During the French and Indian War (1754– 1763), Americans continued the excellent custom of trading with the enemy, and much more readily than in the past. As in King George’s War, Newport took the lead; other important centers were New York and Philadelphia. The individualistic Rhode Islanders angrily turned Governor Stephen Hopkins out of office for involving Rhode Island in a “foreign” war in between England and France.
Rhode Island blithely disregarded the embargo versus trade with the enemy, and enhanced its commerce with France. Rhode Island’s ships likewise functioned as one of the major sources of supply for French Canada during the war. In the fall of 1757, William Pitt was told that the Rhode Islanders “are a lawless set of smugglers, who continually supply the opponent with what arrangements they desire …”
The Crown ordered royal governors to embargo exports of food and to separate the extensive traffic with the West Indies, but carriers once again resorted to flags of truce and trade through neutral ports in the West Indies. Monte Cristi, in Spanish Hispaniola, showed to be a particularly popular intermediary port.
The flags-of-truce device especially inflamed the British, and the lucrative sale of this opportunity– with the detainees’ names left blank– was indulged in by Governors William Denny of Pennsylvania and Francis Bernard of New Jersey. French prisoners, for token exchanges under the flags, were uncommon, and for that reason at a premium, and merchants in Philadelphia and New York paid high costs for these prisoners to Newport privateers. The peak of this trade can be found in 1759, for in the following year, with the end of the war with New France, the Royal Navy had the ability to turn its attention to this trade and essentially reduce it.
However, in the words of Professor Bridenbaugh, “Privateering and trade with the opponent might have their ups and downs … but then as now, federal government agreements appeared to involve little risk and to pay off handsomely.” Particularly feeding at the trough of federal government war contracts were specially fortunate merchants of New York and Pennsylvania. 2 firms of London merchants were specifically prominent in giving out British war contracts to their preferred American correspondents.
Hence, the extremely prominent London firm of John Thomlinson and John Hanbury (who was deeply involved in the Ohio Business) received a big war agreement; the firm designated Charles Apthorp and Business its Boston representative, and Colonel William Bayard its representative in New York.
In addition, the effective London merchant Moses Franks arranged for his family members and pals– David Franks of Philadelphia, and Jacob Franks, John Watts, and the effective Oliver DeLancey of New York City– to be made federal government representatives, New york city, furthermore, was made the concentration point for the British forces and the general storehouse of arms and ammunition, hence permitting “numerous merchants to collect fortunes as subcontractors if they enjoyed the proper household connections.” By 1761, nevertheless, all the terrific ports in America were suffering severely from the severe dislocation of trade wrought by the war.
Smuggling and trading with the enemy were not the only forms of American resistance to British dictation during the French and Indian War. Throughout the French wars of the 1740s, Boston had been the center of violent resistance to conscription for the war effort, an effort that decimated the Massachusetts male population. During the French and Indian War, Massachusetts continued as the most active center of resistance to conscription and of prevalent desertion, frequently en masse, from the militia.
Thomas Pownall took control of as governor of Massachusetts in early 1757, and broken down bitterly on Massachusetts’ liberties: he sent out soldiers outside Massachusetts without Assembly consent, threatened to penalize justices of the peace who did not enforce the laws versus desertion (hitherto interpreted with “salutary overlook”), and threatened Boston with military occupation if the Assembly did not accept the arrival and quartering of British troops. In November, English hiring officers appeared in Boston, and the Assembly and the Boston magistrates forbade any recruiting or any quartering of troops in the town. Pownall vetoed these actions as offenses of the royal prerogative, especially in “emergencies.”
The magistrates then countered by detaining recruiting officers in order to investigate them as possible carriers of disease. When Pownall attempted to terrify the Massachusetts Assembly with the French hazard, it cogently replied that the real danger was the English army, and that if that army marched on Massachusetts, as their commander-in-chief Lord Loudoun was threatening, Massachusetts would resist the troops by force. The legislature insisted on the natural rights of the people of Massachusetts, to defend which they would “withstand to the last breath a vicious, getting into army.”
