The True History of the American Revolution E-Book

Sydney George Fisher

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 590

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Pergamum Collection publishes books history has long forgotten. We transcribe books by hand that are now hard to find and out of print.

Das E-Book The True History of the American Revolution wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
free; george washington; ben franklin; lecturable; colonial; loyalist; thomas jefferson

Leseprobe

Preface

The purpose of this history of the Revolution is to use the original authorities rather more frankly than has been the practice with our historians. They appear to have thought it advisable to omit from their narratives a great deal which, to me, seems essential to a true picture.

I cannot feel satisfied with any description of the Revolution which treats the desire for independence as a sudden thought, and not a long growth and development, or which assumes that every detail of the conduct of the British government was absurdly stupid, even from its own point of view, and that the loyalists were few in numbers and their arguments not worth considering. I cannot see any advantage in not describing in their full meaning and force the smuggling, the buying of laws from the governors, and other irregular conduct in the colonies which led England to try to remodel them as soon as the fear of the French in Canada was removed. Nor can I accept a description which fails to reveal the salient details of the great controversy over the rather peculiar methods adopted by General Howe to suppress the rebellion. This controversy was a part of the Revolution. It involved the interesting question of Howe’s instructions from the ministry and the methods which the ministry intended to use with the revolted colonists.

Whatever we may now think of Howe’s conduct, and in whatever way we may try to explain it, the fact remains that it was once a subject which attracted universal attention and aroused most violent attacks upon him in England and among the loyalists in America. Some of these very plain-spoken arraignments, with the evidence in support of them, can still be read in the writings of Galloway, Van Schaack, and others, or in Howe’s own defence, which some thought was the strongest argument against him. Why should these documents and the evidence taken before the Parliamentary committee of inquiry be concealed from the ordinary reader, with the result that if by chance he turns to the original authorities he is surprised to find that the Revolution there described is entirely different from the one in which he had been taught to believe?

Some of us might possibly not accept these attacks upon Howe as just or well founded; they might think that his reply, which we can still read in his published “Narrative,” was a complete defence and justification. There is no reason why we should not adopt any opinion or explanation which seems best. But I protest against the historians who refuse to give us a chance to form an opinion of our own on either the one side or the other. I protest against the concealing of this subject, of suppressing the whole of the evidence against Howe as well as the evidence in his favor; and I protest because his conduct necessarily produced momentous results in the Revolution.

To my mind the whole question of the conduct of General Howe is as important a part of history as the assistance rendered us by France; for if what the people of his own time said of Howe be true, his conduct directly contributed to bring about our alliance with that country, and ultimately our independence.

There has, it seems, been a strong temptation to withhold from the modern public a knowledge of the controversy over Howe’s conduct, because it is impossible to disclose that controversy in all its bearings without at the same time showing that the British government, up to the summer of 1778, used extremely lenient and conciliatory methods in dealing with the revolted colonists. The historians appear to have felt that to admit that such gentle methods were used would be inadvisable, would tend to weaken our side of the argument, and show that we were bent on independence for mere independence’ sake.

The historians seem to have assumed that we do not want to know about that controversy, or that it will be better for us not to know about it. They have assumed that it will be better for Americans to think that independence was a sudden and deplorable necessity and not a desire of long and ardent growth and cautiously planned intention. They have assumed that we want to think of England as having lost the colonies by failure to be conciliatory, and that the Revolution was a one-sided, smooth affair, without any of the difficulties or terrors of a rebellion or a great upheaval of settled opinion.

The taint of these assumptions runs through all our histories. They are, I think, mistaken assumptions and an affront to our people. They prefer to know the truth, and the whole truth; and there is nothing in the truth of which they need be afraid.

Having decided to withhold from the public a knowledge of the contemporary opinion of Howe, the historians naturally conceal or obscure his relations to the Whig party, the position of that party in England, its connection with the rebel colonists, the peculiar difficulties under which the Tory ministry-labored, and their instructions to Howe on the conduct of the war. Unless all these conditions are clearly set forth, most of the events and battles of the Revolution are inexplicable.

Before I discovered the omissions of our standard histories I always felt as though I were reading about something that had never happened, and that was contrary to the ordinary experience of human nature. I could not understand how a movement which was supposed to have been such a deep uprooting of settled thought and custom—a movement which is supposed to have been one of the great epochs of history—could have happened like an occurrence in a fairy-tale. I could not understand the military operations; and it seemed strange to me that they were not investigated, explained, and criticised like those of Napoleon’s campaigns or of our own Civil War.

I was never satisfied until I had spent a great deal of time in research, burrowing into the dust of the hundreds of old brown pamphlets, newspapers, letters, personal memoirs, documents, publications of historical societies, and the interminable debates of Parliament which, now that the eye-witnesses are dead, constitute all the evidence that is left us of the story of the Revolution. Those musty documents painted a very vivid picture upon my mind, and I wish I had the power of painting the picture as the original sources reveal it.

I understand, of course, that the methods used by our historians have been intended to be productive of good results, to build up nationality, and to check sectionalism and rebellion. Students and the literary class do not altogether like successful rebellions; and the word revolution is merely another name for a successful rebellion. Rebellious are a trifle awkward when you have settled down, although the Declaration of Independence contains a clause to relieve this embarrassment by declaring that “governments long established should not be changed for light or transient causes.” The people who write histories are usually of the class who take the side of the government in a revolution; and as Americans they are anxious to believe that our Revolution was different from others, more decorous, and altogether free from the atrocities, mistakes, and absurdities which characterize even the patriot party in a revolution. They do not like to describe in their full coloring the strong Americanism and the doctrines of the rights of man which inspired the party that put through our successful rebellion. They have accordingly tried to describe a revolution in which all scholarly, refined, and conservative persons might have unhesitatingly taken part; but such revolutions have never known to happen.

