Chapter 13 ROOTS OF REVOLUTION

THE American rebellion against economic tyranny really had its beginning in the 1660’s – about 40 years after the Pilgrims first set foot on New England’s coast. This was during the period when England was “a piece of land entirely surrounded by smugglers,” and ghouls were digging up London’s dead to salvage the woolen shrouds. To improve the industry of his realm, Charles II signed an act permitting the American colonists to ship cotton, lumber, tobacco, and other products to England – but only to England.

It was true that such products were needed in England–most of them were already going there – but it was also true that the colonists needed sugar and molasses from the West Indies. The early Americans were realists. They were fighting the earth and the sea for their lives – and incidentally, they were laying the groundwork for a prosperous trade. The King’s seal on a piece of parchment from faraway London didn’t impress them, so they kept right on swapping their wool and tobacco for Cuban molasses.

Nothing much came of it. Charles II was a negligent ruler, and he had other problems on his mind (see Forever Amber). True, his ships sank a few of the traders’ ships, but not one colonist was burned at the stake or even hanged. Running the blockade became an ordinary business risk, and things went along smoothly for almost three-quarters of a century.

Then in 1733, the British government announced a “five-year plan” in order to meet an emergency. The French government was indirectly responsible. In the interest of price maintenance, the French colonists in the West Indies had been prohibited from shipping food to France. The result was overproduction, and the desperate islanders were ready to sell their products for anything they could get.

The British government, to protect its subjects against this low-priced competition, ordered the colonists to stop trading with the French West Indies. But the Americans had different ideas. Traffic in molasses, sugar, and rum had become the backbone of their business. Their prosperity depended on the West Indies trade. To cut it off would mean a serious depression – and why shouldn’t they take advantage of the lower prices?

An Emergency Measure

American businessmen decided that it was time to have a showdown. They were trying to build a new country; and it was a tough job, even without such artificial interference with the natural and normal flow of trade. They tried to explain the facts back in London; but after two years of “careful consideration,” the British government soothingly replied that it was only an “emergency measure” – it might hurt a little at first but after another three years the law would automatically expire, and everyone would be better off.

But the colonists didn’t quite see it that way, and many who had never broken a law took occasion to indulge in a little temporary smuggling.

At the end of the five-year period, apparently the emergency wasn’t quite over, so the British government renewed the Molasses Act – again assuring the colonists that it was only a temporary measure, just an extension of the “five-year plan” for another five years.

By this time, conditions in America paralleled the prohibition era of the 1920’s. People were losing respect for legal authority. The law was a joke, and everyone enjoyed breaking it. Each home had its contraband jug of molasses, its sugar loaf, its rum toddy, its rum tea, and its buttered rum.

In and out of the ports and along the coast and across the Caribbean, the agile trading ships showed their heels to His Majesty’s Navy – or, when cornered, they stood and fought, cheered on by the folks back home.

Trade was on the boom. Visitors from Europe marveled at the prosperity. And in 1748, the reliable British government, still coping with the “temporary emergency,” renewed the Molasses Act – and business went on as usual for another five years.

Off and on for almost a century, running the blockade had been just one of the ordinary risks of doing business. Of course, the King’s gunners added to the overhead and kept prices a bit higher than they should have been – but that was all. America continued to grow and prosper. By this time, the British colonies were almost as old as the United States is today. They were no longer frontier settlements. Four generations of self-reliant settlers had established towns and farms which were more productive than any in Europe.

Franklin, Washington, and Patrick Henry

Ben Franklin, the self-educated young radical from Boston, had moved to Philadelphia and was building up his own printing business from scratch. George Washington, in his teens, was carrying a musket and keeping a sharp lookout for Indians while earning his living as a surveyor in the Virginia wilderness. Patrick Henry, after going broke – first as a storekeeper and then as a farmer – had now taken up the study of law.

Along the Mississippi, the Ohio, the James, the Delaware, and the Hudson, such men read Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Locke. But among the uncultured farmers, sailors, hunters, and trappers, reading was limited to almanacs, small-town papers, and, more than anything else, the Bible.

Most of the colonists remembered grandfathers, even fathers, who had risked their lives to read the Bible. They knew of men who had been burned at the stake, wrenched joint from joint on the rack, broken on the wheel for saying – or even for being accused of saying–that ordinary men had a right to read the Bible. They had heard old people talk of stealthy meetings at night to hear the Bible read in secret by the light of a shaded candle – of the alarm, the terror, the frantic escapes. They’d been told of meetings back on the open moors of Scotland, where people gathered to recite the Scriptures under a moonless sky – of the sudden “Halloo,” the charging horses, and the frantic running before the galloping troopers, who rode down men and women and slashed at them with swords; then the long period of hiding while the troopers searched craftily and wives of slain men lay under water in the ditches, praying to God that their babies would not whimper and that the hunt might end before dawn.

The children of such people were happy to be in a land where they could fearlessly read their Bibles. They read about adventures and crimes, of hairbreadth escapes, of wars and spies, of political intrigues, of shepherds and vineyards and business deals, and of young lovers and family life.

