The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  A means to cut through the tangle of conflicting rights and claims was finally devised in the summer of 1774; the Quebec Act. It defined the frontiers of Canada, which were extended as far south as the Ohio and Allegheny basins. Henceforward this region, so long a magnet for speculators and settlers, would be detached from the North American colonies and governed from Quebec according to a peculiar mixture of old French and English laws. The Quebec Act not only split British North America, it ended over fifty years of expansion by the North American colonists and barred them from those western lands to which they had long believed themselves entitled. It was widely and bitterly resented and the British government, having apparently sorted out the frontier imbroglio, soon found itself faced with an infinitely greater problem, a colonial rebellion.

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  The Descendants of Britons: North America Rebels, 1765–75

  The influx of immigrants into North America coincided with an intense and increasingly passionate debate about the nature of the empire and the identity of its inhabitants. These issues were first raised in the summer of 1765 when Lord Grenville’s ministry passed the Stamp Act, a measure which imposed a levy on all legal documents throughout the empire. It provoked an outcry in the West Indies and North America, where the colonists resurrected the precedent of the 1754 crisis and called a Continental Congress, which agreed to place an embargo on British imports. Simultaneously, and throughout the colonies, there were rowdy demonstrations in which gruesome threats were uttered against those officials whose job it was to collect the stamp duty.

  This spontaneous and violent reaction took the government completely by surprise. Grenville’s successor, the Marquess of Rockingham, decided to temporise and withdraw what was obviously a detested and, given the mood of the colonists, an unenforceable law. The parliamentary exchanges which marked the repeal of the Stamp Act revealed two conflicting views about the relationship between Britain and its colonies and the political rights of the colonists.

  George III, Grenville and defenders of the Stamp Act asserted that the British parliament had an unquestioned right to make laws for the colonies. They clung to the old orthodoxy that the colonies were economic satellites of Britain, and existed solely to generate wealth for the mother country. This dogma was deeply rooted in official thinking and was expressed, no doubt with an eye to his minister’s approval, by Governor Patterson of Prince Edward Island in his annual report for 1770. ‘This island,’ he wrote, ‘with proper Encouragement in its infantile state, may be made extremely plentiful and useful to the Mother-Country.’1 The use of the word ‘infantile’ is instructive, since it reflected the widely-held contemporary view that the colonies were Britain’s offspring and, like children, needed firm but kindly guidance from their parent.

  The patriarchal view of empire was explained during the Stamp Act debate by Grenville who likened the Americans to children, placed in their lands by a generous father, who had subsequently made every provision for their welfare. Implicit in this statement was the assumption that the colonists would continue to look to their parent for assistance and security. Evidence for this lay easily to hand; in the recent war British troops and warships had removed the threat posed by France, and redcoats continued to man the forts which held the frontier against Indians. These benefits were expensive and it was reasonable that part of the bill should be paid by the grateful colonists.

  Variations of the familial metaphor were used frequently by both sides at every phase of the dispute. In 1775, representatives of the American Congress warned the Iroquois to keep out of a ‘family quarrel’ and, a year later, a British officer described the colonists collectively as a ‘spoilt child’ in need of chastisement.2 Another, less severe perhaps, opened his diary for the year 1777 with the impromptu verse:

  May peace and plenty crown the land

  And civil discord cease,

  When Britain stretches forth her hand

  To give her children peace.3

  As late as 1780, General James Robertson, the governor of New York, appealed to Americans as wayward children whom their patient father, Britain, ‘wishes to include in one comprehensive System of Felicity, all Branches of a Stock, intimately connected by Ties of Language, Manners, Laws, Customs, Habits, Interests, Religion, and Blood.’4

  Behind these sentiments lay the fear that imperial unity was in danger. The historian Edward Gibbon, then beginning his account of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, was convinced that a rupture between Britain and its North American colonies would be the first stage of a general collapse of British commerce and power. Likewise, George III and his ministers were thoroughly alarmed by the temper of the colonists whose defiance, if unchecked, could fragment the empire and ruin Britain. Not surprisingly, the King and his supporters regarded the repeal of the Stamp Act as a surrender to organised sedition and an encouragement to further mischief.

  Dissident Americans and their supporters in Britain agreed that the empire was an extended family, but differed in their intepretation of the ties of kinship. Rhode Islanders, who assembled in 1765 to burn the effigies of revenue officers, declared themselves the heirs in spirit of those Englishmen whose defiance of the Stuarts in the last century had secured the constitution and liberty of the subject:

  Those blessings our Fathers obtain’d by their blood,

  We are justly oblig’d as their sons to make good:

  All internal Taxes let us then nobly spurn,

  These effigies first – next the Stamp Paper burn.

  Their claims were echoed in parliament during the Stamp Act debate, when William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, argued that, ‘The Americans are the sons, not the bastards of England.’ It was therefore proper that they should share all the legal and political rights of their siblings in Britain.

