PART III

SEPARATION FROM ENGLAND

CHAPTER XIX

HOW THE FRENCH WARS PREPARED FOR THE REVOLUTION

212. The seventy years of Intercolonial wars closed in 1763. They had won for England a new colonial empire; but soon it became plain that they had also put at hazard her old empire. (1) They had prepared her old colonies in North America for union. (2) They had removed the need of her protection. (3) They brought her to tax America.

213. The common danger, during the long wars, had done much to bring the colonies together. In 1698, William Penn drew up a scheme for colonial federation, and in 1754, at a council of governors at Albany, Franklin presented his famous plan for union (Source Book, No. 114). Between these dates seven other like plans appeared, and leaders from distant colonies came together to consider some of them. True, the great majority of colonists everywhere ignored or rejected all such proposals; but the discussion prepared men for union when a stronger motive should arise. And without union, resistance to England would have been impossible.

214. The conquest of Canada removed the most pressing need of English protection. Far-sighted men had long seen that the colonies might be less true to the mother country if the dreaded French power should cease to threaten them from the north. In 1748, Peter Kalm, a shrewd Swedish traveler, wrote:

"It is of great advantage to the crown of England that the colonies are near a country under the government of the French . . . There is reason

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PREPARATION IN THE FRENCH WARS

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to believe the king was never earnest in his attempts to expel the French. . . . These dangerous neighbors are the reason why the love of the colonies for their metropolis does not utterly decline."

Probably, in the italicized sentence, Kalm had in mind the fact that, in King George's War (then just closed), the English ministry had refused to coöperate with the colonies for the conquest of Canada. In the "French and Indian" War, Pitt threw aside this ignoble caution, and brought about the conquest. Even then, some Englishmen urged that England ought to restore Canada to France, in order to hold her old empire more securely; and the French statesman, Vergennes, prophesied :"England will soon repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They no longer need her protection. She will call upon them to contribute toward the support of burdens they have helped bring upon her; and they will answer by striking off all dependence.”

215. The colonies had been held to England by ties internal and external,—by affection and by foreign peril. The internal tie, however, had already been sapped, insensibly, (1) by a large non-English immigration (§ 179) and (2) by the long friction over Navigation Acts, paper money, royal vetoes, governors' salaries, and so on (§§ 183 ff.). Now the external bond, too, was loosened, and a shock might jar the two halves of the empire apart. The Intercolonial wars led England to give this shock-first by her "writs of assistance" to enforce old laws, and then by new taxation, in the Sugar Act of 1764 and in the Stamp Act.

216. The "writs of assistance" were used to enforce the old Navigation Acts with a new energy. This policy began with Pitt, during the French and Indian War. The original purpose was, not to raise revenue, but to stop what Pitt indignantly and truly called

แ an illegal and most pernicious Trade. . . by which the Enemy .. is supplied with Provisions and other Necessaries, whereby they are principally, if not alone, enabled to sustain and protract this long and expensive War. "

1 Woodburn's Lecky's American Revolution, 3-5, gives a striking extract from such an argument by William Burke, a kinsman of the orator Burke.

The French armies in Canada and the French fleets in the West Indies were fed by provisions shipped to them from New England, at the very time that England was fighting desperately to protect New England against those armies and fleets. Many colonists confused this shameful trade with the ordinary smuggling which had long made parts of the navigation laws a dead letter. On the other side, the customs officials fell back upon remedies as bad as the evil. In 1755, they began to use general search warrants, known as "writs of assistance." This form of warrant had grown up in England in the evil times of the Stuart kings. It ran counter to the ancient English principle that a man's house was "his castle," into which not even the officer of the law might enter without the owner's permission, except upon definite cause shown. Unlike ordinary search warrants, these new documents did not name a particular place to be searched or a particular thing to be searched for, nor did they make public the name of the informer upon whose testimony they were issued. They authorized any officer to enter any house upon any suspicion, and "were directed against a whole people." They might easily become instruments of tyranny, and even of personal revenge by petty officials.

