A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  As any protest movement rises, action changes people’s ideas, and the change in ideas leads to more action. This was certainly true in Boston and New York in the 1760s. In New York people erected ‘liberty poles’ in protest at British actions. Each time soldiers destroyed them, new poles were raised. British government attempts to establish a new structure of tax collectors simply strengthened people’s feeling that they were being imposed on from outside. In Boston feelings rose to a crescendo in March 1770 when troops fired on a crowd which had thrown snowballs at them and killed five people – the ‘Boston Massacre’.

  The British government retreated for a time, under pressure at home from many City of London merchants and the rioting London crowds which followed John Wilkes. It dropped all the new taxes except one on tea, and the American agitation subsided.

  Yet that could not be the end of the matter. The resentment at any attempt to impose taxation was greater than ever among those who had experienced repression in Boston and elsewhere. Within British ruling circles the fear that the colonies were intent on pursuing their own interests regardless of Britain was also greater than ever. If they were not taught a lesson, disobedience would become an unbreakable habit and the whole point of having colonies would be lost.

  From snowballs to musket balls

  There are times in history when one small action can cause an explosion, just as a pinprick can burst a balloon. That small action occurred in Boston harbour in November 1773. An East India Company ship was delivering a cargo of tea, with which the governor’s sons intended to break the boycott against the remaining tax. While thousands protested on the shore, 100 activists dressed as Native Americans boarded the ship and threw the tea overboard.

  Respectable leaders of colonial opinion were horrified. It was ‘an act of violent injustice’ stormed Benjamin Franklin. 11 But it found a powerful echo among those already bitter at the British government – and it was the last straw for that government. It appointed a General Gage as governor of Massachusetts, with a mandate to bring the colony to heel, dispatched troops to Boston and passed the Intolerance Acts which decreed that colonists breaking the laws would be hauled to Britain for trial.

  The issue was no longer taxation. It was whether the inhabitants of the colonies would have any say in the laws governing them – as Jefferson put it, ‘whether 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain give law to four million in the states of America’ 12 (conveniently forgetting that in his own Virginia, black slaves and many poor whites had no say whatever). All the colonies were threatened. There was a wave of outrage through them, and committees sprang up to give expression to it. The tea boycott spread, and the 13 colonial assemblies agreed to send delegates to another Continental Congress.

  The people at the Congress were, by and large, respectable property owners. They had risen to prominence within the structures of the British Empire and had no desire to overthrow them. Given the choice, they would have preferred things to continue in the old way. But that was not an option. They called for a new trade boycott. But the severity of the measures taken by the British government meant that such a boycott could not just be left to the merchants. It had to be reinforced by the organisation of mass resistance. In every ‘county, city and town’, people had to elect committees to agitate against buying or consuming British goods. 13

  This was not a problem for the planters of Virginia, who joined with Massachusetts in pushing for the boycott. They controlled all the structures of the colony apart from the governor. They could impose their will without disturbance. But elsewhere it raised a thousand and one questions.

  In Massachusetts popular opinion was near-unanimous against the British measures. But judges in places such as Worcester county had decided to implement the new laws. What should be done? In New York many of the wealthier merchants profited from Britain’s imperial trade and were reluctant to follow the boycott, while the powerful landowning families would follow the lead of the British governor. Again, what was to be done? In Pennsylvania, much of the Quaker merchant elite would put ‘loyalty’ to Britain above the call of their fellow colonists. What was to be done there?

  The call for committees to impose the boycott implied, whether the Continental Congress recognised the fact or not, the revolutionary replacement of old institutions by new ones.

  Class and confrontation

  In Worcester county armed farmers had to prevent the courts functioning, even though it meant confronting not British officials but local judges intent on continuing successful careers. 14 In New York City ‘carrying through the decisions that led to independence meant getting rid of … the old … authorities as much as it did breaking with parliament and the king’. The energy to do so ‘came from the “people”, both in the crowds and in the revolutionary committees’. It was ‘mechanics’ (artisans), meeting every week in plenary session, who pushed for the establishment of an ‘official’ committee, and then for the replacement of its Royalist members by ‘mechanics, traders and lesser professionals’. 15 In Philadelphia a meeting of 1,200 mechanics prodded younger members of the merchant elite into calling a mass meeting of several thousand to set up a committee.

  The move from a ‘peaceful’ boycott to war also resulted from direct action from below. After British troops shot down parading militiamen at Lexington in Massachusetts, it was an artisan, Paul Revere, who made a famous ride to warn armed local farmers that a column of British troops was on its way to seize arms hidden at Concord, near Boston. It was those farmers who fought the British at the battle of Lexington and then descended on Boston to besiege the British garrison at Bunker Hill. In each case, members of the middling and lower classes had to push aside hesitant upper-class people connected with the British establishment.