The Revolution was a much more ugly and unpleasant affair than most of us imagine. I know of many people who talk a great deal about their ancestors, but who I am quite sure would not now take the side their ancestors chose. Nor was it a great, spontaneous, unanimous uprising, all righteousness, perfection, and infallibility, a marvel of success at every step, and incapable of failure, as many of us very naturally believe from what we have read.

The device of softening the unpleasant or rebellious features of the Revolution does not, I think, accomplish the improving and edifying results among us, which the historians from their exalted station are so gracious as to wish to bestow. A candid and free disclosure of all that the records contain would be more appreciated by our people and of more advantage to them. They are as fully competent to judge of actions and events as any one of their number who takes upon himself the tasks of the historian.

It will be observed that I invariably speak of those colonists who were opposed to the rebellion as loyalists, and not as Tories. They never fully accepted the name Tory, either in its contemptuous sense or as meaning a member of the Tory party in England. They were not entirely in accord with that party. They regarded themselves as Americans who were loyal to what they called the empire, and this distinction was, in their minds, of vast importance. I have labored to describe them strictly from their own point of view, with the arguments, facts, principles, and feelings which they used in their pamphlets and documents; and I give them the name which they preferred. They were far more numerous than is generally supposed; and on the difficult question of their numbers I shall give my readers the advantage of all that I can find in the records.

In the illustrations of this volume I have for the most part avoided reproductions of portraits, because they are apt to be misleading. I have given, however, the portraits of two loyalists, whose fine clothes do not perhaps misrepresent them. We can have faith in very few of the Revolutionary portraits as likenesses; and the handsome clothes or magnificent uniforms in which it was easy enough to paint patriot officers, and the modern illustrator’s efforts to produce elegance or quaintness, are altogether inconsistent with the agitation, ragged poverty, suffering, and apparent hopelessness which marked one of the most remarkable political outbursts of history.

The True History

of the

American Revolution

I.EARLY CONDITIONS AND CAUSES

The great underlying conditions which brought about the Revolution were the presence of the French in Canada, and the extremely liberal governments, semi-independence, and disregard of laws and regulations which England, in the early days, was compelled to allow the colonies in America. The increasing power of France in the north compelled England to be liberal and even lax in governing her colonies. As the attitude of France became more and more threatening down to the year 1763, England could take no severe or repressive measures with the Americans, who were growing up very much as they pleased.

In our time colonies usually are regarded as places for the overflow of the mother country’s excess of population. But down to the time of our Revolution England had no overflow of population. When England began to have colonies in America, about the year 1610, her population was only five million. At the time of our Revolution it was barely eight million, and large districts of country, especially in the northern part of England, were still almost as primitive and uncultivated as the American wilderness.

Colonies were in early times regarded as places for obtaining gold, silver, and furs; and it was hoped that if people could be forced to go out to them they might be able to extend trade, furnish England raw material, and create a market for manufactured goods. The people who settled in America were either mere adventurous characters, like the first Virginia colonists, or Puritans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics driven out of England by the severities of royalists and churchmen, or they were royalists, like those of the second migration to Virginia, driven out of England when the Puritans under Cromwell got into power.

When persecution ceased there was no migration of any importance to the colonies. Migration to New England ceased after 1640; and in all the colonies the migration was comparatively small. The people increased in the natural way by births, and increased with remarkable rapidity. The two million white colonists of 1776 were largely a native stock, whose ancestors had been on the soil for many generations; and they had grown out of an original stock of immigrants which had not numbered one hundred thousand. This native and natural growth is worth remembering when we are seeking to explain the desire for independence.

Alluring promises of gold and easy systems of government were the great persuasives to English colonization. The British government, only too glad to be rid of rebellious Puritans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics, willingly gave them liberal charters. This explains that freedom in many of the old charters which has surprised so many students of our colonial history. Some of these liberal instruments were granted by the Stuart kings, with the approval of their officials and courtiers, all of whom showed by almost every other act of their lives that they were the determined enemies of free parliaments and free representation of the people.

Connecticut, for example, obtained in 1662 from Charles II. a charter which made the colony almost independent; and to-day there is no colony of the British empire that has so much freedom as Connecticut and Rhode Island always had, or as Massachusetts had down to 1685. Connecticut and Rhode Island elected their own legislatures and governors, and did not even have to send their laws to England for approval. No modern British colony elects its own governor; and, if it has a legislature elected by its people, the acts of that legislature can be vetoed by the home government. A community electing its own governor and enacting whatever laws it pleases is not a colony in the modern English meaning of the word. Connecticut and Rhode Island could not make treaties with foreign nations, but in other respects they were, as we would now say, semi-independent commonwealths under the protectorate or suzerainty of England.

The obtaining of this extremely liberal Connecticut charter has sometimes been explained by suggesting that Winthrop, who went to England to procure it, had money to distribute among courtiers. A pretty story is also told of his having a ring which had been given to his father by Charles I.; and this ring, when shown to Charles II., is supposed to have worked the miracle of the liberal charter.

But the liberality is more easily accounted for by the desire of the British government to encourage planting, as it was called, and get rid of rebellious and troublesome people. England had not then made up her mind exactly what she meant by a colony, except that she was anxious to have people go out and settle on the wild land in America which was hers by right of discovery. The year after the Connecticut charter was granted Rhode Island obtained a liberal charter, almost word for word the same as the charter of Connecticut; and the agent in that case was the Rev. John Clark, a Baptist minister of the gospel, who had no money and no ancestral ring.

