Authors: Edward Cline
O
n July 8, two days before he departed on a tour of some of the Piedmont counties, and before he left again in September to campaign against the Indians, Governor Dunmore prorogued the General Assembly until November. His action was part punishment of the burgesses for scheduling the August convention; and part convenience to the Governor, for once the convention was concluded, the burgesses would have no reason to assemble again in Williamsburg during the months he expected to be absent. He would not need to worry about further rebellious mischief they might concoct behind his back. The Governor liked to keep a close ear to the political keyhole and a hand firmly on the latch of assembly.
Of course, he believed that everyone understood that he would brave the rigors and dangers of a campaign as his duty to protect the western-most reaches of His Majesty’s dominion of Virginia. He did not entertain the possibility that perhaps many Virginians suspected that the Cornstalk uprising was precipitated by his seizure earlier in the year of western Pennsylvania. The Shawnee chief Cornstalk, Pontiac’s successor, knew that the British army was forbidden to protect settlers who ventured west of the mountains. What else could he do, but take steps by calling out the militia — not the army — to protect those settlers and to restore order?
Dunmore appointed a Crown crony, John Connolly, a physician of dubious talent, in Pittsburg to govern the newly acquired land. He even proposed to rename Fort Pitt after himself. But Connolly barely had enough time to set up shop at Fort Pitt when he was arrested by Pennsylvania authorities. In the meantime, war had broken out between the settlers and the Indians in the Ohio territory.
And, the Governor may or may not have had at the time of his departure for the west a copy of the Quebec Act, passed in Parliament on June 22, which made Canadian all land west of the Ohio River and on the east bank of the Mississippi clear to the Gulf of Mexico, and Roman Catholicism that province’s official religion. The Act sanctioned the arbitrary annexation of land claimed by Virginia and other colonies but put in abeyance by the Proclamation of 1763.
Dunmore had personal plans for the Virginia lands. If he had knowledge
of the Act, it did not seem to trouble him. After all, he was the Crown, His Majesty’s viceroy, and the Crown could redraw boundaries at will and at the king’s pleasure. And he must have noted with worried envy that the Crown was already granting enormous parcels of land to favored, well-connected British and colonial speculators. Only the year before the Board of Trade had bestowed upon the Grand Ohio Company 20 million acres in exchange for some £10,000, the region to become another proprietary colony with the curious name of Vandalia.
“Dunmore’s War” — a generous designation for a campaign that saw but one battle, a near disaster at which the Governor was not even present, but for which he was responsible — was a microcosm of the French and Indian War in terms of Crown motives and ends. This time the colonials, especially the Virginians, while grateful for their Governor’s concern, were more perceptive and alert to those motives and ends. As in the past war, the campaign’s ostensible purpose was to remove or at least neutralize a mortal threat to better ensure British sovereignty. But because of the political turmoil of the past ten years, the colonials did not automatically assume that the war was waged and won for the sake of their security and for British liberty.
Tactless, bellicose, and crudely sly, almost from the beginning of his tenure Dunmore seemed to them a caricature of the Crown’s true motives. He was insensitive to that insinuative mockery; he did not care a fig for what his subjects thought of him. He was a Stuart, and he would govern. Most Virginians had heard that the Governor had advocated, in a letter to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, the employment of not only slaves, but Indians, as well, to terrify recalcitrant colonials into deference and obedience, should matters get out of hand. A few of them privately entertained the idea that the Governor’s “war” had a dual purpose: to cause a crisis requiring Crown intervention to resolve the dispute between Virginia and Pennsylvania over western Pennsylvania, to better to enforce the Proclamation of 1763, and to resolve it in the land-hungry Governor’s favor; and to test the mettle of the Virginia militia, and to divert it from any possible action against himself.
John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, was not a model of benevolent despotism. In the course of his campaign, he prorogued the General Assembly three times, the last time to early February next year.