  As Edward Countryman rightly stresses in his two excellent books on the revolution, the struggle only advanced because people set up new institutions in opposition to old elites: ‘Between 1774 and the summer of 1776 those committees did in New York what similar bodies would do in Paris between 1789 and 1792 and Russia in 1917’. 16

  Such agitation was central to the events of 1776. In New York there was bitter hostility to any action against Britain from rich merchants connected to the Atlantic trade, officials dependent on the governor, and some of the great landowners. In Philadelphia the majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly were adamantly opposed to independence. The war against Britain could not succeed without the support of these two cities. But this support could only come as a result of challenges to the old economic and political elites. New, more radical people, mainly from artisan or small trader rather than rich merchant or landowner backgrounds, had to win control of the committees – which, by deciding on what could be imported and exported, exercised enormous influence over the life of the cities.

  Pamphlets as weapons

  The old upper-class political establishments did not simply disappear. They relied on the mental habits of generations to maintain deference to their rule and to blunt resistance to Britain.

  Breaking those habits and that deference required both mass agitation and mass propaganda. The mass agitation took the form of argument for the boycott, parades against boycott breakers, the burning of effigies of governors and British ministers, and the ransacking of buildings. The propaganda involved taking on and tearing apart the arguments used to back up the old ways of thinking. In 1776 alone more than 400 pamphlets appeared, as well as scores of newspapers and magazines. But the decisive role was played by a 40-page pamphlet written by a recent British immigrant, Tom Paine.

  Paine had arrived in Philadelphia early in 1775 with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin. He was a typical product of the ‘middling’ layer of artisans and small traders who were beginning to play a central role in political life. In England he had been variously a skilled corset maker, a seaman, an exciseman and an innkeeper. When he arrived in America aged just over 40, he found employment on a newly founded magazine which circulated among
similar people. Like his audience, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the boycott, but not yet a revolutionary. He later wrote that ‘attachment to Britain was obstinate and it was at that time treason to speak against it’. 17 The events of 1775 – especially the increasing harshness of the repression by Britain – changed his mind, until he was convinced of the case for an independent republic. It was this which he presented in his pamphlet Common Sense , printed early in 1776.

  The pamphlet was written in a popular style, using the language of the artisan and trader rather than that of governors and assemblymen. But it was not simply an agitational work. It sought to provide general arguments to justify the agitational demands. It did so by taking up some of the intellectual ideas which had been circulating for the previous century and a quarter – ideas culled from Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire and, probably, Rousseau – and presenting them in ways the common person could understand. Paine would have come across some of the ideas of the Enlightenment by attending popular scientific lectures and debating clubs in England. Now he translated these ideas into the language of the street and the workshop, insisting that ‘of more worth is one honest man to society than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived’. He scorned George III’s alleged ‘right to rule’, derived from his descent from a ‘French bastard’ leading a gang of ‘banditti’.

  Common Sense had an astounding effect. It sold perhaps 150,000 copies. The Pennsylvania politician Benjamin Rush later told how:

  Its effects were sudden and extensive on the American mind. It was read by public men, repeated in clubs, spouted in schools, and delivered, in one instance, instead of a sermon by a clergyman. 18

  It was one of those points in history when arguments suddenly make people see things differently. The radical movement in Pennsylvania gained impetus and was prepared to take revolutionary measures.

  Many of the wealthy merchants and large landowners remained loyal to the monarchy and still influenced sections of the population which had not been drawn into struggle in the previous two years. They won three out of four seats in an election vital for control of the assembly, and it seemed any scheme to win Pennsylvania’s backing for a declaration of independence was doomed. Yet without such backing things would be all but impossible for the other colonies.

  The radical supporters of independence saw there was only one option open to them – that which was taken by the New Model Army during the English Revolution and which was to be taken again in the Russian Revolution 150 years later. They had to build an activist movement outside the assembly to overthrow its decision. A meeting of 4,000 called for a convention of delegates to decide on the colony’s future, and the call received the support of the Committee of Privates, made up of representatives of the colony’s militia. The old assembly was suddenly powerless, with no armed force at its disposal. It adjourned on 14 June, never to reconvene, and on 18 June the popular convention met to draw up the most radical constitution yet seen anywhere. This gave the vote to 90 per cent of the male population, but denied it to anyone who would not forswear allegiance to the king. The ground was cleared for the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress a few days later.

  The founding of the new United States could only happen because the section of Pennsylvania’s population who backed independence took ‘dictatorial’ measures against those intent on clinging to the monarchy.

  Civil war within the revolution

  The American Revolution is often presented as having been relatively free of bloodshed, consisting of a handful of set-piece battles between two regular armies. But in fact the ‘civil war’ element to it meant it was very bloody indeed in some places. The Tryon Valley area of New York was controlled by a powerful Royalist landowning family, the Johnsons, who set out to crush all opposition. ‘By the time the war was over, according to some estimates, 700 buildings had been burnt, 12,000 farms abandoned, hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain destroyed, nearly 400 rebel women made widows and some 2,000 children of revolutionaries orphaned’. 19 In areas where the rebel side was stronger, measures had to be taken that infringed people’s normal ‘rights’ if Royalists were to be prevented from giving aid to British forces. So the committees censored Royalist publications, confiscated the land of those who joined the Royalist army and annulled debts to Royalist merchants and financiers; crowds tarred and feathered Royalist judges and ran Tories naked through the streets. New York City was under British occupation for much of the war, and when the rebels returned they organised popular feeling against those who had aided the British. No fewer than 20,000 Royalists left the city with the British ships in 1783. 20 The struggle may have begun as a tea party, but it certainly did not end as one.

