The Politics of Piracy by Douglas R. Burgess

Author:Douglas R. Burgess [Burgess, Douglas R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Law, Legal History, Maritime
ISBN: 9781611685275
Google: WdiPBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: ForeEdge from University Press of New England
Published: 2014-12-02T16:08:30+00:00

PART IV

ROPE’S END

CHAPTER TEN

THE BONDS OF SLAVERY

Law, Letters, and the Resumption Bill of 1701–1702

IN THE LAST YEARS of the seventeenth century and the first of the eighteenth, the charter colonies came as close to open rebellion as they would until 1776. In response, agitation rose in Parliament to revoke their charters, returning the New England colonies to the legal impotence they had suffered under Edmund Andros a decade earlier.

Piracy lay at the heart of the dispute. The conflict between England and her colonies was between two competing legal systems, each secure in its right to define and adjudicate the “crime” of piracy. Just as the previous chapter attempted to move beyond the dichotomy between English and colonial understandings of the law by examining the interplay between the two throughout the formative years of the Atlantic colonies, a similar analysis of later events may likewise provide a more nuanced perspective. In 1701 Parliament introduced a bill that, if passed, would have carried out the political transformation envisioned by Edward Randolph: namely, all the colonial charters would be revoked, the colonial maps redrawn and redistricted, and the whole placed under direct supervision by the Crown. This legislative fiat came to be known as the “Resumption Bill.” Startling in its breadth, and incendiary in its motives, it ultimately failed to pass. It is common to view this failure as being largely due to a lack of legislative will on the part of Parliament and the Board of Trade.1 What is markedly absent is any consideration of how events in the colonies both instigated the drive for charter resumption and, later, helped bring about its failure.

This chapter will argue that the crisis surrounding the Resumption Bill was, in fact, an illustrative demonstration of the Crown overreaching itself and being rebuffed. In the context of an ongoing tug-of-war between English and colonial legal regimes, the failure of the Resumption Bill reveals exactly how limited the Crown’s power truly was.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who once described going to sea as akin to prison with the chance of being drowned, was equally disparaging of the lands that lay on the horizon. The colonies, he wrote pithily, existed beyond “the bleak and gloomy solitude of the Atlantic” in a place “fit only for smugglers and buccaneers.”2 He was not alone in this judgment. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, British law still recognized a region “beyond the line,” which historian Eliga Gould describes as “a zone of conflicting laws where Britons were free to engage in forms of violence that were unacceptable [in England].”3

Consequently, England gave her governors exceptional latitude in interpreting and implementing English law and showed surprising tolerance of local custom.4 In part, this was due to a respect for colonists’ charter rights; a British jurist in 1772 maintained that “no power on earth can have the right to disturb” the colonists in their possession of their charters, “or to take from them, without their consent, any part of its produce.”5 Allowing for the fact that this

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