Treason and Rebellion in the British Atlantic, 1685-1800 by Peter Rushton Gwenda Morgan

Author:Peter Rushton, Gwenda Morgan [Peter Rushton, Gwenda Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, World, Law, Legal History
ISBN: 9781350005303
Google: LSzkDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-07-23T01:13:18+00:00

5

Before the American Revolution – The Crisis in Imperial Law: Arson, Treason and Plot

Treason in the North American colonies, 1688–1766

Though this chapter concentrates on the growing tensions of the 1760s and 1770s, and the role played by the treason laws, it is worth noting that the deployment of those laws in the North American colonies during the previous century had been sparse and ineffective. The exception was their use by Sir William Berkeley in Virginia in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, where many prosecutions and executions occurred. Thereafter, the New York trials of Jacob Leisler, Nicholas Bayard and William Prendergast were a reflection of the tension-ridden character of local politics in the colony, though land and rents shaped the disturbances that led to Prendergast’s trial. The 1670s and 1680s were in fact the high water mark in treason prosecutions in America, as it was at the same time as Bacon’s rebellion that Native Americans involved in King Philip’s War were tried and executed for treason, or at least treasonable forms of rebellion. By contrast, the disturbances over key issues of land supply, taxes and rent that pervaded Pennsylvania from the movement known as the Paxton Boys in Philadelphia, the protests in New York against landholders and the similar events in North Carolina from the self-styled Regulators in the early 1770s were suppressed by either the threat or the deployment of a Riot Act modelled on the English 1715 legislation. With this procedure, assembled ‘rioters’ were given an official warning to disperse within an hour or be arrested under the capital offence of illegal assembly – a procedure remembered today in the British phrase of someone ‘reading the Riot Act’ to another person, despite the replacement of the legislation long ago. In the creation of riot acts, the colonial authorities were deliberating following the English strategy of developing lesser legislation, below the level of treason, which could intimidate oppositional groups and crowds by threatening the death penalty for offenders without the full horror of the treason execution. The exception to this pattern was the trial in 1766 of William Prendergast for treason in leading collective protests and direct actions against the proprietors of land and the practices of civil courts in rent arrears and debt cases.

The shifting pattern from treason to riot was therefore not entirely uniform or clearly planned. The conflicts of the 1760s and early 1770s can be seen against a broader background of organization and mobilization against British policies, and the attempts by the colonial authorities to control them were but a part of a much larger struggle to suppress such grassroots agitation. The Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania echoed the issues of conflict almost a century earlier in Bacon’s Rebellion concerning access to Indian land. In 1763 they attacked a peaceful Indian village, initially killing six inhabitants, then returning to kill the rest. The colony passed a Riot Act, copied largely from the English law of 1715. The Paxton boys then marched on Philadelphia itself, and a volunteer militia was formed by the colonial government to meet them.

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