The Molasses Act -- Source of Precedents

Abstract

AS is the case with any nation whose destiny has been profoundly altered by a major event, this country has always conceived the American Revolution as standing out in heroic relief from the panorama of history. In our textbooks and in our assumptions, careful as we may be, the events of that time tend to be drawn in grand proportion, with the result that the whole episode assumes a uniqueness and a spontaneity that is not wholly warranted. It was not a rootless phenomenon. The great ideas of that time, with the possible exception of Independence itself, were engrained in American thinking and American experience. Throughout the colonial period these ideas appear, a hint here, a gleam there, but never-before the great crisis itself-so clearly and completely as in the controversy over the Molasses Act of I733, which, if not quite the dress rehearsal to the main performance, was the next thing to it. This Act was the culmination of years of agitation by the West Indian sugar planters. As early as i69i, when soil exhaustion was already becoming a problem in the West Indies, Parliament had heard The Groans of the Plantations. In the years that followed, sugar steadily became more expensive to raise and complaints became more frequent. In I713, after the Peace of Utrecht, an ominous gap appeared in the iron ring of British mercantilism, when the traders from New England and the other mainland colonies began to go en masse to Martinique, Santo Domingo, Guadeloupe and Surinam to glean the rich harvest of pieces of eight which the French and Dutch were paying for horses, lumber and goods of every description.' It was a crucial moment in the history of the British West Indies for it marked the beginning of the great triangular trades that were to be the making of the northern colonies. French prices for rum and molasses were sixty to seventy per cent cheaper than those of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, and their demand for supplies and slaves was seemingly insati-