Lord Loudoun was threatening to send his army from Long Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania to compel the quartering of troops in Boston. In exasperation, Lord Loudoun wrote to Governor Pownall in December 1757: “They [the Massachusetts Assembly] attempt to remove the King’s undoubted authority; … they try to take away an act of the British Parliament; they try to make it impossible for the King either to keep soldiers in The United States and Canada, or … to march them through his own dominion …” The Massachusetts legislature finally agreed to allow the quartering of troops, but officially insisted that this quartering come under its own authority and not that of England or its guv.
So couple of citizens of Massachusetts volunteered for the 1758 campaign that Guv Pownall resorted to the disliked device of conscription. Resentment amongst the people was magnified by such British recruiting approaches as dragging drunken men into the army. Individuals emerged angrily in a series of riots, assaulting and beating up recruiting squads, all of which required the British to retain a large troop in Massachusetts to squash an impending disobedience. The Massachusetts draftees then turned to the silent however efficient nonviolent resistance of mass desertions, refusal to follow the disliked officers, and going on ill call.
Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson was selected to round up deserters, and hundreds were betrayed by the government’s network of paid informers. Individuals’s animosity and resistance were heightened by the economic depression in Massachusetts triggered by high taxes for the war effort.
Following the disastrous Ticonderoga campaign in 1758, the English general James Wolfe wrote in vehemence dry despair that “the Americans are in basic the dirtiest, most contemptible afraid canines, that you can conceive. There is no relying on them in action. They … desert by battalions, officers and all.” Other authorities and observers remarked wonderingly of the individualistic spirit of the militiamen: “Nearly every guy his own master and a basic.” With the militia officers democratically elected by their men, “the notion of liberty so generally dominates, that they are restless under all sort of supremacy and authority.”
Furthermore, the Americans included a new concept to the age-old European peasant and yeoman practice of desertion: the assassination of officers who would not cooperate.
Even in the following years of English success, the Massachusetts militia continued its resistance. In 1759, it declined to stay at Lake Champlain for the winter, mutinied against its officers, and returned house. The list below year, the Massachusetts militia declined to go from Nova Scotia to Quebec, and mutinied once again. General Jeffery Amherst had high-handedly decided, in late 1759, to keep the Massachusetts troops in Nova Scotia over the winter of 1759– 60, despite the truth that their terms of enlistment had actually expired. The men unanimously announced their refusal to serve any longer, and wrote to the leader requiring that they be sent out house. The Americans were all placed under guard thereafter.
The British decided to shoot the mutinous colonists, but bloodshed was prevented at the last minute when the Massachusetts General Court extended the terms of enlistment to 6 months, and sweetened the pill with an additional bonus of 4 pounds per soldier. By spring, nevertheless, the men and the General Court remained company: the troops unanimously chose to leave and the General Court declined to extend their terms in the army. So distressed were the Massachusetts soldiers to delegate go home that a party of them commandeered a ship and set sail for house. It was wholly in vain that Amherst demanded British-style discipline for these rebellious, democratically governed militiamen.
Great deals of deserting sailors, furthermore, left to join the merchant marine for massive smuggling and trade with the enemy. New York City was a vibrant center for deserting sailors, and New York merchants methodically concealed the sailors from the British soldiers. The British forced their return in 1757 by threatening to carry out a deliberately brutal and extensive house-to-house search, and to treat New York as a conquered city. British troops were quartered upon New York against the vehement opposition of the people they were supposedly “securing.” In Philadelphia, pacifist mobs consistently assaulted recruiting officers and even lynched one in February 1756.
In general, continuing conflict raged in between English commanders, who wanted total control over the colonial militia, and the Assemblies, which insisted on certain constraints on militia service. American disaffection with the war effort was especially marked after 1756, when the minimal campaign to grab Ohio lands was been successful by major war against French Canada.
