The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (42 page)

books, and pamphlets. A revised agreement included a ban on the importation of slaves.
²³

Shortly after completing this work, the general committee of planters, mechanics, and merchants of South Carolina, a group charged with the responsibility of supervising the new agreement, urged Georgia to align itself with the other colonies. The Sons of Liberty in Savannah, calling themselves the "Amicable Society," proceeded to do as they were bade and presented an agreement based on South Carolina's to a mass meeting on September 19 in Savannah. This meeting, which included few if any merchants, approved what were becoming the standard terms of the associations for restricting trade with Britain, not excepting a ban on importing slaves.
²⁴

All this patriotism up and down the colonies left the Rhode Island merchants cold, but not cold to trade with markets formerly controlled from nearby Massachusetts. Providence merchants now apparently succeeded in disposing of British imports in western Massachusetts, and Newporters imported goods from Britain including cargoes which had been turned back from as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. Merchants elsewhere regarded this behavior as crass profiteering, and those in the major northern cities resolved to turn the economic screws on Rhode Island by threatening to break off trade. The New Yorkers evidently did stop their business in October; an anonymous writer to the
Newport Mercury
described trade with Rhode Island as "nearly shut up, as if the Plague was there." The effects of these tactics were soon felt, and in less than a month merchants in both Providence and Newport had entered nonimportation agreements. Neither port, however, entirely satisfied colonial traders in neighboring colonies, who charged that the Rhode Islanders had left themselves ample opportunities to do business with Britain.
²⁵

Paralleling the gradual extension of nonimportation agreements were decisions by individuals and informal groups not to consume British products. Housewives in virtually all the colonies promised to stop serving tea to their husbands, at least tea imported from Britain. Others renounced fine clothes, the silks and satins that presumably graced the fashionable in England and America.
And luxuries of all sorts were to

____________________

be put aside by both men and women: college students to give up foreign wines; mourners the use of foreign-manufactured mourning dress in favor of plain homespun.

As was the case in 1765, nonimportation also spurred home manufacturing. Spinning bees assumed a new popularity, especially in small towns; spinning schools were established in cities and villages, and small-scale manufacturers of clothing and household articles appeared in greater numbers than ever before. The newspapers gave such activities a strong play and doubtless exaggerated their successes. The journey of one Henry Lloyd through the colonies, for example, was reported in many because he and his horse were decked out in American manufactures -- "His clothes, Linnen, Shoes, Stockings, Boots, Gloves, Hatt, Wigg, and even Wigg Call, were all manufactured and made-up in New England." Undoubtedly the most impressive achievement was in the weaving of cloth. The women of Middletown, Massachusetts, wove 20,522 yards of cloth in 1769, and those in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, turned out almost 35,000 yards in a comparable period.

Cooperation in home manufacturing and voluntary compliance by some merchants with nonimportation could not mask the need for coercion to bring others under the agreements. In fact, coercion of varying degrees was employed in all the colonies to produce the associations and to enforce their regulations. The merchants in the large cities drew particular attention, especially those whose primary business was with British ports. These merchants sent their ships along the routes of trade that permitted returns in "dry goods" manufactured in England. Naturally they felt themselves especially hard-pressed by the prohibitions against imports from Britain, and understandably they believed that they were paying the price for colonial constitutional liberties while those colleagues who traded in "wet goods," molasses and rum from the West Indies, escaped virtually untouched. They entered the same complaints against merchants whose trade was largely outside the empire.

Most merchants, at least in the northern cities, traded in and out of the empire, and they may have had difficulty in calculating precisely where economic advantage lay. Not that most did not share the popular constitutional position; they did and they said so, but they also wanted sacrifices spread as equitably as possible. The majority in Boston and New York joined the local nonimportation associations in August 1768 without much coaxing and with a minimum of pressure. The willingness

of the Bostonians is easily understood; they felt threatened by the Customs commissioners, a feeling given intensity by what was popularly considered a fraud against Hancock in the seizure of the
Liberty
. Then there was the Boston mob -- thoroughly outraged by a long series of oppressions, its temper frayed by riots, impressments, and the rumors of troops on the way -- obviously a body willing to punish those who refused to shut off British trade. The New Yorkers also had to face popular discontents; in addition they felt the cramps of a trade depression and of currency shortages, conditions which made them all the more susceptible to suggestions that retaliation against the British was long overdue.
²⁶

