"The Alternative of Williamsburg": A British Cartoon on Colonial American Violence

In the summer of 1774, the Revolutionary crisis in the American colonies moved into its last and decisive stage. The Continental Congress launched an economic embargo against England in September 1774 by adopting the Articles of Association. The terms of this embargo—nonimportation, nonexportation, and nonconsumption—had serious ramifications both in the colonies and in Great Britain.

The year between the summers of 1774 and 1775 proved dangerous to Loyalists who chose not to comply with the rules of the Association. In Virginia many Loyalists encountered the wrath of the Patriots. For example, Robert Shedden, a Scottish merchant in Norfolk, was severely censured for having sent orders for goods to Andrew Lynn of Glasgow. The committee of Accomac declared Arthur Upshur "out of favor with the country" and fined him £100 for a similar offense. Committee members in the port of Yorktown, VA, forced a vessel belonging to the prestigious London firm of merchant John Norton to return to England without unloading because its cargo included a small shipment of tea.

Twelve miles away in the colonial capital of Williamsburg, Patriots erected a scaffold from which they hung a cask of tar and a barrel of feathers. The Patriots compelled several recalcitrant merchants to appear before the threatening scaffold and sign an endorsement of the Articles of Association. That Williamsburg scene became the subject of Philip Dawe’s anti-American mezzotint, "The Alternative of Williams-Burg," which satirized the widespread use of physical violence in 18th-century American colonial society. Printed in London for R. Sager and J. Bennett on February 16, 1775, the political cartoon has been preserved in the Records of Exposition, Anniversary and Memorial Commissions, Record Group 148, as part of the records of the George Washington Bicentennial Commission for the Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of George Washington in 1932. An analysis of the events in Virginia and the other British American colonies that inspired the production of Dawe’s mezzotint helps explain its contents.

BACKGROUND

Most American colonists believed that the advantages of belonging to the British Empire outweighed the disadvantages until the British Parliament passed a series of laws in 1767, called the Townshend Acts, to tax the colonists in order to pay the increasing costs of maintaining the British Empire. When these unpopular laws were enacted, the Virginia House of Burgesses, meeting in Williamsburg on May 16, 1769, unanimously adopted a set of resolutions. These included an assertion that the right to tax Virginians belonged solely to the House of Burgesses. The following day, Baron de Botetourt, the British Governor of Virginia, promptly dissolved the Virginia assembly. The next day the Burgesses met informally inWilliamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern and adopted the Virginia Association, a resolution that was quickly copied by the other colonies. The Virginia Association banned importation of British goods, slaves, and many European luxury goods. Maryland followed suit in June, South Carolina in July, Georgia in September, and North Carolina in November. The rest of the American colonies drew up nonimportation pledges or tightened sanctions already in place.

Throughout the colonies, strong-arm tactics were used by the Sons of Liberty—vigilante groups who often disguised themselves as laborers, blacks, or Indians—to enforce these "voluntary" agreements. Consequently, the British repealed the hated Townshend duties (except the tax on tea) by 1770.

The relatively calm period that prevailed following the repeal of the Townshend Acts quickly erupted into violent protest after Parliament’s passage of the Tea Act in 1773. Perceiving that the new legislation undercut the colonies’ political and economic position, Sons of Liberty bands throughout the American colonies protested and frequently prevented the unloading of British tea. The most vivid incident was the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Parliament retaliated the following year with the Coercive Acts (referred to as the Intolerable Acts by the colonists). These acts, especially the first such measure, the Boston Port Act, created economic stagnation and suffering and served to incite the otherwise cautious colonists into active protest. Patriots in Williamsburg, VA, declared June 1, the day set for closing the port of Boston, as a day of fasting and prayer in support of Massachusetts citizens. Furthermore, the Virginia assembly denounced the occupation of the port of Boston by British troops as a "hostile invasion." Fearing similar treatment for any colony that displeased Parliament, all the colonies except Georgia sent delegates to Philadelphia in September of 1774 to formulate a united stand against recent British colonial policy.

This body, meeting in Philadelphia’s Carpenters Hall, became the First Continental Congress. It passed the Declaration of Rights on October 14 and the Articles of Association on October 20. The Declaration of Rights fulfilled the resolution of the delegates to "state the rights of the colonies," which they declared to be the same "rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects, within the realm of England." The preamble to the Association asserted, "We, his Majesty’s most loyal subjects ... affected with the deepest anxiety and most alarming apprehensions ... find, that the present unhappy situation of our affairs is occasioned by a ruinous System of colony administration ... evidently calculated for enslaving these colonies and with them the British Empire." Fourteen articles list the grievances of the colonists and outline action to be taken by the colonies that, like the earlier resolves made in the separate colonies, included nonimportation, nonconsumption, and nonexportation of British goods. The Association also provided for committees to be "chosen in every county, city and town ... to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association ... ," for committees of correspondence in each colony to inspect the customhouses and "to inform each other, from time to time, of the true state thereof ... ," and for violators to be punished by publicity and boycott The document concluded with a pledge binding the members to the Association and a recommendation that the various colonies establish regulations to carry out the plan of the Congress.

The embryonic government structure in Philadelphia matured in the crucial year of 1775. Colonists developed effective economic resistance, extralegal institutions of political control, and a revolutionary military organization. According to historian Warren Billings, the colonies "moved from sporadic protests against specific acts to a sustained and concerted movement by a people capable of fighting a long war, forming effective governments, administering extensive territories, and, to some degree, reordering American society."