217. When George III came to the throne, in 1760, all writs of the past reign expired. Accordingly, in 1761, a revenue officer at Boston asked a Massachusetts court to issue new "writs of assistance." It then became the place of James Otis, the brilliant young Advocate General, to argue for them. Instead, he resigned his office, and took the case against them.

"Otis was a flame of fire. Then and there the child Inde

pendence was born."1 He called the general warrants "the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and of the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book." He contended, he said, against "a kind of power, the exercise of which had cost one king

1 So wrote John Adams some years afterward. The other quotations in the paragraph are from notes taken at the time by Adams, then a law student.

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GEORGE GRENVILLE

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of England his crown, and another his head. . . . No Act of Parliament can establish such a writ. An act against the constitution is void."

Otis lost the case; but his fiery eloquence roused the people to open the whole question of parliamentary control. Soon afterward, he published his views in two pamphlets which were widely read. "God made all men naturally equal,” he affirmed. Government is "instituted for the benefit of the governed," and harmful government should be destroyed. Parliament he recognized as supreme (so long as it governed fitly), but he urged that the colonists, besides keeping their local legislatures, "should also be represented, in some proportion to their number · and estates, in the grand legislature of the nation."

218. In 1763, peace removed the especial need for writs of assistance; and for a time the Americans forgot all past irritation in their enthusiastic gratitude to England for the conquest of Canada. But in a few months a new head of the English ministry reopened all the old wounds. This was George Grenville, an earnest, narrow man, without tact or statesmanship, bent upon raising revenue in America.

A strong case could be made out for that plan. The Intercolonial wars had made England the greatest world power; but they left her, too, staggering under a debt such as no country to that time had dreamed of. The colonists were prosperous and lightly burdened. Eight millions of Englishmen owed a war debt of ninety dollars a head — incurred largely in defending two million colonials, whose debt counted less than two dollars a head.

Nor could the colonists excuse themselves on the ground that they had done enough in the wars. The struggles in America had been little more than scattered skirmishes, compared with the Titanic conflicts in the Old World. Pitt had declared that he would "conquer [French] America in Germany," and, with the aid of Frederick the Great, he did it.1

1 Modern Progress, pp. 242-245, or Modern World, §§ 492-494.

Even in America, England had furnished fully half the troops 1 and nearly all the money - repaying each colony for all expense in maintaining its own troops when outside its own borders.

Still Grenville did not expect the colonies to pay any part of the debt already incurred by England. He meant only to have them bear a part of the cost of their own defense for the future English statesmen agreed that, to guard against French reconquest and Indian outbreaks, it was necessary to keep ten thousand troops in America.

219. It was easy to find evidence that seemed to show the need of such a garrison. Pontiac's War, the most terrible . Indian outbreak the colonists ever knew, came just at the close of the French War, in 1763, and raged for more than a year, sweeping bare, with torch and tomahawk, a long stretch of western country. A few British regiments, left in the country from the preceding war, were the only reason the disaster was not unspeakably worse. For six months they were the only troops in the field. The Pennsylvania legislature, despite frantic appeals from the governor, delayed to provide defense for its own frontier, - partly from Quaker principles, but more from a shameful dislike felt by the older districts for the Scotch-Irish western counties. The savages, having worked their will in that province, carried their raids across its southern border, getting into the rear of a small force with which George Washington was striving gallantly to guard the western frontier of Virginia. Washington's force, too, was for months altogether insufficient for its task. His letters to the governor of Virginia complained bitterly of his need for reinforcements; but the governor's earnest entreaties to the

1 In the Crown Point expedition of 1755 (before war was declared), the 3000 Colonials made the whole force; and during the next year 4000 of the 5000 troops in the field were Colonials. But after England formally declared war, English troops plainly preponderated. Amherst at Louisburg had only 100 Colonials among his 11,000 troops. At Quebec, Wolfe had 8500 regulars and only 700 Americans - whom he described as "the dirtiest, most contemptible, cowardly dogs . . . such rascals as are an encumbrance to an army."