44. Boycotting the Importers

By late 1769, merchants of every province but New Hampshire had organized to support nonimportation agreements, of varying comprehensiveness and scope. How were they “enforced”?

The merchant associations generally appointed committees to watch over vessels and shipments, and to promote the public boycotts of offenders. In New York the boycott was remarkably effective: total imports from Great Britain to the port fell from over four hundred and ninety thousand pounds in 1768 to about seventy-five thousand pounds the following year. Once in a while, the overeager New York Sons of Liberty strayed beyond the colonists’ scrupulous limits of using strictly voluntary methods of pressure upon non-cooperating merchants. Thus, in the fall of 1769, a blend of boycott and mass intimidation induced the silversmith Simeon Cooley to flee New York; a jeweler, Thomas Richardson, confronted by a scaffold and a mob at the Liberty Pole, was forced to pledge his cooperation. The following June a transient noncooperating merchant named Hills had his goods seized and burned by a mob. Hills promptly fled New York. But these dishonorable instances were few and far between, and the Merchants Committee of Inspection denounced the mob action against Hills as the work of “lawless ruffians.”

Philadelphia’s record of compliance was remarkable, when one recalls that city’s original reluctance to join the boycott. The merchants’ main efforts were to weaken the agreements to the looser terms enjoyed by the Albany and Maryland merchants. Philadelphia imports fell from four hundred and forty thousand pounds to some two hundred and five thousand pounds the following year. No coercion or intimidation of the merchants appeared in Philadelphia. Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware also cheerfully complied with the agreement and gave little trouble. Apart from the caldron of Boston, which will be treated below, only reluctant Newport in the northern colonies gave the nonimport movement much trouble. Indeed, there is evidence that even prominent members of the Newport Sons of Liberty, as well as the Merchants Committee itself, connived at virtually open violations of the nonimportation convenant.

Compliance with the boycott in the southern provinces was another story. The indifference or hostility of the merchants caused imports from Britain actually to increase during 1769, particularly in Virginia. The opposition of the British factors and their agents in Virginia forced the resisters to modify the boycott agreement, and attempts at enforcement by the Merchants Committees of Inspection or county associations were few and feeble. Enforcement efforts were far more successful in Maryland, where many more of the merchants were native-born and hence more enthusiastic about resistance. Too, and not unimportant, the Philadelphia merchants kept a watchful and suspicious eye upon their Baltimore confreres.

The boycott movement was not more successful in North Carolina and Georgia than in Virginia. The merchants ignored the provincial associations instituted by the North Carolina Assembly in late 1769. Finally, in early June 1770, the Sons of Liberty called a general meeting at Wilmington comprising many planters and others from six of the larger counties. The meeting agreed to boycott and publicly condemn all noncompliers with the agreement, and Merchants Committees of Inspection were selected in each county, concentrating on the towns of Brunswick and Wilmington. By the fall of 1770, enforcement had become effective as a result of these efforts.

In contrast to the strenuous if belated efforts at enforcement in North Carolina, Georgia made no attempt whatever to pressure compliance with the boycott. Fortunately, Georgia’s trade was so negligible that its desertion had little effect. Nevertheless, a general meeting of inhabitants of Charleston, at the end of June 1770, unanimously urged the total boycott of all trade with Georgia, which ought “to be amputated from the rest... as a rotten part that might spread a dangerous infection....”

The most interesting southern reaction, and one potentially explosive, to the problem of compliance occurred in South Carolina. There Christopher Gadsden and his vigilant band of radical-liberals stood alert to exert maximum pressure on reluctant merchants. These men, with their great ardor and zeal for liberty, were comparable only to the embattled libertarians of Boston. Like their comrades in Boston, the popular liberal forces of South Carolina confronted organized and articulate opposition, which was led by the wealthy young planter William Henry Drayton. Battling in the pages of the South Carolina Gazette during August 1769, Drayton denounced Gadsden as an advocate of enslavement masquerading as a libertarian; for private associations to brand noncompliers with the boycott as traitors, was a usurpation of the function of the legislature. Here Drayton confused the vital distinction between voluntary and coercive actions, and hence between private and governmental actions. It was typically “conservative” for Drayton to believe that a state branding and punishing a man for treason was somehow legitimate and not really coercive, whereas private denunciation and peaceful boycott were illegitimately coercive. Also typically conservative, Drayton advocated jailing Gadsden for the latter’s views.

