1775 (13 page)

Neighboring Connecticut shared much of the Bay Colony’s millennial faith and expansionism. However, its own territorial imperative was westward and southward and only secondarily northward into the Berkshire Hills, the Green Mountains, and the upper Connecticut Valley. In consequence,
map 3
, with its portrait of Greater Connecticut circa 1775, raises a different set of implications. Four provinces and another future state had hard-charging “little Connecticuts” within their boundaries, whose pushy politics they did not always appreciate.

Self-governing from the 1630s when three early settlements combined, and then given a permissive charter in 1662, Connecticut soon did colonizing of its own. During the 1640s, Puritan emigrants crossed what is now Long Island Sound and put down towns—eleven by 1660—and churches along the eastern end of Long Island. These remained part of Connecticut until 1665. In 1666 thirty families from New Haven planted a settlement that became Newark, New Jersey; others began the town of Shrewsbury. Later emigrants launched Fairfield and Union, New Jersey (first called Connecticut Farms). As for New York, Connecticut officials, encouraged by the sweep of their charter, at various times tried to take parts of Westchester County and western Long Island towns from the Yorkers, but failed.
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By 1775, New Jersey’s Connecticut settlement had grown to be Essex County, the heartland of the province’s pro-independence activists. The catalogue of its leadership is striking, and several years later the town of Connecticut Farms became a revolutionary battlefield.
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The Yankee settlements of eastern Long Island, in turn, became Suffolk County, New York—also a future hotbed of independence sentiment in a province with relatively few. New York’s Tory lieutenant governor Cadwallader Colden understood the connection: “[Suffolk] county in the east end of Long Island…was settled from Connecticut and the inhabitants still retain a great similarity of manners and sentiments.”
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More than Massachusetts, Connecticut admitted to being somewhat “Oliverian.” By some accounts, Oliver Cromwell himself had almost emigrated there in the 1630s, and Thomas Hooker, a Connecticut founder, was the brother-in-law of John Pym, a prominent Parliamentary leader in the English Civil War. Historians at Yale are surprised to note that three streets converging near the university—Whalley, Dixwell, and Goffe—are named for regicides who signed the royal death warrant in the 1649 execution of Charles I. All three fled to Boston and then in 1661 to Connecticut, were hidden by sympathizers, remained free, and died in the province many years later. The flagship of Connecticut’s Revolutionary state navy would be named the
Oliver Cromwell.
When Governor Trumbull’s eldest son visited England in 1764, he went up from London to visit Huntingdon, Cromwell’s birthplace.
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For those of the Crown’s strong supporters who damned the American Revolution for its Cromwellian resemblances, Connecticut does provide substantiation.

However, to come back to politically influential Connecticut emigration, it was not limited to nearby New York and New Jersey. Travelers to the coastal Georgia pinelands south of Savannah in our own day are often startled to see a neat white eighteenth-century New England church surrounded by historical markers and the occasional Yankee license plate. This is Midway, in what was once colonial St. John’s Parish, in 1777 renamed Liberty County. In 1774, this unusual, substantially New England–settled parish rallied to the support of Boston and elected a delegate, Connecticut-born Lyman Hall, to the First Continental Congress. Hall did not go to Philadelphia with that thin credential, but he went in 1775 as one of two Georgia delegates to the Second Continental Congress and later signed the Declaration of Independence. Sir James Wright, the royal governor, deplored the parish’s “strong tincture of…Oliverian principles.”
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Thus the anomaly of historians surprised by votes in the Continental Congress that conjoined Georgia with Virginia and New England.
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Emigrants from Connecticut were not a breed to be taken lightly.

