Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  3 It proved extremely difficult for the public, whether in England or America, to believe that the favourite had fallen for good and was not acting as a ‘minister behind the curtain’. The sinister influence of ‘this mysterious THANE’ was detected everywhere. See below, p. 130.

  4 Nothing ever occurs for the first time. Taxes on cider and perry were among the grievances which provoked the peasants of Normandy to rebel in 1639; a stamp tax provoked a rebellion in Brittany in 1675.

  5 Not to be confused with a postage stamp: see p. 116.

  6 As the controversy developed, Americans drew a distinction (adopted also in the House of Commons by William Pitt) between Parliamentary legislation and Parliamentary taxation. The former, for the good of the Empire, they were, they said, willing to submit to; the latter, in every case, they would resist.

  7 The Connecticut river forms the boundary between the present state of New Hampshire and the state of Vermont, which were one province in the colonial era. It flows on south through Massachusetts and Connecticut. The White Pine Acts thus affected three of the four New England colonies.

  8 Amherst thought of the Indians as Colonel Blimp thought of the Fuzzy-Wuzzy: they ‘never gave him a moment’s concern’, being incapable of ‘attempting anything serious’; being mere savages they could be easily punished with ‘Entire Destruction’ if they tried any tricks. So he denied them the powder and shot which were essential to them, and was surprised when they went to war and devastated the West.

  9 L. H. Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution (New York, 1939–70), X, p. 179.

  10 See above, p. 114.

  11 It is a notably curious feature of American history that the merchants and businessmen have always foreseen ruin whenever a tax has been imposed on their commercial activities, or has been threatened. Yet somehow they have managed to thrive.

  12 For instance, in the autumn of 1763 Yankee traders found there was a glut of flour (their principal export) throughout the West Indies.

  13 The editor of the Virginia Gazette (there were four papers of that name in the colony by 1776 – it must have been very confusing) disapproved of the resolutions so strongly that he would not even print the four that the assembly had actually passed, for fear of their inflammatory effect. This left Henry and his friends free to circulate their most extreme proposals, which the assembly had rejected, as resolutions actually passed, without fear of effective contradiction.

  14 In England the authorities could call out the militia or the regular army. In America there was no regular army to speak of, and the militiamen were usually to be found rioting with their fellow-citizens.

  15 George Rudé, describing the leading characteristics of the English and French political, urban crowd in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, draws a Composite profile which strikingly resembles the Stamp Act mob in Boston (see his The Crowd in History, Chapter 15). The likeness is all the more interesting as he nowhere takes America into account.

  16 For example, by Mr Jesse Lemisch. See his ‘Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 3, July 1968.

  17 Which also earned a bad name among the more prosperous, and not only for impressment. There were numerous cases of naval thieving and marauding. One such involved HMS Gaspee: see below, p. 155.

  18 The same cause produced trouble in England. Professor Rudé states that in the autumn of the peace year, 1763, ‘The justices of the Tower Division were ordered by the Secretaries of State “to take proper measures for suppressing the riots of sailors and others at Shoreditch”.’ Sailors’ disputes continued to be endemic, culminating in a great strike in May 1768. (See G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, Oxford, 1962, p. 93.)

  19 See above, p. 92.

  20 Characteristic of the American Revolution was the presence among the Loyal Nine of Benjamin Edes, printer of the Boston Gazette, which published ‘a continuous stream of articles to stir up feeling against the Stamp Act’ (E. S. and H. M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, Chapel Hill, 1953, p. 122). Edes also printed many radical Whig pamphlets.

  21 Pulling down houses was also one of the traditional riotous activities of the London eighteenth-century mob; and Hutchinson’s experience at the hands of the Boston mob was strikingly like that of Joseph Priestley, the scientist, Unitarian minister and friend of Thomas Jefferson, at the hands of the Birmingham mob in 1791. Hutchinson eventually went into exile in England; Priestley took refuge in the United States.

  22 The other colonies represented were Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland and South Carolina. There were twenty-seven delegates in all.

  23 See below, pp. 295–6.

  24 Except that, the civil courts being closed, debts and rents could not be collected. This distressed English merchants, making them long for repeal, as the Virginian George Washington had, for one, foreseen; the reopening of the courts distressed the debtors and touched off a chain reaction of evictions, riots and the restoration of order by troops in the Hudson Valley, NY.

  25 Rockingham was not to be forgiven for betraying his side by calling in ‘opinion without doors’ – the petitioning merchants – to force the repeal of the Stamp Act. Two generations were to pass before his following recaptured real power and pushed through the Reform Act of 1832.

