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By Root 997 0

Rhode Island’s roars of protest caused a decisive step toward unity. Following a model created among the towns of Massachusetts, Virginia’s House of Burgesses invited the colonies to form Committees of Correspondence to consult on joint acts and methods of resistance. Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry served on Virginia’s Committee. This was the beginning of the development toward intercolonial union, which Britain remained confident could never occur and on whose non-occurrence her confidence rested. The Committees excited little attention—except in moments of confrontation, American affairs on the whole did not. The letters of Mrs. Delany, a well-connected lady and wife of an Anglican dean who corresponded actively throughout this period with friends and relatives in social and literary circles, do not notice America at all.

The two legal officers of the home government who were immediately responsible for the Gaspée order, Edward Thurlow, the Attorney-General, and Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General, were an unpleasant pair. Unmanageable as a schoolboy, expelled from Cambridge University for insolence and misconduct, surly and assertive in the law, Thurlow had a savage temper and reputedly the foulest mouth in London. He was nevertheless an impressive figure, although according to Charles James Fox his deep voice and solemn aspect proved him dishonest “since no man could be as wise as he looked.” His treatment of defendants in court was often offensive. In policy he was inflexible on the demonstration of British sovereignty over America and, although Lord North was known to hate him, the King eventually rewarded his firm support with appointment as Lord Chancellor and a barony to go with it. Equally coercive as regards America, Wedderburn was a Scot of voracious ambition who would use any means, suck up to or betray any associate, to gain advancement. “There was something about him,” said an acquaintance, “that even treachery could not trust.” Although despised by the King, he too eventually became Lord Chancellor.

Yet it was the Cabinet, in which Thurlow and Wedderburn had no place, that ordered the Court of Inquiry and the summons for trial in England, and it was “the good Lord Dartmouth,” as Hillsborough’s successor, who signed the order. In response to an attack on the state, they acted with every conviction of righteousness, and if it was the proper response from the ruler’s point of view, it was utter folly as practical politics. Given the known outrage at the idea of transporting Americans to trial in England, and the obvious unreality of expecting Rhode Islanders to mark their fellows for that fate, the mischief once more lay “in asserting a right you know you cannot exert.” This became very openly apparent at Newport, the hub of coastal communication, from where the impression of the mother country as ineffectual quickly spread.

Lord Dartmouth, although a stepbrother of Lord North, with whom he had grown up and shared the Grand Tour, was an earnest friend of America, possibly as a result of his having joined the Methodists, whose missions and preaching in America were a major activity. Amiable and pious and said to be the model of the virtuous Sir Charles Grandison in Samuel Richardson’s novel of that name, Dartmouth was nicknamed the “psalm-singer.” He had served as President of the Board of Trade in the Rockingham ministry, though credited with very little administrative capacity. Lord North brought him in as Secretary of State for the Colonies when Hillsborough, as a result of an intrigue against him by the Bedfords for reasons of place, not policy, was forced to resign. Alone in the Cabinet as pro-American, Dartmouth “wishes sincerely a good understanding with the colonies,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “but does not have strength equal to his wishes” and while wishing “for the best measure is easily prevailed with to join in the worst.” Gradually, as American intransigence defeated his well-meant paternalism, he was to turn against conciliation in favor of repression.

At this point tea becomes the