by Nick Bunker
In Hillsborough’s eyes, the empire existed for one purpose only: to create material wealth for Great Britain. The colonies were there, he said, “to improve and extend the commerce, navigation and manufactures of this kingdom, upon which its strength and security depends,” and that was all. He listed the ways in which the empire added value to the mother country, and there were only four.
First came the fisheries, from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, which were vast, lucrative, and British, and so they should remain. Because they employed so many ships and seamen, they helped ensure that King George remained the master of the seas. Second, the coastal plain of North America provided a rich supply of raw materials—timber, tar, and hemp—required by the Admiralty to build and rig the fleet. Third, the colonies served as a captive market for goods manufactured in Great Britain. Last, Lord Hillsborough mentioned the role the Americans played in supporting the West Indies. The sugar planters needed food to feed the slaves and lumber for making barrels and sheds. These could only come from the mainland.
Follow these arguments to their conclusion, and you would maintain only a relatively small empire on the coast, a few hundred miles deep at the most. Everything else would be left to the tribes. This was precisely Lord Hillsborough’s point: that the purpose of the empire in America could be accomplished entirely within the terms of the royal proclamation of 1763, without expansion into the Ohio country. But by the time he signed his memorandum, it was already obsolete.
With so many migrants arriving in America, driven across the ocean by rising rents and prices, it was impossible to close the frontier. In New England or beside the Hudson River, fertile soil was scarce. And so, regardless of official wisdom, settlers were crossing the hills in a great arc from western Virginia to Vermont. Hillsborough knew this perfectly well: in 1772 the dispatches from the colonies were full of reports of the trouble that westward migration caused. And yet he believed that somehow the tide could be held back. But his strangest miscalculation of all related not to the Ohio valley, but to the plantation colonies of the South. Time and again, the British government failed to understand how weak a grip it had on the region. Anyone who read a newspaper, in London or in Glasgow, could see how swiftly the slave economy was developing: he or she need only glance at the long lists of ships carrying rice, tobacco, and wheat from Charleston or Annapolis. But Lord Hillsborough barely mentioned the South. It did not occur to him that this might be the Achilles’ heel of empire, where the colonists were most dangerously outgrowing British rule.
By putting his case against the Ohio venture so firmly, Hillsborough made a fight with his colleagues inevitable. Lord Gower and the Privy Council asked for their own report from an advisory body, the Board of Trade, which heard evidence from the Grand Ohio Company. The result was a foregone conclusion, given the powerful allies that Franklin and the company had recruited. In early July, two weeks before the news arrived about the Gaspée, the Board of Trade gave Gower and Rochford what they wanted, coming out in strong support of the Ohio scheme. Meanwhile, the Bloomsbury gang briefed the press with sly little stories that Hillsborough’s days were numbered.
Taking the hint, he began to talk about resignation, throwing Lord North into a customary fit of despair. It had taken years of work to assemble a durable government, and now North found his colleagues at each other’s throats. “I foresee mischief in any new arrangement,” he wrote to Lord Gower on June 30, and the sentence might have served him for an epitaph. The split within the cabinet was the sort of situation North tried to avoid, and it showed him at his least impressive. He could not see how high the stakes had risen. It would be hard to think of an issue more important for the future of the colonies. During its fruitless talks with Hillsborough, the Ohio company had increased the amount of land it wanted, from two million to twenty million acres. Grant the company’s request, and a new province would come into being beyond the Appalachians, nearly two hundred miles square, throwing Indian country wide open. Refuse to give the Ohio investors what they wanted, and Americans would view the closure of the frontier as one more act of imperial oppression.
At this point North might have taken the lead and made the future of America a central theme of British policy. But unless he remained in power, there was nothing he could do at all, and so he tried to kick the Ohio valley into the long grass of politics. Keen to avoid an outcome that would strengthen the Bloomsbury gang, for the whole of July North played for time, hoping that the fuss would soon die down. He urged Gower to put off a final decision about the Ohio grant until after the summer recess.
As the weeks went by, even the king began to tire of what he called Lord North’s “good nature and love of indecision.” The affair was unpleasant, and it could only have one end, regardless of the merits of the case. Coming from Ulster, Hillsborough was expendable, because Ireland sent no members to the British Parliament. His rivals were a very different matter. For the sake of Rochford’s talents, and Gower’s influence and money, they had to be placated. Under pressure from the king, North reluctantly looked for a new colonial secretary. As a first choice, he picked a Bloomsburyite, Lord Weymouth, but fortunately he declined the post. Breathing a sigh of relief, North offered the department to a friend he trusted implicitly: his stepbrother William Legge, the second Earl of Dartmouth.
Forty-one years old, Dartmouth was loyal, pious, and incorruptible, three qualities for which the era’s politicians were less than famous. Surprised to be asked but willing to help, he came over to Bushy Park to be briefed about America, and then he said yes to the offer. Lord Hillsborough resigned. On August 14, 1772, Dartmouth became colonial secretary. With that, Lord North selected the last, and the most important, of the men who would oversee the American debacle.23
For nearly a month, the divisions in the cabinet had left it unable to respond to the Gaspée raid. It was not too late to be resolute, but the omens for the future were poor. The most senior officials in Whitehall were painfully aware that across the ocean they were impotent.
