Arthur Lee “in the light of a rival”

Yesterday I quoted two letters from Samuel Adams in 1771, the first recommending William Story to a lobbyist in London and the second warning the same man that Story might be conspiring with Gov. Thomas Hutchinson.

One might think that on receiving those two letters, Arthur Lee (shown here) would have passed on that warning to his fellow agent for Massachusetts interests, Benjamin Franklin. But that’s not how Lee operated.

Back in April 1770, the London merchant Dennis DeBerdt had died, opening up the job of representing the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court to British officials and lawmakers.

(Lord Hillsborough, the Secretary of State, soon took the position that there was no such job, that the legal agent for Massachusetts in London had to be approved by the Council and governor as well. Nevertheless, the house persisted in employing its own lobbyist.)

House speaker Thomas Cushing and most of the other, more moderate Whigs wanted to make Benjamin Franklin the body’s agent. He had represented colonial governments in London for many years, amassing a long list of clients. He thus already knew everyone in London and was the most famous, respected native of Massachusetts in the British Empire. Franklin was trying to present himself as the voice of all the American colonists, and having an official mandate from one of the larger and more oppositional provinces would strengthen that claim.

However, Franklin wasn’t always in tune with the Whigs back in America. He had misjudged how angry the Stamp Act would make people. He had told Parliament that colonists objected only to “internal taxes” and not tariffs, which shaped the design of the Townshend Acts. Franklin was also growing old—in his mid-sixties—and his attention was divided among many colonies.

For those reasons, Samuel Adams, James Otis, Jr., and some other radicals in the house preferred Arthur Lee—younger, more aggressive, firmly opposed to tariffs, and more recently in America. The result in November 1770 was a compromise, with Franklin the official representative but Lee, as the house told Franklin, ”their Agent in case of your Death or Absence from Great Britain.”

Did that make Franklin and Lee colleagues? Not to the younger man. In his letter to Adams on 10 June 1771, Lee accused Franklin of betrayal and explicitly described their relationship as a rivalry:

I have read lately in your papers an assurance from Dr. Franklin that all designs against the charter of the colony are laid aside. This is just what I expected from him; and if it be true, the Dr. is not the dupe but the instrument of Lord Hillsborough’s treachery. . . .

I feel it not a little disagreeable to speak my sentiments of Dr. Franklin, as your generous confidence has placed me in the light of a rival to him. But I am so far from being influenced by selfish motives, that were the service of the colony ten times greater, I would perform it for nothing rather than you and America, at a time like this, should be betrayed by a man, who, it is hardly in the nature of things to suppose, can be faithful to his trust.

Thus, when Lee received Adams’s letter expressing doubt about William Story, he apparently said nothing about it to Franklin. He just let the older man shepherd Story around to royal officials and waited for another opportunity to undermine him.

COMING UP: William Story in London and later.

“Such a prudent and proper Use of this Letter”

On 29 Feb 1768, as I described yesterday, the passengers on the Abigail finally made it to solid ground in Boston after a terrible fourteen-week voyage from London.

Among those passengers was a new Customs officer named Thomas Irving, who carried a letter of introduction to Gov. Francis Bernard. The economic historian John McCusker reports that letter was dated 23 Oct 1767 and marked as received on Sunday, 30 Jan 1768, which gives us a benchmark for other letters that may have traveled on the Abigail.

On Monday, 1 February, in the Representatives’ chamber:

The Speaker [Thomas Cushing] communicated a Letter from Dennys DeBerdt, Esq; which was read and communicated for Consideration to Mr. Speaker, Capt. [Edward] Sheaffe, and Brigadier [Timothy] Ruggles.

The Colonial Society of Massachusetts published a set of DeBerdt’s letters in 1911. One of those was dated 21 Oct 1767, shortly before the Abigail set sail, and addressed to Whig legislator Edward Sheaffe of Charlestown, appointed to the committee to reply. It’s possible that Cushing brought forward another letter that hasn’t survived, but this appears to be the most likely candidate.

In that letter DeBerdt pressed to be appointed as the official lobbyist for the whole Massachusetts provincial government, not just the House. He added, probably as a sign of his access, “I shall have a Conference with the Secretary of State in a few days…“

That likely reminded legislators of DeBerdt’s last letter to Cushing, dated 19 Sept 1767, in which he wrote about the Earl of Shelburne being sympathetic to the colonies and added:

He had also wrote to every Governour on the continent to behave with temper & moderation to the severl. Provinces over which they preside, & he had wrote to your Governour in particular to persue healing measures & was so condesending to offer shewing me Copy of his letter the next time I waited on Him

The Massachusetts Whigs had been so pleased with that assurance that London wanted their governor to act more moderate that they had the letter published in the 10 November Boston Gazette.

On Wednesday, 3 Feb 1768, the legislators were treated to a different message from London:

Mr. Secretary [Andrew Oliver, shown above], by Order of the Governor, came down and Read in the House a Letter from the Right Honorable the Earl of Shelburne to his Excellency [the governor], and then withdrew.

Bernard had just received a copy of Secretary of State Shelburne’s letter dated 17 September, forwarded from New York. (The signed original didn’t arrive until April, amazingly late.) This was the dispatch that DeBerdt had suggested would show Shelburne advising more “healing measures.”

