Sergeant Lamb's America Page 11

  However, in the next year the alarm passed and the agitation against the British continued steadily in New England. It was given substance by an act of the famous and venerable Dr Benjamin Franklin, already mentioned, the inventor of the lightning-conductor for houses, who was then Deputy Postmaster-General of America and resident agent in London of the colony of Massachusetts. Dr Franklin had by some unknown means possessed himself of certain confidential letters written by Mr Hutchinson, the Governor of Massachusetts, whose house and collection of historical documents had been destroyed in the Stamp Act riots, and of Mr Oliver, Lieutenant-Governor, whose house also had been burned on the same occasion: both men very respectable in their private character. In these letters, written to influential friends in England, they had expressed themselves very freely and with pardonable warmth upon the situation of affairs in America, recommending that the Government should adopt more vigorous methods in support of its authority. Let Parliament clap a padlock on the mouths of the over-eloquent orators of Boston, whose one aim was to preserve the remembrance of every disagreeable occurrence that had ever passed between the soldiers and the townsfolk, who ranted ceaselessly on the ‘blessings of liberty’, the ‘horrors of slavery’, the ‘dangers of a standing army’, but only with a view to keeping the popular mind continuously inflamed, and with a fixed aversion to the truth.

  These private letters were conveyed by Dr Franklin to his friends of the Massachusetts Assembly where they were read aloud to one hundred and five members by Mr Samuel (not John) Adams. This other Adams was an enthusiast by whom the well-known Committees of Correspondence had been founded, which guided particular towns, not only within his colony but scattered throughout all the others, to concerted action against the Crown. These private letters, then, which Dr Franklin with patriotic and lofty excuses thus mischievously published (some say because of a private pique against the Governor, whose Sabbatarian principles he had offended, and against the Lieutenant-Governor, perhaps in revenge for the rifling of his own private correspondence by secret agents in the British Post Office), threw the Assembly into a violent flame.

  By a majority of over twenty to one they voted that the tendency and design of these letters was to subject the Constitution and introduce arbitrary power into the province. They humbly petitioned His Majesty to remove these two men for ever from the government of Massachusetts: asserting that they, teeing ‘no strangers or foreigners but bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, born and educated among us … have alienated from us the affections of our Sovereign, have destroyed the harmony and goodwill which existed between Great Britain and Massachusetts and, having already caused bloodshed in our streets will, if unchecked, plunge our country into all the horrors of civil war.’ Dr Franklin himself conveyed this petition, the sincerity of which may well be questioned, to the King, before whom it was laid in Council. But it became known that the letters on which the petition was grounded had been purloined by this same Dr Franklin, and the Committee of Lords therefore considered it a somewhat indecent affair. Dr Franklin, called in evidence, would not reply to interrogation, the petition was thrown out, and Dr Franklin was dismissed from his Deputy Postmastership. This was thought to be to his satisfaction; for it would prove to the Bostonians that he was ready to suffer from his attachment to their cause – being still somewhat suspect to them as having been a warm supporter of the Quartering Act and the Stamp Act. In the event, he was rewarded by his fellow-countrymen, a year or two later, with the Postmaster-Generalship of the United States.

  Every one on this side of the Atlantic, as on the other, has heard of the ‘Boston Tea-Party’ which was the immediate occasion of the American War; but how it came about is not, I find, so generally known.

  The East India Company stood on the brink of bankruptcy, one reason being that it had lost many hundreds of thousands of customers in America. Until the new duty had been placed upon it, tea had been, after hard liquor, the favourite beverage not only of the white Americans (especially of the women, who were perfect addicts to it) but of the Indian savages, who boiled it regularly twice a day in the kettles suspended over their wigwam fires. Four million pounds’ worth of tea had now accumulated in the London warehouses, and the Cabinet thought to help the East India merchants out of their difficulties by allowing them to sell some of this surplus treasure direct to America at a reduced rate. That is to say, the Company was allowed a drawback of the whole tea duty then payable in England, while the Exchequer continued to claim the duty of threepence on the pound payable by America. This arrangement greatly vexed the Bostonians. It was not only that this slight but aggravating threepence had become a symbol to them of liberties denied – for the watchword, ‘No taxation without representation’, was by now made to cover external as well as internal imports; but that it damaged the private interests of their leaders and put many of themselves out of employment. Colonel ‘King’ Hancock, of the Sons of Liberty, had made a large fortune by smuggling East India tea from Holland, where it was sold at one shilling a pound; having in combination with a few associates handled no fewer than five thousand chests in two years, and engaged a great number of seamen and others in the trade. The new tea being offered for sale far cheaper, even with the duty added, than what Hancock sold (and indeed cheaper than in England, since the English duty was higher than the American) would undercut the profit, amounting to near two hundred per centum, that he was drawing from his venture. It was Colonel Hancock’s friend, Mr Samuel Adams, who personally directed the ‘daring action’, as it has been called, of the fifty Boston mobsmen who, on December 16th 1773, disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the British tea-ships on their arrival at Boston harbour, and threw the whole of their cargo, three hundred and forty-two chests, overboard. In the immediate and particular sense it was not daring: Mr Adams knew well that the troops would not be called out from Castle William to save the tea, since their orders were to intervene in civil disturbances only if blood were shed; nor would the magistrates take any action against him subsequently, for fear of a coat of tar and feathers, even if they were not of his own opinions. But it was a daring action in the sense that it challenged reprisals against the town of Boston as a whole.

