Sergeant Lamb's America

  So it was that the old game of befooling and thwarting the King’s representatives – the regal Governors of the colonies – was taken up with increased zest by many of the Colonial Assemblies, especially in the North. This they were in a position to do, though the Governor had the power of absolute veto upon the laws that the Assemblies would pass, for they held the purse-strings. Unless he assented to their measures they would withhold his salary. There was always great mistrust between the Governor and the Legislature, even when a compromise seemed desirable. The Governors would not pass the laws that were wanted, without being sure of the money, nor the Assemblies give the money, without being sure that the laws would be allowed. The rather indecent bargain-and-sale proceedings that ensued were the rule rather than the exception.

  These Governors were accused of being idle and haughty persons and of bringing in their trains a set of worthless rascals who paid their debts with the perquisites of office and gave the colonies nothing of value in return. That we in Great Britain cheerfully bore with the very same concomitants of monarchy did not concern the Americans. My jailers during my captivity were never weary of telling me that their fathers had left the Old World to escape from these monstrous inequalities of fortune and station there prevalent, which they would not allow to be foisted on them in the New. Certainly, America had served for several reigns as a wilderness into which to banish all the factious people who would not conform peaceably to established religious practice – Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Papists – the liberality of the early provincial charters having been baits to these troublesome folk to emigrate. But that some at least of their parents had come over, not of their own free will, but by order of a magistrate and in chains, I was always too delicate or too cautious to observe. (True it is, that in the sixty years preceding the Revolution no fewer than forty thousand felons had been transported to America from Great Britain, besides a number of persons kidnapped by the ‘spirits’ of the seaport towns and conveyed there against their wills to be sold on arrival as ‘redemptioners’.)

  A deal of loose talk was current in the Northern States about the New World’s natural superiority in grandeur to the Old. Dimensions were compared, always favourably to America. Beside the wide Hudson’s River, or the wider St Lawrence, the Severn was no more than a creek and the Thames a poor ditch; the biggest forest in England would seem no more than a coppice if set beside those of the northwestern parts of America; and how many times would the whole United Kingdom fit into the space of a single one of the greater colonies? ‘A dwarf claiming sovereignty over a giant,’ they said in Boston – Boston being the original seminary of all American malcontents and revolutionaries. Calculations were made as to how soon the population of the American colonies, which doubled itself every thirty years by natural increase, would overtake that of England: this time was expected to be reached about the year 1810. Then how foolish a case that would be, with a great and vigorous nation forced to bow to the superior wisdom of a smaller and weaker, that lived three thousand miles away!

  So we come to the hullabaloo raised in America after the Peace of 1763. Then, since the national debt of Great Britain had been much increased by the expenses of the war and a multitude of extraordinary taxes were now being levied at home, as upon window-panes and wagon-wheels, it was thought equitable that Americans should contribute a trifle to the common stock, in the interests of their own security from invasion. Duties were therefore laid on all articles imported into the colonies from the French and other islands of the West Indies, the amounts to be paid in specie to the Exchequer of Great Britain. The colonists warmly remonstrated, asserting that they had hitherto furnished their contingent in men and money by the vote of their Colonial Assemblies; and that the British Parliament, in which they were not represented, had no right to tax them further. No attention was paid to these complaints, and they soon retaliated by forming associations to prevent the use of British manufactures until they should obtain redress.

  This agitation was still in progress when the Red Indian, Pontiac, secretly knit up a confederacy of those Northern tribes who had formerly favoured the French, to which were added those of the West who wished for revenge, as having been dispossessed of their hunting-grounds by the sturdy and ruthless American backwoodsmen. Pontiac and his allies made a simultaneous attack upon our weak border posts in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, and took scalps of nearly every one of the defenders. Lord Jeffery Amherst, who commanded our forces in America, found himself woefully short of troops: for after the Peace a quantity of British regiments had been disbanded and the few still stationed in America had fallen very low in strength. There had been costly expeditions sent to the Havana and Martinique, where the fever took off thousands of poor fellows. The Indians therefore were able to continue their ravages upon the borders of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, with increasing boldness and violence. Yet when Lord Amherst appealed to each of the colonies for local levies to assist him in his march against Pontiac’s main forces, he met with a shabby enough response from almost every Assembly.