Some thirty years before that time Massachusetts had obtained a liberal charter. It was possibly intended that the governing body under this charter should remain in England; but the Puritans who had obtained it moved the whole governing body out to Massachusetts, elected their own legislature and governor, and did not submit their laws to England for approval. They assumed several of the attributes of sovereignty. They coined their own money, and issued the famous pine-tree shilling. They established by law a form of religion, sometimes called Congregationalism, which was not recognized by the laws of England. They ceased to issue writs in the king’s name. They dropped the English oath of allegiance and adopted a new oath in which public officers and the people swore allegiance, not to England, but to Massachusetts.

They debated what allegiance they owed to England, and concluded that they were independent in government, that no appeals could be taken to England, but that they were under an English protectorate. When some captains of vessels reminded them that no English flag was displayed in the colony, they debated whether the British flag should be allowed to fly on the fort at Castle Island, and concluded that it might be put there, as that particular fort was the king’s property. But they had given so little attention to allegiance and the symbol of it that at the close of this debate no English flags could be found in Boston, and they had to borrow one from the captain of a ship.

Under the charter which allowed so much freedom Massachusetts existed from 1629 to 1685, when her disregard of British authority and the killing, whipping, and imprisoning of Quakers and Baptists had reached such a pass that the charter was annulled, and Massachusetts became a colony, with a governor appointed by the king, and controlled in a way which, after her previous freedom, was very galling. .

These instances show why New England was so hot for independence from 1764 to 1776. Virginia was also ardent, and there, too, we find that an extremely liberal government had been allowed to grow up. Virginia had, alone and single-handed, in 1676, rebelled against the whole authority of the British government, because she thought her privileges were being impaired. Such an outbreak as this and a similar rebellion in Massachusetts in 1690 warned England to be as gentle as possible with the colonies, while France was becoming more and more of a power on the north and west.

The other colonies never had so much freedom. None of them elected their own governors; they had not had such a taste of independence as New England and Virginia, which from the English point of view were regarded as the leaders in rebellion. But they had all had a certain measure of their own way of doing things, and had struggled to have more of their own way, and had found that England was compelled at times to yield to them. It is not necessary to describe the details of this struggle, its successes or failures. It is of more importance to describe a method of government which grew up in all the colonies that did not elect their own governors, a method which they regarded as the bulwark of their liberties, which in England was regarded as scandalous, and which had an important influence on the Revolution.

It arose out of the system by which the people of the colony elected the legislature, and the crown, or a proprietor under the crown, as in Pennsylvania and Maryland, appointed the governor. Under this system the legislature voted the governor his salary out of taxes which all these colonial legislatures had the power of levying. The governor had the power of absolute veto on all acts of the legislature, and, as representing the crown, he wanted certain laws passed to carry out the ideas or reforms of the home government.

The members of the legislature cared little or nothing for these reforms. As representing the people, they had their popular measures which they wished carried out. These measures the governor usually wanted to veto, either because he deemed them hostile to the interests of the crown, or because he wished to punish the legislature for failing to pass crown measures on which his reputation at home depended.

The governor and the legislature being thus dependent on each other, the question of salary threw the balance of power into the hands of the legislature. They quickly learned the trick of withholding the governor’s salary until he had assented to their measures. The system became practically one of bargain and sale, as Franklin called it. The people, through their legislators, bought from the governor, for cash, such laws as they needed. The petty squabbles with the governor, based on the detailed working of the system, were interminable in every colony where it prevailed. They fill the minute-books and records, making colonial history more tiresome than it might otherwise be, except in one instance, where Franklin, who often came in contact with the system, described it in his inimitable manner:

“Hence arose the custom of presents twice a year to the governors, at the close of each session in which laws were passed, given at the time of passing; they usually amounted to a thousand pounds per annum. But when the governors and assemblies disagreed, so that laws were not passed, the presents were withheld. When a disposition to agree ensued, there sometimes still remained some diffidence. The governors would not pass the laws that were wanted without being sure of the money, even all that they called their arrears; nor the assemblies give the money without being sure of the laws. Thence the necessity of some private conference, in which mutual assurances of good faith might be received and given, that the transaction should go hand in hand. What name the impartial reader will give to this kind of commerce I cannot say. . . . Time established the custom and made it seem honest; so that our governors, even those of the most undoubted honor, have practised it. . . .

“When they came to resolve, on the report of the grand committee, to give the money, they guarded their resolves very cautiously, to wit: ‘Resolved that on the passage of such bills as now lie before the governor (the naturalization bill and such other bills as may be presented to him during the sitting) there be paid him the sum of live hundred pounds.’ . . .

“Do not, my courteous reader, take pet at our proprietary constitution for these our bargain and sale proceedings in legislation. It is a happy country where justice and what was your own before can be had for ready money. It is another addition to the value of money, and, of course, another spur to industry. Every land is not so blessed.”—Works, Bigelow edition, vol. iii. pp. 311-316.

What was thought and said of this system depended entirely on one’s point of view. Franklin ridiculed it when it worked against him. Afterwards, in the Revolution, when he saw that colonial self-government depended upon it, he became, like Dickinson and other patriot leaders, a stanch upholder of it. In England it was regarded as corruption. There was plenty of corruption in England at that time; but outside corruption always seems the more heinous; and this particular corruption blocked and thwarted nearly all the plans of the mother country to regulate her colonies. It was believed to have seriously interfered with the raising of supplies and aids for the war against the French and Indians. If anything of the sort existed in our time, if a territory of the United States, or an island like Porto Rico, were governed in that way, we would denounce it as most atrocious and absurd; and in all probability put a stop to it very quickly. It was very natural that England, acting from her point of view, should start to abolish it as soon as France was driven from the continent, and this attempt was one of the fundamental causes of the Revolution.

