A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

The English Government began its task by a rigorous attempt to enforce the Acts of Trade. Grenville had made up his narrow mind that the colonies should be compelled to adhere to the conditions which obliged them to trade with England only for England's principal manufactures. There should be no more smuggling from Spanish America, no more smuggling from the West Indies. To enforce this determination, which deprived the colonists at a blow of the most profitable part of their trade, the Government employed certain general search warrants, which, if strictly legal in the letter, were conceived in a spirit highly calculated to goad a proud people into illegal defiance. They goaded one proud man into active protest. A distinguished servant of the Government, James Otis, the King's Advocate, resigned his office in order that he might be at liberty to denounce the Writs of Assistance. {85} Otis may have been technically wrong in resisting the Writs of Assistance, but it can scarcely be questioned that as a philosophic politician, who was devoted to the interests of his countrymen, he was ethically in the right. Otis was thirty-six years old; he was known to his compatriots as a graduate of Harvard, an able lawyer, a zealous student of classical literature, and an author of repute on Latin prosody. The issue of the Writs of Assistance converted the respected and respectable public servant into a conspicuous statesman as hotly applauded by the one side as he was execrated by the other. A single speech lifted him from an esteemed obscurity to a leading place among the champions of colonial rights against imperial aggressions. The assemblage which Otis addressed, which Otis dominated, was forever memorable in the history of America. "Otis was a flame of fire." The words are the words of one who was a young man when Otis spoke, who listened and took notes as the words fell from Otis's lips. "With a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid torrent of tempestuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take up arms against Writs of Assistance."

The youth who took notes of the words of Otis, and who was inspired by them with the desire to rise and mutiny, was destined to play even a greater part in the history of his country. If Otis was one of the first to assert actively, by deed as well as by word, the determination of the colonies to oppose and, if needs were, to defy the domination of England, John Adams was the first to applaud his action and to appreciate its importance. In 1763 John Adams was no more than a promising young lawyer who had struggled from poverty and hardship to regard and authority, and who had wrested from iron Fortune a great {86} deal of learning if very little of worldly wealth. Short of stature, sanguine of temperament, the ruddy, stubborn, passionate small man had fought his way step by step from the most modest if not the most humble beginnings, as zealously as if he had known of the fame that was yet to be his and the honor that he was to give to his name and hand down to a long line of honorable descendants. If the ministers who weakly encouraged or meanly obeyed King George in his frenzy against America could have understood even dimly the temper of a race that was rich in sons of whom John Adams was but one and not the most illustrious even to them, there must have come dimly some consciousness of the forces they had to encounter, and the peril of their policy. But the Ministry knew nothing of Adams, and knew only of Otis as a mutinous and meddlesome official. Otis and his protest signified nothing to them, and they would have smiled to learn that young Mr. Adams, the lawyer, believed that American independence was born when Mr. Otis's oration against Writs of Assistance breathed into the colonies the breath of life that was to make them a nation.

[Sidenote: 1765—Taxation without representation]

If Otis voiced and Adams echoed the feelings of the colonists against Writs of Assistance and the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they might no less eloquently have interpreted the general irritation at the proposed establishment of a permanent garrison on the continent. The colonists saw no need of such a garrison so late in the day. When the Frenchmen held the field, when the red man was on the war path, then indeed the presence of more British soldiers might have become welcome. But the flag of France no longer floated over strong places, no longer fluttered at the head of invasion. The strength of the savage was crippled if not crushed. The colonists had nothing to fear from the one and little to fear from the other foe. They thought that they had much to fear from the presence of a British garrison of ten thousand men. This British garrison might, on occasion, be used not in defence of their liberties, but in diminution of their liberties. The irritation against the proposed garrison might have {87} smouldered out if it had not been fanned into a leaping flame by the means proposed for the maintenance of the garrison. Grenville proposed to raise one-third of the cost of support from the colonies by taxation. No proposal could have been better calculated to goad every colony and every colonist into resistance, and to fuse the scattered elements of resistance into a solid whole. More than two generations earlier both Massachusetts and New York had formally denied the right of the Home Government to levy any tax upon the American colonies. The colonies were not represented at Westminster—could not, under the conditions, be represented at Westminster. The theory that there should be no taxation without representation was as dear to the American for America as it was dear to the Englishman for England. Successive English Governments, forced in times of financial pressure wistfully to eye American prosperity, had dreamed, and only dreamed, of raising money by taxing the well-to-do colonies. It was reserved to the Government headed by Grenville, in its madness, to attempt to make the dream a reality. It is true that even Grenville did not propose, did not venture to suggest that the American colonies should be taxed for the direct benefit of the English Government. He brought forward his scheme of taxation as a benefit to America, as a contribution to the expense of keeping up a garrison that was only established in the interests of America and for America's welfare. In this spirit of benevolence, and with apparent confidence of success, Grenville brought forward his famous Stamp Act.

