A brash letter and a boycott

In the minds of the delegates to the first Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia in October 1774, there was a separation between the British Parliament and King George III. While they presumed the king’s fairness and benevolence, the legislation of the past few years forced them to conclude that Parliament was wholly against them. So they brashly undertook to write directly to the king, bypassing Parliament, in “a Declaration of Rights and Grievances” from “his majesty’s loyal subjects,” warning that unless the king effected the repeal of the Intolerable Acts by December 1, 1774, a colonial boycott of British goods would commence.

The second task of the Congress was to arrange that boycott.

Past colonial attempts at boycotts had had middling success, but the failures had also served as instruction. This time, instead of each colony setting its own rules, there would be uniformity of rules among the colonies, and explicit provision made for enforcement of the rules. Further, non-importation would be accompanied by non-exportation — the latter meaning that nothing from the American colonies would go to Great Britain or its other colonies. Delegate radicals Sam Adams and Christopher Gadsden, whose earlier advocacy for revolution had been rebuffed by the Congress, wanted non-export to be really punishing, for lumber, livestock, and grains not to go to the British Caribbean, nor flaxseed to Ireland — they imagined idling 30,000 Irish spinners, and the havoc that would wreak.

But Virginia’s delegates argued that tobacco should not be on the list of non-exports because that would wreck Virginia’s economy, a New Hampshire delegate asked for an exception for lumber, a New Yorker for fish, and the entire South Carolina delegation walked out in protest over the prospect of losing sales of rice and indigo.

So they compromised. Non-importation would start December 1, 1774 (before they were likely to get word back from George III), but non-exportation would be put off a year, in the hope that Parliament and king would come to their senses.

As historian T.H. Breen puts it, non-importation was “a brilliantly original strategy of consumer resistance to political oppression.” It proved incredibly effective: over the next year, British imports by the American colonies declined from £2.8 million to £200,000.

Some 7,000 locally elected officials of the boycott were chosen. This was more officials than had ever served in colonial legislatures, and a significant percentage of the 2.5 million Americans, of whom about half were slaves. Also, because the number of boycott officials was so large, they could not come only from the wealthiest class (of the sort of people then attending the Continental Congress) but were mostly men of modest income. Furthermore, the boycott worked especially well because colonial women, in charge of their families’ households, eagerly embraced it and policed what their neighbors were buying. Alongside the boycotting officials, militia groups formed and trained. Boycott enforcement and militia training were later judged as being very good ways to have readied the colonists for an impending war — although at the time, very few expected war.

“Imagine 400,000 people [in Massachusetts] without Government or Law,” John Adams wrote to a friend, “forming themselves in Companies for various Purposes, of Justice, Policy, and War! You must allow for a great deal of the Ridiculous … and Some of the Marvellous.” As Benjamin Franklin had once pleaded for Americans to do, they were learning to “hang together” so they would not “hang separately.”

British General Thomas Gage, army chief and governor of Massachusetts, had been very active, summoning troops from New York and elsewhere to Boston to have enough on hand to quell any uprising, and ordering the seizure of colonists’ gunpowder from a Somerville magazine. That seizure brought out the Sons of Liberty and a mobilization of thousands of militiamen who marched toward Cambridge.

Gage averted the potential clash for the moment, but wrote home to his superiors, “If force is to be used at length, it must be a considerable one … for to begin with small numbers will encourage resistance … and will in the end cost more blood and treasure.”

Next time: While awaiting the King’s answer.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written many books, including three about the Revolutionary Era.