Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins

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Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins: A Perspective from 1774

ERNARD BAILYN’s Ideological Origins of the American B Revolution, in print for half a century, makes a com- pelling case for the prevalence of certain themes in the political thought of eighteenth-century Americans based on a comprehensive examination of the pamphlet literature of the revolutionary years, patriot and loyalist alike. But Bailyn’s fo- cus on the pamphlets’ major themes meant that he tended to obscure certain details of how Americans interpreted and re- acted to specific pre-revolutionary events that were primarily evident in newspaper essays and correspondence. Even though pamphlets, as he points out, could be produced quickly and in- expensively, they could never match the immediacy of opinions expressed in letters or newspaper articles.1 Bailyn’s fourth chapter, “The Logic of Rebellion,” is in many ways the heart of the book, for it shows how Americans ap- plied the ideas Bailyn explored in Chapters Two (“Sources and Traditions”) and Three (“Power and Liberty: A Theory of Poli- tics”) to their encounters with British authority in the 1760s and 1770s. Then Chapters Five (“Transformation”) and Six (“The Contagion of Liberty”) illustrate the continuing, long-term sig- nificance and impact of those ideas. Yet a topic that regularly

1Of course, Ideological Origins had its own origins in the extensive introduction to volume 1 of Bailyn’s edition of The Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), so he cannot be faulted retrospectively for his emphasis on pamphlets to the exclusion of most other sources. Cf. Bailyn, The Ideolog- ical Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 A PERSPECTIVE FROM 1774 201 recurred in public and private conversations during the year 1774, one that directly related to the imperatives of the “logic of rebellion,” is largely absent from Bailyn’s study because it was rarely discussed in the pamphlet literature. In this brief contribution to the forum on Ideological Origins, I aim to look beyond disputes that divided patriots from loyalists and to com- plement the overarching themes of Ideological Origins by ex- amining a debate among patriots that threaded through 1774 as a leitmotif. I refer to the ongoing dispute over the legitimacy of the destruction of the 300-plus chests of East India Company (EIC) tea in Boston Harbor, December 16, 1773. In most accounts, including Bailyn’s, the “Boston Tea Party” (which gained its famous name fifty years later) is presented as unproblematic. In Ideological Origins, the tea destruction appears briefly as the motive for the passage of the Coercive Acts. By omission Bailyn leads his audience to conclude that colonists generally applauded the Bostonians’ dramatic act. As a result, readers miss the controversy that soon erupted over the question of repaying the EIC for the tea—and whether Bosto- nians should have destroyed it in the first place. Yet that very controversy was intricately related to a major theme of Bailyn’s book—that is, the threat to liberty posed by the corrupt grasp- ing for power of the British ministry, which threatened the liberty of all British subjects, even the EIC, to hold their property securely and unmolested.2 Among contemporaries up and down the eastern seaboard, the events in Boston initiated debates that persisted through- out 1774 and into 1775. Colonists in Massachusetts and beyond argued over whether Bostonians should have chosen another tactic and whether the company should be compensated for its losses, if not by residents of Boston or Massachusetts, then

2The primary reference to the “Tea Party” in Ideological Origins is on 118; see also 152. Chapter Three stresses the perceived corruption of the British government and its ongoing threat to freedom, including property-holding and other rights. Lawrence Glickman located what is evidently the first reference to the “Tea Party” in a New York newspaper in 1826; see his Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 323n24.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 202 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY by contributions from other colonists. Their arguments reveal nuances of the political debates in 1774 obscured in more gen- eral studies such as Ideological Origins.

