Borrowed Rhetoric: The Massachusetts Excise Controversy of 1754

Abstract

W X T HEN John Quincy Adams in i823 expressed his concern that the United States might become a mere cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war, he vented a fear which Americans have frequently felt. As we seem at last to be acquiring a certain degree of confidence in our national distinctiveness, now is perhaps a propitious time for a closer examination of those occasions when the direction of the American cockboat through uncharted seas was, in fact, determined by the course of the British vessel out ahead. We may drop the nautical metaphor, but instances of the relationship which it suggests occur frequently throughout our history. Just as historians of the national period recognize that such diverse phenomena as the antislavery movement, William Graham Sumner, Hull House, and New Deal economics cannot be fully understood without a look at William Wilberforce, Herbert Spencer, Toynbee Hall, and John Maynard Keynes, so colonial historians find that events of their period frequently come more sharply into focus when British history on a similar subject is examined. Such an event is a little-known controversy over a liquor excise bill which shook Massachusetts in I754. This dispute illuminates several aspects of colonial Massachusetts's history: the conflict between the rural interior and the mercantile coast; the political sagacity of Governor William Shirley (a quality which John Schutz and others have remarked)'; the use of London agents in the resolution of colonial squabbles; and the development of constitutional theory in the pre-Revolutionary generation-but its most interesting feature is the way it was decisively conditioned by a similar