The 17th of June, the day on which delegates to the Continental Congress were chosen, is also notable for "the Port Act" meeting in Faneuil Hall. From the general distress among the laboring classes in Boston the Tories had expected a reaction in favor of the ministry; consequently a counter demonstration by the patriots was deemed advisable. In the absence of Samuel Adams, then at Salem, John Adams was chosen moderator, and from this time he was one of the most conspicuous actors in the American Revolution. Joseph Warren was also present, and active in the cause which, a year later, he consecrated with his blood. The action of the town became widely known from a broadside, which is here reproduced.
After the repeal of the Stamp Act and the modifying of the Townshend act, there remained nothing to threaten seriously the pockets of the colonists. The tea duty had been retained to save the claim of parliamentary supremacy, which was not likely to be asserted in any offensive way. The navigation acts must soon have given way to a more liberal and equitable policy, and everything out of Massachusetts—certainly out of New England—indicated that the people were becoming tired of strife, and were ready for a return to more cordial relations with the mother country. This was what Samuel Adams feared, and determined to prevent. To this end nothing could have been more efficient than his policy in respect to the teas, and nothing more to his mind than the consequent action of Parliament. After this a contention which had been mainly local became general. The essential modification of the Massachusetts charter was a blow which imperilled every colonial government, and made the cause of Massachusetts that of every other colony,—a cause for which other colonies manifested their sympathy not only in relieving the distress occasioned by the closing of the port of Boston, but by uniting in declarations of their common right to maintain the integrity of a system of government which had been forming through many generations.
The Congress of 1774 was the inevitable result of the conduct of the British ministry subsequent to the peace of 1763. This served only to engender discontent in the colonies, and to strengthen the purpose of the patriotic party to hasten a revolution which many regarded as inevitable in time. The parliamentary government of the colonies fell into confusion for want of a well-defined policy and a consistent administration. But instead of such a policy, colonial affairs were regulated by ministers as wide apart in their views as Grenville, Rockingham, Townshend, Grafton, Shelburne, Hillsborough, Lord North, and Earl Dartmouth. Nothing could have kept the colonies as an integral part of the empire except some plan such as Franklin or Pownall might have devised and Shelburne might have administered. But the colonies were remote and but little known, and in the complication of European affairs, and amid the contentions of parties, they received only slight and intermittent attention from the ministry or the Parliament. No statesman save Choiseul seems to have understood the completeness of the change in interests which had been brought about by the extinction of the French power in America, or the necessary advance of the colonies under a new régime to a place among the great powers of the world. The colonists themselves felt, rather than understood, their relations to nationality and to the commerce of the world. This was the time chosen by the British ministry to impose upon them the restrictive mercantile system of Charles II.
BROADSIDE, JUNE 17, 1774.
The original is in the Boston Public Library. There are other significant broadsides of about this time. On June 8th, the citizens of Boston issued an address to their countrymen relative to the blockade of their port, and on July 26th they adopted a letter on the blockade, which was sent to the several towns,—both in broadside.—Ed.
It is doubtful, however, whether any policy could have rendered permanent the subjection of the colonies, even such a nominal subjection as that in which they had always been held. In looking for the causes of the Revolution, it is well to discriminate between those which were general in their effects and those which were local. The latter had been more actively operative and of longer existence in Massachusetts, where the Revolution began, than in any other colony. These were interwoven with the civil and ecclesiastical history of her people, which made them peculiarly apprehensive in respect to threatened invasion of rights which they had secured only by expatriation. Although the peculiar experience of Massachusetts did not cause the Revolution, it is doubtful whether, except for that experience, the Revolution would have occurred for some years. Nor was resistance to the Anglican ecclesiastical pretensions, connected as they were with the most odious features of the prerogative, confined to New England, but made itself felt in New York and in Virginia.[136] The general causes were the ever present and ever active strife between parties,—the liberals and the conservatives,—arising from a diversity of political ideas, and intensified by ambition, interest, and personal animosities. But the proximate causes of the Revolution will be found in that change of policy which led the ministry, at the close of a war that had strained the colonies to the utmost, to enforce the navigation laws, to lay taxes, to invoke the prerogative, and finally to overthrow the government of Massachusetts, and thus to threaten the autonomy of the people under the provincial constitutions.
