The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [107]
The Townshend Duties met a delayed reaction in America. Many citizens and future loyalists, disturbed by the mob action against lives and property during the Stamp Act crisis, had begun to fear the “patriotic” movement as the vanguard of class “levelling.” They were not anxious to provoke a break with Britain. The New York Assembly, rather than accept suspension, had soberly complied with the Quartering Act. Friction, however, developed soon through harassment by agents of the new American Customs Board, created along with the Townshend Act to administer the new duties. At the same time, Writs of Assistance to allow search of premises had been legalized. Eager to make their fortunes from the penalties they could impose, the Customs agents, with infuriating zeal, halted and inspected everything that floated, boarding ships in every port and on every waterway down to the farmer ferrying chickens across a river in his riverboat.
While tempers rose, America’s cause suddenly found a voice that made everybody listen. It was heard in the Farmer’s Letters, which began appearing in the Pennsylvania Chronicle in December 1767, written by John Dickinson, a Philadelphia lawyer of a prosperous farming family and a future delegate to the Continental Congress. The letters laid out the colonies’ case so cogently and convincingly that they joined the historic company of writings that persuade and move people to action. Newspapers throughout the colonies reprinted them and Governor Bernard of Massachusetts sent a complete set to the agent Richard Jackson in London, warning that unless refuted they could become “a Bill of Rights in the opinion of the Americans.”
Dickinson’s theme was the necessity for unity among the colonies to protest against the New York Suspending Act, which he called a “dreadful stroke,” and the Revenue Act. He asserted that any tax raised for revenue was unconstitutional and that therefore there was no difference between the Townshend Duties and the Stamp Tax. The colonies owed no contribution to governing costs since Britain already reaped profit from control of their trade. To apply the duties toward the civil list and judges’ salaries was the “worst stroke,” absolutely destructive of local control, potentially reducing the colonies to the status of poor Ireland. Dickinson’s most telling point was his suggestion that the reason the duties were so petty was that the British hoped to have them pass virtually unnoticed, thereby establishing a precedent for future taxation. Therefore they must be challenged at once.
Readers sprang to action even if Dickinson’s argument supplied Townshend with a more rational motive for his policy than he in fact had. Americans tended to see a conscious plan to enslave them in every British measure. They assumed the British were more rational, just as the British government assumed they were more rebellious, than was true in either case.
The effect of the Farmer’s Letters was to fire up resistance to the Revenue Act, set Sam Adams on the stump with his calls to the mob and elicit from the Massachusetts Assembly a circular letter summoning the other colonies to resist any tax revenue. Britain’s response came from a figure of new consequence, Lord Hillsborough, whom fate seems to have selected to ensure that Townshend’s death would not empty the cornucopia of mischief. Hillsborough had moved into control of American affairs in place of Lord Shelburne, whom the Duke of Grafton, under pressure from the King and from the Bedfords, whose alliance Grafton needed, had been forced to remove. Not a man for the axe, Grafton split Shelburne’s office