Instead, that letter offered Bernard solid support for all the steps he had taken. Shelburne began, “I have the Pleasure to signify to you His Majesty’s Approbation of your Conduct, and to acquaint you that he is graciously pleased to approve of your having exerted the Power…” He went on to say:

I am to inform you, Sir, that it is His Majesty’s determined Resolution to extend to you His Countenance and Protection in every Constitutional Measure that shall be found necessary for the Support of His Government in the Massachusets Bay.

No doubt pleased, Bernard replied:

I shall make such a prudent and proper Use of this Letter, as I hope it will restore the Peace and Tranquility of this Province, for which Purpose considerable Steps have already been made by the House of Representatives.

The “prudent and proper Use of this Letter” that Bernard planned was to have Secretary Oliver read it to the House, pushing lawmakers to recognize the reality that he had the royal government behind him.

That didn’t work. Instead, the very next day the House decided to repudiate its earlier vote not to send a circular letter to the other colonial legislatures. Whatever “considerable Steps” toward “Peace and Tranquility” Bernard perceived on 2 February were gone two days later. The House decided to communicate with other colonial governments, even if that did breach protocol.

Furthermore, Massachusetts legislators focused on one phrase from Shelburne: “from your several Letters.” For the rest of the session, House leaders periodically asked Bernard for “a Copy of the Letter from the Right Honorable the Earl of Shelburn, lately read to the House by Order of his Excellency, and his own several Letters to which it refers.” The governor gave Cushing a copy of Shelburne’s letter but stonewalled on sharing his own, which is what the Whigs really wanted.

As discussed back here, Massachusetts politicians were convinced Bernard was writing bad things about them to London. All the more reason to form a united front with other colonial legislatures!

And all that time, nobody in Boston knew that the Earl of Shelburne’s opinions no longer mattered. There had been a shakeup in the British government. The Earl of Hillsborough had assumed responsibility for the North American colonies, and he was stricter than his predecessor.

TOMORROW: What was so important about the February 1768 circular letter.

Behind Massachusetts’s Circular Letter

The story of the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768 starts with the previous year’s session of the Massachusetts General Court.

That provincial legislature was supposed to reconvene after its spring session on 2 Sept 1767. But that summer Parliament enacted the Townshend Act, a new way of raising revenue in the American colonies.

Newspaper essayists protested the new law. Boston’s town meeting started talking about cutting imports. John Dickinson’s Letters from an American Farmer appeared. Gov. Francis Bernard delayed calling the legislature back into session as long as he could.

But finally, with a border dispute with New York to be resolved, the governor reconvened the General Court on 30 December. That was “sooner than I intended,” he told his superior in London; “rather earlier than usual,” he told the legislators.

Instead of taking up the border issue, the House proceeded to consider “the State of the Province” and its charter in relation to “divers Acts of Parliament”—meaning the Townshend Act. The House formed a committee to address those questions dominated by strong Whigs: speaker Thomas Cushing, clerk Samuel Adams, both James Otises, Joseph Hawley, John Hancock, Edward Sheaffe, Jerathmeel Bowers, and Samuel Dexter. Only then did the House turn to other matters.

According to Bernard, Cushing had told him before this legislative session that the House planned to protest the Townshend Act. In reply, the governor warned that Parliament would probably not be amenable, adding:

that if they should think proper to address his Majesty’s Secretary of State upon this occasion, it was my Official Business to take the charge of it & I should faithfully remitt it whatever the contents were. And if they put it into other hands, I should remonstrate against it as being irregular & unconstitutional for any addresses to pass from an Assembly (where the King has a representative presiding) to his Majesty either directly or indirectly, except thro’ the mediation of his Representative.

By “other hands,” the governor meant Dennis DeBerdt, the new agent, or lobbyist, for the Massachusetts House in London. Bernard had tried to stop the House from hiring DeBerdt because he thought that a single chamber of the legislature shouldn’t have its own lobbyist, independent of the Council and himself.

Naturally, the House committee responded by first drafting a letter to DeBerdt, which it presented to the whole chamber on 12 January. The principal authors of that document and the committee’s other productions appear to have been James Otis, Jr., and Samuel Adams, though it’s unclear how they collaborated.

The representatives went through two days of intermittent debate. Bernard understood that “many Offencive passages were struck out.” But eventually the House approved that text and instructed Speaker Cushing to sign it on their behalf.

On 15 January, that first letter finally done, the same committee proffered a similar missive to the Earl off Shelburne as Secretary of State for North America. Nobody knew that Shelburne had been dismissed from that post at the end of October.

Five days later, the committee rolled out its biggest gun yet: a letter to King George III himself. The House approved that “humble Petition to the KING” after “divers Amendments.” All this time, Gov. Bernard was asking Cushing to see the letters. The speaker put him off, saying the chamber had voted not to make any copies until he was to sign the documents.

On 21 January, the House took up yet another proposal from the committee: to send a circular letter on those issues to all the other North American legislatures. Circular letters were a standard bureaucratic tool; the London government sent them regularly to the royal governors. But legislatures were supposed to communicate upward to those governors and the Crown, not independently. And especially not to create a united front against one of Parliament’s laws.

TOMORROW: Gov. Bernard stops the circular letter from circulating—for a while.