And once again, we have someone (two someones, really) who manage to come up with a plan that will put all this unpleasantness between the Thirteen Colonies and the British Empire to rest, and once again the physical distance between the two threatens the success of those plans.
What’s more, it turns out that the more popular of the two plans has an almost-hidden ulterior motive…
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We’ve mentioned in the past that the intent of most of the Intolerable Acts and the Coercive Acts were designed to punish the Massachusetts Province, but it had some effect on the other colonies as well. What’s more, there was a growing worry that, if Parliament could do things like this to Massachusetts, what’s going to stop them from doing it to us?
To that end, the city of Albany, NY, began making plans just in case war broke out. It was against the law, but their reasoning was that it was better to have a militia and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
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David Barclay was a British merchant who frequently plied his trade with other merchants in the Colonies. Such trade was quite lucrative for him, so when the Stamp Act was enacted, he stood to lose a lot of money because the Colonists would simply look elsewhere for the goods he sold.
Likewise, when the Intolerable Acts, and the Coercive Acts were enacted, Barclay stood to suffer even more.
So Barclay came up with a plan that would allow everyone to save face and bring these acts to an end.
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The first week or two of February 1775 could best be described as a series of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Any attempts on both sides to reach out with some form of conciliation managed to fail for various reasons.
And during all these breakdowns, the situation on the American side of the pond only got worse as time went on, largely because each side thought that the other wasn’t being responsive.
In the end, however, it didn’t really matter, because as we’ve discussed with the episodes dealing with Massachusettensis and Novanglus debating one another in print, the one thing they agreed upon was that these attempts to reach out were always, at their heart, rooted in some attempt to wrest control from the other party. Both reaching for it, neither attaining it nor caring what the other side’s argument meant at the core.
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As noted previously, the First Continental Congress composed a Petition to the King asking him for some relief from the Intolerable Acts. The petition arrived in London in mid-December, which turned out to be some bad timing for a number of reasons.
Benjamin Franklin was in town for diplomatic purposes, and he composed a letter to Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress, which summed up the problem: not only was the Petition but one among many, many other documents, it appeared that Parliament didn’t much care what the Colonies thought. And that’s the kind of thing that makes for bad relationships.
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