The Triumph of the Suffolk Resolves

Aside from rhetoric, the Suffolk County resolutions of 9 Sept 1774 differ from the Middlesex County resolutions of 31 August in some significant ways.

The Suffolk convention included the Quebec Act among its complaints:

the late act of parliament for establishing the Roman Catholic religion and the French laws in that extensive country, now called Canada, is dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America.

In Philadelphia Samuel Adams was taking steps to dispel his image as a religious zealot, but it was still quite acceptable to be anti-Catholic. Indeed, fighting “popery” was an element of British patriotism.

New grievances arose in just the few days between the two conventions. The Suffolk Resolves complained about how “it has been recommended to take away all commissions from the officers of the militia”—a suggestion from William Brattle that became public on 1 September. Also about “the fortifications begun and now carrying on upon Boston Neck”—Gen. Thomas Gage’s response to the militia mobilization on 2 September.

The Middlesex convention urged people not to cooperate with the court system under the Massachusetts Government Act. The Suffolk convention went further to endorse non-consumption of goods from Britain, as the Solemn League and Covenant promoted:

That until our rights are fully restored to us, we will, to the utmost of our power, and we recommend the same to the other counties, to withhold all commercial intercourse with Great-Britain, Ireland, and the West-Indies, and abstain from the consumption of British merchandise and manufactures, and especially of East-Indies, and piece goods, with such additions, alterations, and exceptions only, as the General Congress of the colonies may agree to.

Probably the most important difference between the Suffolk Resolves and the output of all the other Massachusetts county conventions, before and after, was the connection with that “General Congress,” or First Continental Congress.

The Massachusetts delegates to the Congress presented the Middlesex Resolves to the Congress on 14 September. The Congress’s bare-bones record says simply that they “were read.”

Dr. Joseph Warren, the man who drafted the Suffolk resolutions, had Paul Revere carry a copy to the Massachusetts delegates in Philadelphia. Revere left Boston on 11 September and arrived on the 16th, also bringing more solid news about the state of the province after the “Powder Alarm.”

On 17 September, the Congress heard the Suffolk Resolves and then unanimously voted to endorse them. Rumors of British military action had alarmed delegates the week before. They could have criticized the Massachusetts Patriots for overreacting and heightening the tension further. But instead in this resolution they praised the province’s “firm and temperate conduct.”

The Congress had the entire text of the Suffolk Resolves and the Suffolk convention’s message to Gov. Gage entered into its records, and had secretary Charles Thomson send the text to the Pennsylvania Packet to the reprinted.

John Adams called the 17th “one of the happiest Days of my Life.” Thomas Cushing wrote home to Dr. Warren:

They highly applaud the wise, temperate and spirited Conduct of our People. . . . These Resolves will, we trust, support and comfort our Friends, and confound our Enemies.

Warren in turn had that letter printed in the 26 September Boston Gazette. The message was clear: This Congress was adopting Massachusetts’s cause.

McConville on the Quebec Act at 250, 27 June

Years back, I decided to look into the burning question of whether the Quebec Act of 1774 was one of what American Patriots called the “Intolerable Acts.”

That law wasn’t, after all, directed at Massachusetts, even if the Suffolk Resolves treated the acceptance of Roman Catholicism in a population hundreds of miles away as a serious affront and threat.

The result was discovering that the American Patriots of 1774 didn’t call anything the “Intolerable Acts.” As I wrote in this article, that label surfaced in U.S. history textbooks in the late nineteenth century and was then retroactively embedded in the past.

Nonetheless, the Quebec Act was one of the significant pieces of legislation to come out of Lord North’s government. Years in the making, that law incorporated a large formerly French territory into the British Empire. His Majesty’s government accepted the civil code and religion established under the former regime. The law even expanded the province to include the lands between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

On 27 June, the Congregational Library and Archives will host “The Quebec Act at 250,” an online discussion with Prof. Brendan McConville exploring the significance of how the francophone province was folded into the British North American colonies—and why it made Congregationalists so profoundly uncomfortable.

