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Agents and merchants american colonial policy Agents and Merchants: British Colonial Policy and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1763-1775 Jack Sosin, University Lincoln Press, 1965 Page 1 Within a few years after the United States had won their independence, Anglo-American commerce had returned to century-old channels of trade. British merchants, then as before, played a vital role in economies of both societies by mobilizing credit and marketing the produce of America and manufactured goods of Britain. Page 2 Consequently the composition of the mercantile community constantly changed. Important distinctions within this amorphous community nonetheless did exist, differences between the merchants of London and those of the outports or the interior manufacturing towns. Indeed the metropolitan merchant and his smaller counterpart in the provinces, differing in ideas and interests, were often opposed on economic matters. Even in London significant differences existed, particularly basic political antagonisms between the great merchant financiers and the smaller traders. The "City" of London in a restricted sense consisted of a small number of persons, closely connected with whatever government happened to be in power and concerned primarily with the machinery for creating and mobilizing credit. The great figures in this circle were no longer concerned purely with commercial activities, but with capital and credit primarily for overseas trade and public finance. In a broader sense the "City" included the "middling" men, small merchants, tradesmen, and master craftsmen. And if the financial interest supported government, the more numerous group almost always opposed it. Leaders of Parliamentary factions could appeal to them and the country gentry against administration by invoking outworn prejudices and sentiments. The leaders of the commercial and trading group of London, for their part, were particularly adept at organizing extra-Parliamentary pressure. Politicians such as Chatham, Shelburne, and Rockingham-consistent supporters of the American colonists-cultivated the metropolitan merchants in their struggles with government. Shelburne and Chatham relied on William Beckford, a West India planter, merchant, and onetime Lord Mayor of London. In the City of London the chief supporter of the Rockingham faction was Barlow Trecothick, the most influential of all the London merchants trading to America. The Whigs were also connected with William Baker, son of Alderman Sir William Baker, an important merchant in the colonial trade, friend and adherent of the Duke of Newcastle, and one of this chief advisers on American affairs. Page 24 (23) The British government attempted to regulate colonial issues of paper money since both colonial and British creditors protested the practice of debtors paying their obligations in depreciated currency. In 1751 Parliament had passed an act regulating the New England colonies in the paper emissions of paper money. No steps were taken against the southern colonies. But the practices of Virginia and North Carolina brought further complaints, especially from English creditors. For six years, between 1759 and 1764, they sought redress of their grievances from the provincial legislatures. Nor were the British merchants the only creditors to suffer, for the depreciation of the Virginia currency of 1762 meant losses to not a few merchants in the northern colonies. Discontent in Great Britain, mainly in administrative circles, over the recalcitrance of the legislatures of Virginia and North Carolina to amend their laws fixing the procedures for determining exchange rates led in 1764 to the passage of an act by Parliament limiting the conditions for emitting paper money. The British merchants as a group did not want this act, for they could not agree on the consequences of paper money in the payment of transatlantic debts. They merely asked the Board of Trade to instruct the governors of North Caroline and Virginia to recommend to their legislatures that they pass an act providing that sterling debts be discharged in sterling, or in paper bills of credit only if the creditor would accept them, and not according to the nominal value of such bills but at the actual difference of exchange at the time of payment. Page 28 Unfortunately we do not know fully what transpired at the hearing on February 2, 1764. All present agreed, however, that it would be "highly expedient and proper" to prohibit by act of Parliament all further emissions of paper bills of credit as legal tender, to remove the quality of legal tender from all bills then circulating after the period fixed for their redemption, and to set a terminal period for legal-tender bills not having a specified date for their redemption. Thomas Penn and Richard Jackson requested that Parliament not pass such an act until the following sessions to allow the colonies an opportunity to express their views. Page 31 In its final form, the Currency Act of 1764 was much less severe than the proposal originally suggested by the Board of Trade in its report of February 9, 1764. … The Currency Act of 1764-a comprise reached by the Commissioners of Trade, the agents, and the merchants in the House of Commons-did not ban paper money in the colonies or legal-tender currency then circulating; it merely prohibited further legal-tender laws and required that the provinces retire existing legal-tender currency on the dates specified for their expiration. Only at this time on the question of paper money as legal tender for sterling debts were the agents and some merchants to disagree. Within a short time, particularly after legal tender issues then outstanding were retired in the colonies, the merchants were fully to support the agents in their efforts to lessen the restrictions imposed by the imperial legislature in the act of 1764. They later cooperated in order to obtain remedial legislation satisfactory both to the colonists and the merchants in Great Britain. Page 47 To check smuggling carried on under the guise of intercolonial or coastal trade, the statute specified that no goods could be shipped without a cocket purchased at the port of discharge listing every item carried. The "Black Act," as the Boston merchants called it, went into effect on September 29, 1764. Page 66 Colonial agents and British merchants in the few short months during the winter of 1765-1766 achieved their greatest cohesion and success in influencing British colonial policy. Their efforts directly results in repeal of the Stamp Act, a reduction in the duties on produce imported into North America, and a modification of the laws hampering colonial trade. … The Whigs in America attributed their success in the winter of 1765-1766 during the Stamp Act crisis in great measure to their