While such works are admirable and often invaluable, unraveling the ideological threads of the American Revolution does not alone reveal the entire picture. Many of its most important legacies had little to do with ideology, with the words and writings of the sainted founders or the government they created. Examining the revolution from a truly global perspective, both geographically and thematically, forcefully reveals the often tragic interconnectedness of the world, compelling us to contemplate ourselves in an entangled world rather than as an isolated, exceptional chosen people. Removing the blinkers of a narrowly national political point of view opens new horizons of understanding, allowing us to realize the most urgent lesson taught by America’s founding moment: American actions have, and have always had, unforeseen, unimagined global consequences. Only when we examine the global impact of the American Revolution through a wide range of both political and personal perspectives can we discover a unique and long overlooked window into the thousands of men, women, and children, individuals of all social, economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, who had their worlds turned upside down by global war. Their stories, their struggles and successes, their lives and their deaths are the very lifeblood of the full story of the American Revolution. When we decenter the story of the War for American Independence and take a wider view, our understanding of the revolution and its place in world history is fundamentally transformed.
It becomes clear that though the war began in Massachusetts, it did not end with the surrender of a sword at Yorktown or the scratch of a pen in Paris. Instead, a local protest over taxes in a remote corner of North America would end on the streets of Dublin, the mountains of Peru, the beaches of Australia, and the jungles of India. In the increasingly interconnected world of the eighteenth century, an American spark would ignite an unexpected flame that would consume the globe, leaving in its wake a new world and an altered balance of power. The birth of a new nation in the west would sow the seeds of collapse for millennia-old civilizations in India, Australia, Africa, China, and the Middle East, and help speed the rise of the great powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: America, Russia, and Great Britain. The American Revolution was a war within, between, and over empires, and when the smoke cleared, new empires would emerge and old empires would be forced to fundamentally change or face a steep decline.
The shots fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 echoed across the globe from the Atlantic coast to the English Channel, from Central America and the Caribbean to Africa, India, and Australia, heralding a new world that none could have predicted and few could have imagined. Advocates of revolution in America and in Europe had hoped that the uprising in the colonies would create a global movement, a revolution without borders. But if revolutionary fervor did indeed become international, the true consequences of the revolution without borders, its remaking of institutions and reshaping of lives across the world, were not what anyone expected. A revolution in favor of liberty in one corner of the map initiated a reactionary revolution in the wider world, inflicting new suffering and new restraints on people for whom freedom and independence were not available. In the empires of France, Spain, and Britain, the hard lessons learned from the American Revolution were rigorously applied, inaugurating an authoritarian counter-revolution that stabilized and expanded Britain’s empire while fatally weakening France and Spain. The Age of Revolutions was not simply the child of the enlightened ideals of the American Revolution, but also of the fear, financial crisis, and authoritarian reaction brought by the American War.
Perhaps the most miraculous thing about the American War when viewed holistically is not that America won, but that, given the global scope of the conflict; the numerous powers arrayed against it in America, Europe, and Asia; the rioting, unrest, and threats of invasion at home and in the empire, Britain and its empire were not destroyed entirely. Not only did Britain avoid utter ruin, more than any of its rivals it emerged from the war well positioned to pursue global imperial supremacy. Far from teetering on the brink, the post-war British Empire, and commitment to it, was strengthened by the refashioning that the American crisis necessitated. The American Revolution thus did not delay Britain’s imperial rise but was instead crucial to it. The expansion of Britain in the nineteenth century was in fact predicated upon Britain’s loss in the American Revolution. The war forced Britain to think about its empire in new, more centralized, hierarchical, authoritarian ways, allowing Britain to tighten its grasp both at home and in its far-flung possessions. Britain’s survival of the French Revolution and the wars it spawned owed much to the counter-revolutionary measures it had already undertaken in the years between 1776 and 1789. At the same time, the loss of the American colonies transformed British conceptions of empire. The American War gave Britons scope to reimagine their empire—once viewed by many corrupt, indecent, and unethical—as a noble harbinger of national honor, morality, and civilization. The imperial confidence that fueled Britain’s global expansion in the nineteenth century would not have been possible without the experience of the American War.6
While the British Empire was internally stabilized, the American War destabilized Britain’s primary rivals in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. France’s pyrrhic victory bankrupted the nation and put it on the path to revolution. Spain’s triumph came at the cost of dissension and division within its American possessions, sowing the seeds of insurrection and blunting its attempts to revive its empire. During and after the war, Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire became too focused on eastern Europe to disrupt Britain’s expansion in Asia. In India too, once vibrant, expansionist powers like Mysore and the Maratha Empire were fatally undermined by the American Revolution, missing their last best chance to prevent British domination. Defeat in the American War thus paradoxically strengthened the British government in Britain, Ireland, and India, expanded the empire in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, and everywhere undermined their chief rivals for global imperial hegemony.
