THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
By Sydney George Fisher
II
SMUGGLED, RIOTING,
AND
REVOLT AGAINST CONTROL
ONE of the greatest irregularities in the colonies, the
most conspicuous rejection of British authority, was purposely
omitted from the previous chapter, because it
deserves to he treated separately, and because it was the
first irregularity which England attempted
to remedy as
soon as France was out of the way.
There were a number of laws on the English
statute books
known as the navigation laws and the laws of trade.
They constituted a great protective system of penalties,
tariffs, and duties, designed
to build up the shipping, the
trade, the commerce, and the manufacturing
interests of
Great Britain and the colonies. They were to protect the
colonies from foreign
traders and foreign interference, and
to unite them closely with the mother-country
in bonds of
wealth and prosperity against
all the rest of the world.
In the commercial competition
in which England
was
involved with Holland, France, and Spain
it was thought
important to prevent
those nations from trading with the
British colonies. If England permitted
those nations to
trade with her colonies, her reason for protecting and governing
them was defeated
;
it would be hardly worth while
to have colonies.
Each nation at that time kept, or tried to keep,
its colonial trade exclusively
for itself. To accomplish
this for England was one of the objects of the
trade and navigation
laws. Another guiding principle
that ran through them was,
that the profits of trade
should be shared between the colonies and the mother-country. The colonies must not monopolize any department
of trade. Still another principle was that the colonies
should confine themselves chiefly to the production
of raw
materials and buy their manufactured goods from England.
We find the beginning of these laws in the earliest
period of the English
colonies. The first important product
from the colonies was tobacco from Virginia ;
and the
king, who could at that time, without the aid of Parliament,
impose duties and taxes, put a heavy duty on this tobacco.
The Virginians accordingly
sent all their tobacco to Holland.
This simple instance shows both the cause and the
principle of all these navigation
laws. If Holland, England's
rival in commerce, was to reap
all the advantage
of Virginia's existence, of what value to England was
Virginia ? So the king
ordered that no tobacco or other
product of the colonies should be carried to a foreign port
until it had been first landed in England and the duties
paid.
This regulation was not merely for the revenue from
the duties, but for the advantage
of English tobacco
merchants, and to prevent Holland trading with Virginia
and establishing a connection there. Soon afterwards, in
1651, Cromwell's Parliament took the next step, and an
obvious one, by prohibiting
the ships of all foreign nations
from trading with the colonies. This was part of Cromwell's
vigorous and successful foreign policy, one of the
methods he employed for building up the power of England.
It was intended to keep
for England
all her colonial
trade and encourage
her ship-builders, ship-owners, merchants,
and manufacturers by the same method other nations
pursued.
Cromwell was of the same dissenting religion as a great
many of the American colonists. He favored the colonists,and was generally regarded by them as a great prototype
of liberty. But his Parliament passed
the first navigation
law
;
and the colonists were often reminded of this when,
during the Revolution, some of them argued
so strenuously
and violently against those laws.
In 1660, when the commonwealth period of Cromwell
closed and monarchy was restored in England,
the famous
navigation act was passed, carrying
the protective system
still farther :
1. No goods were to be carried from the colonies except
in English- or colonial-built ships of which the master and
three-fourths of the sailors were English subjects.
2. Foreigners could not be merchants or factors in the
colonies.
3. No goods of the growth, production,
or manufacture
of Africa, Asia, or America could be carried to England in
any but English or colonial ships. And such goods must
be brought direct from the places where they were usually
produced.
4. Oil, whale-fins, fish, etc., usually produced
or caught
by English subjects, must, when brought into England by
foreigners, pay double alien customs.
5. The English coasting trade was confined exclusively
to English ships.
The colonists never objected
to these provisions, because
most of them favored the colonists as much as they favored
England. They built up
and encouraged
colonial shipping.
The provisions relating
to the coasting trade we ourselves
adopted as soon as we became a nation
;
and we still confine
our coasting trade to our own vessels. We also, in
1816 and afterwards, passed navigation
acts somewhat
similar in their provisions
to these clauses of the English
act which I have been cited. There is no question
that these
and similar protective provisions
assisted in building up the greatness, and power
of England
and the prosperity of
the colonies.
But there was a clause in the navigation
act of 1660
which did not please the colonists.
It provided
that no
sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, ginger, fustic, or other dyewood
should be carried from the colonies to any port on
the continent of Europe. Such commodities must be
carried only to England or to English,
colonies. The
reason for this provision was,
that if the colonists sold their
commodities on the continent of Europe they would reap
all the profits of the sale and the mother-country would
get nothing. It seemed fairer that these articles should
be taken to England
and sold to English merchants, who
might then resell at a profit
to continental merchants.
Thus the profits would be shared by the mother-country
and the colonies, instead of the colonies getting them
all.
These colonial commodities which could not be carried
to continental Europe became known in history
as the
enumerated articles.* Judged
from the point of view of
the times, there was nothing
harsh or tyrannical
in this
provision. But the colonists, having ships of their own,
very naturally wanted to trade directly with the continent
of Europe. They wanted all the profits for themselves.