The colonists who had become Americanized, tinged with the soil, differentiated from English influence, or, as Englishmen said, rebelliously inclined, were all enthusiastic supporters of the bargain and sale system. They loved it and were ready to die for it, and resisted any change or reform in it. They would not hear of fixing regular salaries upon the governors, because they knew that the moment the governors ceased to be dependent on the legislatures for their salaries, the legislatures would be powerless to accomplish the popular will, and the colonies, except Connecticut and Rhode Island, would fall completely under control of Parliament and the king. Each legislature was called and adjourned by the governor; and he would hardly take the trouble to call it, except to pass crown measures, unless he was dependent on it for his salary.

In every colony where this system prevailed there was a body of popular laws on the statute-book which, in the course of fifty or a hundred years, had been secured, one by one, by this bargaining with the governor. The people, who were patriotically inclined, loved these laws; and had enjoyed the contests for them. They had heard and read the details of these contests at the taverns and coffeehouses; the self-confident, haughty, or scolding messages of the governor, and the astute or sarcastic replies of the legislature; and they fought the wordy battle over again with keen interest. So long as they controlled the governor’s salary they felt themselves freemen; once lose that control, and they were, as they expressed it, political slaves.

The system extended to the judges, who, though appointed by the crown or governor, were dependent for their salaries on the annual vote or whim of the legislature. In New York the judiciary was believed to be notoriously dependent. A chief justice, it was said, gave a decision against a member of the legislature, who promptly, in retaliation, had the judge’s salary reduced fifty pounds. The local magistrates in New York were controlled by the assemblymen. Some of these magistrates could not write, and had to affix their marks to warrants.

The colonists insisted that they must retain control of the judges’ salaries, because, if the crown both appointed the judges and paid them their salaries, the decisions would all be crown decisions. They were willing to compromise, however, and fix permanent salaries on the judges if the home government would agree that the judges should be appointed for life and good behavior instead of holding office at the pleasure of the crown. This apparently reasonable suggestion the English government would not adopt. They seem to have feared that the judges appointed by that tenure would gradually drift to the side of the colonists, and make regulation and administration more difficult than ever. It was already extremely difficult to get a jury to decide in favor of the crown. The control of the colonies seemed to be slipping away, and the ministry must retain as much of it as was possible.

Those acts of Parliament by which the money raised from taxes on the colonies was not to be cast generally into the English exchequer, but to be used for “defraying the expenses of government and the administration of justice in the colonies,” and therefore would be all spent in the colonies, read innocently enough. What could be more fair and honorable towards you, Englishmen would say, than an act which takes no money out of your country? It is the same money which you now raise by taxing yourselves; it will be spent, in the same way as you apply it, to pay governors and judges, and on a fixed and regular system.

But the “fixed and regular system” destroyed what the Americans considered their fundamental, constitutional principle, by which executive salaries must be within popular control. That principle was vitally necessary to all the colonies, except to Connecticut and Rhode Island. It would become vital to Connecticut and Rhode Island if they should lose the right to elect their own governors, as was not improbable when England began her remodelling after the expulsion of France from Canada.

One effect of the system was to divide the upper classes of the colonists, and indeed all the people, into two parties,—those who were interested in the governor and the executive officers, and those who were interested in the legislature. Around every governor appointed from England there grew up a little aristocracy of powerful families and individuals, with their patronage, influence, and branches extending down through all classes. The people of this party who had means and education considered themselves the social superiors, because they were most closely connected with England and the king, who was the source of all rank and nobility. They considered themselves the only American society that deserved recognition. Nearly all of them became loyalists in the Revolution.

Among the legislative party, as it may be called, there were individuals and families of as much means and as good education as any in the governor’s or executive party. But they formed a set by themselves, and were sometimes hardly on speaking terms with the executive party. In some of the colonies the two parties were on friendly terms; but in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts the contests and hatred between them were, at times, extremely bitter and violent.

Prominent men whose names have become household words among us—Hancock, Adams, and Warren, of Massachusetts, Schuyler, Hamilton, and Livingston, of New York, Reed, Morris, Dickinson, and Mifflin, of Pennsylvania, Paca and Chase, of Maryland, and Lee, Washington, Bland, and Harrison, of Virginia—were all of the Whig legislative set. They were more or less distinctly separated from the high society that basked in the regal sunlight which, even when filtered through a colonial governor, was supposed to redeem America from vulgarity.

Had the Revolution terminated differently, another class of names might be household words in America,—Hunt, Galloway, Allen, and Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, De Lancey, Van Schaack, and Jones, of New York, Leonard, Sewall, Curwen, and Oliver, of Massachusetts,—names which once filled a large place in the public vision, but which now are meaningless to nearly every one.

England’s easy method of dealing with her colonies had certainly produced a confused and irregular state of affairs, which was worse than has yet been described. It is important for us to remember many of the details of this condition, because they show the beginning of English dissatisfaction with the colonies and of the desire to have a sweeping remodelling as soon as France was out of the way.

The colonies, in exercise of the extreme liberty that had been allowed them, had taken on themselves to create their own paper currency. In some of them, especially in New England, the paper currency was very seriously depreciated. In Pennsylvania the currency never depreciated; but this did not help matters, because conservative people in England would regard it as merely a delusive encouragement of an evil system.

