Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (10 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Franklin subscribed to the theory of his friendly acquaintance Edmund Burke that popular discussion of rights was a sure sign of misgovernment, and he watched with concern as the revenue-raising tax became a noisy trans-Atlantic debate about the right to tax. Franklin was shocked at the proportions of the outrage in the colonies when the stamp tax was imposed, in November 1765. There was in the stamp tax a move to tax harmonization in the Empire, but also to strike a preemptive blow for the untrammeled rights of the Imperial Parliament. The English suspected some of the colonial leaders of aspiring to independence, and that must have been correct.
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But they acted in a way that could have been reasonably assumed to fan and inflame that sentiment, not defuse or douse it. The British political class assumed that while there were agitators for independence in America, they were opportunists, rabble-rousers, and scoundrels, and that the great majority were committed Englishmen, loyal to the Crown, come what may. That sentiment was strong, but what the British, from the king down, failed to grasp was that loyalty to the Crown in America depended on the wearer of the Crown appearing to be the impartial arbiter, when necessary, of the interests of all his subjects. If the king were to seem solely interested in upholding the British side of an argument with the Americans, that loyalty, in the face of the higher and more imminent patriotic interest of the colonists, supplemented by their material interests, would quickly evaporate. The British had not sent talented governors to America, with rare exceptions, and as has been mentioned, the conduct of the military expedition leaders had been heavy-handed with the colonists, and completely ineffectual with the French and Indians, prior to Pitt’s taking control of the Seven Years’ War in 1758.
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But they acted in a way that could have been reasonably assumed to fan and inflame that sentiment, not defuse or douse it. The British political class assumed that while there were agitators for independence in America, they were opportunists, rabble-rousers, and scoundrels, and that the great majority were committed Englishmen, loyal to the Crown, come what may. That sentiment was strong, but what the British, from the king down, failed to grasp was that loyalty to the Crown in America depended on the wearer of the Crown appearing to be the impartial arbiter, when necessary, of the interests of all his subjects. If the king were to seem solely interested in upholding the British side of an argument with the Americans, that loyalty, in the face of the higher and more imminent patriotic interest of the colonists, supplemented by their material interests, would quickly evaporate. The British had not sent talented governors to America, with rare exceptions, and as has been mentioned, the conduct of the military expedition leaders had been heavy-handed with the colonists, and completely ineffectual with the French and Indians, prior to Pitt’s taking control of the Seven Years’ War in 1758.
The theory of parliamentary representation of all interests was strained, in part because Parliament was riddled with constituencies that had very few people in them, were controlled by influential individuals, and in any case did not represent the colonies at all, other than in the sense that the national interest of the home islands required some consideration of the Americans. (There were about 9.5 million people in the British Isles, including over two million Irish Roman Catholics who were a good deal more dissentient in spirit as subjects of the British Parliament than the Americans at their most unenthusiastic; there was an electorate of about 300,000, scattered extremely unevenly through about 540 constituencies, and the appointive and hereditary House of Lords had greater powers than the House of Commons.) Even had it been a broad suffrage with equal representation for all districts, it would still have been scandalous non-representation of the Americans, the wealthiest part of the British-governed world with, by the mid-1770s, about 30 percent of the population of Britain, about 70 percent of the population of Prussia, which had just held the great Austrian and Russian Empires at bay for almost seven years, and a greater population than the Netherlands or Sweden, noteworthy powers that had swayed the destinies of Europe at times in the previous 150 years. (Admittedly, about 8 percent of the Americans were unenfranchised slaves, who had only the rights their owners allowed from one moment to the next.)
On the other side, the Americans knew that Britain had saved them from a most unappetizing fate at the hands of the French, a prospect made more gruesome and horrifying by any contemplation of what the Indians might have done to make the lives of the colonists shorter and more uncongenial. All informed Americans knew that Britain had gone a long way into debt doing so, and as America was the most prosperous part of the Empire, it had some obligation to shoulder a proportionate share of the cost. It is impossible, at this remove, and buried as these matters now are in the folkloric mythology of the creation of the United States, to guess what degree of unvarnished cynicism might have hastened and made louder the American caterwauling about rights, and the corresponding failure to make any suggestion, apart from Franklin’s worthy improvisation, of an alternative to the stamp tax to retire the debt incurred in the military salvation of America.
