Five years had now elapsed since the British Tories attempted to fix on the Colonies the Stamp Act, and although they had withdrawn that hateful law, the relations between the Mother Country and the Colonists had not improved. Far from it. The English issued a series of irritating provisions which convinced the Colonists that the Government had no real desire to be friendly, and that, on the contrary, it intended to make no distinction between them and the other conquered provinces of the Crown. Then and always, the English forgot that the Colonists were men of their own stock, equally stubborn in their devotion to principles, and probably more accessible to scruples of conscience. So they were not likely to be frightened into subjection. The governing class in England was in a state of mind which has darkened its judgment more than once; the state of mind which, when it encounters an obstacle to its plans, regards that obstacle as an enemy, and remarks in language brutally frank, though not wholly elegant: "We will lick him first and then decide who is right." In 1770 King George III, who fretted at all seasons at the slowness with which he was able to break down the ascendency of the Whigs, manipulated the Government so as to make Lord North Prime Minister. Lord North was a servant, one might say a lackey, after the King's own heart. He abandoned lifelong traditions, principles, fleeting whims, prejudices even, in order to keep up with the King's wish of the moment. After Lord North became Prime Minister, the likelihood of a peaceful settlement between the crown and the Colonies lessened. He ran ahead of the King in his desire to serve the King's wishes, and George III, by this time, was wrought up by the persistent tenacity of the Whigs—he wished them dead, but they would not die—and he was angered by the insolence of the Colonists who showed that they would not shrink from forcibly resisting the King's command. On both sides of the Atlantic a vehement and most enlightening debate over constitutional and legal fundamentals still went on. Although the King had packed Parliament, not all the oratory poured out at Westminster favored the King. On the contrary, the three chief masters of British eloquence at that time, and in all time—Edmund Burke, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox—spoke on the side of the Colonists. Reading the magnificent arguments of Burke to-day, we ask ourselves how any group in Parliament could have withstood them. But there comes a moment in every vital discussion when arguments and logic fail to convince. Passions deeper than logic controlled motives and actions. The Colonists contended that in proclaiming "no taxation without representation," they were appealing to a principle of Anglo-Saxon liberty inherent in their race. When King George, or any one else, denied this principle, he denied an essential without which Anglo-Saxon polity could not survive, but neither King George nor Lord North accepted the premises. If they had condescended to reply at all, they might have sung the hymn of their successors a hundred years later:
"We don't want to fight,
But by jingo! if we do,
We've got the men, we've got the ships,
We've got the money too."
Meanwhile, the Virginia Planter watched the course of events, pursued his daily business regularly, attended the House of Burgesses when it was in session, said little, but thought much. He did not break out into invective or patriotic appeals. No doubt many of his acquaintances thought him lukewarm in spirit and non-committal; but persons who knew him well knew what his decision must be. As early as April 5, 1769, he wrote his friend, George Mason:
At a time, when our lordly masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something should be done to avert the stroke, and maintain the liberty, which we have derived from our ancestors. But the manner of doing it, to answer the purpose effectually, is the point in question.
That no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment, to use a—ms in defence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good and evil of life depends, is clearly my opinion. Yet a—ms, I would beg leave to add, should be the last resource, the dernier resort. Addresses to the throne, and remonstrances to Parliament, we have already, it is said, proved the inefficiency of. How far, then, their attention to our rights and privileges is to be awakened or alarmed, by starving their trade and manufacturers, remains to be tried.[1]
[Footnote 1: Ford, II, 263-64.]
Thus wrote the Silent Member six years before the outbreak of hostilities, and he did not then display any doubt either of his patriotism, or of the course which every patriot must take. To his intimates he spoke with point-blank candor. Years later, George Mason wrote to him:
I never forgot your declaration, when I had last the pleasure of being at your house in 1768, that you were ready to take your musket upon your shoulder whenever your country called upon you.
Some writers point out that Washington excelled rather as a critic of concrete plans than of constitutional and legal aspects. Perhaps this is true. Assuredly he had no formal legal training. There were many other men in Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in some of the other Colonies, who could and did analyze minutely the Colonists' protest against taxation without representation, and the British rebuttal thereof; but Washington's strength lay in his primal wisdom, the wisdom which is based not on conventions, even though they be laws and constitutions, but on a knowledge of the ways in which men will react toward each other in their primitive, natural relations. In this respect he was one of the wisest among the statesmen.
He does not seem to have joined in such clandestine methods as those of the Committees of Correspondence, which Samuel Adams and some of the most radical patriots in the Bay State had organized, but he said in the Virginia Convention, in 1774: "I will raise one thousand men, subsist them at my own expense and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston."[1] The ardor of Washington's offer matched the increasing anger of the Colonists. Lord North, abetted by the British Parliament, had continued to exasperate them by passing new bills which could have produced under the best circumstances only a comparatively small revenue. One of these imposed a tax on tea. The Colonists not only refused to buy it, but to have it landed. In Boston a large crowd gathered and listened to much fiery speech-making. Suddenly, a body of fifty men disguised as Mohawk Indians rushed down to the wharves, rowed out to the three vessels in which a large consignment of tea had been sent across the ocean, hoisted it out of the holds to the decks and scattered the contents of three hundred and forty chests in Boston Harbor.