Episode 12: The Conspiracy

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode Twelve: “The Conspiracy”

Written by Jim Ambuske
Published 12/18/2024

JIM AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is supported by an anonymous friend of R2 Studios and George Mason University. Learn how you can make a gift to support the series at r2studios.org.

AMBUSKE: A storm raged all through night and into the next morning as the sun rose in Boston on October 28, 1767. With winds swirling out of the northeast, and the skies unforgiving, the town’s property owners and many of its other residents – men as well as women – assembled at Faneuil Hall for the Boston Town Meeting.

AMBUSKE: That most who watched the debates that morning could not vote mattered for very little. They had all come to discuss what had once been unthinkable, but now was becoming all too familiar: Parliament’s presumed right to rule British Americans and to tax them.

AMBUSKE: In Boston, New York, Quebec, Charleston, St. Augustine, and beyond, British Americans had only just learned of a new round of import duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea, and a new imperial administration to govern it and them.

AMBUSKE: The brick walls of Faneuil Hall were old, but the interior was mostly new as Bostonians gathered on that Wednesday morning. Few buildings better symbolized Boston’s connection to the empire, and what some Britons derided as its almost “republican” form of local government.

AMBUSKE: The original Faneuil Hall had been erected in 1742. It had been a gift to the town by the wealthy merchant Peter Faneuil, a descendent of French Huguenot refugees. A portrait of Faneuil painted near the end of his life reveals a prosperous man with a long nose and a paunch, an eighteenth-century sign of a rich and well-fed man. He is dressed in a suit of fine, golden-brown fabric, and as he gestures with his left hand to the scene behind him, viewers behold an ocean vista plied by merchant ships. It reminded them of the fortune Faneuil had made trading in fish, sugar, molasses, rum, and enslaved people.

AMBUSKE: The profits from those ventures funded the construction of Faneuil Hall, which included a marketplace on the ground floor, where Bostonians could buy local goods or imports from the empire, and a second story to house Boston’s town government.

AMBUSKE: The original building burned in 1761, leaving only its brick shell behind. The town rebuilt it and reopened Faneuil Hall in 1763, just as the Seven Years’ War came to an end.

AMBUSKE: When Bostonians gathered in October 1767 to debate the new taxes, the paint on Faneuil Hall was still somewhat new.

AMBUSKE: The new duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea were the work of Charles Townshend, a name that few in British America would recognize, but whose scheme the Boston Town Meeting was certain would only increase the town’s misfortune “by Means of the late additional Burthens and Impositions on the Trade of the Province, which threaten the Country with Poverty and Ruin.”

AMBUSKE: But how to resist them? How to once again make Parliament see the error of its ways, and convince it to abandon a path that to some British Americans was beginning to look like a pattern?

AMBUSKE: For the Boston Town Meeting, threatening the empire’s trade and encouraging their own manufactures seemed like a sensible solution.

AMBUSKE: Before the noon hour, the Town Meeting voted to take all “prudent and legal Measures” to discourage the city’s residents from buying a range of British-made goods, from hats, shoes, silks, and sugar to fine China, glue, gloves, and nails. The town’s government asked Bostonians to wear clothes of their own manufacture and “lessen the use of Superfluities” in the interest of their town and the common imperial good.

AMBUSKE: That afternoon, at 3 O’clock, the storm raged on as the committee appointed to draw up a non-consumption agreement presented its work to the Town Meeting. Those willing to sign it pledged that they would no longer purchase the offending goods beginning on January 1, 1768. It didn’t prevent merchants from importing them, sparing the men and women who made their living from the trade, but it did imply that it would be a wise choice and that the public would do well to avoid “foreign” manufacturers.

AMBUSKE: Signing their names signaled a public commitment, a willingness to abide by the pledge, and accept the risk of the community’s scorn if they chose to violate it.

AMBUSKE: For more than two centuries, historians have wondered just who signed their names, who left their marks. Diaries and letters gave us some clues, but most names eluded us until only recently, when a chance find in a library at Harvard, a college already more than a century old when the Town Meeting met in Faneuil Hall, revealed the names of more than 650 people. Some we knew, familiar names like Joseph Warren, John Rowe, and Paul Revere, but most we did not, and many we did not expect, such as

DEBORAH MONTGOMARY: “Deborah Montgomary”

REBEKKA HOW: “Rebekka How”

LYDIA FRANCIS: “Lydia Francis”

ELIZABETH GREENLEAF: “Elizabeth Greenleaf”

BRIDGET RIDGEWAY: “Bridget Ridgeway”

RUTH THOMPSON: “Ruth Thompson”

AMBUSKE: Fifty-three Boston women added their names to the agreement, including some who were merchants in their own right, like Elizabeth Greenleaf, who sold mustard, cabbage, asparagus, and other seeds imported from London in her shop at the end of Union Street.

AMBUSKE: Along with the men they pledged to deny themselves much of what the empire had to offer if it meant bringing Parliament to heal. But whether any of the Bostonians who signed that day would avoid succumbing to the temptations of tea or the seductions of silk, only time and public pressure would tell.

AMBUSKE: For as British Americans began rallying to once again resist Parliament’s claim to power, and restore their rights as subjects of the king, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic could only wonder if they were witnessing the beginnings of a conspiracy.

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution. Episode 12: “The Conspiracy.”

AMBUSKE: We most often remember the Townshend Duties as the taxes that Parliament imposed on imported paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea. They were a testament to Parliament’s claim that it could legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever” and they reflected the very real needs of an empire struggling to find its footing in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War.

AMBUSKE: Beginning in November 1767, British Americans would be required to pay duties on these items, not unlike the duties they had paid on goods in ages past, but their present had become very different.

AMBUSKE: Those taxes were just the first act of a new, more considered plan to bind the colonies closer to the Mother Country, one very long in the making. And if George Grenville had stumbled with the Stamp Act, Charles Townshend – the author of this new plan – was prepared to make the most of his moment.

AMBUSKE: So, how did Parliament chart a new course for British America in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis? How did lingering questions over Parliament’s supremacy pit British Americans against each other? And why did British Americans resist new taxes on seemingly harmless goods like paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to London, where yet another change in the British ministry brought one of the architects of this new empire to power. We’ll then head back to British America, where Townshend’s Acts provoked arguments about rights that gave way to politics in action, before putting into port at New York, to an imperial city dividing against itself.

AMBUSKE: In July 1766, four months after Parliament repealed the hated Stamp Act, King George III found himself in want of a new prime minister. The Marquis of Rockingham had failed to unify growing political factions in the British government after he had replaced George Grenville, the author of the detested stamp duties, the previous year. The king had supported Rockingham’s efforts to repeal the Stamp Act, much to the delight of British Americans, but the center, Rockingham, could not hold.

AMBUSKE: George III aspired to be a Patriot King, as a monarch who ruled above faction and united all peoples of the empire. But that, he could not do alone. To restore harmony in the government and throughout the empire following the Stamp Act crisis, the king turned to a ferocious, ambitious man who was slowly becoming a shadow of his former self.

AMBUSKE: William Pitt had been prime minister in all but name in the final years of the Seven Years’ War. As Secretary of State for the Southern Department, Pitt had endeared himself to British Americans by treating them as the king’s equal subjects. He reimbursed the colonies for military expenses, made provincial officers equal to British officers of the same rank, and forbade British commanders-in-chief from wielding power over their assemblies. 

AMBUSKE: Yet, the cost of the victory had been great. Besides the staggering sums of money that Pitt had borrowed on the government’s behalf to win the war, his desire to expand the conflict made him an impediment to peace. In 1761, the king and the Earl of Bute maneuvered to force Pitt from office.