  Partly it was that Lord Amherst, who soon resigned his command in disgust and sailed home, was held like the rest of our officers in America to have too haughty a way with the provincials. In the Canadian campaign he had seldom or never called the American colonels to a council of war, so that they knew no more of what was afoot than their own sergeants. Partly it was that a long-standing suspicion and jealousy existed between the colonies; so that if one colony held back from contributing to the common interest, the others felt no obligation to be any more active. But the chief reason why the provincials in general were so lukewarm was that they regarded soldiering as an unprofitable occupation in these roaring times and best left to the English, should they be martial-minded enough to undertake it. The provinces of Massachusetts and Connecticut made conditions which amounted to a refusal; Rhode Island did not deign to reply; New Hampshire excused herself; Pennsylvania would not send a single man; New York and New Jersey voted a mere thousand men between them – but two-thirds of these might not pass across their borders; Virginia had already sent men to her own frontier and could spare no more, so the Assembly pleaded.

  It was two years before Pontiac’s power was broken. By this time the colonies had grudgingly raised between them something better than two thousand men (of whom three hundred immediately deserted) to accompany the British punitive expedition. The most useful fighters were a few score of frontiersmen from Virginia; but the Virginian Assembly refused to pay their expenses and tried to fasten the cost personally upon the Colonel of the Sixtieth Regiment with whom they had marched. The King’s men bore the chief brunt, and won, unsupported, the only pitched battle of this Indian war, that of Bushy Run. They felt more than a little resentment when they recalled that in the days of greatest peril to the colonies sixty invalids of Montgomery’s Highlanders had to be dragged from hospital and conveyed in carts to the weakly-held frontier forts – because free-born Americans refused to make the war any concern of theirs.

  Now for the famous Stamp Act. It seemed clear enough that, if left to their own resources, the colonies would be unable to agree upon secure measures of defence against depredations of Indians in their rear, or possible naval raids of French or Spanish upon their front and flanks. Fifteen thousand men was reckoned by the King’s military advisers to be the lowest figure necessary for the protection of his possessions from Hudson’s Bay to the West India Islands, and it seemed reasonable that the colonies should pay a part at least of the maintenance of these troops, having been such great gainers from the late war.

  The new First Lord of the Treasury, therefore, Mr George Grenville, began considering ways and means. He consulted first with the London agents of the various Colonial Assemblies. He pointed out to them that the Acts of Trade and Navigation were being consistently evaded by the Americans. Even with the addition of the new duties, against which such indignant protests wer
e being raised, the amount of revenue brought in did not pay one-third the cost of its collection! Would not the Colonial Assemblies, since these new duties displeased them, suggest an alternative method of raising money for American defence? But no answer came.

  It may be noted that the famous Dr Benjamin Franklin, agent for Pennsylvania, then privately approved the quartering of British troops in the colonies as a reasonable measure, and as a security not only against foreign invasion but intestine disorder – for armed conflict between the various colonies, in disputes over land, was always threatening. The generality of Americans, however, held that, since no immediate danger seemed to hang over America, and since they had supplied several militia regiments in the late war, for the expulsion of the French from Canada, their obligations were now at an end. It was also held unjust that their militia officers, however extensive their experience of war might be, still ranked junior to the rawest officer from England who held a commission from His Majesty. But the main impediment to a favourable reply, when Mr Grenville raised this question, was that no two American Colonial Assemblies were ever known to agree, and therefore it would have been impossible, even had the principle of contribution been admitted, to fix the proportions of money that each colony should pay into the common fund for American defence.