  This was not the only consignment of tea that was sent to America at that time; and Mr Adams’s Committees of Correspondence in the principal towns of the continent had made preparations for concerted action against its acceptance. The Pennsylvanians greeted a tea-ship on its arrival at Philadelphia, the capital city, with such execrations and threats that the captain turned about and sailed down the Delaware River again and straight home. At Charleston in South Carolina the tea was taken ashore indeed but heaped into a damp cellar, where it was soon utterly spoiled by the mildew.

  On being informed of the destruction of the tea, King George considered himself personally affronted, but was considerate that the other cities of America should not suffer for the fault of Boston, where, as he knew, all the present troubles had been fomented. No action was therefore taken against them in the matter of their refusing the tea, but Boston must be sharply punished as a general warning.

  In March of the year 1774 ‘The Boston Port Act’ was passed: to ‘discontinue the landing and discharging, lading and shipping, of goods, wares, and merchandize at the town of Boston or within the harbour’ until such time as the East India Company had been compensated by the city for the loss of the tea, which was valued at £15,000. The business of the Custom House and the seat of Government transferred at the same time to the port of Salem, seventeen miles distant. The unfortunate Mr Hutchinson was not considered equal to the task of governing Massachusetts in these aggravated conditions: he was instructed to hand over his office to General Gage, a gallant and capable soldier, who had been wounded by Col. Washington’s side in the late war, had married an American lady, and was greatly esteemed by the better people of America. It was remembered that on the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1769 his house at New York had been brilliantly illuminated. General Gage ha
d also been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in America.

  Let nobody think that the name of Boston figures too importantly in this account. But for Boston, it is difficult to see by what means the necessary separation between England and her colonies would eventually have come about. In Boston alone existed the active resolution to rebel. At the close of the war, a Boston statesman whose name it is not hard to guess wrote of his own part in initiating the general movement (against the inclinations of so many of his countrymen) as follows:

  Here in my retreat, like another Catiline, the collar around my neck, in danger of the severest punishment, I laid down the plan of revolt: I endeavoured to persuade my timid accomplices that a most glorious revolution might be the result of our efforts, but I scarcely dared to hope it; and what I have seen realized appears to me like a dream. You know by what obscure intrigues, by what unfaithfulness to the mother-country a powerful party was formed; how the minds of the people were irritated before we could provoke the insurrection.

  Can this justification of end by means be admitted as proved, if the end was so little appreciated by the greater part of those for whom it was conceived, even when the war had been for some time in progress? That the end was not generally appreciated does not, of course, argue against its rightness; for in my opinion the American quarrel was inevitable, and in the long run salutary, though a very ugly, damned business while it lasted.

  Let me speak more explicitly. I had been told, before I sailed for America, that this was a civil war, a rebellion of recreant Englishmen against their rightful Sovereign. Yet I came to realize before I had been many weeks on the scene of action that it was no civil war. Americans are not merely another sort of English, but are in effect Americans, a nation in their own right. Transplant English roots, herbs, or pulse to America, even to that part of the continent which most nearly resembles England in climate, and in three years what will have occurred? The difference of soil and air will have brought about notable alterations in your plants: in some cases for the better, in others for the worse, but at least a pronounced change. It may be that a crop which was feeble in England and required much care will have grown as rank as a weed over there. Or it may be that after three years there is such a degeneration of seed (as with the cabbage and the turnip) that you will be obliged to send home for fresh. It is the same with fruit, poultry, and cattle. Some varieties thrive enormously, some come to no good at all, all alter. Is it therefore surprising that the English race should also alter on transplantation to this continent? Three, nay, two, generations are sufficient for your Englishman to be transformed (or transmogrified) into a different being. He becomes a native American, who walks, works, plays, speaks, looks, feels, and thinks in a way peculiar to the country; and who, once he becomes aware of these changes in himself, can no longer be ruled by gentlemen, though as learned, eminent, or gracious as you please, sent over from England with royal letters patent.

  The town of Boston, however Jesuitical its leaders may appear to our British judgment, however graceless its mob, was right in its main contention; aye, and bold and even, one may say, heroical in maintaining it. Three thousand five hundred able-bodied citizens were not many to challenge so great and powerful an Empire as the British.

