The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (35 page)

Perhaps more than most crises in the past, revolutions take on the appearance of inevitable, even natural, events. They usually have small beginnings that grow into large confrontations between political bodies and a people. Riots become rebellions, and rebellions, war; at the climax, power shifts -- or seems to -- as a ruler or a class is deposed and the state transformed.

In some ways the appearance resembles reality: the populace experiences the growth of popular emotion, of disaffection from old authority, of new loyalties, and perhaps of actual power. But these developments are by no means inevitable. Frequently, established authority emerges not only unscathed but stronger after putting down upheavals against itself. And in the course of "successful" revolutions the way is never free of failure, of loss of popular support, for example, of weariness, declining faith, and confusion.

Certainly confusion and weariness abounded in the American colonies early in the struggle over the Townshend acts. At this time no selfconscious revolutionary movement existed in America, but rather a determination to resist unconstitutional authority, which was much stronger in urban communities and among professionals, merchants, skilled craftsmen, and the great planters in the southern colonies who produced staples for the market than it was in the countryside remote from markets and communications. Yet there were divisions within these groups, especially among the merchants, who resented their financial losses in the resistance to the Stamp Act.

Confusion, weariness, and resentment affected the initial reactions among Americans to the Townshend program. Whether the new duties constituted a violation of colonial rights was a question honestly asked; the answers did not always dispel the confusion. Long after the appearance of John Dickinson
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
( 176768), which insisted that the duties encroached upon the constitutional rights of the Americans just as the Stamp Act had, Richard Henry Lee, the Virginia planter, wrote that the duties were "not perhaps, literally, a violation of our rights," though he added that they were "arbitrary" and "unjust." Lee read Dickinson's essays on the Townshend program and he eventually became convinced that American rights had been violated, but he with others was slow to come to this conclusion.
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Others, especially merchants who knew that they would be called upon to give up the importation of English goods if the public construed the new duties the way they had the stamp tax, simulated confusion about whether rights were at stake, or attempted to avoid the constitutional issue altogether. Rather than discuss rights and liberties, they moved immediately to the issue of nonimportation as if to head off any demand that they reinstitute what had apparently worked so well the year before. They showed themselves first in Boston, whose example everyone knew would be important elsewhere in America. Early in September, news of the Townshend policies having arrived in August, the
Boston Evening Post
opened the campaign against nonimportation. Among the earliest articles, one held forthrightly that nonimportation pressed too hard on the merchants who had to bear the sacrifices virtually alone and without reimbursement. Two weeks later "a true Patriot" attacked the "Blow-coals," presumably the group around Otis, as giving way to "political enthusiasm" in their opposition to British measures; and "Libernatus" stressed that as a "remedy" nonimportation fell unequally on the merchants. Nonimportation, he concluded, is a "partial" method, "the consent partial, the execution partial." In October "A Trader" argued that besides violating the "civil liberties" of merchants, nonimportation would ruin business. According to the "Trader," only those who have "no property to lose" favored it, and he pronounced them "brawling boys" and "hectoring bullies."
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¹
Richard Henry Lee to John Dickinson
, March 1768, James Curtis Ballagh, ed.,
The Letters of Richard Henry Lee
( 2 vols., New York, 1911-14), I, 27. In July, he wrote Dickinson a letter of praise for giving a "just alarm" to Americans about their endangered liberties;
ibid.,
29.

²
Boston Evening Post
, Sept 7, 16, 27, Oct 12, 1767.

Naturally, little of this went unanswered. The Boston Gazette made the case for nonimportation, though only after a period of indecision, in late summer 1767. Eventually it created or picked up a slogan that served well in the controversy: "Save your money, and you save your country." 3 Elsewhere in the colonies -- Philadelphia, for example -- this slogan caught on and appeared in newspapers and tracts. But in most colonies little was published about Townshend's policies until after the appearance of John Dickinson Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. 4

John Dickinson called himself a farmer in these letters, but his ties to the soil were rather remote by 1767. He was the son of a planter in Maryland, where he was born in 1732 and where his father practiced law. The family moved to Dover, Delaware, when Dickinson was still a boy; in Delaware he received a classical education and began his legal training. In 1754 he entered the Middle Temple in London for the study of law and remained there until 1756. On his return he practiced law in Philadelphia, earned a small fortune, and eventually established a handsome country estate in Delaware. Like so many lawyers, he found politics irresistible, and in 176o he was elected to the assembly in Delaware and two years later to the assembly in Pennsylvania. 5

Dickinson Letters struck the colonies with a peculiar impact, unsurpassed, according to many historians, until Thomas Paine Common Sense appeared in 1776. The letters were published first in the Pennsylvania Chronicle and reprinted in all but four colonial newspapers. Collected, they made their appearance as a pamphlet in several editions -- three in Philadelphia, for example, two in Boston, and still others in New York and Williamsburg. Benjamin Franklin, ordinarily on the opposite side of the political fence in Pennsylvania, was sufficiently impressed to write a brief preface for the edition published in London in June 1768. And others, sensing the importance of the essays, had them reprinted in Paris and Dublin. 6

The essays appealed to a people fatigued by the strain of extravagant

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³
Ibid.,
Nov 2, 1767
.

