 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by James Foster. The coercive acts and their theoretical significance. The Boston Tea Party has often been called a pivotal event that led to the American Revolution, but it would be more accurate to say that the British response was the true catalyst. Beginning in March 1774, in retaliation for the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, Parliament passed four pieces of legislation known as the coercive acts. Some historians include a fifth, the Quebec Act, among the coercive acts, but this had been in the works for some time and was not a direct response to the Boston Tea Party. These measures, which many Americans called the intolerable acts, amounted to a declaration of martial law in Boston. They left Americans with no plausible course of action between the extremes of total submission and revolution. The coercive acts closed the port of Boston, with some minor exceptions, until Bostonians provided restitution to the East India Company, compensated customs officers for their losses, and showed proper respect for law and order. The Charter of Massachusetts, its constitution in effect, was severely altered to give the royal governor extensive powers. He could now appoint or fire all judges of the inferior courts of common pleas, commissioners of lawyer and terminal, that is, judges who dealt with treason, felonies and misdemeanors, the Attorney General, provosts, marshals, justices of the peace, and other officers of the council or courts of justice. And upon every vacancy of the offices of Chief Justice and judges of the Superior Court, the governor shall have full power and authority to nominate and appoint the persons to succeed to the said offices, who shall hold their commissions during the pleasure of his majesty. Jurors would no longer be elected, but instead would be appointed by sheriffs, who served at the pleasure of the governor. Except for conducting routine business once a year, the Massachusetts assembly was forbidden to meet without permission from the governor. Even meetings throughout Massachusetts required similar permission to convene, and participants were forbidden to discuss anything that the governor deemed inappropriate. In addition, a military governor, General Gage, replaced the civilian governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and Gage's authority would be backed by four regiments of British soldiers. This was the same number, around four thousand, a ratio of one soldier to every four civilians that had led to the Boston Massacre a few years earlier. Civilians could be compelled to provide lodgings for these soldiers, and if a soldier or any officer of the Crown was accused of murder or other capital offence, his trial could be moved to England or to another colony at the discretion of the governor. It was with good reason that some Americans dubbed this last provision the murder act. The Tea Party had been universally excoriated by members of parliament, even those MPs known as Friends of America called it a criminal act and demanded restitution for the East India Company. But some of these MPs vigorously protested the coercive acts as overkill. It was unfair, they said, to punish all Bostonians, indeed all residents of Massachusetts, for the criminal actions of a small group. Over the coercive acts would compel Americans to confederate in self-defense, and a full-scale revolution would probably be the result. These were reasonable concerns and accurate predictions, as it turned out, but most MPs were not in a reasonable mood. Indeed, one member went so far as to demand that Boston be burned and completely destroyed as the Romans had done with Carthage. The British Ministry had considered the possibility of bringing ring-leaders of the Boston Tea Party to England for trial. The British had a list of the usual suspects, such as Samuel Adams and John Hancock, but they knew they had virtually no chance of finding witnesses who would testify against these popular resistance-leaders. Prime Minister North therefore consoled himself with the belief that it was reasonable to punish the entire town of Boston, because that town has been the ring-leader of all violence and opposition to the execution of the laws of this country. In other words, the coercive acts were payback for much more than the Boston Tea Party. Many prominent Americans also condemned the destruction of East India Company tea. Benjamin Franklin, writing before passage of the coercive acts, called the Tea Party an act of violent injustice on our part, claiming that it was improper to destroy private property in a dispute about public rights. Franklin feared the Tea Party would give the British an excuse to wage war against Americans, so he urged the Massachusetts Assembly to indemnify the East India Company before Parliament retaliated. George Washington was another American who condemned the destruction of tea, but his harsh reaction to the coercive acts illustrates their tremendous theoretical significance. The coercive acts fit perfectly into the conspiracy theory that some American radicals had been pushing since 1763, because those acts seemed to provide conclusive proof that the unjust actions of the British government over the past decade were not unrelated events. The coercive acts were viewed by many Americans as the culmination of a plan or design to extinguish American freedom and establish despotism. As Washington wrote in letters to Brian Fairfax, July and August 1774, the coercive acts made it as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness that there is a regular systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation among us. The British government is pursuing a regular plan at the expense of law and justice to overthrow our constitutional rights and liberties. This fixed and uniform plan was designed to establish the most despotic system of tyranny that ever was practiced in a free government. In short, what further proofs are wanting to satisfy one of the designs of the ministry than their own acts which are uniform and plainly tending to the same point. Washington was convinced beyond the smallest doubt that these measures, the coercive acts, are the result of deliberation. To appreciate the theoretical significance of Washington's remarks, we need to recall this passage from the Declaration of Independence. Prudence indeed will dictate that government's long-established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. That when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, invinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. As I explained in an earlier essay, a design to establish despotism was the bright line in radical-wig ideology that separated the right of resistance from the right of revolution. Under certain conditions, which I will discuss in a later essay, resistance against specific laws was viewed by radical-wigs as justifiable, but revolution was another matter entirely. A revolution was not justified unless it could be shown that unjust laws were part of an overall plan to establish despotism. As John Locke put it in his Second Treaties of Government, 1690, Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, reverications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people and they cannot but feel what they lie under and see whether they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected. George Washington was not alone in viewing the course of acts as conclusive proof of a deliberate plan by the British government to establish despotism. Far from it, the same opinion was expressed many times by many Americans in letters, speeches, pamphlets, newspaper articles and public documents. According to the Boston Committee of Correspondents, the coercive acts were glaring evidence of a fixed plan of the British administration to bring the whole continent into the most humiliating bondage. One orator spoke of the decision to station thousands of British troops in Boston as springing from a plan systematically laid and pursued by the British ministry nearly twelve years for enslaving America. In a summary view of the rights of British America, 1774, Thomas Jefferson wrote of the coercive acts, Scarcely have our minds been able to emerge from the astonishment into which one stroke of parliamentary thunder has involved us before another more heavy and more alarming is fallen on us. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day, but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers to plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery. In the fall of 1774, John Adams, using the nom de plume Novanglis, published what was perhaps the most detailed account of how British politicians and American Tories had conspired for years to strip Americans of their rights and liberties. Throughout these essays we find references to a manifest design, settled plans, systematical means, and so forth. The theoretical implications of the coercive acts were brilliantly summarized by Bernard Baylan, the origins of American politics 1967, pages 11 and 12. Responding to those modern historians who had dismissed American claims of a British conspiracy as extravagant, rhetorical, and apparently far from the realities of the time, Baylan wrote, We shall have much disbelief to overcome for what the leaders of the revolutionary movement themselves said lay behind the convulsion of the time. What they themselves said was the cause of it was nothing less than a deliberate design, a conspiracy of ministers of state and their underlings to overthrow the British constitution both in England and in America and to blot out or at least severely reduce English liberties. This undertaking it was said which had long been brewing had been nourished in corruption, rank festering corruption rising from the inmost recesses of the English polity and coursing through every vein. What was happening in America through the 1760s point by point in the controversy with England could be seen by the end of that decade as fitting a pattern of concerted malevolence familiar to every 18th century student of history and politics. Britain it was said was following Greece, Rome, France, Venice, Denmark, Sweden, in fact almost the whole of continental Europe from the liberty of a free constitution into autocracy and the colonies for reasons variously explained were in the van. Individual details stamp act, towns and duties, Boston massacre and ultimately and overwhelmingly the coercive acts added up to something greater more malevolent than their simple some which was finally and fully revealed in the substitution of military for civil actions in 1775. Thank you for listening to excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history visit www.libertarianism.org