“Not a topsail vessel to be seen”

Dissecting the multiple texts of the Solemn League and Covenant boycott and following the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman’s uncomfortable wriggling around that issue in Westboro pulled me past the debate over that document in Boston.

So I’m going back to mid-June 1774. Many of Boston’s merchants thought the top priority should be finding a way to lift the Port Bill, even if that meant (as George Erving and John Amory proposed) raising money privately to pay the cost of the tea destroyed in December.

The town’s political leaders, on the other hand, felt that standing up to Parliament’s oppressive laws was more important than regaining some expedient advantages in business.

The merchant John Andrews, who normally supported the Whigs (albeit at an ironic distance), joined their opponents on this issue. He saw the town’s economic situation as dire, as he wrote in a 12 June letter to a relative in Philadelphia:

Our wharfs are intirely deserted; not a topsail vessel to be seen either there or in the harbour, save the ships of war and transport, the latter of which land their passengers in this town tomorrow.

Four regiments are already arriv’d, and four more are expected. How they are to be disposed of, can’t say. Its gave out, that if ye. General Court don’t provide barracks for ’em, they are to be quarter’d on ye. inhabitants in ye. fall: if so, am determin’d not to stay in it.

Only five days after Andrews wrote, Gen. Thomas Gage dissolved the Massachusetts General Court, as recounted here. That legislature never had a chance to provide quarters for the troops in Boston—or to refuse to.

Nonetheless, those soldiers were never housed in private homes, nor did Gage invoke the revised Quartering Act to put them into “uninhabited buildings” and taverns. Instead, the royal government built barracks and rented buildings from willing landlords, including warehouses empty because of the lack of trade.

Andrews still thought royal officials were being too strict:

The executors of the [Boston Port] Act seem to strain points beyond what was ever intended, for they make all ye. vessels, both with grain and wood, entirely unload at Marblehead before they’ll permit ’em to come in here, which conduct, in regard to ye. article of wood has already greatly enhanced the price, and the masters say they won’t come at all, if they are to be always put to such trouble, as they are oblig’d to hire another vessel to unload into, and then to return it back again, as they have no wharves to admit of their landing it on.

Nor will they suffer any article of merchandize to be brought or carry’d over Charles river ferry, that we are oblig’d to pay for 28 miles land carriage to get our goods from Marblehead or Salem. Could fill up a number of sheets to enumerate all our difficulties.

Nonetheless, at this time Andrews saved his worst criticism for Boston’s zealous Whigs, “those who have govern’d the town for years past and were in a great measure the authors of all our evils, by their injudicious conduct.” Now those men were supposedly threatening to finish off the town’s trade with the Solemn League and Covenant.

TOMORROW: Back to town meeting.

(The picture above, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, is one version of Christian Remick’s painting of the Crown fleet in Boston harbor as seen from Long Wharf in 1768.)

“The house of Francis Shaw was assigned for quarters”?

Yesterday I quoted the story of Samuel Shaw’s interaction with British marine officers staying in his father’s house in late 1774 or early 1775.

People sometimes point to the Shaw family as an example of colonists forced to host the king’s soldiers in their home under the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774.

Author Josiah Quincy’s language, especially the use of the passive voice, pushed that reading:

…the officers of the army were billeted on the inhabitants. The house of Francis Shaw was assigned for quarters to Major [John] Pitcairn and Lieutenant [John] Wragg.

But that’s not the way Britain’s Quartering Acts worked. Those laws required communities to provide barracks and firewood for regiments stationed in their cities and towns. They empowered the army to use uninhabited buildings if necessary, eventually with the help of royally appointed magistrates. Military commanders didn’t actually want to disperse their soldiers into different households; that was a recipe for desertion.

Furthermore, the Shaw family hosted officers, and officers didn’t live in barracks. As gentlemen, they made individual arrangements with homeowners to rent rooms. And as gentlemen, paying in hard currency, they were desirable tenants, especially when the local economy had been stifled by the Boston Port Bill.

Quincy’s word “assigned” suggests there was some formal process for matching officers with homes. Any bureaucracy produces paperwork, but there’s no evidence of such assignments. Nor were there complaints in the newspapers, and Boston’s newspapers ran lots of complaints. Instead, military officers asked around about rooming possibilities and reached deals with willing homeowners.

But didn’t Bostonians have political objections to hosting army and marine officers? Some surely did. We have no anecdotes about Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other activists agreeing to rent rooms to military men—nor of them being forced to do so.

(After the war began, many of those politicians had moved out of Boston and more troops arrived. During the siege, officers did move into empty private homes. But neither the Quartering Act nor the Third Amendment apply in wartime.)

TOMORROW: Shaw family politics.

A True Crime Podcaster on Colonial America

Back in 2007 I launched a series of posts I called CSI: Colonial Boston.

I periodically returned to that theme over the next few five years with other tales of people investigating how other people died by looking at their remains.

At the time, the CSI franchise was dominating American television with three series. They all went off the air by 2016, though one has been periodically revived. Therefore, while the acronym CSI still has the same technical significance, it no longer carries so much cultural weight.

Instead, one of the hot trends today is “true crime podcasts.” I listen to a few myself while cooking and cleaning.

Among the leading practitioners of the genre is Kate Winkler Dawson, a journalist now based in Texas. She specializes in historical examples as an author and a host of three podcasts:

• Tenfold More Wicked, said to be “a unique blending of narrative nonfiction storytelling with investigative journalism.”
• Wicked Words, interviews with journalists and writers about crimes they looked into.
• Buried Bones, in which Dawson presents expert forensics investigator Paul Holes with the details of cases from the past.

On Tenfold More Wicked, Dawson has just launched a short series focusing on deaths in the last years of colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.

The first episode went where I expected it would, to the death of provincial treasurer and speaker of the house John Robinson in 1766. The narration does a lot of looking ahead to the Revolution, which I think it anachronistic. In that year Virginians and other North American colonists felt that the repeal of the Stamp Act by a new government in Britain held promise for better relations within the British Empire.

There are some other glitches, such as the common misunderstanding of the Quartering Act and allowing the Crown to install soldiers into people’s private homes. But Dawson has interviewed lots of people at Colonial Williamsburg to convey aspects of everyday life among the slaveowning gentry, which is more crucial to the stories she’ll tell.

A couple of years ago Dawson and Holes’s Buried Bones podcast tackled the Joshua Spooner murder from 1778 Massachusetts in an episode titled “Soldiers of Fortune.” As one might expect, there wasn’t a lot of reliable forensic information from 1778 for Holes to sink his teeth into, but fans of Revolutionary Massachusetts might still enjoy this take.

For folks who prefer their true crime in book form, there are a couple of modern books about the Spooner case:

• Deborah Navas, Murdered by His Wife (1999)
• Andrew Noone, Bathsheba Spooner: A Revolutionary Murder Conspiracy (2021)

The podcast has a list of its sources, many available freely over the web.