AMBUSKE: Nevertheless, five years later George III needed a politician who could form a stable government and command respect on both sides of the Atlantic. British Americans lionized Pitt for championing the Stamp Act’s repeal in Parliament, and to many Britons he was “The Great Commoner,” a reflection of the powerful role he had played building the British Empire as a member of the House of Commons.

AMBUSKE: Pitt promised the king a government of “measures and not men,” with a cabinet composed of politicians whose merits outweighed their political inclinations. But by 1766, Pitt was aging and increasingly infirm. He was nearly 60 years old when George III appointed him prime minister that July. His brief, two-year tenure was marked by troubles with gout and what may have been manic depression.

AMBUSKE: Pitt diminished his own light among the British public when he finally accepted what he had long refused: a noble title. William Pitt, “The Great Commoner,” member of the House of Commons became William, 1st Earl of Chatham, member of the House of Lords.

AMBUSKE: With Lord Chatham’s physical and political powers waning, Charles Townshend, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, stepped into the breach. Here’s Patrick Griffin, Madden-Hennebry Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

PATRICK GRIFFIN: Ne's brilliant. Charles Townsend is absolutely brilliant. Now, I don't agree with his policies. And certainly, Americans didn't agree with his policies, but his ability to see and think structurally, and systematically, it's really impressive. It’s an intelligence that not everybody has.

AMBUSKE: Few could see the empire – in all of its flaws and in all of its potential – as Townshend could. In 1749, a then twenty-four-year-old Townshend joined the Board of Trade, the agency that managed the colonies on the government’s behalf. Over the next several years, as he served with imperial reformers like the Earl of Halifax, Townshend read official reports and correspondence coming from the colonies in all their minute detail, reports detailing sugar production in the Caribbean, petitions from mainland merchants about trade restrictions, and letters from provincial governors complaining about their uncooperative colonial assemblies. And from his vantage point in London, the British Empire was an empire of fragments.

GRIFFIN: His years on the Board of Trade, this is where he hones some of those skills and some of those sensibilities to begin seeing the Empire as potentially a coherent whole, and an empire that has to be managed and thought about as a coherent whole. And in many ways, that is his genius. And I think that some people at the time, saw too, we just seen from the American side, well, this is the buffoon who passed these kinds of duties that, you know, it was kind of the next step in the road to inevitable revolution. But in Britain at the time, this guy, no, no, this, this, this, this guy is sharp, he is really, really sharp. And people recognize that at the time, how brilliant he was, because he had gifts that not everybody had to think systematically. And being on the Board of Trade was a perfect place for him to kind of hone those skills.

AMBUSKE: By August 1766, when Townshend became Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had spent years thinking deeply about the empire and how to reform it. When he accepted Lord Chatham’s invitation to join his cabinet, Townshend expressed his hope that:

CHARLES TOWNSHEND: “I shall be happy…if I shall be acknowledged by posterity to have in any degree contributed, under your protection, to facilitate the re-establishment of general confidence, real government, and a permanent system of measures.”^[6]

AMBUSKE: Like most members of the government, Townshend believed firmly in Parliament’s supreme authority over the colonies, that it could legislate for British America “in all cases whatsoever,” that Britain must be the star around which the colonies orbited, and that in the wake of the Stamp Act, it had become necessary:

TOWNSHEND: “to take some steps which by showing the Americans that this country would not tamely suffer her sovereignty to be wrested out of her hands.”

GRIFFIN: Charles is much more comfortable being a centralizer. In that regard, he’s a bit more like a Grenville. But he's a bit more nuanced when it comes to it. But he still believes the center has to dictate the terms. He's doesn't believe in a Commonwealth vision of Empire or anything like that, for Empire to work. In this world of extraordinary geopolitical rivalry, you have to have a sovereignty that is certain and secure that must reside in Parliament, because parliament will look after the rights of the whole, including even the colonists.

AMBUSKE: In his mind, the Stamp Act had been a good imperial policy. It provided a way to fund an army for the defense of British America against the French in a war that few doubted was on the horizon, and it was a clear statement of Parliament’s constitutional power over the colonies. But former prime minister George Grenville had just bungled its implementation.

GRIFFIN: Charles had no problem at all with what the Stamp Act did, he just thought it was a bit foolish to pass it without actually setting up the infrastructure that was going to allow it to be done effectively. That's the cart before the horse, what we need is infrastructure, after we have infrastructure, then we can actually get revenue from the Americans to make the Empire run. Now, he didn't mean to do this in a cruel way try to impoverish Americans or anything like that. But he would agree with Grenville with others saying, look, we have these colonies, they clearly are flourishing, we paid a lot at the time of the Seven Years War to ensure that, they could remain that way. Now all we have to do is set up kind of a bunch of arrangements that are going to ensure that we can derive revenue from them, since we want to have an empire that's going to be fundamentally more integrated than what it is. Whereas others had these kinds of plans before and they were never able to kind of really make good on them. It's Charles Townshend finds himself in a position where he actually can for a little bit of time, begin to make good on them.

AMBUSKE: For Townshend, building the kind of efficient, and centralized empire that he had long imagined in his mind, one that would not repeat the Stamp Act debacle, yet made Parliament’s authority clearer, and strengthened London’s influence over colonial officials, required a fresh approach based on years of studying the empire. 

AMBUSKE: The duties he proposed on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea in 1767 weren’t so much a strategy to raise revenue as they were but one element of an entire political philosophy. 

GRIFFIN: I think the mistake that we largely make is we see these as revenue duties, right? That the idea is like, Oh, well, this is a way for the British to raise money. But when you really dig into them, it's not. They're not revenue duties, per se, they will raise revenue, but what is the revenue going for the revenues not going forward if you will pay down the debt, or even service the debt back in Britain, that's not what they're designed for. What it’s designed for is allow for more efficacious rule and allow for a more centralized rule, and that is, kind of like the evil genius of these kinds of act.

AMBUSKE: In Britain’s older North American colonies, like Virginia, Connecticut, South Carolina, and New York, the salaries for governors and other colonial officials were paid out of taxes levied by their provincial assemblies, even if they had been appointed by the king. That power of the purse gave assemblies some measure of control over governors, making them less beholden to the crown than the king’s ministers might otherwise prefer. 

AMBUSKE: That was not the case in newer colonies like Nova Scotia, Quebec, or East or West Florida, colonies that were funded by Parliament, with crown-appointed officials, and no provincial assemblies.

AMBUSKE: Townshend need only point to Governor Henry Moore’s seeming willingness to humor the New York Assembly’s refusal to comply with the Quartering Act, a directive to provide money for the support of British soldiers stationed in the colonies, as evidence of how local politics corrupted the common imperial good.

AMBUSKE: To modernize the older colonies, then, and counter the influence of self-interested colonists who put themselves above the empire, Townshend designed a new system of imperial administration.

GRIFFIN: You collect duties on these kinds of things, instead of sending the money back to Britain, why don't we pay for Colonial governors and customs officials and others to be paid from the duties as opposed to being paid by legislatures in the colonies? What would this do? It would free up these people then to work on the behalf of the Center, as opposed to be beholden to the colonists, they could never be held ransom, then by the colonists, and they'd be freed up actually to start doing governing. And so what this is, is this was something that would be put in place to allow for more efficacious government and a more centralized vision of empire. It was after this, that the taxing could begin.

AMBUSKE: To ensure the success of his new program, the Chancellor of the Exchequer set out to correct George Grenville’s mistakes with the Stamp Act, using a far more pragmatic and less blunt approach.

