The War of Independence

by John Fiske

The people of London, as well as the Americans, hailed with delight the repeal of the Stamp Act; but the real trouble had now only begun. The resolutions of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry and their approval by the Congress at New York had thrown the question of American taxation into the whirlpool of British politics, and there it was to stay until it worked a change for the better in England as well as in America.

How the question was affected by British politics.

The principle that people must not be taxed except by their representatives had been to some extent recognized in England for five hundred years, and it was really the fundamental principle of English liberty, but it was only very imperfectly that it had been put into practice. In the eighteenth century the House of Commons was very far from being a body that fairly represented the people of Great Britain. For a long time there had been no change in the distribution of seats, and meanwhile the population had been increasing very differently in different parts of the kingdom. Thus great cities which had grown up in recent times, such as Sheffield and Manchester, had no representatives in Parliament, while many little boroughs with a handful of inhabitants had their representatives. Some such boroughs had been granted representation by Henry VIII. in order to create a majority for his measures in the House of Commons. Others were simply petty towns that had dwindled away, somewhat as the mountain villages of New England have dwindled since the introduction of railroads. The famous Old Sarum had members in Parliament long after it had ceased to have any inhabitants. Seats for these rotten boroughs, as they were called, were simply bought and sold. Political life in England was exceedingly corrupt; some of the best statesmen indulged in wholesale bribery as if it were the most innocent thing in the world. The country was really governed by a few great families, some of whose members sat in the House of Lords and others in the House of Commons. Their measures were often noble and patriotic in the highest degree, but when bribery and corruption seemed necessary for carrying them, such means were employed without scruple.

George III. and his political schemes.

When George III. came to the throne in 1760, the great families which had thus governed England for half a century belonged to the party known as Old Whigs. Under their rule the power of the crown had been reduced to insignificance, and the modern system of cabinet government by a responsible ministry had begun to grow up. The Tory families during this period had been very unpopular, because of their sympathy with the Stuart pretenders who had twice attempted to seize the crown and given the country a brief taste of civil war. By 1760 the Tories saw that the cause of the Stuarts was hopeless, and so they were inclined to transfer their affections to the new king. George III. was a young man of narrow intelligence and poor education, but he entertained very strong opinions as to the importance of his kingly office. He meant to make himself a real king, like the king of France or the king of Spain. He was determined to break down the power of the Old Whigs and the system of cabinet government, and as the Old Whigs had been growing unpopular, it seemed quite possible, with the aid of the Tories, to accomplish this. George was quite decorous in behaviour, and, although subject to fits of insanity which became more troublesome in his later years, he had a fairly good head for business. Industrious as a beaver and obstinate as a mule, he was an adept in political trickery. In the corrupt use of patronage he showed himself able to beat the Old Whigs at their own game, and with the aid of the Tories he might well believe himself capable of reviving for his own benefit the lost power of the crown.

The "New Whigs" and parliamentary reform.

Beside these two parties a third had been for some time growing up which was in some essential points opposed to both of them. This third party was that of the New Whigs. They wished to reform the representation in Parliament in such wise as to disfranchise the rotten boroughs and give representatives to great towns like Leeds and Manchester. They held that it was contrary to the principles of English liberty that the inhabitants of such great towns should be obliged to pay taxes in pursuance of laws which they had no share in making. The leader of the New Whigs was the greatest Englishman of the eighteenth century, the elder William Pitt, now about to pass into the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham. Their leader next in importance, William Petty, Earl of Shelburne, was in 1765 a young man of eight-and-twenty, and afterward came to be known as one of the most learned and sagacious statesmen of his time. These men were the forerunners of the great liberal leaders of the nineteenth century, such men as Russell and Cobden and Gladstone. Their first decisive and overwhelming victory was the passage of Lord John Russell's Reform Bill in 1832, but the agitation for reform was begun by William Pitt in 1745, and his famous son came very near winning the victory on that question in 1782.

Now this question of parliamentary reform was intimately related to the question of taxing the American colonies. From some points of view they might be considered one and the same question. At a meeting of Presbyterian ministers in Philadelphia, it was pertinently asked, "Have two men chosen to represent a poor English borough that has sold its votes to the highest bidder any pretence to say that they represent Virginia or Pennsylvania? And have four hundred such fellows a right to take our liberties?" In Parliament, on the other hand, as well as at London dinner tables, and in newspapers and pamphlets, it was repeatedly urged that the Americans need not make so much fuss about being taxed without being represented, for in that respect they were no worse off than the people of Sheffield or Birmingham. To this James Otis replied, "Don't talk to us any more about those towns, for we are tired of such a flimsy argument. If they are not represented, they ought to be;" and by the New Whigs this retort was greeted with applause.

The opinions and aims of the three different parties were reflected in the long debate over the repeal of the Stamp Act. The Tories wanted to have the act continued and enforced, and such was the wish of the king. Both sections of Whigs were in favour of repeal, but for very different reasons. Pitt and the New Whigs, being advocates of parliamentary reform, came out flatly in support of the principle that there should be no taxation without representation. Edmund Burke and the Old Whigs, being opposed to parliamentary reform and in favour of keeping things just as they were, could not adopt such an argument; and accordingly they based their condemnation of the Stamp Act upon grounds of pure expediency. They argued that it was not worth while, for the sake of a little increase of revenue, to irritate three million people and run the risk of getting drawn into a situation from which there would be no escape except in either retreating or fighting. There was much practical wisdom in this Old Whig argument, and it was the one which prevailed when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act and expressly stated that it did so only on grounds of expediency.

Why George III. was ready to pick a quarrel with the Americans.