They wanted full control of all the natural advantages of
the separate country
in which they lived, and in this respect
they were not unlike the rest of the world.
* In 1704 molasses and the rice of South Carolina were added to the enumerated articles. In 1730 rice was allowed to be carried to European ports south of Cape Pinisterre.
Accordingly this regulation about trading with the
continent of Europe
was disobeyed, or, if conformed to
at all, it was to such a slight extent that it was practically
a dead letter. The colonists repealed
it as though they had had a parliament of their own for the purpose;
and while France held Canada they
could do so with
impunity.
In 1663 another act was 'passed,
to parts of which the
colonists had no objection. They certainly approved
of
that clause which prohibited tobacco-planting
in England,
and complained that the weed was still cultivated there in
spite of a previous act prohibiting
its culture. The object
of this act was to favor the Virginia and Maryland tobacco-planters.
In consideration for sending
all their
tobacco to England they were to have the exclusive monopoly
of tobacco-planting. The great object of the trade
laws was to bind together by reciprocal favors the colonies
and the mother-country
as a unit against
all of England's
rivals.
But one of the clauses of the act of 1663 forbade any
commodities of Europe to be taken to the colonies except
in
English-built ships and from English ports.* This was
to compel the colonies to buy their manufactured goods
and articles of luxury from England. Why should the
colonists enrich the merchants of Prance, Holland, and
Spain ? Why not enrich the merchants of England
?
* The act allowed certain exceptions, salt for the New England fisheries, wine from Madeira and the Azores, servants and horses from Scotland and Ireland.
This regulation displeased the colonists, and they
disobeyed
it. They willfully and wickedly carried the enumerated
articles to Europe, and on the return voyage they
brought back European products
in their own ships and
without obtaining them at English ports or from English
merchants. Many a cargo of manufactured articles
from France or Holland, and of wine, oil, and fruit from
Portugal, and many a cargo of the famous cheap Holland
tea, snugly packed
in molasses hogsheads,
did our vessels
"run" as it was called, to the American coast, to the
great damage and underselling of British merchants, and
to the great profit of the natural enemies of Great Britain
in Prance, Spain, and Holland.
If we could raise from the mud, into which she finally
sank, any one of our ancestors' curiously rigged ships,
with her high-turreted stern, her queer
little mast out on
the bowsprit, her lateen sail, and all the contrivances
which made her only
a slight advance on the old
"
Mayflower,"
which brought
such vast cargoes of ancestors and
old china to Massachusetts, we would be tolerably
safe
in labeling her "Smuggler." Most of our ships were
engaged in that profitable business.
The desire to share profits with
"
dear old England"
was not very ardent. In 1676 Edward Randolph was
sent out to Massachusetts as an agent
to look into its condition.
He reported
the navigation laws not executed and
smuggling so universal that commerce was free
;
and the
governor of Massachusetts, he said, "would make the
world believe they were a free state."
He returned in 1680 as collector of customs, and tried
to enforce the navigation
laws. The notice of his appointment
was torn down, and the assembly created a custom office
of its own, so as to supersede him and administer
the navigation laws in the Massachusetts manner. When
he attempted to seize vessels he was overwhelmed with
law-suits. The people were against him, and he returned
to England disgusted.*
*
Palfrey,
"
ISTew England," vol. iii. pp. 284-375
j Randolph's
Report, Hutchinson Papers, published by Princo Society,
vol. ii.
j
Andros Tracts, vol. iii.; Lossing, "Cyclopaedia of United States History,"
pp. 957, 1182.
There was an act of 1696 requiring
the trade between England and
the colonies to be carried in English- or colonial-built ships but to
this the colonists of course had no objection.
In 1733 another trade act was passed, which levied
duties on spirits, sugar, and molasses imported
to the colonies
from any of the French or Spanish West Indies.
This, as the preamble of the act explained, was to protect
the English sugar
islands from competition with the
French and Spanish sugar islands, as well as to give
the
mother-country a share in this trade. But the colonists
found the trade so profitable that they preferred
to have
it for themselves without any tax or duties. They carried
many of their products
to the French and Spanish islands,
making a good exchange for the spirits and sugar, and
bringing back gold and silver money which they needed
in buying supplies from England
and in decreasing the
amount of paper money they were obliged
to issue. The
act of 1733, levying
duties on this trade, was a subject of
much discussion during
the early stages of the Revolution,
and was usually spoken
of as the
"
old molasses act," to
distinguish it from a sort of supplement
to it passed
in
1764, called the "sugar
act." Our people made a dead
letter of it, as they
did of all the others that interfered
with their purposes.
It is hardly worth while to discuss what has sometimes been called the excessive restraint or tyranny of these trade laws, because the American colonists promptly disposed of any element of severity there was in them, by disobeying them. These laws were generally regarded by Adam Smith, and other political writers as much less restrictive than similar laws of other countries.* The trade of all the Spanish colonies was confined by law to Spain ; the trade of the Brazil's to Portugal ; the trade of Martinico and other French colonies to France ; the trade of Curapoa and Surinam to Holland. There was only one exception, and that was in the trade of St. Eustatius, which Holland allowed to be free to all the world ; and through that island a large part of the American smuggling was conducted.
