Desperate Sons Read online

  It is doubtful that Townshend would have seen it that way. As the historian Robert Chaffin explains in his careful analysis of the Townshend programs, the establishment of the board was the only way to ensure that the new duties would in fact be collected. Over time, the existing customs officials had grown estranged from any sense of loyalty to the Crown, becoming little more than lackeys to the smugglers and making more by accepting bribes than they did in salary. Honest officers feared for their physical safety and were often the target of damage suits brought in courts stacked against them. Basing oversight of the system in the colonies, Townshend argued, would not only allow for easier enforcement but be more economical as well.

  A corollary measure, the Vice Admiralty Court Act of 1768, would establish district offices of the admiralty court system (headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia) in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Those courts, much despised in the colonies because they did not have juries attached, were far more likely to support the efforts of the new customs officials in prosecuting accused smugglers.

  There was at least one bit of undeniable chicanery included in Townshend’s plan: though the preamble to the Revenue Act stated that its purpose was “for making a more certain and adequate provision for defraying the charge of the administration of justice, and the support of civil government, in such provinces where it shall be found necessary; and towards further defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing, the said dominions,” Townshend let it be known that he intended to set aside a portion of the funds generated to pay the salaries of the colonial governors. Traditionally, those salaries had been paid by the colonial assemblies, but that arrangement was prone to the sorts of problems recently exacerbated in Massachusetts, where the assembly could withhold payment to a governor who was too conscientious in his allegiance to Parliament.

  Along those lines, Townshend also took action to bring the recalcitrant New York Assembly into line for its failure to comply with the terms of the Quartering Act, requiring support of General Gage’s troops in that colony. The New York Restraining Act was passed along with the Revenue Act on July 2 and officially suspended the authority of the colony’s assembly until it was willing to come up with the funds. Ultimately, the New York Assembly would comply, though, in its resolution approving the delivery of the funds, the representatives made no mention of either the Quartering Act or the Restraining Act, insisting that they were making a free and voluntary gift toward the expense of keeping the troops.

  However onerous all this might seem, the fact is that Townshend’s proposals were mild compared with those of others in Parliament. Lord Shelburne, for instance, pushed his own agenda for the upstart colonies, which included a requirement that troops be billeted in private homes and criminal punishment be applied for untoward criticism of king and Parliament.

  Townshend’s plan won the day, however, aided by a speech that has been called one of the most compelling ever presented in the House of Commons. He had actually spoken on behalf of his proposals earlier in the day on May 8 and then, assuming his work was done, had gone to dinner with colleagues. Townshend, who suffered from epilepsy, had appeared in Parliament with an eye bandaged from a fall during a seizure the previous day and was already a bit worn down.

  After dinner, he and his companions ordered a bottle of champagne to toast what all hoped would be a successful outcome for the measures still being debated. They’d barely drained their glasses when a messenger arrived at the table. Members still had their doubts, and Townshend’s presence was required on the floor. Though one member of Parliament wrote that Townshend appeared “half drunk” when he returned to speak and another described him as “in liquor,” the Treasury minister’s passion carried the day. As MP Horace Walpole wrote, “Half a bottle of champagne, poured on genuine genius, had kindled this wonderful blaze.”

  The performance essentially put an end to debate and earned Townshend the nickname “Champagne Charlie” among popular scribes. Whatever a colonial audience might have thought of it, the speech, which lasted about an hour, was for Walpole “the most singular” of its kind and was filled with “torrents of wit, ridicule, vanity, lies, and beautiful language.” Townshend would have his way.

  Though one might have expected all this to provoke an uproar in the colonies far beyond what the Stamp Act had elicited, the immediate reaction was mild. One of the most significant responses came in the form of a series of letters penned by thirty-five-year-old John Dickinson, a Philadelphia attorney and descendant of a wealthy landowning family of Quakers. Though raised on a plantation in Delaware, Dickinson had studied law in both Philadelphia and London and was a sophisticated observer of the developing political situation.

  In his twelve-part series, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which began circulating in December 1767, Dickinson dismissed the notion that there was any meaningful distinction between “internal” and “external” taxes. The Townshend duties were bald-faced attempts to raise revenue from the colonies, he said, and had nothing to do with the “regulation of trade.” Parliament did indeed have sovereignty in matters that affected the whole of the British Empire, but when it came to the matter of raising revenues and deciding what monies were to be allocated to the mother country for assistance in anything affecting their internal operations, the colonial assemblies were the sole deliberators.

  Generally regarded as constituting “the literary event” of the prerevolutionary period in the colonies, Dickinson’s letters begin in a simple, engaging fashion:

  My dear Countrymen,

  I am a Farmer, settled, after a variety of fortunes, near the banks of the river Delaware, in the province of Pennsylvania. I received a liberal education, and have been engaged in the busy scenes of life; but am now convinced, that a man may be as happy without bustle, as with it. My farm is small; my servants are few, and good; I have a little money at interest; I wish for no more; my employment in my own affairs is easy; and with a contented grateful mind, undisturbed by worldly hopes or fears, relating to myself, I am completing the number of days allotted to me by divine goodness.

