The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

The Act carried a sting in its tail—as yet only in embryo—in the announcement of a projected Stamp Tax to follow. This was no horrendous device to torture Americans but one of numerous ad hoc levies used in England, in this case, a tax on letters, wills, contracts, bills of sale and other mailed or legal documents.

The colonists were not a primitive “fluttered folk and wild” but offspring of exceptionally strong-minded and enterprising dissidents of the British breed. Essentially, the problem was attitude. The British behaved—and what is more, thought—in imperial terms as governors to the governed. The colonials considered themselves equals, resented interference and sniffed tyranny in every breeze coming over the Atlantic.

Liberty was the most intense political sentiment of the time. Government was disliked;

Emphatic protests were delivered by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina, each affirming the “right” to tax itself and denying Parliament’s right.

The fallacy inherent in the British Government’s position was laid bare by

revenue was a fallacious goal because England’s natural profit from colonial trade, which would be endangered by ill-will, was greater than any prospective yield from the tax.

Trade will suffer more than the tax profits.”

“Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.” This in essence was to be the Burke thesis: that principle does not have to be demonstrated when the demonstration is inexpedient.

Here at the very start was the feasible alternative. If revenue from the colonies to pay the cost of their defense was what Britain wanted—which was reasonable enough—she could and should have put it to the colonies to raise it themselves.

They were prepared to respond.

The evidence was ample that taxation by Parliament would meet adamant resistance in the colonies. It was ignored because the policy-makers regarded Britain as sovereign and the colonials as subjects, because Americans were not taken too seriously, and because Grenville and his associates, having some doubts themselves as to the rights in the case, wanted to obtain the revenue in a way that would establish Parliament’s eminent domain.

It was a classic and ultimately self-defeating case of proceeding against all negative indications.

Grenville made no formal “requisitions from hence” upon the colonies to tax themselves and by rejecting this alternative ...

In Parliament, the colonial petitions were rejected unheard on the ground that they concerned a money bill for ...

Jackson and Garth spoke in the House denying Parliament’s right to tax “until or unless the Americans are allowed to s...

to answer, the President of the Board of Trade, Charles Townshend, soon to be a critical figure in the conflict, provoked the first momen...

Shall the Americans, he asked, “children planted by our Arms, shall they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden we lie under?” Unable to contain himself, Colonel Isaac Barré, a fierce one-eyed former soldier who had fought with Wolfe and Amherst in America, sprang to his feet. “They planted by your Care? No! Your Oppressions planted ’em in America.… They nourished up by your Indulgence? They grew up by your neglect of ’em.… They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence.… And believe me, and remember that I this day told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompan...

Barré, who looked on the world with a “savage glare” from a face scarred by the bullet that took out his eye at Quebec, was to become one of the leading defenders of America and orators of the Opposition.

His staunch support of America, joined with that of another champion, of a sort, is commemorated in the town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

the Stamp Tax, the first direct tax ever levied on America, was enacted

by 249 to 49, the usual five-to-one

majo...

it established “the Right of Parliament to lay an internal tax upon the Colonies.”

had been done deliberately, in the face of strong resolutions by the American assemblies, “because it was thought to establish the Right by a new execution of it.”

the Act not only required a stamp on all printed matter and legal and business documents, but extended to such things as ships’ papers, tavern licenses and even dice and playing cards, it touched every activity in every class in every colony, n...

the suspicion of a deliberate plan by the British first to undermine the economy and the...

Sons of Liberty were organized in the towns to foment resistance. In response to a general movement to force stamp agents to resign, mobs rampaged and pillaged and wrecked their homes and paraded with the agents’ figures hanged in effigy.

Heeding the warning, the agents in Boston and Newport resigned in August, and by November, when the Act took effect, not an agent remained in office to execute it.

More astonishing and, to any Englishmen who took notice, ominous was the agreement of nine colonies at a Stamp Act Congress in October in New York. After a mere two and a half weeks of bickering, they united on a petition for repeal, and agreed also to abandon the troublesome distinction that figured so largely in the whole American dispute between acceptable “external” taxation in the form of duties on trade and unacceptable “internal” taxation on domestic processes.

Beyond all words and petitions, the effective protest was boycott, known as Non-Importation. Already set in motion in response to the Sugar Act, a program to cut off imports of English goods was now formally adopted by groups of merchants in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

By the end of the year, imports were £305,000 less than the year before out of a total of some £2 million.

Repeal became an issue in England almost as soon as the Stamp Act became law. As Non-Importation emptied the ports, and shippers and handlers and factory workers lost employment and merchants lost money, Britain awoke to American sentiment. For the next six months the Stamp Act was a leading topic in the press.

