The Rise of the British Deep State and the Coming of the American Revolution

Part 2 in a series

The following essay is the second of a three-part series on the causes and meaning of the American Revolution. The first essay in the series, “Rethinking the American Revolution,” can be found here. The third essay, which I shall publish next week, examines the American response to the rise of the British Deep State.

In 1765, in response to the British Parliament’s passage of the Stamp Act, a 30-year-old John Adams wrote an essay on “The Canon and Feudal Law” in which he claimed, “There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.” This is an extraordinary, even a bizarre, statement. Indeed, taken at face value, the suggestion seems prima facie absurd! What are students of the American Revolution to make of it? Was there really a plan on the part of British imperial officials as early as 1765 to enslave their American cousins, or was John Adams simply delusional and unhinged?

To fully understand why there was an American Revolution and what it was, we must first identify those ideas and actions undertaken by the leaders of the British government that were directed at the American colonies. In the wake of Great Britain’s stunning victory over France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) as it was known in Europe, or the French and Indian War as it was known in North America, prospects for the British Empire and its New World colonies never seemed brighter. The war effectively ended on September 13, 1759, with English General Wolfe’s defeat of General Montcalm and French forces at the Battle of Quebec, although the war did not officially end until the Treaty of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763. As a result of their victory, Great Britain acquired control of all North America east of the Mississippi River. Less helpful to the island nation was its acquisition of a massive war debt of approximately £133 million, which was roughly ten times the annual revenue of the British government and represented about 75-80% of the nation’s GDP.

For a variety of reasons, British imperial officials decided the time had come to reorganize the British Empire financially and politically along lines more favorable to the mother country. At the very least, the war debt had to be paid off and it was not unreasonable to assume that Britain’s American colonists should help defray the costs given that the war was partly undertaken to protect them from the imperialistic designs of France and Spain. Many British legislators and imperial bureaucrats determined that Britain’s longstanding policy of “salutary neglect” toward the colonies must end and the colonial smuggling that came with it. The laxity of Britain’s laissez-faire policy toward the colonies was about to end. An imperial British Grand Design and the construction of what might be called the “British Deep State” to go with it were soon put into effect. All the mercantilist Navigation Laws from the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries were now to be vigorously enforced by a new network of royally appointed bureaucrats funded by taxes and backed by the power of the British navy and army.

Let us again recall John Adams’s curious dating of the beginning of the American Revolution to 1760. What occurred that year to signal to the Americans that the British were reorganizing the empire along lines unfavorable to the colonists?

Sometime in late 1760, British officials sent orders to imperial customs agents in Boston authorizing them to begin issuing general as opposed to specific writs of assistance. Traditionally understood, a specific writ of assistance was a document granted to a litigant in a British court, providing him with the authority to have a sheriff assist him in the collection of a debt known to the court or to obtain possession of property that was due to him. Courts granted these limited and controlled writs on oath and probable suspicion. By contrast, the general writs authorized to Boston customs officials were general standing warrants, which permitted local customs officials to go into any private residence or warehouse at any time with a constable to search for suspected contraband. General writs were valid from the time of issue until six months after the death of the issuing monarch, and the holder needed no special permission from a court to initiate a search. They also gave customs official’s far-reaching powers that were clearly open to abusing local property rights. Both customs commissioners and local merchants petitioned the court for relief, and the case went to court.

The ensuing legal case held in front of the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1761 pitted, certainly from the American perspective, the forces of unlimited, arbitrary government power against the property rights of individuals. James Otis, presenting on behalf of American merchants, argued against general writs on the grounds that they gave the government potentially tyrannical power over the lives and property of individuals. The open-ended nature of these writs posed a genuine threat to the rights of American colonists. They violated the ancient English right against unreasonable searches and seizures. For Otis, even if the writ were recognized in the law and supported with long-standing precedent, it would still be illegal—illegal not based on its standing in the law, but illegal because it violated reason, natural equity, and the fundamental laws of justice, which means the rights of nature as expressed in the common-law rights of Englishmen. Otis lost the case, but Adams certainly believed that the revolution of the American mind began in that courtroom. Otis’s speech signaled that the Americans were thinking in principles—principles derived from the moral laws of nature.