The famous Gadsden-Drayton debate finally led the people of Charleston to publish and distribute handbills in early September containing the names of the recalcitrants. (The original motto of the Charleston General Meeting establishing the boycott had been “Sign or Die,” but this proved to be braggadocio, as no attempt was ever made to go beyond boycott and public ostracism to such violence.) The leading nonsigners, aside from the inevitable royal officials, were Drayton, William Wragg, and John Gordon. Again, Drayton and Gadsden engaged in debate on the fundamental nature of liberty. Drayton asserted that the Gadsden liberals were “laying illegal restraints upon the free wills of free men” — that is, of the nonsigners. Gadsden retorted that the association violated not a single law and that free men had the right to associate—and hence not to associate—with whomsoever they pleased. Drayton replied by falling back on such cant as the old Tory doctrine of “conspiracy,” which supposedly made such boycotts punishable by law. Wragg was more explicit in pointing out that such boycotts should be as illegal as combinations of labor to raise wages. In his rebuttal, Gadsden transcended the preceding debate to proclaim the right of a people, where their rights have been invaded by government, to reassert their inalienable natural rights, those “inherent rights of SOCIETY, which no climate, no time, no constitution, no contract can ever destroy or diminish.”

Drayton did try to suppress the boycott at law. He could not go to the courts, for most of the judges (to say nothing of the juries) were signers of the association. And the South Carolina House summarily rejected his plea, which testified to the effectiveness of the boycott. Finally, the boycotters won. Drayton left in defeat for England in early January 1770, sailing, appropriately, on a ship carrying unsold boycotted goods back to Britain. Editor Peter Timothy of the Gazette thereupon exultantly listed among the unacceptable goods sailing back to Britain one “William Henry Drayton, Esquire.”

The Charleston General Committee, enlivened as it was by mechanics and planters, vigorously enforced the boycott, aided by the alert Merchants Committee of Inspection. Slaves imported by British traders were promptly sent back. Indeed, so effective was the boycott that total English imports in both Carolinas fell from over three hundred and five thousand pounds in 1769 to slightly over one hundred and forty-five thousand pounds in 1770.

Particularly significant was the nonimportation movement in Boston, for here the struggle for the boycott coincided with Boston’s necessarily more acute conflict with the customs board and with the British army. The first town to organize the boycott, Boston had to face the hostility of the British customs officials and troops. They also had to face the effective organized opposition of John Mein, the Scottish publisher of the new newspaper, the Boston Chronicle. The Chronicle was not only the most typographically advanced paper in the country; it was also the only one to advance from weekly to semiweekly publication.

The Chronicle had recently begun as a newspaper above partisan stands in the political fray. But the customs board shrewdly saw an excellent opportunity for a propaganda coup and secretly set about subsidizing Mein’s paper. Mein profited handsomely from the subsidy of being the stationer to the customs board, and after a year his stationery—or rather his vitriolic championing of the Tory cause—was so appreciated that the board made him its sole supplier. Mein also had clandestine help in writing his material from William Burch of the customs board, and from the richly hated customs officer Samuel Waterhouse, whom John Adams denounced as “the most notorious scribbler... and libeller, in the service of the conspirators against the liberties of America.” Yet Mein jealously maintained in public that he was completely “unbiased” and not connected with the government.

The major confrontation between Mein and the liberals began in the spring of 1769. On May 8, the Boston Town Meeting praised the bulk of the merchants for abiding by the nonimportation agreement. In the next few weeks the Committee of Merchants of Boston, headed by John Hancock, helped to distribute thousands of handbills urging a boycott of the few merchants who had not complied. The list included three relatives—two sons and a nephew—of the leading Tory Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor of the province. (Another nephew of Hutchinson, later added to the list, quickly recanted his position.)

