1765

 

__________

 

“The people have rights antecedent to all earthly government.”

 

John Adams

__________ 

IN THIS CRITICAL YEAR, John Adams lays out a few of his key ideas on government, and human rights. 

    Monarchy, he correctly notes, was once the rule: 

In the earliest ages of the world, absolute monarchy seems to have been the universal form of government. Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains, exercised a cruel tyranny over the people, who held a rank in the scale of intelligence, in those days, but little higher than the camels and elephants that carried them and their engines to war.

 

    By what causes it was brought to pass, that the people in the middle ages became more intelligent in general, would not, perhaps, be possible in these days to discover. But the fact is certain; and wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion. …

 

    Adams notes that it has always been the policy of “the princes and nobles of the earth, by every species of fraud and violence to shake off all the limitations of their power” whereas “the common people” in all ages have dreamed of “independency,” and tried in all ways to confine “the power of the great within the limits of equity and reason.”

 

    Unfortunately,

 

    The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government,  – Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws – Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.

 

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THE RICHEST Virginia planters are living well. According to one observer, they loved their fine horses and carriages, and “they all drive Six horses, and travel generally from 8 to 9 Miles an hour – going frequently Sixty Miles to dinner.” Hospitality in the region, he noted, “is everywhere practised.” 

    As for the ladies: “Their Women make excellent Wives, and are in general great Breeders. It is much the fashion to Marry young and what is remarkable in a Stay I have made of near a Month in the province – I have not heard of one unhappy couple.” (300/99)

 

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“The British officials blundered magnificently.” 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN landed in England a few months before the Stamp Act… “But,” he wrote, “I could no more hinder the passage of the bill than I could prevent the sun from setting.” (Coe, Makers of the Nation)

March 22: The Act is passed – word does not reach the Colonies for several weeks, of course. 

If a man bought land, the deed of the purchase must bear a stamp. Notes, mortgages, marriage certificates – in fact all legal papers – were worthless without the stamp. These same stamps were sold by stamp officers, and the money they collected in this way belonged to Great Britain. (Coe, Makers of the Nation)

 

* 

June 4: We forget that King George III was a young man at this time. He turns 27 on this day.

 

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VAN LOON also notes the ineptitude of the British leadership, saying, 

    Fortunately for the cause of free America the British officials blundered magnificently and by a series of colossal errors forced the seaboard and the mountains to make common cause and to forget temporarily at least those economic differences which made a Yankee banker almost as unpopular in an agricultural community as one of His Majesty’s duly appointed and ordained “gougers” and “stamp collectors.” (124/173)

 

    He adds that revolutions are run in this way:

    Ten per cent  of the people are willing to hang for their principles. 

    Ten per cent are willing to hang but are not particularly happy at the prospect and therefore wish to know if the purpose for which they are fighting cannot be achieved in some less violent fashion. 

   Forty per cent (who call themselves “practical” men) sit on the fence until they know which side is going to win, when they join the army of the victors.

 

    That makes a total of sixty per cent. The other forty per cent believe in “law and order” at all costs and either execute their former neighbors if those happen to be unsuccessful or themselves get hanged if it is proved that they have guessed wrong.  (124/173-174) 

 

    With demands for a boycott of English goods, many businesses had a difficult decision to make. 

    There still were a good many merchants who intended to remain loyal to the mother country and who thought it their good right to deal how and where and with whom it best pleased them. These were now delivered to the mercies of lynch law. Their stores were broken into. Their goods were destroyed. Quite frequently they themselves were tarred and feathered and driven away from the place of their birth by mixed mobs of patriots and hoodlums. (124/179)

 

* 

ANDREW JACKSON’S parents leave Ireland and settle in North Carolina. The future president is born two years later.

 

* 

MCMASTER lays out the provisions of the Stamp Act:

    The Stamp Act applied not only to the thirteen colonies, but also to Canada, Florida, and the West Indies, and was to take effect on and after November 1, 1765.

 

    Every piece of vellum or paper on which was written any legal document for use in any court was to be charged with a stamp duty of from three pence to ten pounds.

