Empires Apart (22 page)

The American colonists were well aware of their low priority in the eyes of the government in London. A congress was held in Albany in 1754 to discuss ways of resisting French attempts to block the expansion of the British colonies. This congress was attended by representatives of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and the New England colonies and by representatives of the Six Nations of the Iroquois (who according to Benjamin Franklin often displayed greater diplomatic skills than the colonists).

A few months later a Virginian force under George Washington set out to take a French post on the site of today's Pittsburgh. Washington made his fortune by speculating in frontier land and was determined that the Ohio territory should belong to Britain not France. He surprised a French detachment, killing some and capturing others, including the commander – who was quickly murdered in controversial circumstances:it is claimed that while Washington was talking to him one of the Virginian's native allies unexpectedly sunk his tomahawk into the captive's skull. Washington was himself soon defeated and captured, but was released. He returned with a larger force of British soldiers, only to be defeated, spectacularly, again.

War between France and Britain was formally declared again in 1755, with the start of the Seven Year War. British forces caused havoc in Nova Scotia; Louisburg fell again in 1758 and this time British troops razed it to the ground. Thousands of French settlers in the colony they knew as Arcadia fled south, first to New Orleans, established earlier in the century, and then into the bayous of Louisiana, where ‘Arcadian' would be contracted to ‘Cajun'. After some initial French successes the British eventually took Quebec and Montréal and a string of French colonies in the Caribbean. In 1762 Spain intervened in support of France, but British forces soon grabbed the key Spanish strongholds of Havana and Manila – so that in negotiating an end to the conflict with the Treaty of Paris in 1763 neither France nor Spain had much bargaining power. France was the biggest loser, giving up all claims to territory in North America. Spain and England swapped cards: Spain gave up Florida, but took over
New Orleans and parts of Louisiana from the French. Spain also retained Cuba, provoking outrage among American colonists who had provided around one in four of the troops that had captured Havana. Britain now controlled the whole of the continent east of the Mississippi. The new king, George III, must have surveyed his empire in North America with satisfaction; only two threats were faintly visible – the Spanish west of the Mississippi and the natives.

The natives by now came in two varieties: red and white. As is well known the early European navigators sailing west thought they had found the Indies and naturally labelled the natives ‘Indians', but less well known is that the term ‘Red Indian' had nothing to do with supposed red skins. Many native tribes covered themselves with red ochre at certain times of the year as an insect repellent. The original inhabitants of Newfoundland, the Beothuk, for religious reasons, stained themselves and their clothes with ochre all year round and were called the Red People by neighbouring tribes. The Viking sagas spoke of natives wearing red clothing, and to the first modern Europeans arriving in Newfoundland the Beothuk were ‘Red Indians'. The term survived but the Beothuk did not: the last survivor surrendered to the British in the eighteenth century and died in slavery.

The campaigns of the ‘white' natives against the ‘red' natives continued alongside the wars between the colonial powers. To avoid losses to themselves colonists became adept at using one tribe to suppress another: in 1715 Cherokees were used by English colonists to put down a Yamasee revolt in South Carolina, and in 1729 the French used Choctaws to put down a revolt by the Natchez. The colonists' native allies usually learnt too late that loyalty was not a white man's trait. After the ethnic cleansing of the Yamasee the Carolina colonists put a bounty on all ‘Indian' scalps, and a revolt by the Cherokee in 1759 was brutally suppressed by British troops.

The Dutch, soon followed by the English, introduced the practice of offering a reward for scalps delivered to the authorities. The practice
was highly popular: in Massachusetts the bounty paid for native scalps rose from £12 in 1703 to £100 by 1723. Prices varied according to ‘quality'. The British authorities offered their native allies just £8 for the scalp of a French soldier but £200 for the scalp of the Delaware general Shinngass. The French themselves paid bounty-hunters for scalps when exterminating peaceful natives in Newfoundland.

It is hard to think of a more blatant manifestation of genocide or ethnic cleansing than putting a bounty on the scalps of men, women and children of another ethnic group, and yet the sheer brutality of early colonisation has been largely erased from popular history. One particular episode shows how distorted folk memories can persist into the electronic age, deadening people to the truth about their own history. Most ethnic groups in America have their own websites and the ‘Scotch Irish' are no exception. The Scotch Irish were one of the most vociferous groups pressing for ethnic cleansing on the borders of Pennsylvania in the middle of the eighteenth century. In and around the village of Paxtang (or Paxton) in particular there were large numbers of men anxious to apply to the natives the treatment their own Scottish ancestors had applied to the Catholic Irish. They were known as the Paxton Boys, and one version of their story is recounted on
www.scotchirish.net
. Scotch Irish settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier needed protection against native attack, but the ‘pacifist and self-righteous' Quaker authorities in Philadelphia refused to help. The Paxton Boys then led 1,500 settlers in a march on Philadelphia where they presented their ‘just complaints'. According to the website, ‘This single action is credited as being the first act in the American War of Independence', and the Paxton Boys went on to play their full part in the American Revolution. The website does not mention the events that preceded the march on Philadelphia. There had been a native uprising, known as Pontiac's rebellion, in which numerous frontier settlers had been killed. British troops suppressed the rebellion, but the Paxton Boys used the events as an excuse to demand the eradication of all natives. In December 1763 they attacked a village of the Conestoga natives who had lived peacefully alongside their white neighbours throughout the
rebellion. Six natives were killed and fourteen captured; within days all fourteen prisoners had been brutally murdered.