* * *
*1 There was also a fifth man, Lord Dartmouth, who joined the cabinet shortly afterward, replacing Hillsborough as colonial secretary. We shall come to him later.
*2 Lord North was a backbench MP in 1766, and he played little part in the debates of that year. However, his private correspondence shows that he took the same hard line as Sandwich and his friends.
Chapter Five
IGNORANCE AND BAD POLICY
The British lion has been asleep these four or five years.
—THOMAS HUTCHINSON, GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS, SEPTEMBER 17721
Lord Dartmouth took over a small department drooping under the burden of its duties. His office in Whitehall was delightful, recently redecorated by Lord Hillsborough; and in theory, his staff of thirty-five should have been adequate. But ten of them simply drew their salaries and never turned up for work. Another four merely “attended the king,” in the words of a list drawn up for the new minister. The rest were mostly there to carry messages, to welcome visitors, to sweep the floor, or to brew the tea. In practice, the weight of American affairs rested on the bent shoulders of two undersecretaries and seven clerks.
Shortly before he took up his post, Dartmouth received a plaintive note from the head of the department. “I consider my race as run,” wrote John Pownall, the senior undersecretary. “I have neither spirits nor constitution to undergo the fatigue of attending to the business.” Worn out by the age of fifty, the nation’s leading expert on America was yearning for his pension. He longed to spend his retirement with his collection of Roman coins and pots, dug from the soil of his native Lincolnshire.2
After a lifetime dealing with the colonies, Pownall had every reason to be exhausted. Since his earliest days as a junior clerk, he had displayed “abilities, attention and integrity,” in the words of his obituary. A grammar school boy, from a family shabby but genteel, he rose through the ranks by virtue of brains and hard work. Tied to his desk, he never crosse
d the Atlantic, though his brother Thomas served a term as governor of Massachusetts. Instead, John Pownall tried to run America on paper by reading and writing a mountain of letters.
Every year hundreds of packets arrived from the colonies, each one demanding an urgent reply. All of them were docketed and filed. They survive to this day in the archives in London, bulky and tattered, filled with newspaper cuttings, long lists of numbers, and petitions from people with axes to grind. It would be enough to wear out any official, but John Pownall’s career had been especially wearisome because it was so futile.
During the previous decade, he had advised on every British policy toward the colonies. Almost without exception, each one had fallen by the wayside. The Stamp Act came and went, defeated by American resistance. The Townshend duties also failed to survive, apart from the threepence on a pound of tea. So did the plan to keep the West free from British settlers. Ten years earlier, Pownall drafted the royal proclamation that tried to keep the colonists behind the mountains. Now that doctrine lay in ruins, and no new program had emerged to take its place.
John Pownall expected the consequences to be dire, and word soon arrived of settlers killing Indians on the frontier. “Such savage degeneracy of the human heart,” he wrote in September, “has brought us to the eve of an Indian war: the most ruinous and expensive that can be waged.” This was exactly the outcome that he, like General Gage, had striven to prevent. And when he surveyed the rest of America, Pownall saw signs that the colonies were following the frontier into turmoil.3
On the coast, the smugglers had made the collection of taxes all but impossible. Meanwhile, from Lake Champlain to South Carolina the dispatches carried news of other insults to authority. In the valley of Vermont, settlers had built a town called Pownall, named in honor of John’s brother. It fell within a tract of virgin land between the Connecticut River and the Hudson, where rival groups of pioneers were at each other’s throats. Settlers from three separate colonies—New Hampshire, New York, and Connecticut—laid claim to the area, and by the summer of 1772 something close to civil war appeared to be breaking out.
For the first time, the Colonial Office heard the name of somebody called Ethan Allen, in reports of a skirmish between a magistrate from New York and Allen’s gang of vigilantes. A range war began, violent but very local, of the kind that later generations in America would simply take in their stride as part and parcel of life on the frontier. That year the quarrel in Vermont filled scores of pages in the letters sent to Whitehall. Whatever ministers might say about the rule of law, the Allen affair showed just how little they could do to enforce it.
John Pownall had not the least idea who Ethan Allen was, or why his name would become so famous. Three years had yet to pass before Allen helped to lead the revolution in New England at the head of Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys. But for the British, the stories were already deeply worrisome. As the flow of people westward accelerated, so incidents like this were bound to become more common, but nobody could think of a way to prevent them. In theory, royal officials existed to resolve exactly the kind of boundary dispute that caused the trouble in Vermont. But if nobody would listen while men like Allen openly disobeyed authority, what purpose did the empire really serve? And far to the south in the wealthiest corner of British North America, the system appeared to be breaking down entirely.
