their
chosen representatives, every measure for the destruction of the
liberties of these colonies, and who began to listen to the dictates of
reason and of humanity only when America had become the prison of
thousands of England's soldiers, and thousands of others, hired Hessian
and kidnapped Briton alike, had been welcomed by American freemen to
graves in American soil. The measures which led to war, and the war
itself, were inspired and incited by the trading classes, as well as the
aristocracy of England, who expected, in the destruction of a powerful
commercial and menacing industrial rival, an ample return for the blood
and treasure expended in the strife. The American people recognized that
the struggle was for commercial and industrial as well as for political
independence, and the stand in behalf of American industry was taken long
before the scattered colonies met an empire in the field of arms.

CHAPTER XVI.

Writs of Assistance Issued--Excitement in Boston--The Stamp Act--Protests
Against Taxation Without Representation--Massachusetts Appoints a
Committee of Correspondence--Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry--Henry's
Celebrated Resolutions--His Warning to King George--Growing Agitation in
the Colonies--The Stamp Act Repealed--Parliament Levies Duties on Tea and
Other Imports to America--Lord North's Choice of Infamy--Measures Of
Resistance in America--The Massachusetts Circular Letter--British Troops
in Boston--The Boston Massacre--Burning of the "Gaspee"--North Carolina
"Regulators"--The Boston Tea Party--The Boston Port Bill--The First
Continental Congress--A Declaration of Rights--"Give Me Liberty or Give
Me Death!"

Even before peace had been made with France the king's officers in
America began to enforce the revenue laws with a rigor to which the
colonists had been unaccustomed. Charles Paxton, commissioner of customs
in Boston, applied to the Superior Court for authority to use writs of
assistance in searching for smuggled goods. These writs were warrants for
the officers to search when and where they pleased and to call upon
others to assist them, instead of procuring a special search-warrant for
some designated place. Thomas Hutchinson, chief justice, and afterward
royalist governor and refugee, favored the application, which was
earnestly opposed by the merchants and the people generally.[1] "To my
dying day," exclaimed James Otis, in pleading against the measure, "I
will oppose with all the