Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (24 page)

Equally, the absence of a war to win independence would have prevented the emergence of the single main cause of colonial unity. Even the tenuously confederal system embodied in the Articles of Confederation was agreed to only in response to dire military necessities. Without war, the jealousies, rivalries and diversities of the North American colonies would probably have produced only a much weaker association, if any. The new states, lacking a natural focus of unity, would have been likely therefore to preserve their allegiance to the monarch as a valuable guarantor of the legitimacy of their civil governments and an emblem of their cultural equality with the old world. For a marked feature of political debate in the decades before 1776, even in the last decade before the Revolution, was the absence of a key component which, in retrospect, appears natural and obvious: republicanism.

Colonial Americans had seldom, before the publication of Paine’s
Common Sense
in 1776, denounced monarchy as such and still less often had they speculated on alternative, republican, models for colonial governance or society.
⁸⁴
Common
Sense itself contained no extended discussion of republicanism: it was a negative critique of existing constitutional arrangements, not a blueprint for new ones in the future. Few such blueprints were available to colonists in 1776. Equally, although democracy became a shibboleth of the new republic, it was not a cause of the Revolution. Since these two ‘ostensible causes’ tell us little about why the Revolution occurred, they cannot be invoked as explanations of why it was inevitable. Without the breakdown of 1776, transatlantic relations would not have run on in unchanging tranquillity: the powerful ideological pressures mounting in the colonies would have seen to that. But it remains true that the traditional ‘ostensible causes’ did not make inevitable the exact form that the Revolution took.

Early-modern rebellions were as often provoked by lax government, permitting the growth of practices and expectations of local self-rule, as by active tyranny. A more efficient exertion of Britain’s legal sovereignty over the colonies from an earlier date was another route which might have offered prospects of retaining executive control, and it is necessary to explore the reasons why this was so difficult. For there is an immense contrast between the metropolitan responses to the threatened rebellion in Ireland in 1797-8 (which largely aborted a carefully prepared rising) or the Indian Mutiny in 1857 (similarly repressed by military force) and the relative restraint employed by Englishmen towards fellow Englishmen in America.

Even before the fighting, Whitehall officials might systematically have resisted the many small steps by which colonial legislatures built up their power. The metropolis might have stipulated that colonial grants of revenue to colonial budgets be for long periods, or indefinite; that the salaries of the governor and other officials be shielded from local political pressures; that the colonial treasurers be royal appointments; that the governors’ powers of local patronage be built up, and exercised by the governor, not the ministry in London. Such steps might plausibly have been taken under the energetic and reformist Earl of Halifax, President of the Board of Trade from 1748 to 1761, had he received the necessary backing from his ministerial colleagues. One reason why he did not, of course, was that ministers were wholly preoccupied with the need to secure the full cooperation of the colonies in the war with France.
⁸⁵
Yet there were other reasons too, especially ministers’ unwillingness to revert to the administrative ethic associated with the later Stuart monarchy.

The rare exceptions to this administrative quiescence help to illustrate the rule. In Massachusetts, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson sought to force the issue in January 1773 by instituting an exchange with the assembly on the questions of constitutional principle involved. This initiative had the opposite effect to that which Hutchinson wished, however, for the assembly, especially the House of Representatives, took the opportunity to turn their
de facto
resistance to certain metropolitan measures into a defiant
de jure
rejection of metropolitan authority. The Secretary for the Colonies was appalled: ‘The governor had upset Dartmouth’s hopes that the controversy might subside and even perhaps disappear in time if only the parties would avoid raising the critical issues that separated them. To Dartmouth, Hutchinson had reopened a wound that might have healed if only it had been neglected or ignored.’
⁸⁶
Although this possibility seems implausible in the light of later events, it is open to argument that it represented one possible avenue of development.