* See, also, "The Interests of the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great Britain in the Present Contest," London, 1774
It is hardly worth while to discuss what has sometimes been called the excessive restraint or tyranny of these trade laws, because the American colonists promptly disposed of any element of severity there was in them, by disobeying them. These laws were generally regarded by Adam Smith, and other political writers as much less restrictive than similar laws of other countries.* The trade of all the Spanish colonies was confined by law to Spain ; the trade of the Brazil's to Portugal ; the trade of Martinico and other French colonies to France ; the trade of Curapoa and Surinam to Holland. There was only one exception, and that was in the trade of St. Eustatius, which Holland allowed to be free to all the world ; and through that island a large part of the American smuggling was conducted.
* See, also, "The Interests of the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great Britain in the Present Contest," London, 1774
This system, long
since outworn and abandoned, was
generally believed to be particularly
fair and liberal,
because it was mutual; because, while the colonies
were compelled to trade exclusively with the mother country,
the mother-country,
besides protecting them
with her army and fleet, was compelled
to trade with
the colonies. The British merchants were as closely bound
to buy their raw material only from the colonies as the
colonies were bound to buy manufactured goods only from
the British merchants. The people of Great Britain, as
we have seen, were not allowed to raise tobacco or buy it
anywhere except in Maryland
and Virginia.
The colonists were paid bounties on all the naval stores, hemp, flax, and lumber, which they produced; and the large sums thus paid to them were considered as fully offsetting any inconveniences they might suffer from restrictions on their trade. South Carolina had a bounty on indigo, and could carry her rice to all European ports south of Cape Finisterre. The laws which prohibited the colonies from importing directly from Europe were mitigated by a system of drawbacks on the duties. Their great staples of grain, lumber, salt provisions, fish, sugar, and rum they were allowed to carry to any part of the world, provided they took them in their own or in British built ships of which the owners and three-fourths of the crew were British subjects. The British West India colonies were compelled to buy their provisions and lumber from the American continental colonies. That colonies which had cost such a vast and long-continued expenditure of blood and treasure should be closely bound to the mother-country in trade, should take part in a system which would at the same time enrich the mother-country and themselves, seemed to most Europeans natural and right.
The Americans were prohibited from manufacturing. They could mine ore and turn it into iron, but they were not allowed to manufacture the iron into steel, tools, or weapons. They were prohibited also from cloth manufacturing and similar industries. But they paid little or no attention to these laws. They were not very strongly drawn to domestic manufacturing at that time, because they saw their greatest field of profit on the ocean, in trade, in whaling, and in the fisheries of the Grand Banks. But to such moderate manufacturing as their hearts inclined they turned openly and without even a wink at the royal governors.*
* "The Interests of the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great Britain in the Present Contest," p. 22, et seq., London, 1774 j Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vol. vii. p. 197.
In theory and by law a colony must share with England the profits its own ships might earn ; it was prohibited from making nails, hatchets, and guns out of the iron dug from its own soil, or making coats out of the wool of its own sheep, or hats from the fur of the beaver that lived on its streams ; a colonist could not give an orange to his sick friend unless that orange had made the voyage from Portugal by touching at an English port and passing through the hands of an English merchant. But none of these regulations could be enforced ; or at best were only partially enforced. If England had had sufficient authority and power to enforce them from the beginning, we might have been a milder people, like the Canadians, with no revolution, with less inventive genius, and without our self-reliant, aggressive, or, as some would call them, disorderly qualities.
The smuggling we indulged in so universally was not a daring occupation. A vessel would enter her cargo as salt or ballast ; or would pay duty on part, give hush money or some goods to the customs officials, and " run" the rest ; * and the officials seem to have been easy to deal with in this way. They no doubt felt that their wages were so low that they would starve to death if not assisted by kind captains and merchants. Their presents were not always money. They were given parts of the cargo ; often choice boxes of wines and fruits from Spain and the Mediterranean, so beautiful and luscious that it seemed impossible they could contaminate.
* Hutchinson's letter to Richard Jackson, September, 1763 ; Ryerson's ''Loyalists," vol. i. p. 276; Board of Trade Papers, Pennsylvania Historical Society, vol. ii. B. 34, 619 j Rhode Island Colonial Records, vol. vi. 428-430; " Letters to the Ministry and Memorials to the Lords of the Treasury from Commissioners of Customs, " pp. 115- 120.
The moral aspect of the situation was not allowed to pass unchallenged. We find a pamphlet + written, as is supposed, by John Drinker, of Philadelphia, implying that nearly all merchants were habitual custom-house perjurers, or procured others to commit perjury, and that such a system was ruining the morals of the country. In our time a reform club would have been organized to deal with the question.
+ Observations on the Late Popular Measures, 77 Philadelphia, 1774.
