Philadelphia (Repplier)/Chapter 11
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THE Stamp Act was passed in March, 1765, notwithstanding the strenuous opposition of Franklin and the American agents in London, who, however, were not authorized by the colonies to give their consent to any other proposed measure for the raising of money. Its immediate result in Philadelphia was a sudden decrease of extravagance, a sudden passion for frugality, which would have delighted "Poor Richard's" heart, had he been there to witness it. The merchants and traders bound themselves to import no goods from England until the Act had been repealed; they would not even suffer the "pestilential cargoes," as John Dickinson called them, to be unloaded at the docks, and self-denying citizens resolved to wear no English cloths, to eat no English mutton, to drink no English beer, while the law remained in force. They stinted themselves even in the matter of funerals, and one patriotic alderman who died in these troubled days left directions that he should be buried without a pall, and that his family should wear no crape nor other mourning for him. To John Hughes, a member of the Assembly and a keen partisan of Franklin's, was given the sale of the hated stamps; not a pleasant duty, as it chanced, for the mob, having hanged him in effigy, gathered around his house with muffled drums, and tried vainly to force him into yielding up the appointment. He was even expelled from his fire company—a sad affront, and equivalent to being expelled from a club—on account of his contumacy and lack of public spirit.
The repeal of the Stamp Act, in March, 1766, changed all this bitter discontent into general gladness. The colonists believed that they had won their battle, and the brig, Minerva, which brought the happy news to Philadelphia, was welcomed with universal rejoicings. Bonfires blazed all night long, bowls of punch were emptied under opulent roofs, kegs of beer were rolled into the streets to intoxicate the poor. Every sailor in the crew received a handsome cadeau, and to the captain was presented a fine gold-laced cocked hat. The mayor and aldermen celebrated the occasion with a great civic banquet, at which the King's health was drunk with extravagant demonstrations of loyalty; and we know that these sentiments had by no means abated when June brought round the royal birthday, and Jacob Hiltzheimer went forth with nearly four hundred citizens to dine on the banks of the Schuylkill, and empty a score of glasses in honour of good King George.
It is a pity that this general satisfaction should have been so exceedingly short-lived. In the following year another colonial tax-bill, placing duties on paper, glass, paints, lead and tea, renewed the consternation of the province; and John Dickinson fanned the flame of popular resentment into an angry blaze with his timely "Letters of a Farmer of Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies." Once more Philadelphia prepared to offer a passive resistance to the obnoxious law by steeling her heart against imported luxuries, taxed or untaxed, with the result that patriotism on the one hand, and self-indulgence on the other, waged a steady conflict for mastery. A weak-minded citizen, overcome by the pleadings of his appetite, ventured to surreptitiously purchase some English cheese from the mate of the Speedwell; but his dastardly deed was discovered before he had time to eat the coveted delicacy, and he was compelled to give it, untasted, to the poor debtors in prison. There was more difficulty experienced in persuading women to do without their tea. Notwithstanding its ruinous cost and painful unpopularity, it was never wholly banished. Shopmen escaped detection by selling it in sealed packages, under the name of tobacco, snuff, or any other innocuous merchandise,—just as whiskey is sold in prohibition towns; and fair recalcitrants kept it discreetly hidden in hot water pots, while the empty coffee urns were placed conspicuously in posts of honour, to give their lying evidence to visitors who were not in the secret.
Smuggling grew so common in these days that it wore an air of persecuted honesty; smugglers were as highly esteemed in virtuous Pennsylvania as in lawless Spain; and prying citizens who gave evidence against this illicit trade were promptly tarred and feathered by the mob, to teach them the inadvisability of interference. There was a confused impression in the minds of the angry, illogical colonists that smugglers were patriots; and abstract patriotism had gained so much favour under the stress of general discontent, that sober Philadelphians celebrated with a grand banquet the birthday of the Corsican, Pascal Paoli, and uttered fervid sentiments that would not have shamed a Jacobin club in Paris.