The Pennsylvania Assembly adopted a resolution strenuously condemning the Stamp Act, as did the Virginia Assembly, under the influence of the fiery orator Patrick Henry, who advised George III to contemplate the fate of Julius Caesar and Charles I (as if either the men or their fates were in the slightest similar, and seeming to condone their ends, an assassination and a pseudo-judicial murder, shortly leading in each case to the elevation of their heirs). The Virginians asserted that the tax was “illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust.... The inhabitants of this Colony are not bound to yield Obedience to any law or Ordinance whatever, designed to impose any Taxation whatever upon them,” apart from those legislated in Virginia. This response was known as the Virginia Resolves and was emulated by most of the colonies. The British had designated collectors of the tax, who were pressured into refusing to collect it. With the tax in effect but not being collected, and demonstrations verging on violence around the colonies, nine of the colonies met in New York and declared that taxes could be imposed on the colonists only with their personal consent or that of their elected representatives. This was represented as part of the birthright of Englishmen. It was a stirring stand for individual liberty and rugged individualism, but was nonsense in fact. No sane person will volunteer to be taxed, other than in a severe community or national emergency, and Englishmen were taxed all the time with only a vote of an undemocratically elected House of Commons and a House of Lords that would recoil in horror at the thought that it was answerable to the taxpayers. (It should not be imagined that the colonial houses of assembly had a greatly larger percentage of representation on their voters’ lists, although the procedure of what became known as gerrymandering [after the redistricting artistry of the fifth vice president, Elbridge Gerry] had not had the time to plumb the depths of electoral vote-rigging that existed in England.) The rights Englishmen possessed, which distinguished them from most nationalities, except for some Swiss, Dutch, and Scandinavians, were freedom of speech and assembly, and access to generally fairly independent courts, as well as some participatory legislative processes, and the Americans received them from and shared them with the British.
14. FRANKLIN’S DIPLOMACY IN LONDON, 1764–1767The Americans, Franklin was convinced, didn’t want independence, but they wanted an end to inferiority. They recognized the British right to regulate trade between parts of the Empire, but not to do anything that really touched the lives of the colonists. The problem with this outlook was that it amounted to Britain’s having the high privilege of assuring the security of the colonists, at British expense, and no authority to require anything of the colonists in return. Even if such a thing could be negotiated for the future, it left Britain with the heavy cost of having thrown the French out of North America, to protect the colonists, with the beneficiaries loudly claiming that it was their birthright as Englishmen, and the most well-to-do group of Englishmen at that, to refuse to pay anything toward their own salvation. That would not work as the modus operandi of a functioning empire.
On the other side, the British imagined that they could do what they wished legislating over and for the colonists, that there was any truth to the fiction that the British Parliament represented the Americans, that the colonists, like those in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands, had no capacity whatever for self-government, and that no American could possibly wish it except a few political demagogues and self-seekers. The Empire was not going to last long on such a flimsy foundation as that, either. It was in this deepening vortex that Franklin worked in London.
Franklin had thought of American representation in the British Parliament, but it was soon clear that matters had deteriorated too far for that. The Americans would not seek it, in the same measure that the British would not offer it. There was already an obvious danger of armed conflict, as there was much talk in London of sending the British army to collect the stamp tax. Fortunately the ministry changed, and Pitt’s friend the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister. Franklin met the new president of the Board of Trade, Lord Dartmouth, and proposed the suspension of the Stamp Act, until the colonies’ debt levels, which he attributed to the fiscal rigors of the late war, had subsided. (They were modest compared with Britain’s.) And then the Stamp Act could quietly expire. He also warned that the use of armed force to collect taxes in America would fail, as the soldiers would be induced to desert in large numbers by the higher pay scales of the American private sector, and by the impossibility of rounding up deserters in a country so vast and absorbent of dissenters.
On February 13, 1766, Franklin appeared before Parliament in effect to answer for America. He did so brilliantly. He protested American loyalty, which had been affected by the British imposition of “an internal tax.” There had never been any objection to taxes on exports. Partly because of Franklin’s efforts, the British repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but accompanied that move with the Declaratory Act, which averred that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Franklin wasn’t much bothered by that declaration, as long as nothing was done about it. He cherished a reform of the Empire that would cause Britain to shed even its right to excise taxes on exports. He was more convinced than ever that eventually America would surpass Britain and foresaw a gradual inversion of the relationship, that the American country would be the senior partner. A man of immense subtlety, congeniality, and diplomacy, Franklin exaggerated the ability of others to reason as thoughtfully as he did.
