Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  Rural America, the ideal to which the Virginians were religiously committed, was never, even in the eighteenth century, the thing of absolute joy that they depicted. Social mobility – the means of rising from one class to another – was far greater in colonial America than in Europe, but it was greater in the towns than in the country. In some areas there was substantial social and political equality between the farmers, but these were the poorer regions. The richer areas showed sharp and rigid class divisions. But (a big but) geographical mobility – the chance to move west to virgin land and start a new, more prosperous career – offered hope to agrarian Americans on the make. The future lay that way for many. Before the Peace of Paris the French began to lay out a town where the rivers Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois meet; though it was to be under Spanish sovereignty for the next forty years, St Louis from its beginning attracted English-speaking traders and settlers. To the north-east, at the Forks of the Ohio, after the defeat of Pontiac, another wilderness town, Pittsburgh, began to grow up on the site of former Fort Pitt (or Duquesne). This westward movement soon created problems of the highest policy for the imperial government.

  Meanwhile the great planters of Virginia were falling deeper and deeper into debt to London and Scottish merchants: the world price of tobacco was collapsing and the soil of Virginia was becoming exhausted. Planters in South Carolina, while more prosperous, lived for the few months in the year when they could flee from the dangers of yellow fever and slave rebellion on their rice and indigo plantations to Charles Town or, better still, to the cool breezes of Newport, Rhode Island, just then beginning its long career as the rich man’s playground.

  The back-country, from Georgia to Maine, struggled against Indians, agrarian inefficiency, indebtedness and remoteness, already displaying a provincialism and a hatred for more prosperous Easterners (‘city slickers’) which were to scar American society until well into the twentieth century. Even Dr Franklin, who in 1764 nobly defended the rights of some Indians against a mob of rural lynchers (‘the Paxton Boys’), succumbed sufficiently to bucolic prejudice to worry about the incoming tide of Germans as well as that of Africans, fearing that the English settlers and their culture would be lost, and persuading himself that Swedes and Finns were darker than, and therefore inferior to, the English.

  Almost every province had territorial claims that were unrealistic but not to be relinquished,30 and hence quarrelled with its neighbours over boundaries. The war between debtor and creditor interests which was to figure for so long in American history was beginning, and taking its standard form of a dispute about paper money. Maryland, driven by economic necessity, had imported 20,000 transported convicts, as indentured servants, to the dismay of adjacent colonies.31 A sense of common interest, if not of common nationhood, was slowly, almost surreptitiously growing, but even in the face of the greatest emergency the colonies had yet known, the war with France, was not strong enough to sustain Franklin’s 1754 Albany Plan for colonial union. The peace, it was hoped, would bring renewed prosperity with it, as war had brought vigour and self-confidence; but everywhere there were discontents and grievances which very little would enflame. Rapid growth had made the colonies strong, and therefore potentially dangerous. They were not the sleeping dogs of Sir Robert Walpole’s favourite phrase: they were sleeping dragons.

  8 The Waking of the Revolution 1759–66

  That our subjects in the American colonies are children of the state and to be treated as such no one denies; but it can’t reasonably be admitted that the mother country should impoverish herself to enrich the children, nor that Great Britain should weaken herself to strengthen America.

  Charles Davenant, 1698

  If the Colonies do not now unite, and use their most vigorous endeavours in all proper ways, to avert this impending blow, they may for the future, bid farewell to freedom and liberty, burn their charters, and make the best of thraldom and slavery. For if we can have our interests and estates taken away, and disposed of without our consent, or having any voice therein, and by those whose interest as well as inclination it may be to shift the burden off from themselves under pretence of protecting and defending America, why may they not as well endeavour to raise millions upon us to defray the expenses of the last, or any future war?

  Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut, 1764

  A great empire and little minds go ill together.

  Edmund Burke, 1775

  War, next only to technology, is the most certain solvent of modern society. Reforms miscarry, revolutions are prevented or perverted; war is always with us and seldom or never fails to bring sweeping change. So it was with the Seven Years War.

  Its immediate work was striking enough: the expulsion of the French from India and North America, the confirmation of Prussia’s expansion in Europe, the raising-up of British power, the casting-down of the ancient rival dynasties of Habsburg and Bourbon, the appearance of Russia as a principal factor in the balance of power. The war left behind it, like all wars, a set of new alignments for the next round: France and Spain clung together in hope of a common revenge on Britain and, more ominous for the islanders, Frederick of Prussia, needing them no more, turned to collaboration with the Tsarina Catherine in the partition of Poland. Britain found herself without an ally on the continent.

