Theophilus Lillie: shopkeeper, importer, seeker of liberty

Theophilus Lillie was born in Boston on 18 August 1730, and at the age of twenty-seven married a shopkeeper named Ann Barker. Under the laws of the time, her property became his (in the absence of a prenuptial agreement like those Elizabeth Murray Campbell secured before her second and third marriages). In 1758 Lillie advertised himself as a dry-goods retailer “on Middle Street, near Mr. Pemberton’s meeting-house”—modern Hanover Street in the North End.

Lillie wasn’t known for being politically active, but in late 1769 he took a stand on the most volatile issue of the day: he told Whig merchants and politicians that he would no longer sign onto the “nonimportation” boycott of goods from Britain, that he’d agreed in the first place only because of unfair pressure. In January 1770, Boston’s town meeting responded by condemning Lillie and the other “importers.” Newspapers published their names, as in the clipping shown here, and urged people not to do any business with them.

In the 15 January Boston Chronicle (which supported the royal government, and was supported by it), Lillie responded with one of the strongest statements of the right to resist local crowd pressure, turning the Whigs’ rhetoric about liberty and not being represented in Parliament on its head:

Upon the whole, I cannot help saying—although I have never entered far into the mysteries of government, having applied myself to my shop and my business—that it always seemed strange to me that people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty; that men who are guarding against being subject to laws which they never gave their consent in person or by their representative should at the same time make laws, and in the most effectual manner execute them upon me and others, to which laws I am sure I never gave my consent either in person or by my representative.

But what is still more hard, they are laws made to punish me after I have committed the offence; for when I sent for my goods, I was told nobody would be compelled to subscribe; after they came I was required to store them. This is no degree answered the end of the subscription, which was to distress the manufacturers in England. Now, my storing my goods could never do this; the mischief was done when the goods were bought in England; and it was too late to help it. My storing my goods might be considered, therefore, as punishment for an offence before the law for punishing it was made.

If one set of private subjects may at any time take upon themselves to punish another set of private subjects just when they please, it’s such a sort of government as I never heard of before; and according to my poor notion of government, this is one of the principal things which government is designed to prevent; and I own I had rather be a slave under one master (for I know who he is I may perhaps be able to please him) than a slave to a hundred or more whom I don’t know where to find, nor what they will expect of me.

American Whigs were basically fighting for a collective or community liberty: the power for a colony or town to choose their own laws by a majority vote. Lillie, in contrast, was writing about his individual liberty against that majority and the government they elected.

Naturally, Lillie’s newspaper essay attracted attention to him. In a letter dated 24 January 1770, Crown informant George Mason wrote that on the 16th a large committee of Whigs “waited on Mr. Lillie” to ask whether he intended to comply with most voters’ wishes and stop importing. He answered “that they had already ruined him in his Business and if they now wanted his Life they might take it when they pleas’d.” On 22 February 1770 boys set up their effigies and picket lines outside his shop. (Tomorrow I’ll describe what happened during that first protest.)

Sometime after April 1770, when there was another protest outside his shop, and when the provincial tax lists were compiled the next year, Lillie and his wife closed their shop and moved to Oxford, in Worcester County. When the war began, Lillie and his wife had moved back to Boston, and they evacuated with the British military in March 1776. He died in Halifax that spring. As far as we can tell, Lillie had no children; the only other hint about their household is that Ann Lillie made special bequests in 1791 to a black servant named Caesar.

February 1770: Boston's Boycott Heats Up

As the year 1769 closed, Boston’s Whigs were eager to strengthen their “nonimportation” movement—a boycott on most goods from Britain. Their goal was to pressure British merchants to use their political leverage to make Parliament repeal the Townshend duties.

A handful of merchants and small shopkeepers, most politically aligned with the royal governor, had never signed onto the nonimportation pledge, or wanted to end their participation. In January 1770, Boston’s town meeting voted to declare those businesspeople “Enemies of their Country.” They listed John Bernard and Nathaniel Rogers, both relatives of royal governors; merchants James and Patrick McMasters, printer John Mein, and shopkeepers Ame (Amy) and Elizabeth Cumings, all recent Scottish immigrants; small merchants Theophilus Lillie and John Taylor; brazier William Jackson; Israel Williams of Hatfield; and Henry Barnes of Marlborough.

