Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
be to suppress the colonists, and did not think they would succeed if they tried. It was painful for Benjamin Franklin, as for many. He wrote Lord Kames (Pitt’s friend) that “I love Britain” and many British, and “I wish it prosperity.” His sought-for union could disadvantage America briefly, but “America, an immense Territory favour’d by Nature with all advantages of Climate, Soil, great navigable Rivers and Lakes etc., must become a great Country, populous and mighty; and will in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off any Shackles that may be imposed on her and perhaps place them on the Imposers.”21 This was Franklin’s wistful hope, and prophetic view; while the British grumbled belligerently and garrulously about putting America in its place, the sun was already rising on the mighty and uncontainable power of the New World. Nothing could stifle, or, ultimately, equal it. America was the predestined nation.
15. THE TOWNSHEND TAXES
Franklin was already being overtaken by events. In 1767 the chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, imposed a series of excise taxes on a range of English manufactures, including paper, glass, paint, and, eventually, tea, and provided for a board of customs commissioners to sit in America and collect the tax as the goods arrived. This must have been a gratuitous gesture to annoy the Americans, as the duty could have been levied in British ports as the goods left the country of origin. Franklin did not foresee that this would arouse his countrymen, but a new uproar occurred. The most important American of all, if a confrontation came, would be George Washington, the senior military officer in the colonies. He had not been overly successful as a senior officer, but was a capable and brave leader, a tall, impressive presence, and an astute businessman, though only a mid-level plantation owner. He had continued assiduously to invest in the western part of Virginia and in the Ohio country, and had steadily built his plantation at Mount Vernon, where he was sometimes a harsh slavemaster. Though largely self-educated, he was knowledgeable and worldly, despite the fact that he never left America. Unlike Franklin, he was not gregarious but rather slightly shy. But he was formidable and respected. He was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and steered clear of the debate on the Stamp Act, ignoring the pyrotechnics of Patrick Henry and others, as did also the young plantation owner from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who entered the House at the age of 21 in 1764. Jefferson disliked public speaking, and was never good at it, but he was an elegant writer, a talented lawyer, a fine architect, and a learned polymath.
Washington reasoned that the Stamp Act raised the ire especially of “the speculators,” by which he meant lawyers, publishers, and ship owners, whom he tended to disparage (not land and crop speculators like himself). Washington proposed that the Stamp Act be responded to with a general campaign to buy less from Britain, arguing that British merchants could be relied upon to agitate in ways that the Mother of Parliaments could not resist, whereas it could resist disaffected colonials. He believed such a partial boycott would provide “a necessary stimulus to industry” in America. He was as cool-headed as Franklin, but less intellectual, and tended to think as a businessman or military commander. He soon discontinued tobacco production at Mount Vernon, and went over to arts and crafts manufacturing to fill the void that he anticipated from strained relations with the British.22
By 1769 Townshend’s laws had caused Washington to toughen his stance and call for an outright general American boycott of British goods. More ominously, and getting well ahead of Franklin, who toiled to the end to avoid a complete rupture, Washington wrote that if “selfish, designing men . . . and clashing interests” made a boycott impractical, no one should “hesitate a moment” to take up arms, though this “should be the last resource.”23
In May 1769, the Virginia burgesses adopted “An humble, dutiful, and loyal address” to George III to protect “the violated rights of America.” The angry governor, a typical British Colonel Blimp (an inflexible and traditionalist stuffed shirt) figure, Lord Dunmore, dissolved the House of Burgesses, and its members repaired to the Raleigh Tavern for a venting of fierce oratory. After a fair bit of steam had been blown off, Washington spoke, and unveiled a plan he had worked out with his closest collaborator, George Mason, for total non-importation from Britain. Washington sold it, apart from other factors, as a way for Virginia merchants to simply renege on their often heavy debts to British suppliers. This plan was adopted, and gave Washington a rounded parliamentary status to add to his high standing as an officer and astute plantation owner and land buyer. Washington faithfully adhered to it at first, but it quickly became clear that, though the general boycott did hold in many other areas, Virginians and other Americans did not wish to give up their addiction to British luxury goods, and Washington abandoned his own boycott on British clothes and furniture after a few months. (Yet when he had his portrait painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1772, he wore an old Virginia Regiment uniform he had not been in for 13 years. The colonel, as he now was, had a natural political flair.)
Franklin, in the front lines in London, equable though he was, was also hardening in his attitude. By the end of 1769, Parliament was considering the repeal of all the Townshend taxes except that on tea. Franklin told his British friends that no such repeal would be adequate to lift the non-importation campaign in America, unless it also applied to everything exported to America.24 Parliament and the party leaders had determined that tea was the point where the line had to be drawn. There must be no more concessions to the colonists. By the early 1770s Franklin still loved England and watched the descent toward armed conflict with foreboding, relieved only by the esteem in which the English held him, even King George III.25 In 1770, when a letter of his to a Massachusetts friend was read in the legislative assembly of that colony, Franklin was chosen to become representative for Massachusetts also, as he already had been for Georgia and for New Jersey, where Franklin’s son William was the governor, as well as Pennsylvania.
A running battle went on with partial boycotts, a good deal of smuggling, and outbursts of civil disobedience. In the spring of 1773, the still young Jefferson (30, compared with Washington’s 40 and Franklin’s 67) had earned himself a reputation as a diligent and capable legislator and agreeable and thoughtful and intelligent companion, and he led a “committee of correspondence” to strengthen ties with other colonial legislators and coordinate responses to continuing British impositions. Townshend’s tax on tea was continuously in place through the early 1770s. Once again, the British had no idea that the Americans would find this particularly objectionable. On December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty, a Boston autonomist organization led by vehement opponents of any subordination to Britain, such as John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, disguised themselves as American Indians, stormed the tea ships, and threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor. This passed into history as the Boston Tea Party. The Sons of Liberty went to great lengths to show they were not an unruly mob, repairing locks on the ships’ holds and punishing one of their members who had pocketed some tea leaves for his own use.
The Tea Party, as all the world knows, set the tinder and kindling alight. Parliament revoked the Charter of Massachusetts in early 1774, substituted a military government, and purported to shut down Boston Harbor until the value of the tea destroyed had been paid. The reaction among the colonies was uniform and very supportive of the Boston tea partiers. Thomas Jefferson drafted a resolution denouncing the “Intolerable Acts,” as the parliamentary response was known. The resolution passed and Dunmore vetoed the measure. Jefferson then drafted a pious resolution calling for “a day of fasting and prayer” for the Boston protesters, which passed easily, and Dunmore again dissolved the House of Burgesses. (Jefferson too, like Washington and Franklin, was not a formally religious man—he was pitching this to others.) This time the legislators dispersed to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, and adopted a resolution calling for a “continental congress” from all the colonies to meet in Philadelphia to organize resistance to British rule. The strategy of a nation or people may be crafted deliberately by leaders, or may, in more primitive circumstances, evolve spontaneously from collective responses to events. The Americans were just moving from the second to the first. (Mainly) British people seeking a better life had come to America to find it. British grand strategy, devised by one of its greatest statesmen, William Pitt the Elder, had provided for the successful prosecution of a worldwide war against France, conspicuously in North America, empowering the Americans to reconfigure the nature of their relations with Britain. Pitt’s successors did not grasp the complexities