“absurdity” of the Stamp Act, he wrote to Newcastle, equaled “the mischief of it by asserting a right you know you cannot exert.” Even if effective, he wrote, the tax should bring in no more than £80,000 a year (the government calculated on no more than £60,000), which could not compensate for the loss to Britain in trade worth at least a million a year (it was worth two million).

“Unless the Act from its own nature enforces itself, nothing but a very considerable military force can do it.” The gentlemen of England could not envisage this necessity vis-à-vis rabble.

AFTER A MISTAKE so absolute as to require repeal, British policy-makers might well have stopped to reconsider the relationship with the colonies, and ask themselves what course they might follow to induce a beneficial allegiance on the one hand and ensure a secure sovereignty on the other.

Fate, as we shall see, interfered.

The riotous reaction to the Stamp Act only confirmed the British in their belief that the colonies, led by “wicked and designing men” (as stated in a House of Lords resolution), were bent on rebellion. Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

A new provocation emerged in the annual Quartering Act of 1766 for the billeting, provisioning and discipline of British forces. It carried a clause requiring colonial assemblies to provide barracks and supplies such as candles, fuel, vinegar, beer and salt for the regulars.

Colonists saw themselves soon being required to pay all the costs of the Army in America at the “dictate” of Parliament.

In 2022, Germany pays the US $1Bilion a year besides maintaining all base & infrastructure for free.

Without consulting his Cabinet colleagues or giving them any notice of his intention, Townshend proposed a series of customs duties on imports into America of glass, paint, lead, paper and all grades of tea for the stated purpose not of controlling trade but of raising revenue. The expected return according to his own calculations was £20,000 from the tea duty and a little less than £20,000 from the rest, altogether £40,000, amounting to a tenth of the total cost of governing the colonies and less than a tenth of the loss from the reduced land tax. For this pittance, which would barely reduce and would very likely add to the national deficit by costing more to collect than it would bring in, Townshend was ready to wreck what repeal of the Stamp Act had been intended to gain.

As with most follies, personal self-interest paralyzed concern for the greater interest of the state.

As if deliberately trying to be provocative, Townshend wakened America’s phobia in the preamble to the Act, which announced that the proceeds were to be used for raising revenue to help meet the cost of the colonies’ defense and “for defraying the cost of the administration of justice and support of the civil list.” Without this statement, his duties might well have raised no storm. Folly had now set sail.

Gout in the days of heavy diet and heavy drinking of fortified wines played a role in the fate of nations.

A leading physician of Chatham’s time, Dr. William Cadogan, maintained that the disease had three causes, “Indolence, Intemperance and Vexation” (in modern times ascertained to be an overproduction of uric acid in the blood, which, when not absorbed, causes the inflammation and pain), and that an active and frugal life was the best preventive and possible cure.

That physical exercise and a vegetarian diet were remedial was known, but the theory of opposites, one of the least helpful precepts of 18th-century medicine, was preferred by Chatham’s physician, a Dr. Addington. A specialist in lunacy, or “mad-doctor,” he hoped to induce a violent fit of gout on the theory that this would drive out the mental disorder. He therefore prescribed two glasses of white wine and two of port every day, double his patient’s usual intake, over and above Madeira and port at other intervals. T...

While sometimes linked to gout, probably through pain, madness appeared not infrequently in the 18th-century governing class.

While occasional such cases mentioned in the memoirs may not represent a high incidence, they suggest the likelihood of others that are not mentioned. On the basis of such evidence one cannot say anything significant about madness in the governing class, but only that if Chatham had been healthy the history of America would have been different.

The Townshend Duties met a delayed reaction in America. Many citizens and future loyalists, disturbed by the mob action against lives and property during the Stamp Act crisis, had begun to fear the “patriotic” movement as the vanguard of class “levelling.”

the Quartering Act. Friction, however, developed soon through harassment by agents of the new American Customs Board, created along with the Townshend Act to administer the new duties. At the same time, Writs of Assistance to allow search of premises had been legalized. Eager to make their fortunes from the penalties they could impose, the Customs agents, with infuriating zeal, halted and inspected everything that floated, boarding ships in every port and on every waterway down to the farmer ferrying chickens across a river in his riverboat.

In August and September 1768, the merchants of Boston and New York agreed to cease importing from Britain until the Townshend Duties were repealed. Philadelphia’s merchants joined the agreement a few months later, followed by most of the other colonies through the course of 1769. Home weaving by organized groups of “Daughters of Liberty” had in fact continued since the Stamp Act. The graduating class of Harvard College in 1768 and the first graduating class and President of Rhode Island College (now Brown) in 1769 all appeared in clothes of American homespun.