Desperate Sons Read online

  Modern social scientists have made much of the unlikely collaboration among American blacks, college students, intellectuals, and liberal politicians that fueled the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s, but a glance at the demographics of colonial America suggests a remarkably similar pattern. Some analysis of prerevolutionary protest holds that a small minority of privileged colonials manipulated a largely uneducated mob of workingmen to further their own economic or political ends.

  But that sounds suspiciously like the kind of criticism that faulted only entitled “eggheads” and “liberals” for encouraging the protests against racism and the Vietnam War.

  It was indeed a very different but equally diverse populace that combined to set the American Revolution into motion. Which constituency was primarily responsible for the outcome remains a matter of debate, even if the results were unmistakable.

  Some in England complained at the time that much of the unrest concerning the stamp duties was fomented by merchants who simply wanted to avoid paying their fair share of the freight. They were attempting to duck out on part of the “cost of doing business,” so to speak. But as most accounts of the conflict suggest, it was the common man as well as the more privileged who believed that any burden to trade and to the unfettered conduct of business would harm everyone in the colonies.

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  Nourished by Indulgence

  Just as it is difficult to pin down the first usage of “taxation without representation,” so is it something of a chore to determine just when the term “Sons of Liberty” was coined. The former embodied a concept that was in some ways as old as that of representative government itself, just as the latter phrase was something of a familiar catchall prior to the events of 1765.

  As the Stamp Act was being debated in the House of Commons, one member, Charles Townshend, stood to exclaim in rhetorical wonder, “Will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from heavy weight of the burden which we lie under?”

  Townshend’s statement prompted a passionate reply, one widely disseminated in the colonies, by Colonel Isaac Barré, a veteran of the French and Indian War and a proponent of the concept that the colonists should come up with their own way to contribute toward the costs of maintaining troops and paying down the war debt. “They planted by your care?” Barré responded indignantly to Townshend.

  “No! Your oppression planted ’em in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable, and among others to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most subtle, and I take upon me to say, the most formidable of any people upon the face of God’s earth.”

  Modern readers can only wonder if Townshend expected all this from one of his own, but Barré was just warming up: “They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of ’em. As soon as you began to care about ’em, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over ’em, in one department and another, who were perhaps the deputies of deputies to some member of this house, sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon ’em; men whose behaviour on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them.”

  Barré closed with a passionate flourish that would certainly endear him to the colonists, even if his sentiment failed to win over his fellow parliamentarians: “They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument. . . . The people I believe are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated; but the subject is too delicate and I will say no more.”

  In context, Barré’s characterization of the many “sons of liberty” forced to submit to one incompetent British functionary after the next seems a casual rhetorical touch. But his assessment of the mood of many colonists was accurate, and whether the most passionate of them picked the phrase from Barré’s remarks is immaterial. The concept of sore injustice was crystallized, and the reaction in the colonies would go far beyond mere words.

  The passage of the Sugar Act in 1764 stirred a number of the colonies to establish what were called Committees of Correspondence, unofficial groups made up of influential citizens formed to share information regarding the actions of Parliament and discuss possible strategies to be adopted in response. The formation of such bodies would lay the initial foundation for revolution, but at the time any thought of outright divorce from the mother country was not on the table. What the committees initially facilitated was dissemination of sensitive information and the opportunity to build a sense of common resolve out of sight of the British. Implicit in all of these activities was the hope that Parliament could be reasoned with.

  At the same time, some colonists were openly disputing the authority of Parliament in disguising taxes as regulation. In May 1764, Samuel Adams was appointed by the Boston Town Assembly to write out a set of “instructions” that would guide that body’s set of representatives to the Massachusetts Assembly. (The body is properly identified as the Boston Assembly. The terms “Boston Town Assembly,” “Boston Town Council,” and “Boston Town Meeting” were also used interchangeably.)

  In those instructions, Adams would reason, “If our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves—It strikes our British Privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain: If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?”

  By October 1764, Rhode Island formed its own Committee of Correspondence, and in December, the Virginia House of Burgesses sent a formal protest to London, arguing that it did not possess the hard currency that would be required to pay the proposed Stamp Tax. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Connecticut also sent similar letters of protest, all emphasizing that taxation of the colonies without the colonists’ assent was a violation of their rights.

  No amount of aggrieved letter writing from the colonies or passionate argument by partisans in the Houses of Parliament would alter the course that Prime Minister Grenville had set, however. Though the Stamp Act was decreed as law in late March, word did not reach the colonies until May. When it did arrive, the sense of betrayal among the colonists was palpable. Most historians agree that no other action on the part of the British government was as effective a blow against its relations with the colonies.