This paper money the colonists considered absolutely necessary to supply the place of the gold and silver which were so rapidly drained from them into England to pay for the manufactured goods they bought. There seems to be no doubt but that they were right in this, and so long as the issues of paper money were kept within safe bounds, as in Pennsylvania, no harm resulted. But there were such disastrous results in other colonies that there was a great outcry in England. To many Englishmen this paper money seemed to be a mere dishonorable device to avoid paying the heavy debts which the colonists owed to the  British merchants, who sold to them the axes with which they felled the forests, the ploughs with which they tilled the land, and the utensils in which they cooked their dinners.

This opinion was strengthened when it was remembered that some British colonies had attempted to pass stay laws to prevent English merchants from collecting debts, and that this risk had to be removed by an act of Parliament in 1732, giving English merchants the same right to seize private property for debt in the colonics that they had in England. Finally, in 1751, Parliament tried to remedy the paper money evil, and passed an act declaring the paper money of the New England colonies an illegal tender in payment of a debt.

Good people in England and many members of Parliament looked upon the whole revolutionary movement as merely an attempt of debt-ridden provincials to escape from their obligations. A nation on a firm gold basis always despises a nation struggling with a depreciated currency. We ourselves have had this feeling towards the West Indian and South American republics.

The people in England also heard a great deal about the convicts who had been transported to America, and that some of these convicts had been employed as schoolteachers. Historical writers have given the number of these convicts that were sent here at from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand, most of them going to Maryland and the Middle Colonies. We may believe that this had no demoralizing effect upon us, and perhaps it had not; but English people would naturally think that it had tinged our population, and they would exaggerate the evil effects, as we would ourselves if we should hear of twenty thousand convicts dumped into Japan or Cuba, or England itself.

In early colonial times piracy had been almost openly practised, and respectable people, even governors of colonies, were interested in its profits. The distinction between privateering, smuggling, piracy, and buccaneering was slight; the step from one to the other easy. The fascinating life of these brethren of the wave cannot be described here, except to say that piracy had been another item in the list of colonial offences. Protections to pirates were openly sold in New York, where the famous Captain Kidd lived, and handsome presents given to the governor and his daughters. It was a profitable occupation, and pursued as eagerly as modern stock jobbing and speculation. Charleston was equally deep in the business. Lord Bellamont was sent out to New York in 1695, as the result of what we would now call a reform movement. He reported “a most lycencious trade with pyrates, Scotland and Curaçoa.” The people of New York, he said, “grew rich, but the customs, they decrease.”

Piracy, however, had passed away, and it was only a recollection of disorder, part of the ancient training of the colonists in self-will and love of independence. With regard to the other offences, bargain and sale legislation, dependent judiciary, or the reforms and remedies of them, both the colonists and England were in a constrained position so long as France kept strengthening her power on the north and pushing round to the westward into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

Kalm, the Swedish botanist, who travelled in America in 1748, reported that the presence of the French in Canada was all that held the colonies in submission to England. He met both Americans and English who prophesied that the colonies would be absolutely independent within thirty or fifty years.

The more we consider the conditions at that time, the more it becomes evident that the English-speaking communities in America were not colonies in the modern acceptance of the term. England had never fully reduced them to possession, had never really established her sovereignty among them. She had encouraged them in the beginning with liberal grants for the sake of persuading them to occupy the country, and after that she was unable to repress their steady and aggressive increase of privileges so long as France hung as a menace in the snow-bound north. The lucky colonists were ridden with a loose rein and given their heads until a large section of them began to believe that their heads were their own.

The colonists, however, needed the assistance of England’s army and navy to withstand France. They detested the thought of becoming colonies of the great Celtic and Roman Catholic power; and they were willing to hold in check their desire for extreme privileges, or anything like independence, until France was removed from the continent. Thus France occupied the peculiar position of encouraging our independent spirit and at the same time checking its extreme development.

When the great event of her removal was accomplished; when the superb organizing genius of William Pitt had carried to a successful termination the long war lasting from 1754 to 1763, a totally new condition of affairs arose. Canada being conquered and England in possession of it, the colonies and England suddenly found themselves glaring at each other. Each began to pursue her real purpose more directly. England undertook to establish her sovereignty, abolish abuses, or, as she expressed it at that time, to remodel the colonies. The patriotic party among the colonists resisted the remodelling, sought to retain all their old privileges, and even to acquire new ones.

II.SMUGGLING, RIOTING, AND REVOLT AGAINST CONTROL

One of the greatest irregularities in the colonies, the most conspicuous rejection of British authority, was purposely omitted from the previous chapter, because it deserves to be treated separately, and because it was the first irregularity which England attempted to remedy as soon as France was out of the way.

There were a number of laws on the English statute-books known as the navigation laws and the laws of trade. They constituted a great protective system of penalties, tariffs, and duties, designed to build up the shipping, the trade, the commerce, and the manufacturing: interests of Great Britain and the colonies. They were to protect the colonies from foreign traders and foreign interference, and to unite them closely with the mother-country in bonds of wealth and prosperity against all the rest of the world.

In the commercial competition in which England was involved with Holland, France, and Spain it was thought important to prevent those nations from trading with the British colonies. If England permitted those nations to trade with her colonies, her reason for protecting and governing them was defeated; it would be hardly worth while to have colonies.

Each nation at that time kept, or tried to keep, its colonial trade exclusively for itself. To accomplish this for England was one of the objects of the trade and navigation laws. Another guiding principle that ran through them was, that the profits of trade should be shared between the colonies and the mother-country. The colonies must not monopolize any department of trade. Still another principle was that the colonies should confine themselves chiefly to the production of raw materials and buy their manufactured goods from England.

