Volume 3, Chapter 9, Reaction in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
As the Revenue Act was being passed, Colonel Eliphelet Dyer of Wyndham, a member of the
Connecticut Council, attacked the revenue bill for supporting the standing army and
called on the colonies to unite in protest. If they failed to do so, they may bid farewell
Did farewell to freedom and liberty, burn their charters, and make the best of thraldom
and slavery, for if we can have our interests and estates taken away and disposed of without
our consent, and by those whose interest as well as inclination it may be to shift the
burden off from themselves under pretence of protecting and defending America, then
And England can insist on America's paying the expenses of any wars, past or present.
Connecticut's legislature of May-June 1764 appointed a protest committee that included
Governor Thomas Fitch. The committee's address to England, approved by the legislature in
October, strongly protested the molasses tax, but again it retreated from principle to the
to the artificial distinction between internal and external taxation.
Once again, Connecticut's perfidious London agent, Richard Jackson,
was instrumental in ensuring a suitably weak stand in the colonies.
Rhode Island, with its large interest in trade,
took a similar but a more bitter stance toward the molasses tax.
In July, the legislature chose a committee to confer with other colonies on protesting the tax.
The committee included the merchant Nicholas Brown and was headed by Governor Stephen Hopkins.
Hopkins, a prominent storekeeper and popular politician, had founded the Providence Gazette
and as early as January had written an essay on the trade of the northern colonies,
Urging United Colonial Action for Repeal of the Old Malasses Act
The Hopkins Committee, however, took no action until instructed by the legislature in September to confer with neighboring colonies.
The committee then wrote to other colonies, significantly suggesting an inter-colonial conference to launch a united protest.
In October, the legislature also appointed a committee to frame a protest and sent it to England the following month, along with a draft of Governor Hopkins' pamphlet, The Rights of the Colonies Examined.
The address in Hopkin's pamphlet strongly protested the trade restrictions and enforcement provisions of the Revenue Act, but explicitly denied only the right of Parliament to levy internal taxes.
However, both Hopkins and the Assembly went beyond other colonies by denying the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies except for the general good of the whole Empire.
The Hopkins pamphlet was popular in America and was soon reprinted in every colony. The
Radical Massachusetts Gazette hailed it as a pamphlet that breathes a true spirit of
liberty. The following February, however, the Hopkins
essay was attacked in a pamphlet by Martin Howard, Jr., a leading Rhode Island Tory,
who invoked the transcendent sovereignty of Parliament.
Under pressure, Hopkins retreated from his denial of the right of Parliament to pass
laws governing America, and also hinted that colonial representation in Parliament after
the Manor of Scotland would remove colonial grievances.
Not only was Hopkins pressed into retreat, so too was James Otis of Massachusetts.
In March 1765, Otis, in A Vindication of the British Colonies, attempting to defend Hopkins,
wound up retreating to a repudiation of his own pamphlet of a few months earlier. Otis's
virtual surrender to Howard was soon completed in another pamphlet, Brief Remarks. But in
the same pamphlet, Otis lashed out in bitter and hard-hitting denunciation of Howard and
and his small but powerful clique of Tories known as the Newport Junto.
Otis attacked the Junto as that little, dirty, drinking, drabbing, contaminated knot of thieves,
beggars and transports, or the worthy descendants of such, made up of Turks, Jews and other
infidels with a few renegade Christians and Catholics.
The formation of the Newport Junto in late 1764 was, undoubtedly, one of the reasons
for Governor Hopkins' precipitate retreat from liberal principle. The Junto had had
the gall to petition England for revocation of Rhode Island's precious liberal and self-governing
charter. Leader of the Tory Junto was Martin Howard, Jr., an Anglican lawyer, the son of
Samuel Hall, printer of the Newport Mercury, one of the two newspapers in the colony, supported the Junto and made his paper a spokesman for Junto Views.
Other leading members were Dr. Thomas Moffatt of Edinburgh, George Rome, an agent and debt collector for an English mercantile firm,
Probably Augustus Johnston, Attorney General of Rhode Island, and the King's officers in the colony, especially John Robinson and his roommate, Lieutenant Benjamin Wickham.