Soon thereafter, British imperial officials went all in on reorganizing the empire. There was strong sentiment at home to 1) reform the customs service in America; 2) to end lax enforcement of the Navigation Acts in the colonies; 3) to station British naval vessels in North American waters and grant their commanders powers similar to land-based customs officials; 4) to organize, administer, and police the vast new territories acquired from France and Spain at war’s end; 5) to station regiments of the regular British army in America’s major coastal cities to support imperial officials’ customs and judicial duties; and 6) to raise some kind of revenue from the colonists to pay the war debt. In 1762, it was decided that 8,000 British troops would be permanently deployed to America as a regular standing army, and that the colonists would be forced to pay for the privilege. This military force was clearly for more than just pacifying the Indians on the frontier. The real goal was to intimidate and pacify the recalcitrant colonists in preparation for the new taxes and bureaucracy that were on their way to the colonies.

On October 7, 1763, a royal Proclamation was announced drawing a boundary line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and forbidding settlement west of it. The Proclamation clearly restricted the colonists’ freedom of movement and settlement. The following year, George Grenville (Chancellor of the Exchequer) realized that the American customs service was bringing in far less revenue than it was spending. The time had come, therefore, to tax the colonists to pay their fair share of the empire’s expenses.

On April 5, 1764, Parliament passed a Revenue Act (known as the Sugar Act), which actually lowered the existing duty on molasses from six to three pence a gallon, but with two important differences: this new duty was, first, to be actually collected (unlike in the old molasses duty) through a web of new regulations for the shipment of goods in and out of colonial ports, and, second, to serve as a tax for the purpose of raising a revenue to defray the cost of maintaining troops in America. Whereas the purpose of all previous duties on goods coming into and out of the colonies was to direct trade, the purpose of the Sugar Act was to raise revenue, which meant that it was a tax, or at least an indirect tax. Furthermore, the Sugar Act also deepened and broadened the role of the British State in American affairs. For instance, it ordered absentee customs officials to their posts (many of whom were living in England), and they were given greater authority and protection; it unleashed the British navy to be used in the apprehension of American smugglers; it increased the number of customs officials in America; it encouraged the use of general writs of assistance by customs officers in Massachusetts; it expanded the jurisdiction of the vice admiralty courts, and it established an overall admiralty court in Halifax, Nova Scotia; it granted one-half of the loot from seized goods to the arresting naval officers, who were now incentivized to search for smugglers; and it placed the burden of proof on those accused of smuggling rather than on the arresting officer. A widening bureaucratic net was falling on the colonists and restricting their commercial liberty.

The following year, on March 22, Parliament passed its infamous Stamp Act, which imposed a comprehensive schedule of taxes on a variety of colonial legal and commercial documents and transactions. These included court actions, wills, contracts, licenses, leases, deeds and land grants, mortgages, insurance policies, ship clearings from ports, pamphlets, newspapers, dice, and playing cards. The highest tax charged ten pounds for a license to practice law. In the wake of the Stamp Act, virtually every legal and commercial transaction in the colonies requiring the use of paper now had to carry an official treasury stamp, which meant that all transactions had to be conducted on officially stamped paper. American users were now required to purchase officially stamped paper from officially appointed distributors selected by the Crown’s Board of Stamp Commissioners. As a corollary effect, stamp distributors received an artificial monopoly on the sale of all paper in the colonies.

Ironically, as a side note, a stamp tax is, in many ways, a valid means for the government of a free society to raise revenue for its legitimate functions (e.g., a judicial system to enforce contracts). Commercial and legal transactions only work if the contracts that bind them can be enforced by a neutral third party (i.e., government). The revenue from a stamp tax is legitimate if it is used to fund the legitimate judicial and police functions of government. The problem with the Stamp Act is that it taxed the colonists without their consent.

Shortly after its passage of the Stamp Act, Parliament also approved the Quartering Act (May 15, 1765), which required the colonists to quarter British troops returned to coastal cities from the frontier. The billeted troops were to be kept in facilities under the control of colonial governments, in private alehouses and inns, and in unoccupied dwellings. The cost of quartering and feeding the troops was to be assumed by the colonial legislatures and ultimately local taxpayers. The Quartering Act was, in effect, an indirect tax imposed on the American people by the British Parliament without their consent.

The meaning and implications of the Stamp and Quartering Acts were not lost on the Americans. They reacted to the Stamp Act immediately and with outrage. The colonists rioted, pulled down the homes of Stamp distributors, boycotted English goods, formed organizations called the “Son of Liberty,” tarred and feathered tax collectors and Loyalists, and they gathered in congresses and conventions that sent resolutions, declarations, and petitions to King and Parliament. They rallied around the call of “no taxation without representation.” The Americans’ search for moral, legal, constitutional, and political principles by which to oppose the Stamp Act launched them on a decade long intellectual journey to discover, survey, and map out their rights and the boundaries of freedom.

