the boycott, there was little optimism. “I expect no redress, but, on the contrary, increased resentment and double vengeance,” John Adams remarked to Patrick Henry, showing him a letter to the Massachusetts delegation from a rebel leader in western Massachusetts. “We must fight. It is now or never, that we must assert our liberty,” Joseph Hawley had admonished Adams. “By God,” replied Henry, “I am of that man’s mind.”²⁶

Word that the Continental Congress had passed the Suffolk Resolves reached England in early November. Lord Dartmouth, Lord North’s stepbrother and Secretary of State for the Colonies, was beside himself. “If these Resolves of your people are to be depended on,” Dartmouth told exiled former Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, “they have declared War against us.” Dartmouth later wrote to General Gage, characterizing the situation in Massachusetts as one of “actual Revolt, and shew a Determination in the People to commit themselves at all Events to open Rebellion.”²⁷

George III seemed almost relieved. On November 18, 1774, the king wrote Lord North, “I am not sorry that the line of conduct seems now chalked out, which the enclosed dispatches thoroughly justify; the New England governments are in a state of rebellion, blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”²⁸ It was a rather bold statement, as in the colonies there were many who had yet to wish themselves independent.