After one of the longest and most heated debates in the history of Parliament, under the advice of Benjamin Franklin, given at the bar of the House of Commons,[60] and with the powerful aid of Pitt and Camden, the Stamp Act was repealed. Another act passed at the same time asserted Parliament’s power to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.[61] Thus the firebrand was left smouldering amid the inflammable colonial affairs; and Burke was quick to point out that the right to tax, or any other right insisted upon after it ceased to harmonize with prudence and expediency, would lead to disaster.[62]
It is plain to-day that the only way to keep up the nominal union between Great Britain and her colonies was to let them alone. The colonies felt strongly the ties of blood, interest, and affection which bound them to England.[63] They would all have vowed, after the repeal of the Stamp Act, that they loved their parent much more than they loved one another. They felt only the normal adult instinct to act independently. Could the British government have given up the imperial idea to which it so tenaciously clung, a federal union might have been preserved.
The genius of dissolution, however, gained control of the ministry which next came into power. When illness withdrew Pitt from the “Mosaic Ministry,” which he and Grafton had formed, Townshend’s brilliant talents gave him the unquestioned lead. This man, who is said to have surpassed Burke in wit and Chatham in solid sense, determined to try again to tax the colonies for imperial purposes.[64] He ridiculed the distinction between external and internal tax; but since the colonists had put stress on the illegality of the latter he laid the new tax on imported articles, and prepared to collect at the customhouses. The income was to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges, and thus render them independent of the tyrannical and contentious assemblies. Writs of assistance, so effective in enforcing the revenue laws but so hated by the colonists, were legalized. The collection of the revenue was further aided by admiralty courts, which should try the cases without juries, thus preventing local sympathy from shielding the violators of the law.[65]
All the indifference into which America had relapsed, and which the agitators so much deplored, at once disappeared. The right of trial by jury was held to be inalienable. The control of the judiciary and executive by the people was necessary to free government, asserted the pamphleteers. Parliament could not legalize “writs of assistance,” they rashly cried. The former stickling at an internal tax was forgotten, and they objected to any tax whatever—a more logical position, which John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, supported by the assertion “that any law, in so far as it creates expense, is in reality a tax.” Samuel Adams drew up a circular letter, which the Massachusetts assembly dispatched to the other colonial assemblies, urging concerted action against this new attack on colonial liberties.[66] The British government, through the colonial governors, attempted to squelch this letter, but the Massachusetts assembly refused to rescind, and the other colonies were quick to embrace its cause.
Signs were not wanting that the people as well as the political leaders were aroused. When the customs officials, in 1768, seized John Hancock’s sloop Liberty for alleged evasion of the customs duties, there was a riot which so frightened the officers that they fled to the fort and wrote to England for soldiers.
This and other acts of resistance to the government led Parliament to urge the king to exercise a right given him by an ancient act to cause persons charged with treason to be brought to England for trial. The Virginia assembly protested against this, and sent their protest to the other colonies for approval.[67] The governor dissolved the assembly, but it met and voted a non-importation agreement, which also met favor in the other colonies. This economic argument again proved effective, and the Townshend measures were repealed, except the tax on tea; Parliament thus doing everything but remove the offence—“fixing a badge of slavery upon the Americans without service to their masters.”[68] The old trade regulations also remained to vex the colonists.
In order that no disproportionate blame may be attached to the king or his ministry for the bringing on of the Revolution, it must be noted that the English nation, the Parliament, and the king were all agreed when the sugar and stamp acts were passed; and though Parliament mustered a good-sized minority against the Townshend acts, nevertheless no unaccustomed influence in its favor was used by the king. Thus the elements of the cloud were all gathered before the king’s personality began to intensify the oncoming storm. The later acts of Parliament and the conduct of the king had the sole purpose of overcoming resistance to established government. Most of these coercive acts, though no part of the original policy, were perfectly constitutional even in times of peace. They must be considered in their historical setting, however, just as President Lincoln’s extraordinary acts in a time of like national peril. Henceforth we are dealing with the natural, though perhaps ill-judged, efforts of a government to repress a rebellion.
After the riot which followed the seizure of the Liberty (June, 1768), two regiments of British soldiers were stationed in Boston. The very inadequacy of the force made its relations with the citizens strained, for they resented without fearing it. After enduring months of jeering and vilification, the soldiers at last (March 5, 1770) fired upon a threatening mob, and four men were killed. Much was made of the “massacre,” as it was called, because it symbolized for the people the substitution of military for civil government. A Boston jury acquitted the soldiers, and, after a town-meeting, the removal of the two regiments was secured.
A period of quiet followed until the assembly and the governor got into a debate over the theoretical rights of the colonists. To spread the results of this debate, Samuel Adams devised the “committees of correspondence,”[69] which kept the towns of Massachusetts informed of the controversy in Boston. This furnished a model for the colonial committees of correspondence, which became the most efficient means for revolutionary organization. They created public opinion, set war itself in motion, and were the embryos of new governments when the old were destroyed.
The first provincial committee that met with general response from the other colonies was appointed by Virginia, March 12, 1773, to keep its assembly informed of the “Gaspee Commission.”[70] The Gaspee was a sort of revenue-cutter which, while too zealously enforcing the Navigation Acts, ran aground (June 9, 1772) in Narragansett Bay. Some Providence men seized and burned the vessel, and the British government appointed a commission to inquire into the affair.[71] The commission met with universal opposition and had to report failure.