 

    Many kinds of documents not used in court, as newspapers, almanacs, etc., were to be written or printed only on stamped paper made in England and sold at prices fixed by law. The money raised by the stamp tax was not to be taken to Great Britain, but was to be spent in the colonies in the purchase of food and supplies for the troops. (97/149)

 

    Patrick Henry was born in Virginia in 1736. As a youth he was dull and indolent and gave no sign of coming greatness. After two failures as a storekeeper and one as a farmer he turned in desperation to law, read a few books, and with difficulty passed the examination necessary for admittance to the bar. Henry had now found his true vocation. Business came to him, and one day in 1763 he argued the weak (but popular) side of a case with such eloquence that he carried court and jury with him, and it is said he was carried out of the courthouse on the shoulders of the people. He was now famous, and in 1765 was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses to represent the county in which he had lived, just in time to take part in the proceedings on the Stamp Act. [His greatest moment came when he moved the resolutions be adopted and supported them] in a fiery and eloquent speech, of which one passage has been preserved. Recalling the fate of tyrants of other times, he exclaimed, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III – .” “Treason! treason!” shouted the speaker. “Treason! treason!” shouted the members. To which Henry answered, “and George III may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.” (97/150-151)

 

    Across the colonies, the stamp agents ran into trouble. The colonists rose in indignation. 

    They therefore forced the agents to resign their commissions, and when the tea ships arrived, took possession of them. At Philadelphia the ships were sent back to London. At Charleston the tea was landed and stored for three years and then seized and sold by the state of South Carolina. At Annapolis the people forced the owner of a tea ship to go on board and set fire to his ship; vessel and cargo were thus consumed. At Boston the people wish the tea sent back to London, and when the authorities refused to allow this, a party of men disguised as Indians boarded the ships and threw the tea into the water. (97/156)

 

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STAMPED PAPER: “The prepared paper had to be paid for in specie, a hardship indeed in a community where lawsuits were very common, and whose entire solid coin would not have sufficed to pay the revenue for a single year.” “Another flagrant feature of the act was the provision that violators of it should be tried without a jury, before a judge whose only pay came from his own condemnations.” (2/38-39)

 

    Reaction was fierce:

 

    In Portsmouth, N. H., the newspaper came out in mourning, and an effigy of the Goddess of Liberty was carried to the grave. The Connecticut legislature ordered a day of fasting and prayer kept, and an inventory of powder and ball taken. In New York a bonfire was made of the stamps in the public square. The bells in Charleston, S. C., were tolled, and the flags on the ships in the harbor hung at half-mast. The colonists entered into agreements to buy no goods from England until the act was repealed. Even mourning clothes, since they must be imported, were not to be worn, and lamb’s flesh was abjured that more wool might be raised for home manufacture. England’s colonial trade fell off so alarmingly in consequence that Manchester manufactures petitioned Parliament to repeal the act, asserting that nine-tenths of their workmen were idle.

 

October: Nine colonies called the Stamp Act Congress “and adopted a declaration of rights, asserting that England had no right to tax them without their consent.”  (2/39-40)

 

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THE STREETS of Philadelphia are by this time “paved with brick and illuminated by lamps that were lit every night except when the moon shone.” A night watch had been instituted “to preserve order, and call out the time of night and the state of the weather.” There was also a thirty-man volunteer fire department organized by Benjamin Franklin. (300/124)

 

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THE POLEMICIST Samuel Adams will acquire the title of “Father of the American Revolution.” 

    As for his interest in earlier examples of free governments, a reviewer for a new book on Sam Adams writes, 

    Adams wrote for other publications, providing stentorian commentary on his own fake news, under a charming variety of classical pseudonyms: Candidus, Vindex, Populus, Valerius Poplicola. The comic luxuriance of Roman references should not blind us to the significance of these constant appeals to the Roman Republic and to classical virtue. For the astonishing truth was that hardly anyone in two thousand years had actually seen what a republic or a democracy looked like, or how it might act in the world. The patriots referred to Rome not simply because they were classically educated but because – the marginal cases of Switzerland and Venice aside – it was the last famous, functional republic to look back on. (The Cromwellian Commonwealth, which scarcely managed to outlive its charismatic founder, though occasionally invoked, largely served as a cautionary tale.)

 

   At one point, Adams argued that Americans could “no more be judged by a Member of Parliament than if they liv’d in the Moon.” 

    The reviewer, Adam Gopnik, says: “The patriots, however flawed, really were driven by ideas, and the ideas they were driven by were mainly good ones.” 

   He also points out, correctly, that judging flawed historical figures correctly can require a delicate balance. “They need not be eliminated from study or admiration – their contributions are too important, and history, anyway, is not a book of good-conduct awards. But it’s not wrong to censure them retrospectively.”

Samuel Adams - picture from the internet.