The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  There, for some time, the situation hung. In the Atlantic world and Europe the early 1770s were years of economic prosperity. The British government was satisfied that it had not only maintained its constitutional rights but, also in the hugely important case of tea, shown its determination to stand by the principle of the duties and to establish independent civil lists. Normal trade was to a large degree restored and the non-importation and non-consumption agreements within the colonies ended. But the bitter conflict, and the memories it evoked, would not go away. During the next few years the situation steadily deteriorated because of a series of incidents which was interpreted by each side as evidence of the bad faith of the other. Constitutional disputes in a number of colonies, especially Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, kept the pot simmering. In 1770–1 demands among the Anglican clergy in America for the appointment of an American bishop caused a storm of protest among Protestant denominational groups, especially the Congregationalists. Meanwhile resistance to revenue officers had become something of a mark of colonial resistance. In 1772 violence among smugglers led to the destruction of the revenue ship, HMS Gaspee, by groups from Rhode Island while she was aground on a sand bank. The British decision to institute a commission of inquiry aroused the deepest misgivings about her constitutional authority to do so. The culmination of these conflicts came in 1772–3. The tea duties had financed the salaries of the governors of New York and Massachusetts and those of the lieutenant-governor and judges of the latter. Massachusetts patriots and protesters objected to the constitutional basis of these provisions and brought the dispute to a head. They were now denying the authority of Britain to tax without consent, questioning her right to mobilize troops within the colony without the approval of the assembly and repudiating her power to try revenue offences in the Admiralty courts, where trial by jury would not apply. The campaign against the tea duties was resumed. The destruction of £10,000 of tea in Boston harbour in December 1773 raised the twin issues of law and order and of parliamentary sovereignty. The colonists believed that, faced with the Boston Tea Party, as on previous occasions, the British would back down. British ministers believed that a small group of conspirators was threatening to disrupt law and order in Boston and in the colony of Massachusetts, and that if their efforts were not confronted then the spirit of disorder might spread throughout all thirteen colonies. The government of Lord North (1770–82) decided that the Boston Tea Party deserved exemplary punishment so that, once and for all, the sovereignty of Parliament would be asserted and the rule of law maintained. There is no doubt that ministers reflected public and parliamentary opinion in taking such a strong line against those responsible for the Boston Tea Party. However, the four ‘Coercive’ or ‘Intolerable’ Acts of 1774 probably went further than most observers in Britain expected.

  The first of the ‘Coercive’ Acts was the Boston Port Act, which effectively closed the port of Boston and moved the customs house to Salem, where it would be free from the attentions of the town mob. The Massachusetts Charter Act was much more far-reaching. It strengthened the powers of the governor of the colony over judicial appointments. It also allowed the governor to appoint the upper chamber of the assembly, in place of the annual election of its members by the lower house. The Administration of Justice Act allowed trials of Massachusetts citizens accused of law and order offences to take place outside the colony. Finally, the Quartering Act reinforced the powers of the governor and magistrates to billet troops wherever they thought necessary. This policy met with overwhelming support in Parliament, but the government wished to temper its firmness with conciliation. Although additional troops were to be sent to Massachusetts, it was at pains to reassure the colonists that troops were only to be used as an aid to the civil power. And, in replacing the existing governor of the colony, Thomas Hutchinson, with General Thomas Gage, the government had chosen a man who had great experience of America and who was well known and, to a degree, well liked there.

  It is one of the ironies in the history of the American Revolution that at just this juncture the British government at last produced its long-awaited policy for Canada. The Quebec Act placed the province under the rule of a governor and of a nominated council. The act imposed English criminal law but left French civil law in existence for the indefinite future. Many aspects of the act were anathema to the American colonists: the authoritarian nature of the political regime thus proposed, its concession of full rights to the Roman Catholic Church and, not least, its definition of the boundaries of Quebec to include vast areas north of the Ohio and as far west as the Mississippi. It was impossible for the colonists to regard the Quebec Act of 1774 as anything other than a further coercive measure. They ignored the humane and progressive features of the Quebec Act. Most of the inhabitants of Quebec were Roman Catholic and it satisfied their aspirations; it brought under one political regime a vast area which was linked by the river system of the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River; it did something to conserve and protect the Indian people of the wilderness. In practice, however, on political, religious and territorial grounds the Americans regarded the Quebec Act as the last straw.