  26 Professor Palmer points out that only two weeks before the passage of the Declaratory Act the French King made an equally ringing assertion of his rights before the disobedient parlement of Paris (R. R. Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution, I, p. 164). In the crisis of the old order, Britain and France kept strictly in step.

  1 H. L. Mencken claims an Indian origin for this word. Others, perhaps less plausibly, connect it with the caulkers who, along with other sorts of shipwright, made up the bulk of the club’s membership in its early days.

  2 It is worth pointing out the contrast between England and America in this respect. When Chatham went mad, the government of his country was paralysed. When James Otis went mad, the patriot party of Massachusetts Bay simply turned to the alternative leadership of John Hancock and Sam Adams. Clearly the advantage lay with the colonials.

  3 See above, p. 136.

  4 For the particular case of Pennsylvania, see above, pp. 98–9.

  5 Gerrymandering – the manipulation of constituency boundaries to maximize the effect of votes for the manipulating party. Named after Elbridge Gerry (1774–1814), a patriot in the Revolution and successful politician thereafter, whose activities as Governor of Massachusetts (1810–12) suggested the need for a new word. He died while Vice-President of the United States.

  6 Frederick, Prince of Wales.

  7 John Cannon, Lord North (London, 1970, Historical Association pamphlet), p. 9.

  8 ‘To have a standing army! Good God! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty!’ Thus the Reverend Andrew Eliot, on 27 September 1768.

  9 Though there is wisdom in John Shy’s remark that ‘soldiers tended to be drunken and disorderly, but then so did many Americans’ {Toward Lexington, p. 394).

  10 This word had appeared earlier in England, where in 1766 rioters against the high price of wheat in Dorset ‘declared they were Regulators’. See George Rudé, The Crowd in History, p. 42.

  11 In England, of course, we stand for election: in more dynamic America they run, and it is obviously best to use the American idiom here and throughout the book.

  12 John Adams compared England to imperial Rome: both were the prey of ‘musicians, pimps, panders, and catamites’.

  13 All except Connecticut and Rhode Island.

  14 Roman Catholicism was by now abhorred less for its supposedly erroneous doctrines than for its association with ‘slavery and arbitrary power’: it was the religion of despots – Habsburgs, Bourbons, Stuarts – and as such had to be kept at bay in America.

  15 Lord North, for one, would have agreed. As early as 1770 he was saying: ‘The
language of America is, We are the subjects of the King; with Parliament we have nothing to do. That is the point at which the factions have been aiming: upon that they have been shaking hands.’ It was precisely the point which Lords and Commons would resist most strenuously.

  16 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument’.

  1 The navy, for instance, had just begun the practice of copper-bottoming its ships and was introducing the use of lemons as an anti-scurvy measure.

  2 Contemporaries could be much more critical: ‘I indulge a hope that I shall yet have a chance of seeing a General that’s neither a Rebel nor a Hysterical Fool,’ said a New York Loyalist with bitter irony in 1779.

  3 Though the most ludicrously incompetent British officer was a sailor – Sir Peter Parker, who managed to lose the seat of his trousers during his unsuccessful attack on Charles Town in 1776.

  4 Mackesy, The War for America (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 170.

  5 Washington also helped the cause by the excellent personal impression he made on Massachusetts civilians. Mrs John Adams wrote enthusiastically: ‘Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier, look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.’ The General was harder to please. The men of Massachusetts, he wrote, were ‘exceedingly dirty and nasty’.

  6 This is the traditional name, but the battle was actually fought on the adjacent Breed’s Hill. Here is a point where it would be confusing to be accurate.

  7 The Americans were commanded by Israel Putnam, who gave the famous order, ‘Don’t fire, boys, until you see the whites of their eyes.’ They obeyed to such effect that 226 British soldiers and officers were killed, 828 wounded. The Americans lost 140 killed, 270 wounded, thirty prisoners.

  8 Not the least of which were the indiscipline and inexperience of the troops. Washington imposed savage punishments, usually whipping, for such offences as desertion. But he also had to recognize, as he said himself, that ‘… a people unused to restraint must be led, they will not be drove, even those who are engag’d for the war, must be disciplined by degrees’.

  9 Chief among them, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel; hence the soldiers were generally known as Hessians. They were especially detested by the Americans, for they plundered and destroyed with professional conscientiousness.

  10 Nevertheless, when the decision was made, Dickinson proved to be one of the very few members of Congress who actually went off and fought for the cause.

  11 Apart from deletions in the closing section, of the kind which cause all authors agony but which always improve their texts, the most important, ominous change was the removal of Jefferson’s denunciation of the slave-trade, ‘in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it’ (Jefferson, Autobiography) .

  12 Ralph Barton Perry, Puritanism and Democracy (New York, 1944), p. 133; quoted by Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston, 1948), p. 227.

