A History of Britain, Volume 2 (66 page)

Centre stage were the hostile brothers-in-law Pitt and Grenville, both now out of power. Pitt made what for several years afterwards would be a crucial (though in reality arbitrary) distinction between ‘external' taxation – the authority to regulate colonial trade – and ‘internal' taxation (like the stamps), which trespassed on the right given to the colonial assemblies to raise taxes only with their consent. Grenville replied that if this distinction were to be taken seriously Britain would, in effect, have conceded a vital element of its sovereignty:

Rising on his gout-crippled legs, Pitt then made the speech of his life:

Pitt asked that the Stamp Act be ‘repealed, absolutely, totally and immediately'. And so it was. When the news was learned in Boston, John
Hancock laid out a pipe of his best Madeira on the Common for citizens to help themselves. But the cause of repeal in London was perhaps best helped by a dazzling display of expertly informed advocacy from Benjamin Franklin, called before the bar of the House to answer questions from interested members including Grenville. To Grenville's claim that Britain had reimbursed the colonies already for their own outlay of expenses in the war, Franklin pointed out that in his state, Pennsylvania, alone the £313,000 laid out to equip and pay volunteer troops had been compensated by only £75,000 from the Treasury. To Grey Cooper's question on the ‘temper' of America towards Britain before 1763 he replied, ‘the Best in the World. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid in all their courts, obedience to acts of parliament.'

‘And to their temper now?'

‘Oh,' replied Franklin, ‘very much altered.'

Once they considered parliament the bulwark of their liberties; now, much less. When asked what would be the result if the Act were not repealed, Franklin answered candidly but devastatingly, ‘The total loss of the respect and affection the people of America bear to this country and of all the commerce that depends on that respect and affection.'

These predictions gave Franklin no joy. As he wrote to his good friend, the Scottish luminary Lord Kames,'I have had so great a part of my life in Britain and formed so many friendships in it that I love it and sincerely wish it prosperity and wish to see that union on which alone I think it can be secured and established.' He added shockingly, ‘As to America, the advantages of such a union to her are not so apparent.' For Franklin believed that time was emphatically not on Britain's side. His own vision of the future was uniquely informed by a sense that the destiny of nations was shaped, ultimately, less by inherited customs and traditions than by geography, population and social structure. Only the Scots, like Kames, David Hume, James Ferguson and John Millar, who themselves had thought about such things, de Montesquieu in France and some of his other, advanced friends at the ‘Honest Whigs' Club, like Richard Price, could possibly comprehend this essentially sociological way of looking at the rise and fall of nations. The facts of the matter for Franklin were that, sooner or later, the immense expanse of America (whether or not officially bottled up by British regulations), the vitality of its natural population increase and the robustness of its immigration, together with the extraordinary possibilities offered by continental economic expansion, all virtually dictated that it would outstrip its parent country. And he probably subscribed, too, to the principle first articulated at the end of the Commonwealth in James Harrington's
Oceana
that, ultimately, the
distribution of property determined the balance of political power. Before long the inventory, as it were, of American assets would of itself demand that the British adjust to reality. Even if, in the full flush of their imperial triumph over the French, the British could scarcely conceive of such an eventuality, it was going to happen. That was a certainty. It was up to the British, who chose for the moment to play the sovereign, whether they wanted this extraordinary American future to unfold as part of a genuine empire of the free, built on mutual respect and consent, or whether their short-term needs would blind them to their long-term interests.

To his regret, Franklin was not able to see William Pitt, increasingly infirm, pessimistic and evil-tempered. But even if that encounter had taken place it is extremely unlikely that he would have been able to persuade that ‘friend' of the Americans to his view of the inevitable organic development of his country. For as much as Pitt was adamant in his opposition to the iniquitous stamp tax, he was equally adamant that parliament in principle was indisputably sovereign over the colonies. It was that unwavering assumption that led subsequent British administrations, even when making concessions to American grievances, to make categorical reiterations of that sovereignty. The stamps may have gone, but other commercial duties, the Townshend duties, were introduced in 1767, and the customs administration to enforce them became, especially in ports like Boston, notorious for the shamelessness of its smugglers, increasingly militarized. One of the most shameless of them all, the rich young merchant John Hancock, typically converted self-interest into ideology by calling one of his sloops
Liberty
and flaunting his intention of ‘running' Madeira ashore. When a ship-of-the-line, the
Romney,
was summoned from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to assist the customs officers, riots in the docks made it impossible for it to do its assigned work.

It was the glaring fact that Boston and New York were not only uncowed by the threat of force but also rapidly becoming ungovernable that triggered the decision to use regular troops as police. The colonial ports had responded to the Townshend tariff of duties in 1767 by mobilizing a boycott of British imports; shippers and shopkeepers found to have violated it were denounced, intimidated, roughed up and sometimes tarred and feathered. Some 3500 redcoats under the command of General Gage were brought to the rowdiest of all the centres of protest, Boston. In a small, tight-packed city, they could hardly help being extremely visible – that indeed was the idea – and were habitually abused by jeering crowds (especially by young apprentices) as ‘lobster sons of bitches'. The fact that the soldiers were allowed to moonlight in jobs like ropemaking, which were usually held by the locals, did not help. By late 1769 brawls
were common. And sometimes matters got completely out of control. On 23 February 1770 an eleven-year-old boy, Christopher Seider, joined a noisy protest of schoolboys and apprentices outside the shop of an importer, Theophilus Lilley, where he was shot dead by a customs officer. With feelings whipped up by a powerful woodcut of the shooting published in the
Boston Gazette
, his funeral turned into a mass demonstration, carefully orchestrated for maximum tear-jerking by Sam Adams. As many as 500 boys marched two by two behind the little bier, and behind them came at least 2000 adults.

