The 17th of June, the day on which delegates to the Continental Congress were chosen, is also notable for "the Port Act" meeting in Faneuil Hall. From the general distress among the laboring classes in Boston the Tories. had expected a reaction in favor of the ministry; consequently a counter demonstration by the patriots was deemed advisable. In the absence of Samuel Adams, then at Salem, John Adams was chosen moderator, and from this time he was one of the most conspicuous actors in the American Revolution. Joseph Warren was also present, and active in the cause which, a year later, he consecrated with his blood. The action of the town became widely known from a broadside, which is here reproduced. After the repeal of the Stamp Act and the modifying of the Townshend act, there remained nothing to threaten seriously the pockets of the colonists. The tea duty had been retained to save the claim of parliamentary supremacy, which was not likely to be asserted in any offensive way. The navigation acts must soon have given way to a more liberal and equitable policy, and everything out of Massachusetts certainly out of New England - indicated that the people were becoming tired of strife, and were ready for a return to more cordial relations with the mother country. This was what Samuel Adams feared, and determined to prevent. To this end nothing could have been more efficient than his policy in respect to the teas, and nothing more to his mind than the consequent action of Parliament. After this a contention which had been mainly local became general. The essential modification of the Massachusetts charter was a blow which imperilled every colonial government, and made the cause of Massachusetts that of every other colony, a cause for which other colonies manifested their sympathy not only in relieving the distress occasioned by the closing of the port of Boston, but by uniting in declarations of their common right to maintain the integrity of a system of government which had been forming through many generations. The Congress of 1774 was the inevitable result of the conduct of the British ministry subsequent to the peace of 1763. This served only to engender discontent in the colonies, and to strengthen the purpose of the patriotic party to hasten a revolution which many regarded as inevitable in time. The parliamentary government of the colonies fell into confusion for want of a well-defined policy and a consistent administration. But instead of such a policy, colonial affairs were regulated by ministers as wide apart in their views as Grenville, Rockingham, Townshend, Grafton, Shelburne, Hillsborough, Lord North, and Earl Dartmouth. Nothing could have kept the colonies as an integral part of the empire except some plan such as Franklin or Pownall might have devised and Shelburne might have administered. But the colonies were remote and but little known, and in the complication of European affairs, and amid the contentions of parties, they received only slight and intermittent attention from the ministry or the Parliament. No statesman save Choiseul seems to have understood the completeness of the change in interests which had been brought about by AT a legal and very full meeting of the freeholders The Hon. JOHN ADAMS, Esq; Moderator. UPON [PON a motion made, the town again entered into the VOTED, (With only one diffentient) That the com- Agreable to order, the committee of correfpondence VOTED, unanimoufly, That our warmeft thanks VOTED, unanimously, That the thanks of this town be, Whereas the Overfeers of the poor in the town of VOTED, That all grant and donations to this town VOTED, That the town clerk be directed to publish the BROADSIDE, JUNE 17, 1774.1 . [The original is in the Boston Public Library. There are other significant broadsides of about issued an address to their countrymen relative this time. On June 8th, the citizens of Boston was sent to the several towns, both in broadthey adopted a letter on the blockade, which side. - ED.] to the blockade of their port, and on July 26th the extinction of the French power in America, or the necessary advance of the colonies under a new régime to a place among the great powers of the world. The colonists themselves felt, rather than understood, their relations to nationality and to the commerce of the world. This was the time chosen by the British ministry to impose upon them the restrictive mercantile system of Charles II. It is doubtful, however, whether any policy could have rendered permanent the subjection of the colonies, even such a nominal subjection as that in which they had always been held. In looking for the causes of the Revolution, it is well to discriminate between those which were general in their effects and those which were local. The latter had been more actively operative and of longer existence in Massachusetts, where the Revolution began, than in any other colony. These were interwoven with the civil and ecclesiastical history of her people, which made them peculiarly apprehensive in respect to threatened invasion of rights which they had secured only by expatriation. Although