Knollenberg Bernhard. Growth of the American Revolution: 1766-1775
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tion, the unlimited authority of Parliament to regulate, i.e., restrict, co-
lonial trade. But long before , some of the Whig leaders denied that
Parliament had authority to legislate in any way with respect to the col-
onies, and, in , the First Continental Congress challenged the ear-
lier Whig concession as to regulation of colonial trade by maintaining
that Parliament’s authority over colonial trade extended only to pass-
ing acts designed to benefit the empire as a whole, not to passing acts
designed to promote British interests at the expense of colonial.
The colonists’ change of position as to the extent of Parliament’s au-
thority to levy taxes for revenue on the colonies and to regulate colonial
trade is understandable. As will be seen in later chapters, the Whig
leaders were feeling their way toward a position on which they and their
followers were prepared to take a firm stand. But the failure to take this
stand at the very beginning of the controversy had the unfortunate con-
sequence of giving rise to, and confirming, the widespread fear in Great
Britain that Whig leaders in the colonies were aiming at complete in-
dependence from British rule.
This fear was in fact not well founded. The private correspondence,
as well as the public professions, of the Whig leaders evidence their
recognition until the eve of the Declaration of Independence in of
the authority of the Crown over the colonies in many important respects.
This included recognition of the Crown’s control over the colonies’ re-
lations with foreign nations; the authority of the Crown to use the col-
onies as a base for military operations against the colonial possessions
of France and Spain in America; to hear appeals from, and reverse on
points of law, the decision of colonial courts; and to disallow acts passed
by the Legislatures of all the royal colonies (including Virginia, Massa-
chusetts, and the Carolinas) and of Pennsylvania.*
This recognized right of the Crown to disallow all colonial laws
enabled the British government to enforce the extremely important
standing order of the Crown against the enactment of any law putting
inhabitants of the colonies “on a more advantageous footing than those
of this kingdom” or levying any duties “upon British shipping or upon
xli
* See Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, –
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). [B.W.S.]
the product or manufactures of Great Britain....”¹⁶ Though British
trade with foreign nations might be and often was severely discrimi-
nated against or even absolutely prohibited by foreign laws or decrees,
the ports and markets of the British colonies were always open to British
ships and products and on the most favorable terms.
If from the very beginning of the controversy the leaders of the co-
lonial Whigs had taken the stand they eventually took as to the very lim-
ited authority of Parliament and had stressed their clear-cut recogni-
tion of the authority of the Crown with respect to the matters described
above and the importance to Great Britain of this recognition, would a
rupture have been averted, at least for many years? Who can say?
In considering, as we are about to do, the proceedings in the thirteen
British North American colonies with which this book is chiefly con-
cerned, it is well to have in mind their great differences in population
and commensurate political influence.
The estimated population of these colonies (including areas in their
boundaries which later became separate states) in , as given in His-
torical Statistics of the United States was:
(chiefly slaves)
Virginia , ,
Massachusetts , ,
Pennsylvania , ,
Connecticut , ,
New York , ,
Maryland , ,
North Carolina , ,
New Jersey , ,
New Hampshire , ,
Rhode Island , ,
South Carolina , ,
Delaware , ,
Georgia , ,
To t a l ,, ,¹⁷
xlii
Chapters – deal chiefly with the provisions of acts of Parliament,
–, laying taxes for revenue on the colonies, imposing new re-
strictions on colonial trade, and providing for rigorous enforcement of
both the new and old restrictions, and with the opposition to these acts.¹⁸
With one exception, the other acts of Parliament contributing to co-
lonial discontent, described and discussed in these chapters, were rela-
tively unimportant. The exception was an Act of authorizing trial
in Great Britain of persons accused of destroying arsenals or dockyards
of the British government in the colonies or ships of the royal navy un-
der construction or repair there. Alarming in itself, this act was all the
more so because it intensified colonial fear that the British Government
might carry out its threat to transport colonists to Great Britain to be
tried there for treason under an ancient but not obsolete English act
of .
For a time, there was reason to hope that, despite the unresolved is-
sues over Parliament’s taxation of the colonies and the measures to
expand and rigorously enforce British restrictions on colonial trade, a
rupture would be avoided.
Repeal in of all the major Townshend Act duties, except the
duty on tea, ushered in a three-year period of relative calm. The strong
opposition of colonial Whigs to the Townshend Act had been inspired
chiefly by the fear that the act was intended primarily to establish a
precedent for levying heavier taxes in the future. By repealing most of
the duties imposed by that act and refraining from levying any other
taxes, Parliament largely allayed this fear.
