Protocols of Liberty

Communication Innovation and the American Revolution

William B. Warner

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226061405
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The fledgling United States fought a war to achieve independence from Britain, but as John Adams said, the real revolution occurred "in the minds and hearts of the people" before the armed conflict ever began. Putting the practices of communication at the center of this intellectual revolution, Protocols of Liberty shows how American patriots—the Whigs—used new forms of communication to challenge British authority before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. To understand the triumph of the Whigs over the Brit-friendly Tories, William B. Warner argues that it is essential to understand the communication systems that shaped pre-Revolution events in the background. He explains the shift in power by tracing the invention of a new political agency, the Committee of Correspondence; the development of a new genre for political expression, the popular declaration; and the emergence of networks for collective political action, with the Continental Congress at its center. From the establishment of town meetings to the creation of a new postal system and, finally, the Declaration of Independence, Protocols of Liberty reveals that communication innovations contributed decisively to nation-building and continued to be key tools in later American political movements, like abolition and women's suffrage, to oppose local custom and state law.

1

THE INVENTION OF THE BOSTON COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE AND THE POPULAR DECLARATION

For the course of five, six or seven years the town of Boston has invariably been the ringleader and promoter of all the disorders, the discontents, and disturbances. . . . They, Sir, at the latter end of 1772 . . . began to hold town meetings to consider the rights, and of their grievances. They established correspondence with the country towns in the province, in order to revive and rekindle that flame which appeared to them at that time near extinguished. From thence there has been nothing but disorder and confusion, almost all originating, all at last prevailing without opposition in the town of Boston.

—Lord North, speech to Parliament introducing the Boston Port Bill, March 14, 1774

All Accounts of the discontent so general in our colonies, having of late years been industriously smothered, and concealed here; . . . That the true state of affairs there may be known, and the true causes of that discontent well understood, the following piece (not the production of a private writer, but the unanimous act of a large American city) lately printed in New-England, is republished here.

—Benjamin Franklin, preface to The Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston, February 1773

[T]he votes and resolutions of the town of Boston . . . is a set of ready drawn head[ing]s of a declaration for any one colony in American, or any one distant county in the kingdom, which shall choose to revolt from the British empire, and say that they will not be governed by the King and Parliament at Westminster.

—Solicitor-General Wedderburn, in Privy Council, January 29, 1774

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE COMMITTEE

Historians who narrate the American Revolution are wary of saying precisely when it began. Rather than framing our inquiry as a quest for origins, which produces a vertiginous multiplication of remote causes, we can guide our inquiry with a question that allows us to pinpoint critical developments: How did the colonies move, during the crucial interval of 1770–1774, from what some called “the quiet time” (of 1771–1772) that followed the repeal of most of the Townshend duties to the emergency meeting of the First Continental Congress? How, in short, did the slowly simmering American crisis turn into revolution? These questions invite us to attend to the methods, mechanics, and media of revolution. In this chapter, I argue that the decisive development came on November 2, 1772, the day that the Boston Town Meeting instituted the twenty-one-member Boston Committee of Correspondence. Although the committee’s first task was an apparently modest one—to write a pamphlet stating the rights and grievances of Massachusetts for circulation to the towns of the province—the activities of this autonomous standing committee of correspondence changed the dynamics of the American crisis. Its initial influence was direct. By developing a sustained two-way correspondence with towns throughout Massachusetts, and by extending this correspondence to important centers of political resistance throughout the colonies (Virginia, Philadelphia, Charleston, New York), the committee emerged as an influential counterweight to royal authorities in both America and Britain. In the subsequent two years, the committee replied affirmatively to the Virginia Committee of Correspondence’s invitation for an intercolonial communication, publicized “the Hutchinson-letters affair,” coordinated Boston’s resistance to the Tea Act, and, after the arrival of the Boston Port Bill, developed regular communication with the committees of other colonies so as to manage relief for the city of Boston and plan for the meeting of the First Continental Congress.

