Conceived in Liberty (133 page)

Robert Walpole indeed brought to the Whig party a policy of consistent liberalism: of quiet minimal government, of low budgets and taxes, of little intervention at home coupled with peace, quiet, and minimal government meddling abroad. He thus not only kept Britain at peace for a generation, but also brought to the Whig party an internally consistent liberal program. From that time on, the Whig tradition remained one of liberalism and included such leaders of peace and neutrality as Walpole, the Pelhams, the Rockingham Whigs, and Charles James Fox. It was fortunate for Walpole that in the same way that he was able to resist opposition charges of dishonor, appeasement, and sellout to France, so his French ally and counterpart, Cardinal Fleury, was able to pursue a steadfast policy of peace despite opposition charges of appeasement and sellout to Great Britain.

England had attacked France in two costly wars: in King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War, which had ended with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Now Walpole resolved that the peace would remain unbroken. The French, despite their losses in Canada at the Peace of Utrecht, were able to construct a mighty defensive fort at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, to guard against further English aggression against Quebec. In a far greater feat, they explored and began to develop the Mississippi and the Ohio valleys. New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, and the fur trade developed in the Ohio Valley and defensive forts built there. France not only had survived the English attempt to throw her out of the New World, but was able to expand its settlements and outcompete its rivals.

The professional patriots, the warmongers, and Francophobes were looking for any excuse for aggression, and they thought they had found their opportunity in the War of the Polish Succession, which broke out in Europe in the 1730s. Walpole, seeing no English interest involved, stood out alone for peace—even against King George II, John Carteret, and other opposition leaders in the House of Commons. Resisting the war pressure successfully, Walpole proudly told Queen Caroline in 1734: “Madame, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe and not one Englishman.”

The war party was unable to prevail in the War of the Polish Succession, though it did drag Britain into war with Spain amidst whipped-up hysteria over Captain Jenkins’ ear. For the war party, such an opportunity to grab Spanish territory was even as welcome as a war with France. Effective in leading the war hawks in the Commons was the fiery and maniacal orator, William Pitt.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear was a classic example of the use of patriotic myth to whip up popular hysteria fomented for other goals. In 1731, Captain Robert Jenkins returned from the Caribbean with a harrowing tale that Spanish officers in searching his ship had cut off his ear. This tale was taken up by the war crowd seven years later, even though Jenkins’ ear was apparently intact, and used by the prowar press to foment aggression against Spain.

The actual mainspring of the aggressive war against Spain had nothing to do with national honor or Captain Jenkins. It stemmed instead from longstanding maneuvers by leading London merchants to acquire a monopoly of the West Indian slave trade. In 1663, Charles II had granted the Royal African Company the exclusive monopoly of carrying slaves from Africa to the English colonies, as well as the exclusive right to own land in Africa. After waging a successful war against a competing Dutch company to gain a monopoly of the slave trade, the Royal African Company after 1680 specialized in slave exports to New Spain. The Spanish government sold to private firms the coveted privilege of the
assiento
—the exclusive monopoly of supplying Spanish colonies with slaves. And the Royal African Company
was able to become a favorite subcontractor of the Spanish
assientists.
Its main trade was with the New Spanish ports: Cartagena on the mainland, Havana, and Porto Bello on the Isthmus of Panama. In 1698, the complaints of the English planters over a shortage of slaves led the British government to cancel Royal African’s monopoly and to throw open the English slave trade to other groups.

The
assiento
was one of the main reasons for England’s precipitation of the War of the Spanish Succession (known in America as Queen Anne’s War) against France and Spain in 1701. For Philip V, the new king of Spain in 1700, was a grandson of the French king Louis XIV, and he promptly awarded the coveted
assiento
to the French Guinea Company—an act that led powerful English merchants interested in the slave trade to support an English war upon the two countries.

