The Loyalists of America and Their Times Volume I Part 30
He barred his windows, determined to resist their fury; but his family dragged him away with them in their flight. The mob rushed on, and beating down his windows, sacked the house (one of the finest in Boston) and destroyed everything, even a valuable collection of books and ma.n.u.scripts.
"This excess shocked the wise friends of liberty, and in a public meeting the citizens discovered the destruction, and set their faces against any further demonstrations of the sort. Rewards were offered for the rioters, and Mackintosh and some others were apprehended, but were rescued by their friends; and it was found impossible to proceed against them." (Elliott's New England History, Vol. II., pp. 254, 255.)
"Mayhew sent the next day a special apology and disclaimer to Hutchinson. The inhabitants of Boston, at a town meeting, unanimously expressed their abhorrence of these proceedings, and a civil guard was organized to prevent their repet.i.tion. Yet the rioters, though well known, went unpunished--a sure sign of the secret concurrence of the ma.s.s of the community. Those now committed were revolutionary acts, designed to intimidate--melancholy forerunners of civil war."
(Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol. II., Chap, xxviii., p.
528.)]
[Footnote 273: _Ib._, p. 527.
1. Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, whose house was thus sacked and his valuable papers destroyed, was the historian of his native province of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, whom I have quoted so frequently in the present volume of this history. Of his history, Mr. Bancroft, a bitter enemy of Hutchinson's, says:
"At the opening of the year 1765, the people of New England were reading the history of the first sixty years of the Colony of Ma.s.sachusetts, by Hutchinson. This work is so ably executed that as yet it remains without a rival; and his knowledge was so extensive that, with the exception of a few concealments, it exhausts the subject. Nothing so much revived the ancestral spirit which a weaving of the gloomy superst.i.tions, mixed with Puritanism, had for a long time overshadowed." (History of the United States, Vol. V., Chap, xi., p. 228.)
2. But though mob violence distinguished Boston on this as well as on other occasions, the opposition was such throughout the colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia, that all those who had been appointed to receive and distribute the stamps were compelled, by the remonstrances and often threats of their fellow-colonists, to resign the office; and the stamped paper sent from England to the ports of the various provinces was either returned back by the vessel that brought it, or put into a place of sate keeping. "Though the Stamp Act was to have operated from the 1st of November, yet the legal proceedings in Courts were carried on as before. Vessels entered and departed without stamped papers. The printers boldly printed and circulated their newspapers, and found a sufficient number of readers, though they used common paper, in defiance of the Act of Parliament. In most departments, by common consent, business was carried on as though no stamp law existed. This was accompanied by spirited resolutions to risk all consequences rather than submit to use the paper required by the Stamp Act. While these matters were in agitation, the colonists entered into a.s.sociations against importing British manufactures till the Stamp Act should be repealed. Agreeably to the free const.i.tution of Great Britain, the subject was at liberty to buy, or not to buy, as he pleased. By suspending their future purchases until the repeal of the Stamp Act, the colonists made it the interest of merchants and manufacturers in England to solicit its repeal. They had usually taken so great a proportion of British manufactures, amounting annually to two or three millions sterling, that they threw some thousands in the mother country out of employment, and induced them, from a regard to their own interest, to advocate the measures wished for by America." (Ramsay's Colonial History, Vol. I., pp. 345, 346).]
[Footnote 274: "Pet.i.tions were received by Parliament from the merchants of London, Bristol, Lancaster, Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow, etc., and indeed from most of the trading and manufacturing towns and boroughs in the kingdom. In these pet.i.tions they set forth the great decay of their trade, owing to the laws and regulations made for America; the vast quant.i.ties of our manufactures (besides those articles imported from abroad, which were enclosed either with our own manufactures or with the produce of our colonies) which the American trade formerly took off our hands; by all which many thousand manufacturers, seamen, and labourers had been employed, to the very great and increasing benefit of the nation. That in return for these exports the pet.i.tioners had received from the colonies rice, indigo, tobacco, naval stores, oil, whale-fins, furs, and lately potash, with other staple commodities, besides a large balance of remittances by bills of exchange and bullion obtained by the colonists for articles of their produce, not required for the British market, and therefore exported to other places.