  Even had there not been the passage of a Stamp Act, what transpired over the course of the fateful decade to follow suggests that something else might have taken its place, of course, but the fact remains that no one on the eastern side of the Atlantic—not even Benjamin Franklin—seems to have gauged how provocative this action would be. As William Smith, Jr., an influential young lawyer and assemblyman from New York City, wrote to a friend in England, “This single stroke has lost Great Britain the affection of all her Colonies.”

  It may be difficult for a modern reader to appreciate the depth of feeling expressed in the colonists’ reactions to the Stamp Act. Single legislative acts—the health care reform bill and the debt ceiling debates are recent cases in point—have certainly provoked acrimonious wrangling in Washington and hardened the lines between liberals and conservatives, but even in such litmus-test matters as those, the sense of anguished betrayal felt by the colonists in 1765 is generally absent. For one thing, the nation ha
s experienced nearly two and a half centuries of political debate, and although there is no shortage of passion to be found when Republicans and Democrats (or splinter factions within either party) go toe to toe over important issues, at least the struggles take place on a field of contest far more level than that of 1765.

  When the colonists sent their appeals concerning the Stamp Act to England, the route was not only across the Atlantic but considerably upward as well. The colonies were not viewed there as of equal status; as any number of Britons were happy to remind them, they were not called colonies for nothing. From the time of their creation, the colonies had been in large part dependent upon the benevolence of their caretakers for well-being. And when that benevolence was withheld, or unfair treatment dispensed, in spite of all that seemed logical and just, dismay and resentment began to set in. No son or daughter, hearing a father decree an unjust punishment, could have felt greater pain than did many colonists, who felt rebuked by the “mother” country.

  The November 14, 1765, issue of the Pennsylvania Journal carried a letter written by an American to a British friend stating, “This shocking Act . . . filled all British America from one End to the other, with Astonishment and Grief. . . . We saw that we, and our Posterity were sold for Slaves.” Typical of the letters sent to the editors of various papers was one from a Boston resident reminding the British of the many times that colonials had pitched in during a number of military campaigns of the 1700s. “Tis true you took Quebec,” the writer said, but pointed out that it was taken “in Conjunction with the Royal Americans, who during the War, had above 15,000 Men in the Field. Now you, on your Side of the Water, make a Merit of taking Canada for our Sakes—but you know better—and that it was for your own Sakes. For the above-mentioned Services, you have rewarded us with insupportable Taxes, and even infernal ones, Stamp-Duty, etc.—And that you, our tender Parent, who Mr. Grenville says, has nursed us in our Infancy, should not be wanting in Acts of Kindness to us.”

  Nor were the reactions confined to the realm of the subjective. By July, the Boston News-Letter reported, “It is said that the Prospect of the Stamp-Act has put a Stop to three Gazettes already on this Continent, viz. Virginia, Providence, and one of the New York. It is also said, the Maryland Gazette is in a very ill State . . . and it is thought [it] cannot possibly survive the Month of October next.”

  It is interesting, in fact, to note that in the years leading up to the proposal of the Stamp Act, there were a total of twenty-four newspapers operating in the colonies. New England publications included the New-Hampshire Gazette (Portsmouth), the Boston Evening-Post, the Boston Gazette, the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, the Boston Post-Boy, the Newport Mercury, the Providence Gazette, the New London Gazette, and the Connecticut Gazette (New Haven), though the last suspended operations in April 1764. In the middle colonies were the New-York Gazette, the weekly Post-Boy, the New York Mercury, and the Philadelphia papers, the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal, along with the Wochentliche Philadelphische Staatsbote and the Germantowner Zeitung. In the southern colonies were the Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), the Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), the irregularly published South-Carolina Gazette of Charleston, the South-Carolina and American General Gazette, also of Charleston, and the Georgia Gazette (Savannah). Three fresh papers established in 1764 were the North-Carolina Magazine (New Bern), the Connecticut Courant (Hartford), and the North-Carolina Gazette, of Wilmington.

  While a number of editors were strident in their condemnation of a tax they feared would put them out of business, others chose to ignore the matter entirely. Among the earliest public reactions came one from the Virginia House of Burgesses, when word of the Stamp Act’s passage reached its chambers in late May, after many members of that body, including George Washington, had already left Williamsburg for the summer and business was winding down. As the historians Edmund and Helen Morgan write in their thoroughgoing treatment, The Stamp Act Crisis, it is difficult to pin down exactly what happened on the day that the newly appointed representative Patrick Henry (he’d held office for only nine days) rose to introduce a number of resolutions. No secretary took notes, and no reporter was in attendance—the publisher of the Williamsburg paper being apparently indifferent to what the burgesses might have been debating that day.