Jared Hunt approved of these actions. He did not regret his offer to accompany the Governor on the campaign, even though he was again
obliged to wait two days before being granted an interview. His Excellency had accepted the offer with alacrity, but advised the extraordinary Customsman that he must bring his own weapon and that he would march and camp “at his own or the Customs’ expense.”
When the Governor pressed him for an explanation of his eagerness, to the neglect of his other Crown duties, Hunt had replied that, while he was investigating other venues of smuggling and impropriety, he returned to Williamsburg only to learn that his quarry had sailed for England, removing himself from the likelihood of making that journey in shackles to face trial in London for treason. “He is expected to return in the spring, your lordship,” he had told the Governor. “I will snare him then. As for my other duties, my commission does not oblige me to apply myself in that regard.” The Governor sympathized with such dedication. He advised his visitor to rejoin him in Williamsburg in late August or early September, when he planned to leave for the west.
Jared Hunt then returned to Hampton, and scoured that port’s shops for extra clothing, a musket, and other campaign necessities. He later returned to Williamsburg to join the Governor’s retinue. He did not mind following in the Governor’s footsteps on the arduous march west. The Governor spoke with him as his father, the Earl of Dunmore, did not. They were men of like mind, disposed to like action. He enjoyed lavish meals at the Governor’s field table, plentiful drink from the Governor’s private stock, and ribald conversation with the Governor and his staff about the fickle colonials.
For an aristocrat, thought Hunt, Dunmore was not such a bad fellow.
* * *
Nor was John Randolph, brother of Peyton and the king’s Attorney-General for Virginia, such a bad fellow. A graduate of London’s Middle Temple, he was clerk of the House of Burgesses when Patrick Henry introduced his Stamp Act Resolves in 1765. Originally elected burgess for Lunenburg County in 1769, he was later returned, through Governor Dunmore’s intercession, as burgess for the College of William and Mary, a much more convenient and preferable constituency. The College, like abandoned Jamestown with its single burgess, was the Virginian counterpart of a Parliamentary rotten borough. It was virtually a lifetime sinecure for whoever held it. Also, it kept him close to his brother, burgess for Williamsburg and
Speaker of the House.
The Governor was pleased to assist John Randolph in changing his constituency because the Attorney-General was the epitome of moderation and a champion of Crown authority. Randolph abhorred the course his brother and the rest of the House were following. He was an apologist for the status quo. “We ought to declare, in the most public manner, that the act of the Bostonians in destroying the property of the East India Company, was illegal, and ought not to be countenanced.” The investment of British troops in Boston, he asserted in a tract written in July and published in the Purdie and Dixon
Virginia Gazette
while the convention was sitting, was but “a check to that growing disorder which appeared to be licentiousness instead of freedom, and which must endanger the peace of the British Empire in America, unless it was smothered in its infancy.”
He argued that the reparations expected by Parliament for the destroyed tea were only a matter of justice and civil government. Reconciliation between the mother country and her colonies was possible and a mutually profitable and amicable readjustment of their relationship could be arrived at “without noise” by rebellious rabble. The political mechanism of the Empire could be infinitely cobbled and caulked to the satisfaction of all parties. But, he warned, “Let us make every effort, exert every nerve, in order to terminate a dispute which is big with the fate of both of us,” before it was too late.
After all, he reasoned, if Great Britain and her colonies separated, the mother country would “fall into ruin; and America, that once hopeful and promising soil,” would “become subject to the will of some despotic prince, and be of less importance than it was whilst in the hands of the savages.” Moderation and accommodation were John Randolph’s watchwords. He believed that the status quo could be amended indefinitely to sustain everlasting imperial harmony.
A despotic prince, however, with the connivance of Parliament, was already attempting to subject the colonies to his will. Randolph, though, was unable to conceive of a greater vista of the crisis. He refused to ascribe to the Crown a shred of fault, culpability or villainous intent, and would concede only a tiny measure of thoughtless foolhardiness in some of its legislation. His disenchantment with the march of events was experienced by numerous other colonial gentlemen, whose world of genteel class distinctions, prestige, and Crown-blessed security came to an abrupt and embittering end. John Randolph eventually abandoned Virginia and his family
and exiled himself to England, as did other “Tories.”
