65. The Impact on Britain

Buoyed by the network of provincial conventions and local enforcement committees, the Continental Congress’s boycott of British imports proved extraordinarily effective. Imports of the thirteen American colonies from Great Britain fell from 2.6 million pounds in 1774 to over 200,000 pounds in 1775. The effectiveness of the boycott is even more startling if we omit non-boycotting Georgia, where imports more than doubled, from 57,500 pounds to 135,000 pounds. Omitting Georgia, imports from Great Britain fell ninety-seven percent in one year.

The drastic decline in imports had the desired effect on the British merchants and manufacturers in the American trade. From January through March 1775, they kept up a drumfire of agitation upon Parliament to repeal the Coercive Acts. Petitions to this effect passed into Parliament from London and from such manufacturing towns as Bristol, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham, and Belfast, which all complained of business losses, bankruptcies, and unemployment. Indeed, in February, a subscription fund to send relief to the distressed people of Boston and New England was launched by merchants in London. But the Tory North ministry, far more firmly ensconced than the government of a decade before, adamantly hewed to the tough line of suppression and no appeasement. Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn declared in April that the interests of commerce and manufacturers must bow to the higher interest of upholding supreme legislative power against open rebellion: “An enemy in the bowels of a kingdom is surely to be resisted, opposed, and conquered; notwithstanding the trade that may suffer, and the factories that may be ruined.”

Indeed, rather than relent, Lord North decided to escalate the struggle and bring the fractious Americans to heel by severe retaliation; if Americans would not trade with Britain, then, by God, they would not be allowed to trade with anyone else! On March 30, Parliament, over Whig and Chathamite opposition, enacted North’s New England Restraining Act, prohibiting New England from trading with any place except Britain and the British West Indies after July 1, and from using the Newfoundland fisheries after July 20, until peaceful conditions were restored. When news arrived of the widespread ratification of the Continental Association, Parliament in mid-April extended the provisions of the Restraining Act to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. With petty cunning, the supposedly Tory colonies of New York, Delaware, North Carolina, and Georgia were omitted in an attempt to induce them to break with the boycott. But the time for divisive tactics had long since past.

While moving to impose a big-stick policy of escalating force, Lord North also held out a highly anemic and suspect carrot. His Conciliatory Plan, introduced into Parliament on February 20, tried to seduce the Americans into abandoning their position under the cloak of saving face. Thus, a colony was to be spared parliamentary taxation for revenue provided that it would tax itself to pay for the salaries of the royal officials. Britain—indeed, the whim of the Crown—was, in short, to tell each colony how much it must raise in taxes to pay for purposes fixed by the home country; and then the colony would have to obey. Thus, imposed taxation by Britain would remain under a new guise. North’s complex and unworkable plan was consciously designed, as were his force acts, to split the American colonies. But no one was fooled. The illustrious Whig leader Edmund Burke brilliantly analyzed the plan and such of its unworkable features as deciding on quotas of taxes for each colony as a “ransom by auction” of the colonies. Lord North’s proposal was soon rendered obsolete by the rush of events—reaching New York, for example, the day after news of Lexington and Concord.

Burke, leading the opposition in the House of Commons to the British crackdown, called for repeal and a return to the Old Whig colonial policy. In his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” Burke set forth the necessity of appeasement as the prime foreign policy of a truly strong government: “I mean to give peace. Peace implies reconciliation; and... reconciliation does in a manner always imply concession on one part or on the other. In this state of things... the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer peace with honor and with safety.” And Burke made clear that peace was precisely the desideratum, to be arrived at simply and directly, not by the paradox of pursuing the chimera of peace through waging long and bloody war: “The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle... not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions... it is simple peace, sought in its natural course, and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace; laid in principles purely pacific.”

Burke saluted American achievements and economic development, which had not been “squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection.” He added, “When I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt, and die away within me.” In this way Burke harked back to the crucial distinction he had made in his first work, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), between the benefits of natural voluntary actions in society (“natural government”), and the mischievous effects of the coercive intervention of the state (“artificial government”).*

Burke hailed the “fierce spirit of liberty” that had grown up among the Americans, a result of their remoteness, their religion and customs, their English tradition of liberty and revolution, and their education in legal and political theory. Now the spirit of liberty in America was in collision with the spirit of power in England. Burke saw with acute perception the radically new nature of what the Americans had recently been doing. He saw that they had been creating, in their network of local and provincial committees of correspondence, of enforcement, and conventions of delegates, both provincial and continental, an approach to a state of anarchism. For here were revolutionary institutions completely illegal and outside the legal framework, created spontaneously by the people building from the grassroots. This voluntary network of popular revolutionary organs, from town committees up to provincial conventions and even including the Congress, exercised only minimal coercive authority; its influence was in giving leadership to the voluntary actions of the mass of individuals. These institutions, for example, did not live off taxation—that coercive institution unique to the concept of government. And none printed its own money. Thus, as legal government began to break down, particularly where it was prohibited in Massachusetts, and was replaced by these popular institutions, government in America began to veer toward anarchism. As Burke phrased it:

We thought, Sir, that the utmost which the discontented colonists would do, was to disturb authority; we never dreamt they could of themselves supply it.... They have formed a government sufficient for its purposes, without... the troublesome formality of an election. Evident necessity, and tacit consent, have done the business in an instant. So well have they done it... that the new institution is infinitely better obeyed than the ancient government ever was in its most fortunate period. Obedience is what makes government, and not the names by which it is called.... This new government has originated directly from the people; and was not transmitted through any of the ordinary artificial media of a positive constitution. It was not a manufacture ready formed, and transmitted to them in that condition from England. The evil arising from hence is this; that the colonists having once found the possibility of enjoying the advantages of order in the midst of a struggle for liberty, such struggles will not henceforward seem so terrible to the settled and sober part of mankind as they had appeared before....

[And as to Massachusetts] we were confident that the first feeling, if not the very prospect of anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable. A vast province has now subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor, for near a twelvemonth, without governors, without judges, without executive magistrates.

*This hard-hitting anarchist attack on government, written pseudonymously while Burke was an impecunious and disgruntled young law student, was by him quickly repudiated as a supposed satire when his authorship became known. And yet here Burke echoes a work that was supposed to be a satire. For a brief discussion disputing the satirical nature of the Vindication, see Murray N. Rothbard, “A Note on Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas (January 1958): 114–18.