"That from the nature of this trade, consisting of British manufactures exported, and of the import of raw material from America, many of them used in our manufactures, and all of them tending to lessen our dependence on neighbouring states, it must be deemed of the highest importance in the commercial system of this nation. That this commerce, so beneficial to the state, and so necessary to the support of mult.i.tudes, then lay under such difficulties and discouragements, that nothing less than its utter ruin was apprehended without the immediate interposition of Parliament.
"That the colonies were then indebted to the merchants of Great Britain to the sum of several millions sterling; and that when pressed for payment, they appeal to past experience in proof of their willingness; but declare it is not in their power at present to make good their engagements, alleging that the taxes and restrictions laid upon them, and the extension of the jurisdiction of the Vice-Admiralty Courts, established by some late Acts of Parliament, particularly by an Act pa.s.sed in the 4th year of his present Majesty, for granting certain duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America, and by an Act pa.s.sed in the 5th year of his Majesty, for granting and applying certain stamp duties, etc., in said colonies, etc., with several regulations and restraints, which, if founded in Acts of Parliament for defined purposes, they represent to have been extended in such a manner as to disturb legal commerce and hara.s.s the fair trader, and to have so far interrupted the usual, former and most useful branches of their commerce, restrained the sale of their produce, thrown the state of the several provinces into confusion, and brought on so great a number of actual bankruptcies that the former opportunities and means of remittances and payments were utterly lost and taken from them.
"That the pet.i.tioners were, by these unhappy events, reduced to the necessity of applying to the House, in order to secure themselves and their families from impending ruin; to prevent a mult.i.tude of manufacturers from becoming a burden to the community, or else seeking their bread in other countries, to the irretrievable loss of the kingdom; and to preserve the strength of this nation entire, its commerce flourishing, the revenues increasing, our navigation the bulwark of the kingdom, in a state of growth and extension, and the colonies, from inclination, duty, and interest, attached to the mother country."
"Such a number of pet.i.tions from every part of the kingdom, pregnant with so many interesting facts, stated and attested by such numbers of people, whose lives had been entirely devoted to trade, and who must be naturally supposed to be competent judges of a subject which they had so long and so closely attended to (besides that it showed the general sense of the nation), could not fail of having great weight with the House." (Annual Register for 1766, Vol. IX., Chap, vii., pp. 35, 36.)]
[Footnote 275: Ramsay's Colonial History, Vol. I., p. 348.
"At the same time that the Stamp Act was repealed, the absolute and unlimited supremacy of Parliament was, in words, a.s.serted. The opposers of repeal contended for this as essential. The friends of that measure acquiesced in it, to strengthen their party and make sure of their object. Many of both sides thought that the dignity of Great Britain required something of the kind to counterbalance the loss of authority that might result from her yielding to the clamours of the colonists.
The Act for this purpose was called the Declaratory Act, and was, in principle, more hostile to America's rights than the Stamp Act; for it annulled those resolutions and acts of the Provincial a.s.semblies in which they had a.s.serted their right to exemption from all taxes not imposed by their own representatives; and also enacted that the King and Parliament had, and of right ought to have, power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever."--_Ib._, p. 349.]
[Footnote 276: "The aborigines were never formidable in battle until they became supplied with the weapons of European invention."
(Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. I., p. 401.)]
[Footnote 277: The treatment of the Indians by the early New England Puritans is one of the darkest pages in English colonial history. I have slightly alluded to it in the preceding pages of this volume. Many pa.s.sages might be selected from the early divines of New England, referring to the Indians as the heathen whom they were to drive out of the land which G.o.d had given to this Israel. I will confine myself to the quotation of a few words from the late Rev. J.B. Marsden, A.M., noted for his Puritan partialities, in the two volumes of his _History of the Early and Later Puritans_. But his sense of Christian justice, tolerance, and humanity revolted at the New England Puritans'
intolerance to each other, and their cruel treatment of the Indians. Mr.
