49. New York Breaks Nonimportation

The Americans were now confronted with a fateful choice: Should they be courageous, cleave to principle, and honor solemn pledges by continuing their boycott of British imports until all the Townshend duties were removed and perhaps the other Townshend Acts as well? Or should they cave in to the fact of repeal of the minor duties?

News of repeal came to the colonies in early May, although of course there were previous indications that the move was in the offing. First to react was the powerful multiclass, radically controlled General Committee of South Carolina. On April 25, the General Committee sent a circular letter to the other provinces urging every colony to strengthen its resolve and to maintain the general boycott until repeal of all the Townshend Acts, including the customs board and the vice admiralty courts. This general plea was repeated two months later.

Most of the colonies, however, lacked the iron determination of South Carolina and became mired in indecision. First to break the united front of the colonies against imports were the merchants of Albany, who on May 10 decided to confine their boycott henceforth to tea alone. In a few weeks, learning that they were alone, the same merchants rescinded the change and resumed nonimportation. The first breach had been healed.

The next attempted breach came in Rhode Island a few days later, when the merchants of Newport and Providence ended their agreement and discharged their Committees of Inspection. Nearly the last to join the movement and even then pressured by intercolonial boycotts, Rhode Island’s merchants were eager to resume trade and to ignore the larger principles at stake. Newport proved especially eager to resume full trade. Rhode Island’s action incensed the merchants and citizens of the other colonies, and these determined that if Rhode Island valued trade above all, its trade would suffer more from rescinding the boycott than from maintaining it. Within a week, mass meetings at Philadelphia and New York, and a meeting of Boston merchants pledged an absolute boycott against the merchants of Rhode Island. Providence quickly rescinded its action and joined the boycott against the importers of Newport. Providence merchants were kept in line by its town meeting, which repeatedly voted overwhelmingly to continue the general boycott. By the end of June, ports in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the Carolinas, as well as Chester, Wilmington, New Castle, and Baltimore, had enthusiastically joined the boycott against Newport. Sloops from Newport were turned back from ports from one end of the coast to the other. Finally, under this pressure, Newport merchants, on August 20, resumed nonimportation and appointed a Committee of Inspection. The boycotts by other colonies were rescinded, but many were still reluctant to trade with Rhode Island and especially with Newport.

Newport was the center of mercantile defections in the colonies, and the blame devolved principally upon the leading Jewish merchants of that city. Jewish violators in Newport were apparently more significant than were Tories. Of particular importance was Aaron Lopez, one of the wealthiest merchants in the colonies. As a noncooperator in the boycott, Lopez received lavish favors from the royal customs officials: his captains, for example, were exempted from swearing their cargoes, and when Lopez violated customs regulations, the officials looked the other way.*

The first permanent break in nonimportation came in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, another late-comer to the boycott that needed colonial pressure. When it became known that Portsmouth merchants were merrily importing British goods, Boston merchants instituted a boycott in mid-June, and were followed by Connecticut towns and even unanimously by the inhabitants of neighboring little Rye, New Hampshire. But pressure proved vain. A Boston radical visiting Portsmouth was driven out of town for fear of tar and feathers. The Portsmouth Town Meeting voted overwhelmingly against a boycott.

Not Portsmouth, however, but the great port towns—especially Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—would be the decisive force for or against continuing the boycott movement. In Boston, the reaction was never in much doubt. The formidable Sam Adams saw clearly that the partial repeal was essentially a device to split and destroy the colonial resistance movement, and he urged continuing nonimportation until all British taxes were removed and the customs board and admiralty courts eliminated, and even until the Sugar Act, the Declaratory Act, and the other oppressive measures since the Seven Years’ War were removed. The tea tax was rejected not only on principle, but also as by far the major revenue-earner of all the Townshend duties.