Politics destabilised policy in London, too: throughout the 1760s, indeed up to the end of 1774, British policy towards the colonies was rendered indecisive and vacillating by the instability and internal conflicts of ministries. Had George III been the tyrant that Americans later painted him, this would not have been the case. As it was, with many possible policies being advocated by different groups in the Lords and Commons, the natural response of many politicians was to frame a compromise or leave policy ambiguous, firm in principle, indecisive in practice. True, in a world of greater consistency of conduct and clarity of intentions, American resistance might have come earlier. On the other hand, it might not have come at all.

In part, the ineffectual nature of British policy reflected early Hanoverian phobias about arbitrary power, represented by the hypostatised threat of a Stuart restoration. This meant that successive Whig ministries under the first three Georges were often inhibited about using the power of the executive against Whig opposition. Roman Catholics, Jacobites, Nonjurors and their fellow travellers had often been subjected to persecution, sometimes sanguinary, and the Tory and Jacobite press had suffered legal harassment and judicial suppression. But successive ministries, by contrast, treated Whig and Dissenting opponents gingerly, fearful of the charges of ‘Popery and arbitrary power’ that they could level against the authorities. So, in the colonies from the early 1760s, imperial officials did almost nothing to prevent a quasi-treasonable opposition from organising itself. Colonial governors largely failed to muzzle seditious newspapers and pamphlets, take printers and authors into custody, prosecute inciters of disaffection or prevent the growth of organisations like the Stamp Act Congress which might be the bases for rebellion. Countermeasures like these had often been used in England under the first two Georges to smash the Jacobite underground, and had been used with success. A self-consciously libertarian regime in England had then ruthlessly defended itself against the threat of populist subversion by whatever means were necessary to achieve its ends. With the defeat of the Stuart menace in the 1740s, however, the Hanoverian regime dropped its guard. It is worth considering what the outcome would have been in colonial America had the vigilance of the imperial authorities been maintained at its former level, and redirected against the activities of Dissenters and Whigs.

This was, of course, not done. The British army in America, which, after some delay, was adopted as a symbol by agitators to play on colonial memories of late-Stuart rule, was - even in the occupation of Boston in 1768-70 - almost never used in the role of controlling civil disobedience: officers were still inhibited by the legal dangers which surrounded such interventions in England.
⁸⁷
Even when the ministry decided in the summer of 1768 to send British army units to Boston, the troops found on their arrival that the civilian authorities who alone could requisition the assistance of troops (the Massachusetts Council and justices of the peace) were opposed to their very presence. Up to the outbreak of the Revolution, there was no such legal requisition. British troops in Boston were subject to continual harassment in local courts staffed by hostile colonists:
⁸⁸
this had not been foreseen, and Parliament had taken no steps to change the statutory context within which military power was exercised in America. Had it done so, and from an early date, a preventive military occupation of colonial capitals might have been feasible. In February 1769 Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State for the Colonies, indeed urged on the Cabinet and the King firmer measures against Massachusetts Bay, including vesting nominations to the colony’s Council in the crown, and envisaged a forfeiture of Massachusetts’ charter. George III accepted that such measures might be a last resort, ‘but till then ought to be avoided as the altering of Charters is at all times an odious measure’. That, of course, had been James II’s fatal policy. Nor was there agreement in the House of Lords on altering the charter, as Governor Bernard of Massachusetts had requested.
⁸⁹
Although it was rumoured that a Bill for charter reform was imminent in 1770-1, at the outset of North’s ministry, no such Bill was introduced into Parliament.
⁹⁰

The novel presence of a ‘standing army’ in America after the peace of 1763 was later elevated into a major grievance; it is not obvious that it need have been. Far from being part of a metropolitan plot to extinguish American liberties, the stationing of regular troops in America was a natural response to the strategic problems created by the conquest of vast new territories during the Seven Years’ War, the need to hold down conquered populations and make real the claim to sovereignty. The distribution of British troops reflected this: of fifteen battalions deployed, it was intended to station three in Nova Scotia, four in Canada and four in Florida. Only four remained for Britain’s older possessions, and many even of these troops would be assigned to defend the frontier.
⁹¹
At the time, it was natural that few colonists protested. ‘The decision to maintain a British army in postwar America was not, as such, a matter of controversy. The size and deployment of the force were largely determined by the essential functions it would be called upon to perform.’
⁹²