The autumn of 1773 brought a new complication into this uneasy turmoil. An Act of Parliament permitted the East India Company to carry its tea to America free of all duty, save the trifling three-penny colonial tax. This gave the colonists cheaper tea than England had ever enjoyed, and the temptation was well-nigh irresistible after long months of enforced abstemiousness. It was all very well for ardent and acrimonious Whigs, like Christopher Marshall, to compel their families to drink that vile domestic beverage known as "balm tea"; but the hearts of women had grown rebellious as the weary weeks went on, and there was every danger that this wily measure on the part of England would break down at last the stubborn opposition of the colonies. The committee of merchants determined that no choice between principle and comfort should be permitted; that the weaker portion of the community should have no chance given them to succumb. When the tea ship, Polly, reached Gloucester Point, her captain was invited, or rather bidden to come ashore, and told as briefly as possible that he would not be allowed to land his cargo, and that any attempt to do so would place him in great personal danger. He acquiesced philosophically in a situation which could not be remedied, tarried but a few hours to lay in fresh supplies, and set sail with the outgoing tide for his long homeward voyage. The whole important matter, notwithstanding the usual array of half-mad pamphlets, and the riotous demonstrations of the mob, had been conducted with moderation and dignity. It was not nearly such good fun as pitching the tea-chests into Boston harbour, and it does not make a lively historic anecdote for schoolboys to read; but it has the advantage of greater honesty, of self-respecting decorum, and of being a daylight performance, in which all the actors gave their names to the public before they played their parts.
In May, 1774, Boston port was closed, and Paul Revere brought the news to Philadelphia, where it was received with astonishment and indignation. Christopher Marshall tells us that nearly every shop was shut on the first of June, when Revere's message was given to the people, that the flags were lowered to half-mast, and the churches being opened as though it were Sunday, huge congregations attended, and listened grimly to appropriate sermons. There was no service, indeed, at Christ Church, but her bells rang a muffled peal all day long, as was their wont in time of public calamity. "Sorrow and anger," says the sympathetic Marshall, "seemed pictured in the countenances of the inhabitants, and the whole city wore the aspect of deep distress, it being a most melancholy occasion."
Revere's letters were addressed to Joseph Reed, and to that fighting Quaker, Thomas Mifflin. Through the influence of these citizens, a meeting was called in the City Tavern, at which Dickinson and Charles Thomson spoke with great eloquence and fervour; and Boston was assured of sympathy and support in a letter written by Provost Smith, but which the friends of Dickinson always stoutly declared to have been his composition. A more important gathering met in the State House on June 28th. Thomas Willing and Dickinson presided, much oratory was let loose, and some definite measures decided upon. The governor was asked to call together the Assembly, a committee of correspondence was appointed, and—most momentous step of all—a resolution was passed, recommending a congress of all the colonies, which should assist the Assembly—and override it—in dealing with the grave emergencies of the time.
The Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1774, and held its sessions in Carpenters' Hall, a fine, simple old building which had been erected a few years before by the guild of carpenters and house masons. Eleven only of the thirteen provinces sent delegates, but these were men capable of overriding any Assembly, and of forcing their own measures upon a hesitating country. Among them were John and Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, and Patrick Henry, whose glowing periods won him scant favour in a town which had not yet wholly relinquished its ancient gift of silence. Peyton Randolph of Virginia was elected president, and Charles Thomson—he who knew so much and divulged so little of his country's history—was chosen to be the secretary. The Rev. Jacob Duché—"Tamoc Caspipina"—was invited to act as chaplain, to his unqualified delight. "He appeared," says John Adams, "with his clerk, and in his pontificals," and offered eloquent prayers,
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which were much admired and quoted until such time as he abandoned the cause of liberty and became a devout Tory, when the angry Whigs ceased praising his orisons, and promptly confiscated his estate.
For six weeks the Congress deliberated on the manifold difficulties of the situation, cheered meanwhile by much Philadelphia hospitality. Adams was not the only delegate who ate and drank himself into permanent indigestion amid the seductions of a society, "happy, elegant, tranquil, and polite." A grand banquet was given by prominent citizens to the city's guests, when their first work was done. Five hundred covers were laid in the great State House chamber, and innumerable healths were drunk, the first and foremost toast being still King George III., for the colonists had by no means given up hoping for a peaceful adjustment of their troubles. The resolutions adopted by the Congress were moderate in tone, but expressed steadfast resistance to any form of taxation imposed by the English government while the provinces remained unrepresented in Parliament, and a steadfast rejection of all imports upon which such unconstitutional taxes were levied. The Assembly professed great satisfaction with most of the measures proposed, especially with those which sought to encourage domestic manufactures; and Franklin, returning to Philadelphia in May, 1775, was immediately appointed a delegate, that he might add his share of sagacity and experience to the counsels of men so heavily burdened with responsibility, so new to the perils of their parts.
