§ 221]

PLAN TO TAX AMERICA

183

legislature for supplies bore fruit very slowly. Washington declared that he would have been wholly helpless for a long, critical time, had he not had under his command a small troop of English soldiers.

220. But the colonists had many times made it plain that their Assemblies would give no money to support a standing army. Indeed they feared that such a garrison might sometime be used by a despotic government in England to take away their liberties.1 Accordingly Grenville decided to get the money for the support of a garrison by taxing the colonists through parliament. (1) He would make the Navigation Acts a source of revenue, instead of merely a means of benefiting English merchants; and (2) he would raise money in America by internal taxes, a thing never before attempted.

In 1764 Grenville ordered that the Navigation Acts be enforced rigidly; and zealous revenue officers in America spread dismay and irritation by suddenly seizing many ships with cargoes of smuggled goods. Then, upon communities already angry and suspicious, fell news of a new tax law.

221. This was the "Sugar Act" of 1764. The old Sugar Act of 1733 (§ 185) had tried to check the importation of sugar from the French West Indies - in the interest of the British West Indies; but this law had never been enforced. The new "Sugar Act" (1) provided machinery more efficient than ever before, to enforce the whole system of navigation laws; (2) revised those laws so as to raise more revenue; and (3) forbade absolutely all trade with the French West Indies - which were a chief market for the products of New England and of the Middle colonies (§§ 205, 206).

The commercial colonies were angered and alarmed. They had never so feared French conquest as they now feared the loss of French trade. With every mail from America, a storm of protests assailed the ministry. But the Sugar Act

1 See Source Book, No. 133 b, for a resolution by a Virginia "Convention" on this matter-quite in accord with the old English prejudice against a standing army in time of peace.

did not directly affect the southern colonies; and therefore resistance to it could not arouse a united America. Moreover, though this law did aim to raise revenue, still in form it was like preceding navigation laws, to which the colonists were accustomed. The leaders of public opinion needed a better rallying cry than it gave, to array the colonies against English rule. 222. The Stamp Act gave this better opportunity. Early in 1764, Grenville made the plan of this law public. Parliament promptly adopted resolutions approving the plan, but gave the colonies a year more to provide some other means for supporting a garrison, if they preferred.

The colonies suggested no other plan, but they made loud. protests against this one. In the fall of 1764, the Sugar Act fell into the background; and from colonial town meetings and Assemblies petitions began to assail the ministry against the unconstitutional nature of the proposed Stamp Act. These communications Grenville never presented to parliament. In March, 1765, parliament enacted the law almost without discussion, and with no suspicion of the storm about to break.

The Stamp Act was modeled upon a law in force in Great Britain. It required the use of stamps or stamped paper for newspapers, pamphlets, cards and dice, and for all legal documents (wills, deeds, writs). In a few instances, where the document recorded some important grant, the cost of the stamp rose to several pounds; but, as a rule, it ranged from a penny to a shilling. Not a penny was to go to England. The whole revenue was appropriated to the future support of an American garrison.

223. Now came a significant change in the agitation in America. Astute leaders seized the chance to rally public dissatisfaction against England by appeals to the old English cry,-"No taxation without representation." In opposing the Sugar Act, the colonists opposed an immediate injury to their pocket books; but, from 1765, they contended, not against actual oppression, but against a principle which might lead to oppression. "They made their stand," says Moses Coit Tyler, " not against tyranny inflicted, but against tyranny anticipated." The freest people of their age, they were fit for more freedom.

CHAPTER XX

THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION

224. The English colonial system had guided and guarded the colonies while they needed help and protection. It was not tyrannical; but it was sometimes selfish and often shortsighted, and it always carried the possibility of further interfer ence.1 True, until 1764, actual interference had never been seriously hurtful. Often it had been helpful. But any interference was vexatious to a proud people, who now felt safe enough and strong enough to manage their own affairs. The Americans had outgrown any colonial system possible in that day They were grown up. The time had come for independence.

Mellin Chamberlain, in one of his historical addresses, puts the cause of the Revolution in a nutshell. Levi Preston was one of the minutemen of Danvers who ran sixteen miles to get into the Lexington fight. Nearly seventy years afterward, Mr. Chamberlain interviewed the old veteran as to his reasons that April morning. "Oppressions?" said the aroused veteran; "what were they? I didn't feel any." "Stamp Act?" "I never saw one of the stamps." "Tea tax? " "I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard." "Well, I suppose you had been reading Sidney or Locke about the eternal principles of liberty." "Never heard of them. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt's Hymns, and the Almanac." "Then what did you mean by going into that fight?" "Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should."

:

1 Many shrewd observers (John Adams among others) believed that the Revolution was caused largely by dread of ecclesiastical interference. Several times it had been suggested that England should establish bishops in America. Even the most strongly Episcopalian colonies, like Virginia and Maryland, resisted this proposal (needful as bishops were to the true efficiency of their form of church organization) because of the political power of such officers of the church at that time. (See cut on p. 186.) After the Revolution a bishop, consecrated in England, was received without a murmur.

A COLONIAL CARTOON suggested by a proposal of Lord Hillsborough, Colonial Secretary, to send a bishop to America.

§ 226]

ENGLISH INTERFERENCE

187

225. In growing up, America had grown away from England. If all of England had been picked up in the seventeenth century and set down, strung out along the thousand miles of American coast from Maine to Georgia, its development during the next two centuries would have been very different from what it actually was in the little European island. The new physical conditions would have caused a difference. But not all England had been transplanted, only certain selected people and selected institutions, upon the whole, too, the more democratic elements. No hereditary nobility was established in America, and neither monarch nor bishop in person appeared in American society. No wonder, then, that by 1775 European English and American English could no longer understand each other's ideas.

226. Thus both sections of Englishmen clung to the doctrine "No taxation without representation"; but these words meant one thing in England and a very different thing in America. In England, since 1688, representative institutions had been shrinking, becoming more and more virtual. In America, representative institutions had been expanding, becoming more and more real. The English system had become, in Macaulay's words, "a monstrous system of represented ruins and unrepresented cities." Many populous cities had grown up without gaining representation, while many decayed cities, perhaps without a single inhabitant, or with only a handful of voters (pocket or rotten boroughs), kept their ancient "representation." In reality, a small body of landlords appointed a majority of the House of Commons, and many "representatives" were utterly unknown in the places they "represented." To an Englishman, accustomed to this system, and content with it, "No taxation without representation" meant no taxation by royal edict: no taxation except by the House of Commons, a "representative" body. Such an Englishman might argue (as Lord Mansfield did) that parliament represented

1 A concise three-page account of that shrinkage of representative government in England in the eighteenth century will be found in the Modern World, §§ 741-743, or in Modern Progress, pp. 425–428.