“We have advice from New-York…”

The dispute over the Manufactory in Boston in late 1768 was so controversial that it managed to spark a secondary dispute in New York.

That city was already the British army’s main base of operations in North America, with tensions between soldiers and local working men. Its politicians argued with the royal authorities not over barracks (because those were already built) but over firewood that the Quartering Act required the local government to provide. So New York’s more radical Whigs were primed to support Boston in its resistance.

On 17 Nov 1768, John Holt’s New-York Journal, or the General Advertiser squeezed in this item at the end of its local news. And by “squeezed in,” I mean that this story was set in smaller type so it could fit into the column.

On Monday last a Report prevail’d that the Effigies of Governor [Francis] Bernard, and Sheriff [Stephen] Greenleaf of Boston, were to be exhibited that Evening:

At 4 o’Clock in the Afternoon, the Troops in this City appear’d under Arms, at the lower Barracks, where they remained till after 10 o’Clock at Night, during which Time Parties of them, were continually patrolling the Streets, in order it is supposed to intimidate the Inhabitants, and prevent their exposing the Effigies;

Notwithstanding which, they made their appearance in the Streets, hanging on a Gallows, between 8 and 9 o’Clock, attended by a vast Number of Spectators, who saluted them with loud Huzzas at the Corner of every Street they passed; and after having been exposed some Time at the Coffee-House, they were there publickly burnt, amidst the Acclamations of the Populace, who testified their Approbation by repeated Huzzas, and immediately dispersed, and returned to their respective Homes.—

The Affair was conducted with such Regularity and good Order, that no Person sustained the least Damage, either in his Person or Property.

Holt added a pointing finger and a line in italic type: “A Postscript to this Paper was intended, but could not be got ready.”

The Boston Whigs happily reported in December:

We have advice from New-York, that on the 14th inst. [i.e., of this month] there was exposed and burnt in that city, the effigies of G.B. and S. G. in resentment at the parts they acted in endeavouring to get the troops quartered in the town; contrary to the letter and spirit of the act of Parliament relative to billetting troops in America, as also to the advice of His Majesty’s Council.

But that celebration may have been premature.

TOMORROW: Government crackdown.

“Compleat Quarters were provided for all the troops”

Yesterday we left Gov. Francis Bernard stymied by both Boston’s justices of the peace and the Massachusetts Council in his effort to secure barracks for the king’s troops in Boston closer than Castle William.

By his own account, Bernard told his Councilors:

I said that I was now at the End of my tether: for as they had declared before, that they would adhere to the Act of parliament, and had refused to act in that liberal Way which I thought was their duty when the King’s Necessary Service was obstructed, I could propose nothing farther to them.

For I foresaw that if I proposed to hire [i.e., rent] & fit up houses &c for the troops, they would answer that did not become their business till the public houses were full. But if any Gentleman thought it was to Any purpose to put such a question I was ready to do it: this was declined by Silence.

According to the Boston Whigs, Bernard

recommended their appointing one or more persons, to join with General [Thomas] Gage, in hiring barracks for the troops in this town; the G——r apprehending it best that those who it is likely will finally be saddled with the expence, should be assisting or at least advising in this matter. The Council were utterly against this proposal, as the barracks at Castle-Island still remained empty, and it would have countenanced the quartering of troops in this town; and as the barrack-masters had before taken upon themselves to hire barracks at their own direction and risque.

Would any local citizen take the financial risk of paying for those barracks and waiting to be reimbursed? If providing barracks was the colony’s responsibility, as the Quartering Act said, then the Massachusetts General Court would have to authorize that expenditure. And leaders of that legislature had already warned that they were in no hurry to do that.

But Gov. Bernard was taking a different path: the army would put up the initial money to rent barracks. He wrote:

I then informed them that by reason of this general refusal of quarters the General found himself obliged to hire & fit up houses at the expence of the Crown for the reception of the troops, who now (Oct 26) especially they who were encamped, began to feel the Want of Warm quarters; and as he thought the Expence would ultimately fall upon the province; He desired that I would appoint a Commissary to join with & assist his officers in providing such houses, especially with regard to the Œconomy of the Expences. I therefore desired their Advice & Assistance in making such appointment.

This after a long debate was refused, they saying that if they should join in such appointment, it would be admitting that the province ought to be charged with the Expence; and I could appoint Auditors to examine the Accounts without them.

I thereupon put an End to this Business, having been employed in it from Sep 19 to Oct 26 in all 38 days, without any prospect of doing Any thing to purpose, but under an Obligation of trying evry Effort, before I gave it up.

The army was already implementing Gen. Gage’s plan. According to Bernard, “the General, who foresaw how this Negotiation would end, had employed his Officers to hire & fit up houses for the Troops: so that by the time I had received the definitive refusal, Compleat Quarters were provided for all the troops.”

The question of who would ultimately pay those rents was unresolved. There was also the issue of how the Quartering Act required colonies to supply certain provisions for the barracks, such as firewood. The Council had ordered Massachusetts’s commissary to supply the barracks at Castle William, but not any buildings in the center of town. Bernard concluded, “therefore it is not done, nor like to be done.”

But at least by the end of October all the troops had somewhere in town to sleep.

COMING UP: The regiments’ new landlords.

“Your Excellency will therefore excuse our doing anything”

During the conflict over the Manufactory building, Gov. Francis Bernard was still pushing other ways to find housing for the two-plus regiments in town.

The governing law was the Quartering Act of 1765. That required colonies to provide barracks for army troops, which Massachusetts did at Castle William—but the Crown didn’t want the troops off on that island.

The next option in the law was government-owned buildings—but locals didn’t want troops in Faneuil Hall, the Town House, and Manufactory.

After that came “inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualling houses, and the houses of sellers of [wine and spirits]”—and no one wanted to force citizens to turn over those properties without strong local authority behind the order.

Gov. Bernard had gotten no cooperation from his Council, so he tried another branch of local government. He put pressure on Boston’s justices of the peace. Those magistrates were appointed, not elected, so they supposedly owed more loyalty to the Crown.

The governor started that effort on 20 Oct 1768, the same day that Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf actually got into the Manufactory. In a letter to London, Bernard explained:

I therefore summoned all the acting justices to meet me in the Council chamber: Twelve of them appeared; I acquainted them that the General demanded quarters for two regiments, according to the Act of parliament; they desired to take it into Consideration Among themselves; I consented, & We parted.

Two justices, 2 days after this [i.e., 22 October], attended me with an Answer in writing, whereby the whole body refused to billet the Souldiers. But these Gentlemen informing me that the Justices had been much influenced by the Argument that the barracks at the Castle ought to be first filled &c, I showed them the Minutes of the Council whereby the barracks at the Castle were assigned for the Irish Regiments; and they must be considered as full. This was quite new to them, the Council themselves having overlook’t this effect of their Vote. I gave them a Copy of this Vote & returned the Answer desiring them to reconsider it.