  The Government then, since the agents did not answer, saw no other alternative but to enforce the Trade and Navigation Acts by a tightening of the preventive system, to pass a Bill for the quartering of troops in America, and to pay the resultant expenses by new imposts in the form of stamp-duties. In the year 1765 the Quartering Act and its more famous companion, the Stamp Act, were passed.

  The Stamp Act provided for the annual raising of £100,000, the whole of which was to be spent in America for defraying the costs of that country’s defence. Since the population of America was something above two millions all told – exclusive of negroes and Indians – this amounted to a monthly charge of less than one penny a head. Yet what a howl went up! The loudest mouthed and most energetic dissentients in America were always to be found in Boston and the province of Massachusetts generally. The people of Massachusetts had once enjoyed a far more liberal charter than the present, but it had been withdrawn from them for their frequent defiance of the Crown, and their intolerant killing, whipping, and jailing of harmless Baptists and still more harmless Quakers. Massachusetts was a very litigious province as well, and the numerous irregular lawyers of Boston, who were demagogues to a man, chanced to be hurt in the pocket by this Act: for the new stamp-duties were (as had long been the case in England) applied not only to newspapers, pamphlets, playing cards, and dice but to all legal documents, nor might any but the regular lawyers now ratify documents with the stamps.

  These lawyers roused the town mob to the most striking demonstrations of displeasure. On the limb of a large tree, as one came into Boston from the country, were hung two effigies, one designed for the Stamp Master and the other for a jack-boot, with a head and horns peeping out at the top. Great numbers of enthusiasts, both from town and country, flocked to see it. In the evening these poor, foolish effigies were cut down and carried in procession with shouts of, ‘Liberty and Property for Ever. No Stamps!’ But what became of them after, I do not know. The mob went next to the house of Mr Oliver, the Chief Justice of the colony, beheaded him in effigy, broke his windows and burned down a new building of his which lay adjacent. A few days later they also broke the windows of the Deputy Registrar of the Court of Admiralty, and entering into his house destroyed his official books and papers and much of his furniture. They served the Comptroller of Customs similarly, and drank his cellar dry in addition. As for the Governor himself, Mr Hutchinson, they wholly wrecked his mansion and not only carried off from it all his plate, furniture, and clothing, but scattered or destroyed the collection of historical documents that he had been thirty years at making. These mobs consisted, not of people of substance, but of a rabble who were as unqualified to vote in their provincial assemblies as the lawyers who stirred them up now were to discharge their assumed profession. They were, in fact, the forerunners and exemplars of the Sans-culotterie who, guided by a similar school of lawyers, were the smoke and flame of the subsequent Revolution in France.

  The mobs of the other colonies did not lag far behind Boston in their excesses. At Newport in Rhode Island they burned the houses of two gentlemen who had in conversation supported the right of Parliament to tax the Americans. In Maryland the effigy of the Stamp Master, on one side of which was written ‘Tyranny’, on the other ‘Oppression’, and across the breast, ‘Damn my Country, I’ll get Money’, was carried through the streets from the jail to the whipping-post and from thence to the pillory. After suffering many indignities, this effigy was first hanged and then burned. Similar outrages and frolics took place in New York and Connecticut. On the day that the Act became law there were mock-funerals of Liberty in several towns, church bells tolled mournfully, minute-guns were fired and flags flew at half-mast.

  Nor had the mob alone been the instrument of colonial discontent. The respectable General Assembly of Virginia had passed resolutions strongly protesting against the right of England to lay taxes on America. Of this Assembly, the famous George Washington was a member and a zealous speaker on the text: ‘No taxation without representation.’ But the boldness and novelty of these resolutions, when they were first presented to the Assembly, affected Mr Randolph, the Speaker, to such a degree that he struck upon the table with his gavel and cried out, ‘Treason! Treason!’