Two other outliers of Greater Connecticut, by contrast, complicated matters for pro-independence strategists. We can begin with the three-way struggle for what became Vermont. In 1775 New York had legal title, based on a ruling by the Crown in 1764 against rival claimant New Hampshire. Even so, many local residents still referred to the “Hampshire Grants.” After Lexington and Concord, claimants under New Hampshire deeds presumed that war would vacate the royal adjudication. So did the Green
Mountain Boys, whose Connecticut-born leaders—Ethan and Ira Allen, Remember Baker, and Seth Warner—wanted a separate entity. The name “New Connecticut,” chosen by an early 1777 Patriot convention, had to be dropped because Yankees seeking statehood for northeastern Pennsylvania had taken it first.
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Irritated New Yorkers thought they saw Connecticut nibblers everywhere: occupying Fort Ticonderoga, gathering on Lake Champlain, inciting Green Mountain separatists, sending troops into Westchester and New York City, and colluding with their Puritan cousins in eastern Long Island. The two, New York and Connecticut, had roughly comparable populations in 1775. In military terms, though, the Yankee province was far better organized.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvanians also saw Connecticut through angry eyes. Under several ambitious land schemes, initially the Delaware Company, then the much bigger Susquehannah Company, Connecticut’s Patriot government wound up in 1774 claiming northeastern Pennsylvania—enrolling it as a Connecticut township—based on an expansive reading of its charter. Several armed encounters had already begun what historians named “the Pennamite Wars.” Another flared up in late 1775, when a 500-man Pennsylvania force invaded, but soon retreated. Congress eventually stepped in, but things remained legally unresolved through 1782.
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Which brings us to Virginia, another military-minded and expansionist province. In 1775, the Old Dominion, too, was trying to bite off a large chunk of territory from Quaker Pennsylvania. The latter had been vague about its boundaries and about what territory it would be responsible for defending. Even relative to Connecticut, plantation-owning Virginia was a colony immersed in land speculation—by the early 1770s, planters looked to offset the increasingly difficult economics of tobacco production.

Before profiling Virginia, a broader generalization is appropriate. All four of these colonies were more than plucky, more than merely willing to stand up for their rights. They could fairly be called
aggressive.
With broadly empowering royal charters, including language that in some cases suggested no superior authority in Britain but the Crown, they resembled the “marches” or counties palatine of England’s fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—or so some of their gentry believed. The marches and counties palatine helped hold England’s northern and western borders against the Scots and Welsh, and the four North American vanguard provinces by the late eighteenth century had repeatedly held and counterattacked against France in the
north and west and Spain in the south. The analogy is only partial, but the aggressive, border-protection aspect fits.

Of the four, early-seventeenth-century Virginians took most seriously the charter language about boundaries reaching not just to the Great Lakes but to the South Sea. From 1626 to 1671, westward expeditions were vigilant—literally. One in 1669 thought the Indian Ocean “does stretch an arm or bay from California as far as the Apalatean mountains.” Another two years later reported that “sayles” could be seen from the peaks.
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By the 1740s and 1750s, when Virginians began to concentrate on the more prosaic westward and northwestward expansion allowed under their charter, the sequence of land companies they organized over three decades sounds like a roll call of future American states: Grand Ohio, Greenbrier, Henderson, Illinois, Illinois-Wabash, Indiana, Loyal, Mississippi, Ohio Company of Virginia, Transylvania, Vandalia, Wabash, and Walpole.
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Several companies, to be sure, represented no more than a name change. Others encompassed huge intentions. The Illinois Company, established in 1766, proposed to operate within an area bounded on the east by the Wabash River and on the north by the Wisconsin River. Other names that resonated were those of shareholders destined for political fame: Lee, Randolph, Jefferson, Henry, Washington, Pendleton, even Franklin. After peace came in 1763, every year saw thousands of individual Virginia residents head south down the Great Wagon Road. Organized land speculation, however, looked west and northwest.

So did military leaders. Whereas Connecticut and Massachusetts generally pointed their war making north against French Canada and its Indian allies, Virginia by 1750 directed its military expeditions and banners west and northwest, joining what would be the great Anglo-French contest to rule the Ohio Valley. In 1753, George Washington was present at the beginning of the French and Indian War officially as a Virginia military commander, but also as a member of the extremely interested Ohio Company. He was instructed to tell the French encamped at the Forks of the Ohio that they were trespassing on English territory. This he did, and then returned twice—in 1754, to surrender to the French at Great Meadows, and in 1755, as a colonial officer who performed credibly with General Braddock’s ill-fated British army. When Forks of the Ohio became British in 1763, Virginia as well as Pennsylvania had a strong claim.

