1775 (36 page)

Textbooks rarely publish the relevant estimates, but they are not in great dispute. During the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, roughly 307,400 white immigrants arrived in the thirteen colonies. Of these, some 49.3 percent were free, 33.7 percent were indentured servants, and 17 percent were transported convicts.
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Redemptioners, most of them Germans, were better off than indentured servants—Germans made contracts as families—and are typically categorized as free migrants.

New England had both the fewest indentured servants and the fewest slaves. “South of New England,” said historian Abbot E. Smith in
Colonists in Bondage,
“more than half of all persons who came to the colonies…were servants.”
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Had Dr. Johnson described American colonists as “a race of servants and convicts,” he would have had better grounds.

Indentured servants were rarely well treated. They could go to court in most colonies, but sometimes their effort only wound up extending the term of their indenture. Like most historians, Smith declined to describe indentured servants in flattering terms. Obscure shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and pioneer farmers were “the best, but there were many more. Men and women who were dirty and lazy, rough ignorant, lewd and often criminal…Nor should the fact be forgotten, particularly when dealing with indentured servants, that it was also the last resort of scoundrels. A great many servants went to the colonies simply because, for one reason or another, they wanted to get out of their own country.”
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Others were shanghaied, kidnapped, rounded up on the roads of Ireland, or recruited from places like Bridewell—the London women’s prison. Planters in Virginia, home to many indentured servants and transported convicts, admitted that they did not always distinguish between the two. The convicts were also sold to private owners for seven or fourteen years, for crimes possibly no more serious than minor theft. The historian Gordon Wood reckoned that “in the colonies, servitude was a much harsher, more brutal and more humiliating status than it was in England.” Others preferred a Caribbean comparison.
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Like the transported convicts, a high percentage of indentured servants were brought to Maryland and Virginia, although through the 1750s Pennsylvania was another favored destination. How large a part former servants and convicts, along with successful runaways, played in shaping the pre-Revolutionary southern backcountry is obviously guesswork, but an estimate can be ventured.

Approximately 250,000 migrants flooded into the southern backcountry between 1760 and 1775, probably two thirds of whom originated in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia before heading south. It seems reasonable to assume that many of the 24,000 English and Irish convicts put ashore and sold in the Maryland-Virginia region between 1745 and 1775 would have participated.
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Some would have looked for a new start; runaways would have sought distance and anonymity. Now let us assume that Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia between 1765 and 1775 would have been home to a collective average of 75,000 indentured servants. This suggests a second and larger migration pool: time-finished or runaway ex-servants.

To hypothesize that 50,000 to 75,000 of the 250,000 migrants of all ages might have had such backgrounds seems plausible. Maryland was well known for its high ratio of indentured servants whose bad treatment made
them untrustworthy. Several analyses prepared for the British during the Revolutionary period made a similar point: harshly treated servants were a potential fifth column.
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Irish ex-indentured servants in Philadelphia had a record of deserting from both armies. After their time served, ex-servants’ circumstances rarely improved. In the 1740s, according to one survey, nearly three out of four indentured servants had wound up on the public dole.
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One district of Pennsylvania just over the border was thought to have a sizable concentration of Maryland runaways.

The larger question attaches to Virginia: Why did so many Georgians and Carolinians, to say nothing of Creeks and Cherokee, use the term
Virginian
to describe the poor whites who took the Great Wagon Road south? Flight from the 1750s Indian devastation in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere on the province’s frontier offers one explanation. Between 1753 and 1758, the population of Augusta County plummeted from 10,000 to 5,000, with most of those leaving heading south.
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That area also produced a set of rambunctious borderers known as the Augusta Boys—an Old Dominion imitation of Pennsylvania’s roistering Scotch-Irish Paxton Boys. White runaways doubtless added to the flow.