  As the war dragged on and food shortages developed, the committees had to prevent merchants exporting food to Royalist areas and ensure there was food for the mass of people who backed the movement. They imposed heavier taxation on the well-off, controlled prices and confiscated the land of traitors. These were necessary measures if the war was to be won. But they were also measures which benefited the poor at the expense of the rich. The revolt necessarily took on a social as well as a national dimension.

  It could not have succeeded otherwise. The British strategy was to separate the colonies from one another by seizing New York, cause hardship by blockading coastal trade, and then march powerful armies to seize strategic points and towns. The British expected their mercenary soldiers to defeat the inexperienced militiamen easily, causing a loss of heart once the initial enthusiasm of the revolt wore off. They also expected merchants and landowners to withdraw from the revolt and accede to British rule as their armies enjoyed success.

  The strategy was not completely misconceived. There was a falling away of enthusiasm in the rebel armies as hardship grew. There were many collaborators with British rule in New York and, again, when they seized Philadelphia. The rebel armies did spend much of the war retreating before better-armed and better-disciplined Royalist troops. The bulk of the rebel army had to spend a bitter winter encamped outside occupied Philadelphia. The British strategy was eventually doomed for a single reason – the committees and the agitation had cemented the mass of people to the rebel cause. So long as mass resistance persisted, the rebel army could wear down the Royalist forces by retreating before them and then choosing the time for a surprise attack.

  The war was never reducible simply to class questions. In Virginia, the richest planters were happy to involve themselves in the struggle – Washington, a plantation owner, commanded the American army, Jefferson, another slave owner, wrote the Declaration of Independence. In New York, some landowners and merchants supported the British, but others joined the war against them. Even in Pennsylvania, a wealthy person like Benjamin Franklin could eventually break with his old friends in the local political establishment and become an enthusiast for independence.

  What is more, eventual success depended on the ability of these people to forge an alliance with the French monarchy against Britain. French advisers helped Washington direct the rebel army, and the French navy delivered arms and weakened the hold of the British blockade.

  Just as there were sections of the upper class which sided with the rebellion, there were many lower- and middle-class people who did not embrace the struggle for independence. Sometimes this was because they did not feel the tax question intruded on their own interests sufficiently to break with the loyalties they had been brought up to see as sacred. However, sometimes it was because the local figures most identified with the struggle were those at whose hands they had suffered in the past. So in New York state, many tenants supported the British because a hated landlord was against them. Similarly, in parts of North and South Carolina, poor farmers took up arms as Tory guerrillas because of their bitterness against plantation owners who were for independence, leading to bloody reprisals on both sides.

  The British even succeeded in getting more support than the revolutionary armies from the two most oppressed gro
ups in North America – the black slaves and the Native Americans. The Royalist governor of Virginia offered freedom to slaves who would fight for the British. A sizeable number did, and left with the British armies at the end of the war. 21 By contrast, when Congress suggested in 1779 that blacks in Carolina and Georgia be offered their freedom in return for joining the rebel army, the state governments would not even consider it. 22 This did not mean the whole independence movement was pro-slavery. In New England many radicals regarded slavery as an abomination and many individual blacks fought alongside whites in local militias. Massachusetts and Vermont abolished slavery in 1780, and Philadelphia voted to phase it out. In Maryland, poor whites and blacks talked of making common cause, and even in Virginia some of the planters began to think slavery was an institution they could do without. 23

  The British also found it easier than the colonists to gain ‘Indian’ allies, since settlers and speculators alike were intent on grabbing territory from them, and some of those most radical in the fight against the British were also most hostile to the native peoples.

  Yet the American Revolution was more than just a political break of the colonies from Britain. Out of the turmoil of the war emerged a society which had shaken off features which harked back to a precapitalist past. The feudal rights of the great landowners in New York disappeared. The deference of people to the ‘great families’ was shaken. Hundreds of thousands of people in the northern and central colonies were won to ideas of human equality and liberty from oppression which, they could see, should apply to black people as well as white. For many followers of the Enlightenment in Europe, the language of the Declaration of Independence seemed a living fulfilment of their ideals.

  The radical forces which had done so much to fortify the revolution did not keep power in their own hands anywhere. In places such as Pennsylvania they were able, for a time, to implement measures which brought real benefit to the middle and lower classes. There were state constitutions which gave all men the vote, annual assemblies, measures to protect farmers against debt and controls on prices. But by the time the states agreed to a Federal Constitution in 1788, forces wedded to the creation of an all-American free market had gained control of the state assemblies. This cleared the ground for economic change on a scale that would have been inconceivable otherwise, but also brought the spread and intensification of new and old forms of oppression and exploitation.