McConville is Professor of History at Boston University and Director of the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society. He’s the author of These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776, and The Brethren: A Story of Faith and Conspiracy in Revolutionary America. He’s always offering provocative ways to look at the American Revolution.

This online event is scheduled to start at 1:00 P.M. It is free. To register and receive the link for that session, go to this page.

“Their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep”

Lisa Ford’s The King's Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire was published last year by Harvard University Press. It looks at changes in how the British government sought to keep the peace in its empire by changing its fundamental rules.

Ford built the book around five case studies, starting in the province of Massachusetts and then moving on to Canada, Jamaica, Bengal, and New South Wales.

In a review for H-Net (P.D.F. download), Dana Rabin writes:

Boston’s Liberty Riot in 1768 illustrates the disorders faced by agents of empire in the run up to the American Revolution. Riot and threats of violence from white colonists revealed the weakness of the Crown and the powerlessness of the king’s agents to enforce the peace. Residents of Massachusetts justified their intimidation and threats of violence with their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep but rather that of white, Protestant men in the name of the people. Ford calls this “the end of empire.”

The book proceeds to reconstruct what Ford considers the ramifications of the American Revolution to the legal history of empire, attributing to Parliament and British colonial officials a new resolve to buttress the king’s power and prerogative against similar future threats. In the period after the American Revolution, the Crown accrued great powers by Acts of Parliament that increased the power of governors and decreased the power of legislative bodies or eliminated them entirely. Judges appointed by the Crown and supervised from London enhanced Crown control over colonial legal systems. The Crown’s expanded power was often framed as a duty to protect.

The focus of chapter 2 is Quebec where white Protestant men again resisted the military rule installed upon British victory in the city in 1759. British Protestant merchants resented any limits to their participation in the fur trade and objected to any concession of rights to French Catholics. Ford argues that in response to their ungovernability and Catholic vulnerability, the Quebec Act of 1774 created a Crown colony in Quebec, granting the governor expanded powers to rule without a legislative body. Even after the creation of the elected assemblies of Upper and Lower Canada in 1791, legislation was subject to the approval of an appointed upper house and gubernatorial veto.

Starting in the 1760s, Massachusetts Whigs feared that Parliament wanted to take more control over the colony. British leaders felt that Massachusetts was trying to operate outside of legal bounds. With each new law, the Whigs felt their warnings were vindicated. With each new resolution or riot protesting a new law, London administrators felt their wish for stronger authority was vindicated. The result was a spiral of resentment and suspicion that no one could resolve.

Old Subjects vs. New Subjects in Canada

From Mark R. Anderson’s article on Borealia, I learned that the population of Canada in 1775 was divided between “new subjects” and “old subjects.”

Confusingly, the “new subjects” were the French inhabitants who had lived in the province the longest, starting before the British won it in the Seven Years’ War. They were newly subject to the rule of George III.

The “old subjects” were the new Canadians, people of British descent who had come to the province from other parts of the British Empire in hopes of enjoying commercial and political privileges.

The Quebec Act of 1774 granted the “new subjects” more political and especially religious authority than the “old subjects” had hoped the francophones would have, simply on the basis of being more numerous and experienced in the province.

That law prompted protests in New England, such as the Suffolk Resolves, but also protests in Montréal, as Anderson describes:

On the morning of May 1, 1775, the very day that the historic Quebec Act entered effect, Montrealers discovered this shocking vandalism to King George III’s marble bust, prominently displayed near Notre Dame church on the central Place d’Armes. . . .

There is evidence that the king’s bust represented more than just British rule over Canada, serving as a symbol of elite French Canadians’ embrace of the new imperial regime, too. . . . Thus, the May 1, 1775 bust defacement would presumably have been taken as an affront to the Canadien leadership class—those who benefitted most tangibly from the Quebec Act, including access to high provincial office in the appointive legislative council.

