[151] The history of these writs is given, with a fulness and accuracy which leaves nothing to be desired, in the Appendix to Quincy's Reports, by Horace Gray, Jr. (now Mr. Justice Gray, of the Supreme Court of the United States). Besides other sources of unpublished information, in England and America, Mr. Gray had access to the Bernard Papers (now in Harvard University library); in his administration these writs were legalized and efficiently used.
[152] See Vol. V. p. 612. For more than a century in the government of the colonies political considerations were subordinated to a commercial policy; New England was favored during the Protectorate, and Virginia after the Restoration, equally on political grounds. But with the beginning of the French War this commercial policy began to give way to an imperial policy. To the Congress of 1754 is due the distinction of being the only body, among similar gatherings before or since, which of its own motion seriously entertained and adopted a project of bringing the colonies, as a unit, into defined relations to the mother country, for general government in respect to their defence. Nobody saw more clearly than Franklin, or has more explicitly pointed out the necessity of some general government for the defence of the colonies (Works, by Sparks, iii. 32 et seq.); and to secure these ends he was willing to go further, in some respects, even than Hutchinson. He admitted the power and necessity of parliamentary action in the alteration of colonial charters (Works, iii. 36). He provided that the President-General should be appointed and his salary paid by the crown (3 Mass. Hist. Coll., v. 70); that the Speaker should be approved by the President-General, thus admitting the validity of the prerogative (Works, iii. 44; and see Plan, that the assent of the President-General should be requisite to all acts of the Grand Council, instead of all laws, as stated by Bancroft, iv. 123); and that the Grand Council should have power to "lay and levy such general duties, imposts, or taxes as to them shall appear most equal and just" (Works, iii. 50). Bancroft, in summarizing the Plan of Union, drawn by Franklin, says (Hist., iv. 124) the general government was empowered "to make laws and levy just and equitable taxes", thus giving the impression that the powers of the Council were limited by absolute justice and equity, or by what each colony should so judge. But this is what Franklin neither meant nor said. He lodged the powers in the sole discretion of the Council, which is quite a different thing. Grenville or Townshend asked no more for Parliament. The General Assembly of Connecticut knew what the words meant. In their reasons for rejecting the proposed plan (I Mass. Hist. Coll., vii. 212) they say, "The proposal, in said plan contained, for the President-General and Council to levy taxes, &c., as they please, throughout this extensive government, is a very extraordinary thing, and against the rights and privileges of Englishmen." Their objections to Franklin's Plan read like an answer of the Massachusetts General Court, drawn by Samuel Adams, to a message of Bernard. The governor and council of Rhode Island had similar fears. They said that they found it to be "a scheme which, if carried into execution, will virtually deprive this government, at least, of some of its most valuable privileges, if not effectually overturn and destroy our present happy constitution" (Rhode Island Hist. Tracts, ix. 61). And that sturdy patriot, Stephen Hopkins, who was associated with Franklin, Hutchinson, Pitkin, and Howard in the Albany Plan, was subjected to much worry for invoking the parliamentary authority in modifying the Rhode Island charter, and was driven to self-vindication in A True Representation (Ibid., I). Whatever modifications Franklin's opinions may have undergone in later years on other matters, "it was his opinion thirty years afterwards that his plan was near the true medium" (Works, iii. 24, Sparks's note).
There is a plan of union in the handwriting of Thomas Hutchinson (Mass. Archives, vi. 171, and in the Trumbull MSS., in Mass. Hist. Soc., i. 97; and printed in Frothingham's Rise of the Republic, Appendix) which probably expressed his sentiments in 1754, when it was rejected by the General Court. Like Franklin, he was willing to acknowledge and invoke the parliamentary authority for the union, with the power in the Grand Council to levy such taxes as they deemed just and equal; but, unlike Franklin, he did not allow the President to negative the choice of the Speaker by the Grand Council.
But no one wrote from a more varied experience, or more careful examination of colonial constitutions, and of their possible relations to the mother country, than Thomas Pownall. His connection with the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, as their secretary in 1745, made him familiar with the difficulties of colonial administration from the British point of view; and his successive administrations, as lieutenant-governor, or governor, of New Jersey, Massachusetts, and South Carolina from 1755 to 1761, extended his acquaintance with the state of colonial affairs in the Northern, Middle, and Southern colonies. He was a moderate Whig, and, like all moderate men in those days, his counsels were duly regarded by neither party. He embodied his views in a work entitled The Administration of the Colonies, which passed through several editions. His scheme was elaborate and wise, if his concurrence with Franklin in points which they treat in common may be regarded as a test of wisdom. His commercial scheme was predicated on the general law that colonial trade follows capital, and, while sharing the benefits, pays profit to it. He would have left that trade free to develop itself within certain limits; but inasmuch as it must tend somewhere,—to the English, French, or Dutch,—he thought it right that the trade of English colonies should pay profit to England, as the country whose navy defended it, and by whose capital it was developed. But England ought to grasp this trade only as the centre of a commercial dominion of which America was a part and entitled to parliamentary representation, which he thought practicable. In theory he acknowledged the prerogative of the crown in respect to colonial government, but recognized the necessity of parliamentary intervention, and would have reduced both to cases of actual necessity, and would always have subordinated the question of power to the dictates of reason and expediency.
[153] See letter of Pownall to Franklin, on this subject, and Franklin's remarks (Works, iv. 199).
[154] See the whole passage, not often quoted by historians, in Frothingham's Rise of the Republic, 149, n.
[155] Sidney S. Rider (Rhode Island Hist. Tracts, 9, xxx.) denies that Rhode Island rejected the Plan, as affirmed by Sparks.
[156] Massachusetts State Papers.
[157] Published at Boston in 1818, and edited by Alden Bradford. It is often quoted as Mass. State Papers. The answers were chiefly from the industrious pen of Samuel Adams.
[158] Journals of the House of Lords, xxxiv. 124.