GRIFFIN: This gets back to the famous distinction between internal and external taxation.

AMBUSKE: British Americans had objected to the Stamp Act in part because they viewed it as an unconstitutional internal direct tax. Although they may have grumbled about certain aspects of the Navigation Acts, the seventeenth-century laws that governed the empire’s trade, colonists largely accepted Parliament’s right to regulate that trade. Customs duties on imported goods could be seen as an acceptable form of external taxation. In London, Benjamin Franklin tried to make that case.

GRIFFIN: Benjamin Franklin is going to have this famous moment himself when he's going to say, look, look, look, when it comes to the Stamp Act. It's not so much the act itself. It's the problem between internal and external. This is hitting us with internal stuff that we work with, we produce, external stuff we're not gonna have a problem with. If goods that are made in Britain and coming from Britain, if these are going to be taxed, Americans are not going to have a problem with that, per se.

AMBUSKE: To secure the empire’s future, and his vision of it, Townshend was willing to entertain this pleasant fiction.

GRIFFIN: Charles is all involved with all of this questioning at the time. And he says, basically, this distinction is rubbish, it doesn't matter, because of course, we know the parliament is supreme. So I don't know where he gets off saying this kind of stuff. But if this is what he's going to say, then we can actually use this justification for our own ends. So let's install these duties that are external duties, you know, and so he more or less takes, if you will, Franklin at his word even though he doesn't agree at all with a distinction and he's like, look, these duties are not going to really be that onerous is at all their external, let's take Dr. Franklin as at his word. And Americans are probably not going to have a problem with that, and then we can create a more centralized vision of empire. But he wasn't really concerned as much with Americans being able to find their voice.

AMBUSKE: To collect those taxes and implement Townshend’s plan for a new imperial administration meant the creation of a new Board of Customs Commissioners, to be based in Boston, with offices established in other British American ports, charged with enforcing British trade regulations and ensuring the collection of all legal customs duties.

AMBUSKE: The establishment of new admiralty courts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, to prosecute smugglers, with judges appointed by the king and whose salaries would be paid out of the fines levied against the convicted.

AMBUSKE: And tax relief for the British East India Company, allowing it to better compete against the smuggled tea too often favored by British Americans.

AMBUSKE: Parliament passed four laws in late June and July 1767 to implement this new regime. Today, we collectively call them “the Townshend Acts.”

AMBUSKE: If Parliament had never passed the Stamp Act two years earlier, had never argued so forcefully for its own supremacy, had never so directly declared its right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” then perhaps British Americans would have accepted Townshend’s new scheme and the taxes that came with it as just another round of external duties meant to regulate the empire’s trade.

AMBUSKE: But the Stamp Act had opened Pandora’s Box, and out of it flooded questions about Parliament’s sovereignty and its power over the empire that neither the king’s ministers nor British Americans could afford to ignore.

AMBUSKE: And for all the years that Townshend had spent carefully studying the empire and crafting a plan to harmonize colonies and peoples as different and distinct as Jamaicans, South Carolinians, New Yorkers, and Nova Scotians, and for all of Benjamin Franklin’s confidence that his fellow colonists would accept Townshend’s duties as harmless external taxes, both men badly misread recent events in British America.

AMBUSKE: Word of Townshend’s Acts arrived in North America in the late summer and fall of 1767. Unlike the Stamp Act, British Americans did not immediately greet them with panicked protests, hurriedly arranged meetings with prime ministers, or bonfires and effigies. Instead, they drew on the less destructive lessons of the recent past to deliberate, publish, and organize.

GRIFFIN: So whereas a guy like Charles Townsend, are able to realize the moment and seize it, and kind of create a vision of empire and then come up with a series of policies where Empire could be made coherent. Americans are doing the same kind of thing as well. Only they start to kind of knit together a different kind of pattern. And we see that particularly with John Dickinson with his famous letters.

AMBUSKE: The Philadelphian John Dickinson had been a member of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, where he helped draft petitions to Parliament and the king urging the Stamp Act’s repeal. Two years later, he began building on those and other arguments to publish a series of anonymous essays, which he called “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.”

AMBUSKE: Dickinson was a lawyer, not a farmer, but he adopted that persona and wrote in plain, clear language to reach British Americans who may have been less inclined to hear lectures on constitutional law from an elite, learned man.

AMBUSKE: In a series of twelve letters published from December 1767 to April 1768, Dickinson wrote about the empire in ways that at first glance many readers would have found unremarkable.

GRIFFIN: You read through the letters, and we've heard some of it before There was nothing that was pathbreaking about it. Nothing that was extraordinary about it in any kinds of ways. Many of the ideas he's dealing with are just boilerplate British ideas about rights and everything like that. He even concedes the point that Parliament is supreme. He's like, we don't we don't we don't have a problem with that with parliamentary supremacy or anything like that.

AMBUSKE: As Dickinson wrote in his sixth letter:

JOHN DICKINSON: “[T]here is no privilege the colonies claim, which they ought, in duty and prudence, more earnestly to maintain and defend, than the authority of the British parliament to regulate the trade of all her dominions. Without this authority, the benefits she enjoys from our commerce, must be lost to her: The blessings we enjoy from our dependance on her, must be lost to us; her strength must decay; her glory vanish; and she cannot suffer, without our partaking in her misfortune.”

AMBUSKE: But what Dickinson did do was clarify for many British Americans the danger of Townshend’s duties. Ironically, he agreed with the Chancellor of the Exchequer - there was no distinction between internal and external taxes. And in Townshend’s attempt to cast the new duties under the guise of trade regulation, the fictional farmer saw a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

DICKINSON: “Nothing is wanted at home but a PRECEDENT, the force of which shall be established by the tacit submission of the colonies [...] If the parliament succeeds in this attempt, other statutes will impose other duties [...] and thus the Parliament will levy upon us such sums of money as they choose to take, without any other LIMITATION than their PLEASURE.”

AMBUSKE: For Dickinson, Townshend’s Duties were nothing more than the Stamp Act packaged in a more seductive form - a precedent to confirm Parliament’s right to tax British Americans without their consent, a violation of their rights as British subjects.

AMBUSKE: It made little difference that the money would stay in North America to fund the administration of the colonies. By paying the salaries of governors and other colonial officials, Parliaments and Prime Ministers would control them.

DICKINSON: “[A]ny minister who shall abuse the power by the late act given to the crown…may divide the spoils torn from us in what manner he pleases, and we shall have no way of making him responsible. If he should order, that every governor shall have a yearly salary of £5,000 sterling; every chief justice of £3,000; every inferior officer in proportion; and should then reward the most profligate, ignorant, or needy dependents on himself or his friends…it will be in their power to settle upon us any civil, ecclesiastical, or military establishment, which they choose.”

AMBUSKE: As they read or heard Dickinson’s letters in their homes, in taverns, or in the streets of North America, British Americans pondered abstract arguments about the empire that left little room for compromise. Either Parliament had supreme authority, or it did not. Either the provincial assemblies had the sole and exclusive right to tax their colonists, or they did not.

GRIFFIN: When these things came out, it was almost like a touched off a fire, papers up and down the East Coast of America or republishing these letters, people are talking about these letters, he caught a particular kind of moment, and was enabled to make a certain kind of argument about America's participation of empire that may have been made before. But that literally caught the moment. And that's indeed what it was. And so he becomes this catalyzing individual. He becomes a rallying point, he becomes a catalyst as Americans now try to understand who and what they are during a very fluid period of time.

AMBUSKE: We cannot know what Townshend made of these “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” nor of the events that followed in this fluid moment. A cold and a fever had plagued him for most of 1767, an illness he labored through as he completed his great work. In the late summer it robbed him of his strength and then his life. He died on September 6th at the age of 42. He never knew what his acts hath wrought.

