If the experience of the last French war convinced the English Government that a stricter control of the colonies was necessary, the conquest of Canada convinced the colonists that they could defend themselves, and at the same time removed the only danger which had ever made them feel the need of English protection. As early as 1711, Le Ronde Denys warned the New Englanders that the expulsion of the French from North America would leave England free to suppress colonial liberties, while another French writer predicted that it would rather enable, the colonies to "unite, shake off the yoke of the English monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy." The prediction was often repeated. Between 1730 and 1763, many men, among them Montesquieu, Peter Kalm, and Turgot, asserted that colonial dependence upon England would not long outlast the French occupation of Canada. The opposition to Grenville's colonial legislation, which gathered force with every additional measure, seemed now about to confirm these predictions.
No single law of these early years would have caused its proper part of the resistance which all of them in fact brought about. A measure of oppression could be attributed to each of them, but the pressure of any one was not felt by all classes or all colonies alike. The Proclamation of 1763 was an offense chiefly to speculators in land, and to those border communities that had fought to open free passage to the West only to find the fertile Ohio valleys "reserved to the Indians"—the very tribes which had brought death and desolation to the frontier. The Sugar Act was a greater grievance to the New England distiller of rum and the exporters of fish and lumber than it was to the rice and tobacco planters of the South. New York merchants were seriously affected by the Currency Act, which scarcely touched Massachusetts, and which, in Virginia, meant money in the pockets of creditors, but bore hardly on debtors and the speculators who bought silver at Williamsburg in depreciated paper in order to sell it at par in Philadelphia. The famous Stamp Act itself chiefly concerned the printers, lawyers, officeholders, the users of the custom-house, and the litigious class that employed the courts to enforce or resist the payment of debt.
Only when regarded as a whole was the policy of Grenville seen to spell disaster. Each new law seemed carefully designed to increase the burdens imposed by every other. The Sugar Act, for example, taken by itself, was perhaps the most grievous of all. The British sugar islands, to which it virtually restricted the West Indian trade of the Northern colonies, offered no sufficient market for their lumber and provisions, nor could they, like the Spanish islands, furnish the silver needed by continental merchants to settle London balances on account of imported English commodities.
Exports to the West Indies and imports from England must, therefore, be reduced; the one event would cripple essential colonial industries such as the fisheries and the distilling of rum, while the other would force the colonists to devote themselves to those very domestic manufactures which it was the policy of the English Government to discourage. These disadvantages, which attached to the Sugar Act itself, were accentuated by almost every other cardinal measure of Grenville's colonial policy. With the chief source of colonial specie cut off, the Stamp Act increased the demand for it by £60,000; when the need for paper money as a legal tender was more than ever felt, its further use was shortly to be forbidden altogether; when the diminished demand for labor, occasioned by restrictions upon the West Indian trade, was likely to stimulate migration into the interior, the West was closed to settlement. And the close of the French war, which had raised the debt of the colonies to an unprecedented figure, was the moment selected for restricting trade, remodeling the monetary system, and imposing upon the colonies taxes for protection against a danger which no longer threatened. Little wonder that to the colonial mind the measures of Grenville carried all the force of an argument from design: any part, separated from the whole, might signify nothing; the perfect correlation of the completed scheme was evidence enough that somewhere a malignant purpose was at work bent upon the destruction of English liberties.
Members of the House of Commons who yawned while voting the new laws were amazed at the commotion they raised in America. In all the colonies scarcely a man was to be found to defend any of them. Those afterwards known as loyalists, with Hutchinson, Colden, Dulaney, and Galloway as their most distinguished representatives, were of one accord with the Lees, with Patrick Henry, with Dickinson, and the Adamses, in asserting that the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act were inexpedient and unjust. Hutchinson urged the repeal of both measures.
Colden assured the Board of Trade that the Currency Act, so far as New York was concerned, was uncalled for and very prejudicial to colonial industry and the manufactures of England. The three-penny duty on molasses, said Samuel Adams, will make useless one third of the fish now caught, and so remittances to Spain, Portugal, and other countries, "through which money circulates into England for the purchase of her goods of all kinds," must cease. "Unless we are allowed a paper currency," Daniel Coxe wrote to Reed, "they need not send tax gatherers, for they can gather nothing—never was money so very scarce as now." Governor Bernard expressed the belief that if the proposed measures were executed "there will soon be an end to the specie currency of Massachusetts." Undoubtedly the general opinion of America was voiced by the Stamp Act Congress when it affirmed that the payment of the new duties would prove, "from the scarcity of specie, ... absolutely impracticable," and render the colonists "unable to purchase the manufactures of Great Britain."
But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to shift the issue in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the multiplied resentments accumulated by two years of hostile legislation. It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance, round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect without its material symbols—concrete and visible bundles of stamped papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and the very appearance of which was a challenge to action.
While all Americans agreed that the Stamp Act, like the Sugar Act, was unjust, or at least inexpedient, not all affirmed that it was illegal. Hutchinson was one of many who protested against the law, but admitted that Parliament had not exceeded its authority in passing it. But the colonial assemblies, and a host of busy pamphleteers who set themselves to expose the pernicious act, agreed with Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, with the conciliatory John Dickinson, and the learned Dulaney, that the colonists, possessing all the rights of native-born Englishmen, could not legally be deprived of that fundamental right of all, the right of being taxed only by representatives of their own choosing. Duties laid to regulate trade, from which a revenue was sometimes derived, were either declared not to be taxes, or else were distinguished, as "external" taxes which Parliament was competent to impose, from "internal" taxes which Parliament could impose only upon those who were represented in that body. And the colonies were not represented in Parliament; no, not even in that "virtual" sense which might be affirmed in the case of many unfranchised English cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool; from which it followed that the Stamp Act, unquestionably an internal tax, was a manifest violation of colonial rights.