At the Peace of Utrecht the British financiers achieved what they wanted: for Spain was forced to grant Britain a thirty-year
assiento
for the slave trade to the Spanish colonies. The British government granted the
assiento
monopoly to the newly formed South Sea Company, which promptly used its privilege as a base for general trade with the Spanish West Indies—indeed as a base for a vast amount of illegal trade as well. The South Sea Company was an organization dominated by the leading West Indian merchants and planters. They were led by Alderman William Beckford, the wealthiest planter and an absentee landlord in London, and they supported the imperialist opposition to the pacific Walpole.

Now the Spanish government no more welcomed evasion of its mercantilist regulations than did any other government. It was the attempt of the Spanish colonial coast guard to stop and search British ships in Spanish territorial waters that precipitated England’s going to war, despite England’s previous recognition of Spain’s exclusive right of trade with its own colony. The Jenkins’ ear hoax was fostered by British merchants to gull the country into going to war in order to swell their profits in the illegal trade with the Spanish colonies. The interested merchants, allied to the jingoists, were led in Commons by William Pitt (the main political protégé of Beckford) and his “Boy Patriots.” These war hawks could not this time be denied, even though Walpole was able to negotiate a compromise agreement with Spain in the Convention of El Pardo in 1739.

Walpole’s lone resistance to the war drive was eloquent. Noting the Spanish treaty right of search in its own waters against illegal trade, he warned that the warmongers “insist that our ships ought never to be searched wherever they are to be found, and let them be ever so near to the Spanish coasts. Pray sir, what is the plain English of this but that the trade to the Spanish West Indies ought to be open to every interloper of ours....” Yet the facts of the case, the Convention of El Pardo, and Walpole’s stubborn eloquence could not this time prevail, and George II declared war against
Spain in October 1739. A new wave of deadly European wars had thus begun. Walpole, hearing the bells ring in celebration, prophetically warned: “They are ringing their bells; they will be wringing their hands soon.”

As we have seen, Georgia quickly used the war as an excuse for an attack on St. Augustine. But the most fateful result was the widening of the conflict to France as well. Even though forced to go to war, Walpole tried to keep the fighting as limited as possible. In this effort, he was joined by the powerful British West Indian sugar planters. The planters only wanted to cripple Spanish trade; they emphatically did not want a conquest of French or Spanish colonial territory that would open up the latter’s products to English colonial markets. Prospects for limiting the war, however, were ruined in 1740 by the outbreak of the entirely separate War of the Austrian Succession.

The pacific Walpole was finally ousted in 1742, and the king forced the Duke of Newcastle to bring into the cabinet the war hawk Lord Carteret, who rushed in to try to mount an all-out war against France, which erupted in 1744, and which became known in America as King George’s War. The war dragged on in costly and inconclusive fashion until peace was made at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, restoring the state of affairs of the
status quo ante bellum,
including reconfirmation of the Spanish
assiento
to the South Sea Company.

The most important event of King George’s War in the colonies, and the most fateful of future consequences, was the expedition that conquered the fortress of Louisbourg from the French. From his appointment to the governorship of Massachusetts in 1741, William Shirley had been zealous in preparation and expenditures for a war. On assuming his post, Shirley quickly and happily built up a patronage machine and the buildup was created out of increasing war and military expenditures. Provision contracts for favored merchants, recruiting fees, and naval expenditures lined the coffers of Shirley and his friends; and, as governments have eternally found before and since, the cry of “defense” proved to be a superb patriotic cloak for these nest-feathering operations. Previous conflicts were forgotten as contractors and subcontractors scrambled to win places on the war gravy train. As Professor Schutz, a most favorable biographer of Shirley, writes:

Defense activities raised a political tide in Shirley’s favor. Speculators, contractors and merchants prospered, and their profits attached them to the new administration. The new defense policy won the support of many of Belcher’s allies.... Lesser men, in turn, looked to the contractors; a chain of favors spread war business to a large number of people.
*