If Americans, during the Seven Years’ War, pursued a policy of trading with the enemy, the British bitterly pushed away the other nations of Europe by repudiating all the treasured principles of worldwide law on the sea that had actually been worked out over the previous century. The established and agreed-upon concept of worldwide law was that neutral ships were entitled to trade with a warring nation without molestation by any belligerent (“totally free ships make totally free goods”), unless the items were actual weaponries. After lastly agreeing to this civilized principle of worldwide law in the late seventeenth century, England now returned to the piratical practice of assaulting neutral ships trading with France and of stopping and browsing neutral ships on the high seas.
England had actually long been the significant opponent of logical international law, and of the terrific libertarian concept of “freedom of the seas,” which formed an integral part of that law. Neutrals’ rights were a corollary of that idea, as was the teaching that no nation might declare ownership or sovereignty of the seas– that, in reality, the citizens of any nation might utilize the ocean blues to trade, travel, or fish where they would.
Throughout the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth had not accepted the grandiose claims of the mystic astrologer Dr. John Dee, of England’s claim to ownership of the surrounding seas. After all, England was then engaged in asserting liberty of the seas versus the assumed Spanish and Portuguese monopolies of the recently discovered oceans. But after the accession of the Stuarts, Spain was no longer a serious risk to the seas, and England’s bypassing maritime interest was to ruin the highly efficient and competitive Dutch shipping. Very early in his reign, James I declared ownership of the surrounding seas and the fish therein, and Charles I arrogantly claimed sovereignty over the whole North Sea.
In opposition to the Stuart pretensions, the terrific Dutch “dad of global law,” the liberal Hugo Grotius, put down the principle of flexibility of the seas in his Mare Liberum in 1609, and incorporated the concept into the natural-law structure of worldwide law in his definitive writing of 1625, De jure belli ac pacis. Grotius had the ability to build upon the sixteenth-century works of the great liberal Spanish jurists and scholastics Francis Alfonso de Castro, Ferdinand Vasquez Menchaea, and Francisco Suârez, who grew even in a time when the Spanish interest was in announcing its sovereignty of the seas.
Grotius’ libertarian view of liberty of the seas might expect to meet stern opposition in many countries, however the greatest opposition was in England, where the Stuarts mobilized scholars in their defense. The leading challengers of Grotius and celebrants of governmental and particularly English sovereignty over the seas were the Scot teacher William Welwood (1613 ); the Italian-born Oxford regius professor Albericus Gentilis (1613 ), who declared absolute English ownership of the Atlantic as far west as America; Sir John Boroughs, royal bureaucrat (1633 ); and John Selden (1635 ).
England continued its grand claims throughout the seventeenth century, however with its shipping ever more extensive by the end of the century, it began to consent to be bound by worldwide law on the high seas. England had likewise been the significant challenger of neutral rights in time of war and the Dutch their significant advocate. However, in the Treaty of 1674 with Holland, England finally agreed to the crucial guideline of “complimentary ships, complimentary items” in defense of neutral shipping, a concept that France and Spain had at least officially validated two decades prior to.
America prior to the Declaration
Now, on the opening of the Seven Years’ War, England arrogantly informed the Dutch and other neutrals that any of their ships trading with France would be dealt with as enemy vessels, under a specious, newly coined “guideline” outlawing neutral shipping that the opponent had actually permitted in its ports in time of peace. Chief theoretician of this British reversion to official piracy was the Tory Jacobite Charles Jenkinson.
Britain’s conceited attacks on neutral shipping and offenses of global law throughout the 7 Years’ War pushed away all the neutral countries of Europe, who quickly raised a cry to return to “freedom of the seas.” Especially pestered was the extremely effective Dutch shipping, and fellow victims from British policy were Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Russia, Naples, Tuscany, Genoa, and Sardinia.
This is an excerpt from Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, 4 vols. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), 2:250– 54.