BRITISH POLITICS 145 had formed the habit of deciding everything; and the same group of Whig politicians planned to dominate the new king, George III, in about the same way. But whatever else he may have been, George III was no fool at the art of disreputable politics. He had no intention of letting the Cabinet lord it over him as they had over his two royal ancestors. Moreover, he was not the only politician who objected to seeing the Whigs get all the "plums" of office. Once it became clear that the king was ready to rule, he was able to recruit a number of kindred spirits, known as the "king's friends," who had no guiding principles except opposition to the Whigs and subjection to him. It was not long before Newcastle was crowded out. In 1761 the great William Pitt resigned, and Lord Bute, one of the king's friends, became one of the Secretaries of State; eventually he and the king secured a majority in the House of Commons. At this success the Whigs became furious. They had monopolized the system of rotten politics so long that they could not bear to see their preeminence disappear, and they hated George III because he beat them at their own game. In the meantime, the Whig party was splitting up into fragments, the leaders of which were actuated largely by selfish motives. The more important of these groups were the "Old Whigs," led by Newcastle, and later by Rockingham, and including the famous Edmund Burke. Almost as important were the "Pittites," of whom William Pitt was the guiding spirit, with Shelburne second in command. There was another group led by the Duke of Bedford, popularly known as the "Bloomsbury Gang," and after them the faction led by Pitt's notorious brother-in-law, George Grenville. These were not real parties, but merely "a shifting system of unstable groups." Because no one of these groups could get a majority, the Cabinets had to be made up of representatives from several. So, with such patchwork administrations, consistent, sensible action was virtually impossible. Upon these men of narrow minds and narrower visions, interested in the petty details of backstairs politics, fell the responsibility of dealing with all the new problems of the British Empire after 1760. As professional politicians go, they were not especially incompetent; in fact, they were excellent specimens of their kind. Furthermore, they were not tyrants. Tyranny was probably farther removed from their thoughts than anything else. The chief concern of those actually in office was to hold on to their jobs, while those less fortunate were pulling wires to get in. Incidentally, they tried, as honestly and as conscientiously as men could, to do something worth while with those puzzling North American questions. Nothing would have pleased them better than to see the wheels of government move smoothly, because then they and their friends would find it easier to turn their offices to good account. THE SUGAR ACT With their North American policy duly set forth in the Proclamation of 1763, the Cabinet turned its attention to the matter of finding the necessary funds. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Grenville had the responsibility of suggesting sources of revenue. He knew perfectly well that the English tax payers had complained bitterly over their share in the burdens of the Seven Years' War, and as a good politician he hesitated to fasten upon them the additional cost of defending the newly-acquired territory. The tax-payers were property owners and voters, who must be kept as contented as possible. Concerning America, Grenville's knowledge was none too extensive, and his understanding was not deep enough to command respect. Why not let the colonists pay a part of the military costs of their own frontiers? In the minds of the Cabinet it was easy to join the idea of enforcing some of the old trade laws, notably the Molasses Act, to the idea of colonial revenue. By lowering the duty on molasses, and then collecting that duty, it might be easy to raise money and to cut off trade with the French at the same time, all with one law. The Revenue Act of 1764, generally known as the Sugar Act, provided for both of these things. The duty on foreign molasses was reduced from 6d. to 3d. per gallon, with the expectation that it could be collected. To this latter end, additional measures gave more authority to the customs officials, and made stricter regulations concerning the registration of vessels. Had Grenville been something of a statesman, he would undoubtedly have looked into that molasses trade which he was so ready to tax. In doing so, he would have discovered what every intelligent American merchant and many of the royal governors understood perfectly: that the prosperity of the middle and northern colonies depended on this very trade in foreign molasses. The British islands could not begin to supply the demand. Their entire output was only slightly over fifty per cent of the quantity carried into Rhode THE SUGAR ACT 147 Island alone, while all the colonies together used about eight times. as much as the English islands produced. Moreover, the British sugar planters charged anywhere from twenty-five to forty per cent higher prices than those charged in the French islands. The trade was too important to be treated carelessly. If Grenville had pushed his investigations a little further, he would have learned that colonial authorities considered a 3d. tax too high. They were convinced that a 1d. tax was all the trade could stand. As a matter of fact, in 1769, the English authorities admitted the soundness of the argument by reducing the tax to that figure. But Grenville's mind was not interested in any such subtleties of economics, so he learned none of these things before his measure became law. After its enactment, he found it hard to escape the burden of learning a good deal. He found, for example, that the colonial merchants had very deep convictions on the subject of his revenue scheme. This fact in itself should have been enough to make him go slowly, because the merchants were not at all eager to make trouble, or to have it made for them. In general, they had a very keen appreciation of the benefits accruing to them from their membership in the British Empire. They knew that they were