Featured Image: Ethan Allen (standing left, foreground) at a meeting of the Green Mountain Boys, wood engraving, 1858.
By the spring of 1770, the pact against the non-importation act had begun to fade leaving the more radical elements of the revolutionary leaders with little more to do than hope that Colonial America would wake up to the dangers to their liberties. This lethargy was mainly due to the fact that things in the colonies were improving with the economy rebounding, roads being constructed and the populace at large was relatively happy.
The Tory population saw that the more radical elements were not able to stir up the common people as they had in the past. This too added to the feeling of complacency that the colonies were feeling much to the dismay of Sam Adams, Patrick Henry and Christopher Gadsden who knew that the Parliament would use this period of relative calm as there was dissent among the rural members of the colonies. The more affluent members of Colonial America were in the act of pushing the common people out of the more productive lands forcing them into lands that were further from the markets driving up their costs to get their products to market. This set up the next series of issues that confronted the less affluent, mainly that the American Oligarchs were more interested in making money than they were in confronting the Crown and Parliament.
The “Regulators” of rural Carolina and the “Green Mountain Boys” of Vermont did not back off and made life for the more affluent less than comfortable. They continued to harass the judges and sheriffs that were in the pockets of the planters and landed gentry, with liberal threats of “Tar and Feathers” and rides on “The Rail”, but eventually the planters in the Carolina’s and the land owners in the Hudson Valley finally prevailed over some of the less strident members of these groups.
Riding the rail was a painful and humiliating method of being run out of a town. Tarring and feathering involved heating tar or pitch until it was liquid, over one hundred degrees, and smearing it liberally on the offender and then coating them in feathers.
In England, John Wilkes, John Horne Tooke and other radical Englishmen took up the torch of the Colonials and declared that if Americans could not be free, neither could Englishmen. John Tooke stated that, “we are stones of one arch and must stand or fall together”. The sentiment was openly welcomed in the colonies with some going so far as to welcome these English radicals in America should it become necessary for them to flee England. This was not to be, but the fact that some had considered such a move strengthened the resolve of many Americans.
The lull that encompassed America came to a sudden halt in March of 1772 when one Lieutenant William Duddingston appeared in the waters around Rhode Island and began seizing vessels and cargoes he suspected of being contraband. Duddingston made Narragansett Bay his hunting grounds, seizing ships and cargoes, both legal and illegal, stealing livestock and cutting down fruit trees for firewood. The local populace decided they had enough of this haughty individual and when his vessel, the schooner “Gaspee” ran aground in Narragansett Bay, the locals boarded the vessel, put Duddingston adrift in a small boat and burned the Gaspee to the waterline.
Gaspee was a schooner, a type of two masted sailing vessel. A schooner is typically fore-and-aft rigged.
A commission was sent to Rhode Island to take testimony against the “scoundrels” with the intent of taking them back to England for trail, but to the dismay of the commissioners, no one ever testified against the perpetrators, leaving all who had participated in the burning of His Majesty’s” ship to go free. This act distressed many of the Officers of the Crown, but little could be done in the absence of credible evidence of wrongdoing.
This signaled an end to the lull of good will between the colonials and Parliament with the enactment of a civil list in Massachusetts to pay the salaries of Crown officials from the customs paid by local merchants. To add to the dispute, letters written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson and acquired by Benjamin Franklin recommending “a diminution of English liberties in the colony of Massachusetts” did great damage to his post as governor to the colony. The radicals demanded the removal of the governor but were refused by the Crown. This action also solidified Franklin’s decision to become one of the radicals seeking freedom for the colonies from the English Crown and driving him to leave England for his home in Pennsylvania.
Frederick North, (Lord North) the second Earl of Guilford was appointed Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1770. His lack of attention to the ongoing dispute between Parliament and the colonies contributed to an already disintegrating situation that continued almost unabated with a tea tax that would precipitate a new and ever more dangerous situation.