Marsden says:
"The New England Puritans were revered beyond the Atlantic as the Pilgrim Fathers, the founders of great cities, and of States renowned through the wide world for wealth, intelligence, and liberty. Their memory is cherished in England with feelings of silent respect rather than of unmixed admiration; for their inconsistencies were almost equal to their virtues; and here, while we respect their integrity, we are not blinded to their faults. A persecuted band themselves, they soon learned to persecute each other. The disciples of liberty, they confined its blessings to themselves. The loud champions of the freedom of conscience, they allowed no freedom which interfered with their narrow views. Professing a mission of Gospel holiness, they fulfilled it but in part. When opposed, they were revengeful; when irritated, fanatical and cruel. In them a great experiment was to be tried, under conditions the most favourable to its success; and it failed in its most important point. The question to be solved was this: How would the Puritans, the hunted, persecuted Puritans behave, were they but once free, once at liberty to carry their principles into full effect? The answer was returned from the sh.o.r.es of another world. It was distinct and unequivocal. And it was this: they were prepared to copy the worst vices of their English persecutors, and, untaught by experience, to imitate their worst mistakes. The severities of Whitgift seemed to be justified when it was made apparent on the plains of North America, that they had been inflicted upon men who wanted only the opportunity to inflict them again, and inflict them on one another." (Marsden's History of the Early Puritans, Chap, xi., pp. 305, 306.)
After referring to early conflicts between the Puritans and Indians, Mr.
Marsden remarks as follows in regard to the manner in which the Puritans destroyed the Pequod nation:
"If there be a justifiable cause of war, it surely must be this, when our territory is invaded and our means of existence threatened. That the Indians fell upon their enemies by the most nefarious stratagems, or exposed them, when taken in war, to cruel torments (though such ferocity is not alleged in this instance), does not much affect the question.
They were savages, and fought white men as they and their fathers had always fought each other. How then should a community of Christian men have dealt with them? Were they to contend as savages or civilized men?
As civilized men, or rather as men who had forsaken a land of civilization for purer abodes of piety and peace? The Pequod war shows how little their piety could be trusted when their pa.s.sions were aroused."
"After a week's marching, they came at day-break on the Indian wigwams and immediately a.s.saulted them. The 'ma.s.sacre' (so their own chronicler, Mr. Bancroft, has termed it) spread from one hut to another; for the Indians were asleep and unarmed. But the work of slaughter was too slow.
'We must burn them,' exclaimed the fanatic chieftain of the Puritans; and he cast the first firebrand to windward among their wigwams. In an instant the encampment was in a blaze. Not a soul escaped. Six hundred Indians, men, women, and children, perished by the steady hand of the marksman, by the unresisted broadsword, and by the hideous conflagration.
"The work of revenge was not yet accomplished. In a few days a fresh body of troops arrived from Ma.s.sachusetts, accompanied by their minister, Wilson. The remnants of the proscribed race were now hunted down in their hiding places; every wigwam was burned; every settlement broken up; every cornfield laid waste. There remained, says their exulting historian, not a man or a woman, not a warrior or child of the Pequod name. A nation had disappeared from the family of men." "History records many deeds of blood equal in ferocity to this; but we shall seek in vain for a parallel to the ma.s.sacre of the Pequod Indians. It brought out the worst points in the Puritan character, and displayed it in the strongest light. When their pa.s.sions were once inflamed, their religion itself was cruelty. A dark, fanatical spirit of revenge took possession, not, as in other men, by first expelling every religious and every human consideration, but, what was infinitely more terrible, by calling to its aid every stimulant, every motive that religion, jaundiced and perverted, could supply. It is terrible to read, when cities are stormed, of children thrown into the flames, and shrieking women butchered by infuriated men who have burst the restraints of discipline.
