The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Indignant protests in Parliament from Virginia, Pennsylvania and other colonies showed that resistance to the Revenue Act was spreading and cold figures confirmed the fact. From 1768 to 1769, English exports to America dropped by a third, from £2,400,000 to £1,600,000. New York cut its imports to one-seventh of what they had been in 1764, from £482,000 in that year to £74,000 in 1769. Boston’s imports were cut in half, those of other colonies, where compliance with Non-Importation was uneven, by less.

Receipts from the Townshend Duties in their first year amounted to £16,000, compared to military expenditures for America of £170,000. Even Hillsborough, as Secretary for the Colonies, had to admit that the Townshend Act was “so anti-commercial that he wished it had never existed,” while the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord North, said the duties were “so preposterous that he was amazed that they had ever been passed by the British Parliament.”

Rather than conciliate for the sake of quickly terminating Non-Importation, the Government’s instinct was punitive. Having maneuvered itself into a situation of challenge from its subjects, it felt obliged to make a demonstration of authority, the more so as it was feared that American protest, if...

Hillsborough, like Rehoboam, believed effective demonstration lay in being as rough as possible. He resurrected from the autocratic era of Henry VIII an ancient statute providing for trial in England of persons accused of treason outside the kingdom and this was moved by the Duke of Bedford as a parliamentary resolution with reference to the offenses of Massachusetts. The Commons concurred, the Chathamites of Grafton’s group in the Government seem to have raised no objection and the order was duly transmitted to Governor Bernard in Boston. Reaction was naturally violent. ...

The process of repealing the Townshend Act took more than a year, from March 1769 to May 1770, during which other measures taken to discipline the colonies were as counter-productive as the one undergoing cancellation.

Lord Mayor Beckford observed “that it was a strange piece of policy to expend £500,000 a year to assist the Customs-House officers in collecting £295, which was the whole net produce of the taxes there.”

Instead of ordering the billeting and supply of troops by the Quartering Act, which instantly aroused colonial protest, the process should be left “to the people themselves to do it in their own way, and by their own modes of doing business”

as they had done during the Seven Years’ War.

In moving repeal of the Townshend Act, he showed how the preamble in announcing the purpose to be revenue for civil government was a “total change” of the system by which the colonies had always controlled public servants by their own legislatures having the grant and disposal of funds for government.

You may exert power over, but you can never govern an unwilling people.” Almost unintentionally, Pownall had formulated a principle worth the attention of all who rule at any time—that government must conduct itself with regard to the feelings of the governed, and ignores them at its peril.

As often happens, the logical course of events suffered quirks and diversions. Among the colonial propertied class, fear of mobs and social upheaval had begun to erode their support of the “patriotic” movement. Its impetus dwindled. Wearying of Non-Importation, New York proposed a conference of the northern seaports to decide on a common policy. Merchants of Boston and Philadelphia, also eager to resume trade, were prevented by the agitators. When the proposed conference fell through, New York, rather than be cheated while “starving on the slender Meals of patriotism,” abandoned Non-Importation and opened its port in 1772.

Separately, at different times, the other colonies followed, agitation subsided and the absence of unity confirmed Britain in the assumption that the colonies would never join in a common front and that loyalist sentiment and economic self-interest would prevail over seditious impulse.

With feelings intense in Parliament over the Wilkes issue, Lord North’s policy was to keep American affairs out of the House of Commons, and for two years, owing to the lull in the colonies, he succeeded. This could have been a period of compromise and possible reunion if a positive effort had been made. The colonies were bent on redress of grievances and autonomy in their own affairs, not on independence. On the contrary, the Stamp Act Congress had asserted that they “most ardently” desired “perpetual continuance” of the ancient tie with Britain. Even the Massachusetts Assembly, the most aggressive in sentiment, had disavowed in 1768 “the most ...

the lull, the sails of folly were furled for the moment—until the affair of the Gaspée in 1772.

GASPÉE WAS a British customs schooner under a bellicose commander, Lieutenant Dudington, who pursued his task as if he carried a personal warrant from the King to stamp out smuggling in the thousand isles and inlets of Narragansett Bay. Boarding and examining every ship he met, threatening to blow recalcitrant skippers out of the water, he aroused a lust for revenge in the Rhode Islanders that found its moment when his schooner ran aground below Providence. Within hours local seafarers organized eight boatloads of men who attacked the ship, wounded Lieutenant Dudington, put him and his crew ashore and burned the Gaspée.