And, indeed, the country had sore need of all the wisdom she could muster, in a situation of which no man could reasonably foresee the end. It was a time pregnant with hopes unspoken, and with fears unchecked; a time of deep disquiet, with darkening skies, and universal discontent. Strange omens—like to those which presaged the coming of the great Plague—were witnessed by the apprehensive; and Marshall notes in his diary, without a tremor of disbelief, that a headless snake was seen by many, writhing in the heavens. When this snake shook its tail, there came a trembling vibration like an earthquake shock, and balls of fire descended from the skies upon the doomed houses of men. Past were the old easy days when life held few perplexities, and when the standing quarrel between Quaker and churchman, Assembly and governor, carried with it no deadly frustration of power or purpose. Now any division in the ranks meant certain peril, and possible ruin. How far could the Quakers be cajoled or bullied into open rebellion against England? How far could they be persuaded to advance in a movement which threatened destruction to the laws they had made, and which had been their pride and glory for a hundred years? A most inconvenient people to deal with, these Quakers, for all their mildness and general sanity; a people whose religious scruples were as binding as moral laws, and in whom "the noble firmness of the mule" was backed by a reasonably clear conception of their own interests, and of the material interests of the commonwealth. Equally averse to barracks and to law-courts, they refused to support the one by paying military taxes, or to assist the other by acting as jurors, witnesses, or clients; and it must be confessed that, left to themselves, they had apparently no need for either of these ornaments of civilization. They kept their peace with the Indians, unaided by the convincing voice of firearms, and they settled their own disputes, without assistance from advocate or judge. The "Committee of Monthly Meetings," aided and abetted by the still more awe-inspiring Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, held them in thrall, and gave them all they wanted in the way of laws and penalties.
It was natural that a people so wedded to peace, so content with their own rules of life, and so mistrustful of change, should have been hard to influence in a great public crisis, of which nothing but the insecurity could be wholly understood. "The leading members of the Society," says Mr. Charles Wetherill in his history of the Free Quakers, "were men who had grown old in the habit of loyalty to the crown, and had been rewarded by dignities and wealth." The somewhat clamorous eloquence of the patriots moved them less than the rippling of the wind; the fast-growing authority of the mob filled them with serious apprehensions. At the Yearly Meeting held in Philadelphia, 1774, a solemn letter of warning was prepared and sent to all the Friends in the colonies, bidding them to beware of sedition and strife, and to assume no part in the defiant rebellion against their King. This letter was generally respected and obeyed, for it needed a moment of supreme urgency to awaken in the hearts of all men the common instinct of self-protection, and to startle even the young Quakers into war.
Yet the determination of the Society to hold itself aloof from any hostile demonstrations veiled an equally obstinate determination to yield no civic rights, no long-contested privileges. The delegates to the Continental Congress knew little of the Quaker temperament, or of the Quaker history, else they would have been aware that what was needed to push these strong conservatives into opposition was, not enthusiastic speech-making on their part, but continued injustice on the part of England. It was hard, however, to wait for such slow conversion in a time of profound impatience and restless fear. It was hard to refrain from attacking and alienating a people whose attitude of reserve was more trying than open disaffection. Men had grown suspicious of one another in these weeks of anxious waiting for—they knew not what. At last, on the twenty-fourth of April, 1775, there came an answer to many an unspoken question. It was brought by a weary and travel-stained rider who alighted at the City Tavern, and asked to see some members of the Committee of Correspondence. The news he carried was strange indeed, yet no man was surprised by it. Rather it seemed as though all had been waiting for this hour, and for the word it bore. The English soldiers and the New England militia had fired on one another at Lexington. The first blood had been shed in the great struggle for independence. The Revolution had begun.