⁴
The "Farmer's Letters", as they were immediately called, appeared in twelve installments in the
Pennsylvania Chronicle and Universal Advertiser
(Phila.). The first appeared Dec 2, 1767. I have used the edition edited by Forrest McDonald,
Empire and Nation
( Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962).

⁵
David L. Jacobson,
John Dickinson and the Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1764-1766
( Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965) provides biographical details and a shrewd analysis. McDonald,
Empire and Nation
contains a short sketch.

⁶
McDonald,
Empire and Nation
, xiii.

rhetoric and violent measures. Their tone is established by Dickinson's modest recommendations of further petitioning as a method of obtaining repeal of the Townshend duties; he also proposed economy, frugality, hard work, and home manufacturing, all for the purpose of lessening the consumption of English goods. His language is mild, even meek in places -- as, for example, in the suggestion, "Let us behave like dutiful children who have received unmerited blows from a beloved parent," a proposal George Mason had scorned the year before in the aftermath of the Stamp Act. Within these submissive inflections, the message was inescapable: although Parliament possessed the 'right to regulate commerce, it had no right whatsoever to levy duties for revenue. And however disguised as regulation, the Townshend duties were taxes to raise money on the colonies, an "experiment," Dickinson wrote, to test the colonists' disposition, and, if it were acquiesced in, "A direful foreteller of future calamities." Dickinson's clarity of analysis and his modest phrasing forced Americans to confront the constitutional implications of the Townshend duties -- or, perhaps more accurately, made it possible for the reluctant and the confused to confront them without endorsing the popular upheavals that had marked the crisis of the Stamp Act. Still, action bent toward forcing the repeal of the Townshend duties did not follow hard on the heels of the
Pennsylvania Farmer
.
⁷

The reasons lie in that gray area' of public will and mood. Dickinson had informed men's minds as to the constitutional issues but left their passions unmoved -- indeed, left them in the trough of exhaustion where popular emotion had fallen in summer 1766. Normal desires prevailed then -- desires for business and profits as usual. Recognizing these desires, Dickinson offered an incisive critique of the constitutional issues raised by the Townshend duties and with it sweet reason and condemnation of mobbish violence. His appeals for childlike submissiveness, his quiet calls for petitioning and home manufacturing, seem to have comforted many precisely because they asked for so little. What Dickinson could not supply were lurid descriptions of plots against liberty, of sinister conspiracies of a degenerate ministry determined to enslave the libertyloving Americans. The colonists read the
Letters
, agreed, and with few exceptions did nothing.

The exceptions -- who, not surprisingly, lived in Boston -- turned out to be rather important. They did not include James Otis -- at least they did not until sometime after the first of January 1768. On one of his curious gyrations in the autumn, Otis evidently argued in the Boston

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meeting for the constitutionality of the Townshend duties. The town may have been impressed; in any event it turned down demands that it endorse nonimportation of British goods. It contented itself with a resolution calling for reduced consumption of certain specified British goods which, according to the town, were superfluous anyway. Curiously, the articles slated for the Townshend duties were not included, but the town did resolve to encourage the manufacture of paper and glass.
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A week later the Customs commissioners arrived from England. Their arrival had been expected -- they were already odious figures -- but its timing was a stroke of bad luck: November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, a day ordinarily of riotous behavior. Somehow they avoided all abuse, though they were greeted by a large crowd parading with effigies of "Devils, Popes, & Pretenders", all with labels on their breasts reading "Liberty & Property & no Commissioners".
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The presence of the commissioners, visible embodiments of a parasitic policy, might have given the faction an advantage, but still they were unable to push through a nonimportation agreement. Late in December they evidently persuaded the town to instruct its representatives in the legislature to protest against the Townshend duties, and by this time several small towns, eventually numbering around twenty-five, passed nonconsumption agreements in obvious imitation of Boston. Although the spread of the boycott must have been encouraging, all the signs indicated that the province would submit to the Townshend program.
¹⁰

Governor Bernard confessed to an uneasy delight at the absence of opposition. In December, just before the legislature convened, Otis seemed less threatening to the governor and, as the new session stretched into January 1768, calm evidently prevailed. Bernard remained anxiouswounds, he wrote Secretary of War Barrington, sometimes "skinnedover" without healing. Bernard did not know and could not find out during these peaceful January days that the House, under Sam Adams's tutelage, was writing a series of protests to its agent Dennys De Berdt, Secretary Shelburne, and others it considered friendly, asking that the Townshend acts be repealed. The House also sent a moderate but clear appeal to the king -- again without informing the governor.
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