Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (20 page)

Such a structure would have been as helpful in North America as in the British Isles. Until the 1770s, colonial Americans too sometimes expressed a desire for greater legislative autonomy within the reassuring framework of the empire. They reverted to an argument which, to Hanoverians, appeared shockingly Tory, associated with excessive deference to the crown: the assembly of each colony was claimed to be equal in authority to the Westminster Parliament, and the component parts of the empire were, Americans claimed, united only by their allegiance to a common sovereign. Nor was this argument confined to a handful of American colonists. It could be found in England too, in the writings of reformers like the Dissenting minister and philosopher Richard Price.
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Just as Jacobitism in its later stages came to take on something of the air of a protest movement, adding to its dynastic doctrinal core a series of social grievances which anticipated the platform of John Wilkes, so too its constitutional doctrines came to find echoes at many unexpected points in the political spectrum. A Stuart Britain might have appealed to constituencies on both sides of the Atlantic.

After independence, it was made to seem that American colonists had always been ruggedly anti-monarchical. Parts of the writings of the founding fathers could indeed be made to bear this interpretation. In 1775, for example, John Adams, one of the earliest of his generation to campaign for full independence and later the second President of the USA, argued that the idea of a ‘British empire’ in America was unwarranted in constitutional law, ’introduced in allusion to the Roman empire, and intended to insinuate that the prerogative of the imperial crown of England’ was absolute, not including Lords and Commons.
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But most colonists were attracted by the convenient and seemingly patriotic argument that each colony was linked to the empire solely through its link with the crown. This remained an appealing model for many Americans even after independence. In 1800, reflecting on the then balance of power between the federal government and the states, James Madison, Virginia revolutionary, co-author of
The Federalist
and in 1809 fourth President of the USA, argued that:

This was an old idiom of debate, revolving around charters, statutes and common law privileges. Of course, colonial arguments came finally to be expressed in a quite different natural law idiom which proved explosive. The origins of this can be traced back to the mid-1760s. In 1764, for example, the Boston lawyer James Otis, one of the first patriot controversialists, appealed to Locke’s anti-Stuart natural law argument to contend that the government was dissolved whenever the legislative arm violated its trust and so broke ‘this fundamental, sacred and unalterable law of self preservation’, for which men had ‘entered into society’.
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The revolutionary doctrine that, by ‘the law of nature’, men leaving the mother country to found a new society elsewhere ‘recover their natural freedom and independence’ was heard at least as early as 1766 from the senior Virginia politician and pamphleteer Richard Bland. According to Bland, ‘the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the state they have quitted, ceases’; such men ‘become a sovereign state, independent of the state from which they separated’.
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Such arguments were, after the Revolution, retrospectively organised into a high road to independence. Yet this transition to a natural law idiom was not inevitable and did not become widespread until the 1770s. Had the empire already, since 1688, been structured in terms of the separateness of the colonies and their personal tie to the king, natural law claims of this kind might not have been generated. Anglo-American disputes might have gone on being addressed in the concrete, negotiable context of specific liberties and privileges.
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English law provided another area in which the debate could have taken a different direction. Formally, all lands in America had been granted to settlers by the crown in ‘free and common Soccage’ as if they were located in the manor of East Greenwich in Kent.
¹⁹
They were, in law, merely part of the royal demesne. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed this ancient doctrine of English land law in 1766, but others were to put it to use in the republican cause.
²⁰
It was a doctrine to which both sides might appeal. John Adams cited it in the interest of independence to establish that English law, to the reign of James I, made no provision for ‘colonization’, no ‘provision ... for governing colonies beyond the Atlantic, or beyond the four seas, by authority of parliament, no nor for the king to grant charters to subjects to settle in foreign countries’.
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The argument was still sufficiently powerful that colonists could use it in order to place a particular interpretation on the transatlantic constitution. Others could use the same doctrine differently, however: the argument that men reassumed their rights by the law of nature in quitting the kingdom was always vulnerable since the king had a common-law right to prevent such emigration (given effect by the writ
ne exeat regno
). If colonies were royal grants, some colonists could argue (contrary to Bland’s claim that the colonies were free and independent states) that they were still part of the realm of England and therefore entitled to all the rights of Englishmen, including ‘no taxation without representation’. Complete independence was not the only or inevitable outcome of the remarkable flowering of constitutional and political theory seen in America between 1763 and 1776.

Despite natural law arguments and the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence which natural law arguments generated, this older constitutional idiom remained basic up to the outbreak of the war. In 1775, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, in a debate in the House of Lords, argued that colonial grievances focused on the principle of British supremacy, not the detail of controversial legislation.