We find the beginning of these laws in the earliest period of the English colonies. The first important product from the colonies was tobacco from Virginia; and the king, who could at that time, without the aid of Parliament, impose duties and taxes, put a heavy duty on this tobacco. The Virginians accordingly sent all their tobacco to Holland.

This simple instance shows both the cause and the principle of all these navigation laws. If Holland, England’s rival in commerce, was to reap all the advantage of Virginia’s existence, of what value to England was Virginia? So the king ordered that no tobacco or other product of the colonies should be carried to a foreign port until it had been first landed in England and the duties paid.

This regulation was not merely for the revenue from the duties, but for the advantage of English tobacco merchants, and to prevent Holland trading with Virginia and establishing a connection there. Soon afterwards, in 1651, Cromwell’s Parliament took the next step, and an obvious one, by prohibiting the ships of all foreign nations from trading with the colonies. This was part of Cromwell’s vigorous and successful foreign policy, one of the methods he employed for building up the power of England. It was intended to keep for England all her colonial trade and encourage her ship-builders, ship-owners, merchants, and manufacturers by the same method other nations pursued.

Cromwell was of the same dissenting religion as a great many of the American colonists. He favored the colonists, and was generally regarded by them as a great prototype of liberty. But his Parliament passed the first navigation law; and the colonists were often reminded of this when, during the Revolution, some of them argued so strenuously and violently against those laws.

In 1660, when the commonwealth period of Cromwell closed and monarchy was restored in England, the famous navigation act was passed, carrying the protective system still farther:

1. No goods were to be carried from the colonies except in English-or colonial-built ships of which the master and three-fourths of the sailors were English subjects.

2. Foreigners could not be merchants or factors in the colonies.

3. No goods of the growth, production, or manufacture of Africa, Asia, or America could be carried to England in any but English or colonial ships. And such goods must be brought direct from the places where they were usually produced.

4. Oil, whale-fins, fish, etc., usually produced or caught by English subjects, must, when brought into England by foreigners, pay double alien customs.

5. The English coasting trade was confined exclusively to English ships.

The colonists never objected to these provisions, because most of them favored the colonists as much as they favored England. They built up and encouraged colonial shipping. The provisions relating to the coasting trade we ourselves adopted as soon as we became a nation; and we still confine our coasting trade to our own vessels. We also, in 1816 and afterwards, passed navigation acts somewhat similar in their provisions to these clauses of the English act which have been cited. There is no question that these and similar protective provisions assisted in building up the greatness and power of England and the prosperity of the colonies.

But there was a clause in the navigation act of 1660 which did not please the colonists. It provided that no sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, ginger, fustic, or other dye-wood should be carried from the colonies to any port on the continent of Europe. Such commodities must be carried only to England or to English colonies. The reason for this provision was, that if the colonists sold their commodities on the continent of Europe they would reap all the profits of the sale and the mother-country would get nothing. It seemed fairer that these articles should be taken to England and sold to English merchants, who might then resell at a profit to continental merchants. Thus the profits would be shared by the mother-country and the colonies, instead of the colonies getting them all.

These colonial commodities which could not be carried to continental Europe became known in history as the enumerated articles. Judged from the point of view of the times, there was nothing harsh or tyrannical in this provision. But the colonists, having ships of their own, very naturally wanted to trade directly with the continent of Europe. They wanted all the profits for themselves. They wanted full control of all the natural advantages of the separate country in which they lived, and in this respect they were not unlike the rest of the world.

Accordingly this regulation about trading with the continent of Europe was disobeyed, or, if conformed to at all, it was to such a slight extent that it was practically a dead letter. The colonists repealed it as though they had had a parliament of their own for the purpose; and while France held Canada they could do so with impunity.

In 1663 another act was passed, to parts of which the colonists had no objection. They certainly approved of that clause which prohibited tobacco-planting in England, and complained that the weed was still cultivated there in spite of a previous act prohibiting its culture. The object of this act was to favor the Virginia and Maryland tobacco-planters. In consideration for sending all their tobacco to England they were to have the exclusive monopoly of tobacco-planting. The great object of the trade laws was to bind together by reciprocal favors the colonies and the mother-country as a unit against all of England’s rivals.

But one of the clauses of the act of 1663 forbade any commodities of Europe to be taken to the colonies except in English-built ships and from English ports. This was to compel the colonies to buy their manufactured goods and articles of luxury from England. Why should the colonists enrich the merchants of France, Holland, and Spain? Why not enrich the merchants of England?

This regulation displeased the colonists, and they disobeyed it. They wilfully and wickedly carried the enumerated articles to Europe, and on the return voyage they brought back European products in their own ships and without obtaining them at English ports or from English merchants. Many a cargo of manufactured articles from France or Holland, and of wine, oil, and fruit from Portugal, and many a cargo of the famous cheap Holland tea, snugly packed in molasses hogsheads, did our vessels “run,” as it was called, to the American coast, to the great damage and underselling of British merchants, and to the great profit of the natural enemies of Great Britain , in France, Spain, and Holland.

If we could raise from the mud, into which she finally sank, any one of our ancestors’ curiously rigged ships, with her high-turreted stern, her queer little mast out on the bowsprit, her lateen sail, and all the contrivances which made her only a slight advance on the old “Mayflower,” which brought such vast cargoes of ancestors and old china to Massachusetts, we would be tolerably safe in labelling her “Smuggler.” Most of our ships were engaged in that profitable business.