There were statesmen in England who saw with scarcely less indignation than the Americans themselves, and with even more dismay, the unfolding of the colonial policy of the Government. These protested against the intolerable weight of the duties imposed, and arraigned the folly which, by compelling these duties to be paid in specie, drained away the little ready money remaining in the colonies, "as though the best way to cure an emaciated body, whose juices happened to be tainted, was to leave it no juices at all." They assailed the injustice that refused {88} to recognize as legal tender any paper bills of credit issued by the colonies. Politicians, guided by the intelligence and the inspiration of Burke, applauded the Americans for their firmness in resolving to subsist to the utmost of their power upon their own productions and manufactures. They urged that it could not be expected that the colonists, merely out of a compliment to the mother country, should submit to perish for thirst with water in their own wells. And these clear-sighted politicians saw plainly enough that such blows as the Government were aiming at America must in the end recoil upon Great Britain herself. They appreciated the injury that must be done to British commerce by even a temporary interruption of the intercourse between the two countries. But bad as the restrictive measures were in their immediate, as well as in their ultimate consequences, worse remained behind. The proposed Stamp Act scarcely shocked Otis or Adams more directly and cruelly than it shocked the soundest and sanest thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic. Words which certainly expressed the thoughts of Burke declared that the approval, even with opposition, given to such a measure as the Stamp Act, the bare proposal of which had given so much offence, argued such a want of reflection as could scarcely be paralleled in the public councils of any country.

The King's speech at the opening of Parliament on January 10, 1765, gave unmistakable evidence of the temper of the monarch and of the Ministry. It formally expressed its reliance on the wisdom and firmness of Parliament in promoting the proper respect and obedience due to the legislative authority of Great Britain. The Government was resolved to be what it considered firm, and it undoubtedly believed that a proper show of firmness would easily overbear any opposition that the colonists might make to the proposed measure. The Stamp Act was introduced, the Stamp Act was debated upon; in due time the Stamp Act passed through both Houses, and in consequence of the ill health of the King received the royal assent by commission on March 28, 1765. The first foolish challenge to American loyalty was formally made, and {89} America was not slow to accept it. It may be admitted that in itself the Stamp Act was not a conspicuously unfair or even a conspicuously unreasonable measure. It was a legitimate and perfectly fair way of raising money from a taxable people. It was neither legitimate nor fair when imposed upon unrepresented colonists. But if it had been the sanest and most statesmanlike scheme for raising money ever conceived by a financier, it would have deserved and would have received no less hostility from the American people. The principle involved was everything. To admit in any degree the right of Great Britain to impose at her pleasure a tax upon the colonists was to surrender in ignominy the privileges and to betray the duties of free men. Any expectations of colonial protest that the Ministry may have allowed themselves to entertain were more than fulfilled. Colony after colony, great town after great town, great man after great man, made haste to protest with an emphasis that should have been significant against the new measure. Boston led the way. Boston's most distinguished citizen, Boston's most respected son was the voice not merely of his town, not merely of his State, but of the colonial continent. Ten years later the name of Samuel Adams was known, hated, and honored on the English side of the Atlantic.

[Sidenote: 1765—Samuel Adams]

Samuel Adams was one of those men whom Nature forges to be the instruments of revolution. His three-and-forty years had taught him much: the value of silence, the knowledge of men, the desire to change the world and the patience to bide his time. A few generations earlier he might have made a right-hand man to Cromwell and held a place in the heart of Hampden. On the very threshold of his manhood, when receiving his degree of Master of Arts at Harvard, he asserted his defiant democracy in a dissertation on the right of the people of a commonwealth to combine against injustice on the part of the head of the State. The badly dressed man with the grave firm face of a Pilgrim Father was as ready and as resolute to oppose King George as any Pym or Vane had been ready and resolute to oppose Charles Stuart. He had at one {90} time devoted himself to a commercial career, with no great success. He was made for a greater game than commerce; he had the temper and he gained the training for a public life, and the hour when it came found that the man was ready. When the citizens of Boston met to protest against the Stamp Act Samuel Adams framed the first resolutions that denied to the Parliament of Great Britain the right to impose taxes upon her colonies.

[Sidenote: 1765—The opposition to the Stamp Act]

If Massachusetts was the first to protest with no uncertain voice against the Stamp Act, other colonies were prompt to follow her example, and to prove that they possessed sons no less patriotic. Virginia was as vehement and as vigorous in opposition as Massachusetts. One speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses made the name of Patrick Henry famous. Patrick Henry was a young man who tried many things and failed in them before he found in the practice of the law the appointed task for his rare gifts of reasoning and of eloquence. A speech in Hanover Court House in defence of the people against a suit of the parish clergy gave him sudden fame. As grave of face as Samuel Adams, as careless of his attire, tall and lean, stamped with the seal of the speaker and the thinker, Patrick Henry at nine-and-twenty was already a very different man from the youth who five years earlier seemed destined to be but a Jack of all trades and master of none, an unsuccessful trader, an unsuccessful farmer, whose chief accomplishments in life were hunting and fishing, dancing and riding. The debate on the Stamp Act gave him a great opportunity. As he addressed his words of warning to the stubborn sovereign across the sea his passion seemed to get the better of his prudence and to tempt him into menace. "Caesar," he said, "had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell." He was going on to say "and George the Third," when he was interrupted by angry cries of "Treason!" from the loyalists among his hearers. Patrick Henry waited until the noise subsided, and then quietly completed his sentence, "George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it." The words were not treasonable, {91} but they were revolutionary. They served to carry the name of Patrick Henry to every corner of the continent and across the Atlantic. They made him a hero and idol in the eyes of the colonists; they made him a rebel in the eyes of the Court at St. James's.