The formation of the first, non-legislative committee of correspondence, by becoming a model for others, also had powerful indirect effects on the crisis. An anonymous cataloger of the Bancroft Collection placed the following note upon the first of thirteen volumes of the committee’s minute books: “It was through the correspondence of this committee that disaffection spread throughout the English colonies, precipitating the American Revolution” (Boston 1772–1775, reel 1). This note suggests that revolution came through media contagion: the “correspondence” of the committee produces a contact that is said to “spread” “disaffection” throughout the English colonies, “precipitating the American Revolution.” But the metaphor of spreading disaffection begs the question of how the Boston committee’s writing could induce such a far-reaching change, of how this mode of communication communicated revolution.

One answer to this question comes from the correspondence of John Adams. Writing to his second cousin Samuel Adams from Paris in 1780, John Adams describes the committee of correspondence as an invention or discovery that enables widespread political mobilization: “Your Committee of Correspondence is making greater progress in the World and doing greater things in the political World than the Electrical Rod ever did in the Physical. England and Ireland have adopted it, but, mean Plagiaries as they are, they do not acknowledge who was the Inventor of it” (February 23, 1780; J. Adams 1989, 8:353).¹ A few weeks later, in a letter to Thomas Digges in England, John Adams gives more explicit credit to Samuel Adams as the inventor of the committee of correspondence: “The Committee of Correspondence is purely an American Invention. It is an Invention of Mr. Sam. Adams, who first conceived the Thought, and made the first Motion in a Boston Town Meeting, and was himself chosen the first Chairman of a Committee of Correspondence, that ever existed among men” (March 14, 1780; J. Adams 1989, 9:44).

By characterizing the standing committee of correspondence as an “invention,” John Adams confers upon the committee form the central traits of a scientific invention: appearing at a discrete moment in time, it is new; but, after its invention, it is open to imitation by others. By emphasizing the person “who first conceived the thought and made the first motion in a Boston Town Meeting,” John Adams figuratively awards his second cousin patent rights. But, by fusing the invention to a human with motives, John Adams negates what is happy, lucky, or fortuitous about the “discovery” of the committee form.²

As with other inventions—in art, technology, or social organization—the influence of the Boston Committee of Correspondence derived less from its direct efforts, though these were significant, than it did from the indirect, and only gradually apparent, effects of its invention. The Boston Committee of Correspondence modeled the standing committee of correspondence as an agency for collective political action, and, as I will argue below, it spread through the communication protocols vital to the functioning of these committees. The wide imitation of the committee of correspondence by Whigs on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that the potency of this invention flowed from the ease with which others cloned it. It is this dangerous reproducibility of the committee, its power to spawn numberless local committees, that horrified the Tory polemicist Daniel Leonard. Writing as Massachusettensis in January 1775, a few months after the triumph of the committee movement with the First Continental Congress’s adoption of the Association,³ Leonard excoriates the dangerously generative power of the committee of correspondence: “[A] new and, till lately unheard of, mode of opposition had been devised, said to be the invention of the fertile brain of one of our party agents, called a committee of correspondence. This is the foulest, subtlest and most venomous serpent ever issued from the eggs of sedition” (Boston News-Letter, January 2, 1775; Leonard 1972, 34).⁴

Out of an impasse in the Whig confrontation with royal authority, the Boston Town Meeting instituted its committee of correspondence as a risky new experiment in Whig communications. In this chapter and the next, I argue that the committee’s gradually expanding representative function, of speaking first for the town of Boston and later for the citizens of Massachusetts, derived not so much from its political ideas, which were conventional by design, as from the five communication protocols it observed: correct legal procedure, corporate action, public access, and a general and systematic address to the people that shows virtuous initiative. In this chapter, I describe the particular political emergency out of which the committee emerged, the canny strategy it developed to authorize itself as a new branch of government, and how it developed the committee’s corporately authored pamphlet, The Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston, as the first popular declaration. The success of the Boston declaration and the development of a network of committees of correspondence in Massachusetts helped to break the repetitive political cycle that had persisted since the Stamp Act crisis, whereby British imperial “reforms,” enacted by administration or Parliament, forced American Whigs to scramble and improvise to protect their rights and liberties from imperial encroachment. Because the crises that followed the formation of the committee resemble those that inspired its formation, it is easy to miss what had changed. After November 1772, the Boston Committee of Correspondence had achieved institutional continuity as a “standing” committee: always there and ever ready to act.

THE WHIGS OF BOSTON FACE A MOST DANGEROUS TIME

In the response to the stinging defeat on March 6, 1770, royal officials in Whitehall and Boston worked to reclaim the political initiative. Although the North ministry did not pursue the changes to the Massachusetts charter that had been recommended by the Privy Council in July 1770, Whitehall took a series of steps to strengthen the royal prerogative in Boston. It ordered the lieutenant governor to take possession of Castle William, the provincial fort in Boston Harbor to which British troops had retired in the week after the Boston Massacre; it shifted the American headquarters of the Royal Navy from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Boston, where a substantial number of the navy’s floating fortresses would offer Whigs a useful daily reminder of Britain’s military might (Bailyn 1974, 175); it appointed Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson to be governor of Massachusetts and Secretary Andrew Oliver to serve as lieutenant governor (Hutchinson 1971, 1:80–81). This change enabled Hutchinson to avail himself of his power of appointment and expanded the power of the “government party” in Massachusetts (Bailyn 1974, 177–78). Finally, on December 7, 1770, Whitehall secretly implemented a step that would strengthen the hand of the governor by paying him directly out of customs revenues, a practice that was already followed in many other colonies (P. Thomas 1987, 212). This freed the governor from the dependency that arose from his receiving his salary from the annual appropriation of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. After the success of this change, Whitehall prepared in the spring of 1772 to pay the five judges of the Massachusetts Superior Court, as well as the attorney general and the solicitor general, out of customs revenues.

Why were these administrative initiatives so alarming to American Whigs? Writing as Candidus in the Boston Gazette of September 23, 1771, Samuel Adams explains. If the ministry could raise a revenue through customs duties and use that revenue to pay the salaries of royal officials like the governor, and if the governor could, operating according to instructions of the ministry, delay calling the House of Representatives into session, veto laws of which he did not approve, and prorogue that body whenever it challenged the governor’s authority, then the body representing the people of the colony, whether of Massachusetts or New York (and here Adams quotes “the Pennsylvania farmer,” John Dickinson), “whose deliberations heretofore, had an influence on every matter relating to the liberty and happiness of themselves and their constituents, and whose authority in domestic affairs at least, might well be compared to that of Roman senators, will find their determinations to be of no more consequence than that of constables” (S. Adams 1904, 2:223–30). In short, American Whigs confronted the possibility that structural changes in imperial administration would push their popular assemblies, their main venue for influencing policy and law, into abject subservience. This would bring on, in Adams’s words in a letter to Arthur Lee, “a State of perfect Despotism” (September 27, 1771; S. Adams 1904, 2:233).

At the same time that the royal officials were taking steps to strengthen their power to govern, the Whigs of Boston were losing their cohesion and active sense of purpose. With Parliament’s repeal of all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea, Boston merchants had followed New York and Philadelphia in ending boycotts (P. Thomas 1987, 205). While the Whigs in the town meeting and the House kept up their resistance to several administrative measures—the appropriation of Castle William, the convening of the General Court in Cambridge, and the Crown’s direct payment of the governor—they did not prevail in any of these struggles. At the same time, the Whig leadership of the province suffered an unsettling loss of cohesion. James Otis Jr. was becoming erratic in his behavior and inconsistent in his support for Whig initiatives; a new coolness appeared in the relationship between Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and this was reflected in Hancock’s reluctance to follow Adams on measures before the House as well as his acceptance of a commission from Governor Hutchinson to be the colonel of the Boston cadets (Irvin 2002, 95). Hutchinson hoped that his compromise with Hancock and Cushing on returning the General Court to Boston from Cambridge would finally succeed in “wholly detaching him from” the Whig faction (Hutchinson to John Pownall [private]; Documents 1972, 5:125). Finally, John Adams distanced himself from Boston Whig politics. Sensitive to the criticism that he had received from some fellow Whigs for successfully defending Captain Thomas Preston in the massacre trials, and feeling an increased general disgust with politics, on April 10, 1771, John Adams moved his primary residence from Boston to Braintree, where he stayed until the fall of 1772 (June 6, 1770; J. Adams 1961, 2:6, 63, 68).⁵