  This concept of a common inheritance of freedom was the mainstay of the American argument against governments which asserted parliamentary supremacy over all colonists and offered no representation in return. In 1775, Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut demanded to know why Americans were disbarred from ‘the constitutional rights and liberties delivered to us as men and Englishmen, as the descendants of Britons and members of an empire whose fundamental principle is liberty and security of the subject’.5 The question, had been continually asked by Americans over the past ten years and they had been given no answer. Instead, they had been told to accept that they were unequal members of a family and that their individual rights had been suspended or diluted for no other reason than that they or their ancestors had crossed the Atlantic.

  What was perhaps most perplexing to Americans, faced with what was an arbitrary view of their status, was that they were excessively proud of their Britishness. Benjamin Franklin assured readers of the London Chronicle in November 1770 that Americans ‘love and honour the name of Englishmen; they are fond of English manners, fashions and manufactures; they have no desire of breaking the connection.’ It was, he said, a measure of their patriotism that they insisted that ‘the Parliament of Britain hath no right to raise revenue from them without their consent’.6

  There was much truth in Franklin’s view of the pervasive Britishness of America. Over nine-tenths of the colonists were of British descent and many lived in towns and villages which had been deliberately given British names; in southern New York there were a Stamford, Rye, Gravesend and two Bedfords. Here and elsewhere, settlers had built homes in the vernacular style of the British countryside and had preserved the popular culture of their homeland by passing down folk tales and folk songs. Educated Americans saw themselves not as provincials, but as part of the mainstream of British intellectual and political life. In 1764, a Maryland landowner requested a London merchant to send him ‘the best political and other pamphlets, especially any that relate to the colonies’. Later, when a political break with Britain seemed unavoidable, Franklin was distressed by its possible cultural repercussions for him and his countrymen. Would they be cut off for ever from Shakespear
e?

  Away from the frontier, American life had developed a social sophistication which struck some observers as unexpected and remarkable. An encounter in a Rhode Island town in December 1776 caused Captain John Peebles to comment drolly in his diary:

  Met with a Lady in the Street well dress’d and had a very genteel appearance, and came afterwards into a Shop when, upon enquiring, I found this was Miss Sal Leake, whom I had often heard mention since we came here. She keeps a house of Pleasure, has done for a good many years past in a more decent and respectable manner than is common, and is spoke of by everybody in Town in a favourable manner for one of her Profession, a well-look’d Girl about 30. This place has arrived to a degree of modern luxury, when houses of that kind were publicly allowed of, and the manners of the people by no means rigid when subjects of that sort become family conversation.7

  American morals may have earned the approval of an urbane gentleman, but they were the product of a society in which men of his kind and outlook did not enjoy the same automatic respect and monopoly of power as they did in Britain. American society was pyramidal, but it lacked an aristocracy, so those at the top were the equivalent of the British middle class. Moreover, Americans followed that essentially bourgeois notion that men rose in the world as a result of talent and exertion rather than birth.

  This is not to say that America was democratic. Personal wealth was the yardstick of social position, as it was in Britain, and men of property played a key part in the daily ordering of their communities by serving as magistrates and county sheriffs. They could and did sometimes demand the kind of deference which was found in Britain. When a Baptist interrupted an Anglican service in a Virginian church with impromptu psalm-singing in 1771, he was ejected and whipped by the vicar for his impertinence, and later given a further flogging by the local sheriff, a ‘gentleman’.8 And yet the Church of England, the spiritual backbone of British Toryism, had made little headway in North America where Nonconformists predominated. As a result, a New York Anglican parson regretted that few Americans upheld ‘the principles of submission and obedience to lawful authority’ which lay at the heart of his church’s doctrine.9

  In general, the American temperament was egalitarian and obstreperous and men from all backgrounds did not submit unquestioningly to authority as a matter of habit. In April 1775, Sir James Wright, the governor of Georgia, detected ‘a levelling spirit and contempt for government’ abroad in his colony. The cure was a permanent garrison because British troops would ‘keep up some little show of dignity and command respect, and the officers mixing in with the gentlemen of the towns, the young people would hear the king and government spoken of with that veneration which is proper and due.’10 What had particularly upset Wright was the emergence of a loose alliance between men of substance and what in Britain was called the mob. Whenever the government had been challenged, the reasoned remonstrances of the patricians had been paralleled by popular, disorderly protests. These were most virulent in Boston where, in 1770, Thomas Hutchinson, the assistant-governor, complained that the local magistrates were hand-in-glove with the disaffected and refused to take action against them.11

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  By this time, the government was becoming exasperated by the waves of protests and demonstrations which had greeted each of its attempts to raise money from America. After the repeal of the Stamp Act early in 1766, ministerial face had been saved by a Declaratory Act which insisted that parliament had full powers to make laws for the North American colonies. This gesture had had little impact since the colonists, having discovered their political muscle and encouraged by the overturning of the Stamp Act, continued to resist new taxes and soon scored further successes.

  The 1767 Townshend duties on tea and manufactured imports proved uncollectable because of a campaign of mass intimidation, and were withdrawn after two years. The chief problem was that the day-to-day administration of the colonies, like that of Britain, depended upon the goodwill of unpaid officials drawn from the ranks of property-owners and, in the towns, the richer merchants. By 1770, this group had become divided, and many of its members were no longer willing to cooperate with a government whose policies they disagreed with. Royal governors and excisemen therefore found themselves isolated figures without the wherewithal to enforce the king’s laws.