In spite of the long series of trade and navigation laws, filling so many pages of her statute-books, the revenue received from us by England was only 1000 or 2000 per year and it cost 7000 or 8000 to collect it. In the French War it was discovered that the New England merchants were regularly supplying the French fleets and garrisons with provisions under flags of truce to exchange prisoners. In the hope of preventing such scandals, and of repressing smuggling, the practice of issuing writs of assistance, as they were called, was adopted by the British officials in America. These writs empowered an officer to search generally for smuggled goods, without specifying under oath a particular house or particular goods. Such writs were allowable under English law, but contrary to the principle adopted by Americans that general writs authorizing an officer to go into any house he pleased should never be issued. A test case was made of them in Massachusetts, and James Otis delivered against them a most famous argument, which in a rhetorical and exaggerated sense was described by John Adams as the birth of the American Revolution.
The colonies did pretty much as they pleased for over a hundred years. Their ships sailed in every sea, making of the colonists daring, hardy sailors, and giving them a contempt for the acts of Parliament which they had violated for generations. They were men who won careers from rugged nature, who therefore believed in themselves ; who were conceited, pushing, lanky, gaunt, unpleasant, and ludicrous in English eyes ; but the same men whom the eloquent Irishman, Burke, delighted to describe, as pursuing the whales among the tumbling mountains of Arctic ice, or following the same dangerous game beneath the frozen serpent of the south.
What else had the colonists but their ships and their farms ? Those were their two principal occupations. They ploughed either the sea or the land ; and are not those the rough pursuits of angular, independent, vigorous, self willed men, dexterous with tools and weapons, but very awkward in manners.
Viewed from this stand-point, and setting aside for the moment that part of the population which was aristocratic,loyal, or lived on government salaries, the colonies were merely a long straggling line of settlements, scarcely two hundred miles wide, containing about two million white men and eight hundred thousand slaves, extending along the sea-coast from Maine to Georgia, fishermen, farmers, sailors, and traders. Their ships seemed everything to them, because their ships seemed to give a large part of the value to their farms.
When, therefore, the British government, after the French War was over, resolved on more regular and systematic control, when revenue-cutters became more numerous, when the customs officials were stiffened for their duty and struck at what the colonists called " free trade," and what in England was called the infamous crime of smuggling, it seemed to many of the colonists a terrible thing.
The blow that irritated them most of all was struck at their trade with the French and Spanish West Indies, the trade which, as we have seen, had been prohibited by the " old molasses act" of 1734. They had evaded it for thirty years. But now in this famous year 1764, with France out of the way, and the reorganization of the colonies resolved upon, instructions were sent to men-of-war and revenue-cutters to enforce the laws against the Spanish and French trade, and a new navigation act was passed which the colonists usually spoke of as the "sugar act."
It reduced by one-half the duties which had been imposed on sugar and molasses by the " old molasses act" of 1734. This reduction, like so many other parts of the system, was intended as a favor to the colonists and a compensation for restrictions in other matters. But as the colonists, by wholesale smuggling, had been bringing in sugar and molasses free, they did not appreciate this favor of half-duties which were to be actually enforced. The act also imposed duties on coffee, pimento, French and East India goods, and wines from Madeira and the Azores which hitherto had been free. It also added iron and lumber to the "enumerated articles" which could be exported only to England ; and it reinforced the powers of the admiralty courts which could try the smuggling and law-breaking colonists without a jury.
This "sugar act" of 1764 required the duties to be paid in specie into the treasury in London ; and this the colonial merchants bitterly complained of, because it would drain them of specie and force them to paper money acts to supply a currency in place of the specie ; and at the same time Parliament passed another act to further restrain the paper currency of the colonies. England was evidently very much in earnest.
From the English point of view the " old molasses act" and the " sugar act" were necessary to protect the English sugar islands from French and Spanish competition ; were, in fact, part of the great system of protection for all parts of the empire; the system of give and take, by which inconveniences suffered by one locality for the sake of another were compensated by bounties or special privileges in some other department of trade.
The attempt to enforce the " sugar act" and the old trade laws aroused much indignation among a large number of the colonists. Loyalists afterwards said that the indignation was confined to the smuggling merchants and some radical and rabid dissenters. The indignant ones, however, made themselves very conspicuous, for they combined to protect and conceal smuggling, and at times they broke out into mob violence and outrage which made Englishmen stare. When the officials occasionally succeeded in seizing a smuggled cargo it was apt to be rescued by violence which was actual warfare, but into which the perpetrators entered not only without hesitation, but with zeal, energy, and righteous indignation, as if they were performing a public duty and a perfectly lawful act.
The English regarded these proceedings as a riotous and unlawful rebellion against legitimate authority. The colonists were being driven crazy, it was reported, by certain books about the rights of man, books written by men called Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu, Grotius, and Puffendorf, which told them that all men were politically equal and entitled to self-government ; and the Englishman, John Locke, who was exiled and driven from Great Britain, had written a mad book to the same effect.