On May 2, the day after Montrealers discovered the vandalism, a crowd gathered on the Place d’Armes, awaiting a reward announcement. Two men began quarreling. Newly appointed legislative councillor Chevalier François-Marie Picoté de Belestre and merchant David Salisbury Franks raised voices, exchanged insults, and then resorted to blows. Another scuffle promptly ensued when upcountry fur trader Ezekiel Solomons struck affluent shopkeeper Charles Laferte Lepailleur for making an offensive statement.

Read the rest of “The Quebec Act, Two Fights, and Relative Subjecthood” here.

British Political Cartoons of Boston Under Attack

Above is a political cartoon from the Boston Public Library’s online collection.

It’s titled “Virtual Representation,” and I haven’t seen it reproduced like other Revolutionary political art. One factor is that it’s been colored, making it harder for printers to copy. The British Museum has an uncolored print that might be easier to read.

In her 1935 Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum, M. Dorothy George wrote:

This contrast is an attack on the Quebec Act and on the punitive measures taken against Massachusetts for the Boston tea-party. The attack on the Quebec Act as the establishment of Roman Catholicism in Canada is further stressed by the figures of the monk and of France…

The words of Bute and the action of the Speaker indicate that America was being taxed for the benefit of England, while the title derides the theory that the colonists, like Englishmen without the franchise, were “virtually represented” in the House of Commons.

George guessed that the same artist produced the cartoon called “The Scotch Butchery.” I think that artwork shows more professional training in the posing of the human figures, the rendering of the sky, and the like.

Nevertheless, the two cartoons share a number of features. The principal villain of both is the Earl of Bute, prime minister in the early 1760s and tutor of the future King George III before that. Bute had been out of power and retired from politics for over a decade when these cartoons were published. Nonetheless, he was still a convenient villain for British Whigs because he was a Scotsman, easily depicted in a tartan and kilt.

Another common element is the destruction of Boston. In “Virtual Representation” the town is in flames while Catholic Québec enjoys royal protection. In “The Scotch Butchery,” Bute and others preside as “The English Fleet with Scotch Commanders” bombards the town.

“Virtual Representation” was published in early April 1775, before the war began and well before anyone in London heard about the fighting. The exact date of “The Scotch Butchery” is less clear, but neither cartoon appears to have been inspired by specific actual events. Instead, these incendiary images were created to rile up America’s supporters in Britain, showing the worst that could happen as if it already had.

Reviews of American Revolutions

Probably the biggest Revolutionary War book out this year, in terms of its scope and the professional status of its author, is Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. Here are extracts from four reviews I’ve seen.

Matthew Price in the Boston Globe:

Stretching from Nova Scotia to New Orleans, Taylor’s account proceeds chronologically through a series of themed chapters (“Colonies,” “Partisans,” “Slaves,” and so on) showcasing the author’s mastery of the period. He has synthesized work old and new, especially scholarship from the last 30 years that reflects his interest in Native American history and the role of slaves and women in the period. . . .

The last third of Taylor’s book details the political maneuvering that followed the peace settlements of 1783. There was little unanimity in what course to follow, and the new nation’s leaders were bedeviled by the same problems that proved unmanageable to British authorities. For one, to pay off war debts, they had to enforce higher taxes. (Loyalists, the so-called losers of the war, enjoyed lighter taxes in Canada, where the British instituted reforms to show up the upstart republic to the south. There is a suggestion throughout that the empire, typically caricatured as tyrannical, was more enlightened than its rebel offspring.)

Eric Herschthal at Slate:

As long ago as the Progressive era, historians argued that the Founding Fathers’ war against Britain was waged not for lofty democratic ideals but rather to suit their own material interests. In recent decades, academic historians have exposed the critical role women, blacks, and Native Americans played in the War of Independence, as well as the larger imperial struggles of which the Revolution was just a bit part. In American Revolutions Taylor synthesizes this more recent scholarship but astutely combines it with the Progressive-era argument about the way the Founding Fathers manipulated populist anger to their own ends. Written with remarkable clarity and finesse, this will be the gold standard by which all future histories of the period will be compared. . . .

