Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Grenville had already turned to the problem of defense, so inseparably connected with the question of Indian relations and Western settlement. The English Government had long recognized the necessity of securing the friendship of the Indians; and to this end it had fostered the settlement of the interior. Indian traders, employing methods none too scrupulous, had been encouraged to ply their traffic beyond the mountains. Many thousands of acres of land had been granted, to individuals and to companies of promoters, in the belief that "nothing can more effectively tend to defeat the dangerous designs of the French," or better enable the English "to cultivate a friendship and carry on a more extensive commerce with the Indians inhabiting those parts." It was a policy which all Americans could understand. To those colonists who had fought with Washington to beat back the tide of Indian massacre, to those who had witnessed the destruction of Fort Duquesne, the conquest of Canada had no meaning unless it opened the great West to free settlement. And during the latter years of the war, thousands of families in all the old provinces were prepared, as Franklin said, "to swarm," while many hundreds had crossed the mountains and were already seated in the upper valleys of the Ohio.

Yet before the war began, the Board of Trade perceived that the policy originally advocated required serious modification. It was obvious enough that if titles to land were granted, not only by the English Government, but also by different colonies claiming jurisdiction over the same territory, endless conflict and litigation would be the sure result. And it soon appeared that the actual occupation of the interior was after all far more likely to provoke the hostility than to win the allegiance of the Western tribes. Overreached and defrauded in nearly every bargain, the Indian hated the trader whose lure he could not resist, and with the coming of the surveyor and the settler was well aware that the pretended friendship of the English was but a thin mask to conceal the greed of men who had no other desire than to rob him of his land. During the latter years of the war, after the conquest of Canada placed the allies of France under the heavy hand of Amherst and opened the way to actual settlement, it became clear that an ominous spirit of unrest was spreading throughout all the Northwest. It was precisely to guard against the danger of an Indian uprising, which in fact came to pass in the formidable conspiracy of Pontiac, that the Board of Trade formulated as early as 1761 the policy which found expression in the famous Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The Proclamation announced the intention of the English Government to take exclusive control of Indian relations and Western settlement. "For the present," all territory west of the Alleghanies, from the new provinces of Florida on the south to Canada on the north, was to be "reserved to the Indians." Governors were forbidden to grant land there. Those who had already settled within reserved territory were required to remove forthwith; and every Indian trader was bound to give security for observing such rules as the Imperial Government might establish. It was the intention of the ministers, although unfortunately not so expressed in the Proclamation, to open the reserved lands to settlement as soon as Indian titles could be justly extinguished. In accordance with this intention, the Government negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, by which the Six Nations ceded to the Crown their rights to lands south of the Ohio; and both before and after that event it was seriously concerned with projects for new colonies in the interior. The most famous of these projects was that of the Vandalia Colony, for which a royal grant was about to be executed in 1775 when the promoters were requested to "wait ... until hostilities ... between Great Britain and the United Colonies should cease."

Undoubtedly the Proclamation of 1763 was primarily a measure of defense; but even if strictly enforced, which was found to be quite impossible in fact, it could not alone have secured unbroken peace on the frontier. Primitive in his instincts and treacherous in his nature, the Indian harbored in his vengeful heart the rankling memory of too many grievances, was too easily swayed by his ancient but now humiliated French allies, to be held in check without a show of force to back the most just and wisely administered policy. The English Government would doubtless have been content to leave the management of defense in the hands of the colonists had they shown a disposition to undertake it in a systematic manner. After the Albany Plan was rejected by the assemblies, the Board of Trade recommended a scheme by which commissioners, appointed in each colony by the assembly and approved by the governor, should determine the military establishment necessary in time of peace, and apportion the expense for maintaining it among the several provinces on the basis of wealth and population. Shirley and Franklin were heartily in favor of such a plan. But there is no reason to think that a single assembly could have been got to agree to it, or to any measure of a like nature. "Everybody cries, a union is absolutely necessary," said Franklin in amused disgust, "but when it comes to the manner and form of the union, their weak noddles are perfectly distracted." The colonies being thus unwilling to coöperate in the management of their own defense, the Board of Trade could see no alternative but an "interposition of the authority of Parliament." This alternative the Government therefore adopted; and the permanent establishment of British troops in America to overawe the Indians and maintain the conquest of Canada, already proposed by Townshend, was now determined upon by Grenville. It was the opinion of Grenville, as well as of most men in England and of many in America, that the colonies might rightly be expected to contribute something to the support of such troops. The Mutiny Act, requiring the assemblies to furnish certain utensils and provisions to soldiers in barracks, was now first extended to the colonies; and for raising in America a portion of the general maintenance fund, the ministry, with some reluctance on the part of Grenville, proposed a stamp tax as the most equitable and the easiest to be levied and collected. "I am, however, not set upon this tax," said Grenville. "If the Americans dislike it, and prefer any other method of raising the money themselves, I shall be content." It was soon apparent that the Americans did dislike it; and in February, 1765, Franklin, speaking for the colonial agents then in England, urged that the money be raised in "the old constitutional way," by requisitions upon the several assemblies. "Can you agree on the proportions each colony should raise?" inquired the minister. Franklin admitted that it was impossible; and Grenville, more concerned with what was equitable than with what was politic, pressed forward with his measure to require the use of stamped paper for nearly all legal documents and customs papers, for appointments to offices carrying a salary of £20 except military and judicial offices, for grants of franchises, for licenses to sell liquor, for packages containing playing-cards and dice, for all pamphlets, advertisements, hand-bills, calendars, almanacs, and newspapers. The revenue which might be raised by this law, estimated at £60,000, was to be paid into the exchequer, and to be expended solely for supporting the British troops in America.

