After 1748 various imperial reforms were in the air. The eye-opening experience of fighting the Seven Years’ War amid the colonists’ evasion and corruption of the navigation laws had provoked William Pitt and other royal officials into vigorous, though piecemeal, reforms of the imperial system. But these beginnings might have been suppressed, as others earlier had been, if it had not been for the enormous problems that were created by the Peace of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763.
The most immediate of these problems was the reorganization of the territory that had been acquired from France and Spain. New governments had to be organized, the Indian trade had to be regulated, land claims had to be sorted out, and something had to be done to keep the conflicts between land-hungry white settlers and angry Native Americans from exploding into open warfare.
Even more disturbing was the huge expense confronting the British government. By 1763 the war debt totaled £137 million; its annual interest alone was £5 million, a huge figure when compared with an ordinary yearly British peacetime budget of only £8 million. There was, moreover, little prospect of military costs declining. Since the new territories were virtually uninhabited by Englishmen, the government could not rely on its traditional system of local defense and police to preserve order. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief in North America, estimated that he would need 10,000 troops to keep the peace with the French and Indians and to deal with squatters, smugglers, and bandits. Thus at the outset of the 1760s the British government made a crucial decision that no subsequent administration ever abandoned—the decision to maintain a standing army in America. This peacetime army was more than double the size of the army that had existed in the colonies before the Seven Years’ War, and the costs of maintaining it quickly climbed to well over £300,000 a year.
Where was the money to come from? The landowning gentry in England felt pressed to the wall by taxes; a new English cider tax of 1763 actually required troops in the apple-growing counties of England to enforce it. Meanwhile, returning British troops were bringing home tales of the prosperity Americans were enjoying at the war’s end. Under the circumstances it seemed reasonable to the British government to seek new sources of revenue in the colonies and to make the navigation system more efficient in ways that royal officials had long advocated. A half century of what Edmund Burke called “salutary neglect” had come to an end.
The delicate balance of this rickety empire was therefore bound to be disrupted. But the coming to the throne in 1760 of a new monarch, the young and impetuous George III, worsened this changing Anglo-American relationship. George III was only twenty-two years old at the time, shy and inexperienced in politics. But he was stubbornly determined to rule personally, in a manner distinctly different from that of the Hanoverians George I and George II, his German-born great-grandfather and grandfather. With the disastrous failure of the Stuart heir, “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” to reclaim the English throne in 1745–46, George, who was the first of the Hanoverian kings to be British-born, was much more confident of his hold on the throne than his Hanoverian predecessors had been. Hence he felt freer to ignore the advice of the Whig ministers, who had guided the first two Georges, and to become his own ruler. Influenced by his inept Scottish tutor and “dearest friend,” Lord Bute, he aimed to purify English public life of its corruption and factionalism. He wanted to replace former Whig-Tory squabbling and party intrigue with duty to crown and country. These were the best of intentions, but the results of them were the greatest and most bewildering fluctuations in English politics in a half century—all at the very moment the long-postponed reforms of the empire were to take place.
Historians no longer depict George III as a tyrant seeking to undermine the English constitution by choosing his ministers against Parliament’s wishes. But there can be little doubt that men of the time felt that George III, whether he meant to or not, was violating the political conventions of the day. When he chose Lord Bute, his Scottish favorite, who had little strength in Parliament, to head his government, thereby excluding such Whig ministers as William Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle, who did have political support in Parliament, the new king may not have been acting unconstitutionally, but he certainly was violating customary political realities. Bute’s retirement in 1763 did little to ease the opposition’s fears that the king was seeking the advice of Tory favorites “behind the curtain” and was attempting to impose decisions on the leading political groups in Parliament rather than governing through them. By diligently attempting to shoulder what he thought was his constitutional responsibility for governing in his own stubborn, peculiar way, George III helped to increase the political confusion of the 1760s.
A decade of short-lived ministries in the 1760s contrasted sharply with the stable and long-lasting Whig governments of the previous generation. It almost seemed as if the stubborn king trusted no one who had Parliament’s support. After Pitt and Newcastle had been dismissed, and after Bute had faded, the king in 1763 turned to George Grenville, Bute’s protégé, only because he found no one else acceptable to be his chief minister. Although Grenville was responsible for the first wave of colonial reforms, his resignation in 1765 resulted from a personal quarrel with the king and had nothing to do with colonial policy. Next, a government was formed by Whigs who were connected with the Marquess of Rockingham and for whom the great orator and political thinker Edmund Burke was a spokesman; but this Whig coalition never had the king’s confidence, and it lasted scarcely a year. In 1766, George at last called on the aging Pitt, now Lord Chatham, to head the government. But Chatham’s illness (gout in the head, critics said) and the bewildering parliamentary factionalism of the late 1760s turned his ministry into such a hodgepodge that Chatham scarcely ruled at all.
By 1767 no one seemed to be in charge. Ministers shuffled in and out of offices, exchanging positions and following their own inclinations even against their colleagues’ wishes. Amid this confusion only Charles Townshend, chancellor of the exchequer, gave any direction to colonial policy, and he died in 1767. Not until the appointment of Lord North as prime minister in 1770 did George find a politician whom he trusted and who also had Parliament’s support.
Outside of Parliament, the huge portion of the British nation that was excluded from active participation in politics was stirring as it never had before. Not only was Ireland becoming restless under Britain’s continual interference in its affairs, but political corruption in Britain and Parliament’s failure to extend either the right to vote or representation to large numbers of British subjects created widespread resentment and led to many calls for reform. Mob rioting in London and elsewhere in England increased dramatically in the 1760s. In 1763, George III noted that there were “insurrections and tumults in every part of the country.” By the end of the decade the situation was worse. Lord North was attacked on his way to Parliament; his coach was destroyed and he barely escaped with his life.