In early February, some Whigs decided to take the protests straight to the offenders’ doors. An informant reporting to the Customs office wrote this report dated 8 Feb 1770, which is now at Harvard’s Houghton Library:

about 10 oClock in the forenoon, a board was stuck up, on the Town pump, with a Hand painted on it, pointing to Mr. Jacksons Shop and below, the word Importer, in Large Letters.—

this affair drew the attention of the boys, and Country people, who flock’d about it, in great numbers; the Boys insulting Every body who went in, or out of the Shop, by Hissing and pelting them with Dirt.—

The informant later added, “thursday is the principal market day, and also on that day all the schools are Vacant.” Town schools had only a short morning session on Thursdays, letting out about ten o’clock so the boys could attend a public lecture, a sort of extra sermon for the week; Harry Otis recalled that no boys ever did. Thursdays were also a day when rural farmers brought goods into town and bought their supplies, so it was a good day for a public protest.

Why did the crowd focus first on William Jackson? Why did someone print special handbills about not doing business with him (shown above)? Jackson’s shop was a landmark close to the Town House in the center of town, with the well-known sign of a “brazen head.” I also wonder how popular he had been in Boston since his earlier shop was the source of a fire that burned a big swath of the town in 1760.

The report continued:

Jackson made several attempts to take it Down, but was Repulsed by a Number of Idle people, who were standing by, with Clubs and Sticks in their Hands, however about one oClock it was taken away, by those who put it up, and the Crow’d dispersed first taking care to bespatter, all Jacksons windows over, with mudd and dirt—

During this Exhibition a Number of considerable Merchants Stood at a Little distance, and seemed highly pleased with what was going on, and Mr. M[olineu]x took Care to distinguish himself in a particular manner—

William Molineux was among the most important of Boston’s Whigs at this time, and probably the most paradoxical. He was a merchant deep in business with Crown supporters, a native Englishman, and an Anglican (at least formally—some critics said that he was a deist). Men with those qualities were more likely to side with the Crown than with the Whigs. Yet Molineux not only opposed the royal governor, but he became one of the most radical Whigs, a gentleman leading crowds in the streets or, as in this case, looking on with approval.

It’s unclear who instigated this first protest, but by the following Thursday the boys themselves were taking the initiative. They produced the sort of insulting effigies they were used to carting about on Pope Night. On 15 February, the Crown informant reported:

Between the 8th & this date, most of the Importers had their Windows broke their Signs defaced, and many other marks of Resentment— . . .

The Exhibition the same as last week with addition of the Effegies of some of the Importers, and below was wrote, that the Effegies of four [Customs] Commissioners, five of their understrappers, with some people on the other side the water [i.e., in Britain] where [sic—were] to make their appearance on Liberty Tree the week following—

four soldiers of the 14th. Regt. attempted to take it down, but where bear of [i.e., were borne off] and one of them much Hurt.

This political conflict was turning violent, and the army was unofficially being drawn in.

Oliver M. Dickerson and Where the Money Went

This morning the New York Times reported that the Bush-Cheney administration plans to ask for $121 billion for the U.S. Army in fiscal year 2008, rather than the $138 billion the Army sought. (Last year’s budget was $112 billion.) However, the same story also said the administration was expanding “what costs can be included in so-called supplemental spending bills,” which until recently were emergency measures only. Such bills are still kept out of the normal budgeting process and not counted as part of the U.S. government’s deficit. So we really don’t know what the administration's Army funding plans are, or where the money's coming from.

Earlier in the week, the newspaper broke the story that the commission of the I.R.S. told staff in Louisiana and Mississippi that “He prefers that we do not resume any enforcement actions until after Dec. 31 due to the upcoming elections, holiday season, etc.” The paper noted, “four former I.R.S. commissioners, who served under presidents of both parties, said that [easing off tax collections] because of an election was improper and indefensible.”

All of which put me in mind of an article I read about tricky government budgeting and revenue-collecting during the pre-Revolutionary period. The article is Oliver M. Dickerson’s “Use Made of the Revenue from the Tax on Tea,” which appeared in the New England Quarterly in 1958.

I find Dickerson's work hard to evaluate. On the one hand, he probably spent more time studying the U.K. Treasury Office papers about the North American Customs office than anyone else. He published several other provocative articles and the book The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution based on that research.

On the other hand, Dickerson was almost hostile to the British government of the 1760s-70s, and his theories leaned toward the conspiratorial. He presented the Customs establishment as a corrupt “racket,” and even took seriously Bostonians' flimsy accusations that its personnel had participated in the Massacre of 1770.

So Dickerson’s articles offer lots of fascinating information about how the British colonial administration worked—subsidizing friendly newspaper printers, for instance—but then the last couple of pages make me feel like I’ve been steered off a cliff. That leaves me less confident about all that interesting information that came before.

For instance, the article I cited above says that after the Townshend Act of 1767, which put new duties on tea, glass, lead, paper, and painter's colors shipped to North America, “Total collections on articles other than tea were so unimportant that they were repealed in 1770.” Dickerson had access to these numbers. But is his interpretation reliable? Or was he putting the worst possible spin on the British government's choice to repeal all but the tea tax?