Constitutional doctrines and practical purposes were thus mutually dependent. In an eighteenth-century Britain ruled by Stuart monarchs, such doctrines might have been more easily used as a way of redefining imperial relationships to cope with increasing colonial population, prosperity and political maturity. Imperial devolution was to be the path eventually explored by the metropolis after the Durham Report of 1839; it is possible that a continued or a restored Stuart regime would have found itself committed to a constitutional formula within the British Isles which unintentionally promoted the process of imperial devolution at an earlier date, and so accommodated American ambitions rather than resisting them. No such Stuart restoration recast the political landscape, of course, and a forward-looking Britain found itself increasingly committed to the Blackstonian doctrine of the absolute authority of the crown in parliament which a backward-looking America, still obsessed with the seventeenth-century jurist Sir Edward Coke, finally resisted with armed force.

The revolutions of 1688 in the British Isles and 1776 in Britain’s North American colonies shared a number of essential features: their initial seeming improbability; the reluctance of most men, however critical of the government, to resort to armed force; a high level of eventual unanimity that something had to be done; a considerable degree of disagreement, in historical retrospect, about the causes of what actually was done; but a powerful political need to claim that the meaning of the revolution was profound and unambiguous. Yet, in respect of causation, the two episodes now appear very different. The fall of James II came about in a narrow time frame, as the result of a set of events which contemporaries saw as bewildering and historians explain as dominated by contingency. It was a revolution which, then and later, seemed incomprehensibly under-determined. By contrast, historians of the conflicts of the 1770s and 1780s have always argued that the Revolution was over-determined, the long-delayed result of long-rehearsed social, religious or ideological conflicts in law and religion. This is equally true of those who pointed to British policy and of those who, more recently, explain the Revolution chiefly as the result of causes internal to the colonies themselves.
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Yet even this recognition of the powerful antecedents of the American Revolution is still consistent with the existence of counterfactuals, for that revolution was a
civil
war, each side embracing a plausible alternative, rather than a consensually supported war of colonial liberation aimed at driving out a wholly alien occupying power. Where the great majority of both English and Scots had sat on the fence in 1688, waiting to see which side would prevail, the pattern in the thirteen colonies in 1776 was strikingly different. There, men had often been politically mobilised and pre-committed to one side or other by principled conflicts and local coercion dating from the early 1760s. In England in 1688 a change of government was peacefully effected, but followed by agonisings over the theoretical implications of what had been done; in 1776 American colonists had had their theoretical debates already and were now swiftly drawn into bitter civil war with neighbouring communities of the opposite allegiance. Only the arrival of peace in 1783, the permanent exclusion of the loyalists and the subsequent wave of triumphalism created the illusion of a unity of national purpose and the inevitability of a wholly independent United States.

This over-determination therefore implies not inevitability but two counterfactuals, two distinct and irreconcilable alternatives: a British America, ever more securely integrated into a British modernity of church and king, commerce and science; or a republican America, stepping back into a mode of plebeian politics, sectarian conflict and agrarian self-sufficiency
²⁴
which to many English observers recalled the 1640s and 1650s. Political contingencies defined these options, of course, for the British model of a future American society was not forcefully proselytising. It did not include any sustained attempt to export nobility and gentry to the plantations: colonial society was already sufficiently receptive to English patrician ideals. It did, however, include an attempt to promote the Church of England in America as the basis for a tolerant regime in a plural society, an ambition which many colonists, and not only Dissenters among them, saw quite differently as a sinister bid for spiritual power.
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English hegemony was often interpreted as insidious too, since it increasingly found its expression through the processes of cultural emulation: consumerism, with its cargo of English aesthetic and commercial norms, was giving American polite society an increasingly English orientation.
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Later, these forms of English influence were quickly overlaid by the exultation of the new republic at its independence and at the initial success of its experiment in devising a constitution. The vision of a young society rejecting old-world political corruption in favour of republican innocence
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and spurning the tainted luxury of modern consumerism for rustic simplicity
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was so compelling that it fused in a national myth. When corruption and luxury returned, as return they must, they paid obeisance to that myth and were not allowed to overturn it: colonial cultural exceptionalism, it was assumed, had pointed the way to American political independence. Yet only in retrospect did it seem obvious that the evolution of American values had made independence inevitable.

Before the 1770s the path of rebellion and autonomy seemed anything but likely. The British
ancien regime
, a state form devised in the 1660s to make impossible any lurch back into the horrors of religious war and social upheaval that scarred early-seventeenth-century Europe, had done its work all too well. Many contemporaries regarded the momentous and atavistic events unfolding in the mid-1770s with awe and disbelief: it was a common reaction to say that the ostensible causes were wholly inadequate to explain the scale of the unfolding tragedy, and so they were.

Although some commentators had predicted the hypothetical independence of America at an unspecifically remote date, almost none had expected a crisis as soon as the mid-1770s. Benjamin Franklin, testifying before the House of Commons on 13 February 1766, during its deliberations on the repeal of the Stamp Act, classically identified what colonial republicans came to argue had been the status quo before 1763: the colonies then, he claimed,