The May elections in Boston returned nearly all of the radical leaders, and the Boston Town Meeting manfully denounced English attempts to destroy colonial liberty. It scoffed at any asserted prerogative of the king to violate natural or constitutional rights, or to impose his will upon the fundamental laws of the land. Some Boston merchants tried to abandon the boycott and restrict nonimportation to tea only, but the town overwhelmingly refused to grant its approval.

Governor Hutchinson, under instructions from Lord Hillsborough, tried to split the resistance movement during May by shifting the Massachusetts legislature from radical Boston to Cambridge. But in this attempt he failed, as town after town voted to support the boycott and the “patriotic” merchants of Boston. Hutchinson lamented that the resistance of the boycott was supported by “the whole body of the people” as well as by the elected government officials. Thus in Marblehead, Robert Jameson, a teacher, lost all his pupils for refusing to abide by the boycott, and his house was threatened late at night by mobs “calling out with a loud voice to kill that dog Jameson... a governor’s man and a bastard of liberty.”

Hutchinson asked for a strengthened riot act to punish a mob that had tarred and feathered a customs officer at Gloucester. The Assembly told the governor that he had better investigate the cause of the riots: grievances against oppression. Moreover, it incisively pointed out that far worse than isolated, uncoordinated acts of violence was violence committed systematically, and unpunished, against the people by the standing army of Great Britain. Penetrating sharply beneath the “righteous” veil that the existence of a state apparatus casts over its organized violence, the Massachusetts Assembly denounced the army as a continuing unlawful body that committed continuing assaults and massacres. To this flagrant subversion of royal and military supremacy, the governor replied by dissolving the General Court.

While Boston posed no problem to the resistance movement, sharp struggles over how to react to the Townshend repeal were waged within the other two crucial cities, New York and Philadelphia. In contrast to relatively democratic and liberal Massachusetts, both Philadelphia and New York were plagued by strong Tory factions. The Philadelphia merchants also suffered from lack of uniformity in the nonimportation agreements among the various colonies. Thus Maryland excepted imports of coarse woolens, and the Philadelphia agreement did not; this permitted the Maryland merchants to appropriate the Philadelphia trade in woolens. Of the nineteen members of the enforcing Committee of Merchants of Philadelphia, seven (headed by Chairman John Reynell, a Quaker) resigned and began to agitate for rescinding the boycott. But the artisans and retail traders of Philadelphia insisted on continuing the boycott, backed by encouragement from the merchants of Boston and New York. By the time of the June 5 general meeting of subscribers to nonimportation, the pressure on the merchants had succeeded in ending their disaffection. In Boston, false news that the Philadelphia merchants had decided to abandon nonimportation led the Boston merchants to follow, but the Boston Town Meeting quickly forced the merchants back into line even before the falsity of the rumor was revealed.

One decisive factor in ending defection in Philadelphia was the letters by Benjamin Franklin to his Tory allies urging continued all-out adherence to the boycott. This body blow to Tory resistance by its erstwhile leader had several roots. In the first place, Franklin was very deeply involved in speculation in royal grants to western lands, and his chief enemy was Lord Hillsborough. The natural consequence of Hillsborough’s enmity was to push Franklin into friendships and association with the opposition, and into disenchantment with government policies in general. Furthermore, Franklin always knew on which side his bread was buttered, and several colonial assemblies (Georgia, New Jersey, as well as Pennsylvania) had recently appointed him as their London agent. Now, in 1770, the key agency post from Massachusetts was vacant, and no Tory could hope to obtain this position. Franklin’s call to Philadelphia to stand fast drew him closer, in Philadelphia, to Charles Thomson, iron manufacturer, distiller, and leader of the artisans’ movement for nonimportation, and away from Galloway’s Tories. The Tory press in England, not without justice, assailed Franklin as “Dr. Doubleface” and the “Judas of Craven Street” (Franklin’s home in London), and this of course brought him newfound popularity in America. As a result, the Massachusetts Assembly chose Franklin as its main agent over the estimable liberal and Wilkite Dr. Arthur Lee, and over the strenuous objections of Sam Adams and the bitter attacks of the Boston Gazette. However, Lee was chosen as alternate or substitute agent and Adams kept up his correspondence with the libertarian Lee, an “able and staunch advocate for the rights of America,” rather than with Franklin. Franklin was able to secure the appointment by splitting the liberal leadership and securing the support of the radical Congregational minister the Reverend Samuel Cooper. To do this, he changed his old tune and flatly denied any legislative sovereignty of Parliament over the colonies, conceding allegiance only to the king.

