George Mason: Reluctant Statesman

3. "The Necessity of the Times"

C H A P T E R T H R E E f( The Necessity of the Times" HISTORICAL "ifs" are guesswork, therefore useful only when they set off a fact more clearly by focusing on its opposite. If there had been no Stamp Act the rupture between England and America might only have been postponed. The Stamp Act was a fact that Americans had to face, and it touched off a long series of incidents that reached a climax on the Lexington green. Yet if the British had not tinkered with the old colonial system, George Mason might have lived out his days as a gentleman planter, taking only occasional notice of colonial politics. But the tinkering began. As clumsy men often do, the British leaders stepped on so many toes that instead of isolated outcries they soon had to face the wrath of thirteen colonies. After the year 1763, British policy leaped from crisis to crisis, generating colonial unity in a way that would have seemed incredible a few years earlier. No matter how Boston radicals may have welcomed the friction 30 "THE NECESSITY OF THE TIMES" 31 with England, Mason and most other Virginians did not. So the peaceful days prior to 1763 were soon a precious memory, replaced on the one hand by growing American talk about self-rule and on the other by determined ministers in London who shook with rage at American impertinence. It all began innocently enough. British officials, failing to see that they were in fact sharply reversing old policies, had sought new sources of tax revenue. To the colonial American, Mother England seemed suddenly to have turned into a grasping and greedy scold. Moreover, colonial pocketbooks that had been reasonably obese became flabby, convincing Americans that the shift in policy, far from being shrewd statesmanship, was merely common , ordinary rapacity. The Stamp Act was the first symbol of the power struggle. In Virginia Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee were the foremost spokesmen of resistance. Henry supplied the fiery oratory while Lee represented the rising element that in a decade would be called the radical patriot group. If these two men occupied the center of the stage, Mason was close by in the wings, or often in the prompter's box. During the opening scenes of this developing drama he became a close friend of Lee and may have been the coadjutor when Lee wrote a bold address to Governor Fauquier in 1765. Specie-poor Virginians, having passed a paper currency act that British ministers promptly struck down, complained that Americans had the right to be governed by "laws made with our own consent." A copy of the address in Mason's handwriting further declared that Americans gloried in their British connection "as our only security; but this is not the dependance of a people subjugated by the victorious arms of a conquerer." The stamp tax that soon followed quickly raised American hackles. Coming on the heels of the Currency Act, it was to men of Mason's circle a clear case of an illegal levy that had to be re- PATRICK HENRY, the volatile Virginian whose enormous popularity made him the first governor of the new state of Virginia. "THE NECESSITY OF THE TIMES" 33 sisted. He actively joined the patriots by drafting a plan for the Fairfax County burgesses that would permit certain classes of debtors and landlords to sidestep the use of stamped paper. Then abruptly the whole stamp dispute took an embarrassing personal turn for Mason. His naive cousin, George Mercer, appeared in the Colony as His Majesty's duly-appointed stamp distributor. In \Villiamsburg he received the kind of acclaim reserved for the bearers of plague. The reception committee, wrote Governor Fauquier, could have been called a mob "did I not know that it was chiefly if not altogether composed of gentlemen of property in the colony." Violence averted, Mercer beat a meek retreat to England. There he and others assured Englishmen of the lengths to which Americans would go to resist such taxes, but fresh news of threats to suspend American imports of English goods drew more attention . Parliament, becoming jittery about the whole business, accepted the advice of frightened British merchants and repealed the odious act, fearing the bankruptcy of twenty London firms much more than a thousand protests from the colonies. News of the quick reversal by Parliament brought rejoicing in...