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1765.

May.

said the king, "I have desired you to stay in my service; I see I must yield; I do it for the good of my people. But, if you force me to violate my royal word, you are responsible for it, not I." Thus the king gave way; but he was so deeply moved that his physicians were ordered to attend him; his manner became gloomy and discontented; on the following Sunday, the usual drawingroom was omitted; and his mind was so convulsed that he did not choose to take the sacrament.

This is the moment when the power of the British oligarchy, under the Revolution of 1688, was at its culminating point. The ministry esteemed itself, and, through itself, the power of parliament, more firmly established than ever. It had subdued the king, and imposed a system of taxes on America for the benefit of the British exchequer. The colonists could not export the chief products of their industry neither sugar, nor tobacco, nor cotton, nor indigo, nor ginger; nor fustic, nor other dyeing woods; nor molasses, nor rice, with some exceptions; nor beaver, nor peltry, nor copper ore, nor pitch, nor tar, nor turpentine, nor masts, nor yards, nor bowsprits, nor coffee, nor pimento, nor cocoanuts, nor whale-fins, nor raw silk, nor hides, nor skins, nor pot and pearl ashes-to any place but Great Britain, not even to Ireland. Nor might any foreign ship enter a colonial harbor. Salt might be imported from any place into New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Quebec; wines might be imported from the Madeiras and the Azores, but were to pay a duty in American ports for the British exchequer; and victuals, horses, and servants might be brought from Ireland. In all other respects, Great Britain was not only the sole market for the products of America, but the only storehouse for its supplies.

Lest the colonists should multiply their flocks of sheep and weave their own cloth, they might not use a ship, nor a boat, nor a carriage, nor even a pack-horse, to carry wool, or any manufacture of which wool forms a part, across the line of one province to another. They could not land wool from the nearest islands, nor ferry it across a river, nor even ship it to England. A British sailor, finding himself in

want of clothes in their harbors, might not buy there more than forty shillings' worth of woollens.

1765. May.

Where was there a house in the colonies that did not cherish and did not possess the English Bible? And yet to print that Bible in British America would have been a piracy; and the Bible, though printed in German and in a native savage dialect, was never printed there in English till the land became free.

That the country, which was the home of the beaver, might not manufacture its own hats, no man in the plantations could be a hatter or a journeyman at that trade, unless he had served an apprenticeship of seven years. No hatter might employ a negro or more than two apprentices. No American hat might be sent from one plantation to another, or be loaded upon any horse, cart, or carriage for conveyance.

America abounded in iron ores of the best quality, as well as in wood and coal; slitting-mills, steel furnaces, and plating forges, to work with a tilt hammer, were prohibited in the colonies as "nuisances."

While free labor was debarred of its natural rights, the slave-trade was encouraged with unrelenting eagerness; and in the year that had just expired, from Liverpool alone, seventy-nine ships had borne from Africa to the West Indies and the continent more than fifteen thousand three hundred negroes, two thirds as many as the first colonists of Massachusetts.

And now taxation, direct and indirect, was added to colonial restrictions; and henceforward both were to go together. A duty was to be collected on foreign sugar, molasses, indigo, coffee, Madeira wine, imported directly into any of the plantations in America; also a duty on Portugal and Spanish wines, on eastern silks, on eastern calicoes, on foreign linen cloth, on French lawn, though imported directly from Great Britain; on British colonial coffee shipped from one plantation to another. Nor was henceforward any part of the old subsidy to be drawn back on the export of foreign goods of Europe or the East Indies, except on the export of white calicoes and muslins, on which

a still higher duty was to be exacted and retained. And stamp duties were to be paid throughout all the British American colonies, on and after the first day of the coming November.

These laws were to be enforced, not by the regular authorities only, but by naval and military officers, irresponsible to the civil power in the colonies. The penalties and forfeitures for breach of the revenue laws were to be decided in courts of vice-admiralty, without the interposition of a jury, by a single judge, who had no support whatever but from his share in the profits of his own condemnations.

1765.

May.

It was held that the power of parliament, according to the purest whig principles, was established alike over the king and over the colonies; but, in truth, the stamp act was the harbinger of American independence, and the knell of the unreformed house of commons.

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1765. April.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE DAY-STAR OF THE AMERICAN UNION.

APRIL-MAY, 1765.

IF the British parliament can tax America, it may tax Ireland and India, and hold the wealth of the east and of the west at the service of its own septennial oligarchy. As the relation of the government to its outlying dominions would become one of power and not of right, it could not but employ its accumulated resources to make itself the master of the ocean and the oppressor of mankind. "This system, if it is suffered to prevail," said Oxenbridge Thacher, of Boston, "will extinguish the flame of liberty all over the world."

On the discovery of the new hemisphere, the tradition was spread through the old that it conceals a fountain whose waters have power to restore age to its prime. The tradition was true; but the youth to be renewed was the youth of society; the life to bloom afresh was the life of the race. Freedom, thy brow,

Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarred

With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs

Are strong with struggling. Power at thee has launched His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;

They could not quench the life thou hast from heaven. Here, in the western world, the ancient warrior, " twin-born with man," counselled by the ripened wisdom of thousands of years, will renovate his being, and guide the people of every tongue through the self-direction of the individual mind to the harmonious exercise of the collective reason of the state.

Massachusetts had been led to rely on the inviolability of

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English freedom and on the equity of parliament; and, when the blow fell, which, though visibly foreshown, had not been certainly expected, "the people looked upon their liberties as gone.' "Tears," said Otis, "relieve me a moment;" and, repelling the imputation "that the continent of America was about to become insurgent," "it is the duty of all," he added, "humbly and silently to acquiesce in all the decisions of the supreme legislature. Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand of the colonists will never once entertain a thought but of submission to our sovereign, and to the authority of parliament in all possible contingencies." "They undoubtedly have the right to levy internal taxes on the colonies." "From my soul, I detest and abhor the thought of making a question of jurisdiction."

1765.

May.

On learning the decision of parliament, Hutchinson made haste to say that "it could be to no purpose to claim a right of exemption, when the whole body of the people of England were against it." He was only "waiting to know what more parliament would do towards raising the sums which the colonies were to pay," and which as yet were not half provided for. As chief justice, he charged "the jurors and people" of the several counties to obey. Nor did the result seem doubtful. There could be no danger but from union; and "no two colonies," said he, "think alike; there is no uniformity of measures; the bundle of sticks thus separated will be easily broken.” "The stamp act," he assured the ministry, five weeks after the news of its passage, "is received among us with as much decency as could be expected; it leaves no room for evasion, and will execute itself."

In Boston, the annual election of representatives in May excited the passions of the people. Men called to mind the noble sentiments which had been interwoven into the body of the remonstrances of New York. They were embittered at the thought that their legislature had been cajoled by Hutchinson into forbearing to claim exemption from taxation as a right; and that yet their prayer had been suppressed by the ministry with impartial disdain. While the

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