AMBUSKE: In the months following Townshend’s death, British Americans weighed just how to achieve the repeal of his reforms. While some colonists began to call for more than just non-consumption and push for non-importation of British goods, to once again use the threat of a trade boycott to force Parliament’s retreat, others began calling for the colonies to present a more united front.

AMBUSKE: Like John Dickinson, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, believed that it had a clear sense of who British Americans were in this fragile moment.

AMBUSKE: In many ways, Townshend made Boston the epicenter of his imperial project. The new American Customs Board would be headquartered in the town, and from it the commissioners would enforce the collection of duties on imported goods in all major colonial ports, crack down on illegal smuggling, and work with the new vice admiralty courts to punish Britons guilty of illegal trading.

AMBUSKE: The customs board would make Parliament’s presence felt in very real ways. It was a clear symbol of the new imperial administration, and that was not lost on the men appointed to run it.

AMBUSKE: In November 1767, Henry Hulton arrived from London to chair the customs board. Hulton was born in England and had served the empire from a young age, first in Antigua, then Germany, before landing a job in the London customs office in the early 1760s. His experience made him a good choice, but he was under no illusions about the difficulties that lay ahead as he arrived in Boston to take up his post. Few would have forgotten what Andrew Oliver had endured when the king had appointed him as the colony’s stamp distributor just a few years earlier.

AMBUSKE: Anne Hulton, Henry’s sister, planned to join him in Boston in a few months’ time.  As she made ready to cross the Atlantic, she wrote to a friend in February 1768, reporting how her brother and his fellow commissioners tried to endear themselves to the town elite:

ANNE HULTON: “The Commissioners began an Assembly at Boston in order to wear off the prejudice of the people & to cultivate their Acquaintance. There were about 100 at the first Opening of it, & my Brother had the honor of dancing, the first Minnuet.”

AMBUSKE: Just as Hulton was writing her letter in London, Samuel Adams and James Otis, Jr. were writing one of their own in Boston.

AMBUSKE: In February 1768, Adams, the delinquent tax collector, and Otis, the attorney were members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. They were also members of Boston’s Sons of Liberty, and correspondents with John Dickinson. Otis, in fact, arranged to have Dickinson’s letters published in Boston newspapers.

AMBUSKE: Now, on behalf of the House of Representatives, they composed the Massachusetts Circular Letter. It was sent to the assemblies of the other mainland colonies, offering their fellow British American legislators a brief history of the ways Massachusetts Bay had protested the hardships imposed by the Townshend Acts.

AMBUSKE: The House did not deny:

MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: “that his Majesty's high court of Parliament is the supreme legislative power over the whole empire”

AMBUSKE: But:

MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: “the acts made there, imposing duties on the people of this province, with the sole and express purpose of raising a revenue, are infringements of their natural and constitutional rights; because, as they are not represented in the British Parliament, his Majesty's Commons in Britain, by those acts, grant their property without their consent.”

AMBUSKE: And if the crown paid the salaries of the governors and other officials as Parliament intended, then colonial assemblies would lose the power of the purse to check malicious politicians.

AMBUSKE: That was cause for alarm, even more so because some members of the House had begun to believe:

MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: “that the enemies of the colonies have represented them to his Majesty's ministers, and to the Parliament, as factious, disloyal, and having a disposition to make themselves independent of the mother country.”

AMBUSKE: In other words, the representatives imagined that men like Governor Bernard, or the widely loathed Lt. Governor Thomas Hutchinson, were conspiring to portray colonists as disloyal subjects in order to justify greater imperial rule.

AMBUSKE: To defeat the Townshend Acts and restore the empire to what British Americans thought it was, required a common effort.

MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:  “This House cannot conclude, without expressing their firm confidence in the King, our common head and father; that the united and dutiful supplications of his distressed American subjects, will meet with his royal and favorable acceptance.”

AMBUSKE: As the Massachusetts Circular letter made its way to the other provincial assemblies on the mainland, with its encouragement to petition the king directly, it made its way to London, into the hands of the Earl of Hillsborough, the new Secretary of State for the Colonies, the cabinet official charged with oversight of British America.

AMBUSKE: On April 21, 1768, Hillsborough condemned the circular letter in one of his own to the provincial governors. The king, he wrote:

EARL OF HILLSBOROUGH: “considers this measure to be of a most dangerous and factious tendency, calculated to inflame the minds of his good subjects in the colonies, to promote an unwarrantable combination, and to excite and encourage an open opposition to and denial of the authority of Parliament, and to subvert the true principles of the constitution.”

AMBUSKE: For Hillsborough, it seemed as if self-interested men concerned with their own power and authority, men like the Sons of Liberty, were fomenting a conspiracy to corrupt the minds of the common people, to turn them against Parliament and the King. He ordered the governors to do everything in their power to convince their respective assemblies to ignore Massachusetts’ “seditious” plea, but if they could not:

HILLSBOROUGH: “it will be your duty to prevent any proceeding upon it by an immediate prorogation or dissolution.”

AMBUSKE: In the other colonial assemblies, the Massachusetts letter met with a favorable reception. It reached Virginia’s House of Burgesses in early April, where almost immediately its members began drafting a petition to the king and instructing the colony’s agents in London to lobby Parliament and the crown on Virginia’s behalf.

AMBUSKE: That they could even do so was the result of an auspicious confluence of events. Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the former commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, was the governor of Virginia at this moment. Had he been in Williamsburg, there is little doubt he would have acted to prevent discussion of the circular letter. But, like many Virginia governors before him, Amherst remained in England, leaving the task of ruling to the colony’s lieutenant governors. And yet, Virginia had none. Francis Fauquier had died in March 1768, leaving the Virginian John Blair as the colony’s acting lieutenant governor, and Blair saw no reason to interfere with the Burgesses' debates.

AMBUSKE: The circumstances in other colonies were not as favorable.

AMBUSKE: In North Carolina, Governor William Tryon had already prorogued the provincial assembly in late April, long before he and the other governors received Hillsborough’s instructions. Tyron, however, faced a growing crisis of his own, a smoldering rebellion in the backcountry by colonists calling themselves “Regulators,” who believed the provincial government was corrupt.

AMBUSKE: Tryon had little choice but to call the assembly back into session in November 1768 to deal with the unrest. After approving funds to support the militia, the assembly turned to the Circular Letter and drafted a humble petition to the king. That finally compelled Tryon to again prorogue the assembly, sending its members home until the colony had need of them.

AMBUSKE: By then, it had already been months since Governor Bernard had been forced to dissolve the assembly in Massachusetts Bay. He received Hillsborough orders on June 15, 1768. Bernard was not unsympathetic to colonists’ complaints about the Townshend Acts, but Hillsborough had been direct, and the governor’s duty was clear. When he asked the Massachusetts House of Representatives to rescind its infamous circular letter, its members refused to do so, by a vote of 92 to 17. Hoping to diffuse the situation, Bernard dissolved the assembly entirely, gambling that a future election would return more reasonable and moderate men to the House of Representatives.

AMBUSKE: Bernard acted with Boston already on edge.

AMBUSKE: Just days before, customs officials had seized the Liberty on suspicions of smuggling. I was owned by the merchant John Hancock. As the customs collectors towed the Liberty toward the HMS Romney anchored in Boston Harbor, Bostonians revolted. A riot of some 3,000 people searched the streets for port collector Joseph Harrison. And when they could not find him, they burned his personal boat, and manured the city’s Liberty Tree with its ashes.