Occasional military commentators in earlier decades had suggested that the stationing of British troops would help to ensure the loyalty of Americans, but the evidence does not suggest that the Grenville ministry considered the prospect of resistance to their policy of raising a colonial revenue or the prospect of coercing the colonies. George Grenville’s lack of foresight was shared by many colonists, however, including Benjamin Franklin. Even when metropolitan taxation began to be challenged in the colonies, the target of colonists was the principle of taxation as such, not the army as such.
⁹³
Only later, in a more heightened emotional atmosphere, were the thinly scattered detachments of redcoats built up into a symbol of tyranny. There was nothing inevitable about this invention of a demonology, however, and an alternative scenario is plausible in which no such heightened imagery was employed.

In most areas of Britain’s North American possessions, the minimal presence of the army remained non-controversial. The troops sent to America brought with them the assumptions about their role in society which had, by then, become ingrained in the army’s mentality in England: they attempted to stay out of politics. The army did not interfere in colonial elections, and did not coerce colonial assemblies. Only with great reluctance did it take on a police role, preserving civil order. The flashpoints, the moments of friction with the civilian population, were few. It is reasonable to ask whether this state of affairs might have continued. Certainly, it made coercion extremely difficult. In the autumn of 1774, the commander-in-chief in North America, General Gage, warned correctly that the situation in New England already amounted to rebellion, that imperial authority could be reasserted only by military force, that his own resources of 3,000 troops were inadequate, and that a force of 20,000 was needed to re-establish control. This advice, unwelcome in London, was not acted on.
⁹⁴
But what course might the conflict have taken if large numbers of troops had been committed to New England at an early stage?

Even after the outbreak of fighting, many different outcomes remained possible. The war was long and indecisive partly because of its character as a civil war, driven by powerful social constituencies unwilling to accept defeat, and partly because the conflict revealed the existence of little outstanding military talent on either side. Neither the British nor the republican colonists produced a single dominant general: no Marlborough, no Wellington fought decisive campaigns, and the war dragged on, ebbing first one way, then the other. Thomas Gage offered his home government good advice, but was unable to snuff out the revolution in Massachusetts. The three major-generals sent to reinforce him (John Burgoyne, Henry Clinton, William Howe) did little better. On the other hand, neither the colonial rebels nor the colonial loyalists produced any military geniuses. The characteristics revealed in battle were generally ones of stubborn determination and dogged endurance rather than swift and triumphant conquest. But from the British point of view the war was worth fighting even if the possibility of a sweeping reconquest of the colonies was remote: military force had good prospects of compelling a negotiated peace in which the constitutional points at issue would have been compromised, and some form of political tie retained. The forces of both sides recorded victories during the land campaigns in North America; it is easy to imagine scenarios in which even slightly more successful British commanders could have made an important difference.
⁹⁵

As it turned out, British military action was fatally divided between the alternative goals of a negotiated settlement based on the conciliation of fellow countrymen, and the decisive military defeat of an enemy at any cost to their lives and property.
⁹⁶
It was similarly divided between a strategy of maintaining major bases on the American seaboard, seeking thereby to control American trade, and a strategy of attempting to conquer large tracts of territory inland, often in liaison with loyalist forces.
⁹⁷
The failure of the British authorities to exploit this social constituency was an important feature of the conflict. As a result of lack of preparedness in previous decades, during the Revolution ‘the potentially enormous military strength of Loyalism remained inert, almost untapped as a means to put down rebellion’.
⁹⁸
In return, loyalists were the best-informed and most unsparing critics of British military commanders. Joseph Galloway posed the question: