The Colonists' American Revolution

Preserving English Liberty, 1607-1783

Guy Chet

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119591986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A Dissenting Companion to the U.S. History Textbook

Most U.S. History textbooks track the origins and evolution of American identity. They therefore present the American Revolution as the product of a gradual cultural change in English colonists. Over time, this process of Americanization differentiated and alienated the settlers from their compatriots and their government in Britain. This widely-taught narrative encourages students to view American independence as a reflection of emerging American nationhood. The Colonists' American Revolution introduces readers to a competing narrative which presents the Revolution as a product of the colonists' English identity and of English politics. This volume helps students recognize that the traditional narrative of the Revolution is an argument, not a just-the-facts account of this period in U.S. history.

Written to make history interesting and relevant to students, this textbook provides a dissenting interpretation of America's founding—the Revolution was not the result of an incremental process of Americanization, but rather an immediate reaction to sudden policy changes in London. It exposes students to dueling historical narratives of the American Revolution, encouraging them to debate and evaluate both narratives on the strength of evidence. This stimulating volume:

• Offers an account of the Revolution's chronology, causes, ends, and accomplishments not commonly addressed in traditional textbooks
• Challenges the conventional narrative of Americanization with one of Anglicization
• Presents the Atlantic as a bridge, rather than a barrier, between England and its colonies
• Discusses the American Revolution as one in a series of British rebellions
• Uses a dual-perspective approach to spark discussions on what it means to study history

Exposing students to two different ways of studying history, The Colonists' American Revolution: Preserving English Liberty, 1607-1783 is a thought-provoking resource for undergraduate and graduate students of early-American history, as well as historians and interested general readers.

1
English Origins

To understand early‐modern England and its colonies one must imagine a society without police. This is no easy task for modern readers, given the host of governmental enforcement agencies that currently hold jurisdiction over virtually every aspect of civic, economic, and private life. The absence of police shaped the daily lives of individuals in local communities, restricted the range of policy options available to rulers and legislators from the lowest to the highest levels of government, and informed the constitutional beliefs of both rulers and constituents. Indeed, this administrative reality in both England and America – the limited powers of coercion available to governments – was a running theme in the story of the American colonies and a dominant factor in the coming of the American Revolution. The overriding principle of Anglo‐American society was self‐government, and English communities saw the absence of coercive law‐enforcement by an army or a police force as the manifestation of a free society, one in which constituents have a role in enacting the laws that govern them.

It is no surprise that this feature of American life was not uniquely American, but conventionally English. The customs, values, and beliefs of English settlers in America were shaped over centuries of English history. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a particularly formative era in this respect, seeing the planting of England's first colonial enterprises in the New World, as well as the formation of key political habits and constitutional beliefs that traveled to America with the settlers.

The English Reformation

The Protestant Reformation, a formative process in the history of early‐modern Europe and of New World colonization, had far‐ranging and long‐lasting ripple effects in England and its overseas possessions. In 1517, Martin Luther, a German priest and theologian, challenged the pope's spiritual authority in the Catholic Church. His protest against corruption in the Church and demand for reform were a launching point for the Protestant Reformation. The differences between Catholicism and the various brands of Protestantism are numerous and subtle, but many of them emanate from a basic disagreement over the spiritual authority of the clergy, and of the pope in particular. Catholics see the pope as Christ's vicar, or substitute. As such, he possesses the spiritual powers that Jesus wields, including the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Protestants, on the other hand, see the pope as a man like any other. A related difference between Catholics and Protestants has to do with the means of salvation. In Catholicism, the Church has an essential role in individuals' salvation. Catholics cannot be absolved of the spiritual guilt accrued from sin without priestly intervention; that is, without receiving the sacraments – baptism, confirmation, mass, confession, last rites, and either marriage (for lay people) or ordination (for priests). Most Protestant Churches assert that only contrition can undo spiritual guilt. And no one – not even one's minister – has the spiritual power to usher one into the kingdom of heaven. Some Protestants go further still, holding that not even contrition can undo spiritual guilt. They see salvation as a divine gift that cannot be earned or initiated by humans through either contrition or good deeds.