  13 Today it is probably regarded chiefly as one more opportunity to get down to the beach, but throughout the nineteenth century it was celebrated with the utmost patriotic fervour: flags, parades and torrents of oratory; fireworks, cannon and gallons of drink. Daniel Boorstin amusingly describes the rise of the Fourth in his National Experience (London, 1965), pp. 375-90.

  14 For further particulars, and a discussion, see Chapter 11.

  15 It is worth underlining the point that this important decision, which proved to have dealt a mortal wound to the American slave-trade, was justified as an emergency measure, just as Lincoln’s Emancipation proclamation, which gave the death-blow to slavery itself, was justified eighty-seven years later.

  16 And he by them: he proposed marriage to one of them, the widow of the great Helvetius.

  17 The Spaniards were reluctant belligerents: their King, anxious about his own transatlantic possessions, was most unwilling to help George Ill’s rebels. The King of France, Louis XVI, also had an accurate royal intuition: he showed what he privately thought of the Americans by presenting one of Franklin’s noble lady friends with the Doctor’s portrait painted on the inside bottom of a chamber-pot.

  18 He was quite right: the old order in France was wrecked by the war. In this sense we can say that Saratoga caused the French Revolution.

  19 Philadelphia, for example, taken in 1777, was evacuated the following year.

  20 Most of them (80,000 or so) eventually settled north of Lake Erie and there founded English-speaking Canada. A few went to England, where they suffered innumerable slights from English snobbery and jingoism.

  21 Marquis James, Life of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1938), pp. 25-6.

  1 Because of their proximity to the West Indies and the Spanish Empire the only coinage which the Americans had used at all commonly in colonial times was Spanish, though reckonings were usually given in pounds, shillings and pence. Metal currency was driven out of circulation by Continental paper money during the Revolutionary War; thereafter Spanish coins (pesos, pieces of eight, dollars) slowly returned. In 1792 Congress made a silver dollar the basic unit of American currency; it was divisible into the now-familiar quarters, dimes, nickels and cents. However, it took years to get used to the change, and many of the leading Revolutionaries continued to think in terms of the old English money.

  2 James Swan, National Arithmetick, 1786. Quoted by Merrill Jensen, The New Nation (New York, 1967), p. 240, from which book most of this paragraph is derived.

  3 This revolt against the courts is strikingly similar to other episodes in American history, such as the tumults in Iowa at the depth of the Great Depression a hundred and fifty years later. See below, p. 536.

  4 See above, p. 67.

  5 The observation was made by one of Washington’s former French officers, just then visiting Philadelphia.

  6 A contemporary described Gerry as ‘a man of sense but a Grumbletonian… of service by objecting to every thing he did not propose’.

  7 At this period, before the line of settlement had spread deep inland, what were later known as the Northern states, and still later as the North-Eastern, were generally called Eastern. The custom survives of referring to Maine as ‘down East’.

  8 Constitution of the United States, Article 1, section 2.

  9 It was in fact abolished in that year.

  10 That is to say, every state recorded its vote for the Constitution; but there were individual dissidents, for the way a state would vote was settled by majority voting among its delegates.

  11 Their absence meant that Hamilton’s signature on the Constitution could only be that of an individual, since the New York delegation did not have a quorum.

  12 In the end, North Carolina ratified on 21 November 1789, Rhode Island on 29 May 1790.

  13 See Madison to Jefferson, 24 October 1787.

  14 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York, 1948, Vintage edn), p. 9.

  15 See below, p. 306.

  16 This is a provision of the Fourth Amendment. It well illustrates the extent to which experience shaped the political thought of the Revolution, and, consequently, the Constitution. The authors of the Fourth Amendment wanted to avert any recurrence of the threat posed by writs of assistance.

  17 The last President to reaffirm the right of revolution, so far as I know, was Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural (1861). But although he affirmed the right, his whole argument was against the proposed exercise of it by the South.

  1See above, p. 153.

  2 The name is apparently derived from the Iroquois, Kanta-ke,‘great meadow’.

  3 Unfortunately John Mack Faragher, Boone’s latest and best biographer, does not accept this story.

  4 We have met him before: see above, pp. 178 and 184.

  5 Invariably called Scotch-Irish by American historians.

  6 The word section has three connotations in American history, which must not be c
onfused: (i) the strictest: a section under the land survey regulations – see above, p. 192; (ii) the geographical: when writers use terms such as the South Atlantic section or the South Central area they have the physical configuration of the United States in mind; (iii) the loosest: historical-political (with which this book is mostly concerned); ‘the South’, ‘the Middle West’, ‘the West’, ‘New England’ are sections in this sense.