  It may be thought remarkable that the Virginians, who were the most aristocratic people of America, should have allied themselves with the libertarians of Boston in this protest against taxation. It would indeed have been remarkable, had the flourishing condition continued in which the province found herself when the war ended: for revolution is never made by affluent men. But peace commonly brings unemployment, as the energies that were devoted to destruction are relaxed and cannot at once be converted to constructive ends. Money is scarce, trade stagnates, merchants fail to meet their obligations and men tramp the country in search of employment that is nowhere to be had. All this took place after the Peace of 1763. The prosperity of Virginia was so closely linked to that of England that there were many bankruptcies among the planters; for the London market being glutted with tobacco, which few could afford to smoke or chew, the price of that commodity had fallen alarmingly. The employer of free labour has this advantage over a slave-owner, that he can at least turn his workmen adrift in difficult times: whereas the slave-owner must either house and feed his or sell them in a falling market.

  Another cause of great discontent in Virginia and the South in general was that the planters did not receive a proper return for their crop even in the best of times: with British profits, charges for freight, commissions and taxes, the price of British goods sent to America in exchange for tobacco was, it was said, six times their real value. George Washington was just such a planter who had fallen into difficulties from these complicated causes: however, by a rich marriage he was protected against utter ruin. He was also one who, though a Colonel of Militia, and a soldier of experience in the Indian wars, had taken it ill that as an American he could not be granted a higher rank in the British Army than that of Captain, and had quitted the Service in a huff. To a man of his condition the Government’s choice of such a time to tax America for the purposes of quartering an army on her soil was, of course, most offensive.

  On the matter of taxation and representation the British Government took the following view: owing to the preservation without change of our ancient electoral system, certain decayed Cornish boroughs, for example, of a few houses apiece, still return forty-two members to Parliament between them – while great new cities, such as Birmingham and Manchester, have no members at all. Yet Birmingham and Manchester are virtually, it was held, represented by their manufacturers whose interest controls votes in other boroughs; and it was the same with the American merchants,
who were indirectly a great power in the British Parliament. Why should Boston and Philadelphia be more tenderly treated than Birmingham and Manchester, cities of rather greater size than themselves?

  To which the common American replied: that if the men of Birmingham and Manchester wished to live as slaves, that was their own affair: it did not suit the free populations of America.

  To which the answer came again: ‘If you would be free, then take concerted measures for your own defence, tax yourselves as you were first requested through your agents – do not burden Great Britain with the business. There can be no more proper a time than now for this mother-country to leave off feeding out of her own vitals the children whom she has nursed up. For, by your own showing, they are arrived at such maturity as to be well able to provide for themselves.’

  But the Americans: ‘The supposed danger does not exist, or is much exaggerated: if the French or Spanish invade our country we will turn them out easily enough, we reckon, and without your aid.’ The hotter-mouthed among them cried, ‘We want none of your lazy, foul-mouthed soldiery, hirelings of oppression, quartered upon us, nor of your arrogant, evil-living officers, instruments of a tyranny worse than death itself.’

  Mr Pitt the Elder, who had ruled England in the glorious days of the French wars, was now out of office, suffering from a suppressed but deep-seated gout. This affection prevented him from making any great parliamentary exertions, and was even generally agreed to have impaired his powers of reason, though diminishing little from his fluency as an orator. At the third reading of the Stamp Bill he had warmly taken up the cudgels for the Americans, while tolerantly deprecating the turbulence of the Boston mob. His speech, spoken with great animation, paid witness rather to his continued warmth of heart than to his continued sagacity as a statesman. He declared that he rejoiced that America had resisted the despotic threat to her liberty which this Bill conveyed. Yet he did not suggest by what alternative means the necessary fund for America’s defence was to be raised. Nor would he explain in what sense the old-established Acts of Trade, one or two of which he had himself sponsored, were any less despotic in intention than this Stamp Bill – unless it was that they were more easily evaded by the lawless American people than this might prove to be.