the peculiar experience of Massachusetts did not cause the Revolution, it is doubtful whether, except for that experience, the Revolution would have occurred for some years. Nor was resistance to the Anglican ecclesiastical pretensions, connected as they were with the most odious features of the prerogative, confined to New England, but made itself felt in New York and in Virginia. The general causes were the ever present and ever active strife between parties, the liberals and the conservatives, arising from a diversity of political ideas, and intensified by ambition, interest, and personal animosities. But the proximate causes of the Revolution will be found in that change of policy which led the ministry, at the close of a war that had strained the colonies to the utmost, to enforce the navigation laws, to lay taxes, to invoke the prerogative, and finally to overthrow the government of Massachusetts, and thus to threaten the autonomy of the people under the provincial constitutions. THE CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION. HE change in British colonial policy contemplated by the ministry during the progress of the French War, and entered upon between 1763 and 1774, developed those causes of dissatisfaction which had been intermittently operative for more than a century, and finally led to war in 1775. In the preceding chapter I have omitted, or passed lightly over, many incidents of the period which had no particular political significance, and dwelt more at length on the principles and causes which led to the Revolution. I shall pursue the same course in this essay. The growth and development of the colonies brought forward, in succession, two practical questions. The first was, how far the interests of the colonies, as appendages to the 1 See authorities in John Adams, a pamphlet by the writer of this chapter, 1884. crown, but subject, nevertheless, to an undefined parliamentary authority, could be subordinated to the interests of the trading and manufacturing classes in England. This was purely an economic question, and the answer to it in England assumed the subjection of the colonies and the validity of the mercantile system, neither of which was vigorously contested by the colonists so long as neither was rigidly enforced. But the question changed during the progress, and more especially at the close, of the French War, and then became this: How far could the interests of the colonies be subordinated to the necessities of an imperial revenue and the political policy of an empire? Hence arose the second question: What degree of autonomy could be allowed to the colonies, as integral parts of the empire, entitled to its privileges and subject to its burdens, when both were to be determined consistently with the constitutional prerogatives of the king and the supremacy of Parliament on the one side, and on the other with the natural and acquired rights of the colonies? Regarded purely as an economic question, it was a matter of indifference to the colonists whether their pockets were depleted by the enforcement of an old policy or by the adoption of a new policy. The Sugar Act of 1733, if enforced, would have produced a parliamentary tax. The Grenville Act of 1764 did no more. But the former was intended as a regulation of trade; the latter to produce a revenue. This difference of intent raised a constitutional question, and it was on this constitutional question, behind which lay the real economic question, that the patriotic party chose to fight the battle. Grenville's Act, as an external tax, produced but little; and the Stamp Act, as an internal tax, not a farthing. It was, therefore, mainly on the constitutional question of the right to tax, rather than to throw off intolerable burdens that people divided into parties. As Webster said, "They went to war against a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration." To understand the attitude of the tories on the economic question as well as on the constitutional question, we must consider the state of colonial affairs which led to the Congress of 1754, and the tentative efforts of that body to find consistent and reciprocal relations of the colonies to the imperial government, for union, defence, and revenue. To understand the attitude of the patriots, we must consider the reasons of the ministry for rejecting such a union, and their efforts to force each colony into relations to the crown and Parliament deemed by them consistent and reciprocal, but regarded by the colonists as subversive of their rights as Englishmen, and of their rights acquired by charters, growth, development, and usage, which, as they justly claimed, had become constitutional. Though the enforcement of the navigation laws and acts of trade, at the close of the French War, is regarded by historians as one of the principal causes of the Revolution, I fail to find a satisfactory or entirely accurate account of them, either as the basis of the mercantile system, or, later, of a revenue system. Such a treatment would hardly be practicable in the limits of a general history. These laws have been