It is a dreadful licence; and true and gallant soldiers, occur when it may, feel that their profession is disgraced. But this was worse. Here all was deliberately calm; all was sanctioned by religion. It was no outbreak of mere brutality. The fast was kept; the Sabbath was observed; the staff of office, as a sacred ensign, was consecrated by one Christian minister, while another attended upon the marching of soldiery, and cheered them in the murderous design with his presence and his prayers. Piety was supposed not to abhor, but to exult in the exploit. This was true fanaticism. G.o.d's word and ordinances were made subservient to the greatest crimes. They were rudely forced and violated, and made the ministers of sin. When the a.s.sailants, reeking from the slaughter and blackened with the smoke, returned home, they were everywhere received with a pious ovation. G.o.d was devoutly praised, because the first principles of justice, nay, the stinted humanities of war, had been outraged, and unresisting savages, with their wives and children, had been ferociously destroyed." (Marsden's History of the Early Puritans, Chap, xi., pp. 305-311.)
Such was the early Puritan method of fulfilling the Royal Charter to the Ma.s.sachusetts Company of "Christianizing and civilizing the idolatrous Indians;" and such is a practical comment upon Colonel Barre's statement as to Indian cruelties.
But the intolerance of the Puritans to each other was as conspicuous as their cruel treatment of the Indians. On this point Mr. Marsden adds:
"The intolerance with which the Puritans had been treated at home might at least have taught them a lesson of forbearance to each other. But it had no such effect. It would almost seem as if, true disciples in the school of the High Commission and Star Chamber, their ambition was to excel their former tyrants in the art of persecution. They imitated, with a pertinacious accuracy, the bad examples of their worst oppressors; and with far less to excuse them, repeated in America the self-same crimes from which they and their fathers had suffered so much in England. No political considerations of real importance, no ancient prejudices interwoven with the framework of society, could be pleaded here. Their inst.i.tutions were new, their course was hampered by no precedents. Imagination cannot suggest a state of things more favourable to the easy, safe, and sure development of their views. Had they cherished a catholic spirit, there was nothing to prevent the exercise of the most enlarged beneficence. Their choice was made freely, and they decided in favour of intolerance; and their fault was aggravated by the consideration that the experiment had been tried, and that they themselves were the living witnesses of its folly." (Marsden's History of the Early Puritans, p. 311.)]
[Footnote 278: It was but just to have added that the trade between England and America was as profitable to America as it was to England, and that the value of property and rents advanced more rapidly in America than in England.]
[Footnote 279: This is a withering rebuke to a conceited though clever young statesman, Lord Nugent, who, in a previous part of the debate, insisted that the honour and dignity of the kingdom obligated them to compel the execution of the Stamp Act, "unless the right was acknowledged and the repeal solicited as a favour," concluding with the remark that "a peppercorn, in acknowledgment of the right, is of more value than millions without."]
[Footnote 280: Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. V., Chap.
xxi.]
[Footnote 281: History of the United States, Vol. V., Chap. xxi., pp.
397, 398.]
[Footnote 282: Prior Doc.u.ments, pp. 64-81.]
CHAPTER XI.
AUTHORITY OF PARLIAMENT OVER THE BRITISH COLONIES.
Before proceeding with a summary statement of events which followed the repeal of the Stamp Act, I think it proper to state the nature and extent of the authority of Parliament over the colonies, as interpreted by legislative bodies and statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr.
Bancroft well remarks:
"It is the glory of England that the rightfulness of the Stamp Act was in England itself a subject of dispute. It could have been so nowhere else. The King of France taxed the French colonies as a matter of course; the King of Spain collected a revenue by his own will in Mexico and Peru, in Cuba and Porto Rico, and wherever he ruled. The States-General of the Netherlands had no const.i.tutional doubt about imposing duties on their outlying colonies. To England exclusively belongs the honour that between her and her colonies the question of right could arise; it is still more to her glory, as well as to her happiness and freedom, that in that contest her success was not possible. Her principles, her traditions, her liberty, her const.i.tution, all forbade that arbitrary rule should become her characteristic. The shaft aimed at her new colonial policy was tipped with a feather from her own wing."[283]
In the dispute which took place in 1757 between the Legislative a.s.sembly of Ma.s.sachusetts and the Earl of Loudoun as to the extension of the Mutiny Act to the colonies, and the pa.s.sing of an Act by the local Legislature for the billeting of the troops, as similar in its provisions as possible to those of the Mutiny Act--so that it was accepted by the Earl of Loudoun--the Ma.s.sachusetts a.s.sembly vindicated their motives for denying the application of the Mutiny Act to the colonies, and for providing quarters for the military by an Act of their own, yet recognizing the legitimate authority of Parliament, in a message to Governor Barnard containing the following words:
"We wish to stand perfectly right with his lordship (the Earl of Loudoun), and it will be a great satisfaction to us if we may be able to remove his misapprehension of the spring and motives of our proceedings.
His lordship is pleased to say that we seem willing to enter into a dispute upon the necessity of a provincial law to enforce a British Act of Parliament.
"We are utterly ignorant as to what part of our conduct could give occasion for this expression. The point in which we were obliged to differ from his lordship was the extent of the provision made by Act of Parliament for regulating quarters. We thought it did not reach the colonies. _Had we thought it did reach us, and yet made an Act of our own to enforce it, there would have been good grounds for his lordships exception_; but being fully persuaded that the provision was never intended for us, what better step could we take than, agreeable to the twentieth section of the Articles of War, to regulate quarters as the circ.u.mstances of the province require, but still as similar to the provisions made in England as possible? And how can it be inferred from thence that we suppose a provincial Act necessary to enforce an Act of Parliament?
"We are willing, by a due exercise of the powers of civil government (and we have the pleasure of seeing your Excellency concur with us), to remove, as much as may be, all pretence of necessity of military government. Such measures, we are sure, will never be disapproved by the Parliament of Great Britain, _our dependence upon which, we never had a desire or thought of lessening_. From the knowledge your Excellency has acquired of us, you will be able to do us justice in this regard.
"In our message to your Excellency, which you transmitted to his lordship, we declared that the Act of Parliament, the extent of which was then in dispute, as far as it related to the Plantations, had always been observed by us.
"_The authority of all Acts of Parliament which concern the colonies, and extend to them, is ever acknowledged in all the Courts of law, and made the rule in all judicial proceedings in the province. There is not a member of the General Court, we know no inhabitant within the bounds of the Government, that ever questioned this authority._
"_To prevent any ill consequences which may arise from an opinion of our holding such principles, we now utterly disavow them, as we should readily have done at any time past if there had been occasion for it_; and we pray that his lordship may be acquainted therewith, that we may appear in a true light, and that no impressions may remain to our disadvantage."[284]
This is a full and indefinite recognition of the supreme authority of Parliament, even to the providing of accommodation for the soldiers; and such was the recognition of the authority of Parliament throughout the colonies. "It was generally allowed," says Dr. Ramsay, "that as the planting of colonies was not designed to erect an independent Government, but to extend an old one, the parent state had a right to restrain their trade in every way which conduced to the common emolument. They for the most part considered the mother country as authorized to name ports and nations to which alone their merchandise should be carried, and with which alone they should trade; but the novel claim of taxing them without their consent was universally reprobated as contrary to their natural, chartered, and const.i.tutional rights. In opposition to it, they not only alleged the general principles of liberty, but ancient usage. During the first hundred and fifty years of their existence they had been left to tax themselves and in their own way." "In the war of 1755, the events of which were fresh in the recollection of every one, the Parliament had in no instance attempted to raise either men or money in the colonies by its own authority. As the claim of taxation on one side and the refusal on the other were the very hinges on which the revolution turned they merit a particular discussion."[285]