He wrote home very happily of “the august body” of the British Parliament having done the right and sensible thing in repealing the Stamp Act, and predicted imperial reform. By this Franklin meant a single monarch of the Empire, but the main constituent parts entirely self-governing, or coordinating through a grand assembly of representatives meeting in equality and dealing with matters of common interest, as he had proposed for the colonies themselves. The first option was close to what the British Commonwealth became 150 years later, between Britain and what were called the “white Dominions”—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, more or less, South Africa. Of course, all of those countries combined, and adding the United Kingdom, even today, have a population, as Franklin foresaw, that is not much more than half that of the U.S. The second option, with the grand assembly, was emulated to a substantial degree by the advocates of federalism at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where Franklin presided, in 1787 and 1788.
Franklin’s optimism, as frequently happened in his long life, was unjustified. “Every man in England,” he wrote, “... seems to jostle himself into the Throne with the King, and talks of ‘our subjects in the colonies.’”
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As usually happens in long-running disagreements, tempers escalated and a natural desire to settle the dispute violently steadily gained ground as a prospect. A similar process would be replicated between the slave-holding and free American states 90 years later (Chapters 6 and 7). The British could speak only of repression by force, tipsy with their Seven Years’ War victories, especially as the Rockingham-Pitt regimes gave way to the king’s friends, the reactionary governments of the Duke of Grafton and Frederick, Lord North. Franklin did not think the British possessed the least idea of how difficult it would be to suppress the colonists, and did not think they would succeed if they tried. It was painful for Benjamin Franklin, as for many. He wrote Lord Kames (Pitt’s friend) that “I love Britain” and many British, and “I wish it prosperity.” His sought-for union could disadvantage America briefly, but “America, an immense Territory favour’d by Nature with all advantages of Climate, Soil, great navigable Rivers and Lakes etc., must become a great Country, populous and mighty; and will in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off any Shackles that may be imposed on her and perhaps place them on the Imposers.”
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This was Franklin’s wistful hope, and prophetic view; while the British grumbled belligerently and garrulously about putting America in its place, the sun was already rising on the mighty and uncontainable power of the New World. Nothing could stifle, or, ultimately, equal it. America was the predestined nation.
15. THE TOWNSHEND TAXES20
As usually happens in long-running disagreements, tempers escalated and a natural desire to settle the dispute violently steadily gained ground as a prospect. A similar process would be replicated between the slave-holding and free American states 90 years later (Chapters 6 and 7). The British could speak only of repression by force, tipsy with their Seven Years’ War victories, especially as the Rockingham-Pitt regimes gave way to the king’s friends, the reactionary governments of the Duke of Grafton and Frederick, Lord North. Franklin did not think the British possessed the least idea of how difficult it would be to suppress the colonists, and did not think they would succeed if they tried. It was painful for Benjamin Franklin, as for many. He wrote Lord Kames (Pitt’s friend) that “I love Britain” and many British, and “I wish it prosperity.” His sought-for union could disadvantage America briefly, but “America, an immense Territory favour’d by Nature with all advantages of Climate, Soil, great navigable Rivers and Lakes etc., must become a great Country, populous and mighty; and will in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off any Shackles that may be imposed on her and perhaps place them on the Imposers.”
21
This was Franklin’s wistful hope, and prophetic view; while the British grumbled belligerently and garrulously about putting America in its place, the sun was already rising on the mighty and uncontainable power of the New World. Nothing could stifle, or, ultimately, equal it. America was the predestined nation.
Franklin was already being overtaken by events. In 1767 the chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, imposed a series of excise taxes on a range of English manufactures, including paper, glass, paint, and, eventually, tea, and provided for a board of customs commissioners to sit in America and collect the tax as the goods arrived. This must have been a gratuitous gesture to annoy the Americans, as the duty could have been levied in British ports as the goods left the country of origin. Franklin did not foresee that this would arouse his countrymen, but a new uproar occurred. The most important American of all, if a confrontation came, would be George Washington, the senior military officer in the colonies. He had not been overly successful as a senior officer, but was a capable and brave leader, a tall, impressive presence, and an astute businessman, though only a mid-level plantation owner. He had continued assiduously to invest in the western part of Virginia and in the Ohio country, and had steadily built his plantation at Mount Vernon, where he was sometimes a harsh slavemaster. Though largely self-educated, he was knowledgeable and worldly, despite the fact that he never left America. Unlike Franklin, he was not gregarious but rather slightly shy. But he was formidable and respected. He was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and steered clear of the debate on the Stamp Act, ignoring the pyrotechnics of Patrick Henry and others, as did also the young plantation owner from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who entered the House at the age of 21 in 1764. Jefferson disliked public speaking, and was never good at it, but he was an elegant writer, a talented lawyer, a fine architect, and a learned polymath.
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