And when they read the words of Abraham, Moses, Christ, and all the prophets, who said that men are self-controlling and responsible, it checked with their experience; and they knew it was true. They could have told similar stories of their own lives, if the words had only come to mind.

Modernized Pagans

The colonists had never believed in the ancient pagan gods, and few of them had even heard of the modern pagan gods which were then being created by the Old World intellectuals.

The Age of Science was dawning. It could no longer be denied that the earth is round and spinning in space. Intrepid individualists were prying into the secrets of nature. Galvani had captured something tingling in a jar. Ben Franklin had pulled the same sort of thing out of the sky on a kite string and had proved that it was lightning.

The Old World philosophers recovered from the shock of these new ideas – but they did not give up their pagan superstitions. They concluded that there is no God and then proceeded with great ingenuity to make a god of science.

They recognized natural law but narrowed its meaning to exclude the possibility of progress. They explained that everything is controlled by physical force. Man’s emotions, sentiments, imagination, and creative urges have no place in the picture. The universe is a giant mechanism. Its wheels revolve forever. Everything is foreordained. There is no will. There is no high spiritual purpose – no divine plan. Nothing is created. There is no Creator.

Man is unimportant, they said. As an individual, he counts for nought. He is but an insignificant animal among many species of animals – no more than dust on the cogs of the giant mechanism.

“But,” one may well ask, “what controls the controls?”

The answer is natural law. At least, that was the answer of the French intellectuals who were leading the people of Europe back to the era of pre-Christian thought. They said that natural law controls everything, including man – except that civilization had somehow got the upper hand. Civilization is an unnatural control; it causes all human miseries. And since religion is the basis of civilization, science must make war against religion – religion must be destroyed.

The Enlightened Despot

After the evils of civilization and religion are wiped out, an “enlightened despot” will establish the Age of Reason, based on natural law. When that has been accomplished, the enlightened despot will “wither away,” and natural man – at last living naturally – will be good and happy ever after.

That, as nearly as I can understand, is what the great European intellectuals seem to have believed. And they lived on the bounty of the aristocrats while writing their books and plays designed to destroy the aristocracy and thus to clear the way for the enlightened despot who would run things according to their learned theories.

It seems that most of them were betting on Prussia’s Frederick the Great who was responsible for the Seven Years’ War – which, according to his boastful claim, he had started on a whim.

Frederick was an ardent atheist and an able schemer. He greatly admired the French intellectuals, and they were favored guests at his court. Their theories fitted in with his dreams for a new world empire – with Frederick, of course, as the enlightened despot.

England was now under the rule of her second German king; and as an ally of Prussia, she had turned her guns on France. Quaintly enough, the colonists called it the “French and Indian War.”

On this side of the Atlantic, both governments were seeking allies among the Indians. Both sides bribed them with firewater. Both sides armed them with weapons. Both sides paid liberally for scalps. So the Red Men set fire to the White Men’s cabins. Settlers on both sides were scalped or burned at the stake. Their wives were taken as squaws, and their children grew up as Indians.

The Old World quarrels had extended to the New World. Along the outlying frontiers, things were very bad. And along the Atlantic coast, business was at a standstill.

Bright Idea

But self-preservation is the first law of nature. People must eat; trade must go on.

Out of the war itself, the resourceful colonists devised a peaceful way of doing business, and it was a bright idea: Governments at war have prisoners to exchange. Why couldn’t traders exchange the prisoners?

So they bribed the British and French officials and obtained permits to sail the seas and to exchange the prisoners. As long as the great powers continued to fight, businessmen on both sides carried on a prosperous trade with each other. Their ships no longer ran from their governments’ navies. A captain would merely stand to, wait for the King’s officers to come aboard, and meet them with a smile – and a permit.

A lively business in these permits developed at every port. The permits were sold at public auction – prices depended on supply and demand, and speculators on the sidelines played the “permit market.”

Trading was peaceful, and business boomed until the war came to an end in 1763.

There were no more prisoners to exchange, but the Molasses Act was again renewed as an emergency measure. The American traders put the guns back on their ships and began to readjust their activities to a peacetime basis.

The Next Best Bet

Back in London, the British government was undergoing a change. George II had died in the middle of the war, and his grandson had come to the throne in 1760. George William Frederick was the third of the Hanoverian line of rulers who had been brought over from Germany in 1714, after the House of Stuarts had run its course. The first two Georges had been rather prone to take things easy. They hadn’t even bothered to learn the English language and had depended largely on their ministers to run things.

With George III, it was going to be different. He was only twenty-two years old when he came to the throne, but he was a hard worker and a stickler for detail. For the first time in generations, England had a conscientious ruler. In common with his cousin, Frederick the Great, young George was an ardent admirer of the European intellectuals, who were still looking for an enlightened despot to put their theories into effect.

Frederick the Great was losing interest. He was too busy with domestic affairs to worry about a world empire, and rumor had it that he was becoming a bit too tolerant towards the Christian religion. George III looked like the next best bet.