Horrific as the Conestoga massacre was, it is worth remembering that at exactly the same time on the other side of the continent the Russians were massacring far, far greater numbers as they suppressed the Aleut revolt on the islands between Siberia and Alaska; as with so much else this aspect of life on the American frontier was the Russian frontier writ small. In the Aleuts' case there was not even pretence at remorse from those in authority; while the Pennsylvania governor issued warrants for the arrest of those responsible for the Conestoga attack, but met a wall of silence among the Scotch Irish community. The Paxton Boys then moved to attack Christian natives living near the town of Bethlehem. The natives managed to escape and were given protection in the city of Philadelphia. In response the Paxton Boys marched on the city, as described on the Scotch-Irish website. (It may be a sign of the way political values from one epoch continue down the years that when the Ku Klux Klan was established 103 years later, to terrorise freed black slaves, all six of the founders came from the Scotch-Irish community.)

With a belated sense of fair play George III attempted to provide a degree of protection to his ‘red' subjects by forbidding all new white settlements west of a ‘proclamation line' along the Appalachians, a line that in practice offered no real protection to the red natives and created another grievance to add to the growing list of the white natives. The list lengthened again when the colonial authorities pardoned Pontiac, the chief of the Ottawa tribe who had led the recent rebellion. Although the colonists still thought of themselves as Britons, their interests and values increasingly diverged from those of the Britons back across the Atlantic.

While the threat posed by France and Spain remained, the British colonists were happy to be protected by the British army and navy. Similarly many colonial industries – sugar, tobacco, shipping and indigo, for example – were happy to be protected by laws shielding them from global competition, which could have snuffed them out before they had a chance to establish themselves. The Treaty of Paris, however, seemed
to remove the threat of European military intervention, and colonial industrialists and traders were growing strong enough to stand on their own two feet. The British empire was spreading around the globe and within it the North American colonies were starting to loom especially large. In 1775 London remained by far the largest English-speaking city in the world, but three cities were competing for the title of the empire's second city: Edinburgh, the ancient capital of Scotland; Dublin, whose commercial pre-eminence dated back to the Vikings; and Philadelphia, less than a century old.

King and colonists started to survey the same landscape through different ends of the telescope. The crown tired of subsidising the colonies by providing free protection. Realising that the colonists were becoming rich enough to pay for their own defence, British taxpayers wanted them to do so. The colonists, realising that the only protection they now needed was from natives whom they could handle perfectly well themselves, saw no reason to pay for anything. The phrase ‘No taxation without representation' came to sum up a position that had originally been advanced in the 1730s to protest at the imposition by the king of a tax on the import into the mainland colonies of molasses from the French and Dutch West Indies. At that time the refrain had failed to resonate, partly because links were still strong between many of the mainland colonies and colonies like Jamaica and Barbados, which the Molasses Act was designed to protect, partly because the very real French threat muted all opposition to the crown and partly because the molasses tax was never very rigorously enforced. Forty years later the position had changed. In 1773 the parliament in London passed the Tea Act and the citizens of Boston reacted with fury, casting shiploads of tea into Boston harbour rather than paying the iniquitous import duties.

The Boston Tea Party is another of those foundation myths, like the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, known to everyone. It was the moment when the patience of the colonists snapped, a tax too far imposed on toiling Americans to pay for the whims of a foreign king. There is, however, a flaw in the conventional story: the Tea Act did not impose
a horrendous new tax on the American colonists; it reduced by three-quarters an existing tax.

The American Revolution is often pictured as downtrodden colonists throwing off the weight of an oppressive and suffocating regime. This is simply not the case. It is worth putting at length the conclusions of Harvard professor Niall Ferguson in Empire.
How Britain Made the Modern World:

There is good reason to think that, by the 1770s, New Englanders were about the wealthiest people in the world. Per capita income was at least equal to that in the United Kingdom and was more evenly distributed. The New Englanders had bigger farms, bigger families and better education than the Old Englanders back home. And, crucially, they paid far less tax. In 1763 the average Briton paid 26 shillings a year in taxes. The equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one shilling. To say that being British subjects had been good for these people would be an understatement. And yet it was they, not the indentured labourers of Virginia or the slaves of Jamaica, who first threw off the yoke of Imperial authority.

The key questions become, then, why was New England the tinderbox and what lit the fire? The answers are best provided, perhaps, not in the faculties of history but by using a favourite tool of modern business schools: the case study. An example might read:

Your corporation has established a dominant global position in its markets with only one major competitor, which you have significantly outgrown by large-scale investment. You have funded this investment by issuing corporate debt and this is now causing cash flow problems. Your traditional markets have become saturated and are starting to come under attack from new entrants so that your production capacity exceeds demand and stock turn is deteriorating. You have a market study on a new territory that shows significant potential demand, weak local competition
(small scale and highly fragmented) and underdeveloped distribution channels. The market is highly protected, but you believe there is an opportunity to use your lobbying power to change government policy. What should you do?

This, in fact, would be a very poor case study because the answer, in business school parlance, is a ‘no brainer' – you lobby hard, move into the new market on as large a scale as possible, take over the distribution channels and seize a controlling market share before local firms can consolidate and fight back. The flaw in this answer is that it assumes that everyone plays by the same rules; in the real world, if the stakes are high enough, competition can get very dirty; in 1770s New England it got deadly. Local firms quite literally fought back, and the world was never the same again.

The London oligarchs who had set up the East India Company were having a hard time. They had outgrown their major rival, the Dutch East India Company, but by 1770 were facing the very real prospect of bankruptcy and were desperate to find markets for the tea grown on their Asian plantations. The North American colonies were an attractive market and the Tea Act made it more attractive. This Act was not about raising money for the British crown but about providing state aid to the world's largest multinational company. The East India Company decided to do what today's multinationals would regard as a commonplace – enter the market and use its enormous scale to destroy the local competition. By appointing its own agents in the American colonies and importing not only tea but a host of other essentials, the company planned to take control of the local economy.