The Acts of Navigation and of Trade were not the dead letters that some superficial writers and readers have seen fit to term them. It is true that obedience was reluctant and slow, and that evasion was extensive, and it is also true, that colonial commerce flourished in spite of the restrictions; but it should be remembered that the prolonged wars in which England was engaged gave lucrative opportunities for privateering, and that even the customs duties, though intended to be virtually prohibitory, were not heavy enough to overcome the advantages which the colonists enjoyed. In Rhode Island the General Assembly asserted and maintained the right to regulate the fees of the customs officers, and, as far as was possible, the collection of the dues. The shipping of the colony rapidly increased, and in 1731 included two vessels from England, as many from Holland and the Mediterranean, and ten or twelve from the West Indies, and ten years later numbered one hundred and twenty vessels engaged in the West Indian, African, European and coasting trade. The period preceding the Revolution witnessed New England's greatest commercial prosperity, and it was in that age that Moses Brown and other enterprising merchants and shipowners laid the foundation of fortunes, a liberal share of which has been expended with illustrious munificence in monuments of learning, of art and of charity. As for the restrictions upon domestic industry, they were not severely felt among a people devoted, in the country to agriculture, and in the towns to local traffic and shipping, and the American farmer who wore homespun attire, did not realize the harshness or appreciate the purpose of the statute which prohibited the export of wool, or woolen manufactures. As for the Southern planter, the question of fostering domestic manufactures never entered his thoughts. He raised his tobacco and his cotton, exported them to England, and got what goods he needed there just as his descendants, in a later age, procured the manufactured necessities and luxuries of life from the depots of New England trade.[1] ]
But even if the British Parliament had never attempted to raise a revenue by taxation in the American colonies, it is probable that in time the restrictions on commerce would have led to revolution, unless rescinded. This was the opinion of the shrewd observer Du Chatelet, who, after France had surrendered her American possessions to Great Britain, said that "they (the chambers of commerce) regard everything in colonial commerce which does not turn exclusively to the benefit of the kingdom as contrary to the end for which colonies were established, and as a theft from the state. To practice on these maxims is impossible. The wants of trade are stronger than the laws of trade. The north of America can alone furnish supplies to its south. This is the only point of view under which the cession of Canada can be regarded as a loss for France; but that cession will one day be amply compensated, if it shall cause in the English colonies the rebellion and the independence which become every day more probable and more near."
America, if not contented, was quiet under restrictive laws not stringently enforced, and but for the measures initiated by Grenville and Townshend, and approved by the king, the Parliament and the people of England, there would, if the leading American minds of that day were sincere, have been no insurrection in that era against British authority. George the Third is called a tyrant on every recurring Fourth of July, but the nation he ruled was as tyrannical as he, and impartial history cannot condemn the monarch without awarding a greater share of odium to his people, who sustained by their pronounced opinion and through their chosen representatives, every measure for the destruction of the liberties of these colonies, and who began to listen to the dictates of reason and of humanity only when America had become the prison of thousands of England's soldiers, and thousands of others, hired Hessian and kidnapped Briton alike, had been welcomed by American freemen to graves in American soil. The measures which led to war, and the war itself, were inspired and incited by the trading classes, as well as the aristocracy of England, who expected, in the destruction of a powerful commercial and menacing industrial rival, an ample return for the blood and treasure expended in the strife. The American people recognized that the struggle was for commercial and industrial as well as for political independence, and the stand in behalf of American industry was taken long before the scattered colonies met an empire in the field of arms.
Writs of Assistance Issued—Excitement in Boston—The Stamp Act—Protests Against Taxation Without Representation—Massachusetts Appoints a Committee of Correspondence—Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry—Henry's Celebrated Resolutions—His Warning to King George—Growing Agitation in the Colonies—The Stamp Act Repealed—Parliament Levies Duties on Tea and Other Imports to America—Lord North's Choice of Infamy—Measures Of Resistance in America—The Massachusetts Circular Letter—British Troops in Boston—The Boston Massacre—Burning of the "Gaspee"—North Carolina "Regulators"—The Boston Tea Party—The Boston Port Bill—The First Continental Congress—A Declaration of Rights—"Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!"
Even before peace had been made with France the king's officers in America began to enforce the revenue laws with a rigor to which the colonists had been unaccustomed. Charles Paxton, commissioner of customs in Boston, applied to the Superior Court for authority to use writs of assistance in searching for smuggled goods. These writs were warrants for the officers to search when and where they pleased and to call upon others to assist them, instead of procuring a special search-warrant for some designated place. Thomas Hutchinson, chief justice, and afterward royalist governor and refugee, favored the application, which was earnestly opposed by the merchants and the people generally.[1] ] "To my dying day," exclaimed James Otis, in pleading against the measure, "I will oppose with all the power and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on one hand and of villainy on the other." Parliament had authorized the issue of the writs, however, and the custom house officers therefore had the law on their side. Writs were granted, but their enforcement was attended with so many difficulties that the customs authorities virtually gave up this attempt to encroach upon the rights of the people. The next step in provoking the colonists to revolution was the Stamp Act. The object of this enactment was to raise money for the support of British troops and the payment of salaries to certain public officers in the colonies who had depended upon the colonial treasuries for their compensation. In this there was a threefold invasion of colonial rights. Taxation without representation was contrary to a principle recognized for centuries in England, vindicated in the revolution which cost Charles I his head, and upheld in America from the very beginning of the settlements here. Again, while British troops had been welcome as allies in battling against the French and the Indians, they were not desired as garrisons to overawe the free people of the colonies, and finally the colonial officers whom it was proposed to pay from the royal treasury would become the masters instead of servants of the people—or they would be servants only of the king. The purpose of the Stamp Act obviously was to make America the vassal of Great Britain. The act required that legal documents and commercial instruments should be written, and that newspapers should be printed on stamped paper.
The people everywhere protested against the tyrannical action of Parliament. Samuel Adams drew up the instructions to the newly elected representatives of Boston to use all efforts against the plan of parliamentary taxation. It was resolved "that the imposition of duties and taxes by the Parliament of Great Britain upon a people not represented in the House of Commons is irreconcilable with their rights." A committee of correspondence was appointed in Massachusetts to communicate with other colonial assemblies, and the idea of union for the common defence began to take firm hold on the public mind. Benjamin Franklin, in the Congress held at Albany in 1754 to insure the aid of the Six Nations in the war then breaking out with France, had proposed a plan of union for the colonies, with a grand council having extensive powers and a president to be appointed by the crown. The plan was not adopted. Adams had written about the same time that "the only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us." Everybody now began to perceive the need of union, which the great intellects of Franklin and Adams had discerned long before.
No influence was so powerful in leading the South to stand side by side with the Northern colonies as that of Patrick Henry, the great orator of Virginia. In the House of Burgesses, in 1765, Mr. Henry introduced his celebrated resolutions against the Stamp Act, as follows: