The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [123]
In the debate of 19 April 1774, on a motion by the opposition for repeal of the tea duty, Burke delivered the foundation speech of his views on the American question. It was an immense peroration on the successive acts and repeals, the vacillations and equivocations, the empty menaces, false assumptions and history of colonial policy all the way back to the Navigation Acts and forward to “the distempered vigor and insane alacrity with which you are rushing to your ruin.” Never, he said, “have the servants of the state looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected view.… They never had any system of right or wrong but only invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted.… By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils … they have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the globe.” Striking at the token assertion of authority—what today would be called credibility—he said, in words with a long echo, “They tell you that your dignity is tied to it.… This dignity is a terrible encumbrance to you for it has of late been ever at war with your interest, your equity and every idea of your policy.”
That “terrible encumbrance” has pursued policy-makers in every century. Benjamin Franklin, a wise man and one of the few who derived principles from political experience and were able to state them, wrote during the Stamp Act crisis that it should not be supposed that honor and dignity are better served “by persisting in a wrong measure once entered into than by rectifying an error as soon as it is discovered.”
In America, the Boston Port Bill ignited solidarity. In May, Rhode Island issued the first call for an intercolonial congress, while Connecticut towns held indignation meetings and took vows to rush aid in money and provisions to Boston and “to sprinkle American altars with our hearts’ blood” if occasion arose. The old Indian fighter and ranger of the Seven Years’ War, Colonel Israel Putnam, chairman of the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, personally drove 130 sheep 100 miles from his home in Pomfret to Boston. Baltimore sent 1000 bushels of corn and ultimately gifts were received from all thirteen colonies. Patriot leaders demanded a complete denial of tea throughout the colonies, smuggling was stopped, the “hurtful trash” was burned on village greens and unappetizing herb potions called Liberty Tea substituted.
The summons to a congress was quickly supported by New York and Philadelphia and brought acceptances from twelve colonies during the summer. Many Americans had become convinced that, as Jefferson wrote in a draft of instructions to the Virginia delegates to the congress, Britain’s series of oppressions “pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”
This became an article of faith in America. George Washington endorsed it, speaking of “a regular systematic plan [to] fix the shackles of slavery upon us.” Tom Paine maintained “it was the fixed determination of the British Cabinet to quarrel with America at all events” in order to suppress her charters and control her progress in population and property. The accusation was convenient because it justified the ultimate rebellion, and indeed if Britain had really been pursuing a plan to goad the colonies to insurrection in order to subjugate them, then her conduct of policy becomes rational. Unhappily for reason, that version cannot be reconciled to the repeals, the backings and fillings, the haphazard or individual decisions. Rather than “deliberate