The desire to share profits with “dear old England” was not very ardent. In 1676 Edward Randolph was sent out to Massachusetts as an agent to look into its condition. He reported the navigation laws unexecuted and smuggling so universal that commerce was free; and the governor of Massachusetts, he said, “would make the world believe they were a free state.”

He returned in 1680 as collector of customs, and tried o enforce the navigation laws. The notice of his appointment was torn down, and the assembly created a custom-office of its own, so as to supersede him and administer the navigation laws in the Massachusetts manner. When he attempted to seize vessels he was overwhelmed with law-suits. The people were against him, and he returned to England disgusted.

In 1733 another trade act was passed, which levied duties on spirits, sugar, and molasses imported to the colonies from any of the French or Spanish West Indies. This, as the preamble of the act explained, was to protect the English sugar islands from competition with the French and Spanish sugar islands, as well as to give the mother-country a share in this trade. But the colonists found the trade so profitable that they preferred to have it for themselves without any tax or duties. They carried many of their products to the French and Spanish islands, making a good exchange for the spirits and sugar, and bringing back gold and silver money which they needed in buying supplies from England and in decreasing the amount of paper money they were obliged to issue. The act of 1733, levying duties on this trade, was a subject of much discussion during the early stages of the Revolution, and was usually spoken of as the “old molasses act,” to distinguish it from a sort of supplement to it passed in 1764, called the “sugar act.” Our people made a dead letter of it, as they did of all the others that interfered with their purposes.

It is hardly worth while to discuss what has sometimes been called the excessive restraint or tyranny of these trade laws, because the American colonists promptly disposed of any element of severity there was in them, by disobeying them. These laws were generally regarded by Adam Smith, and other political writers as much less restrictive than similar laws of other countries. The trade of all the Spanish colonies was confined by law to Spain; the trade of the Brazils to Portugal; the trade of Martinico and other French colonies to France; the trade of Curaçoa and Surinam to Holland. There was only one exception, and that was in the trade of St. Eustatius, which Holland allowed to be free to all the world; and through that island a large part of the American smuggling was conducted.

This system, long since outworn and abandoned, was generally believed to be particularly fair and liberal, because it was mutual; because, while the colonies were compelled to trade exclusively with the mother-country, the mother-country, besides protecting them with her army and fleet, was compelled to trade with the colonies. The British merchants were as closely bound to buy their raw material only from the colonies as the colonies were bound to buy manufactured goods only from the British merchants. The people of Great Britain, as we have seen, were not allowed to raise tobacco or buy it anywhere except in Maryland and Virginia.

The colonists were paid bounties on all the naval stores, hemp, flax, and lumber, which they produced; and the large sums thus paid to them were considered as fully offsetting any inconveniences they might suffer from restrictions on their trade. South Carolina had a bounty on indigo, and could carry her rice to all European ports south of Cape Finisterre. The laws which prohibited the colonies from importing directly from Europe were mitigated by a system of drawbacks on the duties. Their great staples of grain, lumber, salt provisions, fish, sugar, and rum they were allowed to carry to any part of the world, provided they took them in their own or in British-built ships of which the owners and three-fourths of the crew were British subjects. The British West India colonies were compelled to buy their provisions and lumber from the American continental colonies. That colonies which had cost such a vast and long-continued expenditure of blood and treasure should be closely bound to the mother-country in trade, should take part in a system which would at the same time enrich the mother-country and themselves, seemed to most Europeans natural and right.

The Americans were prohibited from manufacturing. They could mine ore and turn it into iron; but they were not allowed to manufacture the iron into steel, tools, or weapons. They were prohibited also from cloth manufacturing and similar industries. But they paid little or no attention to these laws. They were not very strongly drawn to domestic manufacturing at that time, because they saw their greatest field of profit on the ocean, in trade, in whaling, and in the fisheries of the Grand Banks. But to such moderate manufacturing as their hearts inclined they turned openly and without even a wink at the royal governors.

In theory and by law a colony must share with England the profits its own ships might earn; it was prohibited from making nails, hatchets, and guns out of the iron dug from its own soil, or making coats out of the wool of its own sheep, or hats from the fur of the beaver that lived on its streams; a colonist could not give an orange to his sick friend unless that orange had made the voyage from Portugal by touching at an English port and passing through the bauds of an English merchant. But none of these regulations could be enforced; or at best were only partially enforced. If England had had sufficient authority and power to enforce them from the beginning, we might have been a milder people, like the Canadians, with no revolution, with less inventive genius, and without our self-reliant, aggressive, or, as some would call them, disorderly qualities.

The smuggling we indulged in so universally was not a daring occupation. A vessel would enter her cargo as salt or ballast, or would pay duty on part, give hush money or some goods to the customs officials, and “run” the rest; and the officials seem to have been easy to deal with in this way. They no doubt felt that their wages were so low that they would starve to death if not assisted by kind captains and merchants. Their presents were not always money. They were given parts of the cargo; often choice boxes of wines and fruits from Spain and the Mediterranean, so beautiful and luscious that it seemed impossible they could contaminate.

The moral aspect of the situation was not allowed to pass unchallenged. We find a pamphlet written, as is supposed, by John Drinker, of Philadelphia, implying that nearly all merchants were habitual custom-house perjurers, or procured others to commit perjury, and that such a system was ruining the morals of the country. In our time a reform club would have been organized to deal with the question.