If measured by the goals of 1775, when Britain still hoped to retain its North American colonies, Britain’s eventual defeat may well have seemed a failure. But in hindsight, from the perspective of Britain’s nineteenth-century rise to world dominance, the war was a smashing success, a confirmation of British preeminence in the face of its most challenging threat. Britain had been buffeted on all fronts, by the combined power of all its major rivals in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and yet, while it lost some troublesome possessions in the Atlantic, it had fended off the challenge, secured its supremacy of the oceans, solidified its grasp in the Caribbean, expanded its interests in India, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, and dealt a serious, in some cases fatal, blow to its rivals. The American Revolution, for all its importance for the United States, was also, perhaps as importantly, a British victory and a world disaster.
Though very much the story of how Britain won the American Revolution, To Begin the World Over Again is not simply a triumphalist narrative of British victory against the odds, not a story of plucky British daring to place alongside tales of the Spanish Armada or the Battle for Britain. Instead, in a world of empires and imperialism, Britain’s gains in the American War came with dire consequences for people in Britain and around the globe. Hidden in the shadows of the more familiar stories of military clashes and imperial contestation, countless lives and institutions were fundamentally altered in ways that reverberate to the present day. For the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants, who did not give a damn about a civil war in British North America or the ideas and ideals that inspired it, the American Revolution was a disaster: not the birth of a new world, but the death of the old and familiar. For indigenous peoples in South America, India, Australia, Africa, and the Crimea, it marked the beginning of a steep decline. For the old empires of Spain, China, the Ottomans, and the Dutch, it spelt the curtain call from the grandest stage of world powers. For India and Ireland, it was the last real shot for independence on their own terms until the middle of the twentieth century. For
France it would usher in an age of chaos and blood. Ironically, only in America, Britain, and Russia were the results remotely positive.
The American Revolution thus certainly remade the world, but not simply through its ideals. In most accounts of the American Revolution, battlefields and debate halls, noble generals and enlightened politicians crowd the scene, providing a veneer of haloed respectability to what was in reality a nasty, bloody, confused and chaotic era. However, in the shadows of these well-worn settings and familiar figures, ordinary people had their worlds turned upside down. The violence of this imperial civil war—which stretched from kings and congressmen to paupers and felons, from Boston and Philadelphia to London, Calcutta, and Botany Bay—was one of the defining features and most important legacies of the global American Revolution. To Begin the World Over Again tells these forgotten personal stories for the first time, demonstrating how the individual and the institutional, the local and the global, were irrevocably intertwined. The geopolitical and economic aftermath of the American Revolution is well known, if passionately argued over and deeply contentious. The wartime experience of the wealthy, the well-educated and well-heeled is often discussed and easily illustrated in the countless diaries, books, newspapers, and letters that proliferated in the final decades of the eighteenth century. The voices of the poor, the struggles and triumphs of the common man and woman are, as always, nearly silent. But they can be heard, if faintly, through a close and careful reading of the archives. Here, hundreds of heart-rending accounts reveal the sheer scale of the consequences of war across the world. The imperial American Revolution altered forever the lives of everyday people, ravaging communities and sending thousands of individuals to new homes in distant lands, to opportunity, to ruin, to prison, and to the gallows. While one set of people struggled to free themselves from the bonds of empire, men and women like Micaela Bastidas, Dean Mahomet, and Yemmerrawannie found themselves bound, incarcerated, and exiled, struggling to survive in the world the revolution created. These are their stories.