Some Virginians had long worried over their convict and indentured-servant ratios. “The inhabitants of our frontiers,” wrote Governor Alexander Spotswood in 1717, “are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as Servants, and being out of their time, settle themselves where land is to be taken up and that will produce the necessaries of Life with little Labour.”
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By the 1770s, convicts were being transported west in quantities and sold by “soul dealers” in the hinterlands of Maryland and Virginia. Just after the Revolution, a Loyalist refugee from Georgia observed that “the Southern Colonies are overrun with a swarm of men from the western parts of Virginia and North Carolina, distinguished by the name of Crackers. Many of these people are descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times, and inherit so much profligacy from their ancestors, that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth, few of them having the least sense of religion.”
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Whether Virginia, the Carolinas, or Georgia bred the first Crackers is a matter for sociologists. What seems indisputable is that the pre-Revolutionary southern backcountry hosted them on a large scale, and that more of those vagrants,
banditti,
and horse thieves would have wound up with the white Tories of the Indian frontier than would have become Whig stalwarts.
Together with the religiously disaffected, they gave neutralism, if not Loyalism, a substantial backcountry base.

Across all thirteen colonies, however, one encouraging trend of 1774 and 1775 had less to do with population shifts and more to do with many colonists’ rising awareness of beliefs and hopes that they shared with people elsewhere in the thirteen. So it is to these sensibilities and their incipient nationalism—to encouraging and rapidly expanding intercolonial ties in communications, commerce, religion, and constitutional argument—that we now turn.

W
e are unfailingly drawn by the whys and wherefores of great events. Searching, identifying, discovering, and exploring origins are preoccupations, perhaps even compulsions, of human nature. In the physical world, explorers seek the source of the Nile; scientists, the origin of the species or of life itself; archaeologists, the lost continent of Atlantis.

Economists, historians, and political theorists, although given to remaining indoors, behave similarly. They publish books and studies on the origins of scientific economics, World War I, or the American party system. They identify the social sources of religious denominationalism in the United States, the sources of political instability in Weimar Germany, and so on. But while one can be definitive in locating the source of the White Nile in Uganda’s Lake Victoria, it’s rarely possible to be precise in dealing with human events.

Generally speaking, the more one-dimensional an explanation of something complex and far-reaching, the greater the grounds for skepticism. And the larger the event, the less likelihood of it having a single cause or origin. With respect to revolutions, bold theses perhaps work best for
bloodshed-driven polities like France and Russia. They apply less well to English-speaking countries. And so this is a reluctant chapter—one that will avoid great emphasis on “ideology” (defined as a system or body of ideas). The better explanation of pre-Revolutionary sentiment in America is multiple, combining popular discontents with British rule, an emerging sense of specifically American community, a shared culture of dissenting Protestantism, a fear of hostile conspiracies in London, and a legitimate apprehension that colonial interests were being neglected or throttled by officials 3,000 miles distant.

An important minority of historians argue that the American Revolution was strongest among those populations who had been in the colonies longest. It maximized, they say, in the regions of old seventeenth-century English settlement and heritage: New England and Virginia. Support was generally weaker where more recent European emigrants kept their language and Old World ties and were less engaged by 1775’s political debate.
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Although there were exceptions, time in America counted. Upholding the colonists’ perceived rights as Englishmen, a motif of Yankee and Virginian orators, would not necessarily have inspired German Pennsylvanians, Hudson Valley Dutch, the Scotch-Irish influx of 1773–1775, or Carolina’s Gaelic-speaking Scots Highlanders. These elements had their own historical sensitivities, group preoccupations with property rights (Teutons especially), or particular desire not to break oaths they had sworn, on arriving in the 1740s or 1750s, to Britain’s House of Hanover. In four or five of the thirteen colonies, persons of non-English descent were a majority among whites.

