by Conrad Black
He wrote home very happily of “the august body” of the British Parliament having done the right and sensible thing in repealing the Stamp Act, and predicted imperial reform. By this Franklin meant a single monarch of the Empire, but the main constituent parts entirely self-governing, or coordinating through a grand assembly of representatives meeting in equality and dealing with matters of common interest, as he had proposed for the colonies themselves. The first option was close to what the British Commonwealth became 150 years later, between Britain and what were called the “white Dominions”—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, more or less, South Africa. Of course, all of those countries combined, and adding the United Kingdom, even today, have a population, as Franklin foresaw, that is not much more than half that of the U.S. The second option, with the grand assembly, was emulated to a substantial degree by the advocates of federalism at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where Franklin presided, in 1787 and 1788.
Franklin’s optimism, as frequently happened in his long life, was unjustified. “Every man in England,” he wrote, “... seems to jostle himself into the Throne with the King, and talks of ‘our subjects in the colonies.’”20 As usually happens in long-running disagreements, tempers escalated and a natural desire to settle the dispute violently steadily gained ground as a prospect. A similar process would be replicated between the slave-holding and free American states 90 years later (Chapters 6 and 7). The British could speak only of repression by force, tipsy with their Seven Years’ War victories, especially as the Rockingham-Pitt regimes gave way to the king’s friends, the reactionary governments of the Duke of Grafton and Frederick, Lord North. Franklin did not think the British possessed the least idea of how difficult it would be to suppress the colonists, and did not think they would succeed if they tried. It was painful for Benjamin Franklin, as for many. He wrote Lord Kames (Pitt’s friend) that “I love Britain” and many British, and “I wish it prosperity.” His sought-for union could disadvantage America briefly, but “America, an immense Territory favour’d by Nature with all advantages of Climate, Soil, great navigable Rivers and Lakes etc., must become a great Country, populous and mighty; and will in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off any Shackles that may be imposed on her and perhaps place them on the Imposers.”21 This was Franklin’s wistful hope, and prophetic view; while the British grumbled belligerently and garrulously about putting America in its place, the sun was already rising on the mighty and uncontainable power of the New World. Nothing could stifle, or, ultimately, equal it. America was the predestined nation.
15. THE TOWNSHEND TAXES
Franklin was already being overtaken by events. In 1767 the chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, imposed a series of excise taxes on a range of English manufactures, including paper, glass, paint, and, eventually, tea, and provided for a board of customs commissioners to sit in America and collect the tax as the goods arrived. This must have been a gratuitous gesture to annoy the Americans, as the duty could have been levied in British ports as the goods left the country of origin. Franklin did not foresee that this would arouse his countrymen, but a new uproar occurred. The most important American of all, if a confrontation came, would be George Washington, the senior military officer in the colonies. He had not been overly successful as a senior officer, but was a capable and brave leader, a tall, impressive presence, and an astute businessman, though only a mid-level plantation owner. He had continued assiduously to invest in the western part of Virginia and in the Ohio country, and had steadily built his plantation at Mount Vernon, where he was sometimes a harsh slavemaster. Though largely self-educated, he was knowledgeable and worldly, despite the fact that he never left America. Unlike Franklin, he was not gregarious but rather slightly shy. But he was formidable and respected. He was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and steered clear of the debate on the Stamp Act, ignoring the pyrotechnics of Patrick Henry and others, as did also the young plantation owner from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who entered the House at the age of 21 in 1764. Jefferson disliked public speaking, and was never good at it, but he was an elegant writer, a talented lawyer, a fine architect, and a learned polymath.
Washington reasoned that the Stamp Act raised the ire especially of “the speculators,” by which he meant lawyers, publishers, and ship owners, whom he tended to disparage (not land and crop speculators like himself). Washington proposed that the Stamp Act be responded to with a general campaign to buy less from Britain, arguing that British merchants could be relied upon to agitate in ways that the Mother of Parliaments could not resist, whereas it could resist disaffected colonials. He believed such a partial boycott would provide “a necessary stimulus to industry” in America. He was as cool-headed as Franklin, but less intellectual, and tended to think as a businessman or military commander. He soon discontinued tobacco production at Mount Vernon, and went over to arts and crafts manufacturing to fill the void that he anticipated from strained relations with the British.22
By 1769 Townshend’s laws had caused Washington to toughen his stance and call for an outright general American boycott of British goods. More ominously, and getting well ahead of Franklin, who toiled to the end to avoid a complete rupture, Washington wrote that if “selfish, designing men ... and clashing interests” made a boycott impractical, no one should “hesitate a moment” to take up arms, though this “should be the last resource.”23
In May 1769, the Virginia burgesses adopted “An humble, dutiful, and loyal address” to George III to protect “the violated rights of America.” The angry governor, a typical British Colonel Blimp (an inflexible and traditionalist stuffed shirt) figure, Lord Dunmore, dissolved the House of Burgesses, and its members repaired to the Raleigh Tavern for a venting of fierce oratory. After a fair bit of steam had been blown off, Washington spoke, and unveiled a plan he had worked out with his closest collaborator, George Mason, for total non-importation from Britain. Washington sold it, apart from other factors, as a way for Virginia merchants to simply renege on their often heavy debts to British suppliers. This plan was adopted, and gave Washington a rounded parliamentary status to add to his high standing as an officer and astute plantation owner and land buyer. Washington faithfully adhered to it at first, but it quickly became clear that, though the general boycott did hold in many other areas, Virginians and other Americans did not wish to give up their addiction to British luxury goods, and Washington abandoned his own boycott on British clothes and furniture after a few months. (Yet when he had his portrait painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1772, he wore an old Virginia Regiment uniform he had not been in for 13 years. The colonel, as he now was, had a natural political flair.)