The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General decided that the attack on the Gaspée was an act of war on the King and as such was treasonable, requiring the culprits to be sent to England for trial.

The consequence was important because Rhode Island’s roars of protest caused a decisive step toward unity. Following a model created among the towns of Massachusetts, Virginia’s House of Burgesses invited the colonies to form Committees of Correspondence to consult on joint acts and methods of resistance. Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry served on Virginia’s Committee. This was the beginning of the development toward intercolonial union, which Britain remained confident could never occur and on whose non-occurrence her confidence rested.

it was utter folly as practical politics.

Given the known outrage at the idea of transporting Americans to trial in England, and the obvious unreality of expecting Rhode Islanders to mark their fellows for that fate, the mischief once more lay “in asserting a right you know you cannot exert.”

At this point tea becomes the catalyst. The financial troubles and notorious abuses of the East India Company and its complex financial connections with the Crown had for years been a problem almost as intractable as Wilkes and are relevant here only because they precipitated the period of no return in the British-American quarrel. To evade the tea duty, Americans had been smuggling Dutch tea, reducing the sale of the Company’s tea by almost two-thirds. To rescue the Company, whose solvency was essential to London for an amount of £400,000 a year, Lord North devised a scheme by which the surplus tea piling up in Company warehouses could be sold directly to America, skipping England and the English customs duty. If the duty in America was reduced to 3d. a pound, the tea could be sold at 10s. instead of 20s. a pound. Considering the Americans’ known extraordinary fondness for tea, the lowered price was expected to overcome their patriotic resistance to paying duty.

The Tea Act of May 1773 accordingly passed by Parliament with no expectation of another American outburst.

The Tea Act proved a startling disappointment. Instead of happily acquiescing in cheap tea, Americans exploded in wrath not so much from popular feeling as from agitation inspired by the merchants, who saw themselves eliminated as wholesalers and their trade ruined through underselling by the East India Company. Ship owners and builders, captains and crews, whose livelihood was in smuggling, also felt threatened. Political agitators, delighted to have a cause again, accommodated them. They raised the horrid cry of “Monopoly” about to grip America by a company notorious for its “black, sordid and Cruel Avarice.”

If established in tea, it would soon extend to spices, silks, chinaware and other commodities. Once India tea was accepted in America, the 3 d. duty would “enter the bulwark of our sacred liberties” and would accomplish Parliament’s purpose of taxation for revenue; nor would its authors desist “till they have made a conquest of the whole.”

Peacemakers in the colonies hoped to arrange return of the tea ships before any cargo w...

In Boston, two of the consignees were sons of Governor Hutchinson, who had come to believe in a firm stand against the agitators. They stood ready to take delivery. The first tea ship docked at a Boston wharf on 1 December 1773, followed by two more.

Because unloaded cargoes after a stated period were liable to seizure by customs commissioners for nonpayment of duty, the patriots suspected the commissioners would sell the confiscated cargo under the counter for revenue. To forestall them and perhaps also to intimidate any hopeful purchasers, they boarded the ships during the night of 16 December and in the enterprise to be known forever after as the Boston Tea Party, slashed open the tea chests and dumped the contents into the water.

the Coercive or Punitive Acts, and in America the Intolerable Acts, which served to advance antagonism in the direction it was already pointing and to pass the fork in the road at which another path might have led to another outcome.

As an act of war upon Crown property, the Tea Party was adjudged another case of treason.

Besides the burning of the Gasspee

the Cabinet chose instead to punish Boston as a whole by act of Parliament. Accordingly, a bill was presented to close the port of Boston to all commerce until indemnity had been paid to the East India Company and reparations to the customs commissioners for damages suffered, and until “peace and obedience to the Laws” was assured sufficiently that trade might be safely carried on and customs duly collected.

While preparing the bill, the Cabinet, having learned nothing from the ten years of angry protests since Grenville’s first tax, expected, as always, no trouble. Ministers believed the other colonies would condemn the Bostonians’ destruction of property, would not intervene on their behalf and might ind...

Emotionalism is always a contributory source of folly.

