THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1756–1776
The American Revolution was one of the most important events of the eighteenth century. Its significance can hardly be exaggerated. It established the independence of a nation state of huge potential wealth and political power; it served as a symbol of national independence and political and economic freedom in the age of the Enlightenment; it exhausted France, diverted her energies and left her with problems so complex and so deep-seated as to be almost insoluble. It created immense political and economic problems for Britain which found itself confronted with conflicts between metropolitan authority and local elites and populations not only in the American colonies but also in India and the West Indies. The American Revolution may thus be best interpreted within an Atlantic, and not merely an American, context. As such it may be seen as the first occasion when any European dependency sought to establish an independent existence. It may with considerable profit be related to the European enlightenment in its political and social ideas. Over the longer term it may also be seen as the inauguration of an Atlantic age of revolutions, spanning the American and French revolutions and eventually the revolutions in South America in the early nineteenth century.
Historians seek comfort in generalizations, including generalizations about the American colonies but until a very late date the American colonies remained remarkably diverse. There was no American nation and very little American common feeling before the revolution. It is true that most of the colonists were of British descent, spoke English and retained many of their former cultural characteristics. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, these original cultural forms, already subjected to the influence of emigration and of the new physical environments in which the colonists lived, were rapidly changing. Insofar as an American identity was emerging it was shaped by the interaction between English and colonial values, and the varied, localized character of American life. Although communications of all kinds, pamphlets, press, post and sail, were rapidly improving, it can be an exaggeration to talk about an Atlantic community’ stretching well over 3,000 miles. No doubt the Atlantic as a thoroughfare united many of the peoples of the North American empire in a set of shared experiences, but it could lead to division and disunity as much as to community and cohesion. Colonists had inherited the Country mentality of early-eighteenth-century British politics and the rabid anti-Catholicism of the mother country, but they blended into it their own elements of populism, nonconformity and self-help.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the culture of the colonies was its pronounced Dissenting character. The four New England colonies – Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island – were strongly Puritan in character. In two of the five middle colonies, New York and Pennsylvania, in particular, the steady emigration of Scotch–Irish Presbyterians from Ulster during the eighteenth century reinforced an already strong Puritan tradition. More generally throughout the colonies, the overall effect of ‘the great awakening’ of evangelical religious groups reinforced these non-Anglican tendencies. From the late seventeenth century down to about 1720, a number of colonial rebellions against British rule had been inspired as much by religion as by the political example of the Glorious Revolution. When we recall the close relationship between the Anglican church and the Whig regime of the first half of the century, the potential danger of the cultural cleavage between the mother country and the colonists can be understood. Yet serious conflict was as yet in the future, and the government of the empire, whatever its shortcomings, was untroubled by serious colonial problems on the eve of the Seven Years’ War.
There was a general assumption on the British side that the King-in-Parliament at Westminster was sovereign over the colonies and that it therefore enjoyed the right of taxing them. When the government came to reorganize the finances and administration of the empire after the heady victories of the Seven Years’ War, it believed that it was entitled to tax the colonies. The government regarded this reorganization as a specific exercise of power, a once-and-for-all correction in the balance of imperial relationships. However the colonists regarded themselves as having the rights of Englishmen, and freeborn Englishmen at that. They had for decades enjoyed a large measure of both political and economic, to say nothing of religious, freedom and they were not now prepared to accept without protest British schemes of imperial reorganization. Quoting English political theories of the seventeenth century back at the mother country, they stood their ground on the principle of ‘No taxation without representation’. Between these two positions there appeared to be little common ground.
The Seven Years’ War inflicted serious damage upon relations between Britain and her colonies. British politicians believed that the colonists had done little to contribute to their own defence; the legislatures had been uncooperative and, in trading with the enemy during the war, the colonies had done much to prolong it. Such convictions bred attitudes of patronizing contempt for the colonists in England, summed up in Wolfe’s view of them as ‘the most contemptible cowardly dogs you can conceive’. The decisions of the British government at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 to retain the whole of Canada and to maintain a powerful commercial and military presence in the West Indies placed the American colonies right at the centre of British imperial concerns. The government believed that the North American colonies had to be disciplined and their administrations placed on a new footing. Not least, an army was to be quartered in North America and the colonists were to pay for it. On the other side, the colonists believed that the British had ridden roughshod over their rights and privileges during the war and had treated their assemblies with disdain. Now, with the threat of France removed from their northern borders, at least one of the most basic reasons for their loyalty to Britain – security – had been removed. They were not likely to look favourably upon the British demand to pay for an army of occupation. Nevertheless, most Americans were content to remain part of the British Empire. There was as yet no real desire for independence or even greater autonomy within the empire.