AMBUSKE: The riot made for a frightening welcome to Boston for Anne Hulton, the sister of customs commissioner Henry Hulton. Six days after her arrival in British America, Anne, Henry, his family, and other members of the custom service fled first to the Romney, and then to Castle William in Boston Harbor. Although no one was killed in the riot, as she would later imply, Hulton’s description of events reveals how confusion, misinformation, and violence took hold in Boston:

HULTON: “These Sons of Violence after attacking Houses, breaking Window, beating, Stoning, & bruizing several Gentlemen belonging to the Customs, the Collector mortally, & burning his boat, They consulted what was to be done next, & it was agreed to retire for the night.”

AMBUSKE: The efforts of gentlemen in Boston to quiet the mob did little to comfort Hulton. Nor did she trust their intent. In her view, they were behind everything:

HULTON: “The Credulity of the Common people here is imposed on by a number of Lies raised to irritate & inflame them. They believe that the Commissioners have an unlimited power to tax even their Lands…every Officer of the Crown that does his duty is become obnoxious, & they must either fly or be sacrificed.”

AMBUSKE: The Englishwoman feared that society itself was unraveling. Having only recently arrived from a country where aristocracy infused every element of British society, Boston’s elite seemed unable, even unwilling, to control their social inferiors. Nor did the rabble seem to give a damn about deference.

HULTON: “From the inherent Republican, & levelling principles, heres no subordination in the Society. Government is extirpated, & it is quite a State of Anarchy…..The Sedition has been falsely represented at home as a dying Faction – but the defection is too general, most of the other Provinces are only waiting to see the event of this effort in Boston.”

AMBUSKE: In the months that followed the riot, Bostonians learned that Lord Hillsborough had issued secret orders to General Thomas Gage in New York, directing the commander-in-chief order two regiments from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Boston. From the confines of Castle William, Henry Hulton and the other customs commissioners pleaded to London “that nothing but the immediate Exertion of military Power will prevent an open Revolt of this Town.” The soldiers arrived in October 1768, to keep the peace and support the colony’s royal government.

AMBUSKE: For Anne Hulton, they were no doubt a welcome sight, for if she needed any further evidence of disorder in British America, or of the unnatural collusion between ordinary colonists and their social betters, she need only look to the non-importation movements growing in many colonies.

ROSEMARIE ZAGARRI: The colonists began to realize that one of their most effective tools for applying pressure against the British was economic pressure. And so they began to call for boycotts against British goods.

ZAGARRI: I'm Rosemarie Zagarri, Distinguished University Professor and Professor of History at George Mason University.

ZAGARRI: Firstly, they had to get merchants on board, because if merchants were still importing the stuff, it was going to be kind of hard.

AMBUSKE: In New York, Massachusetts Bay, South Carolina, and many of the older mainland colonies, British Americans began drawing on lessons learned from the Stamp Act crisis to counter Townshend’s reforms. If they could not make a constitutional case for their repeal, they would make an economic one. Leading men and women began calling on their fellow subjects to go beyond non-consumption and embrace non-importation.

AMBUSKE: That was easier said than done. Merchants had few incentives to voluntarily give up their trade, nor were they keen to act unless their counterparts in other colonies did so as well. It would not do well for a Boston merchant to swear off importing British goods, only for an enterprising Rhode Islander to sail in and steal their customers.

AMBUSKE: Nevertheless, Boston merchants began discussing such agreements in March 1768. A month later, many merchants in New York city, led by the powerful DeLancey family, publicly agreed to stop importing British goods after November 1st. Sixty Boston merchants followed suit with a public declaration in August, pledging to cease importing British wares at the beginning of the new year. Virginians and South Carolinians adopted similar agreements in 1769.

AMBUSKE: These weren’t entirely noble or virtuous decisions. Besides buying time to communicate the threat of an economic boycott to Parliament and British merchants, the months-long delays would also afford merchants and consumers alike the chance to fill orders with their British suppliers and stockpile goods in anticipation of a long, drawn-out dispute with the Mother Country.

ZAGARRI: But as merchants began to agree and sign on, for whatever reasons, to these boycotts, political leaders began to realize that they also needed to enlist the consumers, so ordinary white men, but also ordinary white women and get them to support the boycotts to not buy British goods to not buy them, even if some sneaky merchant in their town offered tea at a cut rate price or, some desirable piece of fabric that they had been have it in our beautiful tea set. 

AMBUSKE: That meant forgoing the purchase of many goods made in Britain, objects both practical and refined, everything from simple farm tools to luxurious fabrics made of silk

ZARA ANISHANSLIN: Silk during the American Revolutionary era, I think takes on some loaded political meaning. Mostly because silk is imported from Britain for the most part, American colonists also have access to Chinese silk. And they're definitely smuggling French silk when they can get it. Because French silk is always seen as the best in terms of patterned silk. But American colonists are supposed to buy their silk from England. They're supposed to be buying London Spitalfields manufactured silk. And they do North American colonies are the second largest market for that silk besides London itself.

ANISHANSLIN: Zara Anishanslin and I'm a Professor of History at the University of Delaware.

ANISHANSLIN: It becomes politically loaded when a lot of important Americans who would wear silk, decide that they are not going to buy British imported goods, luxury goods, until certain legislation is overturned by Parliament. The Stamp Act, but followed them by the Townsend duties. It becomes a matter of if you if you disagree with what is increasingly seen as the tyrannical overreach of British Parliament, then you're not going to wear British silk, at least not openly.

AMBUSKE: Denying oneself the pleasures of British-made silk in favor of more locally made fabrics meant disrupting global trade, if only in a small way.

ANISHANSLIN: Take for example, something that eventually becomes a silk dress worn by the descendant of English colonists in colonial Pennsylvania. That piece of silk would have been manufactured in London in England, but it would have been made from silk fibers that were taken from silkworms that could have been raised as far flung as places like China and North America and Turkey or Italy and France. These are all places where people raised silkworms to produce raw silk that made its way to England in the 18th century to then be fashioned into thread, and then become thread that was woven into fabric, and then fabric that was put on boats and transported across the sea, and then sewn together by someone else's hands into the dress that fits the shape of this woman's body.

AMBUSKE: This portrait of a woman in silk shimmers next to the fabrics that Virginians, South Carolinians, and Georgians imported to clothe their enslaved people. They purchased a kind of coarse, plain linen called osnaburg made in Scottish textile mills to supply their captive populations with their annual clothing needs. Even as enslaved people like Sukey of Campbell County, Virginia made the osnaburg their own by adorning it with a bit of ribbon, enslavers on the mainland and in the Caribbean relied on steady cargos of osnaburg for their growing enslaved communities.

AMBUSKE: The desire for silk and the necessity of osnaburg helps to explain why many British American merchants and consumers were reluctant to join non-importation movements and why they were so hard to enforce. South Carolinians had no interest in damaging their plantation enterprise, and Pennsylvanians wanted the latest fabrics and fashions from London.

AMBUSKE: But as one Bostonian put it bluntly:

BOSTONIAN: “You who can be comfortably and decently clothed with your own manufactures cannot think it an intolerable hardship to abstain from the unmeaning superfluities of foreign countries, when you discover that your fondness for them is the engine intended to be used to destroy the free constitution of your country.”

AMBUSKE: The Bostonian meant to shame colonists who signed an agreement, only to import or wear British-made clothing when they thought no one was looking. Non-importation agreements had no legal force, and colonists did not sign them lightly. By doing so, they signaled their association with a political ideal that became a matter of public record, leaving the men and women who tried to enforce them with only persuasion, public ridicule, and coercion at their disposal.