In 1771 Governor Hutchinson began to sound a new note of optimism about the vigor of royal government. In a long private letter to the American secretary Lord Hillsborough, Hutchinson wrote hopefully of a “change in the temper of the people” and of the “cure” brought by the active assertion of royal authority. At the same time, however, he counseled against any immediate change in the Massachusetts charter, which he feared would probably be “ineffectual” and only “increase the disorders” of the people (January 22, 1771; Documents 1973, 3:32–31). By June 1, 1771, Hillsborough evinced “hopes” that the “respectable inhabitants” and the Council will “preserve the tranquility that has been so happily restored to that town [i.e., Boston]” (Documents 1973, 3:103). By 1772 royal officials like Lord Hillsborough were smugly confident that their policy of “firmness” had restored the colonies of British America to a “quiet” in colonial affairs, such that affairs were finally resuming their “normal” course.

By 1772 the publication in Great Britain of news about the political crisis in British America reached a minimum, as measured by reference to “American Affairs” or “American Troubles” in the Gentleman’s Magazine (see fig. 3.2). After many years in which vituperative challenges to the royal prerogative had kept the political pot boiling, both sides believed—Whigs with anxiety and royal officials with a sense of cautious relief—that the appearance of calm worked to legitimize the government party while it weakened what the governor referred to as “the party of liberty.” In response, the Whigs of Boston conducted extensive private and public discussions about what should be done to challenge a royal policy that they saw as steadily encroaching upon their rights and liberties.⁶ Often this discussion sounded disheartening notes. By 1771 Boston Whigs privately worried that the people of Massachusetts had fallen into a political sleep. To counter this sentiment, Samuel Adams challenged James Warren’s interpretation of the people’s “silence” as acquiescence in Hutchinson’s rule: “If the people are at present hushd into Silence, is it not a sort of sullen Silence, which is far from indicating your Conclusion, that the glorious Spirit of liberty is vanquished and left without hope but in miracles” (March 25, 1771; J. Warren 1917, 9). In addition, Adams reminded Warren that “[i]t is no dishonor to be a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.”

Adams did not, however, underestimate the urgency of the political moment. In the letter to Arthur Lee, which opens their important correspondence, Adams describes the tactical advantages then enjoyed by British administration:

Perhaps there never was a time when the political Affairs of America were in a more dangerous State; Such is the Indolence of Men in general, or their Inattention to the real Importance of things, that a steady & animated perseverance in the rugged path of Virtue at the hazard of trifles is hardly to be expected. The Generality are necessarily engaged in Application to private Business for the Support of their own families and when at a lucky season the publick are awakened to a Sense of Danger, & a manly resentment is enkindled, it is difficult, for so many separate Communities as there are in all the Colonies, to agree in one consistent plan of Opposition while those who are the appointed Instruments of Oppression, have all the Means put into their hands, of applying to the passions of Men & availing themselves of the Necessities of some, the Vanity of others & the timidity of all. (April 19, 1771; S. Adams 1904, 2:164)

After sounding an alarm, Adams attributes the administration’s strength to American weakness: the population “in general” is inattentive, lazy, busy with private business, and therefore not ready to walk the “rugged path of virtue.” Adams notes the operational advantage of the oppressors: they have the means, that is, the money and power, to manipulate the “passions of men” by “applying” to their necessities, their vanity, and their timidity. But in the midst of this familiar lament of the modern political activist, Adams describes the structural problem for those who recognize the danger and want to respond: given the way communities are scattered across all the colonies, “it is difficult . . . to agree in one consistent plan of opposition.” This is the problem to which the Boston Committee of Correspondence would be a solution.

For Adams, the past offered lessons with which Boston Whigs might address the present crisis. In three essays published under the name Can...