The convention in Williamsburg, held in the Capitol instead of the Raleigh Tavern to seat over one hundred elected and reelected burgesses and delegates, began on August 1 and adjourned on August 6. Several rounds of voting chose the delegates who would travel to Philadelphia to attend a general congress unanimously endorsed by the convention: Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, and Edmund Pendleton. It was an unlikely but working union of men who in the past were hostile political antagonists.
Of the seven, Henry was the keystone. He had been the most consistent in his political convictions over the years; the others had been exemplars of caution and “moderation.”
The convention sired a new Association whose twelve resolutions reflected as near a declaration of independence as Virginians would then allow themselves: No purchases of British imports after November 1; no slave purchases after that date; no imports of British tea, nor any consumption of it, even in one’s own home; no tobacco or other colonial exports to Britain after August 10 of the following year; a more vigorous husbanding of sheep to fashion clothing, and a reduction in sheep slaughtering, to eliminate dependency on British-made apparel and textiles; no “price gouging” by traders and merchants for goods made scarce by the boycott; the social and commercial ostracizing of merchants and traders who refused to sign the Association after November 1; the publication of the names of any person who violated the Association’s resolves; an appeal for donations and contributions to relieve the distress of the citizens of Boston; and the naming of Robert Carter Nicholas, Treasurer and burgess for James City County, to replace Peyton Randolph as head of the ad hoc convention, in the event the latter died.
The instructions given to the delegates to the general congress underscored the Association’s resolutions. Aside from naming the delegates, they reiterated most the injustices committed by Parliament, with the king’s approval, since the Proclamation of 1763, and expressed a hope that the king’s ministers would see reason. They also expressed regret for resorting to a boycott of British commerce. Further, they caustically criticized General Thomas Gage, the new governor of Massachusetts, and warned that if he attempted to enforce his edict — which he was empowered to issue under the coercive Massachusetts Governing Act — deeming it a treasonable offense to assemble to form associations or to express or discuss American
grievances, such a “proclamation will justify resistance and reprisal.”
What was intended to be a prologue to the publication of the convention’s resolutions, was instead printed by the Rind
Virginia
Gazette
as a separate epilogue, Jefferson’s anonymously penned “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” Jefferson, who had planned to present it to the convention for consideration, fell ill on his way back to Williamsburg, and forwarded it to Peyton Randolph, who in turn “tabled” it for anyone’s perusal. Most delegates found it too severe in its accusations and language, and nothing in it was adopted. Jefferson’s “Summary” expanded on the Crown’s offenses and the colonists’ grievances, traced the origins of liberty and the proper relationship between king and subject to pre-Norman Conquest times, and ended by appealing to His Majesty to check Parliament’s powers and revoke all its oppressive legislation, as most colonial charters required and expected him to do. “Let not the name of George the Third be a blot in the page of history,” wrote the thirty-one-year-old Virginian.
After tactfully blaming George the Third’s counselors for all the troublesome legislation, and not His Majesty himself, Jefferson appealed, “This, sire, is the advice of your great American council, on the observance of which may perhaps depend your felicity and future fame, and the preservation of that harmony which alone can continue both to Great Britain and America the reciprocal advantages of their connection. It is neither our wish, nor our interest, to separate from her. We are willing, on our part, to sacrifice every thing which reason can ask to the restoration of that tranquility for which all must wish.”
The “Summary” was the precursor of a monumental document its author was to compose two years later. Before the end of 1774, it was reprinted in Philadelphia and London.
The seven deputies, instructions in hand, returned home to their counties to prepare for the journey to Philadelphia, where the first Continental Congress was scheduled to convene on September 5. Georgia was the only colony that did not send delegates, and New York delegates attended
ex officio
. Henry traveled with Pendleton and Washington to Philadelphia, where they joined Peyton Randolph, Benjamin Harrison and Richard Bland. From a tavern they walked together to Carpenter’s Hall, the site of the congress. Richard Henry Lee arrived the next day.