The ablest arguments against the Stamp Act were those set forth by John Dickinson, of Philadelphia, and Daniel Dulaney, of Maryland: the ablest and the best tempered. Unfortunately, the conciliatory note was all but lost in the chorus of angry protest and bitter denunciation that was designed to spur the Americans on to reckless action rather than to induce the ministers to withdraw an unwise measure. Clever lawyers seeking political advantage, such as John Morin Scott; zealots who knew not the meaning of compromise, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams; preachers of the gospel, such as Jonathan Mayhew, who took this occasion to denounce the doctrine of passive resistance, and with over-subtle logic identified the defense of civil liberty with the cause of religion and morality;—such men as these, with intention or all unwittingly raised public opinion to that high tension from which spring insurrection and the irresponsible action of mobs. Everywhere stamp distributors, voluntarily or to the accompaniment of threats, resigned their offices. Stamped papers were no sooner landed than they were seized and destroyed, or returned to England, or transmitted for safe-keeping to the custody of local officials pledged not to deliver them. Often inspired and sometimes led by citizens of repute who were "not averse to a little rioting," the mobs were recruited from the quays and the grogshops, and once in action were difficult to control. In true mob fashion they testified to their patriotism by parading the streets at night, "breaking a few glass windows," and destroying the property of men, such as Hutchinson and Colden, whose unseemly wealth or lukewarm opinions were an offense to stalwart defenders of liberty.
The November riots disposed of the stamps but not of the Stamp Act. Business had to go on as usual without stamps or cease altogether. Either course would make the law of no effect; but the latter course would be a strictly constitutional method of resistance, while the former would involve a violation of law. Many preferred the constitutional method. Let the courts adjourn, they said, and offices remain vacant; let print-shops close, and ships lie in harbor: English merchants will soon enough feel the pressure of slack business and force ministers to another line of conduct.
A good plan enough for the man of independent fortune, for the judge whose income was assured, or the thrifty merchant who, signing a non-importation agreement, had laid in a stock of goods to be sold at high prices. But the wage-earner, the small shopkeeper who was soon sold out, the printer who lived on his weekly margin of profit, the rising lawyer whose income rose or fell with his fees: such men were of another mind. The inactivity of the courts "will make a large chasm in my affairs, if it should not reduce me to distress," John Adams confides to his Diary in December; and adds naïvely that he was just on the point of winning a reputation and a competence "when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as well as that of my country." Men who saw their incomes dwindle were easily disposed to think that the cessation of business was an admission of the legitimacy of the law, a kind of betrayal of the cause. And it was to counteract the influence of lukewarm conservatives, men who were content to "turn and shift, to luff up, and bear away," that those who regarded themselves as the only true patriots, uniting in an association of the Sons of Liberty, set about the task of "putting business in motion again in the usual channels without stamps."
The object of the Sons of Liberty was in part, but only in part, attained. Newspapers were printed as usual, and certainly there was no lack of pamphlets. Retailers did not hesitate to sell playing-cards or dice, nor were the grogshops closed for want of stamped licenses. Yet the courts of law were nearly everywhere closed for a time, and if the clamor of creditors and the influence of lawyers forced them to open in most places, in New York and Massachusetts, at least, they did little business or none at all so long as the Stamp Act remained on the statute-book. But it was in connection with commercial activities that the plan of the conservatives was most effective.
Non-importation agreements, generally signed by the merchants, were the more readily kept because the customs officials were inclined to refuse any but stamped clearance papers, while the war vessels in the harbors intercepted ships that attempted to sail without them. As the conservatives had predicted, the effect was soon felt in England. Thousands of artisans in Manchester and Leeds were thrown out of employment. Glasgow, more dependent than other cities upon the American market, loudly complained that its ruin was impending; and the merchants of London, Bristol, and many other towns, asserting that American importers were indebted to them several million pounds sterling, which they were willing but unable to pay, petitioned Parliament to take immediate action for their relief.
And, indeed, to ignore the situation in America was now impossible. The law had to be withdrawn or made effective by force of arms. When the matter came up in Parliament in January, 1766, Grenville, as leader of the opposition, still claimed that the Stamp Act was a reasonable measure, and one that must be maintained, more than ever now that the colonists had insolently denied its legality, and with violence amounting to insurrection prevented its enforcement. But the Rockingham Whigs, whose traditions, even if somewhat obscured, marked them out as the defenders of English liberties, were pledged to the repeal of the unfortunate law. Lord Camden, in defense of the colonial contention, staked his legal reputation on the assertion that Parliament had no right to tax America. Pitt was of the same opinion. Following closely the argument in Dulaney's pamphlet, which he held up as a masterly performance, the Great Commoner declared that "taxation is no part of the governing or legislating power." He was told that America had resisted.
"I rejoice that America has resisted," he cried in words that sounded a trumpet call throughout the colonies. "Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest.... America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man with his arms around the pillars of the constitution." More convincing than the eloquence of Pitt was the evidence offered by the merchants' petitions, and by the shrewd and weighty replies of Franklin in his famous examination in the House of Commons, to show that the policy of Grenville, legal or not, was an economic blunder.
The Stamp Act was accordingly repealed, March 18, 1766; and a few weeks later, as a further concession, the Sugar Act was modified by reducing the duty on molasses from 3d. to 1d., and some new laws were passed intended to remove the obstacles which made it difficult for the Northern and Middle colonies to trade directly with England. Yet the ministers had no intention of yielding on the main point: the theoretical right of Parliament to bind the colonies in all matters whatever was formally asserted in the Declaratory Act; while the reënactment of the Mutiny Law indicated that the practical policy of establishing British troops in America for defense was to be continued.