52. The Uneasy Lull, 1770-1772

While North Carolina was going through bloody internal conflict, the rest of the colonies had settled into uneasy stability with regard to Great Britain. The lull came with the repeal of the Townshend duties and the collapse of nonimportation in late 1770. But Boston and Massachusetts still served as the focal point of trouble and dispute. Massachusetts continued feeling restive over talk in England of such drastic changes as substituting a royally appointed Council for an elected one, and abolishing the Massachusetts town meeting. The stationing of British instead of provincial troops at Castle William, coupled with the British navy in Boston harbor, was seen as a harbinger of such an unwanted change.

Another feared change was that the British themselves would pay the salaries of American officials, thereby putting the latter beyond the control of colonial assemblies. This would lead to stricter enforcement of the trade and revenue laws. The first step in this crucial change was the decision of Britain in early 1771 to pay the full salary of Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts. Hutchinson was of course jubilant over this development and over the stationing of the military in the harbor, but Sam Adams perceived that the governor was now independent of popular check or control.

There is no question that the grip of the radical-liberals on the people of Massachusetts declined considerably during this lull, this period of “sullen silence” (as Adams put it), and Adams could not succeed in rousing the people against the Hutchinson salary. But despite hints of defection by John Hancock and others, the liberal party held together in the 1771 elections, and the House strongly denounced the Hutchinson salary payment.

The Tories of course tried their best to exploit this period of quiescence by splitting and weakening the liberals. The opposition to Britain, they thundered, was trying to lead the colonists into a “state of anarchy” under the name of “liberty.” The grand old colony of the Puritans, the Tories warned, was now permitting itself to be misled by such “virulent opposers of our holy RELIGION” as Dr. Thomas Young and William Molineux, leading rationalists and deists. Sam Adams, a devout Congregationalist and an advocate of old Puritan virtues, could not be baited for his supposed atheism. Unassailable on this charge, he sprang to the defense of Dr. Young. Young, Adams reminded his readers, was an “unwearied asserter of the rights of his countrymen,” a man who should be judged rather by his political than by his religious views. Of course, the man most hated by the Tories was Sam Adams, and Hutchinson charged that the “incendiary” Adams “wishes the destruction of every Friend to Government in America.”

The crowning effort by Hutchinson and the Tories to crush the radicals during the lull period took place in the Massachusetts elections in 1772. A concerted effort to defeat Sam Adams failed, but it did succeed in reducing his vote to thirty percent below that of his colleagues, Thomas Cushing and John Hancock. And of these, Cushing had always been a conservative opportunist, and John Hancock was seriously flirting with desertion of the liberal cause. Hancock, indeed, had shifted toward a relatively neutral position. Furthermore, James Otis, in moments of sanity, drifted in the conservative direction; John Adams withdrew to the quiet of private life; a disheartened Dr. Thomas Young left Massachusetts for North Carolina; and another of Sam Adams’ leading followers, Dr. Benjamin Church, secretly sold out his colleagues and attacked his own Whig writings in the Tory press. And Sam Adams was rebuffed by such other American leaders as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, when he urged them to help him keep alive the spirit of opposition to British encroachments. Yet Adams remained undaunted, writing that “where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will enkindle it.” Perhaps he realized that no revolutionary movement has ever proceeded in a straight-line fashion; rather, it runs a zigzag course, with periodic bursts of intensity alternating with periods of lull and consolidation, and even partial retreat.

Indeed, just as the liberal movement was being forced into partial retreat, the seeds of the next great advance were being sown. It soon became clear that the British were laying plans. Following the wedge in the door achieved by their payment of Hutchinson’s salary, the British would proceed to the far more serious step of paying the Massachusetts judges’ salaries as well. In short, Great Britain claimed the right not merely to tax the people of Massachusetts without their consent, but also to make judges independent of the colonists by means of the very taxes extracted from them. This move by the Crown was also a reward for the judges’ tenderness toward the British troops in the Boston Massacre cases. The British move was particularly unpopular because Hutchinson had filled the principal posts of the Massachusetts judiciary with his own Tory-minded relatives: Lyndes, Cottons, and Olivers. With Hancock and Adams now reconciled, the Boston Town Meeting promptly denounced this plan. The issue next went to the Massachusetts Assembly, which affirmed that such a proposal infringed the constitutional rights of the Assembly, and, at the end of June 1772, passed this resolution by a vote of 85 to 19. Typically, Hutchinson dissolved the General Court.

Although Massachusetts found itself in a period of troubled quiet, the resentment against Britain remained alive in that other radical colony: South Carolina. A long-continuing dispute arose over the appropriation by the House at the end of 1769 of a gift of 1,500 pounds sterling to the English radical leader John Wilkes. The enraged Crown ordered the governor of South Carolina to veto any further revenue bills that did not expressly delimit the uses of appropriated money and that failed to penalize the colony’s treasurer if he should spend treasury funds without consent of the governor and Council as well as of the House. In short, the House was ordered to agree to stripping itself of its vital power over all appropriations in the colony. This the House, led by Thomas Lynch, Christopher Gadsden, and John Rutledge, flatly refused to do.

This impasse with the Crown, and with the royally appointed governor and Council pitted against the House, continued beyond the end of the Townshend Act crisis. The South Carolina House steadfastly refused to pass any revenue bill complying with the royal instructions, that is, any bill inconsistent with “the proper rights of the people.” So radicalized was the South Carolina oligarchy by this bitter struggle that even a cautious trimmer like Henry Laurens wrote at the end of 1771 that he would rather have “no tax bill for seven years” and even “forfeit [his] whole estate” than surrender, for the issue involved was “nothing less than the very essence of true liberty.” The royal instruction to South Carolina was, to Laurens, a threat equal to the hated Stamp tax.*

Lord Hillsborough, typically, was, determined to grant no concession to South Carolina, and the South Carolina House was repeatedly dissolved. Notwithstanding, the South Carolina House would not yield. The latter’s resistance, in fact, was stiffened by a vote of confidence by the electorate in the spring 1772 elections.

*See Jack P. Greene, “Bridge to Revolution: The Wilkes Fund Controversy in South Carolina, 1769–1775,” Journal of Southern History (February 1963): 32–33.