Philadelphia, then, also stood fast. New York was still to speak. When it did, this oligarchically dominated province sundered the united front of colonial resistance. The key to the difference in outcome was a grievous split within the liberal movement. Whereas the radicals were in total control of Boston, and Philadelphia was veering leftward, the Battle of Golden Hill had intensified a growing conservative reaction among erstwhile liberals, symbolized in the persecution of radical leader Alexander McDougall, a reaction sufficient to wreck radical influence in as oligarchically controlled a colony as New York.

As early as March 1770 the growing reaction had become evident. The annual festivities commemorating repeal of the Stamp Act had always been cordially celebrated by all the liberal forces in the province led by the Sons of Liberty. The Sons suddenly found their claim to lead the celebration challenged by a secessionist organization, the Friends of Liberty and Trade, which organized its own. And so, while the Sons toasted the imprisoned McDougall and continuance of the boycott until total repeal, the Friends ignored the McDougall issue and drank ambiguously to “trade and navigation and a speedy removal of their embarrassments.”* The list of Friends included the leading merchants and property owners in New York, especially the powerful Oliver DeLancey, John Alsop, Isaac Low, Leonard Lispenard, James Beekman, Gabriel Ludlow, and Peter Van Schaack.

When news of Townshend repeal arrived, the New York radicals were able to control matters by leading popular agitation. Tentative efforts of merchants to abandon the agreements were overruled. Recreant Boston merchant Nathaniel Rogers, who had come to a presumably more hospitable New York, was hanged in effigy and had to flee the province. A committee of the Sons informed Philadelphia merchants that New York would stand fast. They were right so far. Furthermore, a general meeting of New York inhabitants on May 30 voted by a large majority to preserve the boycott intact, and to boycott any who dared to violate it. Another mass meeting, on June 5, confirmed this decision.

But the people of New York were one thing, the merchants another. A committee of merchants headed by Isaac Low promptly rejected the popular resolutions, and called for an intercolonial congress of merchants to meet at Norwalk, Connecticut, on June 18 to adopt a uniform and, clearly, a far looser agreement. The idea of the Norwalk congress was promptly rejected by the merchants of the other colonies. The Boston merchants unanimously rejected any idea of deviation from the agreement, and the merchants of Essex County, New Jersey, would only consider meeting to strengthen the boycott. The Philadelphia merchants also stood firm. Of all the American port towns, only Hartford agreed to send delegates.

With the Norwalk congress necessarily abandoned, the New York merchants moved towards scuttling the boycott by themselves. They employed a cunning device: merchants went through New York City visiting each person individually and asking him whether he would vote for continuing the boycott provided Philadelphia and Boston concurred, or for removing it on all commodites except tea. The merchants triumphantly reported an overwhelming popular vote of confidence: 1,180 in favor of rescinding, 300 neutral or refusing to speak their views, and “few” in favor of the status quo.

The New York merchants then sent news of this “vote” to Boston and Philadelphia to win their agreement, but the other towns were singularly uninspired by a canvass that encouraged the maximum of implicit intimidation of the “voters.” Even the Hartford merchants refused to alter the boycott. The New York radicals also pointed out that the poll was composed of only one-fourth of the eligible voters and excluded rural folk entirely.