In contrast, the Philadelphia merchants held out as long as they did because they had to contend with neither a mob nor a depressed trade. Yet they did come up against an increasingly restless collection of artisans who made and sold leather goods, furniture, clocks, tools, silverware, all items which were also imported from England. These artisans resented the English competition and sought to rid themselves of it, at least temporarily, by forcing merchants into nonimportation. Not a rootless proletariat, not rabble or scum, the artisans valued property and liberty as highly as the merchants or any other group did. But shared values did not inspire the same ideas about tactics, especially when one kind of tactic promised profits to artisans and losses to merchants.
²⁷

Artisans in Charleston, South Carolina, made their weight felt more effectively earlier in 1769 than did those in Philadelphia. The Charleston group had better leadership in the person of Christopher Gadsden, who in the summer helped pull them together and brought them into league with Carolina rice planters. Together the two groups insisted that the merchants agree to nonimportation. The merchants first tried to satisfy these demands by a relatively loose agreement, but after a series of mass meetings they met the terms of the artisans and planters. Previous to the general association of July the three groups had maintained separate" committees; now they combined, and a committee of thirty-nine, thirteen representatives from each, was appointed with powers of enforcement.
²⁸

Although unconventional, this league of merchants, mechanics, and planters in Charleston was hardly more unusual than the resort to unofficial bodies in all the colonies to enforce nonimportation.
Such bodies,

____________________

most commonly called committees of inspection, operated without any formal sanction of government, which of course in normal times regulated trade. Merchants probably sat on most of these committees in the North; in the southern colonies, planters took the lead, for many of the merchants were foreign-born representatives of English or Scottish commercial houses. Artisans' committees played a prominent role in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, but in no case did they constitute a majority.

All groups were armed by the agreements to store or ship back goods that arrived in defiance of nonimportation. Slow communications accounted for some arrivals after the signing of the agreements; consignees in many cases had sent their orders long before the restrictions were imposed. Some of course were not so innocent, and should they fail to convince the local committee that they had no intention of violating their pledge, they might receive harsh treatment. At the least the committees ordered their cargoes stored or turned away. A celebrated case of this sort occurred in Maryland in early 1770 and involved the brigantine
Good Intent
carrying prohibited goods from London. The importers, the Annapolis firm Dick and Stewart, contended that their orders had been sent long before the Maryland association was established. After the agreement was signed, Dick and Stewart advertised in the
Maryland Gazette
that the goods were coming and asked for a ruling from the committee of Anne Arundel, Prince Georges, and Baltimore counties. Despite the firm's apparent openness in providing the records and correspondence surrounding their orders, the inspection committee remained suspicious and found against them. The
Good Intent
, cargo intact, sailed back to London at the end of February.
²⁹

The committee which heard the case of the
Good Intent
, like others in the colonies, proceeded on the assumption that those who deliberately violated the nonimportation resolutions were "Enemies to the Liberties of America." These words are from the Maryland agreement; most agreements contained similar denunciations of violators. Merchants who did not defy nonimportation but who did not subscribe to it were usually ignored -- as long as they remained quiet. Those who refused to sign and who imported found their names published in the newspapers and their businesses shunned. Ostracism did not always satisfy committees of inspection and their supporters; violators sometimes received coatings of tar and feathers; sometimes they were driven from town, a favorite

____________________

punishment in New England; sometimes their warehouses were broken into and their goods damaged; and at still other times they were hung in effigy, forced to stand under gallows, and even ducked, as if they were petty criminals or accused of witchcraft.
³⁰

All these tactics drew upon a variety of groups -- women engaged in spinning and home production, students who agreed to give up imported wines and tea, artisans and tradesmen of all sorts interested in capturing the market as well as defending constitutional principles, merchants who wanted a voice in the taxes they paid. Many had also resisted the Stamp Act; for them the Townshend crisis probably produced a confirmation of old ideas. For the others it was more of an awakening and an opportunity to make themselves known in local politics. Because the agitation over the Townshend policies lasted longer than that over the Stamp Act and, paradoxically, because there was more disagreement over how to respond, more groups -- notably artisans and women -- found their voices. The result was a more varied participation in public life, and a more popular politics. None of this boded well for British power in America, which after all made use of the most traditional instruments of royal control -- a foreign-born bureaucracy, Parliamentary statutes, and now a large contingent of the regular army.