Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (80 page)

As colony after colony in the spring and summer of 1776 moved to declare its independence and embark on the task of establishing a new form of government, an irresistible momentum built up for a formal Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress. Individual colonies had taken the law into their own hands, but the United Colonies lacked any internationally acceptable legal standing, and they desperately needed the military assistance that only France could supply to keep their rebellion going. The stark truth was spelled out on 2 June by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: `It is not choice then but necessity that calls for independence as the only means by which foreign alliances can be obtained."" Five days later, on the instructions of the Virginia Convention, he put forward a resolution in the Congress, seconded by John Adams, that `these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.'

Following the passage of the resolution the Congress set up a drafting committee to prepare a Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson, the newly arrived Virginia delegate, as one of its five members. He had recently prepared a draft constitution for Virginia, and it was to him, with his `peculiar felicity of expression', as John Adams put it, that the final wording of the proposed Declaration was entrusted, although the political advantage of involving a southerner in an enterprise which might otherwise have smacked too much of New England radicalism is likely to have weighed at least as heavily as considerations of literary skill.113

After much editing by the Committee of Five, Jefferson's text, which did indeed display his `peculiar felicity of expression', was delivered to Congress on 28 June. On 2 July, after unanimously affirming that `these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States', Congress turned itself into a Committee of the Whole, for further discussion and amendment of the text - a process that caused its author growing distress. The most substantive change, introduced on the urging of South Carolina and Georgia, was the removal of a lengthy paragraph on the `execrable commerce' in slaves. 114 The wording of the text was finally accepted by Congress on 4 July, a date that would prevail over 2 July as the official anniversary of independence."' Four days later in Philadelphia the United Colonies ceremonially announced to the world that henceforth they were to be regarded as free and United States. Copies of the Declaration were circulated and reprinted, and the symbols of royalty were torn down across the colonies.

The document declaring the colonies to be independent of British rule represented an eloquent amalgam of the traditions, assumptions and ideas that had animated the resistance to imperial measures over the preceding two decades.116 In providing a long list of `injuries and usurpations' allegedly committed by the king, the Declaration, like the earlier Declaration prepared by Jefferson for the Virginia Convention, drew on the precedents provided by the English Declaration of Rights of 1689. Now it was George III instead of James II who was bent on ,the establishment of an absolute tyranny', and who had ignored all petitions for redress. The consequence in this instance, however, was the termination of allegiance, not simply, as in 1688-9, to the monarch of the moment, but to the British crown itself. `All political connection' was to be dissolved between the United Colonies - now to become the `United States of America' - and the `State of Great Britain'. In thus dissolving the connection between two polities the Declaration resembled less the Bill of Rights of 1689 than the Act of Abjuration of 1584 by which the States General of the Netherlands renounced their allegiance to Philip II of Spain. 117

The American colonists, like the Dutch and the English before them, were resorting in their Declaration of Independence to that standard recourse for rebels in the western world, the idea of a contract between a ruler and his subjects. Hispanic Americans, when opposing some measure of which they disapproved, traditionally resorted to the same device. While contractualism itself was common to the peoples of both colonial societies, and was firmly rooted in their shared natural law tradition, distinctive national histories and religious traditions inevitably shaped the context in which it was deployed. The Comuneros of New Granada in 1781 were the spiritual heirs of the Comuneros of Castile in 1521, who themselves looked back to the Castilian constitutionalist tradition embodied in the medieval law code of the Siete Partidas. In 1776, Jefferson and the representatives assembled in the Congress consciously took their place in a distinguished historical line of resistance to tyrants that was embodied in Magna Carta, and then ran forward through the Protestant Reformation and the revolt of the Netherlands to seventeenth-century Britain, and eventually to themselves. Buttressed by the English legal tradition with its heroic record of defending English liberties, resistance doctrines drew their theoretical support from the writings of a succession of political philosophers, among them Locke and the radical Whig upholders of the Old Cause.

In the Declaration of Independence, however, the historical and legal case for a separation between the colonies and the British state was subsumed, as it was in Paine's Common Sense, within a larger moral case of universal import: when a government behaves tyrannically, the people have a duty to sever their connection with it.11' Lurking in the background of this argument was the classical republican tradition, as transmitted through the Commonwealthmen, with its emphasis on morality in the shape of civic virtue, as the sole defence against the loss of liberty. More immediately important, however, was the determination of Jefferson and his colleagues to relate the cause of independence to the `self-evident truths' revealed by the Enlightenment.

Although Jefferson, in enunciating the self-evidence of these truths, may have been inspired by the writings of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers,119 they were deeply grounded in Lockean morality. While there was a tension between the organic view of society inherent in classical republicanism, and the individualism inherent in Locke's political philosophy, the unanimity with which the Declaration of Independence was received and approved suggests that the two forms of discourse remained at this stage mutually compatible. The strain of radical individualism in Locke's thinking had yet to be asserted at the expense of its other components, and the men of 1776 drew on a common culture that found space for classical republicanism while being imbued with Lockean principles. 120

At the heart of those principles was the belief in a benevolent Deity who created men and women as rational beings, capable of coming together to form civil societies based on consent. The eighteenth-century colonists had become Lockeans almost without realizing it, accepting in principle the notion of a fundamental equality, at least for themselves, although not for Indians and Africans; tolerating a wide variety of opinions as necessary to the successful functioning of a society that must be based on mutual trust; and applying themselves to industrious pursuits with the purpose and expectation of improving their own condition and that of the society in which they lived.