AMBUSKE: These were powerful allies to the Sons of Liberty. In July 1768, they accused John Williams, a British American and the inspector general of customs in Boston, of becoming “an Actor in the Conspiracy formed against his native Country.” The smuggler John Hancock was among the merchants whose names appeared on the front page of the Boston Chronicle for violating the agreement. Others received visits from local committees inquiring about their loyalties. New Yorkers condemned haberdasher and jeweler Simeon Cooley in a broadside that may have been nailed to the door of his shop.

AMBUSKE: And if the boycotts stood any chance of success, white men recognized they had to enlist the support of white women as well. Here’s Rosemary Zagarri.

ZAGARRI: Male political leaders began to reach out to women through this exploding print media through newspapers, especially through broadsides through poetry, and to enlist the support of women in in these boycotts against British goods, and appealing to the women as fellow British subjects not to buy British goods. And that was an important move. Male political leaders realized that they needed the support of women to make these boycotts truly effective.   

AMBUSKE: In the eighteenth century, white women regardless of class played crucial roles in managing household economies. The seeds, fabrics, books, portraits, and tools they purchased in shops or ordered from Britain shaped local markets and Atlantic trade. One South Carolinian remarked that women “will be much the properest persons to manage [non-importation,] an affair of so much consequence to the American world.”

ZAGARRI: In doing so they were also recognizing that women were political agents, that women had a political capacity. And this hadn't been thought about before, this hadn't been recognized, because women didn't have formal legal rights and privileges the way even ordinary white males did. But this was an important move. And what we see happening is that ordinary middling and upper-class women in the colonies responded to the call for support for these boycott movements. And the boycotts were probably the single most important way that male political leaders brought women into the political sphere.

AMBUSKE: Hannah Griffitts was one of them. Griffitts was born into a Philadelphia Quaker family in the late 1720s.^[22]She was a prolific poet from an early age, and in 1768, she rhymed about “The Female Patriots” in the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette:

HANNAH GRIFFITTS:  "Since the Men, for a Party or Fear of a Frown,

                                         Are kept by a Super-plumb quietly down

                                       Supinely asleep–and depriv’d of their Sight,

                                        Are stripp’d of their Freedom, and robb’d of their Right

                                        If the Sons, so degenerate! The Blessings despise,

                                         Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise”

AMBUSKE: As these daughters of liberty rose, some women had no misgivings about reminding men that restoring harmony in the empire required self-sacrifices on everyone’s part. As one Rhode Islander wrote:

“THE LADIES”: We are willing to give up our dear & beloved Tea, for the Good of the Public provided the Gentlemen will give up their dearer & more beloved Punch, renounce going so often to Taverns, and become more kind and loving Sweethearts and Husbands.”

ZAGARRI: It opened up a wide range of new possibilities, partly because it allowed both men and women to imagine women as political actors. We do have cases then, of women forming analogous groups to the Sons of Liberty and calling themselves the daughters of liberty and making homespun goods themselves rather than purchase, foreign or British textiles. We see women, defiantly drinking herbal tea, instead of imported British tea, or what was more of a likely though was to drink some smuggled Dutch tea. That was still allowed, women started then to write to these publications. And began to write poems and plays that had a political cast that had a political message. It was definitely not the intention of these resistors to British oppression, that women should become political actors in their own right. But it was an unintended consequence that had some long-term repercussions.

AMBUSKE: The Massachusetts Circular Letter and calls for non-importation arrived in New York in April 1768, to a city struggling to find a way out of its own imperial crisis.

AMBUSKE: For New Yorkers, commerce was fundamental to who they were as British subjects.

CHRISTOPHER MINTY: It was central to how people thought about themselves within the empire.

 MINTY: My name is Christopher minty. I'm a Project Editor at The Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia.

 MINTY: People who are dealing in trade at the port is central to who they are. And the people who work at the port is central to who they are to because they earn a living that way. You want New York City to do well, you want the economy to be thriving. During the French and Indian War, when you have all of these British ships coming in, you quite like that, because you're busy. The people in the port are doing well. The people working in the city proper doing well.

AMBUSKE: When the war ended, however, and the money stopped flowing from Britain across the Atlantic, the colonial economy entered a downturn.

MINTY: But they still remember what it was like and what it could be like. And that's central to who they are, New York City as a commercial city. That's how it should move forward. That's who we are. Let's get back to what it was like during the French and Indian War, when there was a lot of money like going around New York.

AMBUSKE: The DeLancy family believed that commerce was the way forward for New York City as well.

AMBUSKE: By the late 1760s, the DeLanceys were ascendant in New York politics. The merchant family’s fortunes had long been tied to the city’s connections to the empire, and the commerce that flowed through its ports. In their view, commerce and a thriving economy were the keys to New York’s prosperity. 

AMBUSKE: But for much of the decade they had been bested by their political rivals, the Livingston family, who controlled the colonial assembly. The Livingston’s owned vast tracts of land on Manhattan Island to the north of the city, and like any great landed proprietors of the eighteenth century, the elite Livingston’s expected their tenants and the lower sort of people to show deference to their power and authority.

AMBUSKE: To challenge the Livingston’s hold on the provincial assembly, the DeLanceys embraced a more popular form of politics. In print, they appealed to men and women who shared their vision of a commercial future by promoting the idea that the Livingstons and their allies, many of whom were lawyers, would use their knowledge of the law to fill their own coffers and deny them their rights and liberties.

AMBUSKE: During the election of 1768, one DeLancey supporter urged voters to reject lawyer John Morin Scott through the majesty of song:

WORDS OF ADVICE: “Unite in Time, against this common Foe,

                                    Convince the Wretch that all his Arts are vain,

                                    That his vile Purpose he shall ne’er obtain,

                                    This once prevent him, in his enterprise,

                                    He’ll fall like LUCIFER, no more to rise”

AMBUSKE: The DeLancey’s also built coalitions of like-minded New Yorkers in local taverns. They paid for lavish dinners and seemingly endless pints of beer in pubs like Benjamin Stout’s Tavern on Bowery Lane, helping elite merchants and common people alike to forge social bonds they could then mobilize into political action.

AMBUSKE: The New York Sons of Liberty had arisen out of this community to resist the Stamp Act in 1765. And the DeLanceys had ridden popular opposition to Townshend’s taxes to electoral victories in 1768 and 1769, taking control of the assembly and putting them in power to realize their vision of New York’s commercial empire.

AMBUSKE: That vision included new institutions to protect and promote the city’s trade and the public good. Here’s Christoper Minty:

MINTY: The DeLanceys established the Chamber of Commerce, is the first one in the colonies to help can regularize New York City's trading economy, almost all of the members and its of trustees, are DeLanceys. And that's one way for them to promote and protect the city's economy. Another thing that they do is they set up the Marine Society which is for widows and orphans.  

MINTY: New York City got more firemen. They were able to make sure there were more firemen on the streets to protect New Yorkers. So they're protecting the public good because there are more firemen. They built a viewing gallery in the assembly. So New Yorkers could quite literally go and watch their assemblyman. he could come in, he could sit down and watch them debate, watch them, talk about bills pass bills, talk about the Parliament's attempts to reorient the British Empire. And that's how they say, Look, we are advancing the public good here, and you can hold us to account because you can come watch us.

AMBUSKE: But the New York Restraining Act, the rest of the Townshend duties, and the DeLancey’s own political missteps threatened all of it.

MINTY: Since 1763, the city's economy has been stagnating. Parliament in London was attempting to reorient the British Empire to exert control, the Currency Act in 1764 made paper currency, hard to come by and amid borrowing very, very difficult. New Yorkers were losing their economic liberty. Paper money wasn't flowing, there wasn't as much there. The DeLancey’s wanted a way to inject more money into the city's economy.

