Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Horrific as the Conestoga massacre was, it is worth remembering that at exactly the same time on the other side of the continent the Russians were massacring far, far greater numbers as they suppressed the Aleut revolt on the islands between Siberia and Alaska; as with so much else this aspect of life on the American frontier was the Russian frontier writ small. In the Aleuts’ case there was not even pretence at remorse from those in authority; while the Pennsylvania governor issued warrants for the arrest of those responsible for the Conestoga attack, but met a wall of silence among the Scotch Irish community. The Paxton Boys then moved to attack Christian natives living near the town of Bethlehem. The natives managed to escape and were given protection in the city of Philadelphia. In response the Paxton Boys marched on the city, as described on the Scotch-Irish website. (It may be a sign of the way political values from one epoch continue down the years that when the Ku Klux Klan was established 103 years later, to terrorise freed black slaves, all six of the founders came from the Scotch-Irish community.)

  With a belated sense of fair play George III attempted to provide a degree of protection to his ‘red’ subjects by forbidding all new white settlements west of a ‘proclamation line’ along the Appalachians, a line that in practice offered no real protection to the red natives and created another grievance to add to the growing list of the white natives. The list lengthened again when the colonial authorities pardoned Pontiac, the chief of the Ottawa tribe who had led the recent rebellion. Although the colonists still thought of themselves as Britons, their interests and values increasingly diverged from those of the Britons back across the Atlantic.

  While the threat posed by France and Spain remained, the British colonists were happy to be protected by the British army and navy. Similarly many colonial industries – sugar, tobacco, shipping and indigo, for example – were happy to be protected by laws shielding them from global competition, which could have snuffed them out before they had a chance to establish themselves. The Treaty of Paris, however, seemed to remove the threat of European military intervention, and colonial industrialists and traders were growing strong enough to stand on their own two feet. The British empire was spreading around the globe and within it the North American colonies were starting to loom especially large. In 1775 London remained by far the largest English-speaking city in the world, but three cities were competing for the title of the empire’s second city: Edinburgh, the ancient capital of Scotland; Dublin, whose commercial pre-eminence dated back to the Vikings; and Philadelphia, less than a century old.

  King and colonists started to survey the same landscape through different ends of the telescope. The crown tired of subsidising the colonies by providing free protection. Realising that the colonists were becoming rich enough to pay for their own defence, British taxpayers wanted them to do so. The colonists, realising that the only protection they now needed was from natives whom they could handle perfectly well themselves, saw no reason to pay for anything. The phrase ‘No taxation without representation’ came to sum up a position that had originally been advanced in the 1730s to protest at the imposition by the king of a tax on the import into the mainland colonies of molasses from the French and Dutch West Indies. At that time the refrain had failed to resonate, partly because links were still strong between many of the mainland colonies and colonies like Jamaica and Barbados, which the Molasses Act was designed to protect, partly because the very real French threat muted all opposition to the crown and partly because the molasses tax was never very rigorously enforced. Forty years later the position had changed. In 1773 the parliament in London passed the Tea Act and the citizens of Boston reacted with fury, casting shiploads of tea into Boston harbour rather than paying the iniquitous import duties.

  The Boston Tea Party is another of those foundation myths, like the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, known to everyone. It was the moment when the patience of the colonists snapped, a tax too far imposed on toiling Americans to pay for the whims of a foreign king. There is, however, a flaw in the conventional story: the Tea Act did not impose a horrendous new tax on the American colonists; it reduced by three-quarters an existing tax.

  The American Revolution is often pictured as downtrodden colonists throwing off the weight of an oppressive and suffocating regime. This is simply not the case. It is worth putting at length the conclusions of Harvard professor Niall Ferguson in Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World:

  There is good reason to think that, by the 1770s, New Englanders were about the wealthiest people in the world. Per capita income was at least equal to that in the United Kingdom and was more evenly distributed. The New Englanders had bigger farms, bigger families and better education than the Old Englanders back home. And, crucially, they paid far less tax. In 1763 the average Briton paid 26 shillings a year in taxes. The equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one shilling. To say that being British subjects had been good for these people would be an understatement. And yet it was they, not the indentured labourers of Virginia or the slaves of Jamaica, who first threw off the yoke of Imperial authority.

  The key questions become, then, why was New England the tinderbox and what lit the fire? The answers are best provided, perhaps, not in the faculties of history but by using a favourite tool of modern business schools: the case study. An example might read:

  Your corporation has established a dominant global position in its markets with only one major competitor, which you have significantly outgrown by large-scale investment. You have funded this investment by issuing corporate debt and this is now causing cash flow problems. Your traditional markets have become saturated and are starting to come under attack from new entrants so that your production capacity exceeds demand and stock turn is deteriorating. You have a market study on a new territory that shows significant potential demand, weak local competition (small scale and highly fragmented) and underdeveloped distribution channels. The market is highly protected, but you believe there is an opportunity to use your lobbying power to change government policy. What should you do?

  This, in fact, would be a very poor case study because the answer, in business school parlance, is a ‘no brainer’ – you lobby hard, move into the new market on as large a scale as possible, take over the distribution channels and seize a controlling market share before local firms can consolidate and fight back. The flaw in this answer is that it assumes that everyone plays by the same rules; in the real world, if the stakes are high enough, competition can get very dirty; in 1770s New England it got deadly. Local firms quite literally fought back, and the world was never the same again.

  The London oligarchs who had set up the East India Company were having a hard time. They had outgrown their major rival, the Dutch East India Company, but by 1770 were facing the very real prospect of bankruptcy and were desperate to find markets for the tea grown on their Asian plantations. The North American colonies were an attractive market and the Tea Act made it more attractive. This Act was not about raising money for the British crown but about providing state aid to the world’s largest multinational company. The East India Company decided to do what today’s multinationals would regard as a commonplace – enter the market and use its enormous scale to destroy the local competition. By appointing its own agents in the American colonies and importing not only tea but a host of other essentials, the company planned to take control of the local economy.

  Only one group stood to lose from the Tea Act: not the toiling masses of Massachusetts but what American history books usually refer to as Boston ‘merchants’, in other words the smugglers who controlled an important part of Boston’s mercantile trade. Colonial business leaders like John Hancock, one of the richest men in New England and prime mover in the Boston Tea Party, would have been ruined. Just as families like the Kennedys thrived 160 years later when alcohol smuggling oiled Boston’s commercial wheels, so political power in mid-eighteenth-century Massachusetts floated on a sea of contraband.

  Millionaire entrepre
neur turned historian Ted Nace characterises the colonists’ action as ‘a highly pragmatic economic rebellion against an overbearing corporation, rather than a political rebellion against an oppressive government’. He concludes that one of the basic reasons for the American Revolution was ‘colonial opposition to corporate power’.

  This, however, is not the popular version of history. Once again it has been rewritten not, like Russia, by dictat from above but by the gradual expunging of what was and its replacement by what should have been. Ferguson points out that ‘Contemporaries were well aware of the absurdity of the ostensible reason for the protest’, but nevertheless it is this absurdity that has remained in the popular memory.

  The American Rebellion did not start with the Boston Tea Party but with another of those events that are now firmly lodged in the annals of received American history: ‘the shot that was heard round the world’. British soldiers marching to Concord to seize an illicit arms stash were confronted at Lexington by an armed militia famously aroused by Paul Revere riding through the night. Somebody fired the famous shot and British troops then opened up, killing eight militiamen. To say the shot was heard around the world is somewhat of an exaggeration. As Edmund Burke had complained a few months earlier, as far as the British public were concerned a ‘robbery on Hounslow Heath would make more conversation than all the disturbances in America’. (The phrase itself comes from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.’ He is probably correct that the first shot was fired at the British troops rather than by them, but to this day nobody can be sure who actually pulled the trigger.)

  The British troops carried on to Concord, but on their way back the redcoats were repeatedly ambushed by American guerrillas and only the arrival of reinforcements prevented a complete massacre; 273 British soldiers died. The attack on the British troops had been well prepared. Revere was only one of the riders who were waiting to summon the militia if the troops left their barracks. (And he certainly did not do this by shouting ‘the British are coming’ as legend asserts: at the time both sides considered themselves British.)

  History is an interpretation of reality; it bears as much relation to the real events on which it is based as West Side Story does to Romeo and Juliet. Not only do later generations rewrite history to reflect the prejudices of their age, but the participants themselves construct instant history to suit the needs of the moment. Today’s history started life as yesterday’s public relations. The stories of Lexington and Concord are classic examples. Both sides blamed each other for firing the first shot, and in no time at all reality was being shamelessly embroidered.

  The Massachusetts Assembly gathered depositions from alleged eyewitnesses for publication in Britain, which claimed that in the British retreat from Concord ‘a great number of the houses on the road were plundered and rendered unfit for use; several were burnt; women in childbed were driven by the soldiery naked into the streets; old men, peaceably in their houses were shot dead; and such scenes exhibited as would disgrace the annals of the most uncivilized nation’. The official British line, contained in the reports sent home by the British commander, was relatively subdued, but the reaction of the loyalist population can be gauged by a letter written by the sister of a government official in Massachusetts. This reported that on their return through Lexington the British troops ‘found two or three of their people lying in the agonies of death, scalped and their noses and ears cut off and eyes bored out, which exasperated the soldiers exceedingly’.