  A wave of anger swept through the colonies; meeting after meeting denounced the legislation of 1774, refused to acquiesce in it and called for its repeal. Even before the texts of the acts had been received, plans were being made for a continental congress, which met in September 1774 in Philadelphia. By then, American public opinion had converted the complex constitutional disputes over taxation and law and order into a simple issue of freedom versus slavery. It was quickly evident that the Coercive Acts were unenforceable. In Boston there were even calls for the militia to be embodied and trained. The Congress decided in favour of the renewal of non-importation and non-consumption agreements, called for a national association of local committees to enforce them, demanded the repeal of the Coercive Acts and of the Quebec Act and denounced as illegal the maintenance of a military force in any colony against the wishes of that colony’s assembly. What the colonies were now fashioning, in effect, was little better than an empire founded on voluntary attachment to the monarchy. To the government of Lord North, such a conception rendered imperial government impossible and endangered the stability of the commerce on which the prosperity of the British economy was increasingly dependent. Already by 1772 no less than one-quarter of Britain’s exports were destined for the colonies. What the Congress was advocating struck at the economic as well as the political foundations of the empire. Within months not only England but also Ireland and the Caribbean islands began to feel the full economic force of the boycotts.

  The British government could not tolerate such colonial defiance, and instructed governors to suppress the local committees. Gage asserted that what looked increasingly like a state of rebellion in Massachusetts could only be suppressed by at least 20,000 troops. The government offered to send 4,000. It also passed the Non-Intercourse Act in March 1775, which excluded the New England colonies from trade with any area outside Britain, Ireland and the West Indies. As the other colonies came to endorse the protest of Massachusetts and the other New England colonies, so the act also applied to them.

  The political response of the British government came in February 1775 with North’s Conciliatory Proposition, an interesting indication of the minimum degree of imperial central direction which Britain would accept. North insisted on the retention of Parliament’s legislative sovereignty and its right to tax but allowed the colonial assemblies to pass their own financial legislation, subject only to the final approval of the British government. Moreover, the colonies would be responsible for their own civil lists. More importantly, they would have responsibility for their own military expenditure, once each colony’s proportion had been agreed with London.

  This was a significant set of concessions which deserved detailed consideration and negotiation. It was, however, overtaken by the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. These engagements were unsucces
sful attempts by General Gage to suppress the rebellion but, heavily outnumbered and in hostile territory, he found himself in an impossible situation. Now that blood had been spilt, the rebellion spread throughout the colonies as opinion hardened and the more radical elements swept moderates aside. The writ of the British government disintegrated as the effective power of its representatives, the colonial governors, dissolved. At the same time, the room for compromise was rapidly diminishing. In July 1775 the Congress rejected the Conciliatory Proposition and sent the ‘Olive Branch’ petition to George III. This affirmed the colonists’ wish to remain within the British Empire but only on the terms which the Philadelphia Congress had spelled out a year earlier. If these were not conceded then the colonists would use force to obtain them. That this was not an empty threat was shown by the dispatch of colonial expeditionary forces which took Montreal and approached Quebec. In the winter of 1775–6 the government recruited 17,000 German mercenary troops to put down the rebellion. By then, moreover, the whole of the Atlantic coast had been blockaded by Sir Guy Carleton, the governor of Canada, and in December 1775 Parliament prohibited all intercourse with the rebellious colonies. In early 1776 Gage’s heavily outnumbered army was withdrawn from Boston. By that time Congress was acting as an independent government, sending negotiators to France and opening American ports to foreign shipping. The Declaration of Independence, adopted by Congress on 4 July 1776, was the logical conclusion.

  THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE, 1776–1783

  The war for America was now joined. British strategy was to isolate the New England rebels by taking New York and controlling the Hudson valley, thus cutting the rebel territory into two. At the start of the war the only British army was encircled in Boston, and it was not until March 1776 that it was able to break out. During these precious months most of the colonies were lost by default; the American colonial leaders won valuable time, trained their militia army and organized and established a revolutionary government. Nevertheless, the 1776 campaign did not go well for the rebels. Strengthened by reinforcements from England, the new commander, Howe, evacuated Boston and during the summer campaign of 1776 took New York, Rhode Island and New Jersey. By the end of the year the British had a decided advantage but the rebel army, led by George Washington, having avoided direct conflict with the superior British forces, was still in the field, and had even retaken New Jersey. Indeed, a minor victory by Washington on Christmas Day 1776 boosted American morale. The strategy for the 1777 campaign was for General Burgoyne to march south from Canada and, by taking Albany and linking up with Howe’s army, to cut off the New England colonies. The British overestimated the difficulty of the latter operation and Howe even launched a successful attack on Philadelphia, the largest colonial city and the centre for meetings of the Congress. Had Howe moved to coordinate his tactics with Burgoyne by a thrust up the Hudson River the New England colonies would have been encircled, and probably doomed. However, Burgoyne’s army, sweeping down from Canada, found itself surrounded at Saratoga. The surrender of his army was a major turning point in the war. The British realized that only a long and hard campaign, possibly stretching over several years, could suppress the rebellion. In view of the extensive distances involved in fighting the war, the irregular and unfamiliar nature of the terrain and the superior numbers of their colonial adversaries, the British were disconcerted at the men and materials that would be needed. Although George III shrugged off the reverse as ‘serious but not without remedy’ Lord North laid peace proposals before Parliament in February 1778 which would have repealed the Declaratory Act and appointed commissioners to discuss peace. This might just have satisfied the Americans in 1775, but they would now settle for nothing less than independence. Far more important, however, than unavailing peace proposals was the alliance between France and America signed in the same month. By its terms, France abandoned any claim to territory east of the Mississippi and promised not to make peace with England until American independence was achieved. At once the colonial rebellion became a world war with potential implications for Europe, the West Indies and India. In June 1779 Spain joined the alliance.

  With the benefit of hindsight, the recovery of the colonies was now almost impossible. Confronted in theatres across the globe and with no allies to assist them, the plight of the British was desperate. The colonies were now not prepared to compromise. The Carlisle peace commission, an initiative by Lord North to draw the Americans into discussion of his peace proposals, was a dismal failure. The commissioners arrived in America in June 1778 but this last opportunity to preserve some political link between Britain and America came to nothing. In spite of some military successes British military and diplomatic prospects worsened. Quite simply, Britain’s resources were overstretched. In 1778 the British withdrew from Philadelphia and Rhode Island so that West Indian theatres could be reinforced. Furthermore, the English Channel had to be protected from a Franco-Spanish invasion, threatened in 1778 and attempted, without success, in 1779. In the same year the French seized Grenada and St Vincent. French naval power was beginning to have its effects on the British military effort in America and by the second half of 1779 was stifling British movement in the southern colonies, especially in South Carolina and Georgia. Still worse for Britain, in 1780 the Baltic powers, including Russia, established the Armed Neutrality, whose purpose was to resist and oppose the British action of searching neutral shipping. In order to prevent Holland from associating itself too closely with the Armed Neutrality, Britain declared war on her before the end of the year. The British were in an impossible situation and by 1781 had lost command of the American waters to France and Spain. The French took Tobago; the Spanish took West Florida. The balance of the war was tilting ominously against Britain. Within the colonies, Cornwallis had raised British hopes in the south with his victory at Charleston in May 1780 and by the recovery of South Carolina and Georgia. He attempted to follow up these successes by marching into Virginia, where he expected the loyalists to flock to his support. Encamped in Yorktown and surrounded by American and French troops, Cornwallis was cut off, the navy unable to reinforce his army. His surrender at Yorktown on 17 October 1781 marked the effective end of the war, and of British control of the American colonies. ‘Oh God: it is all over,’ cried Lord North.