  Faced with continual assaults on its authority, the government turned in 1770 to that most foolhardy of all policies, selective and limited coercion. A small garrison was stationed in Boston to uphold a hard-pressed administration, and keep the peace in what was the most intractable town in America. The force deployed proved not enough to cow the Bostonians, but more than enough to stiffen their resolve and swell the numbers of the rest of the dissident colonists. The shooting of some civilians after a scuffle at the end of December, known as the ‘Boston Massacre’, gave the Americans their first martyrs and a propaganda coup. There was further violence in 1772 when a revenue cutter, the Gaspée, was set alight after it had been beached on Rhode Island. The Tea Act of 1773, contrived to assist the monopoly of the East India Company, was challenged by a party of Bostonians who, masquerading as Indians, came aboard a merchantman and tipped its cargo of tea into the harbour. Boston had clearly not been overawed, and fresh astringents were applied in the form of regulations devised to stifle its commerce.

  This new stern line on America was taken by Frederick North who had become prime minister in 1770. Lord North’s strength lay in his skills as a parliamentary manipulator and dispenser of patronage rather than his vision or intellect. He remained in power until early 1782, relying on the steadfast support of a parliamentary mountain of Tory backbenchers who were happy to let ministers do their thinking for them. What bound North’s adherents together was common hostility towards anyone who rocked the boat, whether in Britain or America.

  There existed within the inner recesses of the contemporary Tory mind a suspicion that a democratic spirit was infecting Britain and America. At home, it was fomented by John Wilkes who, having survived prosecution for criticising the government in 1763, had emerged as a focus for popular, extra-parliamentary opposition to the king and his ministers. The demonstrations which followed his election as an MP in 1768, and ham-fisted government attempts to unseat him, ran parallel to and mirrored the current unrest in America. Furthermore, and this thoroughly alarmed the Tories, both Wilkes and the colonists were willing to fight their political battles in concert with the mob. Disturbed by what seemed to be an upsurge in disloyalty and popular insolence, both at home and in North America, North’s supporters reacted by closing ranks and minds against any form of censure of the king and his ministers.

  What might otherwise have appeared bone-headed reaction could be defended, up to a point, on the grounds that concessions to American opinion threatened the integrity of the empire. Firmness, always commendable in a father, would quickly silence the tumult that had been stirred up by a minority of Americans, who had been allowed to become intoxicated by libertarian ideas. Once the government’s resolution had been demonstrated, their countrymen would return to their senses and allegiance.

  This simple diagnosis of complaint and remedy was rejected by a small group within parliament who pressed for a compromise. Chatham, Rockingham and, later, Edmund Burke, passionately believed that British and American subjects were morally and legally entitled to the same rights and freedoms. Moreover, the sixteenth-century precedent of returning MPs from Calais and Tournai was cited as evidence that Britain’s overseas possessions had the right to a voice in parliament. If this was withheld, and their judgement of the mood of the Americans correct, North’s opponents argued that his uncompromising line would create the rupture he was striving to avoid. The King, his ministers and the mass of backbenchers were unmoved and pointed out that the Americans, by the very recklessness of their actions, showed themselves strangers to reasoned compromise.

  In the end, it was the Quebec Act of 1774 that impelled Americans to adopt a course of action which
transformed civil protests into an armed rebellion. There was much anger against those provisions which closed the frontier and attached to Canada a great swathe of territory south and west of the Great Lakes which Americans had hitherto believed would be open to them for settlement. The official recognition of Catholicism in Canada provoked an outburst of Protestant hysteria. The lurid imagery of ancient sectarian nightmares was revived among a population which was overwhelmingly Protestant, and among whom memories of the persecutions and wars of the past century were evergreen. Early in 1775, the New England backwoods buzzed with rumours that Popery was about to be imposed and that the King was sending Anglican bishops to harass American Presbyterians.12 In Massachusetts. a congregation heard the apocalyptic vision of their pastor, who predicted that ‘the Scarlet Whore would soon get mounted on Her Horned Beast in America, and, with the Cup of Abominations in her hand, ride triumphant over the heads of true Protestants, making multitudes Drunk with the Wine of Her Fornications.’13

  This was absurd, but by now many Americans were ready to believe any calumny against George III and his ministers. New England farmers, already fearful of the imminent arrival of Popery, were further agitated by tales that the government intended to reduce them to abject tenantry under English lords. Apprehensions of this kind, skilfully manipulated by the anti-government press and individual agitators, helped convince many waverers that American freedoms were in danger of being swept away by a ruthless king, whose government would stop at nothing in its efforts to assert its authority over the colonies. As paranoia gripped much of America, it was easy for propagandists to convince the credulous that they would soon find themselves enslaved. This American dread of slavery struck Samuel Johnson as ironic; ‘How is it’, he asked, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of slaves?’