Taylor rightly underscores that slavery—its protection and extension—was a central fact of the Revolution and its aftermath. But he tends to downplay the simultaneous restructuring of black life that happened in the war’s wake. As he notes, enslaved blacks in the North, often with the help of white allies, petitioned their new state governments to ban slavery. Elizabeth Freeman, enslaved in Massachusetts, used the new state constitution’s language, which stated that “All men are born free and equal,” to sue for and win her freedom in 1781. Her victory set the precedent that abolished slavery in Massachusetts, and by the end of the century, all the Northern states would abolish slavery. In focusing on the contradictions, indeed the hypocrisies, of the white Patriot elite, Taylor inadvertently overshadows this quieter revolution in freedom that that was growing up alongside it. The truth is that when we talk about liberty and equality for all today, we mean it in the way these black founders meant it, not the Patriot elite. It is a point worth emphasizing.

Brendan Simms in the Wall Street Journal:

Britain’s attempt to tax the North American settlers without their consent did indeed play a major role in the rise of a revolutionary spirit, but so did the western question, too often overlooked in its full significance. Building on recent work by historians such as François Furstenberg and Paul Mapp, Mr. Taylor places the 13 colonies within a “continental” context, in which the French most of all—but also the Spanish, the Russians (briefly) and of course Native American tribes—battled with British colonists for supremacy in the vast territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. . . .

What infuriated the settlers, as much as London’s proposed taxes, was the British government’s determination not to provoke the French and Spanish or the Indians. The policy was encapsulated in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade the colonists to move beyond the Appalachians. The British settlers perceived that some of the money extracted from them by the crown would be used to enforce this line of demarcation.

Insult was added to injury when London tried to appease the Catholic French-speaking colonists of Canada by awarding them considerable autonomy through the Quebec Act of 1774. This law horrified the colonists not only because it promoted the toleration of Roman Catholicism (inherently tyrannical, in their view) but also because it awarded a vast tranche of the western lands to the province of Quebec. In effect, though Mr. Taylor does not quite put it this way, the colonists were threatened by ideological and geopolitical encirclement. Mr. Taylor rightly speaks of the revolution having “western roots”: The imperial crisis was a product of “western land as well as eastern taxes.”

The 1763 Proclamation was not a big issue here in New England because New York (and, for Connecticut, northern Pennsylvania) already claimed the land to the west. But the Quebec Act was a very big deal, given the region’s fundamental anti-Catholicism. Which makes the pivot to the French alliance all the more striking.

Gordon Wood in the New York Times Book Review:

In a prodigious display of historical research, Taylor has drawn on nearly a thousand books and articles, listed in his 55-page bibliography. Because he has expanded the chronology of the Revolution into the 19th century and has included so much beyond the well-known headline events, he has some difficulty fitting everything in. He often packs so many incidents into each paragraph, with actions succeeding and crowding in upon one another, that there is no space to expand and develop any one of them. Consequently, they tend to get bunched up and leveled, and the narrative often comes to seem unusually compressed and flattened.

Insofar as anything is highlighted in Taylor’s narrative, it is the many Patriot hypocrisies and contradictions. Southerners, Taylor suggests, engaged in the Revolution principally to protect their property in enslaved Africans, but “implausibly blamed the persistence of slavery on the British.” The Patriots’ talk of liberty was very limited. They “defended freedom for white men while asserting their domination over enslaved blacks.” Occasionally the Patriots were not very patriotic. Following the surrender of the American forces trying to take Quebec in 1775, “a quarter of the captured Patriots switched sides to enlist with the British.”

