The American Revolution: A History (6 page)
To counter all these halting and fumbling efforts by the colonists to divide parliamentary authority, the British offered a simple but powerful argument. Since they could not conceive of the empire as anything but a single, unified community, they found absurd and meaningless all these American distinctions between trade regulations and taxation, between “external” and “internal” taxes, and between separate spheres of authority. If Parliament even “in one instance” was as supreme over the colonists as it was over the people of England, wrote a subcabinet official, William Knox, in 1769, then the Americans were members “of the same community with the people of England.” On the other hand, if Parliament’s authority over the colonists was denied “in any particular,” then it must be denied in “all instances,” and the union between Great Britain and the colonies must be dissolved. “There is no alternative,” Knox concluded. “Either the colonies are part of the community of Great Britain or they are in a state of nature with respect to her, and in no case can be subject to the jurisdiction of that legislative power which represents her community, which is the British Parliament.”
What made this British argument so powerful was its basis in the widely accepted doctrine of sovereignty—the belief that in every state there could be only one final, indivisible, and uncontestable supreme authority. This was the most important concept of eighteenth-century English political theory, and it became the issue over which the empire was finally broken.
This idea that, in the end, every state had to have one single supreme undivided law-making authority had been the basis of the British position from the beginning. The British expressed this concept of sovereignty officially in the Declaratory Act of 1766, which, following the repeal of the Stamp Act, affirmed Parliament’s authority to make laws binding the colonists “in all cases whatsoever.” It was natural for the British to locate sovereignty in Parliament, for it was the institution to which they paid the greatest respect. Indeed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the veneration felt by metropolitan Britons toward their Parliament. All good Britons could be suspicious of crown power but not of Parliament. Parliament had always been the bulwark of their liberties, their protector against crown abuses.
The colonists could never share this traditional reverence toward Parliament, and on this issue they inevitably parted from their fellow Englishmen, not by rejecting the doctrine of sovereignty but by relocating it. In 1773, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson was provoked into directly challenging the radical movement and its belief in the limited nature of Parliament’s power. In a dramatic and well-publicized speech to the Massachusetts legislature, Hutchinson attempted once and for all to clarify the central constitutional issue between America and Great Britain and to show the colonists how unreasonable their views were. “I know of no line,” he declared, “that can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies, as it is impossible there should be two independent legislatures in one and the same state.”
By 1773 many Americans despaired of trying to divide what royal officials told them could not be divided. The Massachusetts House of Representatives had a simple answer to Hutchinson’s position. If, as Governor Hutchinson had said, there was no middle ground between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies from Parliament, the House members felt that there could be no doubt that “we were thus independent.” The logic of sovereignty therefore forced a fundamental shift in the American position.
By 1774 the leading colonists, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were arguing that only the separate American legislatures were sovereign in America. According to this argument, Parliament had no final authority over America, and the colonies were connected to the empire only through the king. The most the colonists would concede was that Parliament had the right to regulate their external commerce only “from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries,” as the
Declarations and Resolves of the First Continental Congress
put it. But the British government remained committed to parliamentary sovereignty embodied in the Declaratory Act, which no American leader could any longer take seriously.
It was now only a matter of time before these irreconcilable positions led to armed conflict.
III
Revolution
By 1774, within the short span of a decade following the introduction of the imperial reforms, Americans who had celebrated George III’s coronation were in virtual rebellion against Great Britain. During the two years after the Coercive Acts of 1774, events moved rapidly, and reconciliation between Britain and its colonies became increasingly unlikely. By this time the crisis had become more than a simple breakdown in the imperial relationship. The colonists’ extraordinary efforts to understand what was happening transformed their resistance and ultimately their rebellion into a world-historical revolution. The Americans’ Declaration of Independence in 1776 turned their separation from Britain into an event that many Americans and some Europeans believed was unprecedented in human history. Americans saw themselves striving not only to make themselves free, but also to bring freedom to the whole world.
THE APPROACH TO INDEPENDENCE
The Coercive Acts of 1774 provoked open rebellion in America. Not only had the abuses of the English government aroused the Americans’ principles, but repeated expressions of English arrogance had finally worn out their tempers. Whatever royal authority was left in the colonies now dissolved. Many local communities, with a freedom they had not had since the seventeenth century, attempted to put together new popular governments from the bottom up. Mass meetings that sometimes attracted thousands of aroused colonists endorsed resolutions and called for new political organizations. Committees of different sizes and names—committees of safety, of inspection, of merchants, of mechanics—competed with one another for political control. In the various colonies royal government was displaced in a variety of ways, depending on how extensive and personal previous royal authority had been. In Massachusetts, where the crown’s authority had reached into the villages and towns through the royally appointed justices of the peace, the displacement was greater than in Virginia, where royal influence had scarcely touched the control of the counties by the powerful landowners. But everywhere there was a fundamental transfer of authority that opened new opportunities for new men to assert themselves.