Furthermore, most of the Whig leaders, as men of property and con-
servative instincts, had been alarmed by the violence incidental to the
colonial opposition to recent British measures and welcomed a restora-
tion of “law and order” so long as Parliament showed no sign of further
encroachment on colonial liberty.
Samuel Adams, who had succeeded James Otis as the leader of the
Whigs in Massachusetts, continued to agitate against British measures
endangering or seeming to endanger colonial liberties, but the tide was
against him.
There was a flare-up in over the Act of just cited and a pro-
posal to send to England for trial the participants in an attack in Rhode
xliii
Island waters on a British naval vessel, the Gaspee, stationed there. But
this blew over when a special commission of enquiry established by the
Crown failed to identify any of the culprits.
This respite was broken by the revival of the issue of colonial taxa-
tion through passage of the Tea Act of .
Chapters – deal chiefly with this act; the shipment of tea to the
colonies by the East India Company as authorized by the act; destruc-
tion of the tea shipped by the Company to Boston; the ensuing Boston
Port, Massachusetts Regulating, and other so-called “Intolerable Acts”
of ; and the sending of British troops from the British Isles to Boston
to help enforce the Boston Port and the Massachusetts Regulating Acts.
To understand the significance of the Tea Act of , the reader
must have in mind two earlier acts: an act of granting the British
East India Company the exclusive right to import tea into Great Britain
but providing that it could sell its tea only by public auction; and an act
of forbidding the importation of tea into the colonies from any
place but Great Britain.
The Tea Act of amended the Act of to authorize the Com-
pany, which was in financial difficulties, to export and sell tea on its own
account in the colonies. This, it was hoped, would help the Company
undersell foreign competitors, whose tea was smuggled on a vast scale
into the colonies, and at the same time enhance the yield from the Town-
shend Act duty on tea. (The Company could, of course, be counted on
to pay the duty on the tea imported by it into the colonies.)
The act was obnoxious to all colonial Whigs in principle because it
was evidently designed to make the Townshend Act duty on tea more
effective; and to colonial importers of tea, other than the fortunate few
chosen to act as the Company’s colonial agents, because the act threat-
ened to deprive them of a valuable article of trade. Mass meetings
were held in all four of the cities
—Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
and Charleston
—to which the Company was reported to be shipping
tea under the new dispensation, and pressure was put on the Com-
pany’s agents to resign their agencies.
Boston, where the agents had refused to resign, was the first port at
which a ship, the Dartmouth, carrying the Company’s tea, arrived. The
local agents did not dare unload or pay duty on the tea; however, after
xliv
twenty days from the arrival of the tea it would be seizable by the local
British customs officers to secure payment of duty. To prevent this, a
body of men disguised as Indians, two days before the tea on the Dart-
mouth became seizable for non-payment of duty, boarded the ship and
other later arrived ships carrying the Company’s tea, and threw the tea
overboard.
In the light of developments at Boston, opponents of the landing of
the tea in Philadelphia and New York managed to have the tea destined
for these cities sent away without payment of duty. Charleston permit-
ted landing of the tea on condition that the tea would not be sold until
receipt of further word from the Company.
Soon after news reached England of the destruction of the tea at
Boston, Parliament, under the leadership of Lord North, passed the
first of the so-called Intolerable Acts of . This was the Boston Port
Act, prohibiting any ship, except government vessels and coasting ves-
sels carrying food and fuel to supply the local inhabitants, to enter or
leave the port of Boston.
The act was to take effect June , , and remain in force until the
King and Privy Council were satisfied on two points. Payment must be
made by, or on behalf of, the inhabitants of the town for the damage sus-
tained by the East India Company and for losses sustained by others in
riots in Boston arising out of opposition to the landing of the tea. Fur-
thermore, proof must be given that “obedience to the laws shall be so
far restored in the said town of Boston that the trade of Great Britain
may be safely carried on there and his Majesty’s customs duly collected.”
This act was followed by a second, even more alarming, act, the
Massachusetts Regulating Act.
This act annulled clauses of the Massachusetts charter relating to
the provincial Council (the Upper House of the Legislature and the
Crown-appointed Governor’s advisors) and of an important, long-
established Massachusetts law relating to town meetings.
The Massachusetts charter provided for the election of the Council
and also subjected the Governor’s appointment and removal of judges
and sheriffs to the approval of this elected Council. The Massachusetts
Regulating Act provided for appointment of the Council by the Crown
and gave the Governor unrestricted power to appoint and remove
xlv
judges and sheriffs subject solely to the proviso that judges of the Mas-
sachusetts Superior Court could be dismissed only with the approval of
the King.