Three days after [i.e., 23 October] the same Gentlemen informed me that they had resolved against billeting the Souldiers but could not agree upon the reasons to be assigned for the refusing it:

At that meeting, according to the Boston Whigs, Lieutenant Governor Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson insisted to the magistrates that Bernard “required their answer not in the usual way, but in writing, and under their hands.”

The justices therefore got another day to prepare a written reply to Gov. Bernard. (Meanwhile, the Manufactory option had collapsed.) The Boston Whigs included the 24 October result in their “Journal of Occurrences”:

May it Please Your Excellency,

Your Excellency having been pleased to demand of us to quarter and billet a number of officers and soldiers in the publick-houses in this town: we would beg leave to observe that in the act of Parliament, a number of officers are mentioned for that purpose, namely constables, tytheing-men, magistrates, and other civil officers of the town, which upon enquiring we cannot find have been applied to; and also that by the same act of Parliament the justices are not empowered to quarter and billet the said officers and soldiers, but in default or absence of the aforementioned officers; your Excellency will therefore excuse our doing anything in this affair till it is properly within our province.

William Stoddard
Richard Dana
John Ruddock
Nathaniel Balston
John Hill
Edmund Quincy
John Avery
John Tudor

Dana (shown above) and Ruddock would take the selectmen’s complaint against Capt. John Willson days later. With justices Hill and Quincy, they would also collect most of the depositions about the Boston Massacre. Avery’s namesake son was one of the Loyall Nine. So these men included the most radical of the magistrates.

Gov. Bernard had started this conversation with “Twelve” justices, but only eight signed that letter. The governor reported: “2 others were against billeting & gave other reasons for their refusal; 2 others argued for billeting, but declined acting by themselves after so large a Majority of the whole body had declared for the contrary Opinion.”

Stymied again, Bernard called his Councilors back in. The Whigs’ version of that meeting began:

the Governor proposed in the forenoon their submitting the dispute relative to quartering troops in this town, to the opinion of the judges of the Superior Court [i.e., Hutchinson’s court]; which extraordinary motion was with great propriety rejected.

Gov. Bernard had no legal avenues left to pursue. There was only one way for the army to solve the problem of housing its troops for the winter: throw money at it.

COMING UP: So where did the soldiers go?

“There are no Barracks in the Town”

Thursday, 22 Sept 1768, was not only the first day of the extralegal Massachusetts Convention of Towns. It was also the anniversary of the coronation of George III.

That royal holiday was accordingly observed in Boston, as the Boston Evening-Post described:

by the firing of the Cannon at Castle William and at the Batteries in this Town, and three Vollies by the Regiment of Militia, which, with the Train of Artillery, were mustered on the Occasion.——

At the Invitation of his Excellency the Governor, his Majesty’s Health was drank at the Council-Chamber at Noon.

So much for ceremonial harmony. At that same meeting in the Old State House, Gov. Francis Bernard and the Council were in a major dispute.

Three days before, the governor had formally told the Council the news that he’d leaked earlier—that British army regiments were on the way to Boston. Under the Quartering Act, the local authorities were required to provide housing and firewood for them. As John G. McCurdy argued at a Colonial Society of Massachusetts session last February, we can think of the Quartering Act as one of Parliament’s taxes on the colonies, requiring resources from local communities without their vote.

Gov. Bernard wanted the Council to start arranging to house four regiments, two on their way from Halifax and two more to arrive later from Ireland. But the Council was determined not to cooperate. In a report to London, Bernard claimed James Otis, Jr., had laid out this strategy for the Whigs:

There are no Barracks in the Town; and therefore by Act of parliament they [the soldiers] must be quartered in the public houses. But no one will keep a public house upon such terms, & there will be no public houses. Then the Governor and Council must hire Barnes Outhouses &c for them; but no body is obliged to let them; no body will let them; no body will dare to let them.

The Troops are forbid to quarter themselves in Any other manner than according to the Act of parliament, under severe penalties. But they can’t quarter themselves according to the Act: and therefore they must leave the Town or seize on quarters contrary to the Act. When they do this, when they invade property contrary to an Act of parliament We may resist them with the Law on our side.

Bernard was anxious to head off such trouble. He wrote:

I answered, that they must be sensible that this Act of parliament (which seemed to be made only with a View to marching troops) could not be carried into execution in this Case. For if these troops were to be quartered in public houses & thereby mixt with the people their intercourse would be a perpetual Source of affrays and bloodsheds; and I was sure that no Commanding officer would consent to having his troops separated into small parties in a town where there was so public & professed a disaffection to his Majesty’s British Government.

And as to hiring barnes outhouses &c it was mere trifling to apply that clause to Winter quarters in this Country; where the Men could not live but in buildings with tight walls & plenty of fireplaces. Therefore the only thing to be done was to provide barracks; and to say that there were none was only true, that there was no building built for that purpose; but there were many public buildings that might be fitted up for that purpose with no great inconvenience.

Bernard proposed that the province make the Manufactory House available for the troops. This building had been put up in 1753 to house spinners and weavers. The province had loaned money to build it, expecting to be paid back from the profits of the cloth-manufacturing enterprise. The scheme never made money, the businessmen behind it defaulted on the loan, and Massachusetts was left with ownership of this big building near the center of town.

The Council formed a committee led by James Bowdoin to consult with Boston’s selectmen about the troops. On 22 September, the day of the toasts to the king, that committee reported that the selectmen “gave it for their Opinion that it would be most for the peace of the Town that the two regiments expected from Halifax should be quartered at the Castle.”

That was a new strategy, avoiding confrontations with the soldiers by housing them in the barracks on Castle William—which was on an island in the harbor. Of course, that meant those troops couldn’t patrol Boston and protect Customs officers, which was the whole point of sending them into town. Bernard wrote, “I observed that they confounded the Words Town & Township; that the Castle was indeed in the Township of Boston but was so far from being in the Town that it was distant from it by water 3 miles & by land 7.”

The governor reproached his Council: “I did not see how they could clear themselves from being charged with a design to embarras the quartering the Kings troops.” Bernard thus hinted that the body was being disloyal to the king—and on the anniversary of his coronation! “I spoke this so forcibly,” he wrote, “that some of them were stagger’d, & desired further time to consider of it.” But one member warned the governor not to expect any progress, “pleasantly” adding, “what can you expect from a Council who are more affraid of the people than they are of the King?”

On 23 September, 250 years ago today, a smaller committee, also led by Bowdoin, was ready to present a formal report on the matter to Gov. Bernard.

Who was now at his country house out in Jamaica Plain. This of course kept him distant from the Convention going on in Faneuil Hall. Province secretary Andrew Oliver told the Council “that the Weather being so stormy the Governor will not be in Town to-day, and desires they will meet him at the Province-House to-morrow ten o’Clock, A.M.”