EIC tea ships arrived in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, not just Boston. In Charleston, customs officials seized the tea and stored it. In New York and Philadelphia, the ships were turned away before they could enter the harbor.3 Ac- cordingly, colonists who commented on Bostonians’ actions had other models of resistance to which they sometimes referred. Thus, in February 1774, Henry Laurens, the wealthy South Carolinian then living in London, praised his fellow Charlesto- nians’ solution to the problem posed by the EIC tea: “I com- mend the proceeding in Charles Town in preference to all the rest.” The tea, he remarked, “must remain in Store & perish or be returned at the expence of those who Sent it.” Signifi- cantly, this major leader in the independence movement added that he hoped Bostonians would be “So wise & So honest as to pay for the Tea.” Benjamin Franklin, another future advo- cate of independence, then also resident in London, initially shared Laurens’s opinion. Soon after he learned of the incident, Franklin advised the Massachusetts Committee of Correspon- dence that a dispute over “Publick Rights” should not involve “an Act of violent Injustice” such as an attack on private property. Massachusetts should provide “Speedy Reparation” to the company. He insisted that suitable reparation would not bring “Dishonour to us or Prejudice our Claim of Rights.” It took

3Detailed narratives of what happened in all four cities comprise Chapter One of my book, 1774: Year of Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, forthcoming). Two books about Boston—Benjamin Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), and Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)—contain brief accounts of events in the other cities; see Labaree, Boston, 150–59; and Carp, Defiance, 108–109. See also my “The Seventh Tea Ship,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (2016): 681–710, on a tea ship bound for Boston that wrecked on Cape Cod instead.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 A PERSPECTIVE FROM 1774 203 Benjamin Franklin seven months before he changed his mind and expressed approval of the tea’s destruction.4 Americans in London were not alone in expressing doubts about what Bostonians had done and suggesting that compensation should be made. Some patriots quarreled openly with those like John Adams, who lauded the action as “magnificent,” even “an Epocha in History.” Just two Massachusetts towns explicitly praised the destruction of the tea in formal resolutions, and they were balanced by two others that decried it. Local resolutions in Massachusetts and elsewhere often chose silence as their response to the Bostonians’ action. New En- gland towns adopted strong statements defending Americans’ rights, but commonly and tellingly avoided explicit comment on the destruction of EIC tea.5 Virginians were recognized at the time as fierce proponents of resistance to British measures, yet they, too, had mixed re- actions to what would come to be known as an iconic event. Yes, the tutor Philip Vickers Fithian reported in January 1774 that the news from the north was greeted with “great Profes- sions of Liberty expressed in Songs Toast &c;” but that same month an essayist signing himself “L.H.” criticized the “Sons of Riot and Confusion” who had destroyed the tea. He asked a crucial question for all who treasured property rights: “Is there no Danger to Liberty when every Merchant is liable to have his House, Property, and even Life, invaded or threatened by a Mob”? Another Virginian wrote privately that he believed Charleston had chosen the better course: Bostonians should have landed and stored the tea, and then refused to purchase

4Henry Laurens to George Appleby, February 15, 1774, George C. Rogers et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981–), 9:277–78; Benjamin Franklin to committee of correspondence, February 2, 1774, William B. Willcox et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 21:76–77; for his change of mind in September, see 287. 5December 17, 1773, L.H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–), 2:85–86. On resolutions in Massachusetts towns, see Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 167–68. The same pattern held with town resolutions in New Hamp- shire and Rhode Island.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 204 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY it. “Let it lie in the publick Warehouses & Rott,” he wrote. The arrival in mid-May 1774 of news of the Boston Port Act, closing the port until the tea was paid for, aroused many expressions of sympathy for Boston’s plight. In an oft-quoted passage, Colonel George Washington told a friend that “the cause of Boston . . . now is and ever will be considerd as the cause of America”— but in a parenthesis sometimes omitted from the quotations he added “(not that we approve their cond[uc]t in destroy[in]g the Tea).”6 In Boston itself, the issue of whether the town, or possibly some of its wealthy residents, should reimburse the EIC losses in order to lift the penalties imposed by the Port Act led to heated arguments. In May and June town meetings, the question was hotly contested. These formal debates were only part of an extensive conflict in the press and at informal gatherings. At the meetings, speakers proposed various ways to raise funds to pay for the tea; one reported that even men who opposed specific suggestions acknowledged “the justice and equity” of reimbursing the company.7 In mid-June hundreds of trades- men met at Faneuil Hall to consider whether to repay the company; but Dr. Joseph Warren and other patriots convinced them that such compensation would amount to submission to Parlia- ment. Judging by the diverse opinions expressed in print, an essay published about this time observed accurately that “Various as the Colours in the Rainbow are the Opinions of Gentlemen

6Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., Journal & Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian 1773– 1774. . . (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1957), 59; L.H., in Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), January 20, 1774; William Wiatt to his mother and brother, July 3, 1774, William Wiatt Papers, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA; Washington to George William Fairfax, June 10, 1774, The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, ed. W.W. Abbot et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 10:96. County resolutions in Virginia collected in William J. Van Schreeven and Robert L. Scribner, comps. and eds., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 1:109–68, like the New England town resolves, tended to maintain a discreet silence on Boston’s destruction of the tea. 7Harrison Gray, the colony’s treasurer, recalled those meetings (and possibly con- flated remarks offered at them) in his pamphlet, A Few Remarks upon the Continental Congress . . . and the Provincial Congress (Boston: [no pub.], 1775), 5–6 (Early Amer- ican Imprints no. 14704), republished as The Two Congresses Cut Up. . . (New York: James Rivington, 1775), EAI no. 13698.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 A PERSPECTIVE FROM 1774 205 in this Town” regarding compensation for the EIC. Dr. Thomas Young, a member of the Boston Committee of Correspon- dence, reported “much talk out of doors, as well as writing in the papers concerning payment for the Tea” surrounding the June meetings.8 In the event, at a two-day session blazing with conflict on June 27–28, townsmen voted to support the resistance tactics of the town’s committee of correspondence. Residents explicitly repudiated the committee’s most passionate critics, many of whom were merchants who preferred a conciliatory course of action. The dissenters, apparently outvoted four to one, walked out en masse after their defeat. A customs officer later opined that they should have remained and proposed forming a committee to decide how to pay for the tea. Doubtless, they would have lost that vote too, he wrote, but had they stayed they would at least have had “an opportunity of protesting against [the town’s] proceedings in this important particular.” After the meeting adjourned, over one hundred men published statements challenging the town’s decisions.9 In light of the disagreements in Boston over reimbursing the EIC, it is hardly surprising that comparable discussions and similarly divergent opinions appeared in other colonies. During the summer of 1774, the suggestion that Americans should at a minimum consider compensating the company for its losses repeatedly reemerged. In Virginia, the famous Fairfax County resolves of mid-July, drafted largely by George Mason, promised that if the grievances the document detailed were ad- dressed residents of the county would seriously consider con- tributing to a fund to reimburse the EIC. In Pennsylvania John

8Fanueil Hall meeting: Dr. Joseph Warren to Samuel Adams, June 15, 1774, Samuel Adams Papers, microfilm, reel 1, New York Public Library; untitled essay, by “K.D.,” Massachusetts Gazette & Boston News Letter, June 16, 1774 (hereafter Mass. Gaz. & BNL); Thomas Young to John Lamb, June 19, 1774, John Lamb Papers, New-York Historical Society, New York. 9Nathaniel Coffin to Charles Steuart, July 6, 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, National Library of Scotland (microfilm, reel 2, f. 227, housed at Library of Virginia). Forthe statements by the dissenters, see “Protest against the Proceedings of the Town Meet- ing. . . ,” Mass. Gaz. & BNL, July 7, 1774, signed by 129 men; and an untitled statement signed by eight others in the same issue (also in Boston Evening Post, July 4, 1774).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 206 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Dickinson’s July instructions to his colony’s delegation to the First Continental Congress, which were adopted by the Provin- cial Convention, pledged “to satisfy all damages done to the East India Company” if Parliament would repeal the Coercive Acts and forgo its claim of a right to tax the colonies. Further, many American critics of British policy refused, explicitly or im- plicitly, to defend the Bostonians. So, although Robert Carter Nicholas, Virginia’s treasurer, attacked the EIC, he neverthe- less declared he would not justify the destruction of the tea or other “Acts of Violence or Intemperance.”10 Since most of the delegates to the First Continental Congress would have participated in such earlier discussions, it could be expected that the topic of compensation for the company would arise in Philadelphia. And it did. On October 1, in a vigorous and lengthy debate noted only by the Connecticut congress- man Silas Deane, John Jay, seconded by another New York representative, Isaac Low, moved that Congress consider meth- ods of paying for the tea. According to Deane’s diary, Richard Henry Lee opposed the motion, as did Christopher Gadsden and other South Carolinians, along with Patrick Henry and John Adams. But a key Virginia delegate, Edmund Pendleton, supported Jay. “His Principle is,” Deane recorded, that “We ex- pressly justify the Town of Boston for destroying the Tea, & offer to pay for the Tea, on Condition, that the Town of Boston be instantly relieved and at the same time We resolve never hereafter to Use E India Commodities more untill [sic]the E India Company refund the Money.” But this motion failed unanimously, as its supporters comprised a minority in every delegation, and each colony had only a single vote.11