At the end of the Seven Years’ War the two most urgent problems facing the British government were those of settlement and taxation. The territorial gains made in the war obviously needed to be protected and consolidated and some provision made for the vast wilderness west of the Allegheny Mountains. Those in the south, especially Florida, were easily accessible from the sea. Those to the north presented further problems. The presence of 80,000 French settlers in Quebec required the presence of a military force. If this were not enough, the Great Indian Uprising known as Pontiac’s Rebellion in the summer of 1763 lent urgency to these problems. The British response to the uprising was to establish the area around the Great Lakes and the Ohio basin as a massive Indian reserve. Furthermore, in October 1763 a royal proclamation prohibited the colonists from further settlement west of the Alleghenies in order to prevent Indian unrest. The legal claims to westward expansion were not disallowed and few people questioned the justice of dispossessing native peoples of their land; for the present, however, the administration of the frontier areas was lodged with the commander-in-chief of the British army in America, a restriction which was offensive to the land-hungry colonists, who regarded it as an unnecessary surrender to the primitive redskins. From the very first it was ignored. Furthermore, the Quartering Act of 1764 placed an obligation upon magistrates in the colonies to find billets and to fund barrack supplies for British troops. This appeared to breach the principles of internal taxation, according to which the colonists believed that they ought to be taxed by their own assemblies. Taken with the proclamation and the apparently permanent establishment of a British army among them, the resentment of the colonists can be readily understood.
When George Grenville came to office in 1763, he found that the national debt had doubled during the war to almost £140 million and that the estimated expense of defending America and Canada amounted to at least £300,000 per annum. To meet these costs the Grenvi
lle government (1763–5) imposed a range of taxes which were to have devastating consequences. The new policy was announced in 1764 and 1765. It received only slight opposition in the press and commanded massive support in both Houses of Parliament. The first component of the Grenville policy was the Plantation Act, usually known as the Sugar Act, of 1764. This act defined the list of enumerated goods, imposed duties on certain heavy goods imported into the colonies and, more importantly, established a system of enforcement which was drastically different from the traditional lax habits of control. The Molasses Act of 1733 had set the duty at 6d. but it had never been rigidly enforced. The Sugar Act lowered the duty on molasses from 6d. to 3d. in an attempt to weaken the prosperity of the French sugar trade as well as to provide a substantial revenue. The new rate was agreed upon only after considerable lobbying between mercantile and West India interests. It was not prohibitive, but the government’s determination to enforce it was controversial, not least because it threatened the future of the trade in rum. A second financial measure was the Currency Act of 1764 which attempted to regulate colonial currencies. The depreciation of colonial currency had embarrassed many British debtors. The act of 1764 actually forbade the issue of colonial bills of credit as full legal tender. The third great financial measure of these years was the Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed taxes on newspapers, legal documents and on a variety of other such items. The act was intended to yield a revenue, although Grenville made it clear that the revenue was intended to defray military expenses, and not to reduce the importance of the colonial assemblies. The extension of Stamp Duties to the colonies had been mooted on several occasions in the century, most recently during the Pitt–Newcastle coalition in 1757. The time to grasp this particular nettle now appeared to be right. To the British government the great virtue of the tax was that it was cheap to collect and difficult to evade. Furthermore, the government wished to establish the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. To the colonial objection that the tax violated the principle of ‘No taxation without representation’ Grenville responded that many people in Britain did not vote but still paid their taxes. Furthermore, there was nothing new about internal taxation. For example, the establishment of the American post office in the reign of Queen Anne had subjected the colonists to internal taxation, as indeed had the Molasses Act of 1733.
The imperial strategy of the Grenville ministry was a clear departure from the ‘salutary neglect’ of earlier decades. To what extent was it a reasonable response to imperial problems, and what were its chances of success? Some of the omens were favourable. The Stamp Act was greeted with little hostility in Quebec, where a five year period of grace was allowed before documents in French were to be taxed and, with only limited disturbance, in the West Indies. But in the North American colonies they appeared unnecessary and offensive. The military objectives of the policy are not entirely clear. The colonies were in no immediate military danger. There was little prospect of retaliatory attacks from France and Spain in North America. (The only harbour possessed by France was in distant New Orleans.) Furthermore, the revenues which were to cause so much damage to imperial relations would never have amounted to more than one-third of the costs of military defence. The Stamp Act, for all the opposition it aroused, would only have yielded £60,000 per annum, according to Grenville himself. Furthermore, the colonists may have had some justification for some of their deepest fears. Grenville’s strategy was not directed only at revenue. The stated purpose of the Sugar Act also included, ‘extending and securing the navigation and commerce between Great Britain’ and America’, in practice enforcing to the letter the provisions of the Navigation Acts. With some justice, the colonists believed that their trade and prosperity were threatened by the measures contained in the Sugar Act. Far more serious, however, were the political and constitutional implications of Grenville’s measures. They breached the principle of internal taxation. The colonists regarded as unwarranted and illegitimate any taxes imposed by Parliament with the purpose of raising revenues which would render governors independent of their assemblies. To the British government and to most MPs, however, this viewpoint was unacceptable. If Parliament was sovereign then it must have the power to tax. If it did not have the power to tax and if, as the colonists were arguing, that right rested with colonial assemblies, then there could be no coherent imperial financial or commercial policy. How, then, could imperial defence be financed? How could the colonists themselves be protected from the French and Spanish? How, above all, could the empire have a secure future if it had no coherent government?