The next morning was stormy, too. Bernard finally came into town that Saturday afternoon to hear what the Council had to say. Which was the same thing as before, except longer: the only place for the troops was out at Castle William. After cleaning up some errors in their report, the Council had it published in the newspapers on 26 September, making the dispute a public matter.

COMING UP: Meanwhile, back in Faneuil Hall.

Robert Newman and the Lanterns in the Old North Steeple

As I wrote yesterday, people paid very little attention to the question of who hung the signal lanterns in Old North Church on 18 Apr 1775 until after Henry W. Longfellow published “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1860.

Within a decade, a Boston family had come forward to share their lore of an ancestor hanging those lanterns. The earliest written statement of that tradition that I’ve seen appeared in the Boston Traveler newspaper on 30 Dec 1873, in an article about the sesquicentennial of the first service in Old North   (formally Christ Church, Boston).

Here’s the pertinent paragraph, broken up for easier online reading:

The eighteenth of April, Easter Tuesday, 1775, is a day memorable in our annals, connecting the history of this church with that of the nation. It was the last day of the rectorship of a clergyman owning allegiance to the King of Great Britain [Rev. Mather Byles, Jr.].

That evening the sexton of Christ Church, Robert Newman, sat quietly in his house on Salem street, opposite Bennett street, assuming an unconcerned look and manner to avert the suspicion of the English officers who were quartered upon him, but impatiently expecting the arrival of a friend, a sea captain, who was watching the movement of the regulars. On the other side of the river was Paul Revere, waiting for them to communicate to him the intention of the English.

Mr. Newcomb [sic] succeeded in eluding the vigilance of his unwelcome guests, took down the church keys, and with two large lanterns in his hand went out, met his friend, heard his intelligence, opened the church door and locked it again after him and went “up the wooden stairs with stealthy tread to the belfry chamber overhead.”

The lights from this steeple waked the fires of war and symbolized two mighty changes; the colonies became an independent nation, and the Church of England in this land is the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. If Robert Newman’s courage or patience, or firmness or self-control had failed him for an instant, Paul Revere would have looked in vain across the dark waters at the tall steeple on Copp’s Hill.

When his task was done Mr. Newman came down, passed through the church, jumped out of a back window, went round through Unity and Bennett streets to his house, and succeeded in entering it without being observed. The British found him in bed. They arrested him and threw him into jail, but he had taken such nice [?] precautions that nothing could be proved, and he was set at liberty.

Mr. [Henry] Burroughs [rector of Christ Church in 1873] stated that he had heard these facts from the lips of a son of Robert Newman about four years since. The church was closed that night. Mr. Byles was soon after banished, with other subjects of Great Britain, and he retired to Halifax.

Later newspapers made clear that the “son of Robert Newman” who had spoken to Burroughs was Samuel Haskell Newman. He participated in subsequent lantern-hanging ceremonies at the church. In addition, Burroughs later reported corroboration from:

• “Mrs. Sally Chittenden, now ninety years of age, who is the grand-daughter of John Newman, brother of Robert”
• “Joshua B. Fowle, living at Lexington, who knew Paul Revere, who often came with the other patriots of his time to his father’s house.”
• “William Green, who lives at the North End, is the grandson of Captain Thomas Barnard. His sister, eighty-four years old, remembers Robert Newman.”

Nonetheless, we can see the influence of Longfellow’s poem on this telling as well. Not only does it mistakenly put Revere on the opposite shore in Charlestown awaiting the signal, but the account even quotes a couplet.

This account also reflects the belief that British army officers were “quartered” on unwilling civilian families before the war. In fact, Robert Newman lived with his mother, and she took in British officers as boarders to help pay the bills.

Dramatic details such as sneaking out of the house, sneaking out of the church, and nonetheless being arrested would naturally be the parts of the story that children would remember and pass on. There’s no contemporaneous support for them, but the Newman family simply wasn’t prominent enough in Revolutionary Boston to be noticed.

TOMORROW: A rival claimant from out of town.

[The photograph above shows the Newman house in the North End, as preserved in the collection of the Boston Public Library.]

A New Approach to “American Affairs” in 1767

On 6 July 1767, 250 years ago today, the Boston Post-Boy printed important news from London. A letter dated 11 May described the new policy of Britain’s finance minister, Charles Townshend:

A few Days before the House of Commons adjourned for the Easter Holidays, the Ch[ancello]r of the Ex[cheque]r opened his budget, with very great Applause, even Mr. G——lle [George Grenville, former prime minister] complimented him on the Occasion: among other things he made it appear, that besides paying the Navy and Army and all other Charges for Government for the Last Year, he had sunk [i.e., reduced] Three Millions, nine hundred Thousand Pounds of the National Debt, and assured them that the next Year he would discharge a much greater Sum, notwithstanding they had reduced the Land-Tax one Shilling in the Pound.

He took an Occasion Yesterday to say, that it was reported out of Doors that he was for taxing America. I declare, says he, I am not, nor never was; I thought the Stamp-Act a very improper Measure, and us’d my Endeavours for the Repeal; and (holding out his Hand) he said he would cut off that Hand before he would vote for taxing America; and if any of the Duties laid on Trade shall appear burthensome, nothing shall be wanting in me to remove them.

“Duties laid on Trade”? What did that refer to? The newspaper then printed under the dateline of 14 May:

Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer mov’d the House for Leave to bring in the following Bills, which was agreed to.

An Act to permit Wine, Fruit and Oil to be carried from Spain and Portugal directly to North-America

An Act laying a Duty on China, Paper, Glass, and Painters Colours, shipped from Great-Britain to the Colonies.

An Act for settling a Salary on the Governor, and Judges, &c in North America.

An Act for Establishing a Board of Revenue in North America.

And there was yet more information in letters sent by “some Gentlemen at the New-England Coffee House”—merchants doing business with the region, some of whom had family there as well. Those came with some passengers on a ship that left London on 14 May.

The Parliament met the 13th of May upon American Affairs, and resolved that a Bill be brought in after the following Manner,

That a Tax be laid on Painters Colours, Paper, Glass and China. That the Americans may have Liberty of importing Lemmons, Wine, Fruit & Oil directly from Spain and Portugal, subject to a Duty, the Duty on Wine to be 7£ per Ton

That the Duty on Tea remaining in England be taken off, and a Duty of 3d. per lb. be laid on the Importation in America.

That there be a Board of Customs, as also a Court of Exchequer in New England.

That the Legislative Power of New-York cease until they comply with the Billeting Bill.

That the Governors and Judges be made independent by encreasing their Salary, which is to be paid out of the Revenues of the Customs.

George Grenville made a Motion to oblige the Americans to take an Oath of Allegiance and Obedience to the Parliament of Great Britain, which was put to Vote—for the Question 90[;] against it 180 odd.

The chancellor of the exchequer’s new bills became known as the Townshend Acts—a program that installed new tariffs on selected goods shipped from Britain to America, strengthened the Customs service to collect that revenue, and directed it to officials appointed by the London government.

