The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (15 page)

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These Parliamentary statutes could not have been passed at a worse time as far as the colonists were concerned. An economic depression had gradually overtaken the colonies -- and to some extent Britain -- beginning in late 1760, as the war ground to an end. With the end of fighting in America, the orders for food and supplies for the king's military forces fell off, with predictable effects on American business. Soon all strata of society felt the change in business, especially those farmers who had become accustomed to selling their crops to commissaries. By 1763 the depression was severe. Explanations of economic distress are rarely rational, and the hard times of the 1760s soon came to be connected in American minds to the new imperial measures, among them the Sugar Act and the Currency Act, even though the first indications of depression appeared before the passage of those measures.
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The preoccupation with the economy had still another effect: it contributed to the disposition of Americans to couch their protests in economic rather than constitutional terms. Although more than one American pointed out that the taxation of the colonists by a body in which they were unrepresented violated a long-standing right of British subjects, most Americans who protested concentrated their attention on how the new policies cut into their purses. Even more Americans remained unconcerned of course, probably unaware of exactly what had happened in Parliament and how it affected them. Their political education was beginning, not surprisingly, in a haze of unclear issues, and was productive of indecisive and sometimes incoherent or uncoordinated responses.

Even as astute an observer as Benjamin Franklin did not grasp at first how portentous Grenville's plans for taxation were. Franklin heard the rumors that filtered into Philadelphia in 1763 about a tax on molasses with unconcern. Calm and rational in his temperament, Franklin sometimes may have been prone to attribute rationality to others who were not so rational. In November 1763, Franklin heard from his friend, Richard Jackson, M.P., and Pennsylvania's agent in England, that it was absolutely certain that £200,000 a year will infallibly be raised by Parliament on the Plantations."
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The trade of the colonies would be taxed, according to Jackson, and since there was no way of heading off Parliament, he would not try. But he would attempt to get the duty on molasses set at a penny and a half a gallon. The news evoked the sensible observation from Franklin -- "I am not much alarm'd about

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your Schemes of raising Money on us" -- that he did not expect Parliament to lay heavy burdens on American business because by so doing English business would be curtailed. Franklin's easy confidence persisted for months -- he did not trade in molasses, nor did he manufacture rum -though he suggested that perhaps Parliament should tax luxuries rather than necessities. But what he found reassuring was a belief that Parliament would do nothing to impair English business, and since "what you get from us in Taxes you must lose in Trade," the possibility of damaging taxes seemed remote. By early summer 1764 his confidence in the rationality of English policy had slipped, and not long afterwards Franklin was joining others in action intended to coerce Parliament into repealing the Sugar Act.

Those colonists more directly affected by the Sugar Act naturally tended to regard Parliamentary taxation with less patience. Yet the initial reactions of merchants betrayed uncertainty about Parliament's intentions and indecision about how to meet Parliamentary action. After the end of the war with France, many merchants undoubtedly expected to renew the old arrangements with Customs collectors whatever Parliament did. Bribery was cheaper than paying the duty, and better than being shut out of the trade altogether. Without bribery and corruption, the Customs collector "must starve,"
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as Thomas Hutchinson -- no friend of smugglers -- pungently observed. Merchants who expected starving collectors to appear with outstretched palms as in the good old days got a nasty shock even before the Sugar Act went through Parliament. The new breed of officials sent by Grenville to the colonies disabused the merchants of any notion that things would ever be the same by passing the word that duties on trade would be collected. And the naval vessels sent to the American station to uphold the Acts of Trade and Navigation did so with a frightening zealousness.
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Smuggling without the connivance of Customs officials and with an unfriendly navy in coastal waters was difficult, but it could be done. Molasses imported by Providence merchants in defiance of the Sugar Act, for example, was off-loaded into scows and small boats and landed in inlets near the city. This cumbersome work had to be done at night and it was risky. Securing false papers for a ship's cargo could be done for a price, but it too carried hazards. The Browns of Providence resorted to this means in 1764 at considerable cost to their nerves as well as their purses.
There always seemed to be an informer skulking about,