By the end of 1774, in many of the colonies local associations were controlling and regulating various aspects of American life. Committees manipulated voters, directed appointments, organized the militia, managed trade, intervened between creditors and debtors, levied taxes, issued licenses, and supervised or closed the courts. Royal governors stood by in helpless amazement as new informal governments gradually grew up around them. These new governments ranged from town and county committees and the newly created provincial congresses to a general congress of the colonies—the First Continental Congress, which convened in Philadelphia in September 1774.
In all, fifty-five delegates from twelve colonies (all except Georgia) participated in the First Continental Congress. Some colonists, and even some royal officials, hoped that this Congress might work to reestablish imperial authority. Those who were eager to break the bond with Great Britain, however, won the first round. Led by the cousins Samuel and John Adams from Massachusetts, and by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee from Virginia, the Congress endorsed the fiery Resolves of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which recommended outright resistance to the Coercive Acts. But the Congress was not yet ready for independence. It came very close—failing by the vote of a single colony—to considering further and perhaps adopting a plan of union between Britain and the colonies proposed by Joseph Galloway, leader of the Pennsylvania assembly and spokesman for the conservative congressional delegates from the middle colonies. Galloway’s plan was radical enough: It called for the creation of a grand colonial council composed of representatives from each colony. Laws passed by either the American grand council or the British Parliament were to be subject to mutual review and approval.
By 1774, however, it was unlikely, even if Galloway’s plan had been adopted, that the Congress could have reversed the transfer of authority that was taking place in the colonies. In the end, the Continental Congress simply recognized the new local authorities in American politics and gave them its blessing by establishing the Continental Association. This continentwide organization put into effect the nonimportation, nonexportation, and nonconsumption of goods that the Congress had agreed on. Committees in all the counties, cities, and towns were now ordered by the Congress “attentively to observe the conduct of all persons,” to condemn publicly all violators as “enemies of American liberty,” and to “break off all dealings” with them.
Thus with the Congress’s endorsement of the Continental Association, local committees, speaking in the name of “the body of the people,” carried on the political transformation. Groups of men, from a few dozen to several thousand, marched through villages and city streets searching out enemies of the people. Suspected enemies, under threat of being tarred and feathered, were often forced to take back unfriendly words or designs against the public, to sign confessions of guilt and repentance, and to swear new oaths of friendship to the people. In all the colonies there were signs of an emerging new political order.
These remarkable political changes were not simply the product of the colonists’ resistance to British imperial reform. Britain’s attempts to reorganize its empire took place not in a vacuum, but in complicated, highly charged situations existing in each colony. In some cases these local political conditions had as much to do with the escalation of the controversy between the colonies and the mother country as did the steps taken by the British government three thousand miles away. Everywhere in the 1760s various groups in the colonies were eager to exploit popular resentment against the British reforms in order to gain local political advantage—with, however, little understanding of the ultimate consequences of their actions.
In New York, for example, political factions that were led by the well-to-do Livingston and De Lancey families vied with each other in whipping up opposition to the imperial legislation and in winning the support of popular extralegal groups such as the Sons of Liberty. Thus these gentry generally helped expand the rights and participation of the people in politics—not with the aim of furthering electoral democracy, but only for the tactical purpose of gaining control of the elective assemblies. While this sort of unplanned popularization of politics had gone on in the past, particularly in urban areas, the inflamed atmosphere generated by the imperial crisis gave it a new explosive power with unpredictable implications.
In colony after colony local and often long-standing quarrels became so entangled with imperial antagonisms that they reinforced one another in a spiraling momentum that brought all governmental authority into question. Even authorities in those colonies that were not ruled by royal governors, such as the proprietary governments of Pennsylvania and Maryland, were victimized by the imperial crisis. Thus in Maryland in 1770 a proclamation by the proprietary governor setting the fees that were paid to government officials seemed to violate the principle of no taxation without representation that had been made so vivid by the imperial debate. This executive proclamation provoked a bitter local struggle that forced Daniel Dulany, a wealthy member of the colony’s council and former opponent of the Stamp Act, into defending the governor. In the end, the controversy destroyed the governor’s capacity to rule and made Dulany a loyalist to the British cause.
By the 1770s all these developments, without anyone’s clearly intending it, were creating a new kind of popular politics in America. The rhetoric of liberty now brought to the surface long-latent political tendencies. Ordinary people were no longer willing to trust only wealthy and learned gentlemen to represent them in government. Various artisan, religious, and ethnic groups now felt that their particular interests were so distinct that only people of their own kind could speak for them. In 1774 radicals in Philadelphia demanded that seven artisans and six Germans be added to the revolutionary committee of the city.
