Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (23 page)

On the classic constitutional points at issue, the ‘ostensible causes’ of the Revolution, the colonists themselves proposed a counterfactual. In the 1760s, responses to the Stamp Act assumed that all would be well if the novel legislation were repealed. John Dickinson’s best-selling
Farmer’s Letters
implied the same argument against the Townshend duties of 1767. Governments might adopt wrong measures; ‘But every such measure does not dissolve the obligation between the governors and the governed. The mistakes may be corrected; the passion may subside.’
⁶²
In 1769, Benjamin Franklin wrote:

Congress itself, in its address
To the people of Great-Britain
, dated 5 September 1774, argued that the constitutional relationship prior to the Seven Years’ War was legitimate; it was only at its conclusion that ‘a plan for enslaving your fellow subjects in America was concerted ... Place us in the same situation that we were at the close of the last war, and our former harmony will be restored.’
⁶⁴

Yet this was a counterfactual substantially disproved by events, for the metropolitan government showed a repeated willingness to compromise on the points at issue in the 1760s.
⁶⁵
It can now be shown that British policy towards colonial trade underwent no sea-change from mercantilism to imperialism in the early 1760s, as an older historiography once argued. The Sugar Act of 1764 attempted to raise a revenue in the colonies, at the same time attempting to encourage trade to flow within traditional mercantilist channels. The same was true in 1767 of Chatham’s reduction of the duty on tea re-exported to the American colonies.
⁶⁶
Likewise, inflation in the colonies, the result of colonial issues of paper money, was checked by Westminster’s Currency Act of 1764; after colonial protests, this measure was relaxed in the case of New York by an Act of 1770 and in the case of the other colonies by an Act of 1773: on this basis, it is possible that the issue might have been resolved.
⁶⁷
George Grenville later admitted in a debate in the Commons that he ‘did not foresee’ the degree of opposition to the Stamp Act, and, had he foreseen it, would not have proposed it.
⁶⁸
This was plausible: given that revenue had to be raised by the imperial government in the colonies, a small stamp duty was an ineffective method of raising it. The anticipated revenue from the tax was only £110,000, of which £50,000 would come from the West Indies.
⁶⁹
Without broaching issues of internal taxation, the ministry in London might have raised far larger revenues through the existing customs and excise legislation, vigorously enforced by the use of naval power and adjudicated by an augmented version of the existing vice-admiralty courts. After colonial protests, the Westminster Parliament repealed the Act.

If the Stamp Act was passed with no anticipation of colonial resistance, so too was Townshend’s Revenue Act in 1767: it raised no questions of internal taxation, and seemed to be based on the colonists’ own distinction between legitimate external and illegitimate internal taxation. Not even the colonial agents forecast what was to come, or warned against it.
⁷⁰
Even Benjamin Franklin, in an article in the
London Chronicle
in April 1767, had accepted the constitutional correctness of imperial taxation on external trade, protesting only against ‘internal taxes’.
⁷¹
In turn, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the outcry against the reduction of the duty on tea from one shilling to three pence per pound was manufactured by colonial merchants who stood to lose from the suppression of the lucrative smuggling trade. If the earlier use of the Royal Navy in North American waters to eliminate smuggling might have pre-empted this before it became a political hot potato, it remains true that, in the absence of serious coercion, there was little room for compromise on the American side. Contingency was not dominant in 1776 as it had been in 1688.

Historians who adhered to the traditional scenario of ‘ostensible causes’ have, perhaps, framed too simplistic an alternative to conflict. On 1 May 1769, the Cabinet met to consider the mounting colonial protests against the duties passed by the Commons in June 1767 on the initiative of Charles Townshend, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Now, the Cabinet voted for the repeal of all but one. By five votes to four, the conciliatory First Lord of the Treasury, the Duke of Grafton, was outvoted in his move to abolish the tea duty. ‘,This fateful decision’ it has been claimed, ‘was to prove the point of no return in the sequence of events leading to the American Revolution. Without a tea duty there would have been no Boston Tea Party and no consequent final quarrel between Britain and her colonies.’
⁷²
This confident judgement seems less plausible as colonial causes of rebellion are admitted to the historical record. Counterfactuals can indeed be framed in respect of British policy, yet the more important counterfactuals all concern the patterns of social development and of ideological conflict within the colonies themselves.

These colonial counterfactuals do not chiefly involve the classic constitutional issues, the ‘ostensible causes’ of inevitable revolution. The problem of representation was the most obvious obstacle to a settlement, yet it may be that even this was not the insuperable barrier that it later appeared to have been. Taxation and representation were, of course, linked issues. Yet if questions of revenue seem more open to a negotiated settlement (taxation being a feature of all governments, including republican ones), questions of representation tend to be regarded as more principled, and more irreconcilable. This was not necessarily the case, however, even with the constitutional fiction generally identified as the weakest link in the metropolitan argument. As Thomas Whately argued, ‘All
British
subjects are really in the same [situation]; none are actually, all are virtually represented in Parliament; for every Member of Parliament sits in the House, not as Representative of his own Constituents, but as one of that august Assembly by which all the Commons of
Great Britain
are represented.’
⁷³
In other words, apart from those men sitting in Parliament as members of the House of Lords or House of Commons, all Britons related to their MP not as a delegate but as a representative, a representative unpaid by his constituents and not bound to accept instructions offered by them. The problem with this doctrine of virtual representation was not that it was self-evidently untrue, but that it was a truism, and was therefore introduced into the debate unrehearsed and with no theoretical explication. But it could have been given the sort of theoretical basis which would have contributed to a better understanding both of imperial relations and of the actual working of politics in Britain itself.

It was a truism that a British MP represented the whole polity, not just his constituency; represented all the inhabitants, of both sexes, including minors; represented the eight- or nine-tenths of the populace who were not voters; represented those electors who had voted against him, or had abstained, as well as those who had given him their votes. This was, of course, a necessary fiction of government. But it bore more relation to the daily working of government than did the succeeding myth that a man could be represented only if he himself cast a vote, a theory which, in a system of universal suffrage, by definition subjected to a majoritarian tyranny all non-voters, all voters for defeated candidates, and all voters for MPs on the losing side in parliamentary divisions. In both cases, states were effectively run by small minorities; in the first case this reality was less disguised, and more dignified. Except for the political elite, virtual and actual representation were equally formal concepts. Here too, just as in the replacement of divine-right monarchy by representative democracy, historians are now obliged to dispense with a scenario in which a logic of historical inevitability led men to replace early-modern ‘fictions’ with self-evident modern ‘truths’.
⁷⁴

To be sure, William Pitt in 1766 declared that ‘The idea of a virtual representation of America in this House, is the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of a man; it does not deserve a serious refutation.’
⁷⁵
This was a political gambit, however, for Pitt himself represented only a variety of tiny constituencies including, as his first, the depopulated borough of Old Sarum, which boasted (on a good day) an electorate of about seven. From 1757 to 1766 he sat in the Commons as one of the two Members for Bath: it fielded an electorate of about thirty. Even in that seat, Pitt never had to face a poll.
⁷⁶
Despite his rhetoric, it is not clear just whom William Pitt represented, either in the Commons or when elevated to the Lords as 1st Earl of Chatham. American adulation of him as a democrat overlooked the fact that he fought only one contested election in his entire parliamentary career. Even that was in the tiny Cinque Port of Seaford.

However contemptuous some orators might be of the concept of virtual representation, their desire to create an American nation reintroduced it. Thomas Paine hailed the cause of independence: “Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time by the proceedings now.‘
⁷⁷
Although the colonists rejected ‘virtual’ representation, their ‘actual’ representation in the Westminster Parliament was generally sought neither by themselves nor by their British supporters: since the relations of colonies and metropolis were debated in terms of mutual self-interest, this would only have imported the conflict into the House of Commons, not resolved it in a new context of Anglo-Saxon solidarity. The only viable alternative was to work with and through the growing power of the colonial assemblies. Even Joseph Galloway, later remembered as a resolute loyalist, was explicit at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774 that Acts of the Westminster Parliament did not bind the colonies;
⁷⁸
and, if a man so well disposed could envisage a redefinition of imperial relations only along federal lines, it is unlikely that there would have been substantial backing in the colonies for a solution which failed to include the principle of equivalence between the Westminster and colonial assemblies.

The rise of these assemblies as against the power of the governors was, indeed, a marked feature of the half-century to 1776. Yet, although these assemblies showed a clear desire to assert growing colonial wealth and population, they had shown few overt signs of extrapolating these trends into a bid for separation from the mother country. Even in 1774-6, it was not the assemblies which articulated the claim of independence, but groups of zealots bypassing each assembly to set up a self-authorising representative body. Well-informed and practical individuals like Galloway continued until a late date to act on the belief that a negotiated compromise was still possible. Galloway proposed to the Continental Congress on 28 September 1774 a plan for reconciliation based on the establishment of an American legislative council, under a president-general appointed by the crown, its members chosen by the colonial assemblies.
⁷⁹
Congress voted on that day by six colonies to five to lay the plan on the table for subsequent consideration, so effectively killing it;
⁸⁰
but, had the vote gone the other way, a positive response from London might have cleared the way to negotiated settlement. For there, the ministry remained open to the idea.

In January 1775, the Cabinet agreed on North’s so-called ‘olive branch’: backed up by coercive measures to halt the trade of those colonies perceived as being uncooperative, the proposal was for Parliament to forbear to exercise its right of taxing a colony if that colony, through its normal and legal channels, would contribute its proportion to the common defence and pay the expenses of its civil government and administration of justice.
⁸¹
It was a proposal which inevitably ignored the Continental Congress: for Parliament to have addressed it would have been to recognise its legitimacy, which was the point at issue. At the same time, it expressed the reasonable hope that, by dealing with each colony separately, their common front might have been broken. It was the Second Continental Congress which rejected North’s proposal as inadequate: it did not meet the colonies’ demand for recognition of a right of granting whatever they thought fit, at their sole discretion, and did not address Parliament’s claim of a right to legislate for the colonies in other matters, most recently in the Coercive Acts and most generally in the right to alter colonial charters.
⁸²
But, had Galloway’s proposal been adopted, a compromise might still have been reached.

In its absence, the most dramatic and decisive solution to the problem was that proposed by the Dean of Gloucester, Josiah Tucker. He saw clearly that, by this stage, the claims of the two parties had been defined in terms which precluded compromise. Britain’s interests, however, lay in trade with her colonies, not political control over them. Tucker’s solution was ‘to separate entirely from the
North
-
American
Colonies, by declaring them to be a free and independent People’.
⁸³
Such a pre-emptive act would have at once deprived the republican movement of its raison
d‘être.
If adopted at any time before the Declaration of Independence stigmatised George III personally, it would have caught the colonists at the moment of claiming equality with the Westminster Parliament by taking up their personal loyalty to the crown: independence would have removed most incentives to distance themselves from this royalism. Americans would have been locked into the position of subjects of George III, though a George understood as a very constitutional monarch.