A Massachusetts law of authorized the popularly elected town
selectmen to call a meeting for business “of publick concernment to the
town” at any time. The Regulating Act prohibited them from calling
more than one town meeting a year without the Governor’s consent.
In , Parliament passed several other so-called “Intolerable Acts”
relating to the colonies, of which the most disturbing was the Quebec
Act, confirming a form of government for the Province of Quebec that
included no elected Assembly and greatly extending the boundaries of
the province thus constituted.
To understand the extreme alarm not only in Massachusetts but
throughout the thirteen colonies to the Massachusetts Regulating Act,
the reader must have in mind the long-established system of govern-
ment in all the older British colonies in North America.
The non-charter colonies, including New Hampshire, New York,
New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia,
had a Legislature consisting of a Crown-appointed Governor and Coun-
cil and an elected Assembly. Bills having passed both the Assembly and
Council were subject, in most of the colonies, to absolute veto by the
Governor and even if consented to by him were subject to disallowance
by the Privy Council (the King in Council) in England. But, once an act
was approved by the Privy Council, it could not be repealed or amended
except through a new law passed by the same process as the existing law.
Under this system, the colonists had, over the years
—one hundred
fifty in Virginia
—built up a body of laws covering matters of basic im-
portance to their inhabitants which they had thought were secure from
any change
—except on the initiation of their own Legislatures.
Thus, in passing the Massachusetts Regulating Act, Parliament
struck a blow at the very foundation of their government as understood
by the colonists. If Parliament could strike down an act of Massachu-
setts of over eighty-years’ standing as to town meetings and replace it by
a more restrictive provision, it could and might strike down any exist-
ing act of any of the colonies and replace it by some other provision, no
matter how odious to the people of the colony.
xlvi
As Franklin said in March, , to an influential English acquain-
tance with whom he was trying to find a basis for peaceful settlement,
any British proposal that failed to provide for immediate repeal of the
Massachusetts Regulating Act was unthinkable. This act, he pointed
out, “set us all adrift, and left us without a privilege we could depend
upon, but at their [Parliament’s] Pleasure.”¹⁹
The fears aroused by this and the other Intolerable Acts were in-
tensified by the Crown’s appointment of the Commander-in-Chief of
the British troops in North America, General Thomas Gage, as Gov-
ernor of Massachusetts and the sending of troops to Boston to help
Gage enforce the acts he was called upon to execute.
These troops, together with a regiment already stationed at Castle
William near Boston, gave the new Governor a force of nearly thirty-
five hundred men in and near Boston.
At its first session following receipt of news of the Boston Port Act,
the Massachusetts House of Representatives appealed to the Assem-
blies of the other twelve colonies to send delegates to an intercolonial
congress to meet at Philadelphia in September. All the colonies except
Georgia responded in one way or another to the appeal.
Chapters – describe the convening of this congress, the so-
called First Continental Congress, and the measures adopted by it to se-
cure redress of colonial grievances.
The Congress, sitting in Philadelphia from September to Octo-
ber , , adopted many important measures, of which the so-called
Association was crucial.
The Association, signed by nearly all fifty-six delegates to the Con-
gress, called for a boycott of commerce with Great Britain and Ireland
and a partial boycott of commerce with the British West Indies until the
following colonial demands were met:
Repeal of all acts of Parliament passed since levying duties for
revenue on colonial imports.
Repeal of all acts extending the jurisdiction of colonial admiralty
courts, sitting without jury, beyond their ancient limits, authorizing co-
lonial admiralty judges to issue certificates of probable cause for seizure,
thereby depriving persons injured by illegal seizure of their property of
damages for the seizure, and requiring oppressive security from the
xlvii
owner in suits for condemnation of his ship or goods as a condition to
his entering a defense.
Repeal of the act of authorizing trial in Great Britain of persons
alleged to have destroyed royal arsenals, dockyards, or ships in the col-
onies or vessels of the royal navy under construction there.
Repeal of the Intolerable Acts of .
Additional state papers adopted by the Congress, described in
Chapters –, called for the redress of a number of other colonial
grievances, but these were evidently regarded as negotiable.
The most important of these additional papers was a petition to the
King, stating: “We wish not a diminution of the prerogative....Your
royal authority over us...we shall always carefully and zealously en-
deavour to support and maintain.”
This explicit recognition of the Crown’s prerogative with respect to
the colonies confirmed the repeated assertions of leading colonial Whigs
that they were not aiming at complete independence. For the Crown’s
prerogative unquestionably included control over all foreign relations
of the colonies; use of the colonies as bases for British military opera-
tions against foreign powers; and authority to review on points of law
the decisions of the highest courts of all the colonies.