The powerful merchant Thomas Hancock, a former opponent of Shirley’s, had been bought out by being tied into a firm receiving virtually half of the war contract business in Massachusetts. The old alliance with the merchant Samuel Waldo was further cemented by Governor Shirley himself being made a junior partner in Waldo’s enterprises. After France and England went to war in Europe in earnest in 1744, Shirley determined to escalate the war to the colonies and to capture the great fortress of Louisbourg. In this plan Shirley was backed enthusiastically by the Duke of Bedford, the new first lord of the admiralty and a leading imperialist and expansionist. Driven by patriotism, the desire to crush efficient French fur and fishing competition, and the lure of greater war contracts, Shirley pressed his plan, but the General Court balked at the difficulty and the great expense. Soon, however, in early 1745, the legislature, steered by William Pepperrell, the great timber merchant, lent its approval. Pepperrell was promptly appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition, and the choice colonelcies and contracts were handed out to Shirley’s key friends. Shirley’s sons-in-law, Eliakim Hutchinson and William Bollan, were put in charge of recruiting and provisioning, Waldo was made a brigadier general and his son a commissary, and Pepperrell’s son-in-law was appointed a contractor. A large issue of paper currency was voted to provide the necessary funds.

If Shirley and his friends had never had it so good, the same was scarcely true for the people of Massachusetts. Shirley hoped to raise three thousand men for the expedition, but when enough seamen did not volunteer, the kidnapping policy of impressment was used to fill the quotas. The impressments caused riots in several towns and protests at town meetings. Here indeed was a harbinger of ominous things to come for the Crown and its relations with the people of Massachusetts.

The expedition finally got under way at the end of March 1745. Impressments continued, as one thousand more men were sought, and bitterness increased among the public. All qualms were stilled, however, by the burst of popular enthusiasm for the capture of Louisbourg in mid-June. Dreaming of—and asking for—more favors and a baronetcy, as well his grandiose projects for the conquest of Canada, Shirley ladled out huge contracts to Hancock and his other friends for the maintenance and reconstruction of Louisbourg.

Victory, however, soon proved to have troubles of its own in store for the conquerors. Newcastle and the prime minister, his brother Henry Pelham, were instinctive liberals and had always been reluctant to pursue the war with France. They were now increasingly appalled at the high cost and length of the war; their major aim was to conclude peace as quickly and as gracefully as possible. Their main task was subtly to scuttle their own war effort, and in particular to stem the rise of patrioteering hysteria
in England over the unexpected capture of Louisbourg—the kind of hysteria that called for all-out conquest of Canada, and that led the first lord of the admiralty to swear that he would hang the man who dared to surrender Louisbourg. Pelham and Newcastle were now afraid more of the English war crowd than of the French. Another such “victory” as Louisbourg would be disaster indeed! Hence they began a subtle process of disengagement from the war and therefore from further conquest.

As a part of this process of pacification, William Shirley received slight reward for his victorious campaign, obtaining a colonelcy but not the coveted title of baronet. The post of colonel, however, with its correlative patronage was lucrative enough, and Shirley and Pepperrell spent a happy time in Louisbourg parceling out all the new patronage and war contracts—including captaincies to two of Shirley’s sons. Such friends, relatives, and fellow booty-sharers as Robert Hale, Bollan, Hutchinson, Robert Auchmuty, Benjamin Colman, Hancock, and Paul Dudley were cut in for their share. As always, Samuel Waldo profited handsomely: his son becoming captain and in charge of supply for his regiment, and his stepbrother and Pepperrell’s son-in-law Nathaniel Sparhawk placed in charge of selling French war loot in Boston.

But in the meanwhile, the loot of the lower-ranking heroes was not as abundant. At Louisbourg supplies were low, sickness high, and the troops restive. And through the stormy winter, Shirley found it difficult to supply the unfortunate garrison. Furthermore, the American volunteers found themselves after the victory under the command of British naval officers who had played a decidedly minor role in the triumph. The colonial soldiers had enlisted only for the length of a summer campaign, but now found, to their outrage, that British officers forced them to remain in Louisbourg for the entire miserable winter. The troops threatened to mutiny, and only the personal visit of Shirley in the fall, promising speedier payment and discharges in the spring, quieted the incipient rebellion.