Time and circumstances offered big opportunities for the new king. England had been too loosely governed. The planning had been inadequate. For too long, the colonists had been flouting the authority of the Crown. Something must be done, and George III was the man to do it. Spurred on by an ambitious mother, he intended to bring to the English people the benefits of law and order – with systematic regimentation in the best Prussian manner.

As soon as the war was over, the young monarch rose to the occasion and earnestly set about the job of working out every detail affecting the lives of his subjects, at home and abroad. And truly, no living authority ever could have planned an economy with greater thoroughness.

Thoughtful Planning

Aided and abetted by his statisticians, he became alarmed at the growth of the colonies, which, according to statistics, threatened to depopulate the British Isles and to make a ghost town of London within another 50 years.

George III took immediate action to prevent the impending catastrophe. First, he restricted emigration to the colonies. Then, to further retard their expansion, he prohibited any more settlers from moving westward. In the interest of protecting the future of the fur trade, the area from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi was forever reserved for the Indians.^*

But given the facts as they were at the time, no one could have planned an economy more wisely than did young King George. With his “brain trust” at his elbow and with the welfare of his subjects always of primary concern, he balanced everything most admirably. Agriculture was in the colonies; industry, in England. He set about to regulate both and to provide British shipping with the triangular voyage between England, the American ports, and the West Indies.

This home-office planning was extended to include even the American trees. The King’s men went through the forests, marking the best pines to be held in reserve for the royal Navy. This thoughtful prudence so irritated the colonists that they went out of their way to use these pines for themselves. Then, adding insult to injury, they adopted the pine tree as their symbol of liberty. In later years, it was displayed on the flags flying from the masts of American fighting ships during the first war of the revolution.

The Common Good

It is unfair to place too much blame on George III. He did everything conscientiously and in the interest of what he conceived to be the “common good.” But down through the years, the colonists had grown tired of being the pawns of Old World bureaucracy. They were fed up with all the rules and red tape which interfered with the normal, natural job of applying their energies to the production of goods and services. Things had reached a point where they had lost all sense of distinction between good laws and bad laws.

The Old World mind couldn’t understand this. Why, for instance, should the colonists object to the Stamp Tax? A small, suitable tax on legal documents should not be a burden to anyone. But the colonists refused to pay, and the law was repealed.

And who could explain the Boston Tea Party? There had been an overproduction of tea. The East India Trading Company needed protection. If something were not done, the price of tea would fall, and the tea growers of India would suffer a depression. To prevent this disaster, the British government might have burned the surplus – just as the Brazilian government once ordered the burning of coffee, and just as our own “brain trusters” ordered the killing of little pigs. But King George was more sensible. He had the tea shipped to the American colonies at a controlled price – a little less than they had been paying, a little more than a free market would have supported.^*

Did the colonists applaud this wise measure for the good of all? They did not – they raided the ship and threw the tea into Boston Harbor.

The Boston Tea Party

This act of violence and willful destruction of property was immediately condemned by leading patriots, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

The incident would doubtlessly have been smoothed over, except that King George and his bureaucrats unwittingly came to the aid of the rioters. The port of Boston was ordered closed to all outside commerce. The Massachusetts charter was revoked. One of the King’s military henchmen was appointed governor and was given sweeping administrative powers. Town meetings were prohibited. Persons accused of resisting law enforcement were to be deported to England for trial. Last, but not least – and the thing that was most irritating to the Puritans – the boundaries of the province of Quebec were extended to include everything north of the Ohio River.

The Boston Tea Party is usually thought of as the beginning of the American Revolution; but for more than a century, the colonists had been rebelling against the tyranny of Old World monarchs. From the early 1660’s to the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, they had continuously revolted against just one thing – authority presuming to control the initiative and creative energy of human beings. Five hundred men had come out of the frontier cabins in Virginia to oust the royal Governor, who protected the graft-paying sale of guns and whiskey to the Indians. In the Carolinas, in Pennsylvania, in Connecticut, in Massachusetts, in the New Hampshire grants, and on the high seas, their rebellion had been continuous and increasing.

At last, the British government was compelled to use the only power that any state has at its disposal – the power of brute force used with general consent. But when the King’s troops were moved into Boston to take things over, the Americans did not consent. They stood their ground as free individuals, and they fought the British Regulars.

Without a Leader

The great fact in history is this: The American Revolution had no leader. This fact is the hope of the world because human freedom is a personal matter. Only the individual can protect human rights in the infinite complexity of men’s relationships with each other. Nothing on earth is more valuable than the person who knows that all men are free and who accepts the responsibilities that go with freedom.

The pioneer Americans knew that they were free. They had learned it the hard way – from stern experience. So when the British government tried to regiment them and obstruct their efforts, they simply ignored it. When the King laid down silly restrictions and controls on trade, the colonists went right on trading. When the weaving of cloth was prohibited in order to protect weavers in England, the women of America kept right on working at their looms.

^* It is interesting to note that the pioneer fur traders in their greatest days never got from the Mississippi Valley more than a sixth of the valuable furs it now produces.

^* It is the invariable intent of all economic regulations to prevent a fall in prices, at any cost. Actually, of course, lower prices increase consumption and production and trade and jobs.