A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 4

If the English knowledge of the American colonies had been a little more precise it would have run to this effect. The colonies of the New England region were mainly peopled by a hardy, industrious, sober, frugal race, still strongly Puritanical in profession and in practice, and knowing but little of the extremes of fortune. Neither great poverty nor great wealth was common among those st.u.r.dy farmers, who tended their own farms, tilled their own land, lived upon their own produce, and depended for their clothing and for most of the necessaries of life upon the work of their own hands. A slender population was scattered far asunder in lonely towns.h.i.+ps and straggling villages of wooden houses, built for the most part in the formidable fas.h.i.+on imposed upon men who might at any time have to resist the attacks of Indians. Inside these villages the rough, rude justice of the Puritan days still persisted. The stocks and the pillory and the stool of repentance were things of the present. A shrewish housewife might still be made to stand at her cottage door with {76} the iron gag of the scold fastened upon her shameful face. A careless Sabbatarian might still find himself exposed to the scorn of a congregation, with the words "A wanton gospeller" placarded upon his ignominious breast.

Inside those wooden houses a rude simplicity and a rough plenty prevailed. The fare was simple; the labor was hard; simple fare and stern labor between them reared a stalwart, G.o.d-fearing race. Its positive pleasures were few and primitive. Husking-bees, quiltings, a rare dance, filled up the measure of its diversions. But the summer smiled upon those steadfast, earnest, rigorous citizens, and in the wild and bitter winters each household would gather about the cheerful fire in the great chimney which in some of those cottages formed the major part of the building, and find content and peace in quiet talk and in tales of the past, of the French and Indian wars, and of their ancestors, long ago, in old England. Those same great fires that were the joy of winter were also one of its troubles. Once lit, with all the difficulty attendant upon flint and steel and burnt rag, they had to be kept alight from morning till night and from night till morning.

If a fire went out it was a woful business to start it again with the reluctant tinder-box. There was, indeed, another way, an easier way, of going round to a neighbor and borrowing a shovelful of hot embers wherewith to kindle the blackened hearth. But in villages built for the most part of wood this might well be regarded as a dangerous process. So the law did regard it, and to start a fire in this lazy, lounging fas.h.i.+on was penalized as sternly as any breach of the Sabbath or of public decorum, and these were sternly punished. Drunkenness was grimly frowned down. Only decent, G.o.d-fearing men were allowed to keep taverns, and the names of persons who had earned the reputation of intemperance were posted up in those taverns as a warning to the host that he should sell such men no liquor. In Connecticut tobacco was forbidden to any one under twenty years of age, unless on the express order of a physician. Those who were over twenty were only allowed to smoke once a day, and then not within ten miles of any dwelling.

{77}

[Sidenote: 1765--American colonial customs]

In spite of their democratic simplicity, even the New England colonists had their distinctions of rank as clearly marked as among the people of old England. The gentry dressed in one fas.h.i.+on; the working cla.s.ses dressed in another. The family rank of students determined their places in the lists of Harvard College and Yale College. In Boston, the chief New England town, life was naturally more elaborate and more luxurious than in the country places. Ladies wore fine clothes and sought to be modish in the London manner; gentlemen made a brave show in gayly colored silks and rich laces, gold-headed canes and costly snuff-boxes. Even in Boston, however, life was simpler, quieter, and sweeter than it was across the Atlantic; there was Puritanism in its atmosphere--Puritanism and the serenity of learning, of scholars.h.i.+p, of study.

There was much more wealth in the province of New York; there was much more display in the southern colonies. New York was as famous for its Dutch cleanliness and its Dutch comfort as for its Dutch windmills that twirled their sails against the sky in all directions. There was store of plate and fine linen in New York cupboards. There were good things to eat and drink in New York households. Down South the gentlefolk lived as gentlefolk lived in England, with perhaps a more lavish ostentation, a more liberal hospitality. They loved horses and dogs, horse-racing and fox-hunting, dancing, music, high living, all things that added to the enjoyment of life. Their servants were their own black slaves. The great city of the South was Charleston, the third of the colonial cities. The fourth and last was Philadelphia, the "faire greene country town" of Penn's love, the last in our order, but the first in size and splendor, with its flagged sidewalks that had made it famous throughout the American continent as if it had been one of the seven wonders of the world, with its stately houses of brick and stone, its avenues of trees, its fruitful orchards and sweet-smelling gardens.

The people of Philadelphia had every right to be proud of their city.

