And in 1722, Daniel Coxe, of New Jersey, suggested a practical union of the Colonies for the consolidation of interests common to each. In 1754, when the British government formally advised the Colonies to secure the friendship of the Six Nations against the French, Benjamin Franklin prepared a form for such union. Delegates from New England, as well as from New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, met at Albany on the fourth of July, 1754, the very day of the surrender of Fort Necessity to the French, for consideration of the suggested plan. The King’s council rejected it, because it conceded too much independence of action to the people of the Colonies, and the Colonies refused to accept its provisions, because it left too much authority with the King.
Ten years later, when the Colonies had been freed from the necessity of sacrificing men and money to support the British authority against French, Spanish, and Indian antagonists, the poverty of the British treasury drove George Grenville, then Prime Minister, to a system of revenue from America, through the imposition of duties upon Colonial imports. In 1755 followed the famous Stamp Act. Its passage by Parliament was resisted by statesmen of clear foresight, with sound convictions of the injustice of taxing their brethren in America who had no representatives in either House of Parliament; but in vain, and this explosive bomb was hurled across the sea. Franklin, then in London, thus wrote to Charles Thompson, who afterwards became secretary of the Colonial Congress: “The sun of Liberty has set. The American people must light the torch of industry and economy.” To this Thompson replied: “Be assured that we shall light torches of quite another sort.”
The explosion of this missile, charged with death to every noble incentive to true loyalty to the mother country, dropped its inflammatory contents everywhere along the American coast. The Assembly of Virginia was first to meet, and its youngest member, Patrick Henry, in spite of shouts of “Treason,” pressed appropriate legislation to enactment. Massachusetts, unadvised of the action of Virginia, with equal spontaneity, took formal action, inviting the Colonies to send delegates to a Congress in New York, there to consider the grave issues that confronted the immediate future. South Carolina was the first to respond. When Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, afterwards the famous Governor of New York, asked Colonel (afterwards General) Ashe, Speaker of the North Carolina Assembly, what the House would do with the Stamp Act, he replied, “We will resist its execution to the death.”
On the seventh of October the Congress assembled and solemnly asserted, as had a former convention, that “their own representatives alone had the right to tax them,” and “their own juries to try them.” Throughout the coast line of towns and cities, interrupted business, muffled and tolling bells, flags at half-mast, and every possible sign of stern indignation and deep distress, indicated the resisting force which was gathering volume to hurl a responsive missile into the very council chamber of King George himself.
“Sons of Liberty” organized in force, but secretly; arming themselves for the contingency of open conflict. Merchants refused to import British goods. Societies of the learned professions and of all grades of citizenship agreed to dispense with all luxuries of English production or import. Under the powerful and magnetic sway of Pitt and Burke, this Act was repealed in 1766; but even this repeal was accompanied by a “Declaratory Act,” which reserved for the Crown “the right to bind the Colonies, in all cases whatsoever.”
Pending all these fermentations of the spirit of liberty, George Washington, of Virginia, was among the first to recognize the coming of a conflict in which the Colonial troops would no longer be a convenient auxiliary to British regulars, in a common cause, but would confront them in a life or death struggle, for rights which had been guaranteed by Magna Charta, and had become the vested inheritance of the American people. Suddenly, as if to impress its power more heavily upon the restless and overwrought Colonists, Parliament required them to furnish quarters and subsistence for the garrisons of towns and cities. In 1768, two regiments arrived at Boston, ostensibly to “preserve the public peace,” but, primarily, to enforce the revenue measures of Parliament.
In 1769, Parliament requested the King to “instruct the Governor of Massachusetts” to “forward to England for trial, upon charges of high treason,” several prominent citizens of that colony “who had been guilty of denouncing Parliamentary action.” The protests of the Provincial Assemblies of Virginia and North Carolina against the removal of their citizens, for trial elsewhere, were answered by the dissolution of those bodies by their respective royal governors. On the fifth day of May, 1769, Lord North, who had become Prime Minister, proposed to abolish all duties, except upon tea. Later, in 1770, occurred the “Boston Massacre,” which is ever recalled to mind by a monument upon the Boston Common, in honor of the victims. In 1773 “Committees of Correspondence” were selected by most of the Colonies, for advising the people of all sections, whenever current events seemed to endanger the public weal. One writer said of this state of affairs: “Common origin, a common language, and common sufferings had already established between the Colonies a union of feeling and interest; and now, common dangers drew them together more closely.”
But the tax upon tea had been retained, as the expression of the reserved right to tax at will, under the weak assumption that the Colonists would accept this single tax and pay a willing consideration for the use of tea in their social and domestic life. The shrewd and patriotic citizens, however boyish it may have seemed to many, found a way out of the apparent dilemma, and on the night of December 16, 1773, the celebrated Boston Tea Party gave an entertainment, using three hundred and fifty-two chests of tea for the festive occasion, and Boston Harbor for the mixing caldron.
In 1774, the “Boston Port Bill” was passed, nullifying material provisions of the Massachusetts Charter, prohibiting intercourse with Boston by sea, and substituting Salem for the port of entry and as the seat of government for the Province. It is to be noticed, concerning the various methods whereby the Crown approached the Colonies, in the attempt to subordinate all rights to the royal will, that Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, until 1692, were charter governments, whereby laws were framed and executed by the freemen of each colony. The proprietary governments were Pennsylvania with Maryland, and at first New York, New Jersey, and the Carolinas. In all of these, the proprietors, under certain restrictions, established and conducted their own systems of rule. There were also the royal governments, those of New Hampshire, Virginia, Georgia, and afterwards Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and the Carolinas. In these, appointments of the chief officers pertained to the Crown.
At the crisis noticed, General Gage had been appointed Governor of Massachusetts Colony, as well as commander-in-chief, and four additional regiments had been despatched to his support. But Salem declined to avail herself of the proffered boon of exceptional franchises, and the House of Burgesses of Virginia ordered that “the day when the Boston Port Bill was to go into effect should be observed as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.”