The new king believed that America was growing wild, and that the institutions with which America was identifying itself were opposed to the British Government. Immediately after the peace of Paris, orders were issued directing the execution of the Sugar Act, the Navigation Act, and those arbitrary laws which had long been urged by the Lords of Trade, laws which contemplated bringing the colonists under the absolute control of the mother country. "The Sugar Act," said the Boston Evening Post, "has from its first publication (1733) been adjudged so unnatural, that hardly any attempts have been made to carry it into execution."
A general meeting was urged and it was suggested that a committee write to every maritime town in the province. The Boston Gazette of January 16, 1764, says that the merchants were communicating their actions to every town. The Boston Evening Post, for February 13, 1764, has an account of the meeting of the merchants of New York, held at Mr. Burn's Long Room.
The acts of the Lords of Trade were oppressive to the point of arousing those who were at heart neither Tory nor Whig, and thereby strengthened the Whig party in America, a party believing in the principles of, and claiming an ancestry in, Buchanan and Languet, Milton, Locke and Sidney . . ." of the political school whose utterances are inspired and imbued with the Christian idea of man."[1] We shall see how the seed of democracy, warmed by the battle for a free press and greater personal freedom, grew overnight into a sturdy plant, under the influence of hot resentment against these moral wrongs.
The first organized action took place in Boston on the motion of Samuel Adams, on the 24th of May, 1764.
- ↑ Rise of the Republic, 165.