  But in short order Dickinson moved to share his fears that too little attention had been given to an act of Parliament “as injurious in its principle to the liberties of these colonies, as the Stamp Act was.” Specifically, he explained, he was referring to the act suspending the powers of the New York Assembly:

  If the British parliament has legal authority to issue an order, that we shall furnish a single article for the troops here, and to compel obedience to that order, they have the same right to issue an order for us to supply those troops with arms, clothes, and every necessary; and to compel obedience to that order also; in short, to lay any burthens they please upon us. What is this but taxing us at a certain sum, and leaving to us only the manner of raising it?

  It was a direct rebuttal of Townshend’s claim, pointing out that there was no difference in principle between a tax of a penny and one of a pound, and a stance that found great favor among the colonists, who had come to an awareness of their power through the struggle against the Stamp Act. In his third letter, Dickinson addressed the issue of just how far it might be necessary to go in defense of freedom from such oppression:

  The English history affords frequent examples of resistance by force. What particular circumstances will in any future case justify such resistance can never be ascertained till they happen. Perhaps it may be allowable to say generally, that it never can be justifiable until the people are fully convinced that any further submission will be destructive to their happiness.

  The series of essays was published and widely circulated about the colonies in serial form from December 1767 through February 1768, yet, as popular as they became, Dickinson knew that the relatively conservative Pennsylvania Assembly was unlikely to mount any official challenge to the Townshend measures. Accordingly, he wrote to James Otis in Boston, expressing his hope that the assembly there would take action. “The Liberties of
our Common Country appear to me to be at this moment exposed to the most imminent Danger,” he said, explaining why he had begun to publish his letters and enclosing a copy of the first.

  Dickinson gave Massachusetts much of the credit for forcing the repeal of the Stamp Act and suggested that if Otis agreed with the sentiments expressed in the attachment—that the threat implied in the Townshend measures was even more dire than that of the Stamp Act—then possibly he might want to share the “Farmer’s” letter with the Sons in Massachusetts and others who would be sympathetic. Their common cause was nothing less “than to maintain the Liberty with which Heav’n itself ‘hath made us free,’ ” Dickinson said, insisting to Otis that “the most destructive Consequences must follow, if these Colonies do not instantly, vigorously, and unanimously unite themselves, in the same manner they did against the Stamp Act.”

  Still, Dickinson called for moderation. Despite the importance of the cause, he said, “I hope it will not be disgrac’d in any Colony, by a single rash Step. We have constitutional methods of seeking Redress; and they are the best Methods.” He closed with a similar rejoinder, telling Otis, “The Moderation of your Conduct in composing the Minds of your Fellow-Citizens, has done you the highest Credit with us.”

  Otis’s reply, along with most others, was positive, but meantime, the Sons of Liberty in Boston were not sitting idle. Samuel Adams was instrumental in leading the Boston Town Assembly to issue a ban on the importation of some fifty items, including those named in the Revenue Act, which would no longer be imported after December 30, 1767. The Committee of Correspondence sent copies of the resolution to all towns in Massachusetts as well as to every major city throughout the colonies, asking that they join the embargo. By early spring, a number of cities, including New York, signed on, but Philadelphia held out. Though Benjamin Franklin wrote home that news of the boycott alarmed British merchants, Philadelphia’s absence from the coalition was a serious blow to the endeavor.

  In January 1768, Adams convinced his fellow liberals in the Massachusetts Assembly to draft a petition directly to King George, asking that the revenue acts be rescinded. The colony had been developed principally by investments made by the colonists themselves, not by the Crown, the document began, yet Britain gained significant profit by trading with the province, supplying most of its manufactured goods. The petition went on to reiterate what were now familiar precepts, most of them contained in Dickinson’s letters: that residents of the colony could be taxed only by their own elected representatives, that it was not practicable for the colony to have a representative in the distant Parliament, and that residents of the colony were not truly free so long as the revenue acts oppressed them. The petition closed with a plea to the king to grant relief to his loyal subjects.

  Though Adams initially found it difficult to convince his colleagues to send out a call to the other colonial legislatures, asking them to send their own similar petitions, he finally won out, composing a circular that would accompany a copy of the Massachusetts petition. In his letter, he spent considerable time arguing the unconstitutional nature of taxation without representation, but he attacked the specifics of the Townshend Acts as well. One of the most troubling aspects was the notion that the Crown would henceforth be paying the salaries of the colonial governors and judges, thereby removing them from any influence of their own constituencies.

  Most important, Adams was quick to assure the Massachusetts agent who would bear the petition to London, it should be understood that no colonist harbored any desire for independence. In a letter of January 22, 1768, drafted on behalf of the assembly to Lord Rockingham, Adams insisted that the residents of Massachusetts were well aware of “their happiness and safety, in their union with, and dependence upon, the mother country.” Even if an “independency” were offered them, Adams said, “they would by no means be inclined to accept.”