elaborately discussed by Thomas Mun, Sir Josiah Child, Sir William Patty, Charles Davenant, Joshua Gee, John Ashley, and, not to mention others, Adam Smith and Henry Brougham. But these authors wrote with reference to their influence, as part of the mercantile system, on British interests. How they affected colonial interests is the question which chiefly concerns us. To answer this question we must know not merely what those laws enacted, but to what state of colonial trade they originally and successively applied. For instance, what, from time to time, by development of agricultural or other industries, between 1640 and 1774, had the colonists to sell, and what, as they increased in wealth, did they wish to purchase; and where, left to the unrestricted course of trade, would they have carried their products, and where purchased their merchandise? In other words, what would they have done and become under free trade? 1 Works, iv. 109. I find in the works of no other writer, historical or political, more accurate conceptions of the causes, immediate and remote, of the Revolution, and so fair and judi cial a statement of them. Works, i. 24, 92. Then we must know what changes in this normal condition of trade were intended by the navigation laws, and to what extent and with what effect their partial enforcement operated before 1763. With these facts before us, we could estimate with some exactness the valid objections to the new system on the part of the colonists, when enforced by the British navy, commissioners of customs, admiralty courts, and writs of assistance, and what was their influence in bringing on the Revolution. Having made up the debit account, we should be able to set against it the compensations in naval protection, bounties,1 drawbacks, British capital, and long credits, in developing colonial agriculture and commerce.2 Unfortunately there does not exist any history of the commerce of the American colonies, from the Commonwealth to 1774, as affected by navigation laws, acts of trade, and revenue measures. No one who has read the twenty-nine acts which comprise this legislation will recommend their perusal to another; for, apart from their volume, the construction of these acts is difficult, difficult even to trained lawyers like John Adams, whose business it was to advise clients in respect to them. Nor have special students, like Bancroft, stated their effect with exact precision, as in respect to the Act of 1663; 4 and notably in respect to the Townshend Act of 1767,5 where his error amounts to a perversion of its meaning. Palfrey has been more successful, though not entirely free from error. The author of the Development of Constitutional Liberty, a work of uncommon research and ability, reads the act of 1672 as though it prohibited the carrying of fish from Massachusetts to Rhode Island except by the way of England, failing to notice that it was not one of the "enumerated articles," or that even those could pass directly from colony to colony upon payment, at the place of export, of duties equivalent to those laid upon their importation to England. To give a monographic treatment to the subject would require familiarity with the construction of statutes, and exact information not only of the shifting conditions of colonial trade, but of the evasions which called forth supplemental acts, or constructions of existing acts by the Board of Trade. In Burke's Account of the European Settlements in America much may be found respecting colonial products and commerce, and especially those of New England (in ch. vii.), which leaves little to be desired concerning the sources of her wealth, and the complaints of British merchants of the methods by which it had been acquired. But I have found nowhere else so full and clear an account of the course of trade of Boston at the time of the Revolution, and the effect upon it of the enforcement of the navigation laws and acts of trade in 1770, as in an anonymous pamphlet entitled Observations of the Merchants at Boston in N. E. upon Several Acts of Parliament, 1770.10 1 Bancroft, v. 250. duties imposed on commerce by colonial assem 2 See Rights of Great Britain asserted against blies, Ibid., 354, 404. For complaints of British the claims of America (London, 1776). 8 Works, x. 321. 4 History, ii. 43. 5 Ibid., vi. 85. 6 Hist. N. E., ii. 444. 7 New York, 1882, by Eben Greenough Scott. 8 In the absence of such a work, the student will find something to his purpose in the Hutchinson Papers (Prince Soc. ed.), ii. 150, 232, 265, 301, 313 et passim; Andros Tracts, ii. 69, 215, 224, 233 et passim; Sewall's Letters, i. 4; Chalmers's Political Annals, in the notes particularly, and in his Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the Colonies; Palfrey, Hist. New England, ii. 444; iii. 276, 279, n. For the commerce and products of Virginia in 1671, and the effect of the navigation laws, see Chalmers's Political Annals, 327; and in 1675, Ibid., 353, 354; and for merchants to Charles II. of infractions of the 10 The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies (published at Philadelphia, 1765, and |