64. The Continental Association

As the Congress ended, the colonists hastened to ratify the results at provincial congresses, which were extralegal revolutionary bodies, whose composition was very much like the official assemblies. Localities throughout the colonies created committees of inspection, observation, or “public safety” to oversee and enforce the Association agreement. In Massachusetts, General Gage’s refusal to permit the Assembly to meet brought about the institution of a provincial congress, which endorsed the Congress’s measures in early December. Weeks earlier, Marblehead and Newburyport had taken the lead in forming local committees of inspection. The Boston Town Meeting selected a committee of sixty-three, including Cushing, Hancock, Sam Adams, Paul Revere, and Henry Bass, to enforce the Association. In Massachusetts, few towns needed to establish new commissions of inspection, as they would simply continue committees already chosen to enforce the now superseded Solemn League and Covenant. Only the town of Marshfield refused to agree to the Association. New Hampshire’s provincial congress unanimously endorsed the Association in late January, and many towns appointed local committees.

In Rhode Island and Connecticut, there was no need for special congresses, since the official assemblies were uniquely free from British control; hence the assemblies themselves ratified the boycott. In Connecticut, resistance to the Association centered in the small Anglican elements of many small towns in Fairfield County—Ridgefield, Newtown, and Redding among them. New Jersey, on the other hand, had little trouble in ratifying and setting up local committees; the provincial Assembly itself approved the Congress’s proceedings at the end of January.

The situation in Pennsylvania, in contrast, was highly delicate but soon proved successful. The radicals realized that to enforce the Association the conservative Committee of Forty-three and the Philadelphia politics that it dominated had to be bypassed. On November 14, the radicals held their own mass meeting and decided to hold elections by ballot, with the city and county of Philadelphia each electing its own committee. In the election, the radical committee slate won an overwhelming victory in the city; as a result, the new Committee of Sixty-six was far more radical than the old Philadelphia Committee of Forty-three. The counties also chose committees of inspection to enforce the Association. Finally, the Pennsylvania Assembly itself ratified the Continental Association and then set up a provincial congress that endorsed the Continental Congress in late January. As for Delaware, its Assembly unanimously endorsed the Congress, but Anglican Sussex County refused to select a committee of inspection.

Maryland was the first of the southern colonies to act. Many of its counties chose committees of inspection and a provincial convention unanimously endorsed the Congress in early December. Virginia too acted quickly in forming committees; its provincial convention endorsed the Congress’s proceedings at the end of March. North Carolina also began early, its enforcement committees, particularly at Wilmington and the Tidewater counties, being established in early December. However, North Carolina’s provincial convention did not endorse the Congress until the following April.

In South Carolina, the battle for ratification and enforcement of the Association was led by the liberal General Committee of Charleston. Radical-liberals, led by Gadsden and the South Carolina Gazette, urged ratification without the galling and discriminatory exemption for rice exports, while from the right the indigo planters wanted to include South Carolina’s other staple in the exemption. At the South Carolina provincial congress in mid-January, the magnificent Gadsden argued against special privilege for rice, while John Rutledge pleaded hardship and dependence of the colony on the export of rice to Britain. Furthermore, to purchase the support of the indigo interests, the General Committee had suggested that privileged rice growers compensate the indigo planters by buying a certain proportion of the latter crop. The indigo subsidy was defended by the Rutledges, William Henry Drayton, and even Thomas Lynch, while Gadsden cuttingly asked why only the indigo growers, and not other people, in the province should benefit from the rice exemption. Finally, the compensation was extended to other agricultural commodities.

South Carolina’s provincial congress set up an unusually systematic set of local enforcement committees. In every parish and district, members of the congress composed a majority of the committee, and future vacancies were to be filled in elections by the inhabitants.

Two colonies failed to ratify the Association: New York and Georgia. Many of New York’s conservative intellectuals, such as the Anglican ministers Samuel Seabury and Thomas Chandler, removed themselves in disgust from the Association movement, openly denouncing it, and being branded as Tories in return. But the bulk of conservatives determined to stay within the popular movement in New York and thereby to guide and emasculate it. The conservative Committee of Fifty-one, however, was forced to dissolve and yield to the clamor of the radical Committee of Mechanics for a public election of a new committee. At a public meeting on November 22, the newly elected Committee of Sixty was dominated by the radicals, including Isaac Sears and Alexander MacDougall. However, the landlord-run rural counties remained apathetic to the revolutionary movement, and only Suffolk, Ulster, and Albany counties endorsed the Association. In Suffolk, particularly, the several towns hastened to appoint enforcement committees. Radicals attempted to form committees of inspection in Queens and Tryon counties but with little success; thus, when committees in Jamaica and Newtown, Queens, were appointed, the committees were speedily repudiated by many of their citizens. In upcountry Dutchess County, a Tory association openly combatted the boycott, and the majority of freeholders swore to obey the constituted laws of the land and to enforce obedience to the rightful authority of king and Parliament. A majority of Jamaica freeholders signed a loyalist oath, and Oyster Bay was largely Tory. A public meeting of freeholders of Albany County pledged loyalty to established government and a Loyalty Pole was constructed in Ulster County.

