shaken in future ,” to dissolve the “ union with our parent Country .”
In fact , the rights triad of many of the most ardent patriots had been significantly and negatively influenced by British imperial policies following the French and Indian War . One of those patriots was John Morton , a Pennsylvanian of Swedish-Finnish descent , and a signer of the Declaration of Independence . During his stint as Chester County sheriff from 1766 to 1769 , Morton was forced to auction the homes , businesses and lands of his neighbors whose mortgages were foreclosed upon , and to imprison those whose debts remained unsatisfied . Those duties did not sit well with him because the foreclosures were caused not by his neighbors ’ profligacy , or even their bad judgment , but by British macroeconomic policies . The backstory is a little involved but key to understanding why men like Morton eventually concluded that the British government was not adequately protecting colonists ’ lives , liberties or properties and hence had to be replaced .
During the French and Indian War , real estate prices in the older , more densely populated parts of the colonies doubled and even trebled from their pre-war values . After the war , declining real money balances depressed business activity and hence incomes . The dearth of cash also sent interest rates soaring and that sent real estate prices spiraling back down to , and often below , their pre-war levels . Many of the colonists who had purchased real estate during the booming wartime economy did so by borrowing on bond or mortgage for a year or two , as was the custom for person-to-person loans at the time . When their debts came due , most had difficulty paying the principal because of the depressed economy and found it impossible to refinance because interest rates had increased so much and their collateral had lost so much value .
It was not the real estate bubble or even the consequent recession per se that radicalized colonists like Morton , who would have blamed the calamity on individual greed and miscalculation had the response to the crisis by British policymakers not been so palpably callous and ineffectual . Under normal circumstances , Morton could execute writs like fieri facias , vendicione exponas and levari facias ( which in Pennsylvania was used to sell mortgaged lands at auction for the benefit of the
State Hermitage Museum , St . Petersburg , Russia
Portrait of political theorist John Locke , by Sir Godfrey Kneller , 1697 . Locke believed that neither the King nor Parliament adequately protected the colonists ’ lives , liberties or property , and that such failure was sufficient justification to erect a new government .
lender ) with a clear conscience and even a good deal of pride at providing a Smithian administration of justice . Poor debtors , after all , were generally believed to be at fault for their miserable condition .
But what Morton and other sheriffs had to do in the latter half of the 1760s was nothing short of sinister . Most debtors could and would have paid their just debts if the authorities in London had not injured an economy already reeling from an end-of-the-war recession and credit crisis by introducing new taxes payable in scarce gold and silver , preventing the importation of more specie by greatly ramping up trade restrictions , preventing colonial legislatures from issuing new bills of credit ( paper money ) and blocking entrepreneurs from forming commercial banks . Many colonists felt that the implementation of such economically damaging policies abrogated the social contract between the Mother Country and the colonies . As editorialist “ A Lover of Pennsylvania ” told the Pennsylvania Chronicle in January 1768 :
The burthens of the late war , have greatly enhanced our debts , and we are deprived of the means of satisfying those debts , by the late regulations on our trade ; restricting our iron and some other manufactures ; prohibiting our making paper money , and laying duties on other articles we cannot well do without . And I would now ask , in the softest and tenderest
Portrait of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton , by John Trumbull , circa 1804-6 . In 1775 , Hamilton wrote that “ the origin of all civil government , justly established must be a voluntary compact , between the rulers and the ruled ; and must be liable to such limitations , as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter .”
manner , is it not unparent-like ? Is it not unnatural ? It is not inhuman ? Is it not cruel beyond description ?
“ A Lover ” was far from alone as the newspapers of the era were littered with complaints about the devastating effects of overly restrictive British macroeconomic policies . In late 1767 , a writer in the Pennsylvania Chronicle argued that many sheriff ’ s sales were occurring “ not for want of industry and assuidity … but for want of a currency , which it is impossible for him to reach .”
What to do when debtors want to pay and could pay if only the government would allow the circulation of a sufficient quantity of money ? Morton enforced the writs , as any law-abiding elite would do but , in the process , he came to harbor deep resentment against the policymakers that put him into such a difficult position . He was , after all , the instrument that stripped away the real property of His Majesty ’ s subjects in Chester County for three years , and with their land many colonists also lost their liberty and then their lives because debtors were subject to imprisonment on harsh terms .
Conductor Generalis , a handbook for Anglo-American public officials , defined prison clinically , as a “ Place where a Man is restrained of his Liberty , to answer an Offence done against the Law .” But 18thcentury debtors ’ prisons were so horrid that they represented more than a loss of liberty because they often led to death . The
The Metropolitan Museum of Art ; Gift of Henry G . Marquand , 1881 www . MoAF . org | Fall 2023 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 31