  The heraldic flag of the American Republic consists of bars and mullets (vulgarly ‘stripes’ and ‘stars’) which commemorate in number the colonies of the Union. It was first hoisted on New Year’s Day, 1776. The simple family coat of General Washington, America’s saviour and first President, are recalled in this flag: for it consists of the very same bars and mullets, though not so numerous. I consider it remarkable that the young Republic instead of coining the new motto E pluribus unum (which is to say, ‘One composed of many’), should not have boldly taken over Washington’s own, as well as his heraldic charges: for it was EXITUS ACTA PROBAT – ‘the end justifies the means’.

  Chapter VIII

  TIDINGS OF the Port Act were received by the Bostonians with most extravagant tokens of resentment. The text of the Act was printed on mourning paper with a black border and cried about the streets as a ‘Barbarous Murder’. The terms ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’, for want of better, now being introduced into America (the former covering those who favoured the action of the Bostonians, and the latter those who condemned it as turbulent and unwarrantable), a regular persecution of the Tories throughout New England now began. These Tories were for the most part people of property and education, descendants of the first settlers; but their barns were burned, their cattle driven, their families insulted, their houses broke into, and they themselves forced either to quit or starve. ‘A Tory’, the Whigs held, ‘is one whose head is in England, whose body is in America, and whose neck should be stretched.’ If any one of them was caught alone and unarmed he was seized and led for mockery and detestation from township to township – ‘as by law is provided in the case of strolling idiots, lunatics, and the like’. Soon many hundreds of them had screened themselves in Boston, in the neighbourhood of the barracks. Servants of the Government were most brutally handled, and even ministers of religion whose Toryism was held offensive by their congregations found their cloth no protection to them. One had bullets fired through his windows, another merely had his pulpit nailed up, but a third was put into the village pound, as if he had been a strayed pig; where red herrings were thrown over for him to eat, in mockery of his affection for the red-coats. Only in the case of physicians was a touch of Toryism condoned by the Liberty Boys: from consideration of the ladies whose exigencies could not be denied for a mere political reason.

  But a striking discrepancy was discovered by a number of thoughtful Americans between the professions and acts of the Boston agitators. One judicious writer who ‘eschewed politics as if they were edged tools’ complained about this time that there was something excessively absurd in some men’s eternally declaiming on freedom of thought – while not permitting an opponent to open his mouth on the subjects in dispute, without danger of being presented with a coat of tar and feathers, or being obliged to run like a criminal dog into the nearest woods with the hue and cry behind him.

  At the instance of the revolutionary party at New York a Congress of Delegates was now called from all the colonies to deliberate on the critical state of their affairs. This Congress, at which Georgia alone of the colonies was unrepresented, met at Philadelphia in the autumn of 1774. The fifty-one delegates declared themselves outright Whigs: urging the Bostonians to persevere in their opposition to the Government until their chartered liberties should be restored to them, engaging to support them in this aim to the best of their powers, and passing various resolutions of American unanimity – in which they even artfully tried to include the French Papists of Canada. They avowed, however, their allegiance to King George and drew up a petition in which they entreated him to grant them peace, liberty, and safety. This civility to the King was added as a sop to the representatives of Pennsylvania and New York, who opposed many of the resolutions and absented themselves from the proceedings for several days. A common front was only marshalled by the energies (to quote an American gentleman who was on the spot) of ‘Adams with his crew, and the haughty Sultans of the South, who juggled the whole conclave of delegates’.

  The Bostonians had framed an agreement, which they called ‘A Solemn League and Covenant’, by which the subscribers engaged in the most sacred manner to ‘discontinue commercial intercourse with Great Britain till the late obnoxious Acts are repealed’. This was also taken up by large numbers of people from the other provinces. When General Gage attempted to damp the effect of this covenant by a proclamation against mutiny, they retorted that the law allowed His Majesty’s loyal subjects to associate peaceably in defence of their rights; and he could not deny this. Nor could he do anything by legal methods for the proper protection of the Tories, since a Whiggish unanimity had now been forced on all instruments and accessories of the law – magistrates, jurors, and witnesses alike; or even by m
ilitary means, since the force at his disposal consisted of four weak battalions, which were wholly insufficient to the task of policing so great a province. The men of Massachusetts had now begun secretly to arm themselves and openly to drill; and a rival government to General Gage’s, a provincial congress, had resolved to raise the number of these avowed rebels to twelve thousand men and invited the other New England provinces of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire to assist them with eight thousand more.

  To relieve the distress of the people of Boston, liberal gifts were sent in money and kind from other towns of the province, and from so far away as South Carolina. The merchants of Salem and Marblehead, which lay adjacent, placed their wharves at the disposal of their colleagues of Boston; but these towns soon lost the use of their port, from destroying a cargo of tea which arrived in it.