Communication was not easy between one colony and {78} another, between one town and another. But neither was it easy in England. For the most part the conditions of life were much the same on one side of the Atlantic as on the other. The whole population, white and black, freeman and slave, was about two million souls. They were well-to-do, peaceable, hard-working--those who had to work, good fighters--those who had to fight, all very willing to be loyal and all very well worth keeping loyal. It was worth their sovereign's while, it was worth the while of his ministers, to know something about these colonists and to try and understand natures that were not at all difficult to understand. Had they been treated as the Englishmen they were, all would have been well. But the King who gloried in the name of Briton did not extend its significance far enough.

[Sidenote: 1765--Friction with the American colonists]

It is not easy to understand the temper which animated all the King's actions towards the American colonies. They were regarded, and with justice, as one of the greatest glories of the English crown; they were no less a source of wealth than of pride to the English people. Yet the English prince persisted in pursuing towards them a policy which can only be most mildly characterized as a policy of exasperation.

When George was still both a young man and a young king, the relations between the mother country and her children across the Atlantic were, if not wholly harmonious, at least in such a condition as to render harmony not merely possible, but probable. The result of a long and wearing war had been to relieve the colonists directly from one and indirectly from the other of their two greatest perils. By the terms on which peace was made the power of France was broken on the North American continent. The French troops had been withdrawn across the seas. The Lilies of France floated over no more important possessions in the new world than a few insignificant fis.h.i.+ng stations near Newfoundland. A dangerous and dreaded enemy to colonial life and liberty could no longer menace or alarm. As a consequence of the withdrawal of the French troops the last united attack of the red men against the white was made and failed. {79} The famous conspiracy of Pontiac was the desperate attempt of the Indian allies of France to annihilate the colonists by a concerted attack of a vast union of tribes. The conspiracy failed after a b.l.o.o.d.y war that lasted for nearly two years. Pontiac, the Indian chief who had helped to destroy Braddock, and who had dreamed that all the English might as easily be destroyed, was defeated and killed; his league was dissipated, and the power of the red men as a united force broken for good. Under such conditions of immunity from long-standing and pressing perils, due in the main to the triumph of British arms, the colonists might very well have been expected to regard with especial favor their a.s.sociation with England. If there had been differences between the two countries for long enough, no moment could have been apter for the adoption of a policy calculated to lessen and ultimately to abolish those differences than the moment when the weary and wearing Seven Years' War came to its close. A far-seeing monarch, advised and encouraged by far-seeing statesmen, might have soldered close the seeming impossibilities and made them kiss. Had the throne even been filled by a sovereign slightly less stubborn, had the throne been surrounded by servants slightly less bigoted, the arrogant patronage of the one part and the aggressive protestation of the other part might have been judiciously softened into a relations.h.i.+p wisely paternal and loyally filial. The advantage of an enduring union between the mother country and her colonies was obvious to any reasonable observer. A common blood, a common tongue, a common pride of race and common interests should have kept them together. But the relations were not amicable. The colonies were peopled by men who were proud indeed of being Englishmen, but by reason of that very pride were jealous of any domination, even at the hands of Englishmen. The mother country, on the other hand, regarded the colonies, won with English hands and watered with English blood, as being no less portion and parcel of English soil because three thousand miles of stormy ocean lay between the port upon the Severn and the port upon {80} the Charles River. She came to regard as mere ingrat.i.tude those a.s.sertions of independence which most characteristically proved the colonies to be worthy of it and of her. The theory of the absolute dominion of England over the American colonies might have died a natural death, a harmonious settlement of grievances and adjustment of powers might have knitted the two peoples together in an enduring league, if it had not been for George the Third.

[Sidenote: 1765--England and her colonial governors]

The mind of George the Third was saturated with a belief in his personal importance; the heart of George the Third was exalted by the determination to play a dominating part in the country of his birth and the history of his reign. The hostility to the exercise of home authority latent in the colonies irritated the King like a personal affront. To resist or to resent the authority of the Government of England was to resist and to resent the authority of the sovereign who was determined that he would be to all intents and purposes the Government of England. If the relations.h.i.+p between England and America had been far happier than George found it at the time of his accession, it probably would not long have preserved a wholesome tenor. But the relations.h.i.+p was by no means happy. The colonial a.s.semblies were for the most part at loggerheads with the colonial governors. These governors, little viceroys with petty courts, extremely proud of their power and self-conscious in their authority, generally detested the popular a.s.semblies upon whom they were obliged to depend for the payment of their salaries. Their dislike found secret expression in the letters which it was the duty and the pleasure of the colonial governors to address to the Home Government. The system of colonial administration in England was as simple as it was unsatisfactory. At its head was a standing committee of the Privy Council which had been established in 1675. This committee was known at length as "The Lords of the Committee of Trade and Plantations," and in brief and more generally as "The Lords of Trade." It was the duty of the colonial governors to make lengthy reports to the Lords of Trade on the {81} commercial and other conditions of their governors.h.i.+ps. It was too often their pleasure to supplement these State papers with lengthy and embittered private letters, addressed to the same body, making the very most and worst of the difficulties they had to deal with in their work.