Undaunted by their inability to persuade the merchants, let alone the populace, of any other town to betray the nonimportation movement, the merchants of New York decided to do it themselves. Although a public meeting called by the merchants overwhelmingly rejected the idea of another poll of individuals, the merchants organized a second canvass on July 7, this time asking whether people favored rescinding the boycott even though Philadelphia and Boston had refused. The radicals, led by Isaac Sears and Alexander McDougall, organized a public meeting the same day that voted unanimously to retain the boycott. That night two mobs clashed; the radicals, parading with the inscription “Liberty and No Importation but in Union with the Other Colonies,” were routed by a conservative mob armed with sticks led by Judge Elias Desbrosses, president-elect of the New York Chamber of Commerce.

Two days later, the merchants reported a popular victory in its highly irregular canvass. But the less than eight hundred yes votes were a minority as against abstentions among those polled. But the committee of merchants was interested only in token face-saving, and that night they hastened to announce their resolve to import every British good except tea. The mighty nonimportation movement had been shattered on the rock of New York reaction.

From that point on, the radical leadership in the colonies fought a valiant but doomed fight to preserve nonimportation. When the committee of merchants of New York gloatingly informed the other colonies of their deed, angry reaction was quick to pour in from all sides. In Philadelphia a great mass meeting of the city and county on July 14 condemned New York’s action as a “sordid and wanton defection from the common cause” and announced a boycott against New York. The meeting of Boston merchants voted unanimously to burn the New York letter publicly. The Albany merchants blasted their New York City colleagues for “unaccountable duplicity.” In New Jersey indignation was particularly rife. Students at Princeton College, including James Madison, publicly burned the letter in a funeral service for the betrayed cause. Mass meetings in the towns of Woodbridge and New Brunswick, and in Essex, Sussex, Burlington, and Somerset counties voted to censure and boycott New York; an unfortunate fruit peddler in Woodbridge hailing from New York was dumped into a pond to “cool his courage.” In Connecticut, merchants and other individuals of New Haven resolved to boycott New York. An all-Connecticut meeting at New Haven on September 13, representing merchants and farmers from the great majority of towns in the colony, resolved to boycott all British imports from New York.

The southern colonies did not display as much zeal in denouncing New York’s action, with the predictable exception of Charleston. There a mass meeting on August 22 unanimously voted to punish New York’s “scandalous revolt from the common cause of freedom” by an absolute boycott. This was no idle talk—sea captains from New York were in subsequent months forbidden trading rights in Charleston’s port. In the southern colonies reaction was much more diffuse; but Talbot County, Maryland, resolved to support an absolute boycott of New York, and the merchants and inhabitants of Wilmington and Brunswick, North Carolina, unanimously reaffirmed the boycott.

Although, as Arthur Schlesinger writes, “the patriotic indignation of the other provinces at the defection of New York was splendid to behold,” the boycott could not survive the defection of a port as great as New York.* The strain of New York’s merchants obtaining business that could go elsewhere was too much to bear. In Philadelphia, the seven dissident merchants joined with seven others to demand a house-to-house poll in the crafty New York manner. When a committee of merchants, headed by Charles Thomson, refused, the dissident merchants managed to call a small public meeting of subscribers to the boycott on September 20 to gain a majority for rescinding the agreement. On the flimsy pretext of this majority, the dissident merchants resolved to end the boycott except on tea, and this despite a virtually unanimous advance vote by a mass meeting of Philadelphia citizens to continue the boycott, and a similar vote of a Philadelphia grand jury.

With New York and Philadelphia now fallen, could even mighty Boston be far behind? In mid-September, a huge mass meeting of a thousand merchants and traders of Boston had urged on Philadelphia an intercolonial congress of merchants to strengthen the agreement. But the call came too late, and Philadelphia had irredeemably defected from the boycott. The bulk of Boston merchants had long been restive under the boycott and now they had their chance. On October 12, the Boston merchants unanimously voted to confine their boycott to tea. The great nonimportation movement, to all intents and purposes, was ended. General Gage exulted that “interests” had thus triumphed over “patriotism.”