One of the important features of the early Protestant Churches was that they were national, whereas the Catholic Church transcended national boundaries. This meant that a Protestant head of state was also the head of the reformed Church in that state. As important, it meant that Church taxes, gifts, and other revenues flowed from the king's subjects, through their local churches, to the king's treasury, rather than to the pope's coffers in Rome. Indeed, monarchs who converted to Protestantism habitually took possession of all of properties previously held by the Catholic Church within their territories – churches, monasteries, their treasuries, their lands, and the revenues produced from these properties. Naturally, the Catholic Church did not sit idly while Protestant kings and princes picked its pocket. Thus, the Reformation sparked a series of violent clashes in central and western Europe, referred to collectively as the Wars of Religion.

These developments reached England in 1534, when Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy. This law ended the pope's supremacy over the king within the English Church, declaring King Henry VIII to be the supreme head of the Church in England. England had had an uncomfortable relationship with the Catholic Church for centuries prior to the squabbles between Henry and the pope over the king's desire to rid himself of his wife. This was not unique – European monarchs did not appreciate the pope enriching himself off of their subjects and meddling in their affairs of state; namely, deciding who would receive powerful positions within a given state's ecclesiastical and civil administration. The Middle Ages were therefore rife with “investiture contests” – conflicts between monarchs and popes over who held ultimate authority over Church appointments within those monarchs' countries. In England, however, dissident voices enjoyed great freedom to criticize and challenge the Catholic Church. (Perhaps this was due to the sense of security and autonomy provided by the English Channel, or by England's great distance from Rome.) For example, despite vehement opposition from the Catholic Church, one of the earliest translations of the Bible from Latin into a vernacular language (the Wycliffe Bible) was produced in England in the 1380s.

When Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon failed to produce male children, Henry sought an annulment of his marriage. When the pope (with strong guidance from Charles V, the head of the Holy Roman Empire) denied this request, the English court started tinkering with the idea of creating a national Church, in which Henry would be the spiritual leader. Converting to Protestantism would liberate him from tensions with the Holy See (the pope) over important appointments in the English Church, and it would allow him to control his own marital affairs. As important, it would allow Henry to take possession of all of the English property owned by the Catholic Church, which was the second largest landholder in England at the time, after Henry himself.

Parliament began debating this question in 1529, gradually granting greater powers over the English clergy to the king. Clergymen who refused to serve the king, were dismissed and either jailed or exiled. By that point, all money contributions from England to the Catholic Church (in the forms of tithes, gifts, bequests, bribes, and the like) had dwindled to a trickle. In 1533, with his first marriage annulled, Henry married Ann Boleyn, who was already pregnant with his second daughter, Elizabeth. The English Reformation was completed in 1534, with the Act of Supremacy, by which the English Church effectively separated itself from the Catholic Church and transformed England into a Protestant kingdom.

Henry was succeeded by Edward VI, his third child, born by his third wife, Jane Seymour. (English law did not bar females from the line of royal succession, but gave primacy to male children over their elder sisters.) During Edward's short reign (1547–1553), he and his advisers initiated reforms to turn the Church of England into a more thoroughly Protestant church, shaped by Calvinist theology. Edward died young, however, and was succeeded by his eldest sister Mary Tudor, Henry's first child (by Catherine of Aragon). Devoutly Catholic, Mary declared England to be a Catholic kingdom once again, and assertively went about converting churches back to Catholic practices – images and altars were returned, the Book of Common Prayer was removed, clerical celibacy was reimposed, and Eucharistic practices reaffirmed. Yet Catholic lands appropriated from the Church by Henry were not returned. Mary's restoration of Catholicism and her forceful campaign against Protestant leaders (which earned her the moniker “Bloody Mary”) was short lived, ending with her death at the age of 42 in 1558.

She was succeeded by her younger half‐sister Elizabeth I (1558–1603), widely considered to be the greatest monarch in English history. She repealed Mary's Catholic legislation and reinstated Henry's reforms, but did not revive Edward's more Puritan brand of Protestantism. Her reversal of Mary's policies led the pope to excommunicate her, putting a price on her head by inviting any interested party to overthrow or assassinate the queen with spiritual impunity. Despite this, Elizabeth managed to avoid assassination thanks to her considerable political skills, as well as a pervasive network of informants, spies, and secret agents. The Catholic plots on her life finally ended in 1587, when she executed her cousin, Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots), who had found refuge in England following a successful uprising against her in her native Scotland. Elizabeth went on to subdue Catholics and fervent Protestants, both of whom destabilized her regime in their attempts to force her hand on religious matters and foreign policy.