  As in all wars the two sides, loyalist and rebel, were seeing different realities. In such circumstances a peaceful resolution of their differences became impossible.

  The American Rebellion

  Once the first shot had been fired at Lexington it quickly became clear that the rebels would not fight a defensive war. Right from the first they were convinced that others would inevitably come to share their dream. In particular they looked at the other British colonies, and their first move was to strike north, capturing Montréal and halting only after being heavily defeated in an assault on Quebec. The Americans were taken aback by the failure of Canadians to accept the invitation of the Continental Congress to join the rebellion and by their vigorous resistance to being invaded – prefiguring perhaps the differing reactions of invader and invaded in twenty-first-century Iraq.

  For eight years the conflict dragged on. After their initial success the rebels suffered from British and loyalist counterattacks. Only a curious reluctance on the part of the British commanders to push home their advantages and skilful manoeuvring by the rebels stopped the incipient revolution being crushed. George Washington’s army of 11,000 famously spent the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where nearly a quarter died of starvation and disease and another thousand deserted. Valley Forge marked the low point in the rebels’ cause. The next year France and the self-declared United States of America signed a treaty committing each not to make peace with Britain before the other. The following year Spain joined them. Initially the advent of their new allies did little to help the rebels, who suffered more significant defeats and continued harrying from the Iroquois allies of the British. Washington was faced with mutinies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the US navy was forced to recruit from jails and among British prisoners of war. The rebels lost one of their most brilliant commanders when Benedict Arnold went over to the British, determined, in the old quip, to prove himself ‘the ablest general on both sides’.

  The rebels, by now a genuine American army rather than a collection of local militias, did not give up. They retained real popular support and the conflict took on all the characteristics of a war of liberation. The rebel generals and their troops proved more skilful and more committed than their opponents. Helped by monumental British errors, the war moved to its climax at Yorktown. The scene was set for a repeat of the siege of Louisburg, the Gibraltar of America, albeit on a far larger and more significant scale. Oddly Gibraltar itself played a key part in the final outcome. A Spanish siege of Gibraltar, exacerbated by French attacks in Asia, stretched the Royal Navy to breaking point. British forces proved incapable of fighting a global war, and a much larger French fleet not only overwhelmed the British fleet in Chesapeake Bay but also landed 3,000 French troops to support the Americans besieging Yorktown. On 18 October the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, surrendered.

  The loyalist and British forces in New York still held out, and Washington himself did not believe that Yorktown would settle the conflict, but the British parliament, riven by doubts about the war from its inception, decided to capitulate. Within weeks tens of thousands of loyalists were fleeing for their lives, enriching the Caribbean colonies and especially Canada, and leaving behind spoils for the victors. As J. M. Roberts has pointed out, ‘There were fewer emigrants from France during the French Revolution than from the American colonies after 1783. A much larger proportion of Americans felt too intimidated or disgusted with their revolution to live in the United States after Independence than the proportion of Frenchmen who could not live in France after the Terror.’

  The conflict that began on Lexington Green in April 1775 was at the same time a war of independence, a revolution, a civil war and a tiny fragment of a global struggle. It has even been described by Kevin Phillips as a religious war, pitching Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Low Church Anglicans against High Church Anglicans, repeating the divisions of the English Civil War. Not surprisingly simplistic attempts to describe its origins are doomed to failure. On both sides different groups had different interests. The financial imperatives of the merchant leaders of New England were different to those of their opposite numbers in more cosmopolitan New York; the land hunger driving the ethnic cleansers on the borders of Pennsylvania and South Carolina was no longer shared by the settled farmers of Connecticut and Massachusetts; the lives of the patrician oligarchs of Virginia had no more in common with the fisherfolk of Maine than th
ey did with their own slaves. In Britain the country gentry were pressing for higher taxation on the colonies to avert a threatened rise in land tax at home at the same time as Parliament, in an attempt to defuse the growing crisis, resolved not to tax any colony that would pay for its own administration, defence and judiciary. Underlying these varied sectional interests was a growing psychological gulf between the two sides, a gulf that is inevitable in any empire: the chasm between the coloniser and the colonised. As John Adams later put it, the war itself was a consequence of a ‘Revolution in the minds of the people’, a revolution that he believed had been developing for more than a decade before the first drop of blood was spilt. The crux of the American rebellion is that less than two hundred years after the first English settlement the settlers had become natives. The days when the colonies had been the property of court favourites and London merchants had long since gone, and with them the essential unity of the Anglo-American political establishment. Although bonds of friendship and blood still stretched across the Atlantic they were increasingly tenuous. More than half the colonial population was of non-British origin – native, African or, the biggest group, German and German-Swiss. Furthermore three-quarters of British immigrants in the eighteenth century were Scottish or Irish, neither of whom had any particular love for what they regarded as the ‘English’ crown.