To tighten enforcement, the Boston merchants in late July appointed a committee to inspect any vessels from Great Britain with goods condemned by the agreement, and to publish the names of violators. Another committee circulated a pledge among Boston inhabitants to boycott any merchant so publicized in the handbills as violators. Governor Hutchinson was outraged by the effectiveness of these measures. He was particularly outraged by such regular and vital functions being conducted by purely private, nongovernmental bodies: in short, by nonstate, revolutionary institutions springing up directly from among the people. So effective were the committees that in early August most of the merchants named in the original handbills hastened to recant, and to promise to abide by the agreement.

Pressing their advantage, the Boston Committee of Merchants in mid-August condemned the remaining recalcitrants as “Enemies to the Constitution of their Country” and urged their boycott. The list now included John Mein, who stepped up his attacks to a level of continuousness. One unfair and misleading charge said that the signing merchants themselves, including the eminent Hancock, were secret violators of the nonimportation agreement. Anguished and lengthy denials by the victims of Mein’s smear attacks did not at all deter him from compiling his charges into a large book, which was then widely distributed by eager customs officials throughout the colonies. Mein’s shrewd aim was to split the libertarian movement, and to sow distrust of the Boston leaders in the other provinces.

John Mein’s widely disseminated libel had a chilling effect in the colonies, and gravely weakened the zeal of the nonimportation movement even among the radical cadres in New York, Newport, and Philadelphia. Mein’s campaign also emboldened the nonsigning merchants and heartened Hutchinson’s consistent attempts to induce Parliament to outlaw boycott agreements.

The liberals reacted by stepping up their pressure campaign. The Boston Town Meeting, in early October, condemned the seven recalcitrant merchants, and resolved to enter their names on the town records so that “posterity may know who those persons were that preferred their little private advantages to the common interests of all the colonies....” The merchants, backed perhaps by hints of destruction of the recalcitrants’ property, then forced the sons and nephews of Hutchinson into line. Now there remained only three merchants, including Mein, whose names were advertised as “Those (who) AUDACIOUSLY continue to counteract the UNITED SENTIMENTS of the body of merchants throughout North America.” Of these, of course, the most hated was John Mein. The Free American Fire Company expelled Mein from membership, and the seniors of Harvard College resolved never again to have dealings with him. Finally, harsher measures were taken and his property was defaced and his person threatened.

Mein, it should be noted, was the inevitable focus of a growing climate of violence in Boston. In the first place, Mein had never been forgiven for the brutal and sudden clubbing of John Gill, a co-editor of the Boston Gazette, a year and a half earlier, an attack that Sam Adams and James Otis denounced as a “Spaniard-like attempt” on a free press. A far more precipitating event was a brutal crime that stunned the whole town of Boston. The liberals’ popular leader James Otis had denounced the customs board commissioners in the Gazette of September 4, 1769, for maligning the liberals as rebels and traitors. The next night, in brutal retaliation, John Robinson, one of the commissioners who had been so cordially hated a few years earlier in Rhode Island, set upon Otis with a gang of toughs and beat him unmercifully. From this assault Otis never recovered, having been rendered permanently insane. Boston’s beloved leader had fallen martyr to Tory violence, to what the aggrieved Sam Adams and the Gazette charged was an “intended and nearly executed assassination.” The people of Boston were ready to retaliate.

And so on October 28 a street crowd gathered against Mein and his coeditor John Fleeming. The frightened Mein shot into the crowd, wounding an innocent bystander. Some angry citizens swore out a warrant against Mein “for having put innocent people in bodily fear.” Mein fled for his life to his spiritual home on a British vessel and thence to England, where the grateful King George awarded Mein a handsome pension for his diligent services.

The hated Tory Mein had finally been routed, but his venomous work went on. His faithful ally Fleeming continued to publish the Chronicle, and to publish and distribute updated editions of his and Mein’s compendium of charges against the nonimporting merchants of Boston. Finally, however, Mein’s heavy debts and the dwindling of subscriptions and advertisements caught up with the enterprise. John Hancock was able triumphantly to take possession of the paper in behalf of Mein’s creditors. By late June 1770, the voice of the most dangerous Tory organ in America, the Boston Chronicle, had finally been stilled.