The colonies, as represented in these semi-official communications, were turbulent, contumacious, discontented, disrespectful to viceregal dignity, rebellious against the authority of Great Britain. These communications informed the minds of the Lords of Trade, who in their turn influenced those who were responsible for the conduct of the King's Government. Thus a vicious system, acting in a vicious circle, kept alive an irritation and fostered a friction that only increased with the increasing years. It had always been the worst feature of England's colonial policy that she was ever ready to accept with too little question the animadversions of the governors upon the governed.

The Lords of Trade accepted the communications of the colonial governors as gospel truth, and as gospel truth it was taken in its turn by the ministers to whom it was transmitted and by the monarch to whom they carried it. The general public were as ignorant of and as indifferent to the American colonies as if they were situated in the mountains of the moon. The major part of the small minority that really did seek or desire information about America gained it from the same poisonous sources that inspired the Government, and based their theories of colonial reform upon the peevish epistles, often mendacious and always one-sided, which fed the intelligences of the Lords of Trade. The few who were really well informed, who had something like as accurate an appreciation of the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts as they had of the county of Middles.e.x, were powerless to counteract the general ignorance and the more particular misconception. It was the cherished dream of authority in England to bring the colonies into one common rule under one head in such a way as to strengthen their military force while it lessened their legislative independence. It now seemed as if with the right King and the right Ministry {82} this dream might become a reality. In George the Third and in George Grenville prerogative seemed to have found the needed instruments to subjugate the American colonies.

[Sidenote: 1765--Trade restrictions upon the colonies]

Many of the grievances of the colonies were grave enough. If some of the injuries that England inflicted upon her great dependency seem petty in the enumeration, a number of small causes of irritation are no less dangerous to peace between nations than some great injustice. But lest the small stings should not be enough, the Government was resolved that the great injustice should not be wanting. The colonists resented the intermittent tyranny and the persistent truculence of the most part of the royal governors. The colonists resented the enforced transportation of criminals. The colonists resented the action of Great Britain in annulling the colonial laws made to keep out slaves.

It is melancholy to reflect that the curse of slavery, for which Englishmen of later days often so bitterly and so rightly reproached America, was unhappily enforced upon a country struggling to be rid of it by Englishmen who called themselves English statesmen. The colonists resented the astonis.h.i.+ng restrictions which it pleased the mother country to place, in what she believed to be her own interest, upon colonial trade. These laws commanded that all trade between the colonies should be carried on in s.h.i.+ps built in England or the colonies. This barred out all foreigners, especially the Dutch, then the chief carriers for Europe. They compelled the American farmer to send his products across the ocean to England. They forbade the exportation of sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods to any part of the world except to England or some English colony. They only allowed exportation of fish, fur, oil, ashes, and lumber in s.h.i.+ps built in England or the colonies. They forced the colonists to buy all their European goods in England and bring them over to America in English vessels. They prohibited the colonial manufacture of any article that could be manufactured in England. They hara.s.sed and minimized the trade between one colony and another. No {83} province was permitted to send woollen goods, hats, or ironware to another province. Some of the regulations read more like the rules of some Turkish pashalik than the laws framed by one set of Englishmen for another set of Englishmen. In the Maine woods, for instance, no tree that had a diameter greater than two feet at a foot above the ground could be cut down, except to make a mast for some s.h.i.+p of the Royal Navy.

Bad and bitter as these laws were in theory, they did not for long enough prove to be so bad in practice, for the simple reason that they were very easy to evade and not very easy to enforce. The colonists met what many of them regarded as an elaborate system for the restriction of colonial trade by a no less elaborate system of smuggling. Smuggling was easy because of the long extent of sea-coast.

Smuggling was lucrative, as few considered it an offence to evade laws that were generally resented as unfair. When the Sugar Act of 1733 prohibited the importation of sugar and mola.s.ses from the French West Indies except on payment of a prohibitory duty, the New England colonists, who did a thriving trade in the offspring of the union of sugar and mola.s.ses, rum, found themselves faced by a serious problem.