Franklin, in the front lines in London, equable though he was, was also hardening in his attitude. By the end of 1769, Parliament was considering the repeal of all the Townshend taxes except that on tea. Franklin told his British friends that no such repeal would be adequate to lift the non-importation campaign in America, unless it also applied to everything exported to America.24 Parliament and the party leaders had determined that tea was the point where the line had to be drawn. There must be no more concessions to the colonists. By the early 1770s Franklin still loved England and watched the descent toward armed conflict with foreboding, relieved only by the esteem in which the English held him, even King George III.25 In 1770, when a letter of his to a Massachusetts friend was read in the legislative assembly of that colony, Franklin was chosen to become representative for Massachusetts also, as he already had been for Georgia and for New Jersey, where Franklin’s son William was the governor, as well as Pennsylvania.
A running battle went on with partial boycotts, a good deal of smuggling, and outbursts of civil disobedience. In the spring of 1773, the still young Jefferson (30, compared with Washington’s 40 and Franklin’s 67) had earned himself a reputation as a diligent and capable legislator and agreeable and thoughtful and intelligent companion, and he led a “committee of c
orrespondence” to strengthen ties with other colonial legislators and coordinate responses to continuing British impositions. Townshend’s tax on tea was continuously in place through the early 1770s. Once again, the British had no idea that the Americans would find this particularly objectionable. On December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty, a Boston autonomist organization led by vehement opponents of any subordination to Britain, such as John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, disguised themselves as American Indians, stormed the tea ships, and threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor. This passed into history as the Boston Tea Party. The Sons of Liberty went to great lengths to show they were not an unruly mob, repairing locks on the ships’ holds and punishing one of their members who had pocketed some tea leaves for his own use.
The Tea Party, as all the world knows, set the tinder and kindling alight. Parliament revoked the Charter of Massachusetts in early 1774, substituted a military government, and purported to shut down Boston Harbor until the value of the tea destroyed had been paid. The reaction among the colonies was uniform and very supportive of the Boston tea partiers. Thomas Jefferson drafted a resolution denouncing the “Intolerable Acts,” as the parliamentary response was known. The resolution passed and Dunmore vetoed the measure. Jefferson then drafted a pious resolution calling for “a day of fasting and prayer” for the Boston protesters, which passed easily, and Dunmore again dissolved the House of Burgesses. (Jefferson too, like Washington and Franklin, was not a formally religious man—he was pitching this to others.) This time the legislators dispersed to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, and adopted a resolution calling for a “continental congress” from all the colonies to meet in Philadelphia to organize resistance to British rule. The strategy of a nation or people may be crafted deliberately by leaders, or may, in more primitive circumstances, evolve spontaneously from collective responses to events. The Americans were just moving from the second to the first. (Mainly) British people seeking a better life had come to America to find it. British grand strategy, devised by one of its greatest statesmen, William Pitt the Elder, had provided for the successful prosecution of a worldwide war against France, conspicuously in North America, empowering the Americans to reconfigure the nature of their relations with Britain. Pitt’s successors did not grasp the complexities of the post-French era in North America, though Pitt and his most talented contemporaries did. And so had an emerging cadre of unusually capable Americans.
16. THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
Jefferson wrote some guidelines for the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress that were judged too radical to be adopted, but one was published in London, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, with the author identified as “A Virginian.” It is a learned but rabidly partisan constitutional-law treatise. Jefferson claimed that the colonists carried to the New World all the rights of free-born Englishmen, and that the unwritten constitution of England assured these rights as, according to the Virginian in question, the colonists had built the colonies “unaided” by the mother country, which was nonsense, of course, and ignored the chief subject of the dispute: the demand of the British to be assisted in recovering their huge investment to protect the colonies from the French. Jefferson claimed that the British were taking the view that the only rights the colonists had were those of conquered people, because the colonies were conquered. This was doubly nonsense, both substantively and because that was not the British position, which was that the Parliament of Great Britain represented all British subjects whether they participated in elections to it or not (another tenuous argument, but they abounded on both sides). Jefferson also improvised the sheer fiction that the pre–Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxons had a fundamental attachment to individual liberties, to which the colonists were legitimate heirs. They had no claim to be continuators of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain before 1066, and those Anglo-Saxons had no such system. The whole argument was moonshine, but it indicated the polemical and casuistic legal skill of Jefferson.