1
THE REVOLUTION
COMES TO BRITAIN
On Tuesday, June 6, 1780, Ignatius Sancho, former slave, abolitionist, celebrated man of letters, and the first African to cast a ballot in an English election, looked out the window of his grocer’s shop in Charles Street in Mayfair onto a scene of menace and mayhem. Sancho’s life had begun in tragic circumstances, born on a slave ship en route to the Spanish colony of New Granada, where his mother would succumb to the harsh rigors of plantation life and his father would kill himself in despair. He arrived in England in 1731 still a child, still enslaved, where his quick intelligence caught the attention of the Duke of Montagu, whose family became his employers, supporters, and patrons for the rest of his life. Through the Montagus, Sancho met and charmed literary London, becoming friend and correspondent to Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gainsborough, and David Garrick among others. Though he lived in England nearly all his life and rose to become a property-holder and public figure, Sancho never felt entirely at ease in England. As an African adrift in a sea of white faces he felt himself to be “only a lodger” in England, “and hardly that.”1
And yet, he loved his adopted home and cherished its freedoms, grateful for the “many blessings” he enjoyed. He could be a harsh critic of Britain, especially its role in the slave trade, but when trouble with the American colonies began to brew, he instinctively sided with king and country against the rebels. At first the conflict had seemed remote, but now, in 1780, the war seemed to be bursting forth on the streets outside his own hard-won door. As he wrote to a friend, “about a thousand mad men, armed with clubs, bludgeons, and crow[bar]s” swarmed past his door on that sweltering summer evening. Led by a sailor newly returned to shore from the fight against America and its allies, the mob was, they said “off for Newgate, to liberate . . . their honest comrades.” When they arrived before the newly finished prison, a hated symbol of a new system of British justice, the crowd roared into furious action, tearing into the prison, releasing its 117 inmates—thieves, robbers, rapists, and murderers alike—smashing windows and doors, destroying the chapel and the keeper’s house before setting the hulking edifice aflame. By morning the new prison had been nearly razed to the ground.2
But the outburst of rage that summer night did not cease with the burning of Newgate Prison, and other symbols of the criminal justice system quickly fell to the combustible anger of the mob. “The Fleet Prison, the Marshalsea, King’s Bench, both Compters, Clerkenwell, and Tothill Fields, with Newgate are all flung open; Newgate partly burned, and 300 felons from thence only let loose upon the world,” a horrified Ignatius Sancho recorded. In all some 1,600 inmates, seen by many rioters as victims of an overly repressive system rather than as threats to order, were broken free from London prisons. As one rioter sentenced to die for his role in the tumult later confessed, the crowd hoped to see that “there should not be a prison standing . . . in London.” The private homes of prominent judicial officials were also targeted for destruction. Justice William Hyde’s house was pillaged and its contents spilled on the street and burnt; Justice David Wilmot’s house was leveled; and the home of Sir John Fielding, driving force behind the new policing of the capital and brother of the writer Henry Fielding, was set alight as well. Even the residence of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in fashionable Bloomsbury Square “suffered martyrdom” and had its railings ripped away, its windows shattered, and its paintings, furniture, and 200 notebooks cast into a bonfire, all while Lord Mansfield and his wife fled for their lives out the back door. Six rioters were killed at Lord Mansfield’s, including a condemned man freed from Newgate earlier that day who, Sancho bitterly commented, “found death a few hours sooner than if he had not been released.” Looking out that night at the artificial glow, it seemed to the diarist Fanny Burney as if all of judicial London was engulfed in flame. “Our square was light as day by the bonfire from the contents of Justice Hyde’s house . . . on the other side we saw flames ascending from Newgate, a fire in Covent Garden which proved to be Justice Fielding’s house, and another in Bloomsbury Square which was at Lord Mansfield’s,” all sure signs of the popular anger with the changing justice system inaugurated by the American Revolution.3
