Volume 3, Chapter 65, The Impact on Britain.
Buoyed by the network of provincial conventions and local enforcement committees, the Continental
Congress's boycott of British imports proved extraordinarily effective.
Imports of the 13 American colonies from Great Britain fell from 2.6 million pounds in 1774
to over 200,000 pounds in 1775. The effectiveness of the boycott is even more startling if we
omit non-boycotting Georgia, where imports more than doubled, from 57,500 pounds to 135,000
pounds. Omitting Georgia, imports from Great Britain fell 97 percent in one year. The drastic
Declining imports had the desired effect on the British merchants and manufacturers in
the American trade. From January through March 1775, they kept up a drum fire of agitation
upon Parliament to repeal the coercive acts. Petitions to this effect passed into Parliament
from London and from such manufacturing towns as Bristol, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester,
Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham and Belfast, which all complained of business losses, bankruptcies and unemployment.
Indeed, in February a subscription fund to send relief to the distressed people of Boston and New England was launched by merchants in London.
But the Tory North Ministry, far more firmly ensconced than the government of a decade before,
An enemy in the bowels of a kingdom is surely to be resisted, opposed and conquered, not
notwithstanding the trade that may suffer and the factories that may be ruined.
Indeed, rather than relent, Lord North decided to escalate the struggle and bring the fractious
Americans to heel by severe retaliation.
If Americans would not trade with Britain, then by God, they would not be allowed to
trade with anyone else.
On March 30, Parliament, over Whig and Chattamite opposition, enacted North's New England Restraining Act, prohibiting New England from trading with any place except Britain and the British West Indies after July 1, and from using the Newfoundland fisheries after July 20, until peaceful conditions were restored.
When news arrived of the widespread ratification of the Continental Association, Parliament in mid-April extended the provisions of the Restraining Act to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina.
With petty cunning, the supposedly Tory colonies of New York, Delaware, North Carolina and Georgia were omitted in an attempt to induce them to break with the boycott.
But the time for divisive tactics had long since passed. While moving to impose a big-stick policy of escalating force, Lord North also held out a highly anemic and suspect carrot. His conciliatory plan, introduced into Parliament on February 20, tried to seduce the Americans into abandoning their position under the cloak of saving face.
Thus a colony was to be spared parliamentary taxation for revenue, provided that it would tax itself to pay for the salaries of the royal officials.
Britain, indeed the whim of the crown, was in short to tell each colony how much it must raise in taxes to pay for purposes fixed by the home country.
And then the colony would have to obey.
Thus, imposed taxation by Britain would remain under a new guise.
North's complex and unworkable plan was consciously designed, as were his force acts, to split
the American colonies.
But no one was fooled.
The illustrious Whig leader Edmund Burke brilliantly analyzed the plan and such of its unworkable
Berk's proposal features as deciding on quotas of taxes for each colony as a ransom-by auction of the colonies.
Lord North's proposal was soon rendered obsolete by the rush of events, reaching New York, for example, the day after news of Lexington and Concord.
Berk, leading the opposition in the House of Commons to the British crackdown, called for repeal and a return to the old Whig colonial policy.
In his Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, Burke set forth the necessity of appeasement as the prime foreign policy of a truly strong government.
I mean to give peace. Peace implies reconciliation, and reconciliation does in a manner always imply concession on one part or on the other.
In this state of things, the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself.
The superior power may offer peace with honor and with safety.
And Burke made clear that peace was precisely the desideratum, to be arrived at simply and directly, not by the paradox of pursuing the shimmer of peace through aging long and bloody war.
The proposition is peace, not peace through the medium of war, not peace to be hunted
through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations, not peace to arise out of universal
discord formatted from principle, not peace to depend on the juridical determination of
perplexing questions.
It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts.
It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, laid in principles purely pacific.
Burke saluted American achievements and economic development, which had not been squeezed into
this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that, through
Through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way
to perfection. He added, When I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride
of powers sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die
away within me. In this way, Burke harked back to the crucial distinction he had made
in his first work, A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756, Between the Benefits of Natural
Voluntary Actions in Society, Natural Government, and the Mischievous Effects of the Coercive
Intervention of the State, Artificial Government.
This hard-hitting anarchist attack on government, written synonymously while Burke was an impecunious
by the famous and disgruntled young law student, was by him quickly repudiated as a supposed satire when his authorship became known.
Burke hailed the fierce spirit of liberty that had grown up among the Americans, a result of their remoteness, their religion and customs, their English tradition of liberty and revolution, and their education in legal and political theory.
Now, the spirit of liberty in America was in collision with the spirit of power in England.
Burke saw with acute perception the radically new nature of what the Americans had recently
been doing.
He saw that they had been creating, in their network of local and provincial committees
of correspondence, of enforcement and conventions of delegates, both provincial and continental,
and an approach to a state of anarchism. For here were revolutionary institutions completely
illegal and outside the legal framework created spontaneously by the people building from
the grass roots. This voluntary network of popular revolutionary organs from town committees
up to provincial conventions and even including the congress exercised only minimal coercive
of Authority. Its influence was in giving leadership to the voluntary actions of the
mass of individuals. These institutions, for example, did not live off taxation, that coercive
institution unique to the concept of government. And none printed its own money. Thus its legal
government began to break down, particularly where it was prohibited in Massachusetts and
It was replaced by these popular institutions. Government in America began to veer toward
anarchism. As Burke phrased it, We thought, sir, that the utmost which the discontented
colonist would do was to disturb authority. We never dreamt they could of themselves supply
They have formed a government sufficient for its purposes, without the troublesome formality of an election. Evident necessity and tacit consent have done the business in an instant.
So well have they done it that the new institution is infinitely better obeyed than the ancient government ever was in its most fortunate period.
Obedience is what makes government, and not the names by which it is called.
This new government has originated directly from the people, and was not transmitted through
any of the ordinary artificial media of a positive constitution.
It was not a manufacture ready-formed and transmitted to them in that condition from
England.
The evil arising from hence is this, that the colonist, having once found the possibility
of enjoying the advantages of order in the midst of a struggle for liberty, such struggles
will not henceforward seem so terrible to the settled and sober part of mankind as they
had appeared before. And as to Massachusetts, we were confident that the first feeling,
If not the very prospect of anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete submission.
The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy
is found tolerable. A vast province has now subsisted and subsisted in a considerable
for a considerable degree of health and vigor for near a 12-month, without governors, without judges, and without executive magistrates.