Should they accept the Act and its consequential ruin of their trade or ignore it, and by resorting to smuggling prosper as before? Without hesitation they decided that their rights as Englishmen were a.s.sailed by the obnoxious imposition, and they turned to smuggling with the light heart that is conscious of a heavy purse. The contraband trade was brisk, the contrabandists cheerful, and so long as England made no serious attempt to put into operation laws that the genial and business-like smugglers of the Atlantic sea-coast regarded as preposterous n.o.body complained, and international relations were cordial. But the situation was not seen with so bright an eye by the British merchant. He witnessed with indignation the failure of the attempt to monopolize the commerce of the colonies to his own advantage, and he clamored for the restoration of his fat monopoly.

His clamor was unheeded while the great war {84} was running its course. But with the end of the war and the new conditions consequent upon the advent of a new King with a brand-new theory of kings.h.i.+p and prerogative, the situation began to change.

The colonial policy of George Grenville's Administration might be conveniently considered under three heads. The Ministry was resolved, in the first place, to enforce Acts of Trade which smuggling had long rendered meaningless in the American colonies. The Ministry was resolved, in the second place, to establish a permanent garrison of some ten thousand men in America. The Ministry was resolved, in the third place, to make the colonists pay a third of the cost of keeping up this garrison by a direct taxation. It was easy enough for Grenville to formulate the three ministerial purposes, but it was not very easy to give them any effect. The colonists resented and the colonists resisted all three proposals. If they were technically wrong in their resentment at the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they were reasonable in their reluctance to accept the proposed garrison, and they were justified by every law of liberty and of patriotism in resisting with all the strength at their command the proposed scheme of taxation.

[Sidenote: 1765--James Otis and John Adams]

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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sistance.

{85} Otis may have been technically wrong in resisting the Writs of a.s.sistance, 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 cla.s.sical literature, and an author of repute on Latin prosody. The issue of the Writs of a.s.sistance 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 a.s.semblage 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 prompt.i.tude of cla.s.sical 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 a.s.sistance."

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 a.s.sert 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 hards.h.i.+p 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, pa.s.sionate 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sistance 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 a.s.sailed 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 pa.s.sed through both Houses, and in consequence of the ill health of the King received the royal a.s.sent 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 a.s.serted 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 fis.h.i.+ng, 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 pa.s.sion 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.

Ma.s.sachusetts had set an example which Virginia had bettered; Ma.s.sachusetts was now to better Virginia. If Virginia, prompted by Patrick Henry, declared that she alone had the right to tax her own citizens, Ma.s.sachusetts, inspired by James Otis, summoned a congress of deputies from all the colonial a.s.semblies to meet in common consultation upon the common danger. This congress, the first but not the last, memorable but not most memorable, met in New York in the early November of 1765. Nine colonies were represented at its table--Ma.s.sachusetts, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York. The congress pa.s.sed a series of resolutions, as firm in their purpose as moderate in their language, putting forward the grievances and a.s.serting the rights of the colonies.

But the protests against the Stamp Act were not limited to eloquent orations or formal resolutions. Deeds, as well as words, made plain the purpose of the American people. Riots broke out in colony after colony; the most and worst in Ma.s.sachusetts. Boston blazed into open revolt against authority. There were two Government officials in Boston who were especially unpopular with the mob--Andrew Oliver, the newly appointed collector of the stamp taxes, and Chief Justice Hutchinson. A scarecrow puppet, intended to represent the obnoxious Oliver, was publicly hung upon a tree by the mob, then cut down, triumphantly paraded through the city to Oliver's door, and there set on fire. When the sham Oliver was ashes the crowd broke into and ransacked his house, after which it did the same turn to the house of Chief Justice Hutchinson. Oliver and Hutchinson escaped unhurt, but all their property went through their broken windows and lay in ruin upon the Boston streets. Hutchinson was busy upon a History of Ma.s.sachusetts; the ma.n.u.script shared the fate of its {92} author's chairs and tables, and went with them out into the gutter. It was picked up, preserved, and exists to this day, its pages blackened with the Boston mud. Many papers and records of the province which Hutchinson had in his care for the purpose of his history were irretrievably lost.

The next day the judges and the bar, a.s.sembled in their robes at the Boston Court House, were startled by the apparition of a haggard man in disordered attire, whom they might have been pardoned for failing to recognize as their familiar chief justice. In a voice broken with emotion Hutchinson apologized to the court for the appearance in which he presented himself before it. He and his family were dest.i.tute; he himself had no other s.h.i.+rt and no other clothes than those he was at that moment wearing. Part even of this poor attire he had been obliged to borrow. Almost in rags, almost in tears, he solemnly called his Maker to witness that he was innocent of the charges that had made him obnoxious to the fury of the populace. He swore that he never, either directly or indirectly, aided, a.s.sisted, or supported, or in the least promoted or encouraged the Stamp Act, but on the contrary did all in his power, and strove as much as in him lay, to prevent it. The court listened to him in melancholy silence and then adjourned, "on account of the riotous disorders of the previous night and universal confusion of the town," to a day nearly two months later.