  But it was the economic consequences of the Seven Years War, above all, that were to shape the future. The usual wartime boom (produced by military purchasing) was followed by the usual post-war slump. All the former belligerents had to grapple with monster deficits left by the struggle, and to do so with very inadequate means. The governments of the old order, in fact, were in an impossible situation. As Norman Hampson has remarked, ‘It was the cost of warfare, irrespective of its success, in an age when the destructive capacity of government had got ahead of the economic productivity of societies, that subjected all the Powers to new stresses. The attempts of governments to raise more money in turn set off new social conflicts.’1 Louis XV’s efforts to solve his money problems led him on to his final and most dramatic clash with his parlements. The deficit incurred by the victorious power was to lead to revolution in North America.

  In April 1763, two months after the Peace of Paris, Lord Bute resigned. His nerve (always feeble) had been destroyed by ill-health, by the outcry of the mob, by the abuse hurled at him as a Scotchman,2 as a royal favourite, as the architect of a pusillanimous treaty (William Pitt’s pet allegation) and above all (though of course it was not said openly) as the man who had dislodged the Walpolean Whigs from the seats of power and profit which they had enjoyed for forty years. George III was bitterly disappointed at thus losing his ‘Dearest Friend’, who, after encouraging his King to believe that, together, they would bring back the reign of public virtue, had despaired of the project and was now leaving him in the lurch;3 but he made the best of it in welcoming Bute’s chosen successor as First Lord of the Treasury (in effect, prime minister), George Grenville (1712–70). Grenville was a rising star whom George and Bute had earlier brought into power as leader of the House of Commons in succession to Pitt – which had caused Pitt, who was his brother-in-law, to disown him. The King no doubt supposed he was taking on a loyal ally. He and his unfortunate subjects were to pay dearly for this natural mistake.

  Grenville was one of the most formidable politicians of his day. After Pitt’s elevation to the Lords in 1766 he dominated the Commons as no one else could. This was not because of his charm or eloquence, for he was quite without either quality: his speeches went on for ever, and a discerning follower said that ‘he was to a proverb tedious’. But the same man noted that ‘though his eloquence charmed nobody, his argument converted’. Logical, accurate and overwhelmingly well-informed, he was always the expert. He had further virtues as an administrator, being cautious, upright and, above all, ceaselessly hard-working. He was too greedy for personal profit from office, otherwise we could say that today he would have made an excellent senior civil servant under a strong minister. As a
statesman in any age he would have been a disaster, for he was an impolitician, entirely lacking that sagacity which was, for example, a leading characteristic of Dr Franklin. He was tactless, unimaginative, stubborn, void of judgement and self-satisfied as only they can be who never stop talking: they have time to hear, but not to listen to criticism. His worst trait from the King’s point of view was that, having been kept out of power for years, he was now determined to be master, and badgered his wretched sovereign ceaselessly for tokens of subjection. In the end George got rid of him, and summed him up as no better than a clerk in a counting house. But by the time of his fall he had done irreparable damage.

  As a good clerk he had a horror of debt and immediately set about reducing the country’s vast liabilities. He pared cheese with the zeal and folly that England expects of the Treasury. If he lacked Mr Gladstone’s hawk’s eye for detail, he had all his recklessness in military and naval affairs, starving the army of men and the navy of money. The evil results of this policy were to become evident in the War of the American Revolution: meantime Grenville grew very popular with backbenchers hoping for reductions in the land-tax. Nothing would have pleased the minister more than to be able to oblige them; but he was well aware that at the moment it looked as if he would be obliged to raise another tax instead (for he refused to borrow). Peace has its deficits as well as war.

  Grenville may not have had the imagination to realize that a militarily enfeebled England invited attack, and another expensive war; but he could not overlook one that was actually raging. In America in May 1763 the North-Western Indians went on the warpath, inspired by the Ottawa leader Pontiac; the whole frontier, from the Great Lakes far southwards, was in flames, and the British army had.to stamp them out. The Pontiac rising was just the sort of sudden crisis that the Empire might expect in the future and for which, therefore, it would have to be always ready (as it had not been in 1763) – ready with soldiers, ready financially. The French and Catholic colony of Quebec had no settled form of government and might rebel at any moment. British soldiers in America were needed to keep the older colonies in order, should they get restive. They might also be used to make the fur-traders behave, deter squatters on Indian land and put down smuggling. In the opinion of General Amherst, the British commander in North America, garrisons ought to be maintained in Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and the Floridas. ‘The Whole,’ he rightly commented, ‘is an Immense Extent.’ There were also the garrisons of Gibraltar and Minorca to think of. Grenville estimated that the annual cost of supporting these forces would be £372,774, most of which would be spent in North America. The only questions that remained were, where and how to raise this sum?