By the end of 1765, the colonists had effectively nullified the Stamp Act, and Parliament repealed it the following year. To save face, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act in 1766, which affirmed in theory Parliament’s authority to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” In many ways, it was the Declaratory Act that threatened the Americans more than any other piece of legislation passed by Parliament during the years between 1764 and 1776. Parliament was, in effect, declaring to the colonists that its power was without limit and absolute. The defenders of parliamentary sovereignty refused to retreat from this constitutional principle right up to the time of the Americans’ declaration of independence. The American Revolution and the War for Independence were borne of the Declaratory Act.

By 1767, the British Parliament faced another financial crisis and ongoing resistance from the colonials in reaction to the Quartering Act, which, unlike the Stamp Act, had not been repealed. At the end of 1766, for instance, the New York legislature refused to comply with the provisions of the Quartering Act. Angered by the response of the New York legislature and several others, Parliament decided it was time to come down harder on the Americans and assert its authority over the colonies. Charles Townshend, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a long-time supporter of bringing the colonies under closer scrutiny and control introduced a series of bills into Parliament to address the American problem. Townshend’s first bill, the Revenue Act of June 29, 1767, or the so-called Townshend Act, imposed “external” taxes in the form of import duties in colonial ports on glass, paper, paints, led, and tea coming into the America colonies. The Townshend Act was meant to crack down on the Americans by drawing a distinction between “internal” and “external” taxation. The Americans revolted against the Stamp Act as an “internal” tax, which Townshend thought he could cleverly get around with an “external” tax on imported goods. Townshend’s purpose, though, was not to regulate trade but to tax the Americans to support British troops in America and to provide salaries for royal officials, thus making them independent of the colonial assemblies. The Townshend Revenue Act was yet another violation of the colonists’ right to not be taxed without their consent.

Townshend accompanied his Revenue Act with two other laws, the purpose of which was to reorganize and strengthen Great Britain’s control over the colonies. The second of the Townshend Acts—the so-called “Commissioners of Customs Act” (June 29, 1767)—created a separate five-man American Board of Customs in Boston to improve the effectiveness of the colonial customs service. The new act centralized control of American customs and trade enforcement, and it dramatically increased the enforcement powers of British officialdom in the colonies. In support of the Commissioners, four regiments of troops were sent to Boston. And to make matters worse, the King’s Privy Council issued an order creating three new vice-admiralty courts by executive order at Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston in July 1768 to strengthen customs enforcement. The third of the Townshend Acts—the New York Suspending Act (July 2, 1767)—prorogued the provincial assembly until it complied with the Quartering Act, thereby violating the New Yorkers right to self-government. The tentacles of the British Deep State were spreading far and wide and beginning to smother American freedom.

As tensions rose in Massachusetts, the most dramatic and best-known confrontation between colonial Americans and British power before the battles at Lexington and Concord occurred on the night of March 5, 1770, when British regulars shot and killed three Bostonians and wounded eight, two of them mortally. The Americans did not return fire, although they had no doubt provoked Captain Prescott and his troops with insults and snowballs. In the two years leading up to the Boston Massacre, the city was full of redcoats who had been in a state of hostile relations with the natives. Most Bostonians believed that British troops were in the city not to enforce civil law and order but to support corrupt customs officials who were plundering colonial shipping as well as intimidating the citizens of the Bay Colony into obeying unjust laws and preventing them from proclaiming and asserting their natural rights and their traditional rights as Englishmen. The Boston Massacre was the inevitable result of policies designed to overawe and check liberty with force.

The next major intrusion of the British Deep State into colonial American affairs occurred in 1773 with the passage of the Tea Act, which gave the near-bankrupt East India Company an artificial monopoly on the selling of tea in America at discount prices. The new law permitted the East India Company to send its tea directly to its own agents in the colonies without first having to sell its tea at public auction in London as did all other tea sellers. By cutting out the middleman and giving the East India Company a virtual monopoly on the selling of tea in America, the colonists viewed the Tea Act as an arbitrary law that circumvented the free choices of Americans who preferred to purchase Dutch tea at lower prices. Boston radicals then famously liberated £10,000 worth of tea into Boston Harbor.