In Virginia additional provincial conventions met in March, June, and December and became a de facto legislative body to organize military resistance and pass binding ordinances. In July, Virginia established a Committee of Safety to administer the affairs of the colony betweensessions of the convention. Both the conventions and the Committee of Safety raised, equipped, and provided training for colonial military forces. On the local level, Patriots in Virginia established county committees to enforce the articles of the Continental Association and to raise forces for local defense. At least 33 counties and three towns, including Williamsburg, established committees by early 1775. These local instruments of resistance rallied much support for the Association and, after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, for the Revolution.

The local committees, often self-appointed and usually composed of the Sons of Liberty, loosely interpreted the authorization of the Continental Congress to observe, condemn, and publicize the conduct of those citizens who refused to pledge. In an effort to weed out disloyal or wavering colonists who would not Associate, committee members looked into private papers, monitored individuals’ conduct, and reported suspects. The repercussions of engaging in disloyal activities-defined as passing information to known Loyalists, recruiting for the British, assisting Loyalist refugees, breaking the embargo, and even drinking tea-could be severe. Punishments included intimidation, vilification, humiliation, whipping, beating, and tarring and feathering. Historian Catherine Crary commented that "tarring and feathering, followed by a rough ride on a rail or a parade through the town amid the scorn and derision of the mob, was no mild punishment, but an effective one which the Tories seriously dreaded."

The price of loyalty to the Crown in Virginia and the other colonies could be very high, as Dawe’s mezzotint suggests. Tar and feathers hang threateningly over the scene as colonists, holding crude clubs, knives, and scissors, coerce merchants and other Loyalists into signing the nonimportation agreement and even into taking an oath of allegiance to the new Continental Congress. The colonists’ esteem for John Wilkes, a Londoner and political radical who championed individual liberty and fought for his seat in the House of Commons, is indicated by the gift of tobacco on which the colonists force the Loyalists to sign.

The statue of Botetourt, an actual statue found in Williamsburg, represents the relations between the British and the colonies. Botetourt was a popular Governor in Virginia and was mourned and buried with high style in the Chapel of William and Mary in 1770. The "alternative" of Williamsburg, that is, the alternative to refusing to sign the agreement, presumably includes tarring and feathering, clubbing, or worse. Although these and other particulars of the cartoon’s contents and significance may be argued, cartoons, in the words of M. D. George, author of "America in English Satirical Prints," provide "immediate reactions to events, ... trends of propaganda, waves of emotion, common assumptions, myths, fantasies, distorting mirrors, political climates— ... what is called public opinion." The featured document reveals volumes about British perceptions of events unfolding in the rebellious colonies.

Selected Bibliography Billings, Warren, John Selby, and Thad Tate. Colonial Virginia: A History. White Plains: KTO Press, 1986. Crary, Catherine, ed. The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings From the Revolutionary Era. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973. Thomas, Peter, ed. The American Revolution: The English Satirical Print 1600-1832. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986.

Note: When the First Continental Congress met on September 5, 1774, in Philadelphia, one of its earliest acts was to elect Charles Thomson as Secretary of the Congress. He served in this capacity for both the Continental Congress and its successor, the Congress of the Confederation, for 15 years-until the establishment of the Federal Government in 1789. Thanks to Thomson’s conscientious care, the "Papers of the Continental Congress," now in the National Archives of the United States, provide modern historians with a rich record of events during the formative years of the United States. The Articles of Association are included in the Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, Record Group 360, and have been reproduced by the National Archives in a documentary teaching package entitled TheConstitution: Evolution of a Government. For more information, call the Education Branch at 202-501-6172, or access the Digital Classroom at http://www.nara.gov/education.

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TEACHING ACTIVITIES

Cartoon Analysis

1. Use the Cartoon Analysis worksheet with your students to analyze the document.

Cartoon Techniques

2. Help your students to define the following techniques: symbolism, ridicule, caricature, metaphor, satire, and puns. Ask them to find examples of each of these techniques in the cartoon. Identify with the class the dominant techniques used by this cartoonist. The most effective cartoons use symbols and other devices that are unusual, simple, and direct. You might invite an art teacher to join in a class discussion on the elements that make a cartoon effective. Direct the students to write a paragraph evaluating the effectiveness of Dawe’s use of symbols and each of the other techniques identified in this mezzotint.

Time Line

3. Use the note to the teacher, textbooks, and other secondary sources to make a time line of the events surrounding the topic of this cartoon. Divide the class into groups of three, give each group a copy of the time line, and ask them to create a line drawing to represent each entry on the time line. As an alternative, this activity could be used as an evaluation tool at the end of a unit on pre-revolutionary American history. Give the students a list of events surrounding the topic, and ask each one to place the items on a time line and to draw a representative visual for each entry.

Point of View

4. Write the following questions on the chalkboard for your students to consider aloud: From whose point of view is this cartoon drawn? What evidence do you see of the cartoonist’s viewpoint? What traits make you feel sympathetic or unsympathetic to the cartoon’s

point of view? After discussion, ask them to locate a cartoon, broadside, poem, or pamphlet that takes a different point of view of the events related to this cartoon and then to write a paragraph comparing the similarities and differences of the two opposing items.

Opposing Perspectives

5. Discuss with your students how we know that the cartoon is drawn from the British perspective, what attitudes are expressed by the artist, and what the British might lose in a conflict against the colonies besides economic advantages. Ask students to locate three political cartoons on any subject that they like, analyze the perspective each cartoon takes, and draw a new cartoon that takes the opposite view to one of their selections. Mount these opposing cartoon pairs in a bulletin board display.

Click the image to see a printable, full-page version of this teaching activity