Empires Apart (23 page)

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 entrepreneur 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.

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 they 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.

To the colonists the British authorities and the British army were no longer their fellow Britons but agents of an occupying power. The colonists may still theoretically have been Britons, but they were second-class Britons. George Washington was horrified to discover in 1754, when he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in the British army, that he would be paid less than British-born officers of the same rank.

Although the majority of colonists undoubtedly chafed at their second-class status it is important not to over-emphasise the extent of discontent. As Niall Ferguson has written, ‘The Hollywood version of the War of Independence is a straightforward fight between heroic Patriots and wicked, Nazi-like Redcoats. The reality was quite different. This was indeed a civil
war that divided social classes and even families. And the worst of the violence did not involve regular British troops, but was perpetrated by rebel colonists against their countrymen who remained loyal to the crown.'

Around half of all the British colonies in the Americas did not rebel. One of the first actions of the Continental Congress was to place a trade embargo on the colonies that stayed loyal. Bermuda was particularly hard hit. The colony had been controlled by a group of oligarchs known as the ‘forty families' since its establishment 130 years earlier. They had strong commercial links with the rebel leaders and a deal was soon reached. On 14 August 1775 two American ships anchored in Tobacco Bay, Bermuda, under cover of darkness and were loaded with barrels of gunpowder; ransom paid, the blockade was lifted. Thereafter Bermudian sloops regularly flouted the Royal Navy's blockade to carry salt to Washington's army. The far more populous and important Caribbean colonies, which were to be in the forefront of the fighting as the French captured island after island, stayed loyal, and Jamaica became a key base for the British navy. The rebels did capture and briefly hold the Bahamas.

The bulk of the colonial population was on the mainland and here the call of the rebels was much more strongly heeded. Of the eighteen mainland colonies only five did not join the rebellion, although in New York loyalists were probably in a majority when the war started. Of the thirteen most developed colonies only Quebec stayed loyal. In the less developed colonies Georgia went with the rebels and Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, East and West Florida stayed loyal, but with such tiny populations they made no difference to the balance of power.

Despite their widely different, indeed conflicting, interests the majority of the colonists rose up in rebellion. Initially they were united in their opposition to the crown but in little else; they needed a stronger glue to bind them together. That glue proved to be the ideology of democracy. The very first Continental Congress held in Philadelphia a year before the rebellion broke out, and including representatives of twelve of the eventual thirteen seceding colonies, adopted a lofty ‘Declaration of Rights and Grievances' designed to grab the ethical high ground.

The American War of Independence was the first war to be fought overtly for an ideology. The rebels were not fighting a nationalist war, as the concept of America as a nation did not yet exist, nor were they following charismatic leaders promising them wealth and glory. They were not even fighting for ‘freedom' in the sort of practical sense that would have been understood by those fettered by the shackles of slavery; they fought for the ideology of what today is called democracy.

(There is a danger in using the term ‘democracy' as its meaning has changed considerably over the last two centuries. Many of the Founding Fathers of what today proudly calls itself the world's leading democracy would have been horrified to be labelled democrats, a term that, especially after the French Revolution, implied an element of mob rule. As one eminent historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, has written, the clergy and political leaders of New England considered democracy to mean ‘terror, atheism and free love', and they fought to ensure that America would not become ‘too democratic for liberty'.)