The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [92]
By the time the protests and petitions were received in London—the eastbound crossing took anywhere from four to six weeks, and it took longer the other way—Grenville was preparing the Stamp Act. Anxious to prevent it, four of the agents, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Jackson, Charles Garth, an M.P. agent for Maryland and South Carolina, and Jared Ingersoll, newly arrived from Connecticut, waited on him in a body. Discussion focused on the alternative of the colonies taxing themselves. Asked by Grenville if they could state how much each was prepared to raise, the agents, uninstructed on that point, could give no answer, and Grenville did not really want one. What he wanted was to establish Parliament’s right to tax for now and thereafter. He avoided pressing the question and remained deliberately vague in responding to the agents’ queries about the amounts needed.
Here at the very start was the feasible alternative. If revenue from the colonies to pay the cost of their defense was what Britain wanted—which was reasonable enough—she could and should have put it to the colonies to raise it themselves. They were prepared to respond. The Massachusetts Assembly petitioned Governor Francis Bernard in 1764 for a special session to enable the colony to tax itself rather than be taxed by Parliament, but the Governor, though he favored that procedure, refused because he thought it would be useless without specific requisitions from Grenville. Pennsylvania instructed its agent in London to signify its willingness to raise revenue if requested in a regular manner for a specific sum. “Most of the colonies,” according to the agent Charles Garth, “had signified their inclinations to assist their Mother Country upon proper requisitions from hence.”
The firmness of colonial objection was made equally explicit. When Thomas Whately, the Treasury Secretary and M.P. responsible for drafting the Stamp bill, asked the agents for likely American reactions, they told him the tax was neither “expedient” nor “prudent.” Ingersoll of Connecticut said the New England colonies were “filled with the most dreadful apprehensions of such a step’s taking place,” and if it did, many gentlemen of property had said they would “remove themselves with their families and fortunes into some foreign Kingdom.” Whately was unimpressed because, as he said indisputably, “some taxes are absolutely necessary.” He was to hear more. Britain’s own representative, the Royal Governor of Rhode Island, Stephen Hopkins, stated in a published pamphlet, The Rights of the Colonies Examined, the fixed opposition of His Majesty’s American subjects to taxation except “by their own representatives as Your Majesty’s other free subjects are.” The Rhode Island Assembly sent his pamphlet to their agent in London along with a petition to the King confirming its sentiments. The New York Assembly likewise, in petitions to the King and to both Houses of Parliament, expressed its “most earnest Supplication” that apart from necessary regulation of trade, Parliament should “leave it to the legislative power of the Colony to impose all other Burthens upon its own people which the publick Exigencies require.”
The evidence was ample that taxation by Parliament would meet adamant resistance in the colonies. It was ignored because the policymakers regarded Britain as sovereign and the colonials as subjects, because Americans were not taken too seriously, and because Grenville and his associates, having some doubts themselves as to the rights in the case, wanted to obtain the revenue in a way that would establish Parliament’s eminent domain. It was a classic and ultimately self-defeating case of proceeding against all negative indications. Grenville made no formal “requisitions from hence” upon the colonies to tax themselves and by rejecting this alternative opened the path to the Revolution.
In Parliament, the colonial petitions were rejected unheard on the ground that they concerned a money bill for which