Protestant agitators in England wanted a closer alliance with Protestant causes on the Continent, whereas Catholics supported a foreign policy that conformed to the interests of Spain and France, the major Catholic powers in Europe. But although Elizabeth aligned herself with rivals of France and Spain, she never went as far as her more radical Protestant constituents advocated with regards to both religious reforms at home and an anti‐Spanish policy abroad.

New World Exploration, Settlement, and Trade

While Elizabeth remained cautious in her confrontations with Spain in Europe, this rivalry spurred her to support more aggressive anti‐Spanish schemes in the Atlantic and the New World. Spain was the preeminent European power at the time thanks to the immense riches discovered in Central and South America. France and England began dabbling in New World exploration in the hope that they could hit pay dirt as the Spanish had. From the early stages of English exploration and colonization in the New World, English promoters looked longingly at the Caribbean, universally seen as the richest part of the Americas. Even before sugar established itself as the lucrative staple crop of the region, the association between hot climates and riches was firm in the minds of English leaders. They expected heat to produce not only rich crops, but also minerals, which were thought to be produced in the earth and drawn to the surface through the sun's magnetic power. Colonial promoters like Sir Walter Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt knew about the fabulous wealth of the Aztecs and Incas, which had rewarded Spain's early colonizing efforts, and they dreamed of an empire in the Caribbean that would allow England to rival the power of Spain.

But even though the English very much wanted a Caribbean empire to resist Spain's ascendance in Europe and the Catholic Church's Counter‐Reformation, their environmental beliefs caused them to fear the effects of life in such a hot climate. They doubted whether English civilization could survive in such an alien environment. The history of English settlement there, under Elizabeth's successors, seemed to bear out both hopes and fears. Mineral wealth never materialized in the English West Indies, but once sugar plantations were established in Barbados in the 1640s, England's island colonies became far richer than any in mainland North America. However, the society these planters developed seemed outlandish by English standards. Ominous reports soon circulated in England about the sky‐high death toll in the West Indies (due to tropical diseases), and about a society of great intemperance, violence, indulgence, and debauchery. Slavery quickly became the dominant feature of these colonies' labor system, and the slave population vastly outnumbered the free. Initial impressions suggested, therefore, that English society, culture, values, and religion did not transplant well to the Caribbean.

The Caribbean sugar islands became the economic center of England's emerging Atlantic economy. These plantations were fueled by continuous imports of slaves from Africa and North America (since workers perished quickly and routinely in these tropical environments) and by a steady supply of food and construction materials from North America and Europe (since every inch of arable land on the islands was used to produce sugar, rather than other necessities of life). Indeed, the success and growth of England's rice economies in the American South and its wheat economies in the northern colonies correlated with the success and growth of England's Caribbean colonies. Merchants who brought slaves, foodstuffs, and supplies to the West Indies sailed away with sugar, rum, and molasses (a dark brown syrup made from sugar cane), all of which were sold in West Africa (along with European firearms) in return for more slaves. These triangular trade routes (connecting England, the Caribbean, North America, and West Africa) illustrate the role of the American mainland colonies in the operation of England's Atlantic economy. In the seventeenth and early‐eighteenth centuries, these mainland colonies were a backcountry support system for the Caribbean centerpiece of the English empire. The North American colonies were on the edge of European civilization, out of sight and mostly out of mind, as long as those sugar economies were being fed and supplied.

Figure 1.1 The triangular trade routes.

© Guy Chet.

North America's peripheral role in the empire explains not only societal and demographic patterns of colonization there, but also the imperial government's habit of “salutary neglect” – the light imperial footprint in the mainland colonies, which allowed institutions of colonial self‐government to take root there and gain cultural legitimacy and political dominance.

The first colony to be established successfully and permanently was Virginia (1607), followed by Plymouth and New Hampshire in the 1620s, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware in the 1630s, Carolina, New Jersey, and New York in the 1660s, Pennsylvania (1681), and Georgia (1732). The method by which English colonies were founded and settled in the New World had originated in Ireland, in the sixteenth century. An individual investor or a company o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Companion Website
• Introduction
• 1 English Origins
• 2 American Colonization
• 3 African Slavery, White Supremacy, and Republicanism
• 4 The Glorious Revolutions in England and America, 1688–1689
• 5 The Imperial Wars
• 6 From Deference to Suspicion
• 7 The Road to Revolution
• 8 The War
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Questions for Further Discussion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement