Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (22 page)

Given the absence (as historians now acknowledge) of a new, liberty-threatening master-plan for the empire in the minds of British politicians in 1763, especially George Grenville, it can seem even more plausible that ‘A little more knowledge, a little more tact, a little more political sensitivity, and it all might have turned out differently.’ But, if even so instinctively pro-American an observer as Thomas Pownall was not at odds with the policies adopted, there is a ‘prima facie case that British colonial policy in this period was neither fortuitous nor susceptible of change.... The impulse that swept the British Empire toward civil war was powerful, and did not admit of any real choice.’
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Before accepting so fatalist a diagnosis, however, we need to examine those points at which, as some have argued then or later, a different line of policy could have been adopted which would have retained the colonies within the empire (however that empire might have been redefined). One such set of policy options concerns the strategic setting of the thirteen colonies. Given the appeal by many Americans in the 1760s and 1770s to the status quo which, they claimed, prevailed before the Peace of Paris in 1763, the first such change of direction has been located in the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63, an episode decisive, in some accounts, in re-establishing metropolitan control, abrogating customary relationships and asserting novel powers including a right of taxation. Many scholars, but especially Americans, once discerned a new attitude towards empire in these years as Britain adapted to the responsibilities and opportunities created by the defeat of France in North America.
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Even if this were the case, British military successes in the second half of that war were by no means assured, as a series of reverses in its first half, including the loss of Minorca, emphasised to contemporaries. Wolfe’s victory at Quebec was a classic military contingency, and it could not be foreseen that Canada, once conquered, would be retained. The key French Canadian fortress of Louisbourg, captured by a colonial expedition in the previous war, had been returned at its end in 1748. A debate raged between 1759 and 1761 over whether Canada or more immediately valuable conquests in the French West Indies should be retained at the peace, if both could not be kept;
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the eventual choice of the former might easily have gone the other way. Few statesmen at the time entertained the visionary belief in an empire of vast geographical extent in North America or saw its potential for commerce. Even William Pitt, speaking against the Treaty of Paris and in favour of the retention of Guadeloupe, argued that ‘The state of the existing trade in the conquests in North America, is extremely low; the speculations of their future are precarious, and the prospect, at the very best, very remote.’
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Canada might not have been won; when won, it might not have been kept. True, in the debate over its retention, William Burke famously predicted that the removal of the French threat would remove also a powerful inducement which kept the other British colonies in subjection to the metropolis: Guadeloupe should be retained, Canada returned to France. The prospect of a colonial bid for independence was already entertained as a hypothesis : ‘If, Sir, the People of our Colonies find no Check from
Canada
, they will extend themselves, almost, without bounds into the Inland Parts ... by eagerly grasping at extensive Territory, we may run the risque, and that perhaps in no very distant Period, of losing what we now possess.... A Neighbour that keeps us in some Awe, is not always the worst of Neighbours.’
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But this was hardly a disinterested argument, for William Burke had obtained the posts of secretary and register of Guadeloupe when that island was conquered in 1759, and was to lose them again when it, rather than Canada, was returned at the peace in 1763. The possible future loss of the mainland colonies of British settlement was evidently a remote possibility to most observers. Despite warnings of the future independence of North America, what weighed more with British statesmen was the need to defend the colonies as a whole against the French threat. Canada was retained in order to make British possession of its more southerly colonies secure. That such a move would provide a necessary condition of their independence was, as yet, a counterfactual to which few people gave weight.

In 1760, Benjamin Franklin argued passionately in reply to William Burke’s pamphlet that Canada should be retained at the peace, and that this posed no threat to Britain’s hold over its other North American colonies. Writing anonymously, and adopting the character of an Englishman, Franklin argued: ‘A people spread thro’ the whole tract of country on this side of the Mississippi, and secured by Canada in our hands, would probably for some centuries find employment in agriculture, and thereby free us at home effectually from our fears of American manufactures.’ Indeed, they would be tied by dependence on British manufactures. Franklin predicted that rapid population increase in America

Even the fourteen North American colonial governments already in existence found it impossible to combine:

If the colonies could not unite against the French and Indians, ‘who were perpetually harassing their settlements, burning their villages, and murdering their people; can it reasonably be supposed there is any danger of their uniting against their own nation, which protects and encourages them, with which they have so many connections and ties of blood, interest and affection, and which ‘tis well known they all love much more than they love one another?’ Such a union, predicted Franklin, was ‘impossible’ (though he at once added a rider: ‘without the most grievous tyranny and oppression’).
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A second consequence of the Seven Years’ War stemmed from the manner in which it was terminated, for the decision of a restructured British ministry to end the conflict in circumstances interpreted by Frederick of Prussia as abandonment of him was crucial. As a result of this decision, Britain went into the American war in 1776 without a major ally on the European continent. Britain, undistracted, might have been able to contain or suppress a rebellion in her American colonies, but in the 1780s it was drawn into a major war against both the Bourbon powers, France and Spain, and the League of Armed Neutrals. Continental alliances had been essential to sustaining British naval supremacy, argued one historian: ‘Neither administrative weakness, nor military and naval ineptitude was responsible for the humiliating disaster’ of Yorktown. ‘The dominating factor was political isolation.’
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A continental alliance might have made a difference in the years 1763-76. But the absence in this period of a French expansionary threat on the European continent meant that no other major continental power had an interest in fighting Britain’s continental battles for it.
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In this perspective, its failing hold on its American colonies was largely the consequence of its own over-stretched military resources. But this was not widely foreseen, any more than the consequences of the retention of Canada were foreseen.

Strategic speculation on the long-term future of transatlantic relations normally focused on another theme. Some commentators speculated that the changing balance of population between Britain and America would eventually bring about a redefinition of imperial relationships. By 1776, this could be used as a decisive argument for the inevitability of independence by a friend of America like Richard Price:

Yet, even among those who so argued (and such arguments can be traced back many decades), none foresaw the immense cataclysm of the 1770s. Even Price himself had not done so, writing to Benjamin Franklin on colonial demographic data in 1769. In the version of his letter intended as a paper to the Royal Society, Price added a sentence on the colonists, ‘Formerly an increasing number of FRIENDS, but now likely to be converted, by an unjust and fatal policy, into an increasing number of ENEMIES.’
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But, even here, it was British policy that Price sought to blame, not some inexorable logic of demography.

Price’s correspondence before the outbreak of the Revolution shows no anticipation of that momentous event, an apparent blindness that he shared with almost all of his contemporaries. The constitutional conflicts of the 1760s had, after all, been settled by negotiation; the explosion of the mid-1770s caught by surprise even colonists soon to be in the forefront of the movement for independence. The Dissenter Price’s interest in American affairs was first attracted when the colonists were seen to be engaged in a battle like his own against those ‘enemies to truth and liberty’, bishops: ‘If they once get footing there, it is highly probable that in time they will acquire a power (under the protection and with the aid of their friends here) that will extend itself beyond Spirituals, and be inconsistent with the equal and common liberty of other religious persuasions.’
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These atavistic English Dissenting phobias, not the imminent independence of America or its constitutional claims, were Price’s starting point.

With the advantage of hindsight, of course, men were able to argue differently: by 1773, Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant Governor of the colony of Massachusetts, locked in controversy with his colony’s assembly, looked back on the retention of Canada as the great mistake. Without it, ‘none of the spirit of opposition to the Mother Country would have yet appeared & I think the effects of it [the acquisition of Canada] worse than all we had to fear from the French or Indians’.
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In this sense, the acquisition of Canada is now acknowledged as ‘a major cause’ of the American Revolution.
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But it was a necessary, not a sufficient, cause: it established the context in which a rebellion might occur, but it did not determine that such a rebellion would occur. The same causes (the removal of a neighbouring threat) obtained equally within Canada, but it was not Canada in the 1770s which sought to break its political ties with the metropolis.

A second set of policy options concerned developments within the colonies. One reason for thinking an American revolution unlikely was, as Franklin suggested, the marked lack of enthusiasm for plans for colonial union in earlier decades. The scheme discussed at a conference at Albany, New York, in 1754, would have vested very substantial powers, including that of taxation, in a Grand Council nominated by the lower houses of colonial assemblies; but so dominant did such a unified government seem that the provincial assemblies themselves unanimously rejected the scheme.
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When a more modest plan of inter-colonial cooperation in military and Indian affairs was drawn up by Lord Halifax at the Board of Trade in 1754, Charles Townshend dismissed it: ‘It is ... impossible to imagine that so many different representatives of so many different provinces, divided in interest and alienated by jealousy and inveterate prejudice, should ever be able to resolve upon a plan of mutual security and reciprocal expense.’ Nor would the colonial assemblies, thought Townshend, pass the Act of Supply necessary to fund a union: it would run counter to their ‘settled design of drawing to themselves the ancient and established prerogatives wisely preserved in the Crown’ by steadily gaining control of each colony’s finances.
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Yet even this ‘quest for power’ on the part of colonial assemblies, if real, did not create an assumption that independence was inevitable. Even the man regarded as the greatest catalyst of the Revolution did not claim it to be the outcome of a trend which the colonists had long understood. In
Common Sense
, published in Philadelphia in 1776, Tom Paine wrote of the colonists’ policies of 1775: ’Whatever was advanced by the advocates on either side of the question then, terminated in one and the same point, viz. a union with Great Britain; the only difference between the parties, was the method of effecting it; the one proposing force, the other friendship ...’.
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In the words of Jack Greene, the ‘latent distrust’ that lay behind transatlantic relations could not ‘become an active cause of disruption between Britain and the colonies so long as the delicate and uneasy accommodation that had been worked out under Walpole continued to obtain. That it would not obtain was by no means predictable.’
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Given the commitment of colonists to the constitutional practices they claimed as a shared inheritance, it is understandable that so many at the time regarded transatlantic controversies as open to negotiated settlement. However, Paine’s claim was contradicted by much evidence of which, as a recent migrant, he was probably unaware. In the early 1760s, long before he set foot in America, the political rhetoric of many colonists had moved in a relatively short period from eulogies of the liberties they enjoyed, as Englishmen within the empire, to denunciations of the corruption and tyranny into which English society, in their perception, had fallen. ‘It is when viewed amidst this widespread and enthusiastic acclamation for the English constitution’, as Gordon Wood has observed, ‘that the American Revolution takes on its tone of irony and incomprehensibility - a tone not lost to the Revolutionaries themselves.’ By a rhetoric which sought to take its stand solely on the English constitution, ‘the Americans could easily conceive of themselves as simply preserving what Englishmen had valued from time immemorial.... Yet this continual talk of desiring nothing new and wishing only to return to the old system and the essentials of the English constitution was only a superficial gloss.’
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