The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (5 page)

Washington was leading his troops to solidify Virginia's claim to the Ohio Valley against the French. The result was a short, sharp engagement on 28 May 1754 that killed ten Frenchmen (another twenty were captured)
and that inspired Washington to write, “I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me there is something charming in the sound”
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—a sentiment that many a British imperial officer might have seconded. Less charming was the allied Indian chief who smashed a tomahawk through the skull of a French officer, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, whom Washington was trying to interrogate. The Indian washed his hands in the Frenchman's brains.

To the French, Washington's ambush was an act of murder: Jumonville, they cried, had been on a diplomatic rather than a military mission. His brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, moved swiftly to surround and capture Washington and his men at their hastily constructed Fort Necessity. As part of his surrender, Washington, ignorant of French, signed a document convicting himself of murder.

In 1755, General Edward Braddock arrived from England. He took Washington as his aide and vowed to avenge the Virginian's defeat, clear the Ohio Valley of Frenchmen, and even march into Canada. It was an epic march (among his wagon drivers were Daniel Boone and future American general Daniel Morgan), but as it turned out, the sixty-year-old Braddock—a stout, choleric veteran who had been in the army since he was fifteen—never made it to Canada. In fact, he never made it out of the Ohio Valley. His men were massacred in a well-placed French and Indian ambush that left more than 60 British and American officers—and all but 459 of his 1,400 other ranks—killed or wounded. Washington heard plenty more zinging bullets that day: four pierced his clothes and two shot horses from beneath him. Among the dead was General Braddock. Washington had him buried in an unmarked grave on their retreat to prevent the Indians from desecrating the corpse. Washington's gallant leadership in extracting what was left of Braddock's army made him something of a popular hero—a fame that would later make him a general, though not in the king's service. The greater hero of the war, however, was an Englishman named James Wolfe.

When Winston Churchill appointed R. A. “Rab” Butler president of the Board of Education in 1941, he told him, “I should not object if you could introduce a note of patriotism into the schools. Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec.”
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If Braddock's defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela represented the military disaster that so often began British imperial wars, James Wolfe's winning of Quebec represented the stunning victory by a memorable commander that so frequently ended them.

Ginger-haired, skinny, with a pointed nose, weak chin, and a history of bad health, Wolfe hardly looked the hero. He was eccentric and so emotionally volatile that some doubted his sanity. But for all that, he was extremely capable, ambitious, intelligent, and dedicated to self-improvement of body (through martial exercises) and mind (he taught himself Latin and mathematics and read deeply in both literature and military strategy). He was an experienced soldier—commissioned at thirteen and seeing his first combat at sixteen—and chivalrous. In a famous incident, he refused to kill a captured and wounded Highlander after the Battle of Culloden, though ordered to do so. He was truly an officer and a gentleman. But most of all he had the patriotic faith that was the lifeblood of the empire: “For my part, I am determined never to give myself a moment's concern about the nature of the duty which His Majesty is pleased to order us upon. It will be a sufficient comfort . . . to reflect that the Power which has hitherto preserved me may, if it be his pleasure, continue to do so; if not, that is but a few days more or less, and that those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country die admirably.”
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At the Battle of Quebec (1759) Wolfe, a thirty-two-year-old brigadier general, found his apotheosis. The night before his surprise assault behind Quebec City, he recited Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a County Churchyard,” which ends with the line “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” To his
assembled brigadiers, he said, “Gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than taken Quebec.”
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But take Quebec he did. He snuck his troops past French sentries by night, lined his redcoats up on the Plains of Abraham to the skirl of bagpipes, and then waited as the French marched out to meet him. When they were only forty yards distant, the redcoats fired, in what the British military historian Sir John Fortescue wrote was “the most perfect [volley] ever fired on any battlefield, which burst forth as if from a single monstrous weapon, from end to end of the British line.”
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A second volley tore through the French. The Britons advanced and fired, advanced and fired, until they were ordered to charge. Wolfe, shot first through the wrist, then in the groin, and finally in the chest, was led away, mortally wounded. An officer told him, “The enemy, sir. Egad, they give way everywhere!” Wolfe gave his final orders and said: “Now God be praised, I will die in peace!”
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He died the conqueror of New France. With the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years' War in 1763, the entirety of Canada was ceded to Britain.

One Frenchman, at least, recognized that Wolfe's victory would be troublesome for the British Empire. Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, noted that “Delivered from a neighbor they have always feared [the French], your other colonies [the Americans] will soon discover that they stand no longer in need of your protection. You will call them to contribute toward supporting the burden which they have helped to bring on
you, they will answer by shirking off all dependence.”
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That was exactly what happened.

The Americans of the Thirteen Colonies saw a vast imperial domain stretching before them; the only thing standing in their way was the reluctant Mother Country that was more interested in appeasing the Indians of the frontier than fighting them. In 1769,
The American Whig
editorialized, “Courage, then Americans! The finger of God points out a mighty empire to your sons.... The day dawns, in which this mighty empire is to be laid by the establishment of a regular American Constitution. . . .”
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John Adams, like many of the founding fathers, saw this future clearly:

Alexander Hamilton (in
The Federalist
), Thomas Jefferson, and many of the founders later referred to the United States they had created as a great “empire.” Benjamin Franklin foresaw, in 1767, that “America, an immense territory, favored by nature with all the advantages of climate, soil, great navigable rivers and lakes, must become a great country, populous and mighty; and will, in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off shackles that may be imposed on her and perhaps place them on the imposers.”
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But of course there were no shackles on the Americans. They were the freest people in the world under the protection of the most liberal power of its time. The colonies had been treated with the most lenient supervision, often described as “benign neglect,” and the colonials enjoyed a higher standard of living (they were taller, healthier, and better fed than their English counterparts) and minuscule taxation compared to the average Englishman. The Americans had a long tradition of self-government given them by the British; and the British had, in the past, rarely interfered with colonial assemblies.

When Britain did intervene it was to fight Frenchmen or Indians or to temper populist passions and act as a force of disinterested moderation. There were only two fetters on the Americans. One was the Proclamation Act of 1763, which to the dismay of the colonists designated all lands west of the Appalachian Mountains as Indian Territory. The Indians were under the protection of the Crown, and redcoats were stationed on the frontier to keep the peace. Trade, which had been a source of friction between the Indians and the colonists, was to be regulated by the British. Britain wanted to mollify the Indians; instead she enraged the colonials, who saw their manifest destiny blocked by Indian-loving redcoats.

The second fetter was the long-standing Navigation Acts, which confined American trade within Britain's mercantile system. But this was no new innovation, it was hardly burdensome, and the British authorities had largely ignored the Americans' rampant smuggling: what piracy was to the Caribbean, smuggling was to the Thirteen Colonies.

It is wrong to think of the American War of Independence as a popular struggle on either side of the Atlantic. In Britain, many were the voices in and out of Parliament (even in the army and the navy) who had no enthusiasm for a cousins' war and who sympathized with the colonists for standing
up for the traditional rights of Englishmen, even if these were being taken to a somewhat libertarian extreme. In America, John Adams estimated that at the war's outset, one-third of the population were Patriots, one-third were Loyalists, and one-third were uncommitted, which leads to the rather sobering conclusion that in 1776 perhaps two-thirds of Americans thought the war for independence was either unnecessary or wrong. At the war's end (1783), the statistics are equally sobering. As the historian J. M. Roberts has pointed out, “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.”
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During the War of 1812, the second cousins' war, the United States, in good imperial fashion, even hoped to conquer Canada (where many loyalists had fled). Thomas Jefferson—who was never much good at things naval and military—predicted that “The acquisition of Canada this year as far as the neighborhood of Quebec will be a mere matter of marching.”
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As it turned out, Jefferson's “empire of liberty” had a northern border.

What was important for the British Empire, in the aftermath of the War for American Independence, was that British imperialists learnt the wisdom of the great parliamentarian Edmund Burke that “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”
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The British might have been right in principle in the American War for Independence—as Dr. Samuel Johnson put it, “taxation is no tyranny”
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—but wrong in terms of prudence. Better to sacrifice the principle than to lose the colonies.

Britain put the wisdom of magnanimity to good use in Canada: granting French Canadian Catholics freedom of religion in the Quebec Act of 1774 (to the outrage of Calvinist pastors in New England); devolving most governing authority to the Canadians themselves with the 1840 Act of Union; and creating the Northwest Mounted Police (later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), the Mounties, whose charming scarlet tunics, Smokey the Bear hats, and operatic talents made them less threatening than the lobster-back troopers who so affrighted the Americans.