1775 (37 page)

The politics of decision making before America makes war is typically painful. Broad consensus is rare. Decision making before a civil war is even more divisive. Which brings us back to 1775. Had it been possible to have a thirteen-colony popular plebiscite on war or independence then or in the spring of 1776, the returns probably would have been as complex as 1860’s emotional mirror of sympathies, grudges, kinship, and self-interest. Perhaps war in 1775 would have won no more than the 39 percent of the total vote won by Abraham Lincoln in 1860. American historians have come up with a wide range of estimates. Obviously, this complicates grand ideological pronouncements.

Part of why civil wars are difficult to explain is that so many different reasons are at work in different places. Of course, it is more plausible to single out narrow-gauge ideological origins for the Revolution if one is talking
about only a subsection of the population. Conceivably, an important slice of middle-to-upper-class white males of English descent who frequently read the Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston Patriot press—some 3,000, 4,000, or possibly 5,000 men of Whiggish political sentiment—would, if polled by an eighteenth-century George Gallup, have more or less upheld historian Bernard Bailyn’s famous ideological contention. Perhaps they were roused not by “common Lockean generalities” but, as Bailyn argues, by the oft-reprinted writings of the radical publicists and opposition politicians of early-eighteenth-century England. Those publicists’ warnings did seem applicable once again, as harsh British policies unfolded in the 1760s and early 1770s.
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However, there was a lot more behind proto-Americanism than a small educated cadre who read newspapers. The remaining 96 to 98 percent of the population, little given to reading beyond hymnals, bibles, almanacs, and tavern prices, would have paid more attention to preachers, pocketbooks, folk history, and tribal memories ranging from the siege of Londonderry to Calvinist theology. Even Thomas Paine’s fast-paced and highly influential
Common Sense
was more king bashing than elevated discourse.

This being said, there is much to support Bailyn’s collateral argument that many Revolutionaries—not least Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—were driven by belief in a British conspiracy to undermine American liberties. Americans’ long-standing fascination with conspiracies is such that any reasonable definition of ideology must include that proclivity. The history of Anglo-American political attentiveness to allegations of plots and conspiracies goes far back—indeed, both were mainstays of Plantagenet and Tudor history. This context is examined later in this chapter.

We cannot simply discard ideology, though—far from it. From a broader perspective, it is too parochial to root the American Revolution in the potting soil, however rich, of radical pamphleteering. These pages will argue that the growth of colonial pride, commercial frustration, and incipient nationalism circa 1775 had a much broader and more affirmative “ideological” genesis. A growing national sense of community had begun to interact with other relevant factors—increasing awareness that maturity required economic self-determination; the quirky, colony-by-colony evolution of American “constitutions” and law; and the powerful influence of a dissenting Protestant theology. Wariness of British designs came in part from a more cynical Boston-Philadelphia perception of British policy than Parliament or Whitehall professed. To set the scene for the motivations and
actions of 1775, five more or less ideological categories can be shorthanded: Community, Commerce, Constitution, Calvinism, and Conspiracy.

Community: The Growth of American Nationalism

The eighteenth century was a period of massive realignment within the “community” of English-speaking peoples better known as the British Empire. In the home island alone, Scotland was added to a union that transformed English, Welsh, and Scots into Britons. New French speakers were included in Quebec, Acadia (Nova Scotia), Senegal, and the West Indies. Tens of millions of non-English speakers were added in India, and in 1783 3 or so million Americans were subtracted.

Although the change in North America did not come about overnight, the contiguous thirteen colonies developed closer relations with one another as they lost belief in a shared imperial community led from London. Part of what provoked Bostonians in 1773 was that tea policy was made by His Majesty’s government to benefit the East India Company, another emerging horizon of empire.

The disillusionment that pervaded the loose confederation of thirteen ex-colonies in 1783, weary after eight long years of war, stood in sharp contrast to the enthusiastic but naïve union and
rage militaire
of those thirteen in 1775. Jefferson and Hamilton were among the Revolutionary leaders who feared for the future, but further into the eighties the uncertainty began to fade. Nor was the United States alone in its political posttrauma syndrome. Britain, too, finished the war gloomily, replacing the imperial hubris of the 1760s with a sense of lost prestige, brutal debt burdens, and concern over other potential falling dominoes from Ireland to the West Indies.