The customs regulations became more elaborate. A board of commissioners of customs was created in 1767, for enforcing the revenue laws and the laws of trade and navigation, and instituting a general reform in America. In the fleet on the American coast, each captain had to take the custom-house oaths, and be commissioned as a custom-house official to assist in the good work. The admiral of the fleet became, in effect, the head of a corps of revenue officers ; and, to stimulate the zeal of his officers, they were to receive large rewards from all forfeited property. Some of the captains even went so far as to buy on their own account small vessels, which they sent, disguised as coasters, into the bays and shoal waters to collect evidence and make seizures.*
* "Observations on the Several Acts of Parliament, etc., )J p. 17, Boston, 1769,
But a people who had been left so long to themselves were not easy to bring under the discipline of a more methodical government. The new commissioners of customs sent out more than twenty fresh, cutters and armed vessels to cruise for smugglers. But they rarely made a seizure; and the colonists laughed in their bucolic way, and said that it was like burning a barn to roast an egg*
* Jared Ingersoll, " Letters Relating to the Stamp Act," 3STew Haven, 1766.
It had been the practice in America ever since 1670 to try all smuggling and revenue cases in the admiralty courts, which acted without a jury, because it was found that no American jury would convict a smuggler. The acts which were now passed to improve administration in the colonies, and even the Stamp Act, provided that their provisions should be enforced in admiralty. "Vice-admiralty courts were established and various regulations were made to increase their efficiency and encourage the judges. This seemed entirely justifiable to the ministry, because penalties under the revenue laws had long been recoverable in admiralty, and in England stamp duties were recoverable before two justices of the peace without a jury.+
+ Tucker, "True Interest of Great Britain set forth," London, 1774 j " Correct Copies of Two Protests against the Bill to Repeal the American Stamp Act," p. 17, London, 17GG j "The Conduct of the Late Administration," etc., pp. 12, 13, London, 1767.
To many of the colonists it seemed as if these courts without juries would soon extend their power from their proper sphere of the seaports into the " body of the country," as it was called. They raised the alarm that Britain was depriving her colonies of the right of trial by jury, that she intended to cut off trial by jury more and more,and in the Declaration of Independence this is enumerated as one of the reasons for breaking up the empire.
It is interesting to remember in this connection that by act of Parliament the British government can at any time withdraw trial by jury from Ireland, and in the year 1902 withdrew it by proclamation in nine Irish counties. Great Britain began the conquest and pacification of Ireland seven hundred years ago, but the Irish are not yet submissive and British sovereignty is not yet established.
The colonists also complained because the officers of the admiralty courts were paid out of the proceeds of fines, of which the informers got half. In some instances the governors of provinces were rewarded out of the fines and forfeitures, for the sake of encouraging them to greater diligence in executing the laws.
To Englishmen who reflected on the smuggling and piracy, the thousands of convicts transported to the colonies, the thousands of fierce red Indians by whom the colonists must be influenced, and the million black slaves driven with whips, the withholding from such people of the right of trial by jury, or even of the right of self government, seemed a small matter.
At the close of that famous year 1764 the ministry and Parliament were inclined to congratulate themselves on having done a good deal towards remedying the disorders in America, At the opening of the next session of Parliament, in 1765, the king reminded them that the colonial question was simply " obedience to the laws and respect for the legislative authority of the kingdom," and Parliament, in reply, declared that they intended to proceed " with that temper and firmness which will best conciliate and insure due submission to the laws and reverence for the legislative authority of Great Britain."
We find the pamphleteers in England recommending stronger measures. These rascals, they said, will forever smuggle and complain, complain and smuggle, and call every restraint a badge of slavery. Their long stretch of fifteen hundred miles of sea-coast need be no protection to them. The two thousand miles of sea-coast of Great Britain and Ireland does not prevent unlawful traders from meeting with the punishment they deserve. Therefore double the number of custom-houses and of sloops of war, and pursue every vigorous measure to compel these lawless Americans to learn that while they live in society they must submit to law.
The new Board of Commissioners of Customs had made its head-quarters in Boston, a significant event, followed by a long train of the most important historical circumstances. Boston seemed to be the worst place in America. It had always been so. It needed curbing. Massachusetts was the only colony which had persistently, from her foundation, shown a disloyal spirit to the English government and the English church. Her people seemed to be naturally riotous.[proud to be a Massachusetts native myself NR]
When the sloop " Liberty" was seized for violating the laws of trade the patriot party of Boston rescued her smuggled cargo and smashed the windows of the houses in which lived the collector, comptroller, and inspector of customs, and these unfortunate gentlemen narrowly escaped with their lives. The mob dragged the collector's boat through the town and burnt it on the common. The customs officials had to take refuge on the British man-of-war " Romney."
The proceedings to stop smuggling were carried on from 1764 for a period of eight or ten years, and were contemporaneous with other events relating to the Stamp Act and other taxing laws which are more conspicuous in our histories. It is somewhat difficult to tell how far the repression of smuggling was successful, because the colonists laughed at the revenue cutters and men-of-war as failures, and at the same time complained that they were being ruined by the stoppage of their old " free trade." It seems to be true that the naval and customs officers made very few seizures ; but at the same time the fear of seizure and the presence of the men-of-war may at first have stopped a great deal of the smuggling. The island of Jamaica complained of much loss. Exactly what were the losses among ourselves cannot now be known.