AMBUSKE: New Yorkers navigated this weakened economy with soldiers living in their midst.

MINTY: It’s important to remember, that New York City is the center for the British Army in North America. There are lots of British soldiers, always.

AMBUSKE: The relationship between the soldiers sent to defend British America, and the city’s civilian inhabitants, who did not want a standing army among them, remained tense. The Liberty Pole that now stood on the city’s Commons, within sight of the Upper Barracks, attested to a growing divide between the king’s subjects. Blacksmith’s had encased part of the 70-foot tall pine mast in iron, to prevent soldiers from the 28th Regiment from tearing down their monument to liberty, a monument the soldiers saw as a rallying cry for mob rule.

AMBUSKE: Nevertheless, in the British Army, and most especially in the coins they carried in their pockets, the DeLanceys saw an economic opportunity.

 MINTY: They saw British soldiers as potential consumers. So that these soldiers who were living in New York anyway, they like they did in the 1750s and early 1760s. They could go and purchase things spent their money and on whatever New York City has to offer. The British Army not only could offer like a short-term solution, but this was a long-term solution for them. And the DeLancey’s view on how to move forward the city was on its development through colonial consumers. They wanted people to spend their money in the cities, taverns and coffee houses and stores and whatever. If New Yorkers had more money, literally in their hands. They would be able to spend more they spend more all the way across the city that opened other marketplaces where New Yorkers could spend more money and in the long run, New Yorkers would realize economic liberty.

AMBUSKE: The DeLanceys could do little to revive the economy, however, if the colony remained under sanction by the New York Restraining Act.

AMBUSKE: Historians sometimes treat the Restraining Act – one of the first of Townshend’s reforms – as a law separate from the other acts that created the new taxes and customs board. But in reality, they were one and the same. Townshend could not hope to build a coherent empire with more centralized rule without a clear demonstration of the colonies’ subordination to Parliament’s.

AMBUSKE: The New York Restraining Act was designed to do just that. It prevented the New York General Assembly from passing any new laws until it complied with the Quartering Act of 1765, which directed all colonies to raise money to support British soldiers stationed in North America.

AMBUSKE: Governor Henry Moore had little choice but to dissolve the legislature and calling for new elections until its members agreed to supply British troops according to Parliament’s mandate.

AMBUSKE: The Massachusetts Circular Letter only compounded an already complicated situation. The New York assembly was not in session when the letter arrived, and when it reconvened later that fall, the representatives continued playing the kind of political games that had given rise to the Restraining Act in the first place. Instead of discussing the letter from Massachusetts, the members just debated one from Virginia instead.

AMBUSKE: In the meantime, the DeLancey’s and their allies took to the streets to mobilize against the Townshend Acts. With DeLancey support, many of the city’s merchants began signing a non-importation agreement, to take effect on November 1,1768, pledging not to import British goods until Parliament repealed the Townshend reforms.

AMBUSKE: The DeLanceys also canvassed the city’s free men, asking them to sign a petition calling on the assembly to take the bold, risky step of debating the circular letter from Massachusetts.

AMBUSKE: The petition was a stratagem. James DeLancey, the leader of his family’s faction, knew that if the assembly began debating the letter, Governor Moore would be obliged to dissolve it. And that was the point. By introducing a motion to begin the debate, one that would pass with his faction’s support, DeLancey and his allies could claim the moral high ground, that they were acting in response to the people’s demands. And then when Moore followed his orders from London, and sent the representatives home, the DeLanceys could argue that imperial officials, in league with their Livingston rivals, had conspired to harm New York’s interests and its economic liberty.

 AMBUSKE: It would make for good political fodder in the next election campaign, when the DeLanceys hoped to bolster their numbers in the assembly, and finally deal with what they saw as an even greater threat: the New York Restraining Act.

AMBUSKE: But in early December 1768, when the assembly was once again in session, the Livingstons sprung a political trap. They sent a newly elected representative named Philp Schuyler to the floor, to call for a debate on the circular letter. Having lost the political high ground, and their plan to dissolve the assembly on their terms, the DeLanceys saw no choice but to vote against Schuyler’s motion, and keep the legislature open.

AMBUSKE: It wasn’t until the waning hours of the year, long after the assembly had attended to other business, when it no longer mattered if they stayed in session, that the representatives finally took up the plea from Massachusetts. They began debating the circular letter on December 31st. Governor Moore dissolved the assembly two days later.

AMBUSKE: The Livingstons may have robbed the DeLanceys of their political triumph in 1768, but they believed they were playing a game of chess while everyone else amused themselves with rounds of whist. In the election of 1769, the DeLanceys mobilized their networks, campaigning in print and pouring pints in the pubs to increase their gains in the assembly.

AMBUSKE: By the fall of 1769, reports began arriving from London that Parliament was considering the repeal of Townshend’s taxes in a sign that the boycotts were having some effect. Imports had dropped in New York by 85% from the previous year, dramatically greater than the 54% decline in Pennsylvania and a similar number in New England.

AMBUSKE: With their gains at the polls, the DeLanceys believed they had a popular mandate to pursue their vision of New York’s commercial future. In their eyes, that meant lifting the weight of the New York Restraining Act and reinvigorating local trade by issuing paper money.

AMBUSKE: That would not be easy. The prospect of new paper currency was widely popular, but casting off the shadow of the Restraining Act meant complying fully with the widely reviled Quartering Act. Even if the DeLanceys saw soldiers as potential consumers, as customers for the city’s many shops and taverns, most of the city’s residents did not want a standing army in the city, and they had even less desire to pay for it.

AMBUSKE: As the assembly began debating two bills - one to issue paper money, the other to comply with the Quartering Act, the DeLanceys sought advice from their old allies, the Sons of Liberty.  Here’s Christopher Minty:

MINTY: The DeLanceys consult with a member of the Sons of Liberty called Isaac Sears. He's a very prominent supporter of the DeLanceys, he helped alliances get elected in 68. He also helped them get elected and 69. So they consult with him, kind of viewing him as someone who has a good sense of the city. It's like we have to talk about this, because as part of the Townsend acts, Parliament had passed the New York restraining Act, which would essentially close and shut down the New York assembly. We have to talk about this, and we have to do something. Because if we don't, Parliament is going to essentially shut us down. And that's bad. That's worse than the Quartering Act. Is it not?  Sears is like, Well, yeah, I guess you're right. But New Yorkers hate it. If you can kind of tag, the paper currency bill, on to quartering bill and push them through at the same time, maybe we can get it through that way. But it's a sensitive topic, so might go well, might not.

AMBUSKE: It did not go well at all. When the Delancey’s introduced bills in December 1769 to issue £120,000 of paper currency, out of which some would be used to provide for the soldiers, New Yorkers who wanted to watch the debates from the gallery gathered at the assembly doors. And as they did so, the Delanceys made an incalculable mistake.

MINTY: They're in the assembly and they get ready to talk about it. And as they get ready to kind of vote and discuss everything, they close the assembly doors and lock them. So nobody can access the viewing chamber. Now, up until this point, they've been smart political actors. They've done very well. And mobilizing support and making sure that they're engaging with New Yorkers on another level, shutting the doors. Big mistake, because New Yorkers are waiting to get in and they realize oh, I can't get in. They put chains around the door and the paper currency and the Quartering Act bill, they both pass. So that's just like, oh, look what's happened.

AMBUSKE: Governor Moore’s death just a few months earlier only made matters worse for the DeLanceys.