  The result of the American war was a disastrous defeat for Britain. It is impossible to contest the point. Yet the ultimate outcome of the war could have been much worse. The military defeat has overshadowed the fact that Britain escaped to a large extent without suffering excessive damage to her economy and to her empire. Gibraltar had not fallen, Bengal was safe and Ireland appeared disinclined to pursue legislative independence. Indeed, after Yorktown Britain, while incapable of preventing American independence, was able to recover much of her naval, and thus diplomatic, influence. In April 1782 Admiral Rodney won a glorious victory in the West Indies at the Battle of the Saints. By then both the French and the Spanish were ready for peace. France, in particular, had found the war a crippling financial burden. The British were fully aware of French exhaustion and intended to exploit it. The British minister who concluded the peace terms signed at Versailles in 1783, Lord Shelburne, insisted that France and Spain should not frustrate America’s ambition to expand west to the Mississippi. Influenced by the new free-trade theories associated with Adam Smith, Shelburne saw that if Americans settled and developed the west then they would become a valuable market for British manufactured goods. To Shelburne, commercial intercourse with North America could still continue even though Britain had lost a territorial empire. In this he was to be proved right. Within a decade, Anglo-American trade was once again one of the cornerstones of British prosperity, later to become one of the foundations of her credit during the Napoleonic wars. Furthermore, and possibly owing to divisions between Britain’s enemies, the peace terms of 1783 were not nearly as bad for Britain as they might have been. France gained Tobago and fishing rights off the west coast of Newfoundland. In Ind
ia, however, she only procured some territory near Pondicherry. In Africa she recovered Senegal. Spain, it is true, recovered Minorca and Florida, but the fabric and structure of the British Empire remained substantially intact. America had been lost but almost everything else had been retained. The united power of the Bourbon nations had helped to prise America out of Britain’s grasp, but it had not been enough to overwhelm British naval power. Finally, America had indeed become an independent nation; it did not become a client state of the Bourbons.

  Could the British have won the American War of Independence? At a distance of 3,000 miles it would have been extremely difficult but it need not have been impossible. The significance of the 3,000-mile separation between Britain and America was that it took three months – at certain times of the year much longer – to communicate messages, instructions, supplies and reinforcements. By the time any of these arrived in America the situation with which they were intended to deal might have changed out of all recognition. Indeed, to avoid the hazards of winter sailings, reinforcements usually set sail in spring, arriving in summer, when the campaigns were already well advanced. Within North America geographical distances were enormous, the terrain unfriendly and an invitation to forms of guerrilla warfare to which the British had no answer. Yet if geographical factors weakened the prospects of a British victory, we need to remember that they were almost as damaging to the colonists. It was not easy for the fragile American government to raise armies and keep them in the field. Colonies which were bitterly resentful of the centralizing policies of the British were not likely to accept those imposed by Washington without reluctance. There was no overwhelming reason why the British should not have defeated the colonists in the first year of the war had they been better prepared and ready to exploit from the outset the fact that the war for American independence was also, in part, a civil war. Furthermore, in 1775 there still existed in the colonies a strong fund of goodwill towards the mother country and the monarchy. At the outset, perhaps as many as a quarter of the colonists were British loyalists rather than colonial patriots. Many of them served in militia units, provincial regiments or merely as recruits and volunteers in the regular army. They did so, moreover, with energy and passion, but their talents were never really mobilized. The British were seriously unprepared for the war and, as we have seen, allowed many months to pass in which they lost the initiative both militarily and politically. Yet the British cannot be criticized for lack of effort. By 1780 over 100,000 seamen had been deployed. Somewhere between one in six and one in seven of British men of fighting age served in the armed forces, less than in the Napoleonic wars but more than in the Seven Years’ War.