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CHAPTER SIXTEEN AUTHORITY TO REGULATE "It has not been made a question, that I know of, whether the parliament hath a right to make laws for the regulation of the trade of the colonies," Samuel Adams wrote in the Boston Gazette at the relatively late date of January, 1772. After making that observation, Adams next answered one of the questions asked in this chapter: whether, in addition to not questioning parliamentary authority, colonial whigs positively acknowledged Parliament's authority to regulate the foreign trade of the colonies. "Power she undoubtedly has to enforce her acts of trade," Adams said of Parliament. Historians should heed well the identity of the person who wrote these words. The messenger is more important than the message. He has often been depicted as the most militant of whigs, an advocate for independence, not a constitutionalist willing to concede Britain its customary due. Yet on this issue of trade regulation, a potential area of contention that some scholars surmise must have been a real cause of the American Revolution, Adams did not make an issue of Parliament 's "right to make laws for the regulation of the trade of the colonies ."l He accepted that jurisdiction. Like all other American whigs, he said that Parliament's authority to regulate the trade of the colonies was a constitutional authority. The unanimity of American whig acceptance of Parliament's author222 AUTHORITY TO REGULATE 223 ity to regulate trade helps make the case for saying that the Revolution was a constitutional conflict. After all, trade regulation, as Albert B. Southwick has pointed out, was a power every colonial whig knew could have "proved more onerous than a hundred Stamp Acts. This is something to remember by those who hold that the Revolution was ignited by grievances basically and principally economic, and who believe that the political theories advanced were merely so much specious rationalization designed to conceal the 'real' motivations of the struggle."2 There is a side issue, a myth of the American Revolution that is worth reconsidering in terms ofthe fact that colonial whigs said Parliament had constitutional authority to regulate their trade. It is the fantastic assumption that colonial whigs found their "legal" principles in natural law, that the British constitution was not their guide, but wanting independence they excogitated from the "laws" of nature a case to fit their needs. Surely, if the Americans had any grounds for appropriating naturallaw it would have been on the authority-to-trade issue. Just as if the colonial motivations had been nationalism, the strongest argument would have been natural law-that the colonies had come to age, that they were large enough, mature enough, and rich enough for independenceso , if freedom of trade had motivated them, and had they believed that natural law could be authority for constitutional innovation, they would have claimed that free trade was one of the natural "rights of mankind." After all, if any legislative program was "unnatural," it was the British Navigation Act, which not only defied economic laws but also prevented Americans from doing business with people that today would be called their natural trading partners. The natural-law claim, to be sure, was asserted late in the contest,3 but it was drowned out by the overwhelming chorus of American acquiescence to Parliament's authority. Just what jurisdiction did American whigs concede to Parliament's authority? The question deserves closer examination than it has received in most studies of the Revolution. A good start at finding the answer are two statements of a single colonial legislature: the New York General Assembly. The first statement was made before passage of the Stamp Act, the legislation that began the constitutional crisis, and the second was made after passage of the Coercive Acts, the legislation making civil war inevitable. "The Authority of the Parliament of Great-Britain, to model the Trade of the whole Empire, so as to subserve the Interest of her own, we are ready to recognize in the most extensive and positive Terms," the Assembly assured the House of Commons in October, 1764. "But a Freedom to drive all Kinds of Traffick in a Subordination to, and not inconsistent with, the British Trade; and an Exemption from all Duties in such a Course of Commerce, is humbly claimed by the Colonies, as the most 224 AUTHORITY TO REGULATE essential of all the Rights to which they are intitled, as Colonists from, and connected, in the common Bond of Liberty, with the...

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