MINTY: Henry Moore, he dies. And because of the way that New York's government is set up. Until the new governor can be appointed and traveled to New York, the more senior politician steps into the role. And that's Cadwallader Colden, who had served as temporary governor during the Stamp Act riots, didn't go well from then, is probably the most hated person in New York. And at this time, he, he's, he's really old. He is very old, like he has served in one office or another since the 1720s. So he is old. He's tired. He remembers what happened in 1765. He doesn't want a difficult temporary governorship, he just wants it. It to be quote “easy.” So he just kind of goes along with what's happening. But because he's there, and people don't like him, that Delanceys are guilty by association with him. And this leads to the emergence of a coherent political association organized by Alexander McDougall. And that's when he really comes onto the scene.

AMBUSKE: Locking the doors on the assembly all but destroyed the popular support the Delanceys had spent so much political capital building. And it enraged Alexander McDougall, an emigrant from Scotland.

MINTY: McDougall is from the Hebrides. He moved to New York in the late 1730s. He's a privateer during the French and Indian War. And he's kind of a middling merchant in the 1760s. McDougall emerges in December 1769 by authoring an anonymous broadside, called To The Betrayed Inhabitants of New York, it's very dramatic to the betrayed inhabitants of New York. And it's published by James Parker, the one of the printers in New York.

AMBUSKE: McDougall gave the DeLanceys and Cadwalader Colden no quarter in his anonymous broadside:

MCDOUGALL: “In a day when the minions of tyranny and despotism in the mother country and the colonies, are indefatigable in laying every snare that their malevolent and corrupt hearts can suggest, to enslave a free people, when this unfortunate country has been striving under many disadvantages for three years past, to preserve their freedom; which to an Englishman is as dear as his life, – when the merchants of this city and the capital towns on the continent, have nobly and cheerfully sacrificed their private interest to the public good, rather than to promote the designs of the enemies of our happy constitution: It might justly be expected, that in this day of constitutional light, the representatives of this colony would not be so hardy, nor be so lost to all sense of duty to their constituents, as to betray the trust committed to them. This they have done in passing the vote to give the troops a thousand pounds out of any monies that may be in the treasury.”

MINTY: This broadside, spreads, the DeLanceys are immediately aware of it, because this is a very public attack on them.

MINTY: He criticizes the DeLanceys and Cadwallader Colden. He alleges that the DeLanceys have formed an alliance with Colden and their only goal is to advance themselves to get richer for themselves to take money from ordinary New Yorkers. They're self-serving. They don't care about ordinary New Yorkers call them. He's basically the worst person in the world. And there's a lot of seats or next because they're associated with him.

AMBUSKE: In the wake of the broadside, the DeLanceys and Colden began searching for its anonymous author.

MINTY: They start off this huge man hunt to find who's written and eventually, they land on McDougall partly because of the printer, and James Parker's apprentice, they're able to put a draft of the Broadside and link it to Parker and then Parker's apprentice and then link it to McDougall. So eventually, they arrest McDougall and they're going to try him for seditious libel. Because they're attacking everybody in government. So they put McDougall in jail. And McDougall’s like, okay, you can put me in jail if you want.

AMBUSKE: Jailing McDougall only enhanced his reputation. Throughout British America, many colonists began to liken him to John Wilkes, the radical English politician and printer. In the early 1760s, the British government tried Wilkes for seditious libel, after he criticized the king and his ministers in the 45th issue of his magazine, The North Britain. Many British Americans celebrated Wilkes as a defender of liberty. In McDougall, they began to see the same.

MINTY: People could come up and see him through the bars. They delivered 45 bottles of wine 45 pints of venison, 45, almost anything that you can think of, because they view him as similar to John Wilkes.  They appropriate the number 45. And McDougal becomes the Wilkes of America. He keeps writing as well. So he's writing pieces in the newspapers to mobilize support to him and away from the dances. And it works.

AMBUSKE: Despite the seriousness of the charges, McDougall never stood trial.

MINTY: He tries to get James Otis in Massachusetts to represent him. He says no, tries to get John Dickinson to represent him. He says no. Eventually as the as this cadre of New York lawyers but doesn't go to trial, because Parker the printer dies, so McDougall kind of gets off, forgive the pun scot free. He gets off. He gets off and then now he's out on the streets. He's back out able to mobilize support.

MINTY: His way that he mobilizes people is that he thinks, and his supporters think that you should be monitoring government at all times. And as soon as they turn against you, and they look to compromise your liberties, you should remove them from power, and through the Quartering Act and the Currency Act debacle, closing the doors, that's what he thought the DeLanceys had done. And their subsequent behavior, throwing him in jail, trying to try him was just further evidence they're not all they're made up to be. And that's when, like people really diverge.

AMBUSKE: For New Yorkers, for many British Americans, and for Britons an ocean away, the glass they had peered through but darkly at the end of the Seven Years’ War had grown darker still, and they could not more grasp the triumphant future they had once imagined together than they could Townshend’s ghost. Here’s Patrick Griffin

GRIFFIN: Americans begin connecting dots. Some people are saying, oh, wait a minute, we had the Stamp Act, but then we were euphoric when it was kind of when it was done away with. Now we have the Townsend duties. Wait a minute, there's a bit of a pattern here. People take these events that don't necessarily have to be tied together, but in their minds, they tethered them, and people were on both sides of the ocean, were engaged in the same kind of pattern making but two different ends. To me the interesting thing is how you knit together the contingencies, how you create a pattern in your mind, and that on one hand for the Townsend's could lead to a vision of Empire, but for Americans could also lead to a vision of revolution.

AMBUSKE: In January 1770, King George III appointed yet another new prime minister, his sixth in seven years.

AMBUSKE: Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford, more commonly known as Lord North, had succeeded Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer when Townshend succumbed to his illness in 1767. Now, as prime minister, Lord North began to undo some of Townshend’s work.

AMBUSKE: The duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea never raised a substantial revenue, yet the non-importation agreements had cost British merchants much, by some estimates £700,000 in one year alone. As many colonists had hoped, long-suffering British merchants who depended on North American markets began pressuring Parliament to resolve the imperial crisis by repealing at least some of Townshend’s Acts.

AMBUSKE: Lord North and his new government agreed. The customs boards, the vice admiralty courts, and the East India Company’s tax relief would stay, but the duties on paper, paint, lead, and glass would go. Only the tea duty would remain, a token tax on a luxury good, a modest symbol of Parliament’s supremacy and its authority over British America. With most of the duties gone, then perhaps the trade boycotts would collapse and life would return to normal.

AMBUSKE: Lord North introduced a motion in Parliament to repeal most of Townshend’s duties on March 5, 1770. The prime minister had no way of knowing that hours later, on a bitterly cold night on King Street in Boston, the king’s soldiers would fire on the king’s subjects.

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE:  I’m your host, Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is supported by an anonymous friend of R2 Studios and George Mason University. Learn how you can support the series at r2studios.org, where you’ll also find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading.

AMBUSKE: Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick. Special thanks also to J. L. Bell, Jocelyn Gould, and Sara Georgini for additional research support.

AMBUSKE: Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.

AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor for this episode is Jeanette Patrick. Special thanks to Curt Dahl of CD Squared.

AMBUSKE:  Hayley Madl is our graduate assistant.

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Patrick Griffin, Zara Anishanslin, Rosemarie Zagarri, and Christopher Minty for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Adam Smith, Melissa Gismondi, Grace Mallon, Jeanette Patrick, Anne Fertig, Hayley Madl, Alexandra Miller, Beau Robbins, [Norman Roger], Kathryn Gehred, and Evan McCormick.

AMBUSKE:  Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.