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.In 1767, John Dickinson, a respected and wealthy Delaware lawyer, prepared a se-ries of letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (the law against criticism of the gov-ernment remained in place, so opponents of the Townshend duties had to use pseu-donyms) to reveal the system of oppression behind the new duties.They were additional evidence of tyrannical designs, more evidence that a conspiracy thrivedin England against American liberty.As the Pennsylvania Farmer warned his read-ers, you ought to be upon your guard.against men who.serve as decoys fordrawing the innocent and unwary into snares. The Stamp Act protests had surprised the British; the nonimportation agreementagainst the Townshend duties confounded them.Early in 1767, newspapers inBoston introduced a proposal to boycott British goods, and in their regular meet-ings, Massachusetts towns began to press for nonconsumption of the items Town-shend enumerated.Until 1765, the instructions the towns issued to their delegatesto the General Court were infrequent and usually concerned matters of purely localimportance; after 1765, the instructions became stridently anti-imperial.Reading the town meetings instructions, Sam Adams sensed the trend toward abroader, more systemic protest, a shift from resistance to rebellion, and asked theGeneral Court to circularize the other colonies with a request for a common policy.No doubt Adams s real intent was to spread his own views.New Jersey and Con-necticut agreed to Adams s circular letter proposal.The Virginia House of Burgesses,meeting without a royal governor (Fauquier had just died), took advantage of its mo-mentary independence of action and concocted its own circular letter, advocatingstrong measures of some (unnamed) kind.The other colonies were indifferent to Adams s effort until the Privy Council un-wisely directed Lord Hillsborough, graduated from the Board of Trade to the newlycreated office of Secretary of State for the Colonies, to order Massachusetts to retractits original letter and colonial governors to dissolve assemblies that endorsed the cir-cular.The tactic backfired.Massachusetts refused to budge.Indeed, in August 1767 A NATI ON I N THE WOMB OF TI ME, 1764 1775 441the merchants signed a nonimportation agreement, and the idea spread to othercolonies.Reluctant merchants were bullied into signing by the Sons of Liberty.Angry at Adams, Governor Bernard refused to convene the General Court, and thetowns sent representatives to a convention instead a mock assembly, LieutenantGovernor Hutchinson sneered.But the delegates to the convention addressed thegovernor as if the convention were a sovereign body an omen of more permanentextralegal colonial bodies to come.Bernard, like Samuel Adams, sensing the changein the wind, took his pension and arranged for Hutchinson to replace him as gov-ernor.Hutchinson, thinner and more dyspeptic than usual, longed for the job butknew it was too much for him.A breakdown in 1767 had already overburdened hisnerves understandable after his house was almost pulled down around his ears.He clung to the doctrine that a supreme Parliament could not be curbed by fractiousprovincials, but hoped that he could mediate the dispute between his beloved colonyand his imperial masters.Nonimportation was a powerful and novel weapon in the protestors arsenal.Itdrew upon the increasing dependence of the British economy on colonial purchases.But its impact upon the colonists mentality may have been even more importantthan its impact of the British exporters.As T.H.Breen has argued, nonimportation,followed after 1770 by nonconsumption, that is, by boycotts, enabled ordinarycolonists to take part in the protest.Those without formal power women, for ex-ample could become patriots by refusing to buy English goods.By visibly and au-dibly putting aside private pleasures, they could make themselves into model re-publicans.By not consuming, they rejected luxury, corruption, and all the otherdefects that undermined liberty in the home country.Nonimportation and boycott also fostered the creation of protesting associationsand demonstrations.These need not be violent or expose the protestors to arrest,like mob action in the streets.Instead, they made the simplest of all private, personalactions, like buying and using or not buying goods, into political acts.What wasmore, because these acts could be shared by all purchasers in the colonies, they be-came a material counterpart to the work of the committees of correspondence uni-fying the protest across the face of the colonies.Thus a movement begun in the mar-ket town of Boston reverberated up and down the entire coastline and into theinterior of the colonies.Meeting together at spinning bees to protest, women wove new roles for them-selves.The more than a thousand women who joined these demonstrations com-bined the spiritual force of the Great Awakening with the language of disinterestedcivic virtue to produce garments for daughters of liberty. In 1774, fifty-one gentle-born women in Edenton, North Carolina, signed a pledge not to consume Britishimports, as a duty we owe.our near and dear relations
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