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the Townshend preamble and tea duty. As often happens, the logical course of events suffered quirks and diversions. Among the colonial propertied class, fear of mobs and social upheaval had begun to erode their support of the “patriotic” movement. Its impetus dwindled. Wearying of Non-Importation, New York proposed a conference of the northern seaports to decide on a common policy. Merchants of Boston and Philadelphia, also eager to resume trade, were prevented by the agitators. When the proposed conference fell through, New York, rather than be cheated while “starving on the slender Meals of patriotism,” abandoned Non-Importation and opened its port in 1772. Separately, at different times, the other colonies followed, agitation subsided and the absence of unity confirmed Britain in the assumption that the colonies would never join in a common front and that loyalist sentiment and economic self-interest would prevail over seditious impulse.

With feelings intense in Parliament over the Wilkes issue, Lord North’s policy was to keep American affairs out of the House of Commons, and for two years, owing to the lull in the colonies, he succeeded. This could have been a period of compromise and possible reunion if a positive effort had been made. The colonies were bent on redress of grievances and autonomy in their own affairs, not on independence. On the contrary, the Stamp Act Congress had asserted that they “most ardently” desired “perpetual continuance” of the ancient tie with Britain. Even the Massachusetts Assembly, the most aggressive in sentiment, had disavowed in 1768 “the most distant thought of independence,” claiming that the colonies “would refuse it if offered to them and would deem it the greatest misfortune to be obliged to accept it.” George III, Lord North, Hillsborough and the Bedfords, however, were not equipped for positive effort or creative government. In the lull, the sails of folly were furled for the moment—until the affair of the Gaspée in 1772.

4. “Remember Rehoboam!”: 1772–76

The Gaspée was a British customs schooner under a bellicose commander, Lieutenant Dudington, who pursued his task as if he carried a personal warrant from the King to stamp out smuggling in the thousand isles and inlets of Narragansett Bay. Boarding and examining every ship he met, threatening to blow recalcitrant skippers out of the water, he aroused a lust for revenge in the Rhode Islanders that found its moment when his schooner ran aground below Providence. Within hours local seafarers organized eight boatloads of men who attacked the ship, wounded Lieutenant Dudington, put him and his crew ashore and burned the Gaspée.

As so often, Britain’s response started out sternly and ended feebly. The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General decided that the attack on the Gaspée was an act of war on the King and as such was treasonable, requiring the culprits to be sent to England for trial. First they had to be discovered. A Royal Proclamation offered a £500 reward and the King’s pardon to informants, and an imposing Commission of Inquiry consisting of the Governor of Rhode Island and the chief justices of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts and of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Boston was appointed to indict the suspects. This announcement revived every slumbering suspicion of a conspiracy against liberty. Rhode Island, together with Massachusetts the most intractable of the colonies, shook with cries of “Tyranny!” and “Slavery!” “Ten thousand deaths by the haltar and the ax” proclaimed the Newport Mercury in outraged italics, were preferable “to a miserable life of slavery in chains under a pack of worse than Egyptian tyrants.” No informants came forward; no suspects could be found although every neighbor knew who they were. After several hollow sessions in Newport, the Court of Inquiry in all their wigs and scarlet sheepishly adjourned, never to reconvene. One more chastisement went unexecuted, confirming the perception of Britain as both despotic in intent and ineffectual in execution.

The consequence was important because