John Adams and the Constitutional History of the Medieval British Empire by James Muldoon

Author:James Muldoon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Under such circumstances, the imperial government is obliged to issue “acts for regulating trade” in order to “prevent one part of the empire being enriched at the expence and to the impoverishing of another ….”29 Such regulation in turn requires a large number of officials of all sorts, special courts such as the admiralty courts, and so on in order to ensure that all of the elements of the imperial structure function as they should for the good of all, both individually and collectively.

A specific problem that faced the imperial regulatory regime in North America was smuggling, an occupation that Leonard claimed was scorned in England because wealth accumulated by such means was “obtained at the expence and often the impoverishing of another …. The smuggler not only injures the public but often ruins the fair trader.”30 He argued that it was smugglers who instigated the Tea Party that destroyed the tea of the East India Company. The tea would have been sold below the price of smuggled tea even with the three-pence tax on it. The tax was, according to Leonard, not for the purpose “of raising a revenue from the three penny duty, but to put it out of the power of the smugglers to injure them by their infamous trade.”31 Fearing the destruction of their illegal enterprise, the smugglers aroused some of the colonists to destroy the company’s tea for their own selfish ends.

The response of the British government to the Tea Party’s challenge to its regulatory regime demonstrated to Leonard the wisdom and generosity of the imperial government. If, for example, the refusal of the colonists to repay the East India Company for its losses had occurred when Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) ruled England (1653–1658) Boston would have “been levelled with the dust” and “rivers of blood would have been shed to make atonement for the injured honor of the nation.” Instead of a bloody Cromwellian response, however, George III ’s government presented two choices to the rebellious colonists. The first and milder choice, would “compel an indemnification for the sufferers and prevent the like for the future ….” The second option would be “severe,” depending on how the Bostonians acted in the future. The choice of responses “was to depend on us.”32

According to Leonard, the British response to the Tea Party was the milder one, a blockade of the port of Boston until the East India Company was paid. The smugglers and their supporters responded to this mild bloodless punishment by inflaming the public against the government and creating a “committee of correspondence” to carry on their contest with the imperial government. “These committees,” Leonard charged, “when once established, think themselves amenable to none” and “they assume a dictatorial style” and were “propagating sedition through the country.”33

The result of the Whigs’ opposition to the mild imperial response encouraged the spread of opposition to imperial policy. Thus the “humane and benevolent, in various parts of the continent, were induced to advise us not to comply with the terms for opening our port ….

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