It seems that the smuggling soon got under way again, and was as bad as ever. Our people also formed associations pledging the members to cease importing manufactured goods from England, to cease wearing English clothing, and to violate the act against manufacturing by at once starting manufacturing of all kinds among themselves. Every one appeared in homespun. The promptness with which all this was done is striking. One might suppose that England was already a foreign country. Before that year 1764 was closed the consumption of British merchandise had diminished by thousands of pounds.
When the year 1774 was reached the mobs and tar-and feather parties had driven so many British officials from office that all attempts to check smuggling and enforce the trade laws were necessarily abandoned until the army could restore authority. Those old laws can still be read in their places in the English Statutes at Large ; and, in truth, those clauses of them which the colonists disliked were from the beginning almost as dead as they are now.
to be continued....
III PARLIAMENT PASSES A STAMP TAX AND REPEALS IT
The colonists were paid bounties on all the naval stores, hemp, flax, and lumber, which they produced; and the large sums thus paid to them were considered as fully offsetting any inconveniences they might suffer from restrictions on their trade. South Carolina had a bounty on indigo, and could carry her rice to all European ports south of Cape Finisterre. The laws which prohibited the colonies from importing directly from Europe were mitigated by a system of drawbacks on the duties. Their great staples of grain, lumber, salt provisions, fish, sugar, and rum they were allowed to carry to any part of the world, provided they took them in their own or in British built ships of which the owners and three-fourths of the crew were British subjects. The British West India colonies were compelled to buy their provisions and lumber from the American continental colonies. That colonies which had cost such a vast and long-continued expenditure of blood and treasure should be closely bound to the mother-country in trade, should take part in a system which would at the same time enrich the mother-country and themselves, seemed to most Europeans natural and right.
The Americans were prohibited from manufacturing. They could mine ore and turn it into iron, but they were not allowed to manufacture the iron into steel, tools, or weapons. They were prohibited also from cloth manufacturing and similar industries. But they paid little or no attention to these laws. They were not very strongly drawn to domestic manufacturing at that time, because they saw their greatest field of profit on the ocean, in trade, in whaling, and in the fisheries of the Grand Banks. But to such moderate manufacturing as their hearts inclined they turned openly and without even a wink at the royal governors.*
* "The Interests of the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great Britain in the Present Contest," p. 22, et seq., London, 1774 j Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vol. vii. p. 197.
In theory and by law a colony must share with England the profits its own ships might earn ; it was prohibited from making nails, hatchets, and guns out of the iron dug from its own soil, or making coats out of the wool of its own sheep, or hats from the fur of the beaver that lived on its streams ; a colonist could not give an orange to his sick friend unless that orange had made the voyage from Portugal by touching at an English port and passing through the hands of an English merchant. But none of these regulations could be enforced ; or at best were only partially enforced. If England had had sufficient authority and power to enforce them from the beginning, we might have been a milder people, like the Canadians, with no revolution, with less inventive genius, and without our self-reliant, aggressive, or, as some would call them, disorderly qualities.
The smuggling we indulged in so universally was not a daring occupation. A vessel would enter her cargo as salt or ballast ; or would pay duty on part, give hush money or some goods to the customs officials, and " run" the rest ; * and the officials seem to have been easy to deal with in this way. They no doubt felt that their wages were so low that they would starve to death if not assisted by kind captains and merchants. Their presents were not always money. They were given parts of the cargo ; often choice boxes of wines and fruits from Spain and the Mediterranean, so beautiful and luscious that it seemed impossible they could contaminate.
* Hutchinson's letter to Richard Jackson, September, 1763 ; Ryerson's ''Loyalists," vol. i. p. 276; Board of Trade Papers, Pennsylvania Historical Society, vol. ii. B. 34, 619 j Rhode Island Colonial Records, vol. vi. 428-430; " Letters to the Ministry and Memorials to the Lords of the Treasury from Commissioners of Customs, " pp. 115- 120.
The moral aspect of the situation was not allowed to pass unchallenged. We find a pamphlet + written, as is supposed, by John Drinker, of Philadelphia, implying that nearly all merchants were habitual custom-house perjurers, or procured others to commit perjury, and that such a system was ruining the morals of the country. In our time a reform club would have been organized to deal with the question.
+ Observations on the Late Popular Measures, 77 Philadelphia, 1774.
In spite of the long series of trade and navigation laws, filling so many pages of her statute-books, the revenue received from us by England was only 1000 or 2000 per year and it cost 7000 or 8000 to collect it. In the French War it was discovered that the New England merchants were regularly supplying the French fleets and garrisons with provisions under flags of truce to exchange prisoners. In the hope of preventing such scandals, and of repressing smuggling, the practice of issuing writs of assistance, as they were called, was adopted by the British officials in America. These writs empowered an officer to search generally for smuggled goods, without specifying under oath a particular house or particular goods. Such writs were allowable under English law, but contrary to the principle adopted by Americans that general writs authorizing an officer to go into any house he pleased should never be issued. A test case was made of them in Massachusetts, and James Otis delivered against them a most famous argument, which in a rhetorical and exaggerated sense was described by John Adams as the birth of the American Revolution.