Dickerson does seem to have the goods on where the Townshend Act revenue actually paid for. It was widely said in 1767, and often since, that the British government imposed those new duties in order to pay for the Seven Years’ War and the costs of defending the colonies. Dickerson argued that that's not where the money went. He wrote:

Under previous acts all revenue arising from parliamentary taxation applicable to the colonies was collected by the Customs Commissioners in London, and paid into the Treasury to be expended by Parliament for the defense of the colonies. The Townshend Revenue Act…set up the innovation that revenue arising under this act should first be used “to make a more certain and adequate provision for the charge of the administration of justice and the support of civil government in such of the colonies as it shall be found necessary.” . . .

The net effect was to impose the vast charges incident to the operation of the new system upon the receipts from the Navigation and Sugar acts and to open the entire American revenue to the political patronage system.

Thus, the older Navigation and Sugar Acts revenues were tapped to pay for an expanded Customs bureaucracy, leaving less for London to put toward defense. The new Townshend Act revenues instead covered the salary of certain royal appointees:

Four classes of colonial officials were selected as coming under the provisions of the act. These were governors, lieutenant governors, attorneys general, and chief justices, and other provincial judges. In addition some of the admiralty judges were paid all or part of their salaries in the same way, apparently without color of law. Payments were limited to officers in the three provinces of Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson (shown above) received £1,500 a year after 1771, for example; the governors of New York £2,000.

Previously, the colonies’ legislatures had set and paid those governors’ salaries. We might assume that locals were happy to be relieved of that cost. In fact, being able to limit and delay salaries for royal appointees was the only leverage that the legislature, and thus the people, had over those men. They couldn’t be voted out of office, after all. By providing governors, judges, and other officials with salaries, the London government both gave them a personal interest in seeing Customs laws enforced and insulated them from local opposition.

Furthermore, when Dickerson totaled up all the salaries and other expenses drawn from the Townshend Act revenues, he came out with £36,200. But he found the total revenue collected was £33,155. The difference, he wrote, was made up from the older duties. So the new system was actually draining away money that had previously gone in part to colonial defense, and putting it toward more salaries for Customs officers and other royal appointees.

At least, that's what Dickerson found. Now I don't particularly feel like spending decades rooting through Treasury Office files at the U.K.'s National Archives to confirm his numbers. But I don't want to dismiss them out of hand, either. It's always worth thinking about how the government's collecting money and where it's really going.

Henry Hulton Meets the Locals

Henry Hulton was an English bureaucrat who arrived in Boston as one of the new Commissioners of Customs in 1767, responsible for collecting the Townshend duties. He happened to debark on 5 November, known in Boston as "Pope-Night" because of the raucous anti-Catholic processions that consumed the day and night. Lord George Sackville (later Germain, and minister in charge of the colonies during the Revolutionary War) recorded this secondhand description of the Commissioners' reception:

They landed on the 5th of November, and the populace were then carrying in procession the Pope, the Devil, and the Pretender, in order to commit them to the flames in honour of Protestantism. . . . these figures met the Commissioners at the water side and were carry’d before them without any insult through the streets, and whenever they stopped to salute an acquaintance, the figures halted and faced about till the salutation was over, and so accompany’d them to the Governor Hutchinson’s door, where the Devil, &c. took their leave with loud huzzas from the mob...

That quote is from a letter printed in the 49th volume from the UK's Historic Manuscripts Commission. I quoted a bit more in my essay on Pope-Night in the Dublin Seminar's Worlds of Children volume.

According to Hulton's sister Ann, whose reports were published in 1927 as Letters of a Loyalist Lady, "the Mob carried twenty Devils, Popes, & Pretenders, thro the Streets, with Labels on their breasts, Liberty & Property & no Commissioners," but Commissioner Hulton "laughed at 'em with the rest."

Hulton became less pleased with the locals' attitudes as time went on. This is from a letter he wrote in February 1770, now kept at the Houghton Library at Harvard:

The servant will not call the person he lives with, Master; and they have the utmost aversion to wearing anything in the shape of a livery, or performing any office of attendance on your person, or table; We have however a Coachman, who had the fortitude to drive us in spite of the ridicule of his Countrymen, who point & look at him, with contempt, as he passes by.

The people are very inquisitive, and what we should call impertinent; they never give one a direct answer, but commonly return your question, by another; and if you fall in with them on the road, or at a public house, they will directly inquire of you, who and what you are and what is your business.

One day I overtook a country man on the road; and after saying something to him about the weather, he began, Are you from Boston? what is the news? Are you a Merchant? me hap you are going into the Country to get in your debts? Can you lend a body a hundred or two of pounds? no. you can if you would.