These riots, the worst in English history, were at least nominally precipitated by anti-Catholic feeling and a reaction to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. But the vast destruction visited upon these prisons and the homes of London’s juridical elite were not merely casualties of religious bigotry, but also of the American Revolution itself. What Ignatius Sancho and Fanny Burney chronicled was a violent reaction to a new British order, one that turned old notions of justice and punishment on its head—and one forged deliberately in the light of the American Revolution and the crisis of crime, disorder, and fear it generated. The descent into madness Ignatius Sancho charted in the summer of 1780 was the culmination of pressures that had been building for years. The war that had begun five years earlier in 1775 had since spread beyond Britain’s American colonies, sucking France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic into a global maelstrom that threatened to engulf the world. What had been an imperial civil war had become an imperial world war as well, ensuring that the fighting did not remain limited to the distant shores of the western Atlantic. As the theater of war rapidly expanded, and Britain moved from the sidelines to the frontline, Britons were transformed from comfortably detached observers safely ensconced in their island fastness to active participants in the traumas of the times.
Threats now appeared disconcertingly close to home—foreign invasions, revolutionary sympathizers, and emboldened criminals seemed to materialize everywhere at once. Britain, once arrogantly sure that an easy victory over America was foreordained, now became suffused with fear, paranoia, and panic. The mood of the country changed. Attitudes toward dissent and disloyalty, crime and disorder hardened, precipitating the worst popular violence in London’s history. The riots, in turn, only served to confirm and reinforce Brit
ons’ worst fears about the vulnerabilities of the nation and the dangers posed by a revolutionary age. As Londoners sifted through the charred rubble of a war-torn city, the country embarked on a mental and institutional refashioning, a counter-revolutionary reimagining that would reshape domestic policy and help keep the tide of crime, disorder, and revolution at bay in the turbulent years to come.
The first sign that the American War was no ordinary conflict, that Britain was not immune to the dangers of a revolution an ocean away, could be seen on the streets of the capital, where crime and disorder appeared to be growing at an alarming rate in the years after 1775. This in itself was unusual. For most of English history crime rates had fallen during times of war as those individuals most likely to fall into criminality—poor young men—were drafted into the military and sent abroad to fight. Contrary to established historical patterns, however, crime rates began to rise dramatically during the American Revolution, with prosecutions increasing by as much as 50 per cent in London between 1779 and 1782 and only grew in the years following the end of the war in America. This surge in crime was in part a result of the enormous pressures placed upon the British people by a truly global conflict. Eighteenth-century crime rates were largely driven by men, but the war witnessed a highly unusual phenomenon: men and women were equally affected by the growth in crime. The war placed a great deal of strain on the wives left behind by soldiers and sailors, and it is no surprise that growing numbers turned to crime as a way to survive. Mary MacDaniel explained her own sad descent into crime; “we happened to get a little drop of liquor in our heads, it is natural, Sir. My husband and son were killed in America.” With her husband and son dead an ocean away, MacDaniel had turned first to the menial labor often undertaken by poor women with few options, working as a cleaner or servant in the homes of her better-off neighbors. “I go out a charing very hard for my bread,” she told the court, but in the absence of a reliable income and with the difficulty of securing one when alcohol has become a daily necessity, MacDaniel turned to theft, robbing newly enriched soldiers who, unlike her husband, had returned from the war. She was not alone in her desperate turn to crime.4
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