With the great ports brought low, the other colonies could put up no further resistance. At a meeting of the general committee of Maryland on October 25, the Baltimore merchants, led by Jonathan Hudson, affirmed their absolute determination to end the boycott, and duly ignored the resolution of the meeting (which included assemblymen, councillors, and planters as well as merchants) to abide by the agreements and to boycott any Baltimore violators. The merchants simply resumed all British imports except tea. In Virginia, never enthused about the agreements, nonimportation would be quietly repealed early next July. In North Carolina it simply disappeared without a trace.

But South Carolina died hard. Radical sentiment dwindled but was still strong. A general meeting of subscribers met on December 13 to decide South Carolina’s course. Even now, though alone among the colonies, South Carolina’s magnificent radical movement fought on. Thomas Lynch, planter and eminent radical leader, traveled fifty miles to plead with all his eloquence “for the expiring liberty of his dear country which the merchants would see like any other merchandise.”* Lynch was backed wholeheartedly by fellow leaders Christopher Gadsden and John MacKenzie. The radicals urged continuing the boycott coupled with open importation of the banned goods from Holland, but their valiant effort was in vain, and even South Carolina surrendered. Notwithstanding, the Assembly considered boycotting the northern provinces in protest against their betrayal, but finally abandoned the idea as punishing every northerner for the sins of some of their merchants. Unstated was the realization that a one-colony boycott would not be very effective.

By the end of 1770, an uneasy stability had settled upon the American colonies. A few things had been achieved: the bulk of the Townshend duties were now repealed, and the British troops were out of Boston. The nonimportation movement had helped in the former (although its impact in Britain had been greatly lessened by coincidentally increased demands for British products on the Continent); and violent rebellion in Boston had accomplished the latter. But the major Townshend tax—on tea—remained, as did the customs commissioners (who returned to Boston in December), the vice admiralty courts and their new hierarchical powers, and the previous trade and Navigation Acts. British troops remained at Castle William and the navy was now stationed in Boston harbor, thus permitting Boston to remain as the potential center of future crisis. Ominous rumblings of threats against Boston and against the Massachusetts’ charter were only temporarily dampened by the war crisis with Spain, as were intentions to make official salaries in the colonies independent of their assemblies. Peaceful resolution of the Spanish crisis in early 1771, by the way, further strengthened the hold of the Tory North ministry by discrediting the war hysteria of Chatham and Shelburne in opposition.

The experience of the Townshend crisis imparted certain lessons to the radical leaders in America. In the first place, it was clear that revolutionary violence was a powerful weapon against the British. Where it could be employed, as against stamp distributors, customs officers, or British troops, it either accomplished its task of getting rid of the oppressive officials or effectively mobilized mass support by raising popular indignation against the violence of the British. In some cases, it is true, as in the Battle of Golden Hill, violent rebellion led to a victorious counterrevolutionary reaction. But these two consequences were not contradictory; in any case, violence radically polarized public opinion, and the question to be weighed was which newly polarized side would be the stronger. Since the revolutionary movement was a mass movement of the American people, in most cases such polarization could only help the radical cause.

Second, while voluntary boycott of British goods was certainly a vital weapon, it had proved most effective when used in conjunction with violence, as in the stamp crisis. When the boycott dragged on for several years, as in the Townshend crisis, inevitable strains might lead to a breach in the agreement, and one important breach was bound to end the movement. Furthermore, it was realized that a boycott movement confined to merchants would be particularly vulnerable to breakup from within.

*See David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760–1776 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1958), pp. 145f.

*It must be noted that New York merchants felt aggrieved that New York had relatively the best record of abiding by the nonimportation agreement, and had therefore suffered the greatest loss of trade. See Knollenberg, Growth of the American Revolution, pp. 223–24.

*Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763—1776 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), p. 229. The Schlesinger volume is indispensable for an account of the entire nonimportation movement.

*Sam Adams, for his part, denounced the defecting merchants who “like a spaniel meanly cringed and kissed the rod that whipped them” (quoted in John C. Miller, Sam Adams [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1936], p. 225).