Late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England had been the preeminent ally and protector of embattled French, Dutch, German, and Swiss Protestants—and respect and gratitude lingered among emigrants to the colonies from those backgrounds. Even to some Americans of English descent, the Crown was gratefully remembered for favors and assistance. The Quaker William Penn, for example, had received his Pennsylvania charter in 1681 from Charles II. To many Quakers, the last Stuart kings were patrons, not the objects of scorn they were to many Congregationalists and Presbyterians. Nearly a century later the Philadelphia Quaker Annual Meeting of 1775 praised royal rule and deplored sedition. Such are some of the obstacles to overly sweeping abstractions about the origins of the American Revolution.

On top of which, black slaves were about one fifth of the overall
thirteen-colony population. Should their ideologies and motivations be set out separately? Perhaps not. But no more than one slave in a hundred would have been interested in the English radical Whig definition of
liberty.
Their focus would have been on their own liberty, as the response of many thousands to Lord Dunmore’s proclamation in 1775 showed. Many free blacks in New England, on the other hand, fought on the Patriot side, probably for reasons that substantially overlapped those of their white compatriots-in-arms.

Neighborhood also helped to define
enemy.
Along the frontier, as we have seen, Whig pamphlets took a backseat to a near-at-hand tribal menace. The 1775 relevance of sixty-year-old indictments of English Jacobites and parliamentary corruption reprinted in Williamsburg and Philadelphia newspapers paled alongside searing ten- or fifteen-year-old memories of Huron, Seneca, Shawnee, Cherokee, or Creek raiding parties. Fifty or a hundred would recognize the names of Pontiac, Cornplanter, or Dragging Canoe for every frontier cabin dweller who could identify John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, or Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

Nor, for the moment at least, is it necessary to repeat New England concern over the economics of molasses smuggling or customs harassment or the parallel angst in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina over currency shortages, debt suits, and the commercial practices of British tobacco merchants. But any plausible definition of
ideology
must include an emerging sense of economic frustration.

Another very relevant underlying theme is simply this:
The American Revolution was as much a civil war as a revolution.
It did not represent one whole people rising against the overlordship of another. Hundreds of thousands in the thirteen colonies sympathized more with Britain than with Congress, and at least as many in Britain wished the rebels well. Here the Revolution resembled the other two major English-speaking civil wars—the English Civil War of the 1640s and the American Civil War of the 1860s. None reflected a nationwide or popular consensus; to some extent, they pitted region against region; and in places, people of one church opposed those of another. But as internecine conflicts, these wars also pitted brother against brother, and neighbor against neighbor. In divided border areas, many people tried to stay neutral. Ideology was not a day-to-day point of reference.

However, even if 60 percent of the population was actively or passively Patriot, we are still looking at a de facto civil war. Four individual colonies
are usually counted in the local-civil-war category—New York, New Jersey, and both Carolinas. Portions of all four were still experiencing that local civil war in 1782. Delaware and Maryland, by contrast, shared a large Loyalist-leaning region on the Delmarva Peninsula but sidestepped all-out civil war. The openness of local bays and rivers to British warships able to land soldiers or marines encouraged Patriot restraint. To avoid sustained fighting, officials on the peninsula spent as much time tolerating Loyalists as actively suppressing them.

Nor was the Revolution a unique period of American internal conflict. Over the centuries, the very heterogeneity of the United States has made going to war a painful process, especially when large populations are unhappy about having to fight the “old country.” Doubters should examine the huge swings in county-by-county returns for German areas from Ohio to the Dakotas in 1916 or 1940—or even urban Italian districts in 1940. Yankee New England did not want to fight its own “old country”—Old England—for a second time in 1812, as that section’s presidential caucuses made clear. And if these elections sparked internal tensions, deciding on war with a foreign nation was a relative picnic compared with the nation’s one other crisis on the eve of
civil war
—the Lincoln-Douglas- Breckenridge-Bell four-way presidential race of 1860. Ethnic, religious, sectional, and economic preoccupations cut across obvious lines—for example, the 15 to 20 percent backing won by the pro-compromise, antiwar candidate (Constitutional Union nominee John Bell) in several New England districts. Most of these were unhappy at disrupting trade or cotton-manufacturing ties to the South.
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