Notes and Documents

Government Interception of Letters from America
and the Quest for Colonial Opinion in 1775

Julie M. Flavell

JUST days after the news of Lexington and Concord reached London, early in June 1775, the British government ordered the opening and screening of all letters carried by the packets from the colonies to the metropolis. The resulting extracts, considered here in aggregate for the first time, form a set of post office intercepts that is probably unique of its kind. These letters represent what may be the only instance of the use of post office surveillance by eighteenth-century British ministers for opinion-gathering purposes. The undertaking sheds new light on the attitudes of the ministers as they steered the empire into a civil war. During the critical months following the outbreak of armed conflict in America, the North Administration's refusal to deal directly with the patriot leadership in the colonies exposed it to accusations of a crude predilection for coercion. These accusations have continued to inform historians' assessments of the ministry's response to the renewal of conflict after 1774. But in an era when there were no opinion polls, the government was clearly aware of the shortcomings of the diplomatic void it had created when it resorted to the unusual measure of a surreptitious gathering of public opinion in the colonies.	1
Almost half of the manuscripts produced by these interceptions are located in a well-known collection in the Colonial Office Papers at the Public Record Office. What has not been recognized is that an even greater number of interceptions from the same series, dated earlier in 1775, are in the Dartmouth Manuscripts in the Staffordshire Record Office. These constitute the first half of the total post office interceptions of the mails from America. The letters are extracts and copies of private correspondence from a random cross-section of individuals in the American colonies, selected by the General Post Office from the mails carried by the Charleston and New York packets. The nonspecific screening of private correspondence from the colonies began in early June 1775. During the next five months the practice was extended, swelling from an average of twenty-one extracts a month to an average of fifty by the end of the packet service in late 1775. The content of the letters makes it plain that ministers were looking for candid opinion from every side of the burgeoning conflict.	2
It is a truism to say that the British government at the start of the American War of Independence misjudged the extent and nature of the support it could command from the colonies. The predicament of the government, by which it misunderstood the situation in the colonies and fatally miscalculated the effects of its policies after early 1774, had historical antecedents. Since the Seven Years' War, imperial decision making had increasingly shifted to Parliament. One casualty of this transition was the influence of the transatlantic interest groups that had formerly been an important source of the government's information about the colonies. What one historian has called the government's "decisive failures of understanding" regarding the mood in the colonies during the final political crisis beginning in 1774 continues to form a central part of any narrative of ministerial decision making in London in the two years prior to American independence. 1	. . .