The radicals made a determined effort to get the New York Assembly to ratify the Association, but failed—by one vote. Notwithstanding, the radical Committee of Sixty proved sufficient in controlling the course of the trade in New York City.

In Georgia, conditions in late 1774 were more favorable for ratification; the looming Indian war had faded and rice had received its exemption from the Continental Congress. But now many of the radical leaders in Georgia began to lose their nerve. The Savannah and the Assembly radicals proposed to endorse the Association only if more time were granted for launching nonimportation and nonexportation. Only the pure radicals of St. John’s Parish, led by Dr. Lyman Hall, adopted the Association without deviation, on December 1.

A provincial congress met in Georgia on January 18. Only five of the twelve parishes sent delegates, and these represented only small minorities of their parishes. The congress, then, lacking self-confidence, decided to submit its extralegal decisions to the official Georgia Assembly. The congress proceeded to ratify the Association but with modifications: postponing nonimportation to March 15 and nonexportation to December 1, 1775. Governor Wright dissolved the Assembly before it could ratify, but the congress tried to redeem itself by publishing its decisions. It did not, however, go so far as to ratify undiluted the actual measures of the Continental Congress.

Local committees in every province began immediately to enforce nonimportation after December 1, and nonconsumption the following March. In addition to boycotting and ostracizing violators, the same methods were used against persons of known Tory leanings. While historians have remarked on the paradox of a libertarian movement using coercive measures against dissidents, the remarkable thing is the degree of libertarian means that this movement used in pursuit of its ends. Never before in history had so much reliance been placed on such nonviolent methods of mass struggle as the boycott, and on such libertarian and nonviolent means of enforcing the boycott as secondary boycotts, social ostracism, blacklists, and public obloquy. This unprecedented constancy of libertarian ends and means, especially for a revolutionary mass movement of such size and scope, was marred only around the edges by such minor excesses as the use of the tarpot, the rail, and the feathers. The whole Association movement of 1774–75 is a remarkable testament to the strength of libertarian ideals permeating the revolutionary era.

One of the earliest examples of organized voluntary boycott took place in Worcester, Massachusetts, in early November, when over forty blacksmiths of the county pledged to refuse to sell their services to all who violated the Association in any way. They also resolved to do no further work for specified persons and families with Tory leanings, particularly Timothy Ruggles and others who had been trying to form a Tory association supported by Governor Gage, and pledged each other mutual aid against a popular threat to their lives or liberties or properties. Further pressure on the Ruggles group came from the Massachusetts provincial congress on December 9, which recommended to the local committees of correspondence a widespread public notice to such associations and any people signing them that “their names be published to the world, their persons treated with that neglect, and their memories transmitted to posterity with that ignominy which such unnatural conduct must deserve.” Under this pressure the Ruggles group found that it was virtually devoid of signers. Only in the incorrigible Tory town of Marshfield did a sizable number gather to sign a Loyalist association, and even they had to send a hurried call to British troops for protection.

There was little trouble about endorsing nonimportation in Massachusetts. Nonconsumption presented a more difficult enforcement problem. The Newburyport inspection committee solved the matter by requiring shopkeepers to produce a certificate from a committee of inspection, attesting that the goods were not sold in violation of the Association. Tea, a product hitherto in great demand in the colonies, was the biggest nonconsumption problem. Typical of committee vigilance was the crackdown on Thomas Lilly of Marblehead for buying tea for his own consumption. Lilly was pressured into publicly burning the English tea and publicly recanting his errors. A particular problem was the itinerant peddlers who sold East Indian tea in the country towns. A certificate here would not be practicable; hence the provincial congress in mid-February urged abstinence from all trading with peddlers.