Three more Coercive Acts followed in rapid succession. First was the Massachusetts Regulatory Act, virtually annulling the charter of the Bay colony. Rights of election and appointment of officials, representatives, judges and juries and the basic right to summon town meetings, all that had been at “the sole disposal of her own internal government,” in Burke’s phrase, were taken over by the Crown acting through the Governor.

The Administration of Justice Act followed, which allowed Crown officials accused of crime in Massachusetts who claimed they could not be assured a fair trial to be tried in England or in another colony. This was an insult considering that Boston had leaned over backward to give Captain Preston, commanding officer in the “Massacre,” a fair trial with defense by John Adams and had acquitted him.

Next, the annual Quartering Act added a new provision authorizing, in case of any refusal to furnish barracks, the billeting of troops in citizens’ homes, taverns and other buildings.

The most furiously resented of the measures, though it was not one of the Coercive Acts, was the simultaneous Quebec Act extending Canada’s boundaries to the Ohio River, where Virginia and other colonies had territorial claims. The Act also formulated terms of civil government in Canada providing for the right of taxation by Parliament, for trial without jury according to the French manner and for toleration of the Catholic religion.

Yet if any intention remained of calming and eventually reconciling the colonies, passage of the Quebec Act on top of the Coercive Acts was a perfect model of how not to proceed.

The measures of March–June 1774 roused the opposition to real apprehension and to explicit warnings of dire consequences.

In formulating Cassandra’s curse—that she would tell the truth and not be believed—the ancient Greeks showed their remarkable early insight into the human psyche.

In America, the Boston Port Bill ignited solidarity. In May, Rhode Island issued the first call for an intercolonial congress, while Connecticut towns held indignation meetings and took vows to rush aid in money and provisions to Boston and “to sprinkle American altars with our hearts’ blood” if occasion arose.

The old Indian fighter and ranger of the Seven Years’ War, Colonel Israel Putnam, chairman of the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, personally drove 130 sheep 100 miles from his home in Pomfret to Boston.

Baltimore sent 1000 bushels of corn and ultimately gifts were received from all thirteen colonies. Patriot leaders demanded a complete denial of tea throughout the colonies, smuggling was stopped, the “hurtful trash” was burned on village gre...

By uniting the colonies into a whole, the Coercive Acts accomplished the same cohesion in the adversary as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor accomplished two centuries later—and with ultimately the same result. The first Continental Congress of 56 members representing all colonies except Georgia convened at Philadelphia in September 1774. They declared all acts of Parliament respecting the colonies since 1763 to have violated American rights and pledged themselves to renew Non-Importation until all were repealed.

If there were no redress of grievances within a year, they would move to Non-Intercourse, that is, cessation of exports as well as imports. They adopted ten resolutions on the rights of self-government, including self-taxation by their own legislatures, and under pressure by the radicals, endorsed the Resolves taken by Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which declared the Coercive Acts to be unconstitutional and invalid, authorized no obedience until they were repealed and advised citizens to arm and form militia for defense if attacked.

While acknowledging allegiance to the Crown, they considered themselves a “dominion” ...

Some were ready, however, for the alternative, as Jefferson phrased it in his instructions to the delegates of Virginia, of “union on a generous plan.” His conditions were that there must be no limitation of the colonies’ external trade and no taxation or regulation of their properties “by any power on earth except our own.”

As the crisis in relations worsened, the idea of union found advocates among progressive thinkers in England. In 1776, Adam Smith was to propose it in The Wealth of Nations as the means “to the prosperity, to the splendour, and to the duration of the empire.”

England saw treason in the unpleasing unity of the Continental Congress. By now, resort to force had become an accepted idea. Increasingly alarming letters had been coming from General Gage, who reported that “the Flame of Sedition” was spreading rapidly, that it was not confined to a “faction” of agitators but shared by the generality of freeholders and farmers in Massachusetts and its neighbors, that they were assembling arms and ammunition and even artillery, and finally that all New England must be considered in open rebellion.

Viscount Barrington, the long-serving Secretary at War, entered a dissent.

land war in America would be useless, costly and impossible to win. Useless because it was plain that Britain could never successfully impose internal taxation; costly and impossible to win because conquered areas must be held by large armies and fortresses, “the expense of which would be ruinous and endless,”

Britain’s only war aim was proving supremacy without being able to use it; “I repeat, our contest is merely a point of honor” and “will cost us more than we can ever gain by success.”