A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (12 page)

Some Northerners envisioned, and prayed for, an end to American slavery, as did a small number of Southerners. George Washington would free all of his slaves following his death; Jefferson and Madison would not. They privately decried slavery as a “necessary evil”—something their fathers and they had come to depend upon, but not something they were proud of or aimed to perpetuate.
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Jefferson’s commitment to ending slavery may be more suspect than Washington’s or, certainly, Franklin’s. But virtually all of these men believed that slavery would some day end, and often they delayed confronting it in hopes that it would just go away. Until the invention of the cotton gin, their hope was not necessarily a futile one. After the advent of the Cotton Kingdom, however, increasingly fewer Southerners criticized slavery, and the pervading philosophy about it slowly shifted from its presence as a necessary evil to a belief that slavery was a positive good.

Georgia: The Last Colony

Unlike the Puritans, who wanted to create a “city on a hill,” or the Virginia Company, which sought profit, the founders of Georgia acted out of concern for Spanish power in the southern area of America. Although Queen Anne’s War ended in 1713, Spain still represented a significant threat to the Carolinas. General James Oglethorpe, a military hero, also had a philanthropic bent. He had headed an investigation of prisons and expressed special concern for debtors, who by English law could be incarcerated for their obligations. If he could open a settlement south of the Carolinas, he could offer a new start to poor English and settle a region that could stand as a buffer to Spanish power.

In 1732, Oglethorpe received a grant from King George II for land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers. Oglethorpe and his trustees deliberately limited the size of the landholdings to encourage density and, thus, better defense. Debtors and prisoners were released on the condition that they emigrate to Georgia; they helped found the first fortified town on the Savannah River in 1733. The trustees, though, had planned well by encouraging artisans, tradesmen, farmers, and other skilled workers from England and Scotland to emigrate. In addition, they welcomed all religious refugees—to the point of allowing a small group of Jews to locate in Georgia—except Catholics, fearing they might ally with the Spanish.

Within a decade, Britain’s fears of Spanish aggression proved well founded. The European War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) spawned conflict in the Western Hemisphere when Spain and France allied with Indian tribes to attack the British. During the 1739–42 War of Jenkins’s Ear, General Oglethorpe led Georgians and South Carolinians into Spanish Florida to thwart a Spanish invasion. They enjoyed mixed success but failed to wrest Saint Augustine from Spain. Despite limited military success, Oglethorpe soon found that his colonists wanted to limit his power. Former convicts actively opposed his ban of rum (sobriety, they believed, would not expedite their rehabilitation!). Planters chafed at his prohibition of slavery. In 1750, Georgians repealed the ban on slavery, importing nearly ten thousand Africans by 1770. One year before its original charter expired, Oglethorpe’s group surrendered control and Georgia became a Royal colony.

With the stabilization of Georgia as the thirteenth American colony, the final American adjustment to empire was complete. Britain’s colonies spanned the entire Atlantic seaboard, and the system appeared relatively sound. At the same time, on paper, the mercantile apparatus of the 1600s seemed to function satisfactorily. The king and Parliament handed down laws to the secretary of state who, with the Board of Trade, issued orders for commerce and governance of the New World. Britain deployed a small network of royal governors, officials, and trade and customs officers who were directed to carry out these laws.

Ultimately, it would be up to these officials to prevent the American Revolution—a challenge well beyond them. The most common thread that connected the British colonies was their governmental structure: eleven colonies had an appointed council and elected assembly (with the franchise, or voting rights, bestowed on adult white male property owners); ten colonies had a governor selected by the king, in the case of a royal colony, or by the directors of the joint-stock company. The legislators’ right to vote on taxes, the governor’s salary, and all other revenue measures—the coveted power of the purse—constituted a central part of the rights of Englishmen the colonists enjoyed. Thus, citizens took even relatively minor local levies as serious business. As they grew more prosperous, wealth permeated through the greater part of the body politic, making inevitable the ascendancy of the legislative bodies over the executives. Despite resistance from the governors, virtually all the American colonies in 1770 had seen the elected legislative bodies supersede the governors’ offices, wresting almost all important decision-making power from the king’s proxies.
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American Whigs clung to (and radicalized) a distrust of power that Puritans had displayed in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution. Colonists distrusted appointed governors and held them at bay with the economic power of the lower house of the legislature and its budgetary/appropriation powers. If a governor proved uncooperative, the legislature might hold back his salary to foster compromise. Separated from the mother country by three thousand miles and beholden to the legislatures for their pay, most governors learned how to deal with the provincials on their own terms. But colonial governments were not balanced governments in any sense. Elected representatives commanded disproportionate power, as the colonists and English Whigs desired. At the same time, a separation of powers was clearly visible, if imperfectly weighted in favor of the legislature.

Benign Neglect

Continued clashes between colonial legislators and governors picked by the Crown only heralded a larger dissatisfaction among Americans with their position in the empire. Three factors fueled their growing discomfort with English rule. First, there was the tenuous nature of imperial holdings themselves: overseas possessions required constant protection and defense against foreign threats, especially those posed by the French. Not only did Britain have to maintain a large, well-equipped navy capable of extending English power to all areas of the globe, but colonial settlements also needed troops to defend against natives and encroachments from other nations’ colonies. A nation as small as England could not hope to protect its possessions with English soldiers alone: it needed conscripts or volunteers from the colonies themselves. Even so, the cost of supporting such far-flung operations, even in peacetime, was substantial. In wartime, the expense of maintaining armies overseas soared still further. Attempts to spread that expense to the colonists themselves without extending to them representation in England soon bred animosity in the North American colonies.