Even before the meeting of the Continental Congress, radical editors had begun publicly blacklisting Massachusetts supporters of the Intolerable Acts and “traitors” accepting jobs in the Gage regime. The Norwich Packet, of Connecticut, on October 13, blasted the Reverend Samuel Peters, a Tory Anglican minister, as the “most unnatural monster” and “detestable parricide to this country.” In response, the Petersham Town Meeting branded fourteen Tories “incorrigible enemies of America” for being opposed to the Continental Congress and the Association. The Marblehead Town Meeting decided to boycott a half-dozen of its citizens as “abettors of tyranny, and parricides of their country.” Sometimes, of course, there were excesses, as when mob coercion forced Dr. Abraham Alden of Biddeford and John Taylor of Shrewsbury to confess their errors.

In New Hampshire, nonimportation was energetically enforced in the port of Portsmouth by the Committee of Forty-five. The main trouble was in the country towns, where peddlers violated nonimportation and nonconsumption regulations. As a solution, the towns of Exeter, Kingston, New Market, and Brentwood imposed a prohibition upon peddling. The provincial convention in late January endorsed the prohibition and extended it to the province, urging all citizens to maintain the boycott by abandoning the use of tea. Rhode Island enforced the Association very well. One excess in that province went beyond voluntary, market means: the requirement by the town of Providence that all traders show certificates of compliance with the Association.

Connecticut did little direct importing of its own; therefore, its problem was largely that of enforcing nonconsumption. The vigilant committees of inspection conducted their own private trials of people accused of violating the Association. These trials were almost always fair and impartial; they required full proof of violations according to the laws of evidence, and invited the defendant to appear voluntarily. This procedure began in Hartford County in late January and soon spread to New Haven, Fairfield, and Litchfield counties. The committee of the town of Norwich also adopted the idea of requiring dealers under pain of boycott to certify that their goods were not acquired in violation of the Association.

One problem that plagued Connecticut and many other colonies was introduced by the Continental Congress’s demand that merchants and traders not take advantage of scarcity and that they hold the prices of boycotted goods to the previous year’s levels. This absurd attempt at voluntary price-fixing betrayed a monumental ignorance of how the market price system operates. When goods become scarce (as under nonimportation agreements) the free market price rises to account for the greater scarcity. Putting the matter into such pseudo-moralistic terms as “taking unfair advantage” of the scarcity, completely ignores the “rationing” function of the price system. If prices do not rise to reflect increased scarcity, then the goods will soon disappear and not be available at all to those clamoring to buy. Consumers as well as producers are gravely injured by this form of price control.

In Connecticut, in late January, a joint meeting of committees of inspection of Hartford County attempted to impose fixed retail prices on imported goods, and this drive spread to the other counties as well.

New York was the great feeder port for New Jersey and Connecticut; hence its importance for enforcing nonimportation. Fortunately, the radicals on the Committee of Sixty soon took over the commercial affairs of the city, and the committee rigorously enforced the boycott. Great mobs prevented several English ships from landing. Happily, while enforcement of the boycott was rigorous, the committee showed instinctive economic sense by not insisting on prices remaining the same as the supposedly God-given prices of the previous year. In this way, the committee did not aggravate the substantial amount of Tory sentiment in New York, while allowing effective imposition of the boycott. Furthermore, the rigorous enforcement of nonimportation upon the city made unimportant the fact that nonconsumption could not begin to be enforced outside the city and Albany, Ulster, and Suffolk counties—the only areas where local inspection committees were available. Probably most of the infractions, again, occurred in the area of tea consumption. Like the Ruggles association in Massachusetts, Tory organizations did not get very far in New York. A group of Tories in ultraconservative and landlord-ridden Dutchess and Westchester counties attempted to form such associations but did not succeed.

The Association was also well enforced in New Jersey, where there were few ports. The Elizabethtown committee cooperated with their brethren in New York. Woodbridge Township and Gloucester County also enforced the boycott wholeheartedly, and a “tea party” was held by New Jersey “Indians” when East Indian tea almost landed secretly at Greenwich in Cumberland County. And in February, the committees of observation of Elizabethtown and Woodbridge decided on a complete boycott of trade with the Tory citizenry of Staten Island.

Tea drinking, a favorite pastime of Americans, again proved the most difficult part of the Association to enforce. When Silas Newcomb of Cumberland County announced rather rashly that he proposed to drink tea, all dealings were broken off with him by the Cumberland committee, and in two months he abjectly recanted.