The Old Dominion’s claims got a further boost in 1774 when provincial troops under the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, took the field against
Ohio’s Shawnee and Mingo Indians and extracted a treaty that secured another stretch of Virginia-claimed territory already known as Kentucky. In 1775, Kentucky and the part of present-day Pennsylvania around the Forks of the Ohio (Pittsburgh) were both administered from Virginia, despite officials in Philadelphia belatedly labeling the Pittsburgh district as Westmoreland County,
Pennsylvania.
The point here is less about which province got the Forks—eventually, Pennsylvania did—than about the aggressiveness of the two provinces, Connecticut and Virginia, busy trying to detach territory large enough combined to represent 20 to 25 percent of what is now Pennsylvania.

Although land hunger was a prime motive, historians who find little more than economics at work make a mistake. Much grander dreams were involved. Virginians like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Connecticut leaders like Jonathan Trumbull thought in terms of a nation being born—of a destiny, be it manifest or biblically millenarian, being fulfilled by every pioneer, town builder, and Conestoga wagon driver moving west. In 1751, Jefferson’s father, Peter, drew the first map of Virginia spreading into the Shenandoah and upper Potomac valleys; and George Washington always waxed fulsomely about the westward course of empire in general and his beloved Potomac River in particular.
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History lived on almost everywhere in Virginia, just as it did in New England. By 1775, the pride of Virginian leaders was starting to work for independence or its equivalent. George Washington was not alone in seeing hostility or even conspiracy in British treatment of the colonies and Americans. By some accounts, ordinary Virginians had thought along roughly similar lines in 1676, when under the leadership of a small planter named Nathaniel Bacon, they rose against the abuses of Royal Governor Sir William Berkeley. That uprising failed, but a mid-twentieth-century Virginia historian, Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, romanticized about its example, concluding that “it gave the English Privy Council a realization of what was to be expected when the Americans were driven to desperation. But after all, the [Bacon] movement was symptomatic, not conclusive. The flight of Berkeley to the Eastern Shore foreshadowed the flight of Dunmore to Norfolk and Gwynn’s Island; the burning of Jamestown by the patriots in 1676 had its counterpart in the burning of Norfolk by the patriots in 1776; Bacon’s Declaration of the People was the forerunner of the Declaration of Independence.”
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Fourth of July prose, to be sure. Contemporary chroniclers doubt that
Virginians of 1774–1776 took particular inspiration from Bacon or his rebellion. During the lead-up to the Revolution, too many new provocations were at work—from planter debt levels and British commercial exploitation of tobacco, to the Coercive Acts and London’s decision to put the territory north of the Ohio River within Quebec and beyond Virginians’ reach. But pride was part of what made Virginia revolution-minded.

Which brings us to South Carolina. If that colony was both wealthier and more politically incendiary than Virginia—in 1775, clearly true—two explanations stand out. First, a pair of highly lucrative crops—low-country rice and indigo—were more profitable than Chesapeake tobacco; and second, a cocksure sort of wealth. South Carolina was the only British North American colony settled from the Caribbean, notably from sugar-rich Barbados, England’s original New World plum.

The first proprietors of Carolina—
South
Carolina didn’t exist until 1692—were eight prominent royalists, men to whom a restored King Charles II had cause to be grateful. The charter he issued in 1663 swept across the map of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, employing two bold latitudes roughly 500 miles apart. The upper followed the southern boundary of Virginia; the lower ran west from what is now Daytona Beach, Florida, to mid-Baja California in Mexico. Plans were even made for a local aristocracy, to be headed by landgraves.

This vast territory was trimmed in 1689 by the tentative separation of what became North Carolina, and then again in 1732 by the creation of Georgia. However, the conveyance had been generous in more than square mileage. Rare powers were granted, most notably the charter’s so-called Bishop of Durham or county palatine clause delegating authority normally held only by the monarch. In addition to land, crops and mining, and tax and customs rights, the charter also included “the rights to make war and peace, create towns and ports, grant ‘titles of honor,’ [and] raise and maintain an army.”
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