Americans today are used to such “coalition” and “interest-group” politics, but their eighteenth-century counterparts were not. Educated gentlemen such as the prominent Oxford-trained landowner William Henry Drayton of South Carolina complained of having to participate in government with men who knew only “how to cut up a beast in the market” or “to cobble an old shoe.” “Nature never intended that such men should be profound politicians, or able statesmen.” In 1775 the royal governor of Georgia noted in astonishment that the committee in control of Savannah consisted of “a Parcel of the Lowest People, chiefly carpenters, shoemakers, Blacksmiths etc. with a Jew at their head.” In some colonies politicians called for an expanded suffrage, the use of the ballot rather than the customary oral voting, the opening of legislative meetings to the public, the printing of legislative minutes, and the recording of votes taken in the legislatures. All these proposals enlarged the political arena and limited the power of those who clung to the traditional ways of private arrangements and personal influence.
Everywhere in the colonies “incendiaries” (as royal officials called them) used fiery popular rhetoric and competed openly for political leadership. More and more “new men” took advantage of the people’s resentments of the British regulations and actively campaigned for popular election in order to bypass the traditional narrow and patronage-controlled channels of politics. The political atmosphere in America was now charged as never before with both deep animosities and new hopes for bettering the world. Americans told themselves they were “on the eve of some great and unusual events,” events that “may form a new era, and give a new turn to human affairs.”
Men who, like Thomas Hutchinson, had been reared in the old ways and had benefited from them stood bewildered and helpless in the face of these popularizing developments. They possessed neither the psychological capacity nor the political sensitivity to understand—let alone to deal with—this popular politics and the moral outrage and fiery zeal that lay behind it. They intrigued and schemed, and they tried to manipulate those who they thought were the important people in the opposition. (In 1768, for example, John Adams was offered the office of advocate-general in the Massachusetts admiralty court.) When they could not buy them off, they accused those individuals of demagoguery or ridiculed them as upstarts. Frightened by the increased violence, they struck out furiously at the kinds of popular politics they believed were undermining authority and causing the violence. Traditional and prudent men of this sort could not accept a new and different world, and soon they either fell silent or became loyalists, determined to remain faithful to the king and to support the hierarchical society that had bred them.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
By the beginning of 1775 the British government was already preparing for military action. By this time North’s supporters and the king himself saw no choice but force to bring the colonists back into line. As early as November 1774, George III had told North that “blows must decide whether they are to be subject to the Country or Independent.” The British government thus built up its army and navy and began restraining the commerce first of New England and then of the other colonies.
In May 1775 delegates from the colonies met in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, to take up where the first Congress had left off. Outwardly the Congress continued the policy of resolves and reconciliation. In July, at the urging of John Dickinson, the Congress approved the Olive Branch Petition, which claimed loyalty to the king and humbly asked him to break with his “artful and cruel” ministers, whom the Congress blamed for the oppressive measures. At the same time, the Congress issued a Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms (largely written by Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson) in which it denied that Americans had any “ambitious design of separating from Great Britain, and establishing independent states.” As this superb summary of the American case against Britain demonstrated, the time for paper solutions had passed.
In April 1775 fighting had broken out in Massachusetts. Since the British government had long assumed that Boston was the center of the disturbances in America, it believed that isolating and punishing that port city would essentially undermine all colonial resistance. The Coercive Acts of 1774 had rested on this assumption, and the British military actions of 1775 were simply a logical extension of the same assumption. The British government, thinking that it was dealing only with mobs led by a few seditious instigators, therefore ordered its commander in Massachusetts, General Gage, to arrest the rebel leaders, to break up their bases, and to reassert royal authority in the colony. On April 18–19, 1775, Gage’s army attempted to seize rebel arms and ammunition stored at Concord, a town northwest of Boston. Colonial scouts, including the silversmith Paul Revere, rode ahead of the advancing redcoats, warned patriot leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams to flee, and roused the farmers of the countryside—the minutemen—to arms. No one knows who fired first at Lexington, but shots between the colonial militia and British troops were exchanged there and later at nearby Concord, where the British found only a few supplies.
During their long march back to Boston, the strung-out British columns were repeatedly harassed by patriot militia. By the end of the day, 273 redcoats and 95 patriots had been killed or wounded, and the countryside was aflame with revolt. From positions in Charlestown and Dorchester, the colonists quickly surrounded the besieged British in Boston and thus raised doubts among the British authorities that police action would be enough to quell the rebellion.
Two months later, in June 1775, British soldiers attempted to dislodge the American fortification on a spur of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, overlooking Boston. The British assumed, as one of their generals, John Burgoyne, put it, that no numbers of “untrained rabble” could ever stand up against “trained troops.” Under General William Howe, British forces attempted a series of frontal assaults on the American position. These attacks were eventually successful, but only at the terrible cost of 1,000 British casualties—more than 40 percent of Howe’s troops. At Bunker Hill—the first formal battle of the Revolution—the British suffered their heaviest losses in what would become a long and bloody war. “Never had the British Army so ungenerous an enemy to oppose,” declared a British soldier in the aftermath of Bunker Hill. The American riflemen “conceal themselves behind trees etc till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!”