The colonial reaction to these measures took the British government by surprise. The colonial assemblies denounced the constitutional status of the measures, affirming their own entitlement to the privileges and legal rights of Englishmen. Nine of the assemblies sent delegates to a congress at New York which outlined the grounds of their objection to the legislation. If this were not enough, colonial merchants launched a boycott of trade with Britain and declared a moratorium on repayment of debt to British suppliers. In most of the colonial seaport towns, royal governors were unable to staunch the incidence of organized violence. Most of it was directed against the Stamp Act and the hapless officials who were trying to enforce it.
Faced with extensive hostility and disorder the British government had only two alternatives. One, supported by George Grenville and his party and, almost certainly, by the court was the physical suppression of what amounted to a rebellion. Those who advocated such a solution were seriously disunited, especially when Grenville fell from power in the summer of 1765. Such a policy would have found little support in a country that was just beginning to recover from the last war and would have given little support to a major land and sea campaign 3,000 miles away. If nothing else, the expense of such a war would have been impossibly daunting. The only alternative was to climb down with as much grace as possible. This was achieved with commendable dignity by the first Rockingham administration (1765–6), the successor to Grenville’s. Rockingham repealed the Stamp Act on economic grounds: the interruption to commerce and the damage to the British economy which resulted. He accompanied the repeal with a Declaratory Act which reaffirmed the supremacy of Parliament and its right to legislate for the colonies ‘in all cases whatsoever’. Not only was the Stamp Act swept away; the Rockingham ministry repealed the Sugar Act, substituting for the 3d. duty on molasses a duty of 1d. on all imports entering the American colonies. Such measures were, in the last analysis, acceptable to the colonists because they were external revenue measures, taxes upon trade, not internal taxes. An accompanying measure established a free port in Dominica which was authorized to trade with foreign colonies, and thus to regulate and tax sugar, coffee and indigo coming from the West Indies to the colonies.
These measures took the sting out of colonial resistance but they did not end it. Whilst resentment was still simmering, the British government aggravated colonial feeling by a measure associated with the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Chatham administration (1766–8), Charles Townshend. In a further attempt to meet the spiralling costs of colonial defence, Townshend proposed to raise a revenue through imposing customs duties on a wide variety of goods including paper, glass, paints, lead and – with the benefit of hindsight, most provocatively – tea. It was not merely the raising of a revenue which offended the colonists but the specific use to which it was to be applied. Unlike Grenville’s Stamp Act, Townshend intended the revenue to fund the colonial civil lists. Townshend believed that he was learning the lessons of the Stamp Act crisis, namely that imperial officials needed to have a source of revenue independent of the colonial assemblies, otherwise government could be brought to a stop whenever the assemblies or the colonists desired. At the same time, he tightened up anti-smuggling measures by facilitating searches for smuggled goods in on-shore premises. Another measure established a commission of customs in America to give drive and direction to this vitally important service. That it was established in Bosto
n reflects the central role of that city in the unravelling pattern of colonial resistance. John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies, published between December 1767 and February 1768, spelled out the constitutional and political issues and reaffirmed the principle of ‘No taxation without representation’. In the Letters, as well as in the Massachusetts Circular, which went round the colonies in 1768–9, objection was voiced to the purposes for which the revenue derived from the Townshend duties was to be put. Yet so long as the supreme legislative authority of the imperial Parliament was still acknowledged there remained some prospect of compromise and accommodation. This was, however, dashed when Boston and parts of Virginia erupted into violent demonstrations against the duties in July 1768. The British government dispatched troops in order to quell the disturbances. The colonists reacted by joining non-importation agreements, which by early 1769 had spread throughout every colony except New Hampshire. London stepped back from the brink. Some ministers had never been happy about the duties. The death of Townshend late in 1767 removed the author of the controversial measures, but it was not until May 1769 that the cabinet voted (by five votes to four) to abolish the duties, except – as a symbolic demonstration of the continuing legislative sovereignty of Parliament over the colonists – that on tea. Legislation to this effect was passed in 1770.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 38