The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (31 page)

In the radicals' understanding of history, England had enjoyed liberty for so long because her constitution, her laws, and her institutions had successfully checked power and confined it to useful functions. But these writers did not share the general confidence that liberty would continue to flourish, for they detected relentless plots against it. Their writings from the late seventeenth century to the American Revolution are studded with laments for the vanishing liberties of England. In a typical warning, "Cato" declared that "public corruptions and abuses have grown upon us; fees in most, if not all, officers, are immensely increased; places and employments, which ought not to be sold at all, are sold for treble value; the necessities of the public have made greater impositions unavoidable, and yet the public has run very much in debt, and as those debts have been increasing, and the people growing poor, salaries have been augmented, and pensions multiplied."
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"Public corruptions and abuses": the phrase or similar ones appeared

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repeatedly in the oppositionist literature. Just as frequently the radicals bewailed the growing "luxury," officeholding by "wicked men," the degeneration of manners, the bribery of officeholders and the electorate. The climax of all this corruption, this pervasive moral decline, according to these political Jeremiahs, would be the destruction of liberty, and its replacement by a ministerial tyranny.

In England these grim predictions never persuaded the great Whig leadership or its massive following. But in America they were taken in deadly seriousness by a vast company of responsible men. When the crisis of the Stamp Act reached its peak, they seemed all the more compelling.

The other sort of circumstance leading Americans to accept charges of conspiracy as simply commonsense truth was the character of their Protestantism. The children of the awakened, the evangelical, the revivalistic could not have been astonished at the news that an evil plot against their liberties had been hatched in a corrupt and faintly "Catholic" England. The founders had come to America in the seventeenth century to escape an earlier version of what seemed by the eighteenth a persistent conspiracy. Christian history afforded many such examples.

Protestant Americans were especially sensitive to the pictures of hordes of placemen and taskmasters that the pamphleteers predicted would descend upon the colonies. The traditional Protestant virtues -- purity and simplicity in life, work, thrift, and frugality -- shaped their lives and conduct, after all., Hence the revulsion they felt at the accounts of the degeneracy, idleness, and profligacy which threatened to pass from England to America in the persons of placemen and their satellites.
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This feeling suggests that the uprising in the colonies, half-articulated and partially disguised as it was, occurred in part over values. The hatred of English corruption set off fears in many colonists that their society too might give way to effeminacy, sloth, luxury, and moral decay. Thus the victims chosen by the mobs at the time of the Stamp Act were struck not simply because they supported or were presumed to support English policy. Such men as Andrew Oliver, Jared Ingersoll, and in particular Thomas Hutchinson represented a dangerous moral order. In attacking them, and others like them, the mobs not only defended political liberty in America but also virtue and morality.

The mobs and no doubt popular leaders as well acted in the belief

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that they face an unqualified evil. The Devil's specter had been summoned up in the denunciation of the stamp men. Protestant concerns and mental patterns had fostered an exaggerated clarity of morality and immorality, thereby heightening the emotional receptivity to fear of unseen, utterly evil forces. This disposition was broadly diffused in colonial society, and it seized ways of thinking and feeling because it was encouraged by a Protestantism that also supplied many moral and psychological values. It seemed to explain political conduct because it had always explained private behavior. It aligned the colonists with much that was old, comfortable, and good in their moral code, for a hatred of idle, dissolute placemen who served the designs of tyrants implied a love of honest, hard-working freemen committed to constitutional government. There is irony, of course, in fears and delusions fostering a national and responsible public order, but ultimately that occurred in the prolonged crisis that began with the passage of the Stamp Act.

Rumors that Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act, or soon would, seeped through the colonies soon after Grenville's dismissal in July 1765. Ships from England brought most of these reports and occasionally less happy news as well -- of a reluctant Commons and a beleaguered ministry trying unsuccessfully to get the Act off the books. Certainty replaced rumor on May 2, 1766, when the
Virginia Gazette
published copies of the repealing and Declaratory acts, and in a few weeks printers spread the statutes all over their newspapers.