The colonies did pretty much as they pleased for over a hundred years. Their ships sailed in every sea, making of the colonists daring, hardy sailors, and giving them a contempt for the acts of Parliament which they had violated for generations. They were men who won careers from rugged nature, who therefore believed in themselves ; who were conceited, pushing, lanky, gaunt, unpleasant, and ludicrous in English eyes ; but the same men whom the eloquent Irishman, Burke, delighted to describe, as pursuing the whales among the tumbling mountains of Arctic ice, or following the same dangerous game beneath the frozen serpent of the south.
What else had the colonists but their ships and their farms ? Those were their two principal occupations. They ploughed either the sea or the land ; and are not those the rough pursuits of angular, independent, vigorous, self willed men, dexterous with tools and weapons, but very awkward in manners.
Viewed from this stand-point, and setting aside for the moment that part of the population which was aristocratic,loyal, or lived on government salaries, the colonies were merely a long straggling line of settlements, scarcely two hundred miles wide, containing about two million white men and eight hundred thousand slaves, extending along the sea-coast from Maine to Georgia, fishermen, farmers, sailors, and traders. Their ships seemed everything to them, because their ships seemed to give a large part of the value to their farms.
When, therefore, the British government, after the French War was over, resolved on more regular and systematic control, when revenue-cutters became more numerous, when the customs officials were stiffened for their duty and struck at what the colonists called " free trade," and what in England was called the infamous crime of smuggling, it seemed to many of the colonists a terrible thing.
The blow that irritated them most of all was struck at their trade with the French and Spanish West Indies, the trade which, as we have seen, had been prohibited by the " old molasses act" of 1734. They had evaded it for thirty years. But now in this famous year 1764, with France out of the way, and the reorganization of the colonies resolved upon, instructions were sent to men-of-war and revenue-cutters to enforce the laws against the Spanish and French trade, and a new navigation act was passed which the colonists usually spoke of as the "sugar act."
It reduced by one-half the duties which had been imposed on sugar and molasses by the " old molasses act" of 1734. This reduction, like so many other parts of the system, was intended as a favor to the colonists and a compensation for restrictions in other matters. But as the colonists, by wholesale smuggling, had been bringing in sugar and molasses free, they did not appreciate this favor of half-duties which were to be actually enforced. The act also imposed duties on coffee, pimento, French and East India goods, and wines from Madeira and the Azores which hitherto had been free. It also added iron and lumber to the "enumerated articles" which could be exported only to England ; and it reinforced the powers of the admiralty courts which could try the smuggling and law-breaking colonists without a jury.
This "sugar act" of 1764 required the duties to be paid in specie into the treasury in London ; and this the colonial merchants bitterly complained of, because it would drain them of specie and force them to paper money acts to supply a currency in place of the specie ; and at the same time Parliament passed another act to further restrain the paper currency of the colonies. England was evidently very much in earnest.
From the English point of view the " old molasses act" and the " sugar act" were necessary to protect the English sugar islands from French and Spanish competition ; were, in fact, part of the great system of protection for all parts of the empire; the system of give and take, by which inconveniences suffered by one locality for the sake of another were compensated by bounties or special privileges in some other department of trade.
The attempt to enforce the " sugar act" and the old trade laws aroused much indignation among a large number of the colonists. Loyalists afterwards said that the indignation was confined to the smuggling merchants and some radical and rabid dissenters. The indignant ones, however, made themselves very conspicuous, for they combined to protect and conceal smuggling, and at times they broke out into mob violence and outrage which made Englishmen stare. When the officials occasionally succeeded in seizing a smuggled cargo it was apt to be rescued by violence which was actual warfare, but into which the perpetrators entered not only without hesitation, but with zeal, energy, and righteous indignation, as if they were performing a public duty and a perfectly lawful act.
The English regarded these proceedings as a riotous and unlawful rebellion against legitimate authority. The colonists were being driven crazy, it was reported, by certain books about the rights of man, books written by men called Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu, Grotius, and Puffendorf, which told them that all men were politically equal and entitled to self-government ; and the Englishman, John Locke, who was exiled and driven from Great Britain, had written a mad book to the same effect.
The customs regulations became more elaborate. A board of commissioners of customs was created in 1767, for enforcing the revenue laws and the laws of trade and navigation, and instituting a general reform in America. In the fleet on the American coast, each captain had to take the custom-house oaths, and be commissioned as a custom-house official to assist in the good work. The admiral of the fleet became, in effect, the head of a corps of revenue officers ; and, to stimulate the zeal of his officers, they were to receive large rewards from all forfeited property. Some of the captains even went so far as to buy on their own account small vessels, which they sent, disguised as coasters, into the bays and shoal waters to collect evidence and make seizures.*
* "Observations on the Several Acts of Parliament, etc., )J p. 17, Boston, 1769,
But a people who had been left so long to themselves were not easy to bring under the discipline of a more methodical government. The new commissioners of customs sent out more than twenty fresh, cutters and armed vessels to cruise for smugglers. But they rarely made a seizure; and the colonists laughed in their bucolic way, and said that it was like burning a barn to roast an egg*
* Jared Ingersoll, " Letters Relating to the Stamp Act," 3STew Haven, 1766.