10The Fairfax Resolves, in The Papers of George Mason, 1725–1792, ed. Robert A. Rutland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 1:201–209; “Penn- sylvania Convention,” Peter Force, ed., American Archives (Washington, D.C.: Peter Force and M. St. Clair Clarke, 1837–1846), 4th series, 1:561; Robert Carter Nicholas, Considerations on the Present State of Virginia Examined (1774), in Van Schreeven and Scribner, comps. and eds., Revolutionary Virginia, 1:261. 11Silas Deane, diary, October 1, 1774, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976), 1: 133.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 A PERSPECTIVE FROM 1774 207 Even the decisive vote by the Congress did not stop spec- ulation that if Americans agreed to reimburse the EIC, Par- liament and the ministry might make concessions. In one of the last such proposals, in February 1775, the Pennsylvanian Joseph Reed, who believed the Secretary of State for America, Lord Dartmouth, was favorably disposed to compromise, wrote him to suggest an arrangement that Reed claimed would give the colonies “Confidence” in future prospects for a peaceful solution to the underlying dispute. If Americans paid for the tea and Parliament repealed the Tea Duty and the Coercive Acts and also declared “the Inexpediency of Taxation,” then colonists would be willing to provide “the so much desired Revenue” on grounds that could be determined through further negotiation. By the time his letter arrived in London, the question was most likely moot: hostilities had probably begun.12 This brief summary of debates occurring largely within the resistance movement itself during a single year, 1774, demon- strates that even those Americans who agreed with each other on the basic principles of opposition to British policy out- lined in Bailyn’s Ideological Origins—as, say, John Jay and John Adams surely did—could disagree about the application of those principles to tactics in particular situations. In this instance, the question was whether the East India Company should be reimbursed for its destroyed tea, or, at the very least, whether Americans should hold out such an offer as a bargain- ing chip in possible negotiations regardless of the principle in- volved. As a Charleston resident later recalled, during the first debate about the tea ship that arrived in that city, even many “friends of liberty” contended that the directors of the EIC had the same right as every other British subject to send goods for sale to any location in the empire. Security of property, after all, was a fundamental right belonging to every Briton, guar- anteed by the constitution they all revered. And as American

12Joseph Reed to Lord Dartmouth, February 14, 1775, American Papers of the Second Earl of Dartmouth, microfilm, reel 7, no. 1097, Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford, UK. Sailing to Great Britain from North America commonly took six weeks to two months; Dartmouth could have received this letter on or before April 19.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021 208 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY patriots argued against parliamentary taxation, they based that argument on the need to retain full control over their property and its disposition. Some of them, although by no means all, recognized that the principle should apply to the East India Company as well as to individual colonists.13

13John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution. . . (Charleston, SC: A.E. Miller, 1821), 1:98.

Mary Beth Norton wrote her PhD dissertation on the Ameri- can loyalist exiles with Bernard Bailyn in the 1960s. She is cur- rently Mary Donlon Alger Professor at Cornell University.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00666 by guest on 29 September 2021