The Continental Congress met in the autumn of 1774 and called for a complete boycott of British goods, and adjourned to May 1775. Before that meeting occurred, the American Revolutionary War had begun. These three men, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, would be the most important of the prominent figures that conducted the American side, a surprisingly talented leadership group, given the colonies’ population of now just under three million, though their distinction has been somewhat exaggerated by the American genius for hyperbole, for the recreated spectacle, and by the star system, which Jefferson largely originated with his fantastic polemical assertions at the new nation’s birth.
The rebels would look to Washington to put together a fighting force from the previously rather unreliable militia (which Washington himself had despised), and successfully resist the battle-hardened British regulars, the Redcoats. Benjamin Franklin, the great diplomat and world-renowned intellectual, would be relied upon to recruit allies by exploiting the fissiparous European interplay of ever-changing balances of power, which always included a deep reservoir of resentment of whichever power had won the last European war, never mind that the suitor was the beneficiary of Britain’s great victory. And Thomas Jefferson would be the chief expositor, not to say propagandist, to make the case that this was not a grubby contest about taxes, colonial ingratitude, and the rights of the martial victor and mother country (all of which it largely was), and to repackage it as an epochal struggle for the rights of man, vital to the hopes and dreams of everyone in the world. Instead of, as Austria would do in the following century, “astound the world with our ingratitude,” America would raise a light unto the nations and uplift the masses of the world with a creative interpretation of its motives.
All three men were suffused with the vision of the rising America, predestined to mighty nationhood. They had the starting strategy for the vertiginous rise of America: Washington the military and commercial might, Franklin the intellectual leadership and diplomatic felicity, Jefferson the clarion of a new order of freedom (unencumbered by a number of incongruities, not least among them the institution of slavery, which all three enjoyed, although Franklin became an abolitionist). The combination of people and events was combustible and would produce both heat and light. Inconveniently prematurely perhaps, but inevitably, the American project would show the world what free men in a new world could do. From the start, the world was watching, and its astonishment at what has followed has not ceased, these 238 years.
CHAPTER TWO
Independence
The Americans and French Defeat
the British in America, 1774–1789
1. THE END OF EMPIRE IN LONDON
Benjamin Franklin, such a constant figure in the rise and decline of Anglo-American relations through and after the Seven Years’ War, remained in London as trans-Atlantic civil war in the English-speaking world doomfully approached. Franklin published letters with the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, which inflamed opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. (In them, Franklin again, as he often had before, wrote that “The inhabitants of this country, in all probability, in a few years, will be more numerous than those of Great Britain and Ireland together.” This was the core of Franklin’s belief that America was sure to win. 26
On January 29, 1774, the Privy Council summoned Franklin to be present to hear discussion of the Massachusetts Assembly’s petition, and Franklin stood poker-faced, expressionless, while he was subjected to a vitriolic attack from the solicitor general of Great Britain, Alexander Wedderburn. The petition was rejected as “groundless, vexatious, and scandalous and calculated only for the seditious Purpose of keeping up a Spirit of Clamour and Discontent.”27 Two days later, Franklin was sacked as deputy postmaster general of America. Franklin retired as agent for Massachusetts, but continued for Pennsylvania. He demonstrated admirable repose of manner and was calm and courteous throughout this difficult time. His serenity was doubtless fortified by his long-he
ld prediction of what would come and his unshakeable conviction that America was predestined to surpass Great Britain and all other nations of the world.
Parliament’s response to the Boston Tea Party—the Intolerable Acts (or the Coercive Acts, as they were known in Britain)—substantially not only closed the Port of Boston and reduced the powers of the Massachusetts Assembly, it purportedly banned town meetings, curtailed trial by jury in the colony, and declared that British troops must be stationed in Boston and billeted and paid for by the locals at the whim of the commander of the troops. Franklin denounced the acts for provoking war with the colonies, “for a war it will be, as a national Cause when it is in fact only a ministerial one.”28
Despite his many British friends, and the esteem in which he was held there, Franklin was also seen by the arch-imperialists as the evil visionary who transmitted messages back and forth with America, always twisting them toward increased disharmony. This was not a fair allegation and was essentially a famous case of blaming the messenger. Abrasive spirits were skyrocketing on both sides. Franklin proposed compensation of the East India Company for its loss of tea, and of Boston for the closing of the port, without success in either case.
In the autumn of 1774, the ban on town meetings was generally ignored, and what were known as “Resolves” were adopted in Massachusetts and delivered by the talented horseman Paul Revere to the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, on September 18. They called for civil disobedience, dissolution of the courts, seizure of the money of the colonial government in Massachusetts, and intensive preparation for war. The Congress balked at this as too provocative, but prepared a bill of rights virtually seceding from the British jurisdiction and demanded an airtight boycott of all British goods. A petition to the king to uphold the colonies’ side in the dispute was also included. A reintroduction of Franklin’s Albany plan for inter-colonial parliamentary union was voted down as too much resembling the over-powerful Parliament against which they were virtually in revolt.