In doing so, they looked to government to protect what the Declaration called `certain unalienable rights', among them `life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. While the more normal formulation was `life, liberty, and property', Locke himself, in book 2 of the Essay Concerning Understanding, had written several times of `the pursuit of happiness'. For Locke, happiness was what God desired for all His creation, and was the earthly foretaste of His goodness. The Swiss jurist and philosopher Burlamaqui and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, with whose writings Jefferson was well acquainted, had similarly emphasized the right of human beings to be happy.'21 So fashionable, indeed, had the notion become that eighteenth-century rulers conventionally pronounced the promotion of happiness to be one of their aims. The governor of Massachusetts, Jonathan Belcher, picking up on the language of the age, spoke in an address to the General Assembly in 1731 of laying the foundation for laws that `would greatly promote the Happiness of this People'.'22 As used in the Declaration of Independence, however, the notion of happiness acquired its full resonance, as the inalienable right of God's creatures to enjoy to the maximum their liberty and the fruits of their labours, unmolested by government as they went about their business and their pleasures.

The Declaration of Independence, by setting the particular within the context of the universal, and transmuting British into natural rights, resonated far beyond the English-speaking world. It appeared in French in a Dutch journal within a month of publication. German translations were to follow, and there would be at least nine more French translations before 1783.123 Spain, however, was more circumspect. Readers of the Gaceta de Madrid on 27 August might have noticed, buried among various items of news, a report that `The Congress has declared independent of Great Britain the twelve [sic] united colonies, with each one forming its own government while a common regency system is planned for all of them.' The Spanish government was not anxious to see its subjects, and least of all its subjects in the Americas, more than minimally informed.124

It was the French reaction, however, not the Spanish, that mattered to the men in Philadelphia. It was to France above all that the new republic looked for the immediate moral and practical support essential to victory in their fight for liberty. It was a fight which, in the bleak winter of 1776, looked as if it could only end in defeat for the Patriot forces. They had as yet no allies, and they had pitted themselves against an imperial power that only a decade earlier had defeated the combined forces of France and Spain. Moreover, in renouncing their allegiance to George III, they had torn the British Atlantic community apart, and in the process had left themselves dangerously exposed. Away to the south, East and West Florida were firmly in British hands. To the west of the rebel colonies, the Indian nations sought to maintain an increasingly precarious neutrality in this white, fratricidal conflict, anxious to be on the winning side when it finally ended, but more likely to come out in support of the British as offering the better hope of recovering lost community lands.12' To the north, Canada and Nova Scotia, following the defeat of the invading American army in 1775, stayed loyal to the crown, and became an important base of operations against the rebels.

The British West Indies, too, although sharing many similarities with the southern colonies, showed no inclination to join the revolt. In a society where whites were massively outnumbered by blacks, fears of a slave rebellion acted as a strong deterrent, although similar fears in the American South, where the balance of races was more even, had proved insufficient to discourage the planters from defying the British crown. Unlike their Virginian counterparts, however, many of the Caribbean plantation-owners were absentee landlords, and therefore more tenuously connected to their estates. In the face of competition from the French sugar islands, the West Indies, too, were totally dependent on a protected British market. Already in the disputes over imperial legislation in the 1760s the West India lobby had found it convenient to play the card of loyalty in the hope of reinforcing the islands' preferential status. Submission was a price worth paying, both to keep the sugar exports flowing and to be asssured of British military assistance if the slaves revolted.126

If the thirteen colonies failed to carry with them significant portions of Britain's Atlantic empire, they also failed to carry a substantial section of their own populations. While the Declaration of independence did much to mobilize enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause, for a large minority it proved a step too far. Some who had famously championed the cause of American liberty, like John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, pulled back from the brink.127 Others, intimidated into silence, waited for the arrival of British troops before showing their hand. As always in revolutions, there were many who were neutral or uncommitted, hoping simply to ride out the storm. But perhaps as many as 500,000 in a white population of around 2,200,000 remained loyal to the British crown. Of these loyalists 19,000 joined up as volunteers in the `provincial' corps of the British army in America, while perhaps 60,000 emigrated to Canada or England.121

This, then, was a civil war as much as a revolution, although one in which the loyalist `Tory' opposition proved notably unsuccessful in winning the initiative or providing that continuity of leadership which was to be such an important element in the eventual victory of the Patriot cause. If that cause for a time looked hopeless, British military errors, and the grim determination of Washington and his men to hold on, slowly turned the tide. Congress, for its part, never withdrew its support from Washington, even when the military situation was at its bleakest. Always careful to defer to the civilians, Washington himself developed into a genuinely national leader, whose wisdom and steadfastness in the face of adversity came to symbolize, for contemporaries as for posterity, the tenacity and high ideals of the American Revolution.129

It was the British surrender at Saratoga in 1777 that transformed the prospects for the fledgling United States. The American victory persuaded France to enter the war in 1778. In June 1779 Spain, still smarting from the loss of Florida, and anxious, as always, to recover Gibraltar, followed suit.130 What had begun as a rebellion of disaffected colonists was now transformed into a global conflict, in which the rebels were no longer fighting on their own.

When General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781 an exhausted Britain lost the will to win a war in which it had never quite been able to believe. By the terms of the treaty of Versailles of September 1783 it retained Canada, but returned the Floridas to Spain, and formally recognized the independence of the thirteen rebel colonies. Only nine years had passed since Samuel Adams had written to the London agent of Massachusetts that he wished for a permanent union with the mother country, `but only on the principles of liberty and truth. No advantage that can accrue to America from such an union can compensate for the loss of liberty ...'131 In the end, the American Patriots placed 'liberty' above the union they had initially hoped to re-establish on more equitable foundations. The effect of their victory was to break the British Atlantic community in two. It remained to be seen whether a Spanish Atlantic community experiencing many of the same tensions would fare any better.