In Charleston, the planters had an assembly. Keen to run their own affairs, its members saw an ally in John Wilkes. In 1769, believing that Wilkes was friendly to their cause, they sent a donation to help him in his efforts to take his seat in Parliament. From the British point of view, this was illegal, and so Hillsborough issued instructions banning the assembly from making any payments of the sort. The fight that followed, between the royal governor and the assembly, paralyzed the government of South Carolina. No taxes were levied, and no laws were passed. Either the assembly would not vote for them, or the governor barred the members from sitting at all. Endless letters passed to and fro between London and the colony, but the dispute was never settled. Only the war put an end to the quarrel.4
All around the rim of the empire there were little local crises of this kind under way, just as there were disputes and disorders in Great Britain. Seen from Whitehall, each individual problem might seem trivial, but added together they painted a picture of chaos. The empire had grown too swiftly, in Asia and America alike, partly because of greed and speculation and partly as a side effect of victory against the French. Nobody knew what it meant to be a global power. Nobody put in place the structures such a huge empire required. John Pownall had a deputy named William Knox, the second undersecretary, who never ceased to say exactly this.
Born in Ireland, Knox was another pious man, from a family of Presbyterian Scots. In his youth he went to Georgia to grow rice, hiring missionaries to convert his slaves to faith in Jesus Christ. Returning home, he married an heiress and penned a stream of essays on American affairs that attracted the attention of the government. He joined the Colonial Office, which needed an eloquent writer to put the empire’s case. In public he defended the official wisdom that the colonies were merely humble satellites, orbiting around the king and Parliament. Privately, Knox urged his superiors to reform an imperial system that seemed to be disintegrating. In Georgia, Knox had seen just how hard it was to rule a continent three thousand miles away. This became a constant theme of his career. The colonists, he argued, were hell-bent on independence, while the ministers in London would not take the necessary steps to hold them back. “It was with no small degree of astonishment,” he once wrote, “that I perceived a total want of plan or system in the British government.” In the history of British North America, he saw nothing but a long, sad chronicle of “neglect, Ignorance, bad Law and worse Policy.” While John Pownall was depressed, William Knox felt driven to distraction by a cabinet he saw as timid and effete.5
And so he spent his time writing papers to which his superiors paid no heed. Both he and Pownall were struggling, in their different ways, with a basic flaw of the old colonial system. Far from being unified, the empire was split into fragments, with thirty separate colonies on the mainland or in the West Indies, twenty-five of which had their own parliament or assembly. Each one had developed its own constitution, which it was determined to preserve. At the most extreme, there were Rhode Island and Connecticut—“little republics,” Knox called them—already independent in all but name. But everywhere else, he saw worrying evidence of what he called “the predominancy of the Democratic Power.”6
It was all very different from the way the Victorians would supervise their empire. If the British had ruled America in the way they later governed India, they would have installed a viceroy in New York to oversee the whole. He would have been given powers to tax and spend and to borrow money to build roads and drain or irrigate the land. He would have made a code of laws, uniform across the continent. With an army of his own, recruited locally and officered by men like George Washington, he would have defended the frontier. If he were honest and talented and stood up for colonial interests, he might have won the respect of the Americans. Perhaps he might even have kept their loyalty.
Failing that, an English viceroy might have bought off a pampered elite with commissions, salaries, and subsidies, as the British did in Bengal, while leaving the slaves and peasants to toil. But at this stage in the history of the British Empire, a viceroy of such a kind was inconceivable. Each colony jealously guarded its own laws and customs. Each one preferred to pay its own bills and call out its own militia when the need arose. And the very mention of an American viceroy would have caused uproar in London. For Lord North and the lawyers who advised him, authority must always lie with Parliament and the Crown. But as his name implied, a viceroy would be a petty king, and so potentially a rival to Westminster. As far back as 1754, Benjamin Franklin had come close to proposing a viceregal government for America, with his abortive plan for a union between the colonies, devised as a means to organize
defense against the French. We cannot really call Franklin’s plan a missed opportunity, because the British cabinet apparently never discussed it at all, and his ideas left his fellow Americans equally unimpressed. But without a viceroy or some system for managing America as a whole, the British were left with an empire too diverse to be held.
It would have been hard enough to cope if Pownall and his staff had merely had the mainland to occupy their time. But they had to deal with the Caribbean as well. Time and again, before and during the war, the West Indies fatally diverted the attention of the government. With as many as 1,800 slave plantations producing sugar cane worth £3 million a year, these treasure islands were the brightest jewel in the crown of empire for crude financial reasons that a single tale will illustrate. It concerns the clerical half brother of Lord North. As a young man, Brownlow North struggled to obtain preferment in the Anglican church, and the family had no money to give him an income. At last the king came to the rescue by making the youth a bishop at the age of only thirty. That was in 1771; the very same year, the newly eligible Brownlow married a slave owner’s heiress from Antigua. And so the bishop secured his future, until Mrs. North lost so heavily at cards.7
For reasons such as this, the sugar islands were simply too valuable to lose, but they were also very costly to keep. Always at risk of a slave revolt or a surprise attack by the French, the West Indies required a garrison and warships standing by, but this depleted the strength of the army and the navy, whose young men died in their hundreds from fever. Every year produced some fresh emergency, and 1772 was no exception. On St. Vincent, British troops were about to fight a small war against what remained of the native people, the Caribs who had risen in revolt. In Grenada, meanwhile, where John Wilkes’s brother had gone to grow sugar, the British planters were staging their own peaceful insurrection.