It was a thankless privilege to be a stamp officer in those stormy hours. Most of the stamp officers were forced to resign under pressure which they might well be excused for finding sufficiently cogent. In order to make the new law a dead letter the colonists resolved that while it was in force they would avoid using stamps by subst.i.tuting arbitration for any kind of legal procedure. With a people in this temper, there were only two things to be done; to meet their wishes, or to annihilate their opposition. It is possible that Grenville might have preferred to attempt the second alternative, but by this time Grenville's power was at an end.

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CHAPTER XLVII.

EDMUND BURKE.

[Sidenote: 1730-82--Rockingham and his Ministry]

The friction between Grenville and the King was rapidly becoming unbearable to George, if not to his minister. George was resolved to be rid of his intolerable tyrant at the cost of almost any concession.

He was now fully as eager to welcome Pitt back to office as he had once been hot to drive him out of it. Again c.u.mberland was called in; again c.u.mberland approached Pitt; again Pitt's willingness to resume the seals was overborne by the stubbornness of Temple. The King was in despair. He would not endure Grenville and Grenville's bullying sermons any longer, and yet it was hard indeed to find any one who could take Grenville's place with any chance of carrying on Grenville's work. c.u.mberland had a suggestion to make, a desperate remedy for a desperate case. If Pitt and the old Whigs were denied to the King, why should not the King try the new Whigs and Rockingham?

The old Whig party, as it had lived and ruled so long, had practically ceased to exist. So much the King had accomplished. Saint George of Hanover had struck at the dragon only to find that, like the monster in the cla.s.sical fable, it took new form and fresh vitality beneath his strokes. There was a Whig party that was not essentially the party of Pitt, a party which was recruiting its ranks with earnest, thoughtful, high-minded, honorable men to whom the principles or want of principles which permitted the old Whig dominion were as intolerable as they appear to a statesman of to-day. At the head of this new development of Whig activity was the man to whom c.u.mberland now turned in the hour of the King's trial, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham.

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Lord Rockingham was one of those ornaments of the English senate for the benefit of whose biographers the adjective amiable seems especially to have been invented. Although the master of a large fortune, while he was still a boy of twenty he was deservedly noted for the gravity and stillness of his youth, and during a political career of one-and-thirty years, if he showed neither commanding eloquence nor commanding statesmans.h.i.+p, he did honor to the Whig party by his sincere patriotism and irreproachable uprightness of character. If heaven had denied Rockingham the resplendent gifts that immortalize a Chatham, it had given him in full measure of the virtues of patriotism, honesty, integrity, and zeal. The purity of his life, the probity of his actions, and the excellence of all his public purposes, commended him to the affectionate regard of all who held that morality was more essential to a statesman than eloquence, and that it was better to fail with such a man than to succeed with those to whom, for the most part, the successes of that day were given. Two years before, in 1763, his dislike for the policy of Lord Bute had driven him to resign his small office as Lord of the Bedchamber, and he carried his scrupulousness so far as to resign at the same time his Lord-Lieutenantcy of Yorks.h.i.+re.

To the delight of the Duke of c.u.mberland, and to the delight of the King, Rockingham consented to form a Ministry. With the best will in the world Rockingham could not make his Ministry very commanding. It was but a makes.h.i.+ft, and not a very brilliant makes.h.i.+ft, but at least it served to get rid of Grenville and of Grenville's harangues. So long as Grenville was unable to terrorize the royal closet with reproaches and reproofs addressed to the King, and with menaces aimed at Bute, George was quite willing to see Newcastle intrusted with the Privy Seal, and Conway made Secretary of State for one department, and the Duke of Grafton for the other. But the Ministry which the King accepted because he could get nothing better, and because he would have welcomed something much worse so long as it delivered him from {95} Grenville--the Ministry that provoked the derisive pity of most of its critics was destined to attain an honorable immortality. The heterogeneous group of men who called themselves or were called, who believed themselves or were believed to be Whigs, had obtained one recruit whose name was yet to make the cause he served ill.u.s.trious.

Lord Rockingham had many claims to the regard of his contemporaries; undoubtedly his greatest claim to the regard of posterity lies in the intelligence which enabled him to discern the rising genius of a young writer, and the wisdom which found a place by his side and a seat in the House of Commons for Edmund Burke.

[Sidenote: 1765--The coming of Edmund Burke]