The prerogative also included authority to prevent the Legislatures
of the royal colonies, including Virginia, Massachusetts, New York,
New Jersey, New Hampshire, the Carolinas, and Georgia, from passing
laws adversely affecting British interests by instructing the Crown-
appointed Governors of these colonies to refuse consent to, i.e., veto,
any such law. (An especially important example of this was the Crown’s
instruction to colonial Governors to refuse assent to any law imposing
“duties...upon British shipping or upon the product or manufactures
of Great Britain,”²⁰ thus providing against discriminatory duties in fa-
vor of local shipowners, merchants, or manufacturers against British.)
The last seven chapters describe the response in the colonies and
Great Britain to the measures of the Continental Congress and the as-
sembling of a Massachusetts provincial congress which proceeded to es-
tablish a rebel government in Massachusetts.
This Congress, meeting off and on at Salem, Concord, and Cam-
bridge from October to December, , set up several committees of
xlviii
which the most important, the Committee of Safety, was authorized to
call into the field “so many of the militia of this province as they shall
judge necessary” to oppose any attempt to execute the Massachusetts
Regulating Act by force.
In preparation for this contingency, the Congress voted that officers
of the provincial militia, appointees of the royal Governor, be super-
seded by elected officers. The company officers were to be elected by
the men of the company, field officers by the officers of the companies,
and general officers by the Congress. One-quarter at least of the men
were to be enlisted as “minute men,” to “equip and hold themselves in
readiness on the shortest notice...to march to the [appointed] place
of rendezvous.”
A Committee of Supplies was chosen to provide for “the reception
and support” of men called into service and to purchase a wide range
of military supplies.
To provide funds for these purposes, the Congress directed all col-
lectors of provincial taxes to turn over their collections to a Receiver
General elected by the Congress, instead of to the provincial Treasurer,
who was a Tory.
Though informed by Governor General Gage of the situation in
Massachusetts, the British Cabinet decided to wait for word of the out-
come of the Continental Congress. Hopefully, a body composed chiefly
of persons distinguished for wealth, family, success at the law, or a com-
bination of the three could be counted on to avoid extremes likely to
endanger the favorable status acquired by them under British rule.
When word reached England of the spirited measures adopted by
the Continental Congress, the British Cabinet, headed by Lord North,
adopted a plan (January and , ) to reinforce Gage with three
regiments of infantry, a regiment of cavalry, and six hundred marines,
and to put severe economic pressure on most of the twelve colonies rep-
resented at the Congress.
On the other hand, Lord Chatham, long out of the Cabinet but still
influential, now made moves for peace. On January , he introduced
a motion in the House of Lords for immediate withdrawal of all British
troops from Massachusetts “to open the way towards an happy settle-
ment of the dangerous troubles in America” and, on February , pre-
xlix
sented a plan that might well have been acceptable to all but a few of
the most fiery colonial Whigs.
The plan envisaged taxation of the colonies by Parliament only with
the consent of the Assemblies of the colonies; repeal of the provisions
denying trial by jury in cases involving alleged violation of British acts
restricting colonial trade; and suspension of all the Intolerable Acts of
. But Chatham’s motion for withdrawal of the troops was defeated
to , and his plan by a vote of to .
In the House of Commons a petition for “healing measures” from
merchants and others concerned in commerce with North America
was defeated to .
North did, indeed, move and secure adoption of a resolution for Par-
liament to “forbear” taxing all colonies whose legislatures would agree
to contribute “their proportion to the common defence.” But since no
method for determining how much this “proportion” was to be, the
proposal was almost meaningless. (Franklin wrote in disgust that the
resolution reminded him of a highwayman who, with pistol in hand,
kindly offered not to take all your money provided you handed over
enough to satisfy him.)²¹ Furthermore, and of even greater moment,
North’s resolution gave no promise of the repeal of the Intolerable Acts,
without whose repeal or drastic amendment there was no possibility of
a settlement.
Why
—after it had become clear that determined colonial opposi-
tion to British measures was general and not limited to a relatively few
hotheads of little or no local standing
—were these efforts for peace so
decisively defeated in both Houses? Pride, hauteur, arrogance, call it
what you will, of many of the members was doubtless an important fac-
tor; no one would be allowed, cost what it might in men and money, to
challenge Great Britain without fighting. But probably even more per-
suasive was the common, though not universal, illusion in Great Britain
that it would be easy to bring the colonists to book; that, when put to
the test, they would be too cowardly to fight, or, if they did fight, would
be easily subdued.
Had not General James Wolfe, hero of the British taking of Quebec
in the French and Indian War, written in to Lord George Sackville
(now about to succeed Lord Dartmouth as Secretary of State for the
l