News of repeal set off celebrations in small towns and cities through America. The cities, of course, made more of the opportunity than the towns. New York proved itself especially rowdy, with the Sons of Liberty there consuming an incredible amount of hard drink, offering toasts to a long list of English heroes and to themselves, exploding fireworks, shooting guns, and finally marching in a body to the fort to "congratulate" the governor. That eminence received three of them, drunk as they were, as representatives of the rest. An officer in the British army who witnessed the celebration reported sourly that the night "ended in Drunkeness, throwing of Squibbs, Crackers, firing of muskets and pistols, breaking some windows and forcing off the Knockers off the Doors."
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Far to the south, the citizens of Charleston in their joy did some of these things, but more sedately and with restraint. Boston thoroughly enjoyed itself with fireworks, music, "a magnificent Pyramid" decorated with 280 lamps, and the recitation of a surprising number of grandilo-

quent verses. Several wealthy citizens put up the money to obtain the release of all debtors in jail, and perhaps the wealthiest, John Hancock, "treated the populace with a Pipe of Madeira Wine."
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Hancock also gave a lavish party for his friends. Philadelphia behaved itself -- it had been warned to do so by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who had written that repeal should not occasion either boasting or recriminations. The city gave a handsome dinner, presided over by the mayor and attended by the governor and other officials. There was an "illumination" by fireworks for ordinary people which, according to one of Franklin's friends, "was conducted with great Prudence."
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As the colonial legislatures convened throughout the remainder of the year, they too declared their pleasure over the repeal, and most sent addresses of gratitude to the king. None matched the Massachusetts House of Representatives in professions of loyalty or in fulsome sentiment. Only the Virginia House 6f Burgesses, where opposition had first declared itself, failed to rise to the occasion. In refusing to send thanks to the king, the Burgesses maintained the integrity it had shown a year earlier.
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The Burgesses was not in session when the report of repeal reached America in May, and it did not convene until the following November. In the interval, enthusiasm for Parliament's action inevitably cooled and just as surely the meaning of the previous year penetrated more Americans' minds. As it did, thoughtful people asked what all the celebrating was about.

Not that the Americans had not felt genuine joy and relief in May. They had, and they quite rightly said so. What they felt but conveyed only rarely was a mood, a feeling of uneasiness at what had befallen them and distrust of the English across the sea, even of those merchants who had interceded in their behalf. The belief that a sinister ministry had conspired to deprive them of their liberties remained strong, though expressions of this conviction were naturally muted after the Rockingham Whigs took over. The plotters had long since identified themselves -George Grenville ostensibly led them, but behind him lurked the Earl of Bute.

If the Americans who had written and rioted against the Stamp Act hated these men, they regarded with something less than love the "friends of the colonies" -- those who had pushed through repeal.
These friends

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had also passed the Declaratory Act with its curious phrase about Parliament's right "to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever." At first, most colonists who read this line seemed to believe that by this claim Parliament did not include taxation. Others were not so sure. More ominous was the curiously patronizing, even arrogant, attitude of the so-called friends of the colonies. The merchants, for example, who had organized support outside of Parliament seemed more than smug over their success -- they acted as if the colonists were under great obligation to them, when everyone knew that they had favored repeal in order to get trade flowing again, and profits flowing too. The Americans had felt no cynicism or even surprise that British merchants defended America to protect British commerce; they understood this motive and indeed had depended upon it. The British merchants, however, persisted in talking as if they had saved the foolish Americans from themselves and not from a policy which the Americans regarded as subverting their rights and which had cut into British profits. Yet the British merchants betrayed no understanding of these facts -- at least not in their warnings to Americans against repeating claims to be exempt from Parliamentary taxation. The manner of the merchant addresses to the colonies was all wrong and had been from the beginning of the crisis. It approached, as George Mason the distinguished Virginia planter said,

the authoritative Style of a Master to a School-Boy: "We have, with infinite Difficulty and Fatigue got you excused this one Time; pray be a good boy for the future; do what your Papa and Mama bid you, and hasten to return them your most grateful Acknowledgments for condescending to let you keep what is your own; and then all your Acquaintance will love you, and praise you, and give you pretty things; . . . but if you are a naughty Boy, and turn obstinate, and don't mind what your Papa and Mama say to you, but presume to think their Commands (let them be what they will) unjust or unreasonable, or even seem to ascribe their present Indulgence to any other motive than Excess of Moderation and Tenderness, and pretend to judge for yourselves, when you are not arrived at the Years of Discretion, or capable of distinguishing between Good and Evil; then everybody will hate you, and say you are a graceless and undutiful Child; your Parents and Masters will be obliged to whip you severely, and your Friends will be ashamed to say anything in your Excuse: nay they will be blamed for your Faults."
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