A second factor, already evident in Bacon’s Rebellion, involved a growing difference between Americans and Englishmen caused by the separation of the English colonists from the motherland in both distance and time. In the case of America, absence did not make the heart grow fonder. Instead, the colonists started to see themselves differently—not as Americans, to be sure, but as Virginians, Georgians, and so on.
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The final source of unrest originated in the flawed nature of mercantilism itself. Mercantilist doctrine demanded that the individual subordinate his economic activity to the interests of the state. Such an attitude may have been practicable in Rome or in Charlemagne’s empire; but the ideas of the Enlightenment soon gave Americans the intellectual basis for insisting that individuals could pursue wealth for themselves, and give the state only its fair share. It did not help the English that mercantilism was based on a conceptual framework that saw wealth as fixed and limited, meaning that for the government to get more wealth, individuals had to receive less of the fruit of their own labor.
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After the Glorious Revolution, the English government failed to develop a cohesive or coherent policy for administering the colonies, even though by 1754 there were eight colonies under the authority of royal governors. The British utilized a series of laws collectively called the Navigation Acts (originated in 1651 as a restriction against trading with the Dutch), which placed regulations on goods manufactured or grown within the empire. Various acts provided subsidies for sugar, molasses, cotton, or other agricultural items, but only if they were grown in an approved colony. The British West Indies, for example, were to produce sugar, and any other colony attempting to grow sugar cane faced penalties or taxes. Britain hoped to foster interdependence among the colonies with such policies, forcing New England to get its sugar from the British West Indies, cotton from India, and so on. Above all, the Navigation Acts were intended to make all the colonies dependent on England for manufactured goods and English currency, and thus they prohibited or inhibited production of iron ore or the printing of money.
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As the governor of New York revealed in a letter to the Board of Trade, all governors were commanded to “discourage all Manufactures, and to give accurate accounts [of manufacturing] with a view to their suppression.”
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Having the state pick winners and losers in the fields of enterprise proved disastrous, and not merely because it antagonized the Americans. The Board of Trade, desperate to boost shipbuilding, paid subsidies for products such as pitch, tar, rosin, hemp, and other seafaring-related products to reduce Britain’s reliance on Europe. As production in the colonies rose, prices for shipbuilding basics fell, encouraging fishing and shipping industries that none of the other colonies had. Not only did a government-controlled economy fail to keep the colonials pacified, but it also unwittingly gave them the very means they eventually needed to wage an effective war against the mother country.

Americans especially came to despise regulations that threatened the further development of America’s thriving merchant trade in the port cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. Those urban centers had sprouted a sturdy population of aspiring merchants, self-employed artisans, and laborers, perhaps one in ten of whom were criminals, leading William Byrd II to instruct an English friend in 1751, “Keep all your felons at home.”
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In the country and on the frontier, farmers and planters exported surplus produce. Traders at the top favored the regulations because they allowed them to freeze out aspiring competitors, but producers and consumers disliked the laws, and they were swiftly becoming the majority.

But even by clinging to the outmoded mercantilist structure, entrepreneurs in places like Philadelphia found that nothing could stem the advance of more energetic people with better products or ideas. In Philadelphia, “Opportunity, enterprise, and adversity reinforced each other. A young business man could borrow money and move into trade, challenging the commercial position of older, more established merchants. His opportunity was…their adversity.”
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The rich got richer, but so too did the poor and a large middle class. All Americans except slaves were energized by the emergent global economy. In this new economy, raw materials from the American frontier—furs, fish, naval stores, tobacco, lumber, livestock, grain—moved to American port cities and then east and south across the Atlantic in sailing ships.
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In return, manufactured goods and slaves flowed to America over the same routes. Americans prospered from this booming economy, witnessing unprecedented growth to the extent that on the eve of the Revolution, colonists had per capita annual incomes of $720 in 1991 dollars, putting these people of two hundred years ago “on a par with the privately held wealth of citizens in modern-day Mexico or Turkey.”
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The conflict lay in the fact that, in direct violation of British mercantile policy, Americans traded with both French and Spanish colonies. Large quantities of wine and salt came from Spain’s Madeira Islands, and molasses, gold coin, and slaves came from the French Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Great Britain was engaged in war against France and Spain throughout the eighteenth century, making this illicit trade, quite literally, treasonous. Yet that trade grew, despite its illegality and renewed British efforts to put teeth in the Navigation Acts.

Enforcement of British trade policies should have fallen to the Board of Trade, but in practice, two administrative bodies—the king’s Privy Council and the admiralty courts—carried out actual administration of the laws. Admiralty courts almost exclusively dealt with the most common violation, smuggling by sea. But like any crime statistics, the records of the courts reflect only those caught and prosecuted, and they fail to measure the effort put into enforcement itself. Smuggling made heroes out of otherwise obnoxious pirates, turning bloodthirsty cutthroats into brave entrepreneurs. Moreover, the American colonies, in terms of their size, population, and economic contribution to the empire, represented a relatively minor part of it, meaning that prior to 1750 most acts were designed with the larger and more important possessions in mind. A critical, yet little-noticed, difference existed between America and the other colonies, however. Whereas in India, for example, British-born officials and troops constituted a tiny minority that dominated a huge native population, in America British-born subjects or their descendants accounted for the vast majority of the nonslave, non-Indian population.

Another factor working against a successful economic royal policy was the poor quality of royal officials and royal governors. Assignment in America was viewed as a less desirable post than, say, the British West Indies, Madras (India), or even Nova Scotia. These colonies were more “British,” with amenities and a lifestyle stemming from a stronger military presence and locations on major trade routes.

Colonial governorships offered havens for corrupt officials and royal cronies, such as New York governor Lord Cornbury, a cousin of Queen Anne, who was a dishonest transvestite who warranted “the universal contempt of the people.”
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Sir Danvers Osborn, the most mentally fragile of the colonial governors, hanged himself after one week in America.
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