  Thus, although the twenty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson watched the proceedings from the lobby on that day and would some forty years later do his best to reconstruct exactly what had happened, the words of an anonymous Frenchman in a letter discovered a century and a half later provide the most reliable account of the momentous proceedings.

  Legend has it that Henry stood encased in a bastion of oratory as others among the burgesses tried to stop him with shouts of “Treason!” While it is likely that Henry, even though a novice, owned the good sense to wait until a number of the more conservative members decamped from the chambers for home precisely so that some of the since-reported drama did not take place, there can be no doubt as to the content of the resolutions that the roughly one-third of his fellow assemblymen did pass.

  The first stipulated that all the original settlers of the colonies brought with them and passed down to their present heirs “all the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed by the people of Great Britain.”

  The second reiterated the terms of the royal charters of King James I, stipulating that the colonists were “entitled to all liberties, privileges, and immunities . . . as if they had been abiding and born within the Realm of England.”

  The third stated that “the taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them, who can only know what taxes the people are able to bear, or the easiest method of raising them, and must themselves be affected by every tax laid on the people, is the only security against a burdensome taxation,” closing with the insistence that such a principle was “the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom.”

  In the fourth, Henry asked for agreement that until the recent imposition, colonists “without interruption enjoyed the inestimable right of being governed by such laws, respecting their internal policy and taxation, as are derived from their own consent, with the approbation of their sovereign, or his substitute; and that the same has never been forfeited or yielded up, but has been constantly recognized by the kings and people of Great Britain.”

  All of that was mild enough. However, it was the fifth of the resolutions that began an uproar. In it, Henry asked for his colleagues’ agreement “that the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the inhabitants of this Colony and that every Attempt to vest such Power in any person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.”

  In essence, in this resolution, not only was Henry insisting that it was the sole province of the Virginia assembly to tax Virginians, but he was also calling those who passed the Stamp Act enemies of liberty—and it was there that he had gone too far for several of his peers.

  Though Henry had of course written down the resolutions themselves, he did not do the same with the excited rhetoric he used to frame his introduction of them. However, it is generally agreed that at one point he went so far as to suggest that there would be dire consequences to a king who allowed such legislation as the Stamp Act to stand, referring to other imperious rulers, including Julius Caesar and Charles I, who had been brought low by agitated subjects offended by their actions (Brutus, Cromwell, and so on). Such a threat, history tells us, brought Henry’s opponents to their feet, crying, “Treason!”

  There are garbled and conflicting accounts of the exchange contained in subsequent letters and distant newspaper accounts of the time, and more eloquent accounts would appear in histories penned on both sides of the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. One of the most stirrin
g is found in William Wirt’s Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, published in Philadelphia in 1816:

  It was in the midst of this magnificent debate, while he was descanting on the tyranny of the obnoxious act, that he exclaimed, in a voice of thunder, and with the look of a god, “Caesar had his Brutus—Charles the first, his Cromwell, and George the third”—(“Treason!” cried the speaker—“treason, treason,” echoed from every part of the house. It was one of those trying moments which is decisive of character. Henry faltered not an instant; but rising to a loftier attitude, and fixing on the speaker an eye of the most determined fire, he finished his sentence with the firmest emphasis)—[we] may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.

  The very ring of such a concluding phrase (the italics have been added) is the stuff of which legends are made. And were it not for the chance discovery, more than a century and a half later, of the account of an anonymous Frenchman’s travels through the colonies, who would ever be the wiser as to the truth?

  “Mr. Abel Doysie, searching Paris archives under the general direction of Mr. Waldo G. Leland, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was so fortunate as to discover the following journal in the archives of the Service Hydrographique de la Marine,” began an article in the American Historical Review of 1921, “and, immediately appreciating its interest and importance, has placed it at the disposal of the Review.”

  The editors of the review go on to theorize as to who the author of this letter found in history’s bottle might be:

  The writer was a Catholic, and apparently a Frenchman, indeed apparently an agent of the French government; but all efforts to identify him, both by careful investigations in the French archives and by consultation of books and manuscripts in this country, have thus far been unsuccessful. . . . He seems to use English and French with nearly equal freedom, at any rate spells both about equally well. The manuscript is in the same hand throughout, with the same peculiarities of execution, such as the almost constant capitalizing of C, D, and E.