Philadelphia, filled with conservative Quaker merchants, was the big problem area for the American rebels. Here was the weak link that threatened to collapse the entire boycott movement. In the late seventeenth century, the Quaker creed of nonviolence had been radically individualist and antistatist. But during the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania Quakers had become increasingly conservative, statist, and even warlike. Quaker nonviolence was now largely a thinly veiled camouflage for highly conservative, quasi-Tory views. The official Quaker Committee of Sufferings in Pennsylvania and New Jersey kept up a steady drumfire of agitation against the Association and other anti-British measures, which agitation, despite its nonviolence, was supposedly in violation of Quaker religious views. A Quaker meeting for Pennsylvania and New Jersey in late January was quite explicitly Tory; it denounced “every usurpation of power and authority in opposition to the laws and government, and... all combinations, insurrections, conspiracies and illegal assemblages.” The official Quakers were not able to silence their pro-Association brethren.

Despite these problems, the Philadelphia Committee of Sixty-six did an excellent job of enforcing nonimportation. The committee divided its membership into six districts, and one member from each district was delegated each morning to inspect all incoming vessels. This enforcement, as in New York, was greatly facilitated by a sensible laxity in fixing import prices. Despite the de jure pronunciamentos, for example, dry goods prices had increased by twenty-five to one hundred percent by March 1775.

Delaware, a small and agricultural, rather than commercial, province, was scarcely a center for nonimportation struggles and had little trouble in enforcing the boycott.

The southern colonies had particular problems in enforcing the boycott, especially where the merchants were Scots or factors of Scottish firms—Scottish zeal for the American cause was less than ardent. But with the planters heavily in debt to these merchants in the normal course of trade, the southerners had a powerful political weapon against the Tories: a threat to suspend the judicial collection of debts.

Maryland faced the problem of a score of navigable rivers where imports could enter the province, but keen vigilance by committees of radicals at the commercial centers of Baltimore and Annapolis ensured effective enforcement of the Association. In December a provincial convention resolved that all lawyers should refuse to prosecute any suits, especially collections of debt, for those who violated the boycott. In enforcing nonconsumption, tea was again the main problem. Sometimes a bit of violence was added, as in the case of the stubborn tea dealer John Parks. Parks was boycotted by the committee for Upper Frederick County, and to the boycott was added the breaking of his doors and windows by a mob. Unfortunately, the rigors of enforcement here extended to price-fixing as well, and the local and provincial committees tried, Canutelike, to hold back the tides, of which they knew nothing, by fixing precise but necessarily arbitrary markups of wholesale and retail prices over costs.

The opposition of Scottish merchants and factors was particularly strong in Virginia. That colony led in closing down collections of debts as a means of putting further pressure on British merchant-creditors for repeal of the Coercive Acts. A provincial convention in August, for that reason, closed up the county courts and successfully recommended boycott of the General Court by lawyers and witnesses in civil cases; this action was confirmed by the convention of the following March. Many historians have charged that the court closings and indeed much of the revolutionary impetus in Virginia occurred primarily because of a desire to avoid paying debts to Great Britain. It seems clear, however, that the measure was rather a means of putting pressure on Britain to repeal the Intolerable Acts, just as similar pressure had been used against the Stamp Act a decade before. This is indicated by the fact that when some grasping planter-debtors urged a boycott of merchants not just for violating the Association but also for failing to extend credit, this attempt was immediately slapped down by the leadership. Indeed, Peyton Randolph, who had presided at the Continental Congress, sternly reminded the hotheads that the Association did not empower local committees to dictate to merchants how much credit they may give. And even for strictly political purposes against Britain, a good many of the more moderate of the Virginia leaders opposed the temporary nonpayment of debts as unjust; these included George Washington, Robert Beverley, Peyton Randolph, and Edmund Pendleton. Backing political nonpayment were the more radical George Mason, Patrick Henry, Landon Carter, and Richard Henry Lee. Both sides of the dispute, of course, were led by large tobacco planters.*

The Virginia rebels made enforcement of the boycott much more difficult than it had to be. In the first place they frenziedly tried to prevent any price increases, and the committees arrogantly insisted on inspecting the daybooks and invoices of the merchants to make sure that prices were not increasing. Indeed, price-fixing committees were actively harassing merchants in many Virginia counties. The other unnecessary task taken up by the radicals was the decision to require every individual citizen to sign the Continental Association. This went beyond all the other colonies and forced the radicals to boycott not only violators of the Association but also any of those who were not enthusiastic enough to endorse it. All this considerably multiplied the roster of supposed delinquents and those harassed by the popular forces. As in the other colonies, open Tories were of course held up to public obloquy.