In spite of the long series of trade and navigation laws, filling so many pages of her statute-books, the revenue received from us by England was only £1000 or £2000 per year and it cost £7000 or £8000 to collect it. In the French War it was discovered that the New England merchants were regularly supplying the French fleets and garrisons with provisions under flags of truce to exchange prisoners. In the hope of preventing such scandals, and of repressing smuggling, the practice of issuing writs of assistance, as they were called, was adopted by the British officials in America. These writs empowered an officer to search generally for smuggled goods, without specifying under oath a particular house or particular goods. Such writs were allowable under English law, but contrary to the principle adopted by Americans that general writs authorizing an officer to go into any house he pleased should never be issued. A test case was made of them in Massachusetts, and James Otis delivered against them a most famous argument, which in a rhetorical and exaggerated sense was described by John Adams as the birth of the American Revolution.

The colonies did pretty much as they pleased for over a hundred years. Their ships sailed in every sea, making of the colonists daring, hardy sailors, and giving them a contempt for the acts of Parliament which they had violated for generations. They were men who won careers from rugged nature, who therefore believed in themselves; who were conceited, pushing, lanky, gaunt, unpleasant, and ludicrous in English eyes; but the same men whom the eloquent Irishman, Burke, delighted to describe, as pursuing the whales among the tumbling mountains of Arctic ice, or following the same dangerous game beneath the frozen serpent of the south.

What else had the colonists but their ships and their farms? Those were their two principal occupations. They ploughed either the sea or the land; and are not those the rough pursuits of angular, independent, vigorous, self-willed men, dexterous with tools and weapons, but very awkward in manners.

Viewed from this stand-point, and setting aside for the moment that part of the population which was aristocratic, loyal, or lived on government salaries, the colonies were merely a long straggling line of settlements, scarcely two hundred miles wide, containing about two million white men and eight hundred thousand slaves, extending along the sea-coast from Maine to Georgia,—fishermen, farmers, sailors, and traders. Their ships seemed everything to them, because their ships seemed to give a large part of the value to their farms.

When, therefore, the British government, after the French War was over, resolved on more regular and systematic control, when revenue-cutters became more numerous, when the customs officials were stiffened for their duty and struck at what the colonists called “free trade,” and what in England was called the infamous crime of smuggling, it seemed to many of the colonists a terrible thing.

The blow that irritated them most of all was struck at their trade with the French and Spanish West Indies, the trade which, as we have seen, had been prohibited by the “old molasses act” of 1734. They had evaded it for thirty years. But now in this famous year 1764, with France out of the way, and the reorganization of the colonies resolved upon, instructions were sent to men-of-war and revenue-cutters to enforce the laws against the Spanish and French trade, and a new navigation act was passed which the colonists usually spoke of as the “sugar act.”

It reduced by one-half the duties which had been imposed on sugar and molasses by the “old molasses act” of 1734. This reduction, like so many other parts of the system, was intended as a favor to the colonists and a compensation for restrictions in other matters. But as the colonists, by wholesale smuggling, had been bringing in sugar and molasses free, they did not appreciate this favor of half-duties which were to be actually enforced. The act also imposed duties on coffee, pimento, French and East India goods, and wines from Madeira and the Azores which hitherto had been free. It also added iron and lumber to the “enumerated articles” which could be exported only to England; and it reinforced the powers of the admiralty courts which could try the smuggling and law-breaking colonists without a jury.

This “sugar act” of 1764 required the duties to be paid in specie into the treasury in London; and this the colonial merchants bitterly complained of, because it would drain them of specie and force them to paper money acts to supply a currency in place of the specie; and at the same time Parliament passed another act to further restrain the paper currency of the colonies. England was evidently very much in earnest.

From the English point of view the “old molasses act” and the “sugar act” were necessary to protect the English sugar islands from French and Spanish competition; were, in fact, part of the great system of protection for all parts of the empire; the system of give and take, by which inconveniences suffered by one locality for the sake of another were compensated by bounties or special privileges in some other department of trade.

The attempt to enforce the “sugar act” and the old trade laws aroused much indignation among a large number of the colonists. Loyalists afterwards said that the indignation was confined to the smuggling merchants and some radical and rabid dissenters. The indignant ones, however, made themselves very conspicuous, for they combined to protect and conceal smuggling, and at times they broke out into mob violence and outrage which made Englishmen stare. When the officials occasionally succeeded in seizing a smuggled cargo it was apt to be rescued by violence which was actual warfare, but into which the perpetrators entered not only without hesitation, but with zeal, energy, and righteous indignation, as if they were performing a public duty and a perfectly lawful act.

The English regarded these proceedings as a riotous and unlawful rebellion against legitimate authority. The colonists were being driven crazy, it was reported, by certain books about the rights of man, books written by men called Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu, Grotius, and Puffendorf, which told them that all men were politically equal and entitled to self-government; and the Englishman, John Locke, who was exiled and driven from Great Britain, had written a mad book to the same effect.

The customs regulations became more elaborate. A board of commissioners of customs was created in 1767, for enforcing the revenue laws and the laws of trade and navigation, and instituting a general reform in America. In the fleet on the American coast, each captain had to take the custom-house oaths, and be commissioned as a custom-house official to assist in the good work. The admiral of the fleet became, in effect, the head of a corps of revenue officers; and, to stimulate the zeal of his officers, they were to receive large rewards from all forfeited property. Some of the captains even went so far as to buy on their own account small vessels, which they sent, disguised as coasters, into the bays and shoal waters to collect evidence and make seizures.

But a people who had been left so long to themselves were not easy to bring under the discipline of a more methodical government. The new commissioners of customs sent out more than twenty fresh cutters and armed vessels to cruise for smugglers. But they rarely made a seizure; and the colonists laughed in their bucolic way, and said that it was like burning a barn to roast an egg.