It had been the practice in America ever since 1670 to try all smuggling and revenue cases in the admiralty courts, which acted without a jury, because it was found that no American jury would convict a smuggler. The acts which were now passed to improve administration in the colonies, and even the Stamp Act, provided that their provisions should be enforced in admiralty. "Vice-admiralty courts were established and various regulations were made to increase their efficiency and encourage the judges. This seemed entirely justifiable to the ministry, because penalties under the revenue laws had long been recoverable in admiralty, and in England stamp duties were recoverable before two justices of the peace without a jury.+
+ Tucker, "True Interest of Great Britain set forth," London, 1774 j " Correct Copies of Two Protests against the Bill to Repeal the American Stamp Act," p. 17, London, 17GG j "The Conduct of the Late Administration," etc., pp. 12, 13, London, 1767.
To many of the colonists it seemed as if these courts without juries would soon extend their power from their proper sphere of the seaports into the " body of the country," as it was called. They raised the alarm that Britain was depriving her colonies of the right of trial by jury, that she intended to cut off trial by jury more and more,and in the Declaration of Independence this is enumerated as one of the reasons for breaking up the empire.
It is interesting to remember in this connection that by act of Parliament the British government can at any time withdraw trial by jury from Ireland, and in the year 1902 withdrew it by proclamation in nine Irish counties. Great Britain began the conquest and pacification of Ireland seven hundred years ago, but the Irish are not yet submissive and British sovereignty is not yet established.
The colonists also complained because the officers of the admiralty courts were paid out of the proceeds of fines, of which the informers got half. In some instances the governors of provinces were rewarded out of the fines and forfeitures, for the sake of encouraging them to greater diligence in executing the laws.
To Englishmen who reflected on the smuggling and piracy, the thousands of convicts transported to the colonies, the thousands of fierce red Indians by whom the colonists must be influenced, and the million black slaves driven with whips, the withholding from such people of the right of trial by jury, or even of the right of self government, seemed a small matter.
At the close of that famous year 1764 the ministry and Parliament were inclined to congratulate themselves on having done a good deal towards remedying the disorders in America, At the opening of the next session of Parliament, in 1765, the king reminded them that the colonial question was simply " obedience to the laws and respect for the legislative authority of the kingdom," and Parliament, in reply, declared that they intended to proceed " with that temper and firmness which will best conciliate and insure due submission to the laws and reverence for the legislative authority of Great Britain."
We find the pamphleteers in England recommending stronger measures. These rascals, they said, will forever smuggle and complain, complain and smuggle, and call every restraint a badge of slavery. Their long stretch of fifteen hundred miles of sea-coast need be no protection to them. The two thousand miles of sea-coast of Great Britain and Ireland does not prevent unlawful traders from meeting with the punishment they deserve. Therefore double the number of custom-houses and of sloops of war, and pursue every vigorous measure to compel these lawless Americans to learn that while they live in society they must submit to law.
The new Board of Commissioners of Customs had made its head-quarters in Boston, a significant event, followed by a long train of the most important historical circumstances. Boston seemed to be the worst place in America. It had always been so. It needed curbing. Massachusetts was the only colony which had persistently, from her foundation, shown a disloyal spirit to the English government and the English church. Her people seemed to be naturally riotous.[proud to be a Massachusetts native myself NR]
When the sloop " Liberty" was seized for violating the laws of trade the patriot party of Boston rescued her smuggled cargo and smashed the windows of the houses in which lived the collector, comptroller, and inspector of customs, and these unfortunate gentlemen narrowly escaped with their lives. The mob dragged the collector's boat through the town and burnt it on the common. The customs officials had to take refuge on the British man-of-war " Romney."
The proceedings to stop smuggling were carried on from 1764 for a period of eight or ten years, and were contemporaneous with other events relating to the Stamp Act and other taxing laws which are more conspicuous in our histories. It is somewhat difficult to tell how far the repression of smuggling was successful, because the colonists laughed at the revenue cutters and men-of-war as failures, and at the same time complained that they were being ruined by the stoppage of their old " free trade." It seems to be true that the naval and customs officers made very few seizures ; but at the same time the fear of seizure and the presence of the men-of-war may at first have stopped a great deal of the smuggling. The island of Jamaica complained of much loss. Exactly what were the losses among ourselves cannot now be known.
It seems that the smuggling soon got under way again, and was as bad as ever. Our people also formed associations pledging the members to cease importing manufactured goods from England, to cease wearing English clothing, and to violate the act against manufacturing by at once starting manufacturing of all kinds among themselves. Every one appeared in homespun. The promptness with which all this was done is striking. One might suppose that England was already a foreign country. Before that year 1764 was closed the consumption of British merchandise had diminished by thousands of pounds.
When the year 1774 was reached the mobs and tar-and feather parties had driven so many British officials from office that all attempts to check smuggling and enforce the trade laws were necessarily abandoned until the army could restore authority. Those old laws can still be read in their places in the English Statutes at Large ; and, in truth, those clauses of them which the colonists disliked were from the beginning almost as dead as they are now.
to be continued....
III PARLIAMENT PASSES A STAMP TAX AND REPEALS IT
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