As elsewhere, the difficult article of consumption to boycott was tea. This was the product requiring enforcement. Tea parties were held at the port of Yorktown to reinforce the boycott.

North Carolina, as so often happened, largely followed the example of neighboring Virginia. Here the body of suspect Scottish merchants was compactly gathered at Wilmington. The merchants agreed to obey the boycott but understandably balked at price-fixing. The implacable committees persisted in carefully supervising prices, and committees in Pitt and Rowan counties and in Wilmington presumed to fix maximum prices for salt, dry goods, rum, and gunpowder. The Wilmington committee also followed the aggressive Virginia lead of insisting that every individual sign the Association. When eleven Scottish merchants refused to sign, they were boycotted; eight recanted and signed. The most striking example of tormenting a nonsigner was the case of Thomas Macknight of Currituck County, in the extreme northeastern part of the colony. A member of the provincial convention in April, Macknight announced that he would abide by the Association but would not endorse it; a struggle now raged at the convention on whether to harass him further. The majority favored accepting Macknight’s course, but the fanatical minority threatened to withdraw from and split the convention, and thus forced through a boycott of the candid Macknight.

To put pressure on British merchants, the North Carolina liberals, again following Virginia, refused to allow the courts to operate, thus suspending collections of debts. There was little trouble, furthermore, in enforcing the nonconsumption agreement.

As could be expected, the radicals were active and zealous in South Carolina. Charleston’s radical-oriented General Committee led the enforcement, and advanced beyond the Continental Association by establishing its own association for nonconsumption of tea to begin on November 1. At committee direction, the schoolboys of Charleston collected all the tea in the city and burned it publicly on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5. Merchants of Charleston were induced by the committee to dump their English-imported tea into the river. Nonimportation was enforced with great efficiency and zeal. Sometimes, as in the Macknight case, enforcement degenerated into petty absurdities. Consider, for example, the case of Robert Smyth, who returned from London to Charleston bringing with him his furniture and two horses. Immediately the ultraradicals, led by Christopher Gadsden, denounced this act as an “import” in violation of the Association. After the General Committee had narrowly approved Smyth’s action, Gadsden and 250 radicals urged reconsideration; but led by Lynch and the Rutledges, the General Committee continued to endorse Smyth, but by one vote only.

As elsewhere in the South, action was taken against collection of debt by British or Tory creditors. South Carolina’s provincial congress in January decided that any judicial processes for debt had to be approved by local committees of observation. The absence of anticreditor animus per se is seen in the instruction to the local committees to permit prosecution for debt whenever debtors were trying to evade their obligations permanently or to defraud their creditors.

Georgia did not join in the nonimportation agreement until March, and even then there was no effective enforcement in that royal-bureaucrat-ridden colony. The colonies were then faced with the problem of boycotting this lone holdout of the thirteen American colonies. Accordingly, on February 8, the Charleston General Committee decreed a boycott of trade with all citizens of Georgia. The radical enclave of St. John’s Parish hastened to send delegates to Charleston urging exemption for themselves, and the perplexed General Assembly agreed to turn the case over to the next meeting of the Continental Congress. In the meanwhile, however, the boycott of Georgia persisted, and the poor citizens of St. John’s were forced against their principles to engage in limited trade with the Tory merchants of Savannah.

Quebec had also been invited to join the Association. The English merchants of Quebec were willing to join, but the overwhelming French majority was understandably loath to join with either wing of its hated oppressors, and the English merchants understandably feared that they would simply lose their trade to their French rivals. Quebec, therefore, did not join the Association. By mid-April the Philadelphia committee began the colonial boycotts of the nonsigning colonies: Georgia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.

The task of checking and certifying the good faith of merchants within the several colonies was not unduly difficult; local committees in the seaports performed the major tasks. But how could the genuineness of goods and merchants be assured in the coastal trade when the merchants of two remote colonies traded with each other? Early in the Association movement, a Salem merchant trading with Virginia hit on a happy device that served also to cement and expand the scope of the network of revolutionary popular institutions in America. The merchant asked the Salem Committee of Correspondence to issue him a certificate vouching for his devotion to the cause of American liberty. The Boston Committee of Correspondence enthusiastically welcomed the idea, and the plan, spearheaded by Providence and the Virginia counties, was soon adopted in the other provinces.

*For revision of the older emphasis on repudiation of Virginia debt as a motive for closing the courts and for revolution in Virginia, see Emory G. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 1962): 511–33