  It was easy to decide that the British taxpayer, already the most heavily mulcted in the Western world, should not be further burdened. Had Great Britain been a militarist absolute monarchy like France, her government might have calculated that the power and wealth accruing from the empire of North America would in the end richly repay the Treasury for any immediate outlays: further taxation or further borrowing might have seemed easily acceptable policies. But the achievements of the previous century and a half made such calculations impossible. Paradoxically, the comparative modernity of British institutions made adaptation to modern needs harder. In an absolute monarchy glory, power and profit (if any) redounded in the first place to the King, who could thus take the long view, if he chose, or was able to (two conditions not often fulfilled); but in a constitutional monarchy, where the purse was firmly controlled by a tax-paying gentry, it was much harder to see what would be gained by sacrificing the present to the future. It was not a case of choosing to lose America rather than spend £372,774 per annum: it had not come to that yet, though it shortly would. Rather it seemed to the English neither just nor necessary that they alone should bear all the cost of an imperial organization from which the Americans profited, in immediate terms, so much more than they (it was not Yorkshire which Pontiac threatened, after all). The notion that they ought in prudence to sacrifice their immediate rights and interests to the larger good of the Empire had no attraction for them. The taxpayers’ strike which was to bring the Empire down may be said to this extent to have begun on the eastern Atlantic shore.

  Besides, the existing governmental machinery made further taxation in England almost impossible. Great Britain enjoyed unusually advanced financial arrangements (one of the reasons for her triumph over France); but, like all other states of the old order, she could never make her full economic resources available to her rulers. In 1763 she was at the end of such resources as were available. A tax on cider, determined upon by Bute, provoked ‘tumults and riots’ in the West Country.4 It incorporated an excise, a hated name since the storm which had forced Walpole to withdraw his similar scheme in 1733; more important, it seemed extraordinary, to a country newly at peace, that additional levies should be imposed. Times were bad, and for some years got worse: it was thought that some 40,000 persons were in prison for debt in 1764. Decidedly, further exactions were out of order. In the view of Grenville, and indeed of most people who thought about the matter, it was high time that the Americans assumed a share of the burden of their own defence.

  There remained the question of what duties to levy, and how. Here another matter was relevant. It had not escaped the government’s notice, during the war, that it was not only very difficult to get the colonies to pay anything directly for the war effort – Pitt had had to promise reimbursement before even Massachusetts would raise a penny – the extensive colonial trade with the enemy had probably prolonged the long and expensive war and had certainly strengthened the foe significantly. This mightily enraged William Pitt. Never mind that the New Englanders’ traffic with the French was essential to enable them to exist, let alone play their part in financing the great struggle: Pitt could only see that it gave the French the essential supplies they needed to continue to fight. It was a paradox of the kind that ministers hate to face: without New England the French in the New World must have collapsed much sooner; yet without the French the Americans could not have fought at all. Pitt, instinctive autocrat that he was, could not endure the thought that the Navigation Acts were being systematically flouted; worse, that the customs officers in the New World eked out their miserable pay by accepting fees from smugglers in lieu of full payment of the tariff (the going rate at Boston was id. a gallon of rum when the duty was notionally 6d.); he may even (while in office) have had some sympathy with Grenville’s view that the whole system was very expensive to administer and brought in next to nothing to cover the costs. He and others denounced this ‘lawless set of smugglers’ and their ‘illegal and most pernicious trade’, and the Royal Navy was ordered to enforce the Acts. It seemed a necessary step towards victory. But like other wartime measures in other wars, this decision was to have a long peacetime history. Without realizing it Pitt had diverted the mercantile system from its role as an instrument for regulating and encouraging trade – the only one in which it made any sense – to one of raising a revenue. It was an example eagerly followed by the Grenville ministry. ‘Preventing smuggling is to be a favourite object of the present administration,’ announced Thomas Whately, Grenville’s Man Friday at the Treasury. The navy was kept at work, and strict administrative measures were taken to enforce the Navigation Acts (not before time: colonial administration had grown dreadfully slack). And the Acts were now definitely to be exploited for raising a revenue, the money gained to be spent on the imperial establishment in North America. To increase the take, new articles of trade were enumerated.

  It was estimated that this new policy, embodied in the so-called Sugar Act (1764), would bring in some £45,000 per annum – a good return, but not nearly enough to cover the costs of empire. To fill the gap Grenville took up a measure that had often been proposed – a colonial stamp duty. Legal documents, such as wills and conveyances, could be required, to be valid, to carry a stamp,5 for which the party involved would have t
o pay the government. Such a duty had been imposed in England for years and had proved a dependable, cheap and easy source of revenue. In America too it would, no doubt, prove, Grenville thought, ‘equal, extensive, not burdensome, likely to yield a considerable revenue, and collected without a great number of officers’. Accordingly, in March 1764, at the same time as he announced his other colonial measures, Grenville proposed, and carried, a resolution in the House of Commons that a stamp tax might be imposed by Parliament on the colonies; and he explicitly asserted, without being challenged, that Parliament had the right thus directly to tax the colonists. He was unambiguous: ‘Mr Grenville strongly urg’d not only the power but the right of Parliament to tax the colonies, and hop’d in God’s Name as his expression was that none would dare dispute their sovereignty’; he added that if a single man doubted Parliament’s right, ‘he would take the sense of the House, having heard without doors hints of this nature dropped’. No one responded.