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eager to tell the Customs officials that off-loading was occurring near by or that a ship's papers were false. One William Mumford of Providence -- "that pussy William Mumford," in Nicholas Brown's tart description -- challenged the legality of more than one ship's papers in the late spring of 1764, rousing the merchants there to try to squelch him.
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New York City merchants showed what could be done to an informer by resourceful and powerful men. The informer was George Spencer, who was arrested for debt, paraded through the city, pelted by a mob with the filth of the streets, then jailed, to be released only on his promise to leave the city.
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The violence used against Spencer was condoned by the law. There were other cases in which violence was used which occurred outside -indeed, in defiance of -- the law. The most extreme violence seems to have been at the expense of royal authority in Rhode Island, probably because the economy there was so fully dependent upon molasses produced in the foreign West Indies. Moreover, Rhode Island in the eighteenth century still harbored an unusual collection of extravagant personages -- some called them wild men -- who traced their origins back to the colony's seventeenth-century beginnings.

Whatever their origins, Rhode Islanders did not mind giving the British navy grief: the
Newport Mercury
in December 1764 reported with indignation an affair in which a lieutenant of a party boarding a colonial vessel suspected of smuggling had run his sword through one of the crew. We know from other sources that the lieutenant had at least some slight provocation -- a sailor on the colonial ship had attacked him with a broadaxe, and in the fight that ensued several members of the boarding party had been thrown overboard.
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This fight had seen a naval officer tangle with private citizens, not an unprecedented incident in England or America. A rather more complicated struggle, and surely a more ominous one, took place in the same year between His Majesty's schooner, St.
John,
and a number of inhabitants, the sheriff, and two members of the Council, as the upper house of this legislature (an elective body in Rhode Island) was called. The details of the fray included impressment by the St.
John,
smuggling of

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molasses by the Rhode Islanders, chicken stealing by several of the ship's company, and an angry confrontation between the navy and civilians. At the climax of the struggle, the St.
John
attempted to sail out of Newport, at which time the batteries in the harbor fired upon her on the orders of the two councillors. The incident was more than ugly; it had seen civilian officials willing to order colonial guns to shoot at a ship of the Royal Navy.
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A more important episode involved John Robinson, the Customs collector at Newport. Robinson, one of the new appointees under Grenville's reform, arrived early in 1764, whereupon the local merchants attempted to bring him under the arrangement customarily reached with collectors: a bribe of £70,000 colonial currency a year to look the other way when illegal cargoes were landed. Robinson, an honest man, said no to this handsome offer and began enforcing the law. He soon discovered that enforcement in the local vice admiralty Court was difficult because the judge and the advocate, who prosecuted cases, were both Rhode Islanders with large capacities for friendship. Among their friends were the merchants. To oblige these worthies the judge called cases on short notice when Robinson was out of town, and the advocate failed to appear. The judge thereupon dismissed the case for lack of evidence. When somehow the court convened and condemned a ship, it sold the vessel back to the owner for virtually nothing. Friends, after all, did not buy at auction the ships seized from their own kind.
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Robinson thought such behavior scandalous, until one April day in 1765 he discovered what scandalous meant when he seized the sloop Polly for failure to report all her cargo of molasses. The seizure took place in Dighton, Massachusetts. Robinson left the
Polly
there under guard while he went back to Newport to hire a crew to sail her to Newport for proper condemnation proceedings. Nobody in Dighton had been willing to serve, a fact which might have tipped off a more experienced official that the
Polly
was laden with trouble as well as molasses. While Robinson was gone, a mob took the wind out of his sails -- and the sails off the Polly, along with her rigging, cables, anchors, and of course the cargo of molasses. For good measure, they ran her aground and bored holes in her bottom. When Robinson's unsuspecting crew arrived in Dighton to sail the
Polly
to Newport, the mob persuaded them to do something else.
And when Robinson himself showed up

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to supervise, as he thought, the voyage to Newport, the local sheriff arrested him. It seemed that the
Polly's
owner wanted £3000 damages for his damaged ship and vanished cargo.