By the 1790s, both nations’ fears had relaxed. The United States returned to rapid economic and population growth under a new constitution, while Britain, under a revitalized conservative government led by William Pitt the Younger, regrouped to defeat Napoleon and to make the nineteenth century the first of clear “British” preeminence.

Unfortunately, much of the gestation of American community and then of nationalism in the 1760s and 1770s has been lost in what can be called Fourth of July boosterism. The clumsiness of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission in stereotyping the Revolution around 1776 only intensified the existing confusion and oversimplification. Belief that almost everything important came together in 1776 ignored the extent to which a
sense of community and incipient nationalism was taking hold in the thirteen colonies many years before the Declaration of Independence. Amid the approach of the bicentennial, colonial historian Carl Bridenbaugh wrote regretfully that after nearly a half century of studying the Revolution, he had never found any satisfactory explanation of what the rank and file of the colonists were like in 1776 or of their “hopes, fears and kindred emotions.” Blaming the date fetishism that surrounded 1776, and its implication that patriotism sprang to life suddenly in that year, Bridenbaugh subtitled his book
The Growth of American Patriotism Before Independence.
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By the mid-eighteenth century, colonial interconnectedness was growing like Jack’s Beanstalk. Six years after the first postal service was set up in 1692, a post road stretched from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to New Castle, Delaware. By 1732, as road traffic grew, a Boston bookseller published
The Vade Mecum for America: Or, a Companion for Traders and Travellers.
It listed the towns and counties, their principal roads, courts, religious meetings, and public houses, from the Kennebec River south to the James River in lower Virginia. Next came detailed maps of New England and the mid-Atlantic provinces, enabling not just travelers but dreamers to see the colonies’ scope and spread. A revised version of the Fry and Jefferson map centered on Virginia appeared in 1755 with a new feature: detail of “The Great Wagon Road from the Yadkin River through Philadelphia, distant 435 miles.”
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A country was taking shape across the coincidental borders of individual British provinces.

Ferries proliferated, and stagecoaches and packet boats traveled surprisingly far afield. By 1769, passage could be booked from Charleston to Pensacola in what was now British West Florida. Sea travel from Charleston to Newport, Rhode Island, was short enough to turn Narragansett Bay into a cool and breezy summer resort favored by rice and indigo planters and their families. Easy passage the other way brought enough New Englanders to Charleston to help fill the city’s famous Circular Congregational Church. One governor even complained about seasonal winds deluging South Carolina in sedition-minded visitors and writings from Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Princeton, still at that time the (Presbyterian) College of New Jersey, attracted young southerners of that faith—and in May 1775, a clique of them, back home in Charlotte, North Carolina, penned the so-called Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.

The major seaports developed commercial hinterlands and markets that cut across colony borders: Charleston’s included Georgia and southeastern
North Carolina as well as all of South Carolina; Philadelphia’s drew in northeastern Maryland, Delaware, and western New Jersey as well as most of Pennsylvania; New York’s stretched around eastern New Jersey and southwestern Connecticut as well as lower New York. A similar commercial extension often explained paper currency use. South Carolina paper bills circulated beyond the colony’s borders. New York and Philadelphia merchants usually found it wise to accept New Jersey money.

The population was even more mobile than the commerce was interconnected. As we have seen, Greater Pennsylvania reached down into South Carolina. Within the thirteen colonies, it is a good bet that one third to one half of the 150 or so counties that existed in 1775 had populations in which “outsiders”—persons born outside the province or with at least one parent born outside—outnumbered “natives.” Connecticut had planted emigrant colonies as far south as Georgia, and such people kept in touch. Mid-Atlantic Pennsylvania in particular, but also nearby parts of Maryland and Virginia, tended to overflow southward after the 1720s and 1730s. In 1775, this population flood, much of it along the Great Wagon Road, was recent enough and fresh enough that many ethnic groups—Germans, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish—as well as religious denominations, including Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and German Reformed, looked back to Pennsylvania for clergy, goods, specialized publications, and information from societies, meetings, synods, and associations.

