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By Root 8098 0

for scarce jobs and resources. They also brought new voices of protest, for they included some of Britain’s most militantly disaffected urban craftsmen and rural laborers—unemployed journeyman weavers from the Spitalfields district of London who tried to storm Parliament in 1765 and followed George III about with black flags; shipwrights recently discharged from the royal naval yards after striking for higher wages; and some of the bands of Whiteboys, Oakboys, and Steelboys who were now throwing down fences and mobbing landlords in Ireland. Their anger against the British government, and the experience they had gained while fighting it, ensured that the postwar political climate of New York would become increasingly volatile.

POLICY

Even before the war with France was over, young George III began fiddling with the political system in England. It now appeared that his break with Pitt was only the beginning of a campaign to reassert the power of the monarchy by arranging a permanent majority for it in Parliament. Year after year, more and more impatient with long-established alliances, the king shuffled ministers, shifted policies, and shoveled out patronage on a scale that would have made Walpole himself cringe.

Also on the royal agenda was a new get-tough attitude toward the colonies. Like a good many people, the king no longer believed that America could be controlled, as in the past, by the easygoing, solicitous policy that Edmund Burke famously defined as “salutary neglect.” Uncooperative colonial courts and legislatures had repeatedly obstructed the recent war effort, or so it was said; now, without the threat of French Canada hanging over their heads, there was every reason to expect the colonies would become more rather than less difficult to manage in the future. Besides, customs fraud, smuggling, and illicit manufacturing had flourished so extravagantly during the war that respect for imperial regulations seemed to have sunk to an all-time low, even among the richest and most respectable elements of colonial society.

The crux of the matter was money. Given that customs duties accounted for well over a third of the crown’s income, how was the government to finance the defense of Britain’s vast new conquests, much less pay off the nation’s sky-high war debt, if the colonies continued to flout the law? Increased domestic taxation was next to impossible: the landowning classes refused to accept a higher land tax, while stiffer excises looked very risky in light of widespread industrial and agrarian unrest. Considering how much the mother country had already done for the colonies, let alone the precarious state of her finances, surely the time had come for them to bear their fair share of imperial expenses. What were colonies for, after all?

In that frame of mind the king and his ministers began to tighten the administrative screws of the Empire. As early as 1761 customs officials were authorized to use writs of assistance, a kind of search warrant, to ensure compliance with the Navigation Acts. In 1763, in addition to banning further settlement across the Appalachians, the government announced it would station ten thousand British regulars in America to make certain that His Majesty’s subjects did as they were told.

The following year, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Grenville won parliamentary approval for a sweeping American Revenue Act. Popularly called the Sugar Act, it raised duties on a variety of items imported into the colonies, provided more efficient collection of duties on sugar and molasses imported from the foreign West Indies, required all duties to be paid in silver, and lengthened the list of colonial products that could be shipped only to Britain. A companion bill gave the customs service broad new powers to catch and prosecute merchants who violated trade regulations. Still another measure, the Currency Act, prohibited colonial governments from issuing paper money to meet the need for specie. If necessary, Grenville said, he would also ask Parliament to raise a revenue in the colonies by means