The actions of the Boston Tea Party forced the British Parliament (or so British officials thought) to take stronger, punitive measures against the colonists. Of course, the Boston Tea Party and the Americans’ overall reaction to British legislation for the previous ten years might have inspired British imperial officials to back off and return to the old laissez-faire policy of “salutary neglect, but they were in no mood for reconciliation. Parliament therefore chose to bring Massachusetts to heel. In the spring of 1774, Parliament enacted a series of laws known as the “Coercive Acts” or the “Intolerable Acts” as they were referred to in the colonies. The first law—the Boston Port Act (March 31, 1774)—closed the Boston Port to all incoming and outgoing trade. The second law—the Massachusetts Government Act (May 20, 1774)—effectively subverted the colony’s governing charter and thereby altered the Massachusetts government by giving the King the power to appoint the Governor’s Council rather than having it elected by the assembly. The royally appointed Governor was also given new powers to appoint and dismiss all judicial officers, including justices of the peace and sheriffs. Superior court judges were to be nominated by the Governor for appointment by the King, and juries were to be chosen by the sheriff instead of being democratically elected by the people. Finally, local town meetings (i.e., the famous New England town meeting) were barred from meeting without the consent of the Governor. The third law—the Administration of Justice Act (May 20, 1774)—provided an exemption for any royally appointed official in Massachusetts from being tried in the colony on any indictment for a capital offense. Instead, they could now be brought to England or Nova Scotia for trial so as not to face a hostile local jury. Finally, the fourth law—a new Quartering Act (June 2, 1774)—required the billeting of troops in the town of Boston. To ensure complicity with its new laws, British General Thomas Gage was commissioned as governor of Massachusetts.

To add insult to injury, Parliament soon thereafter passed the Quebec Act (October 7, 1774), which is sometimes referred to as the fifth of the so-called “Intolerable Acts.” The Quebec Act extended the boundaries of the Canadian province to the Old Northwest territory (i.e., the Mississippi Valley as far south as the Ohio River); it gave to the former French colony a civil government with no representative assembly; and it guaranteed the Roman Catholic religion to the French inhabitants of the province. All in all, the Quebec Act was an ominous warning to the colonists, particularly to those living in New England, that Parliament viewed its powers as unlimited. If Parliament could change the boundaries of a province or change its form of government, why could it not do the same thing for any one or all the thirteen American colonies?

For the Americans, the Coercive Acts represented the epitome of arbitrary and despotic government. Indeed, they were the straw the broke the camel’s back. The Coercive and Quebec Acts represented to the American colonists the ultimate design and goal of British imperial policy over the course of the previous decade—to reduce all the American colonies to abject creatures ruled arbitrarily by the corrupt and combined force of Parliament and Crown.

The Intolerable Acts changed everything for the colonists. The furthest seeing Patriot leaders—e.g., Samuel and John Adams, George Washington, and Patrick Henry—understood that British imperial officials were digging in their heels and willing to use increased coercive force to bend the colonists to their will. Virtual tyranny had become actual tyranny. By early 1775, the British government was preparing for military action, and civilian and militia leaders in the colonies began preparations to defend themselves. Fighting finally broke out in April 1775 at the Battles of Lexington and Concord (273 redcoats and 95 Patriots were killed or maimed) and then in July at the Battles of Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill in Boston (1,054 redcoats and 411 Patriots were killed or maimed). Both military incursions were initiated by the British army. On August 23, King George III declared the colonists to be in a state of rebellion and sedition, and on December 22, 1775, the British Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act, which cut off all trade between the colonies and Great Britain and it removed the colonies from the King’s protection. These two action by King and Parliament were, in effect, a declaration of war. To many colonial leaders, it seemed patently clear now that the final goal of the British Deep State was to crush colonial resistance and to make the colonies mere client states of the British Empire.

Looking back on the ten years or so of the imperial crisis, students of the American Revolution must confront and reconsider John Adams’s claim quoted at the beginning of this section to the effect that there was a formal design on the part of British imperial officials to enslave the American people. What do we think of that claim now? Did Adams foresee what few others saw was coming? By 1774, other colonial Americans were beginning to see what Adams saw almost a decade before. In his 1774 pamphlet, “Summary View of the Rights of British North America,” Thomas Jefferson laid bare the evidence suggesting that Adams had been right all along. As the Virginian put it: “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” The Americans’ so-called “conspiratorial” thinking, as some historians have called it, was grounded in evidence and the cause-and-effect relationship between principles and policies.

American Revolutionaries believed that ideas have consequences, and that untrue and bad ideas must be challenged with true and good ideas. The real question now was not whether John Adams was right in 1765, but whether Thomas Jefferson was right in 1774, and, if he were, then what?