  In a letter penned the following week to the chief judiciary officer of Great Britain, the generally sympathetic Earl of Camden, Adams reiterated, “The subjects in this province, and undoubtedly in all the colonies, however they may have been otherwise represented to his Majesty’s ministers, are loyal: they are firmly attached to the mother state: they always consider her interest and their own as inseparably interwoven, and it is their fervent wish that it may ever so remain.” All they desired, he emphasized, was to have their rights respected and restored.

  Such protestations of loyalty did not convince everyone, of course. General Gage wrote to London in March 1768, saying that anyone with sense could see the trend. First, the colonists had refused to be taxed on their internal affairs. Now they were denying the obligation to pay import duties. “They mean to go on step by Step,” he said, “ ’till they throw off all subjections to your laws.”

  As for protestations of loyalty to the king, Gage insisted, the colonists might acknowledge the king for a time but soon enough would “deny the prerogatives of the Crown, and acknowledge their King no longer than it shall be convenient for them to do so.” The ultimate aim of the colonies was for “independency,” he declared, and the sooner everyone in England understood it, the better.

  When copies of the Massachusetts petition and circular letter reached London in April, Parliament was not in session, but the king’s ministers immediately foresaw the possibility of a second pan-colonial congress coming into being, to develop a coordinated resistance to the Townshend Acts. Accordingly, the secretary in charge of colonial affairs wrote immediately to Governor Bernard of Massachusetts, directing him to order the assembly to retract the circular letter at once; if they did not disavow the letter, the assembly would be dissolved.

  On June 30, the Massachusetts Assembly met and voted on the matter, and by a vote of 92 to 17, they refused to rescind the circular. Samuel Adams, the house clerk, was directed to write a letter to Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state in charge of the colonies, justifying the refusal, and in a letter of his own to Hillsborough, Governor Bernard shared an interesting bit of behind-the-scenes jockeying between Otis and Adams that had ensued. Since Adams had not been asked to read his letter to the assembly, no one would know its contents—theoretically, at least—until it was read by its intended recipient. Governor Bernard, however, offered the following fly-on-the-wall dialogue between Otis and Adams as an example of his adversaries’ political cunning, all of it “from a gentleman of the first rank” who happened to be in the representatives’ anteroom at the time:

  When Otis asked Adams bluntly what he intended to do with the letter to Lord Hillsborough, Adams replied casually, “To give it to the printer to publish next Monday.”

  By that point, Otis understood the value of sharing the various passionate appeals with the broadest possible audience, but still he was concerned. “Do you think it proper to publish it so soon,” Otis asked, “that he [Hillsborough] may receive a printed copy before the original comes to his hand?”

  Why would that small point matter? Adams responded. “You know it was designed for the people, and not for the minister.”

  Of course Otis knew as much, but still he wondered whether Adams was being carried away by his own importance. “You are so fond of your own drafts that you can’t wait for the publication of them to a proper time.”

  It was a moment at which the discussion might have taken a truly contentious turn, but Adams put an end to it. “I am clerk of this House,” he reminded Otis, “and I will make that use of the papers which I please.”

  On the heels of its resolution to refuse to rescind the circular, the assembly also voted a committee headed by Samuel Adams into being, its business being to draft a petition to the king, this one calling for the removal of Bernard as governor. As Adams’s biographer John Alexander points out, the assemblyman seemed uncannily prepared for the task, given that he had a fourteen-paragraph draft ready for the assembly’s consideration by that same afternoon. It was a rather daunting list of complaints, one of the kindest being that Bernard possessed “an arbitrary dispo
sition,” but before the assembly got the chance to consider the document, Bernard dissolved the body.

  Meantime, the situation on the streets and docks of Boston was deteriorating. The Board of Customs Commissioners had begun operations late in 1767 and proved itself to be even more vigorous in its operations than Townshend or anyone else in Parliament had probably envisioned. The commissioners did operate independently of local government, but in a particularly unfortunate manner. One of the first actions of the new commission was to deploy its own harbor patrol fleet, which soon came to operate essentially as privateers.

  Since there were no funds allocated to pay the crews, it was understood that the proceeds would come from the sale of seized contraband. But in short order, the question of what was contraband and what was legitimate became murky indeed, prompting great complaint from local merchants and traders, who often found their goods seized upon dubious pretexts. Worse yet, when such cases did end up in court, they were heard by the newly expanded admiralty courts, where the verdicts regularly vindicated the actions of the customs “agents.”

  Still, the new commissioners were troubled by threats from their doughty constituency and were petitioning London for a show of military support from the day they landed, when they were escorted to their offices by a crowd of a thousand or more, bearing their hanging effigies and signs that proclaimed “Liberty & Property & no Commissioners.” Though local merchants might have said otherwise, the commissioners in short order complained to London, “we shall find it totally impracticable to enforce the Execution of the Revenue Laws until the Hand of Government is strengthened. At present there is not a ship of war in the [Massachusetts] Province, nor a company of soldiers nearer than New York.”