Rioting had long been common in England, but many of the popular uprisings of the 1760s were different from those in the past. Far from being limited to particular grievances such as high bread prices, much of the rioting was now directed toward the whole political system. The most important crowd leader was John Wilkes, one of the most colorful demagogues in English history. Wilkes was a member of Parliament and an opposition journalist who in 1763 was arrested and tried for seditiously libeling George III and the government in No. 45 of his newspaper, the North Briton. Wilkes immediately became a popular hero, and the cry “Wilkes and Liberty” spread on both sides of the Atlantic. The House of Commons ordered the offensive issue of the newspaper publicly burned, and Wilkes fled to France. In 1768 he returned and was several times elected to the House of Commons, but each time Parliament denied him his seat. London crowds, organized by substantial shopkeepers and artisans, found in Wilkes a symbol of all their pent-up resentments against Britain’s corrupt and oligarchic politics. The issue of Wilkes helped to bring together radical reform movements that shook the foundations of Britain’s narrow governing class.
Thus in the 1760s and early 1770s the British government was faced with the need to overhaul its empire and gain revenue from its colonies at the very time that the political situation in the British Isles themselves was more chaotic, confused, and disorderly than it had been since the early eighteenth century. No wonder that it took only a bit more than a decade for the whole shaky imperial structure to come crashing down.
The government began its reform of the newly enlarged empire by issuing the Proclamation of 1763. This crown proclamation created three new royal governments—East Florida, West Florida, and Quebec—and enlarged the province of Nova Scotia. It turned the vast trans-Appalachian area into an Indian reservation and prohibited all private individuals from purchasing Indian lands. The aim was to maintain peace in the West and to channel the migration of people northward and southward into the new colonies. There, it was felt, the settlers would be in closer touch with both the mother country and the mercantile system—and more useful as buffers against the Spanish in Louisiana and the remaining French in Canada.
But circumstances destroyed these royal blueprints. Not only were there bewildering shifts of the ministers in charge of the new policy, but news of Pontiac’s Indian rebellion in the Ohio Valley in 1763 forced the government to rush its program into effect. The demarcation line along the Appalachians that closed the West to white settlers was hastily and crudely drawn, and some colonists suddenly found themselves living in the Indian reservation. The new trading regulations and sites were widely ignored and created more chaos in the Indian trade than had existed earlier. So confusing was the situation in the West that the British government could never convince the various contending interests that the proclamation was anything more than, in the words of George Washington, who had speculative interests in western lands, “a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” Scores of land speculators and lobbyists pressured the unsteady British governments to negotiate a series of Indian treaties shifting the line of settlement westward. But each modification only whetted the appetites of the land speculators and led to some of the most grandiose land schemes in modern history.
In the Quebec Act of 1774, the British government finally tried to steady its dizzy western policy. This act transferred to the province of Quebec the land and control of the Indian trade in the huge area between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and allowed Quebec’s French inhabitants French law and Roman Catholicism. As enlightened as this act was toward the French Canadians, it managed to anger all American interests—speculators, settlers, and traders alike. This arbitrary alteration of provincial boundaries threatened the security of all colonial boundaries and frightened American Protestants into believing that the British government was trying to erect a hostile Catholic province in the Northwest.
The new colonial trade policies were more coherent than Britain’s western policy but no less dangerous in American eyes. The Sugar Act of 1764 was clearly a major successor to the great navigation acts of the late seventeenth century. The series of regulations that it established were designed to tighten the navigation system and in particular to curb the colonists’ smuggling and corruption. Absentee customs officials were ordered to return to their posts and were given greater authority and protection. The jurisdiction of the vice-admiralty courts in cases of customs violation was broadened. The navy was granted greater power in inspecting American ships. The use of writs of assistance (or search warrants) was enlarged. To the earlier list of “enumerated” colonial products that had to be exported directly to Britain, such as tobacco and sugar, were added hides, iron, timber, and others. And finally so many more American shippers were required to post bonds and obtain certificates of clearance that nearly all colonial merchants, even those involved only in the coastwise trade, found themselves enmeshed in a bureaucratic web of bonds, certificates, and regulations.
To these frustrating rigidities that were now built into the navigation system were added new customs duties, which raised the expenses of American importers in order to increase British revenue. The Sugar Act imposed duties on foreign cloth, sugar, indigo, coffee, and wine imported into the colonies. More important, the Sugar Act reduced the presumably prohibitory duty of sixpence a gallon on imported foreign West Indian molasses, set by the Molasses Act of 1733, to threepence a gallon. The British government expected that a lower duty on foreign molasses, rigidly enforced, would stop smuggling and lead to the legal importation of foreign molasses and earn money for the crown. The colonists thought otherwise.
These British reforms, which threatened to upset the delicately balanced patterns of trade that had been built up in previous generations, could be regarded as part of Britain’s traditional authority over colonial commerce. But the next step in Britain’s new imperial program could not be thus regarded; it was radically new. Grenville’s ministry, convinced that the customs reforms could not bring in the needed revenue, was determined to try a decidedly different method of extracting American wealth. In March 1765, Parliament by an overwhelming majority passed the Stamp Act, which levied a tax on legal documents, almanacs, newspapers, and nearly every form of paper used in the colonies. Like all duties, the tax was to be paid in British sterling, not in colonial paper money. Although stamp taxes had been used in England since 1694 and several colonial assemblies had resorted to them in the 1750s, Parliament had never before imposed such a tax directly on the colonists.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Stamp Act galvanized colonial opinion as nothing ever had. “This single stroke,” declared William Smith, Jr., of New York, “has lost Great Britain the affection of all her Colonies.”