protected from foreign competition in the carrying trade by the First Navigation Act. This advantage alone was far more than enough to outweigh the restrictive measures of the other Navigation Acts, especially since they could be easily evaded. Then, at a time when piracy was a factor in real life, the merchants knew that they were enjoying the full benefits of protection by the British navy, without paying a penny for it. Incidentally, they knew that in their Mediterranean trade, they were protected from the depredations of the Barbary corsairs by the payments made by the British government. Finally, they had enjoyed a flourishing trade before the Seven Years' War, and the British conquests held out the brightest hopes for a steady increase in their commerce. While they were enjoying all these benefits, serious protests from them really meant something. The new measures had no appreciable effect upon the plantation colonies, and the chief protests came from the commercial centers: Boston, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia. The merchants aimed simply at reform, and they urged merely the repeal of the objectionable bill. The most famous protests were those written by James Otis of Massachusetts, the lawyer who had assisted the mer chants in their campaign against the Writs of Assistance, by Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, a merchant deeply interested in the West Indian trade, and by John Dickinson of Philadelphia, a lawyer in close touch with the mercantile interests of that city. These critics of Grenville's plan tried to make plain the vital importance of the West Indian trade, with reference not only to the merchants and to the distillers, but to the farmers, who depended upon the West Indian market for the sale of their surplus products. It seems that the law brought hard times to the colonies. From Boston there were complaints that the number of vessels engaged in the West Indian trade had dropped to a fifth of those in it the preceding year. The merchants generally agreed that business was bad, and getting worse. Similar complaints poured in from all the commercial colonies. Of course these have to be discounted to a certain extent, because it was obviously desirable to make out against the law as bad a case as possible, but with due allowance for this strategic factor, the evidence points toward definite harm. Along with the genuine, bona fide protests of the merchant class against the Grenville policy, there were to be seen numerous traces of those local contests described above. In Massachusetts for example the Otis group in the House of Representatives used the Sugar Act as an ordinary political issue to strengthen themselves and to weaken their opponents. There was so much of that sort of political maneuvering in the Bay Colony that it is impossible to draw any dividing line between the larger and the smaller disputes. In this connection it is worth noting that the debate over the Sugar Act afforded the opportunity for another one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution to come into prominence. Samuel Adams drafted one of the protests against the measure, and as a reward, the Boston voters put him into the House of Representatives. Undeterred by all this evidence of colonial disapproval, Grenville proceeded to carry out the other parts of his original plan. In 1764 he had announced that revenue measures in addition to the Sugar Act would be necessary, and he had suggested, as the least bad of possible schemes, a series of stamp taxes. Before putting the measure before Parliament, however, he gave the colonial legislatures an opportunity to provide the desired revenue by other means. They took no ac THE STAMP ACT 149 tion beyond registering further protests, so in March, 1765, the Stamp Act became law, to go into effect the following November. During its course through Parliament, this ill-fated measure attracted almost no attention. The debates were enlivened by no real protests against the measure itself, and outside of Parliament there were no premonitions of impending trouble. Not even William Pitt, who has the reputation of having been the friend of the colonies, paid any attention to the bill. To be sure, when it passed he was temporarily out of public life (ill with gout) but he was constantly writing letters on all sorts of issues, and if he had been at all interested in the matter, he would have said so. This question of Pitt's attitude toward the colonies is an interesting one. He did criticize the Stamp Act, after the protests had come in from America, but in discussing the repeal of it, he made the very interesting observation that "if the Americans should manufacture a lock of wool or a horse shoe," he would "fill their ports with ships and their towns with troops." A curious sentiment, certainly, but not one that would suggest any overwhelming enthusiasm for American development. There were others in London at the time who saw no great harm in the Stamp Act. Benjamin Franklin, for example, anticipated no trouble, and according to report he applied, in behalf of his son, for one of the positions as Stamp Distributor. Richard Henry Lee did the same thing for himself, much to his embarrassment when colonial opposition broke loose. It required considerable explaining to tell why he was ready to serve in that capacity. Even after news came that the measure had become law there were no indications of any opposition more serious than a few protests. This second offspring of Grenville's none too fertile mind provided for the levying of stamp duties on a wide variety of documents, such as ship clearance papers, licenses, deeds, bonds, and leases, and also upon playing cards, dice, newspapers, pamphlets, and advertisements. The proceeds, so the law made clear, were to go toward the maintenance of English troops on the frontier. Thus the money raised would all be spent in America, and had the Proclamation of 1763 not set up a barrier to settlement it would have been spent for a purpose distinctly beneficial to all the colonies interested in the West. In any case, the older colonies would profit from having the frontier adequately guarded. Viewed simply as an abstract problem in economics, the Stamp Act was not unpromising. |