The Junto called for strict Crown control over fractious and democratic Rhode Island and for suppression of the abusive protests against English measures.
The citizens of Rhode Island were understandably incensed at the Junto and at Howard's pamphlet against Hopkins.
Freedom of speech and press was hardly, purely upheld in 18th century America,
and Deputy Governor Joseph Wanton Jr. urged the Assembly to move against the Tory pamphlet and its printer.
Fortunately, the Assembly voted down the zealots.
The Superior Court under Governor Hopkins' control did call up and intimidate the printer,
Samuel Hall, for a while, but did nothing further. Hall's Mercury, in reply, thundered
that liberty of the press and freedom itself were in grave danger.
Rhode Island and Connecticut were uniquely fortunate. Both had democratically elected
Executives and therefore were free of an appointed oligarchy of royal officials, their friends
and their favorites. In Rhode Island, the New Port Junto had nuisance value but not
political power. Instead, Rhode Island was torn between two political factions, both
of which were relatively liberal and opposed to British exactions. One faction was led
by Stephen Hopkins of Providence and the other by Samuel Ward of Westerly in South Rhode
Island. Historians have unfortunately woven around the Ward-Hopkins controversy, the neo-Marxian
myth that the two sides waged a class struggle. The Hopkins group representing the radical
Federal Farmers and the ward faction, the conservative merchants. Actually both parties
had similar liberal principles and both were equally democratic in a highly democratic
colony where nearly 80 percent of the adult males were eligible to vote. In addition to
personal disputes, the two factions roughly represented sectional interest. The Hopkins
Business forces represented Providence and the North, and the Wardites, Newport and the
South. The controversy was sectional, but not class. Each group represented a similar
economic congrease of agriculture, trade and finance. This should not be surprising when
we remember that on the market, farmers, merchants and financiers are not in conflict or even
Each occupational group is interdependent, and together they form a harmoniously integrated network of production and exchange, each benefiting from the other's activities.
Competition, not conflict, existed between two such commercial complexes as rising Providence and relatively declining Newport.
Both factions, then, were inter-class. Thus, Hopkins was backed by the influential Brown brothers, leading merchants of Providence, and by the wealthy and aristocratic wantons of Newport. Samuel Ward, on the other hand, was a farmer and small-town merchant who was no more wealthy than his rival Hopkins.
As Professor Lovejoy puts it, farmers and merchants alike supported ward or Hopkins for reasons not directly related to the position either candidate or voter held in society.
What then did the Hopkins and ward groups quarrel about? About the essentials of government in any era or any country.
Allocation of the privileges to be derived from government and of the burdens to pay for these privileges.
The essence of government is an exploitative rob-peter-to-pay poll process,
and the jockeying of factions is to become as much of the poll and as little of the peter as possible.
The perquisites of government in the Rhode Island of that day were largely public funds
for bridges, lighthouses, schools and public works, letters of marque to allow ships to
be privateers upon the enemy during wartime, grants of monopolies to businesses, and grants
of permission to businesses to build dams or to towns to hold lotteries.
Particularly important was the allocation of the tax burden. When the Hopkins faction
came to power, the colonies' taxes fell more heavily upon the southern towns and more lightly
on the northern. And the reverse was true when the ward group was in the saddle. A general
atmosphere of local rebellion against taxation then began to permeate the colony. The northern
Southern towns began to refuse tax payments during a warred regime, and the southern towns
became delinquent during a Hopkins period. Each set of towns could wait for an ex post
facto vindication when political fortunes would change. Seeing this, the towns of the
factions in power began to take advantage of the situation and quietly cease to pay.
As a result, tax refusal and tax delinquency permeated Rhode Island.
Here was a particularly strong reason for Rhode Island's bitter resistance to the prospect
of parliamentary taxation.
The Rhode Islanders were paying very little colonial taxes at all, and neither the Ward
nor the Hopkins faction had any wish to disturb this idol by becoming subject to levies from
in England.