43. Rhode Island Joins Nonimportation

One by one the other colonies joined in the boycott movement. The grand jury and then all the freeholders of New Castle County in Delaware followed Philadelphia’s lead, at the end of August 1769. In New Jersey the Assembly, in mid-October, passed a vote of thanks to the noble conduct of the merchants and traders of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania for stopping the importing of British goods. Mass meetings in Essex County and at New Brunswick pledged nonimportation and a boycott of all nonsigners and violators. Connecticut merchants heeded the appeals of their fellow merchants from the large port cities. The merchants in New Haven agreed in mid-July 1769 to purchase no British goods, except for certain commodities excluded in the Boston and New York agreements. Violators were to be boycotted as “enemies of their country.” Merchants at Groton and New London followed suit in August. The farm-dominated Connecticut House, in mid-October, gave its enthusiastic approval of the nonimport agreements. The boycott was joined by the towns of Wethersfield and Norwich at the end of the year. Merchants and some other citizens from all over Connecticut met in late February 1770 and drew up a uniform agreement for the entire colony. Violators were to be boycotted whether they were individual merchants or entire provinces.

Two continuing recalcitrants were Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Of these Rhode Island, a leading mercantile center, was by far the more important. Rhode Island’s merchants took the golden opportunity to reap trade while their fellows were renouncing profits in behalf of principle. Thus, Rhode Island imports of British goods grew during 1769, and much new trade in these goods was conducted in western Massachusetts. Providence merchants and its town meeting, it is true, extended an old but loose nonimportation agreement. Newport merchants, however, were far more stubborn. Severe pressure descended upon Newport from the other colonies: the Philadelphia Merchants Committee threatened to sever commercial relations; Boston shut off all trade with Newport; and Charleston was preparing to enter the fray. Even a nonimportation agreement drawn up by Newport merchants, at the end of October 1769, proved unsatisfactorily lax, and Philadelphia and New York merchants proceeded to boycott Newport. Finally, in late January 1770, Newporters surrendered and agreed to a strong nonimportation agreement.

By no means all Rhode Islanders, it should be noted, lagged behind in the resistance movement. As early as September 1767, an article in the Providence Gazette spoke eloquently of the natural rights of mankind, declaring it a self-evident truth that all were by nature equal in rights. The obligation to obey man-made laws rested on the consent of men. Therefore, it concluded, Parliament not only had no right to tax unrepresented Americans; it had no right to regulate them either. Leader of these logical advances in libertarian thought in Rhode Island was Silas Downer, a lawyer and a leader of the Sons of Liberty of Providence. In a speech to the Sons at the Providence Liberty Tree in July 1768, Downer, while admitting allegiance to George III, denied the right of Parliament to make “any laws whatsoever to bind us....” He went on to apply this principle, denouncing royal post office charges in America as a tax and therefore illegal. Moreover, Downer attacked the British laws of trade and manufacturing as violations of the natural rights of men.

At least one Rhode Island writer trenchantly called for extending the libertarian doctrine to one group often neglected by the Americans: Negro slaves. If the cry for liberty is sincere, why is not the principle extended to the Negro slaves at home, the writer challenged? The only way to prevent enslavement from abroad, he declared, was to end “that hellish practice of... enslaving another part of the human species,” for Negroes were surely Sons of Liberty, too.

New Hampshire’s failure to join the resistance had a simpler and far different cause. An agricultural province lacking a large trading town, this small royal colony was a virtual fief under the thumb of the Wentworth family. As merchants, landowners, and top executive officials in the province, this family, uniting formidable political and economic power, was able to dominate the affairs of New Hampshire for decades. At the apex of this cozy pyramid was Sir John Wentworth, the royal governor and the surveyor of the King’s Woods for all the colonies. Wentworth astutely named numerous new towns and counties in New Hampshire after his friends at the British court—for example, Rockingham, Grafton, and Hillsborough counties—and founded in 1770 a new college that he named after his friend the Earl of Dartmouth. Also in 1770, eight of the nine members of the appointed Council of New Hampshire, as well as a judge and a clerk of the superior court, were members of Governor Wentworth’s family. In this situation, no nonimport association could be formed in New Hampshire.