Another new law put pressure on the New York assembly to supply barracks and firewood for royal troops in that province. Though the House of Commons voted down Grenville’s proposal that Americans have to swear an oath of allegiance, the rest of the package had a lot to concern North American Whigs, regardless of Townshend’s assurance that he opposed “taxing America.”

And by the time the Post-Boy and other newspapers printed that intelligence, the laws had already sailed through the entire Parliament. On 29 June, King George III gave his assent, and the Townshend Acts became law.

TOMORROW: Who assured Townshend that Americans wouldn’t object to tariffs?

Austerity and Stimulus in the American Revolution?

A few weeks back, the Course of Human Events blog highlighted a new book about the American Revolution coming from Steven Pincus, the Bradford Durfee Professor of History and co-director of the Center for Historical Enquiry and the Social Sciences at Yale University. His previous books have been about Britain in the turbulent 1600s.

About The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government, the blog explains:

Pincus maintains that the American Revolution was a major turning point in not just British or American history but global history, because it was a response to the huge debt crisis that had overtaken the European empires. The patriots and their opponents had differing opinions on how best to respond to a debt crisis. One side wanted to stimulate economic growth “in the most dynamic part of the empire, and that was the American colonies.” The other side argued for pursuing austerity measures and shifting the tax burden away from the English and onto those who couldn’t vote (the American colonists, for example).

The various acts passed in the 1760s and 1770s demonstrate which side won out in this fight between austerity measures and stimulus measures. The Sugar Act (1764) and Stamp Act (1765) taxed the colonies in order to raise revenue, and the first of the Townshend Acts was even called the Revenue Act (1767). Instead of stimulating economic growth in the American colonies, the colonists refused to purchase or even to import British goods because of the taxes imposed upon them. As Pincus explains, “The 1770s saw the first time austerity measures pursued in response to a debt crisis generated revolution, but it wasn’t going to be the last time.”

I read about this thesis a couple of years ago, and on first blush it struck me as too relevant for its own good. “Austerity measures and stimulus measures” have been a huge debate in western polity since 2009. But do those terms (or does that analogy) fit the situation of the 1760s?

There’s no question that the imperial government in London sought to collect more revenue from the North American colonies through various tariffs and the failed Stamp Act. But “austerity” seems like more than paying down the debt, especially when contrasted with an economic “stimulus.” Austerity also means freezing or cutting services, and I can’t think of significant services that the British imperial government provided to the colonies that could be cut.

With peace in 1763, the imperial government did shrink its military, which meant it wasn’t shipping specie into the colonies to pay its soldiers and sailors and mount campaigns. There was no doubt less expended on fortifications. But can we equate those with the sort of investment in infrastructure or other public projects we now consider “stimulus”? Furthermore, the colonists who protested imperial policy of the 1760s usually objected to seeing more soldiers in their cities on the grounds that those troops required local spending as well (the real problem with the Quartering Act).

In one area, Parliament definitely increased spending after the Seven Years’ War: the payroll of the Customs office. The Treasury Department also started to pay gubernatorial and judicial salaries instead of relying on colonial governments to come through with that money. Again, the American Whigs and their allies in Britain objected to that new imperial spending because the money ultimately derived from the new tariffs and went toward enforcing those tariffs.

So what austerity/stimulus does Pincus argue was significant?

TOMORROW: Another of today’s hot-button issues.

Rape as a Cause of the American Revolution?

Earlier this month The National Journal ran a profile of Rep. Todd Akin, now running for the U.S. Senate in Missouri with the on-again/off-again support of the national Republican Party.

Over the summer Akin stated that rape caused a woman’s body to “shut that whole thing down” and prevent conception, with the logical conclusion that there’s little need for “Plan B” birth control or abortion for rape victims. In the national backlash that followed, members of Akin’s own party said that he should drop out of the senate race (while presumably remaining in the House).

The article described this response of Akin’s wife Lulli:

The pressure and attacks clearly reinforced Akin’s sense of mission. For the family of the lawmaker known for dressing in colonial garb at Fourth of July parties, the attacks also increased their identification with Revolutionary America. Lulli Akin said that efforts to push her husband out of the race threaten to replace elections “by the people and for the people” with “tyranny, a top-down approach.” She added, “Party bosses dictating who is allowed to advance through the party and make all the decisions—it’s just like 1776 in that way.”

She cited colonists who “rose up and said, ‘Not in my home, you don’t come and rape my daughters and my…wife. But that is where we are again. There has been a freedom of elections, not tyranny of selections since way back. Why are we going to roll over and let them steamroll us, be it Democrats or Republicans or whomever?” Obama and Mitt Romney “both seem to be embodying” a British monarch, “with all the tactics that they’ve been revealing” toward her husband, Lulli Akin said. “Are they that dissimilar?” she asked. “Are they really dissimilar? They say with their mouths ‘free enterprise’—but, really, how free?”

Asked about comparisons of his plight to revolutionary Americans, Todd Akin called it “a little more grandiose than the way I would say it.”

It does seem audacious for Lulli Akin to invoke “rape” when that was precisely the issue that got her husband in trouble, and then to tie it to “free enterprise” and whether the national party would give money to her husband’s campaign.

But what about Akin’s claim that a threat to “rape my daughters…in my home” was why American colonists “rose up” in the American Revolution? That has no historical basis. In 1768-69 Boston’s Whigs published occasional complaints about soldiers treating women poorly, but those involved theft or disrespect in the street. No soldier was charged with rape. No soldiers were quartered in people’s homes. The long lists of grievances put out by colonists which culminated in the Declaration of Independence mention “Murders” but not rape.

I suspect this belief, which is not Akin’s alone, is an outgrowth of the common misinterpretation of the Quartering Act: that the royal government forced individual householders to host soldiers in peacetime. That didn’t happen. The Quartering Act required colonies to provide barracks and supplies for royal troops. If the enlisted men had been in individual homes instead of barracks, the main result would have been even more desertions.

Rape and sexual abuse have happened in virtually all known wars, and Americans did complain of rape by British troops before the end of 1776. British officers even joked about the topic. There are also allegations of American soldiers raping a Loyalist woman in a 1777 raid on Staten Island.

But those documented complaints came after the war had started and the Continental Congress had voted for independence. They weren’t why the colonists had risen up. Picturing rape as a cause of the American Revolution turns a political dispute into a fictional melodrama and mixes up metaphorical propaganda like the cartoon above with actual events. It blurs the real history, just like seeing both “Obama and Mitt Romney” as George III.

More Wisdom from xkcd

Last November I announced the first Comics Week at Boston 1775, looking at how the medium now given the high-falutin’ term “graphic novels” has treated the American Revolution. Now, a little more than a year later, it’s time for Comics Week again!

We’ll start with xkcd, Randall Munroe’s “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

From the sequence of strips that starts here.

No Tolerance for “Intolerable Acts”

I’ve written a few times on the Quartering Acts, and what Parliament’s laws on housing soldiers really said (as opposed to what many latter-day American authors have claimed). While I did that research, I read several authors saying that American Patriots had listed the Quartering Act of 1774 as one of the “Intolerable Acts” while several others said the Patriots had left it off those lists. I decided to check out the original sources, and here’s what I found.

There were no lists of “Intolerable Acts.” In fact, I couldn’t find the phrase “Intolerable Acts” in any of my digital sources from the pre-Revolutionary period (most of them listed at the left). Boston 1775 readers know I like to point out myths, but this one astonished even me.

Encarta defines “Intolerable Acts” this way:

popular name given by Americans to four laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 in response to the Boston Tea Party.

And that reference site is by no means alone in that definition. Many resources state that in Britain those same laws were referred to as “Coercive Acts” since they were meant to coerce Massachusetts into behaving better.

However, the Early American Newspapers database pops out the first use of the phrase “intolerable act(s)” only in 1808, and then in regard to recent foreign news. The first newspaper story in that database to use “Intolerable Acts“ in connection to the American Revolution was the Kansas City Times on 25 May 1913.

The phrase “intolerable act(s)” doesn’t appear in the George Washington correspondence on the Library of Congress’s American Memory website or the George Washington Papers project at the University of Virginia (except in modern footnotes). The phrase doesn’t appear in John Adams’s diary, autobiography, and correspondence with Abigail Adams available through the Massachusetts Historical Society.

“Intolerable act(s)” doesn’t appear in the Library of Congress’s “Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention” or “A Century of Lawmaking” databases. The phrase doesn’t appear in the documents printed in the massive American Archives, compiled by Peter Force in the early 1800s.

The American Patriots did occasionally use the word “intolerable,” as in the Continental Congress’s resolution on 9 June 1775 authorizing Massachusetts to hold elections for its General Court again. But I’m still looking for the phrase “Intolerable Acts.”

Back in 1810, Robert Bisset’s History of the Reign of George III characterized the Congress’s 1774 “Address to the People of Great Britain” this way:

Their grievances (they said) arose from eleven acts of parliament passed in the present reign; but the most intolerable resulted from the three acts of the last session of parliament, respecting the colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the law for extending the limits of Canada.

However, Congress’s actual address, drafted by John Jay, didn’t use the word “intolerable.”

In 1826, Edward Everett gave an Independence Day speech in Cambridge that described the Patriots this way:

Not only was the independence, for which they struggled, a great and arduous adventure, of which they were to encounter the risk, and others to enjoy the benefits; but the oppressions, which roused them, had assumed, in their day, no worse form than that of a pernicious principle. No intolerable acts of oppression had ground them to the dust. They were not slaves rising in desperation from beneath the agonies of the lash; but free men, snuffing from afar “the tainted gale of tyranny.”

In The American Laborer in 1842, co-published by Horace Greeley, an author complained:

The degrading restrictions imposed upon our industry while British Colonies, were intolerable acts of oppression, and enforced with the utmost rigor by the Parliament of Great Britain.

Those ante-bellum writers used the phrase “intolerable acts” in a general sense. That implies that they didn’t link the phrase to the 1774 coercive measures, and they didn’t expect their audiences to do so.

The earliest example of the phrase “Intolerable Acts” as a label for specific legislation that I’ve found on Google Books appears in A History of the United States for Schools, by Alexander Johnston, with a copyright date of 1885. It lists “The Four Intolerable Acts,” the same four that Bisset had said were most grievous. In 1893, A History of the United States, a rival school textbook by Allen C. Thomas, went further and listed “The Five Intolerable Acts.” (That’s when the Quartering Act of 1774 entered the picture.)

Within a few years, a new orthodoxy appeared in American textbooks and popular histories: whether there were four or five parliamentary bills involved (and books continued to differ), people had called them the “Coercive Acts” in Britain and the “Intolerable Acts” in America. Still, no book quoted a Revolutionary-era source for the second label.

Even the “Coercive Acts” label appears to have been less common than that textbook formulation implies, but at least it’s documented in one very prominent place: George III’s speech to Parliament on 26 Oct 1775.

As for me, unless I hear from someone with a period reference, I’m swearing off any mention of “the Intolerable Acts.” (Not that I liked the phrase to begin with.)

Quartering Act Questions and Evidence

I’ve been pointing out that the British royal authorities didn’t force American colonists to house soldiers in their homes in peacetime under the British 1765 and 1774 Quartering Acts. Some people have asked why, in that case, the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution and the 1791 Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbade the state and federal governments from doing so.

This is a classic “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” stumble (though any argument expressed in Latin would be, ipso facto, “classic”). Just because one event preceded a second doesn’t mean it caused the second. If every statement of rights in our constitutions came out of abuses during the Revolution, then we should look for royal attempts in the 1760s and 1770s to prohibit “the free exercise of religion,” to impose “cruel and unusual punishments,” or to forbid people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The U.S. Bill of Rights includes all those rights as well, after all. We might also want to look for infringements on copyright and patent laws since the Constitution provided for those.

In fact, our guarantees against householders having to billet soldiers in peacetime grew out of a long tradition in British law. In 1776, Delaware put that protection into its founding state documents, and the British army hadn’t yet operated there. Quartering in private homes was a big issue during the English Civil War of the 1600s. There are precedents for this guarantee in English history going back to the London city charter of 1131.

The actual arguments over quartering in 1760s America involved whether communities had to provide resources—food, firewood, buildings—to regiments sent by the London government with no approval from the local legislatures. I’m still looking for any example of a New England family forced under the Quartering Act to house soldiers before the war. If there had been such an example, the Whigs of the time would have complained about the problem at great length and volume, and they didn’t.

What’s more, when we consider that one of the British command’s biggest headaches was enlisted men being enticed to desert, we can understand why they quartered those privates in large barracks. They had to keep those men under watch. Sending small batches of enlisted men into homes where the families were hostile to the royal authorities would have made desertion much easier.

Some Boston families did have military men in their homes before the war, but in every example I’ve seen those men were:

• officers, and thus of a higher social class.
• renting rooms from willing property owners.

Indeed, because army officers were paid in hard cash on a regular basis, they were good tenants, especially in tough economic times—such as when the Boston port was closed.

One famous example is the Newman family of Boston’s North End. According to tradition, twenty-three-year-old Robert Newman had to evade British officers living in his family home when he went out to hang two signal lanterns in the Old North Church (shown above, courtesy of the Freedom Trail Foundation) for Paul Revere in 1775. Had those officers been quartered by force of law on the Newman family?

According to a small book about Robert Newman written by Robert Newman Sheets and published by the Newman Family Society in 1975, the force was economic, not legal: “Hard times had forced the family to rent out rooms.” David Hackett Fischer summed up the family’s situation in Paul Revere’s Ride:

When Robert Newman was two years old, the family’s fortunes were shattered by his father’s death. His mother was forced to convert their handsome home into a boarding house, and Robert was apprenticed to a maker of leather breeches. Like many other families in Boston, the Newman family was hard-pressed in 1775. They earned a few shillings by renting rooms to British officers, whom they disliked and resented. Robert Newman was unable to find work in his trade and could get employment only as a church sexton, a job that he despised.

The Newmans may not have liked the British officers, and their presence certainly made the young sexton’s clandestine departure and return on 18 Apr 1775 harder. But his mother hadn’t been legally compelled by the Quartering Act to host those men any more than he’d been legally compelled to take the job of sexton.

Back to the Myths of the Quartering Act

On 24 Mar 1765, Parliament passed the first Quartering Act, setting out rules for housing its troops in the North American colonies. This law became a political issue in New York and then in Boston during the late 1760s after the army insisted that the local authorities supply provisions and space for its regiments. In 1774, while sending more troops into Boston to enforce strict new post-Tea Party laws, Parliament passed another Quartering Act that amended the first.

As a callow but educated youth, I understood that Parliament’s Quartering Acts, especially that of 1774, forced people to house soldiers in their homes, even during peacetime. Obviously, that would feel oppressive, and would curtail political discussions and organizing, and altogether would be a Bad Thing.

I discarded that position after reading about the actual disputes in colonial Boston and New York, and after reading the texts of the Quartering Acts themselves. Back in March 2007, I wrote a couple of posts on the myth of the Quartering Act and the real disputes. But of course the same books I’d read earlier are still out there, and they leave the same misunderstanding of the laws.

There are also some clear statements available about what the Quartering Acts really said, such as Don R. Gerlach’s article in the New England Quarterly back in 1966:

This [1774] measure has received such varied treatment by historians that perhaps the law and its antecedents are worth closer attention, especially for American historians of the “patriotic school.” Some scholars have correctly reported the content and purpose of the law, and some have avoided errors by the brevity of their remarks. Others have clearly misstated its provisions, and some writers have so phrased their comments as to support the allegation that the act was tyrannical, or they have suggested this by a kind of innuendo.

The chief offense, however, appears to be a failure to report accurately and adequately the content and intent of the law; indeed some writers have boldly stated that it provided an innovation and a despotism that any reader of the measure will find difficult to detect. Still others have suggested how the measure might have operated without duly examining how it actually was executed. . . .

the law does not suggest any intention of forcing troops into private homes. Rather, it outlined the conditions and procedure for billeting royal troops in unoccupied buildings when barracks were not conveniently located and where the soldiers’ presence was required.

David Ammerman’s In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 presents the same arguments, and serves as Wikipedia’s main source on the matter.

And no one has to take those authors’ word for what the laws say. Georgia Tech offers the texts of both the 1765 and 1774 Quartering Acts on its website. Both use the phrase “uninhabited houses, out-houses, barns, or other buildings.” The 1774 law didn’t expand the types of buildings where soldiers could be housed; rather, it spelled out how a military officer and a royally-appointed magistrate could seize uninhabited buildings without seeking approval from local selectmen or legislators. The Patriot movement found that objectionable, of course, but not because individual families suddenly had soldiers sleeping in their homes.

(Today’s thumbnail image shows a march on the House of Commons in 1780, and comes courtesy of the British Parliament.)

People Turned Out of Their Houses

On 16 Nov 1775, winter was approaching, and the British commanders besieged in Boston had to worry about moving their troops out of tents and into buildings, about firewood for warmth and cooking, and about food. Boston selectman Timothy Newell described the situation in his journal, recording every development as another injustice by the Crown:

Many people turned out of their houses for the troops to enter. The keys of our Meeting house cellars demanded of me by Major [William] Sheriff by order of General [William] Howe.

Houses, fences, trees &c. pulled down and carried off for fuel. My wharf and barn pulled down by order of General Robinson [actually Gen. Archibald Robertson of the Corps of Engineers].

Beef, Mutton, Pork at 1/6 pr. pound, Geese 14/ Fowls 6/8 L.M. [lawful money]

This the first time in his diary that Newell described the military forcing Bostonians out of their homes. It isn’t entirely clear whether those people owned those buildings, rented them, and were housed by the town in, say, the almshouse (which the military command had tried to empty). In any event, the army’s move was legal because of the war. Even the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permits Congress to enact laws taking possession of homes for the use of troops in times of war.

I get the sense that the British army actually preferred to house its troops in large buildings, where they would be easier to supervise—hence the demand for the keys to the cellar of Newell’s meeting-house on Brattle Street.

Then comes the matter of firewood, a real crisis for the people left in Boston after coastal vessels had stopped bringing in cordwood. Among the other structures torn down and burned during the siege were Old North Meeting-House, John Hancock’s fence, and George Robert Twelves Hewes’s little shoemaking shop. The army also chopped down Liberty Tree for symbolic reasons, and pulled down the spire of the West Meeting-House so that spies couldn’t use it for signaling. It’s possible that Gen. Robertson had Newell’s wharf and barn removed (as opposed to being converted into a barracks) for similar security reasons. But the wood also certainly went into a fire.

The Real Quarrels over the Quartering Act

Yesterday I wrote about the Quartering Act of 1765 and its 1774 revision, which were among the so-called “Intolerable Acts” that supposedly led up to the Revolution. Since they didn’t require people to house soldiers in their homes, as our modern conception has it, why were those laws so controversial?

There were two major arguments over the Quartering Act in the decade before the Revolutionary War. First, in January 1766, the New York legislature refused to pay for food and supplies for the several regiments stationed in the colony, as that law required. There were more British troops in New York than any other colony, most of them in New York City.

In response, in June 1767, the London government under Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend secured a new law threatening to suspend the New York assembly until it complied with the Quartering Act. New York was among the least unified and confrontational of the colonies, but the legislature held out through two election cycles until 1769. At the end of the year it finally voted to pay £2,000 for food and supplies for the troops.

Meanwhile, another Quartering Act quarrel arose in Boston, where the British government moved four regiments starting on 1 Oct 1768. The mission of those soldiers was to make it easier for the Customs service to collect Townshend’s new duties by discouraging townspeople from rioting. Under the Quartering Act, the province was obliged to supply barracks for those troops.

Fine, said the Whigs; the soldiers can go into the barracks at Castle William. A company of Royal Artillery had spent the winter there a couple of years before, and the Castle was within the town’s legal borders. There was only one problem in regard to the military mission: Castle William was on an island in Boston harbor. (At least it was an island at high tides. Now the site is called “Castle Island,” but it’s attached to the mainland. Go figure.) So the military commanders couldn’t accept those quarters.

Instead, Gov. Francis Bernard wanted to house the troops in a big building next to Boston Common called the Manufactory-House. It had been erected in the 1750s to house spinners and weavers manufacturing linen and wool cloth. That business venture had failed, and the building became property of the province. A family of weavers named Brown lived there, perhaps along with some other families, and they, encouraged by local leaders, refused to leave.

