Run-up to the Revolution,VI: Boycott, ‘Conciliation’

When Prime Minister Lord Frederick North read in the Dec. 15, 1774 London Evening Post the plans of America’s Continental Congress for boycotting all British goods and preparing local militias for resistance, he was surprised — and worried. Aggressiveness by all the colonies, not just Massachusetts, contradicted what his government had believed for a year, and what secretly intercepted messages from Americans said, that British threats of force were successfully cowing them. Now it was clear they were not only uncowed but on the road to rebellion and punishing economic sanctions. British merchants were already feeling the pinch.

Immediately North began teasing reconciliation by introducing next year’s budget early, prior to the Christmas holiday, to prevent funding to send military reinforcements across the Atlantic. And he considered rescinding the tax on tea that a year earlier had caused the Boston Tea Party.

Unfortunately, the prime minister’s tilt toward reconciliation was directly opposed to that of his sovereign, George III, who wanted more troops to reinforce those already in Massachusetts, and to get even tougher with the Americans. King George agreed with General Thomas Gage, chief military officer in America, who wrote, “They will be lyons, whilst we are lambs; but, if we take the resolute part, they will undoubtedly prove very meek.”

In the American colonies, as 1775 began, the split between those who would conciliate the mother country and those who would defy her was still extant but was narrowing as the boycott firmed and militias began to arm and drill.

Virginia planter-lawyer Thomas Jefferson apologized to his local boycott group for having previously neglected to mention that he had ordered window sashes from London for Monticello and had not been able to countermand his order; he resigned himself to the likelihood that the windows would be seized on arrival.

Lawyer-farmer John Adams, ushering in the new year, wrote to fellow Bostonian firebrand James Warren, quoting a letter from fellow-Continental Congress delegate Samuel Chase of Maryland, ratifying that colony’s support of the boycott: “He thinks we may never have a more favourable Crisis to determine the Point, I mean the Colonies will never be so cordially united, and their Spirits in a higher Tone that at present.” And that same day, to Mercy Otis Warren, playwright and friend of his and Abigail’s, Adams confided that his private business had been “totally annihilated … by the inauspicious Course of Public Affairs” in the past year, and he saw no prospects of it returning; yet he was ready to do whatever his fellow colonists required of him for the “Cause of Truth Justice Liberty and Humanity … at whatever Hazard it may be can insure it.” His scholarly Novanglus articles, refuting the British right to tax the colonies, began to appear in the Boston Gazette.

Planter George Washington, also in Virginia, tended to his farm, hunted fox, dined with neighbors, and participated in his local militia, which was requiring that each militiaman bring a tomahawk as well as a firelock musket and bayonet. As with other men of wealth, Washington continued to hope the British would come to their senses and obviate the need for armed resistance, but he backed a plan to require each “tithable” resident to pay a few shillings toward a common gunpowder supply.

On Feb. 10, Lord North, in an extraordinary move, introduced into the House of Commons a Conciliatory Proposal to allow the American colonies to tax themselves so long as they paid enough of the resulting monies to London to underwrite the administering of the colonies. The proposal also included rescinding the hated tea and sugar duties, which American agent in London Benjamin Franklin, through an intermediary, had advised him to do.

King George III was outraged.

Franklin thought North’s Conciliatory proposal a positive step, but warned, in a note to a friend, “It seems to me the Language of a Highwayman, who with a Pistol in your Face says, Give me your Purse, and then I will not put my Hand into your Pocket,” and deemed the proposal no more than “divide-and-conquer” tactics, designed to prevent Americans from uniting against British tyranny.

Next time: Push coming to shove.

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