In 1775, North Carolina Patriots enlisted Pennsylvania Presbyterian leaders to write supportive letters to their coreligionists in the politically divided Carolina Piedmont. Within the Dutch Reformed Church, the same sharp differences between the Conferentie and Coetus factions applied in New York as in New Jersey. And for some ten years, Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles had been hard at work promoting, if not quite achieving, religious mergers—most notably between Congregationalists and Presbyterians, but also between Congregationalists and Baptists in southern New England.
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Togetherness born of serving in multicolony military expeditions was also important, especially in the four vanguard provinces. New Englanders had cooperated since early days, having established the United Colonies of New England in 1643 to ensure their common defense amid the descent of Old England into civil war. The famous New England expedition of 1745 that captured the French fortress of Louisbourg had drawn support from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island alike.
South Carolina authorities, for their part, had not only collaborated with Georgia and North Carolina troops from time to time but journeyed as far afield as the Ohio Valley. A South Carolina company participated in the Virginia expedition against the French in 1754 led by youthful militia colonel George Washington.

This bonding process included a shared sense that emerged during the French wars: frequent disdain for the competence and reliability of British generals and London-based armchair strategists. A huge ratio of colonial troops sickened and died during the bungled British sieges of Cartagena and Havana in the 1740s, arousing indignation in the provinces suffering losses. The Royal Navy’s arbitrary impressment of American seamen bred bitterness in New England, as did Britain’s decision to return Louisbourg to France after colonial forces had captured it.

Wars also bred provincial community. The prominent role of the locally recruited South Carolina Regiment in the Cherokee War of 1760–1761 imparted not just a distaste for inept British commanders but a fellowship of colonial captains and majors who would become Patriot leaders in the Revolution. The western Virginia regiment organized to fight the Shawnee during Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774 also drew officers from prominent families who would serve together in 1775–1776.

Population growth also spread institutions across colonial boundaries. Organizations taking shape around those connections and ambitions began using the term
American
—the American Philosophic Society in 1743,
The Royal American Magazine
in 1741, the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge in 1768, the American Medical Society in 1771, and several more in 1773. One historian who searched colonial newspapers to catalogue the explicit symbols of identification used—
American, Great Britain, Virginia, Massachusetts,
and the like—found that “a fairly high degree of community awareness” existed by the French and Indian War. However, the “take-off” point came in the early summer of 1763.
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This was well before the Stamp Act furor of 1765, and we have noted several probable catalysts. The summer of 1763 was when British politicians started talking about not letting the American colonies spread out or get too big. It was also when news arriving in New England about British naval vessels joining customs officers in a new crackdown on American smuggling produced a level of Yankee apprehension not seen since the fall of Fort William Henry in 1757.

What community the term
British
meant or included was also unclear. Imperial officials and American opinion molders of the 1750s, 1760s, and
1770s employed the description “British Empire” to express markedly different concepts. To British ministers and their advisers, the vital derivation came from the Roman imperium. This concept did not connote specific geography or territory but a vehicle of administration, discipline, authority, and subordination.
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Colonials in North America or the West Indies, by contrast, generally viewed the British Empire as a geographical or political entity within which they, too, played a vital role and enjoyed the much-belabored rights of Englishmen. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin described the empire as encompassing both sides of the Atlantic—and enthused that in another century “the greatest number of Englishmen would be on this side of the water.”
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Lawyers for the Crown did not share the American interpretation of empire, nor did they welcome such population projections. The American pride of future was by no means confined to future rebels. In the 1750s William Shirley, the royal governor of Massachusetts, had included the colonists within his conception of the empire, urging that they be given representation in Parliament.
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William Pitt, addressing the House of Commons in 1766 as first minister, identified the profits of trade with the West Indies and North America as “the fund that carried you triumphantly through the last war…You owe this to America.” North American egos had also swelled with the international comments heard and read about in 1762 and 1763 as France and Britain negotiated an end to the Seven Years War. The chief French negotiator, the Duc de Choiseul, stated what was widely assumed in Amsterdam, Madrid, and St. Petersburg: that “in the present state of Europe it is colonies, trade and in consequence sea power, which must determine the balance on the [European] continent.”
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