meant no taxation with representation, either.”1
According to Palmer, “The British Americans enjoyed a lighter tax burden than [almost] any other people of the Western World.” Americans “paid no direct taxes, and not much in the way of customs duties, to the central government.” British Americans enjoyed many other freedoms as well, and this fact led some skeptics, including some modern historians, to question the motives of those Americans who fought against the British during the Revolution. Why would a people with so much freedom—more freedom than found anywhere in Europe and more freedom, in certain crucial areas, than Americans enjoy today—take up arms against a relatively benign government?
Thomas Paine addressed this issue in Letter to the Abbé Raynal (1782). Calling the Stamp Act (1765) “a slight tax upon the colonies,” Raynal could not understand why it provoked ferocious resistance in America. After all, colonial America was not ruled by an arbitrary power. “Morals there had not been insulted. Manners, customs, habits, no object dear to nations, had there been the sport of ridicule.”
Paine replied that it was not the amount of the stamp tax, large or small, that inspired widespread, violent resistance. Rather, Americans viewed the new tax as a dangerous precedent that would inevitably lead to greater taxes, so “it was necessary they should oppose it, in its first stage of execution.” Paine also noted that many Americans did not voice their opposition to the Stamp Act in terms of well-reasoned general principles. There “were many, who, with best intentions, did not choose the best, nor indeed the true ground, to defend their cause upon. They felt themselves right by a general impulse, without being able to separate, and analyze, and arrange the parts.”
Paine’s reference to “a general impulse” is key to understanding the colonial mentality. Revolutionary Americans felt, on a gut level, the inestimable value of individual freedom and the dangers of government power—a feeling that was articulated in writing by Paine, Jefferson, Adams, and other libertarian authors. Without that fundamental, ingrained, and widespread sentiment of freedom, the writings of American revolutionaries would have had few if any practical consequences.
So have I answered my previous question? Have I explained what libertarians can find to celebrate in Independence Day? Yes and no. There was much in colonial America (slavery in particular) that was ugly—but there was also the ideal of freedom that, however compromised in practice, was sincerely believed, felt, and acted upon by a significant portion of the population. This tells us, at the very least, that the ideal of individual freedom is more than a will-o’-the-wisp, that it was widely appreciated in the past and so may become widely appreciated in the future.
I’m not sure if all this is cause for celebration, but certainly it is cause for hope. Such nuances, however, are irrelevant to my life. If to celebrate means to goof off, then I will always celebrate the Fourth of July with the enthusiasm of a fanatical patriot.
1 Americans with Attitudes: Smuggling in Colonial America
Since the 17th century, American commerce had been regulated by a complex system of British laws. The basic idea behind this “mercantile system,” as Adam Smith called it—or “mercantilism,” as it was later called—was fairly simple. The colonies were to produce raw materials, many of which could be shipped only to Britain, and Britain, in turn, would produce finished products to sell to the colonies.
During the 1720s and 1730s, while Robert Walpole was the English prime minister, many of the trade laws were loosely enforced, if at all. Walpole’s motto, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” was reflected in his attitude toward the American colonies. A free-trader at heart, Walpole allowed the Board of Trade, the enforcement arm of mercantilism, to languish. And to the important position of Secretary of State for the Southern Department, Walpole appointed the like-minded Thomas Pelham, Duke of Newcastle.
The Duke of Newcastle was responsible for American affairs. More interested in the patronage of his office than in enforcing commercial regulations, Newcastle pursued a policy that the Irish statesman Edmund Burke later called “salutary neglect.” That is to say, Newcastle pretty much left the colonies alone, allowing customs officials to take bribes in exchange for looking the other way. In the view of Burke and other proponents of free trade, this neglect—or “corruption,” as some called it—allowed both Americans and Britons to prosper. It was said that Newcastle had a closet-full of unopened dispatches from colonial governors who were complaining about American lawlessness.
As a result of salutary neglect, smuggling was rampant in the colonies, and most Americans saw nothing wrong with it. They did not look kindly on government interference with their commercial activities. They agreed with Thomas Jefferson that free trade is a “natural right.”
For example, in 1756 and 1757, some 400 chests of tea were imported into Philadelphia, but only 16 were imported legally. Indeed, three-quarters or more of the tea consumed by Americans was illegal. In 1763, the British government estimated the value of commodities smuggled into the colonies at 700,000 pounds annually, an enormous sum at that time.
The preference for inexpensive tea was not peculiar to Americans. Over half the tea consumed in England was smuggled, and English smugglers, like their American counterparts, could get quite indignant when their free-trade activities were interrupted by government. Consider this reaction of an English smuggler when his vessel was boarded and his men arrested by Captain Bursack of the Speedwell, a British revenue cutter. The captain of the smugglers was not aboard when this happened, but he made his feelings known in a letter to Captain Bursack:
Sir: Damn thee and God damn thy two purblind eyes thou bugger, thou death-looking son of a bitch. O, that I had been there (with my company) for thy sake when thou tookest them men of mine on board the Speedwell cutter on Monday, the 14th of December. I would drove thee and thy gang to Hell where thou belongest, thou Devil incarnet. Go down, thou Hell Hound, unto they kennel below and bathe thyself in that sulphurous lake that has been so long prepared for such as thee, for it is time the world was rid of such a monster. Thou art no man but a devil, thou fiend. O Lucifer, I hope thou will soon fall into Hell like a star from the sky, there to lie unpitied and unrelented of any for ever and ever, which God grant of his infinite mercy. Amen.
The period of salutary neglect came to an end during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)—known in America as the French and Indian War—when many American merchants engaged in trade with the French. Trading with the enemies of Britain during wartime was something of a tradition among the colonials. During an earlier war, for instance, American merchants used neutral ports in the Caribbean to exchange their provisions for French molasses, while bribing customs officers to obtain false clearance papers.
One method of trading with the enemy was especially popular in Rhode Island, the smuggling capital of America. Flags of truce were used to exchange prisoners, and merchants found that these could be purchased at reasonable prices from colonial governors. Then, after hiring some men who spoke French to pose as prisoners, and sailing under flags of truce, American merchants traded with the French West Indies. In 1748, an American wrote to a correspondent in Amsterdam:
The sweets of the French trade by way of flags of truce has put me upon turning my navigation that way, which is the most profitable business I know of. But, my friend, of this you must not lisp a word.
This illegal trade continued during the Seven Years’ War, especially during its later phase when inhabitants