On 5 March the inevitable disaster happened when a wigmaker's apprentice ragged a soldier all the way to the Custom House for an allegedly unpaid bill. When a guard struck the pursuing youth, a tocsin normally used as a fire alarm was sounded and mobilized a large and angry crowd. A small and frightened platoon of eight soldiers, sent to restore order, was surrounded by the crowd who pelted them with rock-solid snowballs. Terrified they were about to be manhandled or worse, they panicked and started shooting. Five were killed, including a black, Crispus Attucks, and an Irish leather breeches-maker, Patrick Carr. Several more were badly wounded. Only the appearance of Thomas Hutchinson, promising swift and proper legal action and evacuating the troops to Castle Island in the harbour, avoided much more serious bloodshed. Though it was recognized that the soldiers had acted out of fear rather than malice, and though they were defended by at least one well-known ‘patriot', John Adams, their acquittal only contributed to the legend of a deliberate ‘massacre' carefully cultivated by the widespread distribution of a print made by the engraver and silversmith Paul Revere, showing a line of British soldiers firing in unison at defenceless civilians. The print was also incorporated into an extraordinary front page of the
Boston Gazette
, its dense columns of print lined in funereal black and including images of five coffins, engraved with skulls in the manner of the tombs in the Granary and Copps Hill burial grounds. Though he knew better, Sam Adams (John's cousin) had no hesitation in publicizing the incident throughout the colonies as evidence of the murderous intent of the British to slaughter civilians who refused to truckle to parliamentary coercion.

Even at this point, however, there was nothing inevitable about the separation of America and Britain. Most Americans, even those deeply affronted by the economic and military policies of governments and parliament, still considered themselves in religion, language and historic culture ineradicably British. If anything, they felt passionately that
they
were the legatees of the ‘true' British constitution, which had been
abandoned in the mother country or somehow held hostage by a vicious and corrupt oligarchy. Some Americans who visited London and were shocked by the excesses of luxury and depravity they found there (while occasionally enjoying a sample of it) explained the lamentable abandonment of the old traditions of freedom by this sorry descent into voluptuary wickedness. But many still hoped the clock could yet be turned back to the days before 1763, a date that began to assume scriptural significance as the first year of iniquity. The virtuous king, evidently misled by wicked counsel, might yet be rescued from his misapprehensions. A changing of the guard at Westminster actually seemed to bode well. The author of the infamous customs duties, Charles Townshend, died. The non-importation campaign against British goods had begun to subside so gratifyingly that in 1770, when Lord North became First Lord of the Treasury, he could announce, without fear of being accused of surrendering to intimidation, that most of the objectionable duties would be repealed. In 1771 Franklin wrote optimistically to Samuel Cooper that there seemed to be a ‘pause in Politics . . . should the [British] Government be so temperate and Just as to place us on the old ground where we stood before the Stamp Act, there is no danger of our rising in our demands'.

There was, however, one commodity on which Lord North, in his wisdom, decided to retain the duty: tea. And the storm that stirred this particular cup would overwhelm British America.

Few could have foreseen the repercussions in May 1773 when the Tea Act was passed through parliament. Looked at from London, it seemed merely a pragmatic expedient designed to get the financially beleaguered East India Company out of its difficulties. The Company had been chartered by Queen Elizabeth in 1600 and had established its first trading post on the west coast of India at Surat eight years later. As usual, the expectation had been that some exotic raw materials might be imported to England (and re-exported to Europe) in exchange for the sophisticated manufactured goods of the home country. But India, and especially its dazzling, printed cotton textiles, turned out to be a lot more sophisticated than anything produced in England. There was nothing that India wanted or needed in exchange for those ‘calicoes' other than silver. So bullion poured out of England as the calicoes poured in, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century, generating a costume revolution as the light, brilliantly patterned fabrics gripped first the fashionable and then the middling classes. Only the panic-stricken representations of English linen manufacturers stemmed the flow of the imports. Happily, tea came along as a substitute and by the middle of the eighteenth century accounted for almost 40 per cent of its import business.

But – especially in America – heavily dutied British tea, although an obligatory item in the pantry, was expensive compared to virtually identical leaf smuggled by the Dutch. The non-importation campaign of 1768–9 had only made matters worse. By 1773 there was a tea mountain piled high in the Company warehouses in the City of London around Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets, 18 million pounds of it. East India Company stock was in free-fall, and, as if this were not bad enough, the Company owed the government a substantial debt for unpaid customs duties, as well as the military protection of its trade. Lord North and the government were darkly considering its future. Then someone – a Scot, Robert Herries – had a bright idea. Why not abolish entirely the customs duties on tea imported into Britain, lowering the price to the point where it could undersell Dutch contraband leaf not only in Britain but even on the European and American markets? The answer was yes, but. Lord North had decided that he would repeal all the Townshend duties
except
for tea, if only to preserve the principle of parliament's right to impose tariffs on the colonies. Now, however, it was thought that the drastically lowered price of tea shipped into America through the East India Company would sweeten the modest payment of threepence a pound to the point where the Americans would hardly notice they were swallowing it.