Meanwhile, the troops in town had to be housed somewhere. At first they went into other government buildings, and the Whigs complained in their newspaper dispatches:

We now behold the Representatives’ Chamber [in the Town House], Court-House, and Faneuil-Hall, those seats of freedom and justice occupied with troops, and guards placed at the doors; the Common covered with tents, and alive with soldiers; marching and countermarching to relieve the guards, in short the town is now a perfect garrison.

Then some friends of the royal government rented space to the army, and the Whigs pointed out how two of them were (a) not from around here, and (b) profiting:

Report, that James Murray, Esq; from Scotland, since 1745, had let his dwelling house and sugar houses [actually his sister’s], for the quartering of troops, at £15 sterling per month, and that Mr. Forrest from Ireland had let them a house lately purchased for about £50 sterling, at the rate of £60 sterling per annum.

After hearing about two more regiments on their way from Ireland, Gov. Bernard again demanded use of the Manufactory. On 18 October, the Council—the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature—voted to approve this move. Two days later, Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf and his deputy Joseph Otis led some soldiers into taking part of the building by force. The Whigs tried to portray this action as tyrannical, reporting that Brown had “received several [sword] thrusts in his cloaths.” Newspapers praised the hold-outs, highlighting “children at the windows crying for bread.” Brown sued Greenleaf and Otis in court.

By the end of the month, however, the stand-off was resolved, at least as a practical matter. The regiments left the government buildings and moved into unused warehouses and distillery buildings around town. In fact, one businessman involved in these private transactions was William Molineux, the most radical of the Whig merchants. He had apparently received instructions from Charles Ward Apthorp of New York, whose Boston property he managed, to rent space to the army. And the regiments remained in those quarters until after the Boston Massacre.

Thus, the disputes over the Quartering Act were not between the military and individual families, but between the London government and local governments. The Browns and other families in the Manufactory were briefly displaced by the army, but they were living in a public building, not their own property.

In modern political terms, the Quartering Act of 1765 imposed an “unfunded mandate” on colonial and local governments, requiring them to provide resources for an imperial government initiative that they didn’t want and couldn’t control. The law imposed on the community as a whole. And the Quartering Act of 1774, though it didn’t change where troops could be quartered, did give even more decision power to authorities appointed in London. Colonial leaders had a real quarrel with that.

Myths and Realities of the Quartering Act

Parliament’s Quartering Act has a lousy historical reputation. It was one of the “Intolerable Acts,” according to Patriot politicians in 1774. [Whoops. Actually not.] A lot of us probably imagine that law forcing subjects to host soldiers in their homes. After all, the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution seems to have been written to forestall just such a law:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

At least, that’s what I thought until I looked at the “quartering” conflicts that came up in the years before the Revolution, and at the texts of the Quartering Acts themselves.

Parliament first passed a Quartering Act in 1765. The complete text is on a helpful website at Georgia Tech. It’s a fine example of how legal language may actually have gotten easier to read in the last two and a half centuries. The relevant parts:

An act to amend and render more effectual, in his Majesty’s dominions in America, an act passed in this present session of parliament, intitled, An act for punishing mutiny and desertion, and for the better payment of the army and their quarters

...such constables, tithingmen, magistrates, and other civil officers as aforesaid, are hereby required to quarter and billet the officers and soldiers, in his Majesty’s service, in the barracks provided by the colonies;

and if there shall not be sufficient room in the said barracks for the officers and soldiers, then and in such case only, to quarter and billet the residue of such officers and soldiers, for whom there shall not be room in such barracks, in inns, livery stables, ale-houses, victualling-houses, and the houses of sellers of wine by retail to be drank in their own houses or places thereunto belonging, and all houses of persons selling of rum, brandy, strong water, cyder or metheglin, by retail, to be drank in houses;

and in case there shall not be sufficient room for the officers and soldiers in such barracks, inns, victualling and other publick alehouses, that in such and no other case, and upon no other account, it shall and may be lawful for the governor and council of each respective province in his Majesty’s dominions in America, to authorize and appoint, and they are hereby directed and impowered to authorize and appoint, such proper person or persons as they shall think fit, to take, hire and make fit, and, in default of the said governor and council appointing and authorizing such person or persons, or in default of such person or persons so appointed neglecting or refusing to do their duty, in that case it shall and may be lawful for any two or more of his Majesty’s justices of the peace in or near the said villages, town, townships, cities, districts, and other places, and they are hereby required to take, hire, and make fit for the reception of his Majesty’s forces, such and so many uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns or other buildings, as shall be necessary, to quarter therein the residue of such officers and soldiers for whom there should not be rooms in such barracks and publick houses as aforesaid, and to put and quarter the residue of such officer and soldiers therein.

So the first and most important part of this law required local authorities to “quarter and billet” royal troops “in the barracks provided by the colonies.” Because of the long string of wars with France and the militia system, most large port towns colonies had such barracks. (Why say “quarter and billet” when those two words were synonyms? Legal formulas of the period contain a lot of redundancy: “will and testament,” “have and hold,” “cease and desist,” “breaking and entering,” “aiding and abetting,” &c. Parliament liked to be totally clear and transparent.)

If no such barracks were available, then the law gave local authorities the responsibility to find soldiers accommodations in inns, livery stables, and taverns. The first two types of buildings were already taking in guests and their horses. All the liquor-selling establishments described by the law were licensed by the local authorities, so they were already beholding to the state and receiving the public. They were “public houses,” in the period parlance.

Only after all those possibilities were exhausted, and only after jumping through a set of legal hoops that would take several breaths to describe, did the authorities have the power to requisition “uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns or other buildings.” The law said nothing about inhabited houses.

But what about the Quartering Act of 1774, the one that seemed “Intolerable”? Here is its complete text, which is mercifully shorter. It starts by reaffirming the previous law, and transferring that power to demand barracks to “the officer who, for the time being, has the command of his Majesty’s forces in North America”—i.e., Gen. Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief. Then it adds this provision:

That if it shall happen at any time that any officers or soldiers in his Majesty’s service shall remain within any of the said colonies without quarters, for the space of twenty-four hours after such quarters shall have been demanded, it shall and may be lawful for the governor of the province to order and direct such and so many uninhabited houses, out-houses, barns, or other buildings, as he shall think necessary to be taken, (making a reasonable allowance for the same), and make fit for the reception of such officers and soldiers, and to put and quarter such officers and soldiers therein, for such time as he shall think proper.

Again, this boosts the power of the royal governors—including Gen. Thomas Gage. But again, it’s limited to “uninhabited houses, out-houses, barns, or other buildings.” I haven’t found a single case of the peacetime British army in North America demanding the use of a private home to quarter troops. Instead, as we saw in yesterday’s posting about Boston in late 1774, the army rented buildings, mostly from friends of the royal government.

TOMORROW: So why did colonists object so strongly to the Quartering Act?