At the time there were few men either in England or in the colonies who imagined that the Stamp Act would release forces that were destined to disrupt the empire. It was scarcely debated in the House of Commons. "There has been nothing of note in Parliament," wrote Horace Walpole, "but one slight day on the American taxes." And even in America few men supposed that it would not be executed, however much they might dislike it. It was impossible to prevent the passage of the act, Franklin assured his friends. "We might as well have hindered the sun's setting. That we could not do. But since 't is down, my friend, ... let us make as good a night as we can. We may still light candles." It was not candles alone that were lighted, but a conflagration; a conflagration which soon spread from the New World to the Old and burned away, as with a renovating flame, so much that was both good and bad in that amiable eighteenth-century society.

II

If the experience of the last French war convinced the English Government that a stricter control of the colonies was necessary, the conquest of Canada convinced the colonists that they could defend themselves, and at the same time removed the only danger which had ever made them feel the need of English protection. As early as 1711, Le Ronde Denys warned the New Englanders that the expulsion of the French from North America would leave England free to suppress colonial liberties, while another French writer predicted that it would rather enable, the colonies to "unite, shake off the yoke of the English monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy." The prediction was often repeated. Between 1730 and 1763, many men, among them Montesquieu, Peter Kalm, and Turgot, asserted that colonial dependence upon England would not long outlast the French occupation of Canada. The opposition to Grenville's colonial legislation, which gathered force with every additional measure, seemed now about to confirm these predictions.

No single law of these early years would have caused its proper part of the resistance which all of them in fact brought about. A measure of oppression could be attributed to each of them, but the pressure of any one was not felt by all classes or all colonies alike. The Proclamation of 1763 was an offense chiefly to speculators in land, and to those border communities that had fought to open free passage to the West only to find the fertile Ohio valleys "reserved to the Indians"—the very tribes which had brought death and desolation to the frontier. The Sugar Act was a greater grievance to the New England distiller of rum and the exporters of fish and lumber than it was to the rice and tobacco planters of the South. New York merchants were seriously affected by the Currency Act, which scarcely touched Massachusetts, and which, in Virginia, meant money in the pockets of creditors, but bore hardly on debtors and the speculators who bought silver at Williamsburg in depreciated paper in order to sell it at par in Philadelphia. The famous Stamp Act itself chiefly concerned the printers, lawyers, officeholders, the users of the custom-house, and the litigious class that employed the courts to enforce or resist the payment of debt.

Only when regarded as a whole was the policy of Grenville seen to spell disaster. Each new law seemed carefully designed to increase the burdens imposed by every other. The Sugar Act, for example, taken by itself, was perhaps the most grievous of all. The British sugar islands, to which it virtually restricted the West Indian trade of the Northern colonies, offered no sufficient market for their lumber and provisions, nor could they, like the Spanish islands, furnish the silver needed by continental merchants to settle London balances on account of imported English commodities. Exports to the West Indies and imports from England must, therefore, be reduced; the one event would cripple essential colonial industries such as the fisheries and the distilling of rum, while the other would force the colonists to devote themselves to those very domestic manufactures which it was the policy of the English Government to discourage. These disadvantages, which attached to the Sugar Act itself, were accentuated by almost every other cardinal measure of Grenville's colonial policy. With the chief source of colonial specie cut off, the Stamp Act increased the demand for it by £60,000; when the need for paper money as a legal tender was more than ever felt, its further use was shortly to be forbidden altogether; when the diminished demand for labor, occasioned by restrictions upon the West Indian trade, was likely to stimulate migration into the interior, the West was closed to settlement. And the close of the French war, which had raised the debt of the colonies to an unprecedented figure, was the moment selected for restricting trade, remodeling the monetary system, and imposing upon the colonies taxes for protection against a danger which no longer threatened. Little wonder that to the colonial mind the measures of Grenville carried all the force of an argument from design: any part, separated from the whole, might signify nothing; the perfect correlation of the completed scheme was evidence enough that somewhere a malignant purpose was at work bent upon the destruction of English liberties.

Members of the House of Commons who yawned while voting the new laws were amazed at the commotion they raised in America. In all the colonies scarcely a man was to be found to defend any of them. Those afterwards known as loyalists, with Hutchinson, Colden, Dulaney, and Galloway as their most distinguished representatives, were of one accord with the Lees, with Patrick Henry, with Dickinson, and the Adamses, in asserting that the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act were inexpedient and unjust. Hutchinson urged the repeal of both measures. Colden assured the Board of Trade that the Currency Act, so far as New York was concerned, was uncalled for and very prejudicial to colonial industry and the manufactures of England. The three-penny duty on molasses, said Samuel Adams, will make useless one third of the fish now caught, and so remittances to Spain, Portugal, and other countries, "through which money circulates into England for the purchase of her goods of all kinds," must cease. "Unless we are allowed a paper currency," Daniel Coxe wrote to Reed, "they need not send tax gatherers, for they can gather nothing—never was money so very scarce as now." Governor Bernard expressed the belief that if the proposed measures were executed "there will soon be an end to the specie currency of Massachusetts." Undoubtedly the general opinion of America was voiced by the Stamp Act Congress when it affirmed that the payment of the new duties would prove, "from the scarcity of specie, ... absolutely impracticable," and render the colonists "unable to purchase the manufactures of Great Britain."

But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to shift the issue in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the multiplied resentments accumulated by two years of hostile legislation. It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance, round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect without its material symbols—concrete and visible bundles of stamped papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and the very appearance of which was a challenge to action.