boycott on British goods and the resultant economic distress in the mother country. British merchants reflecting this distress in turn applied pressure on the government. Page 79 The almost daily sessions [House of Commons] lasted for eight or ten hours, with the administration subjecting the members to some forty witnesses testifying on the detrimental effects of the Stamp Act. The parade included merchants, Americans then in London, and agents. Page 81 The agents and merchants had won a great victory, primarily because they were dealing outside formal governmental channels with inexperienced, politically unstable ministers who were at a loss in enforcing British authority in North America. Page 87 They submitted a scheme for a general currency in the colonies supported by the Bank of England and authorized by act of Parliament. In April, 1766, after consulting with Charles Townshend, the Pennsylvania agent set down his proposal in the form of a bill to be introduced in Parliament. Franklin south primarily to satisfy British merchants who had suffered by the depreciation of colonial currency in the payments of transatlantic debts. Page 88 The heads of the administration had often reached basic decisions with the agents and merchants at private meetings, and the cooperation between the representatives of the colonies and the British mercantile community, as Franklin pointed out, had been close. Intimidated by the violent reaction in the colonies to the Stamp Act, Rockingham relied heavily on the agents and merchants in formulating his American program, and organized and focused merchant discontent on Parliament to repeat the Stamp Act. Page 162 Colonial agents and British merchants had aided in bringing about accommodations and adjustments such as the repeat of the Stamp Act and all but one of the Townshend duties, but in 1770 Parliament had retained the tax on tea as the symbol of its authority. Although there were few specific points at issue from 1770 to 1773, the imperial government and the Whig leaders in the colonies were further apart than ever before. Initially the Whigs had claimed freedom merely from Parliamentary laws for the purpose of raising revenue, then freedom from all Parliamentary taxation, and finally, by 1773, many were claming complete immunity, that Parliament had no authority in the colonies. Page 163 The British merchants, primarily concerned with a possible interruption of their trade, failed to understand that the government was principally concerned with a basic political crisis which threatened British rule over North America. For the first time in a decade, the agents and merchants were to make no impression. Although Hutchinson was a stockholder was a stockholder I the British East India Company, material gain does not seem to have motivated him to write the British government when he pointed out that it could considerably increase this fund by stimulating the consumption of British tea and eliminating the illicit trade in the smuggled Dutch product. If the price of British East India Company tea were lowered, it would render the profit from smuggling not worth the risk involved in breaking the law. Page 165 In the summer of 1773 the East India Company concluded arrangements with selected merchants in America who were designated consignees to receive and sell the tea. The British product would now be able to compete with smuggled Dutch tea if the colonists were willing to pay three-penny duty, symbolic of Parliamentary authority. If they were unwilling, they could demonstrate their principals by purchasing from the Dutch. Benjamin Franklin felt confident that they would prefer the latter course. The British ministers "have not Idea that any People can act from any other Principle but of [material] Interest," he wrote sarcastically to the Boston leaders. The English believed that the lower price of East India tea would be "sufficient to overcome all the Patriotism of an American." Page 169 The colonists considered that the East India Company Act was contrary to their interests, "introductive of monopolies" that were "forever dangerous to public liberty," paved the way for further impositions, and was "pregnant with new grievances." Furthermore, it threatened the "final destruction of liberties." Page 172 The administration's program was contained in four bills brought into Parliament between March and May, 1774: the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Act for the Impartial Administration of Justice, and the Quartering Act. Page 175 The British merchants trading to New England were most concerning with restitution to the East India Company, if only because their trade would suffer if the ministry closed the port of Boston, as it proposed to do when Lord north put the finishing touches to the Boston Port bill on March 16. Page 188 Arthur Lee, the associate agent for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, wrote to his brother in Virginia, Richard Henry Lee, on the best course of action. A general resolution by the colonists "to break off all commercial intercourse" with Great Britain until the Americans were secure in their liberties was the only advisable mode of defense. This might be "irksome" initially, but the colonists would be amply compensated not only by saving money and becoming "independent of these petty tyrants," the British merchants, but also by securing their "general liberties." The merchant William Lee also advised their relations in Virginia, and he too painted a distorted, if not altogether false, picture, not an uncommon picture amount the Lees. The British merchants and manufacturers concerned in the American trade "are almost universally your enemies," he informed Richard Henry. They had been forwarding the late iniquitious measures with all their force…" Page 190 In the spring of 1774 ships westward bound across the Atlantic brought to America news of recent laws the British government had enacted for Massachusetts. They also carried advice from the few remaining colonial agents in London to their constituents on the best course the Americans should adopt: economic sanctions to intimidate the British merchants and, in turn, the imperial government. Page 191 Moreover, the imperial government had legislated on the assumption that the Whig leaders in America sought independence. Page 206 At the request of the Secretary of State, Brooke Watson sent him his "Thoughts upon the Dispute between Great Britain and her Colonies." The primary concern of the merchant was to prevent the probable disruption of Anglo-American trade resulting from a political crisis with the colonies. Britain must retain the affection of her American provinces, he felt, inasmuch as one-third of her commerce depended on the colonies. The loss of America would ruin the mother country.

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