Sometimes Taylor’s emphasis on irony and contradiction slips into anachronism. Because the colonial legislatures denied women, free blacks and propertyless white males the vote, he concludes that “colonial America was a poor place to look for democracy.” But where in the 18th century was there a better place to look for democracy? Despite restrictions on the suffrage, the colonies still possessed the most democratic governments in the world at that time.

But isn’t the question whether the state and national governments that followed the American Revolution were more democratic? Or were they just better designed to serve the “ordinary white men” whose “bad behavior” Wood says Taylor emphasizes?

The Revolutions of Sir Robert Smyth

In 1774, Thomas Paine emigrated to Pennsylvania with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin and a fervent wish to help the American colonists resist the royal government.

That same year, Sir Robert Smyth (1744-1802) was first elected to Parliament, representing the boroughs of Cardigan. Sir Robert had inherited a baronetcy (a hereditary knighthood), but we all remember that knights and baronets are technically commoners and therefore eligible for election to the House of Commons, right?

In Parliament, Smyth “generally voted with the court,” or the Tory government, according to Horace Walpole. He supported Lord North’s American policy, speaking in favor of the Quebec Act and delivering “a reply to [opposition member Edmund] Burke…laughing at his metaphors.” His opponent challenged the results of Smyth’s election, however, and he lost his seat at the end of 1775.

In 1780, Sir Robert returned to Parliament as the member from Colchester, a seat he held for ten years. He had shifted from voting with Lord North to being a strong opponent of him and the American war. Smyth instead appears to have aligned himself with the younger William Pitt.

As shown above, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted Smyth’s wife Charlotte and children in 1787, a portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum. The children were:

• Louisa, born 1782, according to Debrett’s Baronetage.
• Charlotte, born 1783.
• George-Henry, born 1784, and heir to the baronetcy, which is why he gets the top position among the children and all the attention.

In 1790 Smyth stepped away from Parliament. He moved even further to the left and moved his family to Paris, going into business there. Smyth was part of a small community of British gentlemen who were big fans of the French Revolution.

Another of those men was Thomas Paine. He’d left the U.S. of A. in 1787 with big plans for building an iron bridge in England, but then got inspired by the events in France. When Burke criticized the French Revolution, Paine replied with his Rights of Man, moving back and forth between London and Paris as British government agents threatened him. On one of those trips, Lafayette entrusted Paine with the key to the Bastille, which the marquis wanted to go to George Washington.

In 1792, Paine moved to France one step ahead of an indictment for seditious libel. Britain convicted him in absentia while France elected him to four seats in its new National Convention—even though at the time he didn’t speak French.

The Convention was the legislative successor to the Assembly, part of the French constitutional monarchy that fell apart in late 1792. The country was then at war with Austria and Prussia. Louis XVI was arrested. Lafayette fled the country. In September the Convention declared France to be a republic.

On 18 Nov 1792, according to a story that appeared in London newspapers, “the English arrived in Paris [i.e., the British expatriate community] assembled at White’s Hotel, to celebrate the triumph of victories gained over their late invaders by the armies of France.” Paine was staying in that mansion, also known as the Hotel d’Angleterre, and attended the dinner.

The other diners included Sir Robert Smyth and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, younger son of an Irish duke and a former British army officer who had been wounded at Eutaw Springs, South Carolina. The newspaper report credited them with a couple of actions:

Among several toasts proposed by the citizens, Sir R. Smith and Lord E. Fitzgerald, was the following: “May the patriotic airs of the German Legion (Ça ira, the Carmagnole, Marseillaise March, etc.) soon become the favourite music of every army, and may the soldier and the citizen join in the chorus.” . . .

Sir Robert Smith and Lord E. Fitzgerald renounced their titles; and a toast proposed by the former was drank:—“The speedy abolition of all hereditary titles and feudal distinctions.”

Thus, the baronet Sir Robert Smyth was now, he declared, simply Citizen Smyth.

TOMORROW: Imprisonment, flirtation, and young Charles Este.